The Politics of Nature

Explorations in Green Political Theory

Andrew Dobson, Paul Lucardie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN:
  9781138159266
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134803002
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Philosophie politique

This book presents a uniquely comprehensive and balanced survey of current green political ideas. It analyses the ability of these ideas to provide plausible answers to fundamental problems in political theory, concerning justice and democracy, individual rights and freedom, human nature and gender. The authors, who come from a range of different disciplines, explore the relationship between green ideas and other traditions including liberalism, anarchism, feminism and Christianity.

Part I
ETHICAL FOUNDATIONS

1
THE IDEA OF NATURE AND THE NATURE OF DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE¹

Marcel Wissenburg

INTRODUCTION

When I wrote the first draft of this text, Iraq was threatening to set fire to Kuwait’s oil wells. And so they did. There are at least two philosophical points of interest in this disaster, both relating to the possibility of a green political theory. In the first place, it reminds us of the fact that environmental catastrophes, though they have happened all through the geological history of the earth, seem to happen more often since man took over the world—and more of them seem to be caused by man. Whether causal responsibility for the mutilation of nature implies that we can speak of harming or benefiting nature, of treating nature justly and unjustly, is one of the themes I shall discuss in this chapter.

Secondly, the reactions to the Kuwait fires illustrate the fact that different people interpret the world differently. Those who stressed the ecological repercussions of the battle, rather than the political, social, or economic consequences, were a minority. On the view that language games are sets of rules for selecting and mixing facts and values concerning the way the world fares and ought to fare, the Greens seem to be playing a different game. (I will use the word ‘Green’ to denote all variants of the environmentalist and ecologist persuasions.)

This last observation will serve as my point of departure. I am not interested—at least not here—in the question: ‘What is to be done, given the ecological crisis?’ For the sake of argument I shall suppose that this is a legitimate question with a definite answer. I thus assume that there is an ecological crisis in a malleable world, that this crisis can perhaps be controlled in some way or other, and that we should control it if we can. My question is rather: ‘Given a necessary course of action directed towards the environmental crisis, can we defend it in terms of distributive justice?’

Hence I am engaged in the distributive justice language game rather than in the green language game. I am, in particular, interested in the basic questions concerning the theoretical side-constraints of green theories of distributive justice. Unlike most writers on green distributive justice (for example, Wenz 1988, Singer 1988, Taliaferro 1988), I will ask whether, and not how, the concept of justice can be applied in green political theory. I shall make no proposals for new principles or theories of distributive justice, and there will be little discussion of the proposals made by green thinkers in this field. I do however intend to follow them in presupposing that we want a green theory of justice to be defensible in the terms of the debate on distributive justice as it has been going on for the last twenty-odd years. The phrase ‘in terms of’ will be taken in a literal sense to catch of some categories essential to the debate: those of distributor, distributed benefits and burdens, and recipient of the distributed resources² or goods and what Orwell would call ungoods. I plan to go some way towards discovering which ethical and ontological assumptions about nature are compatible with the categories of distributive justice. In short, my subject is the idea of nature and the nature of distributive justice.

Now why would this be a problem worth discussing? Consider my heuristic device (see Figure 1.1). Ecologism or environmentalism, far from being a unified movement, is a collection of controversies between more and less radical positions at various levels of abstraction. A radical position at one level does not necessarily exclude a more moderate position at another.

Figure 1.1 Varieties of green thought

Strongly oversimplified, the questions we are dealing with here are those of tensions between new social movements and political parties, tensions between darker and lighter shades of environmental concern, tensions between ecologism in a broad sense and ‘grue’ political theories, and finally a fundamental conflict between anthropocentrism and biocentrism. Grue, a combination of the words green and blue, stands for theories that used to be thought of as non-green in the days when concern about the environment wasnot ‘in’, but which turned green when the tide changed: socialism, conservatism, leftish liberalism, and some variants of Marxism.

What interests us is whether a green language game can generate a political theory. But what is political theory? The simplest definition of politics talks about who gets what, when, and how. Political theory is that and a little more. It is the ‘Why?’ question about who gets what, when, and how:

Y (who-what-when-how)?

My approach, one of the possible Ys, starts out from within the theory of distributive justice and is directed towards the essentially new part of green movements, that is, not their concern with pacifism, feminism, socialism, anarchism, or sometimes even Luddism—let us call that old news—but with the element of nature and the intrinsic value of nature. I suppose a green political theory would be incomplete and therefore not totally convincing without a satisfactory answer to this Y-question.

In contrast to my talk of justice, the ecologists play a totally different language game. To make the difference clear, let me focus on an ideal type of what, following Arne Naess’s terminology, has been called deep ecology. The points deep ecologists stress are also the main issues of the whole green debate. Whether a so-called shallow ecology (aka environmentalism) exists as a school, or whether it is defined only by criticism of deep ecological theories—as in the bad old days, when Marxist critics of True Marxism were by definition bourgeois traitors—is another question.

Deep ecology is not concerned with justice but with nature in relation to man. Man is considered to be a danger to the whole of nature, and ultimately, as part of nature that totally depends on it, also as a danger to mankind— though the deepest ecologists seem to be a trifle less worried about the last aspect. Some, like Rudolf Bahro (Bahro 1980:87–115, 179–81), blame capitalism, industrialism, consumerism or humanism; others blame egoism or individualism, regardless of the structure of society. Garrett Hardin’s ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ (Baden and Hardin 1977) is of course the best-known and most often quoted source for this approach. All end up with the same conclusion: we are heading for an ecological disaster that can only be prevented if we develop a new way of life, an alternative society and social consciousness, in which individual responsibility and a harmonious relation with the totality of nature are the most important values.

The essential difference between deep and shallow ecology is philosophical. Unlike shallow ecologists, deep ecologists propose a fundamental change of mentality—often described as biocentrism or ecocentrism—away from traditional anthropocentrism. We ought to judge our actions from the point of view of nature as a whole, rather than from the partial position of man, because ‘mother Nature knows best’, because nature is the first and most important condition of human existence, or—the mainstream position—because nature has intrinsic value. Consequently, deep Greens do, and shallow Greens do not necessarily, defend a radically new society, a kind of Ecotopia.³

Greens of all kinds are aware of the need to convince others of the rationality of their proposals, and one of the ways in which they try to do so is by appealing to the idea of distributive justice. But can they? Can green policies be defended as just policies? My answer will amount to a qualified ‘yes’.

Seen from the perspective of a scholar of distributive justice, there is no such thing as the environmental problem. There are environmental problems, problems of different types, in which the idea of nature has different meanings, and which require that different environmental policies be justified in different ways. It all depends on whether we are dealing with rational, with sentient, or with living and inorganic nature, and on the different roles nature can play in the distributive justice language game: those of distributor, distributed good, and recipient of whatever is distributed. The differentiation I propose does not violate the rule of objectivity in distributive justice that equals be treated equally. I shall argue that there are sound reasons for treating different types of nature differently.

The next section is devoted to the translation of the idea of nature, as it is understood in environmental ethics into terms suitable for discussion within the framework of distributive justice. I will distinguish three types of nature: rational, sentient, and living or inorganic nature. Subsequently I will ask if and how these three types can function as legitimate variables in a metric of distributive justice—that is, if they are compatible with the categories of distributor, distributed resource, and recipient. Finally, in the last section, I shall discuss whether an alternative biocentric approach to distributive justice is possible, and what it takes to justify a green theory of distributive justice.

CONCEPTIONS OF NATURE

‘Nature’ is a vague and promiscuous term. It fits all sorts of things: those green things outside, or everything that is not man-made, either including or excluding humanity itself, or the essence of things, or even, as in Spinoza’s Ethics, everything that exists (Deus sive Natura). Consequently, ‘nature’ is also a term with a certain rhetorical value. Politicians can and do often use it to build up credit: being known as a friend of the earth is politically wise, nowadays.

The meaning in which I will use the term ‘nature’ in this essay is closely related to both Spinoza and deep ecology. Roughly speaking, nature is the interconnected system of all that exists and for its existence depends on everything else—in the vicinity of this planet. The difference from Spinoza is the restriction to earth, which is simply meant to focus attention on ecology rather than on metaphysics. The difference from deep ecology is more important: my nature explicitly includes artefacts like factories, poems, WordPerfect macros, and artificial diamonds, which are only implicitly included in the deep green image of nature. Whether it is, all in all, a more adequate conception than that of the (deep) ecologists is a question I cannot answer here—though I think it makes little sense to talk about the interconnectedness of everything, andeverything’s dependence on everything else, while at the same time disconnecting artefacts.

In terms of the variables used in theories of distributive justice, nature is conceived of as having three roles. Politicians and ecologists often talk about it as a resource of mankind—that is, as a source of rest and healing, or as a source for economic use, or even, according to Ernest Partridge, as a moral resource: respecting nature for the sake of nature would be a moral act (Partridge 1984:101). Others think of nature or parts of it as a recipient of distributive justice. Animals, for instance, are supposed to have the need or right not to be hunted and tortured, not to be robbed of their means of existence, or not to be eaten (by humans); ecosystems should not be destroyed or harmed for human- as well as nature-centred reasons; species must be protected against extinction. A third party, the Diggers among the deep ecologists, stress the role of nature as the ultimate distributor, giving and taking life and whatever comes with it: Gaia, the goddess of earth, an idea borrowed from James Lovelock (Lovelock 1979).

It is a broadly if not unanimously accepted axiom in the theory of distributive justice, ever since Aristotle introduced the idea in his Ethica Nicomachea (1959:1134b9, 1138a11), that it makes no sense to talk about distributive justice when there is only one party involved: a person cannot be unjust to herself or her possessions, nor can she distribute things ‘over’ herself—except metaphorically. The same goes for nature. If nature is the distributor, then it cannot distribute itself justly or unjustly to itself. If nature is a recipient, it cannot be distributed. Finally, if nature is a resource, there is no one to distribute it to. So if we want to think about distributive justice with regard to nature, nature must be cut into parts. It does make sense to say that some part of nature distributes another part, justly or unjustly, to a third part. There is no answer in the structure of theories of distributive justice to the question of how to cut up nature. An answer could come from environmental ethics, where several models are offered.

First, there are theories which deny the possibility of valuing different parts of nature differently. Let us call these theories varieties of the Gaia hypothesis. As they deny Aristotle’s axiom, they cannot answer our question and thus, by implication, cannot be defended in terms of distributive justice. Even if we disregard this fact they must be hard to defend at all. They do not have a basis in the considered judgements or practices of most cultures, and therefore lack an intuitive moral justification. It is doubtful whether a contractarian theory in which all of nature decides can defend any other principle than that the lion must lie peacefully next to the lamb; and like problems confront an ideal observer. The remaining possibilities are absolutist: that is, referring to a true view independent of human consent—but to be practical and convince nonbelievers they still need that consent.

Second, there are theories which differentiate between degrees of nature; theories that, I think, all have their roots in the Greek model of stages of existence with decreasing moral importance: God, demons, mankind,animals, plants and inorganic nature. Differences between these modern theories derive from disagreement about the reasons for the distinctions rather than about the distinctions themselves. In our modern picture of the world the model has been simplified by leaving out all beings higher than man, whereas at the lower levels more precise distinctions (borrowed from biology) are made—for example, between mammals and other higher and lower animals, plants, bacteria, microbes, viruses, water, clay, and so forth (cf. Singer 1988:224, Wenz 1988). For my argument, three categories will suffice, broadly made up of mankind, animals, and a residual category which I will call living and inorganic nature.

Finally, theories of what is called biodiversity, which are borrowed from ecology, offer alternatives to the Greek model by distinguishing different subsystems of nature: individual (living) beings, biospheres, and ecosystems (cf. Devall and Sessions 1984:312). Such theories may or may not offer a viable alternative, depending on whether these subsystems can be analysed as, and reduced to, aggregates of the various degrees of existence distinguished by the classic model—as multi-species, multi-degree societies for instance. Though I feel that this is possible, I shall h...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• FIGURES
• CONTRIBUTORS
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I: ETHICAL FOUNDATIONS
• PART II: GREEN POLITICS: THE STATE AND DEMOCRACY
• PART III: GREEN SOCIETY: ECONOMICS AND WELFARE
• PART IV: GREEN POLITICAL THEORY: THE BOUNDARIES