“Against Holism”: Roundtable on *The Ecocentrists* Pt 2

Swans gliding along a canal in Venice. Cougars wandering through the streets of downtown Santiago, Chile. A coyote spotted in the middle of Chicago’s Magnificent Mile. A groundhog chomping on a discarded slice of pizza in Philadelphia. Amidst scenes of human suffering unleashed by the coronavirus pandemic, these images of animals reclaiming urban spaces evoke the same wonder that made Alan Weisman’s book The World Without Us a bestseller in 2007. What would happen to natural and built environments, and to non-human animals, he asked, if people suddenly disappeared from the face of the earth? Today, social distancing has created conditions that faintly mimic Weisman’s thought experiment. Of course, humans have not disappeared for good (at least not this time around). But earlier this year, when we first took temporary hiatus from much of the outside world, at least some members of the animal kingdom appeared to have taken notice. And with many of us stuck at home, we also noticed them. While many businesses were going bankrupt, pest control companies had never been busier, since occupants now at home during the day could hear their nocturnal companions scampering around their attics.

This fantasy of a world emptied of people casts humans as an invasive species and the non-human world as bouncing back once we have exited the scene. In The Ecocentrists, Keith Makoto Woodhouse terms this thinking “holism”—a tendency to portray human civilization as comprised of an undifferentiated mass of people bearing down on a planet with finite resources and capacities. This proclivity toward holism was at the heart of radical environmentalism, where it played a paradoxical role. On the one hand, it gave the movement its teeth and empowered activists to reject the incrementalism of mainstream environmental organizations and engage in direct action, often at personal risk. On the other hand, at its worst, holism could shade into misanthropy, a blindness to social and economic inequality, and even anti-immigrant nativism.

Woodhouse is keenly aware of this paradox, and the portrait of radical environmentalists that emerges are nuanced. This book neither pathologizes nor romanticizes radical environmental activists. Much of the book centers on the story of Earth First!, and at one point, Woodhouse stresses that Earth First!ers saw themselves as part of a movement rather than an organization. It is worth taking a moment to reflect on the depth of that distinction. Earth First! was founded in April 1980 at the start of a decade when the radical energies of many social movements of the 1960s and 1970s would be routed into a dense and well-funded liberal apparatus comprised of non-profit organizations, think tanks, and lobbying groups that sought to reform the system from the inside. Modern environmentalism was particularly vulnerable to this kind of institutional capture because of its reliance on litigation strategies. But Earth First!ers were “movement” people. To be a movement person is to set oneself apart from the dominant society, to feel swept up by the forces of historical change, and to place political commitment at the center of your everyday life in ways that people outside the movement often find baffling and inexplicable. These tendencies arguably ran even deeper for radical environmentalists, who were motivated by a sense of urgency predicated on the prediction that the planet was running out of time. The Earth First! slogan—“no compromise for Mother Earth”—captured the movement’s single-minded drive.

But that single-mindedness also created contradictions that dog radical environmentalism to this day. The portrait of an existential standoff between an imperiled earth and “human civilization” overlooked the histories of global capitalism, colonialism and imperialism, enslavement and coercive labor structures, the appropriation of indigenous lands, concentrations of wealth and resources in the global north, and widening social and economic inequality. When radical environmentalists simplistically argued that “people were the problem,” they failed to grapple with how these histories were entwined with assaults on land, air, and water. This critique of a “universal humanity” will be familiar to anyone who has followed the more recent debate about the Anthropocene, the geoscientific term used to mark the moment when human activity became traceable in the geological record. Scholars such as Jason Moore, Andreas Malm, and Donna Haraway reject the term “Anthropocene” for its universalizing tendencies, introducing instead clumsier but more precise designations such as the Capitalocene, the Chthulucene, and the Plantationocene.[1] Woodhouse’s book reminds us that the current Anthropocene debate has deep historical roots. It has long proven difficult for radical environmentalists to simultaneously combat both the planetary threats posed by humans and the inequalities that exist among humans. (Radical environmentalists are not the only ones who struggle with this. Activists focused on human inequality have also tended to subordinate the non-human world, but that is a different–if not unrelated–story).

The story presented by Woodhouse is one of lost opportunities. Holism made it difficult for radical environmentalists to form political alliances with New Left activists focused on social inequality, anti-racist activists who foregrounded racial oppression and structural racism, and union organizers who sought working class empowerment. One notable exception to the latter was EF! activist Judi Bari, who stressed the common interests shared by environmentalists and loggers in Northern California. At its worst, holism established disturbing affinities between environmentalism, eugenics, and anti-immigrant nativism. The movement’s preoccupation with population control as a remedy to environmental crisis in the 1970s and 1980s represented the inverted twin of a pronatalism that sought to control women’s reproductive lives. The metaphor of “the lifeboat,” first introduced by ecologist Garrett Hardin in 1974, advanced a brute image of survivalism in a world of rapidly diminishing resources that would require a hardening of national boundaries. Hardin described “waves of humanity” crashing over “national borders,” and by the 1980s, some environmentalists had embraced an explicitly anti-immigrant stance. This history can help us make sense of the disturbing rise of ecofascism on today’s political right at the very moment that nativism has reached a fever pitch. In a 2019 interview with The Atlantic, Fox News personality Tucker Carlson claimed that the Potomac River outside Washington, D.C., “has gotten dirtier and dirtier and dirtier and dirtier” due to litter “left almost exclusively by immigrants.”[2] Environmentalists may be disgusted by the weaponization of some of their ideas, but they ignore the revival of ecofascism at their peril. Woodhouse offers no easy answers, but he does call on radical environmentalists to combine their longstanding sense of humility in the face of the non-human world with a rootedness in human communities.

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This turned out to be a fortuitous moment to read Woodhouse’s excellent book. In the midst of the current plague, I gave myself permission to observe an attenuated version of Alan Weisman’s thought experiment as it played out in real time. I even gave myself permission to derive some pleasure from the photographs of animals in the city or the clear, bright blue sky hanging over a Los Angeles clear of smog. I cling to those images because they appear to affirm something I desperately need to believe in the era of catastrophic climate change: that maybe, just maybe, if we can transition to a post-fossil fuel society in time, then the non-human world might one day be able to heal and recover. ­­­But I am also wary of these images, as I fear that their circulation is driven by the same holistic tendencies that Woodhouse cautions against. The coyotes may be walking the streets of Chicago, but there is no existential battle underway there between the human and non-human worlds. Chicago is not home to any single human community any more than is the planet itself. Coyotes may be roaming free for the time being, but there is nothing to celebrate in a city where African Americans made up a stunning seventy percent of the first wave of Covid-19 fatalities.[3]

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[1] See, for example, Jason Moore (ed), Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism (PM Press, 2016) and Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulecene (Duke University Press, 2016).

[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/12/tucker-carlson-fox-news/603595/

[3] https://www.npr.org/2020/06/09/869074151/chicago-tackles-covid-19-disparities-in-hard-hit-black-and-latino-neighborhoods