Keith Makoto Woodhouse Responds: Roundtable on *The Ecocentrists*

No matter how many years you spend thinking through a set of questions and concerns, smart and careful readers can always push you to think further and better. I am deeply grateful to Paul Murphy, Daniel Rinn, Roy Scranton, and Natasha Zaretsky for the close attention they have paid to The Ecocentrists and for the trenchant comments they’ve offered. I also owe a great debt of gratitude to Anthony Chaney for suggesting, organizing, and editing this roundtable. It’s a real pleasure and privilege to engage in conversation with such thoughtful colleagues.

In a sense it is the title of the book—The Ecocentrists: A History of Radical Environmentalism—that is at issue in this roundtable. As Roy Scranton notes, the book focuses overwhelmingly on Earth First!, leaving out many subjects that could fit easily under “a history of radical environmentalism.” Scranton points specifically to other groups and movements, from the Earth Liberation Front to ecofeminism to environmental justice. We could name many more. Scranton is right to call attention to what is missing and although I never aspired to write an exhaustive study I take full responsibility for leaving much out in the interest of streamlining the narrative. I do think some of the ideas that Scranton gestures towards are present even if key figures are not. Although movements like ecofeminism and environmental justice appear only in passing, I tried to include their likely objections to Earth First! and other ecocentric environmentalists through the voices of Murray Bookchin, Judi Bari, and the eco-anarchist collective called “Alien-Nation.” Because the book focuses on Earth First! I wanted to articulate key criticisms through Earth First!’s own antagonists, and in doing so to demonstrate the sort of debates that took place even among wilderness activists in the 1980s. I hope I gave a sense of the diversity of environmental thought during this period.

Scranton wonders especially about the absence of the 1999 WTO protests. It’s an astute observation; the WTO protests have not yet been woven into the history of the environmental movement, and they need to be. There is important work to be done on the period from the late 1990s through the early 2000s and especially from November 1999 to September 2001, not just in regard to environmentalism but to social protest in the United States more broadly. Although I finally decided that story was outside the scope of this book, I look forward to reading others’ accounts of a pivotal and understudied moment of transition.

I’ve approached this roundtable as an extended discussion about the main title—The Ecocentrists—and all that lies behind it. I am terrible at titles, and I can’t take credit for this one; my brilliant editor came up with it. Now it seems obvious, and I am happy to discuss the implications and ambiguities that inhere in the idea of ecocentric environmentalism.

Daniel Rinn manages to find some solace, amid the many tragedies of a worldwide pandemic, in reports of happier whales. “Does this make me an ecocentrist?” he asks. I hope not. I would like to think that some consideration for the well-being of nonhuman animals even as humans suffer terribly is not an especially radical point of view. Rinn, though, clearly has bigger questions in mind. I assume that the happy whales he mentions are those—particularly orcas in the Pacific Northwest—who may be experiencing less stress thanks to significantly reduced boat traffic and so significantly reduced underwater noise. The real question Rinn poses is how we should feel about a seemingly zero-sum calculus: the greater the restrictions on human activity, the less nonhuman animals have to worry about. As Rinn notes, this sort of species-level thought in which what is bad for humans is good for the nonhuman world, and vice-versa, can quickly lead to misanthropy.

Misanthropy was in no way inevitable, however, and Rinn spends much of his comment making clear the ways in which ecocentric activists did not necessarily think in binary terms. Those activists defended productive and even denuded landscapes as well as lush wilderness; they utilized conventional methods of reform at the same time as they engaged in direct action; and in their fight against the environmental harms of ranching they were as willing to employ market-based critiques as they were the more familiar complaints of conservationists. I would add, too, that in some contexts ecocentrists treated human and nonhuman as distinct and opposed categories while in other contexts they talked about them as deeply intertwined.

Given this intellectual and methodological promiscuity, what exactly underpinned “ecocentrism”? Rinn judiciously settles on its ethical implications and especially the way in which ecocentrists downplayed individuals (whether human or not) and emphasized “the moral standing of nature’s relational web.” Even this definition allows for different and incongruous constructions of ecocentric thought, and Rinn offers “non-anthropocentrism” as a wide and stable foundation. I think that’s fair; the fundamental claim of ecocentrism is that human beings should not assume moral primacy relative to the rest of the world. This is more of a stipulation than a verdict, and treating it as such helps to avoid thorny questions about just how far the philosopher Arne Naess’s “biospheric egalitarianism” might extend: should we give equal moral consideration to mosquitoes? To hookworms? To coronaviruses? Like many social movements, ecocentric environmentalism has been better at useful provocations than at definitive conclusions.

To be non-anthropocentric is to be skeptical of humanism, and Paul Murphy asks what alternatives exist. “[W]hat happens when you forsake humanism?” he wonders. “To what do you cling for ballast?” This is a crucial question. The easy answer is that ecocentrists put their faith in a natural order, but to say so is to answer one question with another. Murphy’s comment makes this clear. By emphasizing ecocentric activists’ conception of wilderness as furthest from all that is human, Murphy alludes to an evergreen problem in environmental thought: What exactly is “nature”? Or put another way: What is the distinction, if any, between the natural and the human?

These are questions without answers, or questions with too many answers. But I think asking them remains a vital and even essential part of environmental thought. Environmental historians tend to insist that humans are a part of nature, which is both true and also not always helpful. When we consider policies governing how people consume natural resources, define particular landscapes, and interact with nonhuman animals, it becomes necessary to draw some lines—to think in terms of other-than-human parts of the world, including whales disoriented by human technology and rejuvenated by its absence. Those lines should not be overly fixed and determinative but neither should they be entirely fluid. I think environmentalism and environmental policy must involve stepping outside of a humanist framework, and acknowledging that while humans are a part of nature we are also in some ways apart from it.

Several figures in The Ecocentrists are both vexed and defined by these questions. Murphy mentions two. He wonders what sort of commitments Edward Abbey, a charismatic thinker and writer as well as a nativist misanthrope, might have held dear. And he wonders what Murray Bookchin, the father of social ecology, owed to the humanist tradition. Abbey and Bookchin, although they debated with and lobbed insults at each other for years, were in many ways opposite banks bounding the same stream of thought. Abbey insisted on the intrinsic value and essential separateness of wild nature. Bookchin argued that hierarchy led to both the exploitation of people and the exploitation of nature and that addressing one did little without addressing the other. Both thinkers believed that modern civilization was destroying the nonhuman world and yet both also believed—to varying degrees—that human beings were singularly significant. Bookchin excoriated modern society for polluting the planet but also wondered whether human reason might constitute the pinnacle of natural evolution. Abbey mostly thought of human beings as destructive of all that was beautiful and noble but he acknowledged that “wilderness” was in part a product of human ideas, and in rare moments he recognized the allure of humanism. “[H]uman life,” he wrote in Desert Solitaire, “in some way not easily definable, is significant and unique and supreme beyond all the limits of reason and nature.”[1]

Forsaking humanism was not easy. Murphy is right to ask what might have served as ballast when human beings were no longer the center of gravity, and he is right to consider religion and secularism as a point of reference. I don’t believe that radical environmentalism in the United States constituted a religion, as some have suggested. But I do think that radical environmentalists wrestled with what might order a world absent a great chain of being. Too often the answer was sweeping and singular, measuring value according to distance from modern human society. Most of the time, though, radical environmentalists asked the question earnestly rather than rhetorically, conceding its elusiveness and yet grappling with it again and again.

How does a movement with unfathomable questions at its heart shape a strategy and an agenda? In a sense this is what Scranton wants to know when he contemplates the possibility of an “enlightened ecological humanism” (or “ecohumanism”) and asks whether the contradictions of ecocentrism and the profound limits of anthropocentrism can ever be reconciled. And it is what Natasha Zaretsky has in mind when she invokes contemporary debates about the Rorschach test that is the term “Anthropocene.” The intersection of an accelerating environmental crisis and a society structured by inequity and injustice has, historically, abounded with wrong turns. As Zaretsky writes, “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.”

The potential risks and rewards of ecohumanism are considerable. Both, I think, begin with “holism”—the propensity for thinking about “humans” in undifferentiated terms. One of the scariest directions in which holistic thought can lead, Zaretsky rightly notes, is towards “the disturbing rise of ecofascism.” Bookchin frequently used this label, fairly or not, to describe Edward Abbey in particular and Earth First! more generally. It has gained greater prominence today in the wake of mass shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand and El Paso, TX, which Scranton points to as the tragic fruit of ecofascist tendencies, and through anti-immigrant arguments that Zaretsky reminds us often come from mainstream pundits like Tucker Carlson.

“Broadly construed,” Scranton writes, “ecofascism combines an ecocentric commitment to environmental sustainability with an ethno-nationalist commitment to political separatism based on race, ethnicity, and nationality, along with a willingness to use violence to make good on those commitments.” It remains a difficult and imprecise term, as Scranton allows, often used vaguely and reflexively. But it calls attention to the perils of a misanthropy born of holism. First, it warns of the way that holism and misanthropy can justify violence against people. Second, and even more frightening, it flags how misanthropic holism can be paradoxically mobilized against particular groups of people who are made to bear a cumulative blame.

But holism is not solely a threat. There are those happy whales. Crafting environmental policy can require weighing collective human interests against those of the nonhuman world, and asking whether and how those various interests might be misaligned. Laws like the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act—both currently under attack—are premised not just on sustainability and “ecosystem services,” but also on the idea that human interests are not the only ones and may at times need curtailing. Especially in the era of climate change, making environmental policy means engaging, at least momentarily, in what Dipesh Chakrabarty calls “species thinking”—understanding the effects of human civilization in the broadest sense, over vast sweeps of space and time.[2]

As Zaretsky makes clear, it was this equivocal stance towards humanism and human interests that in some ways made Earth First! so dynamic. Earth First! remained a grassroots movement at a time when many environmental organizations grew more and more professionalized. Its adherents consciously resisted the main currents of modern human society and so possessed a deep reserve of commitment and a virtual immunity to inertia. Earth First!ers who perched for weeks in an ancient redwood or who “locked down” in front of a line of bulldozers were zealous in their dedication to protecting the wild, and that zeal arose in part from the belief that what most people supported most of all—growing economies, material progress, and trust in human knowledge—was also most deserving of doubt. For the environmental movement as a whole that doubt was like a prescribed forest fire, dangerous but vital.

It is impossible to know what it will mean to keep asking difficult questions about humanism and human limits in a rapidly changing world, but Scranton and Zaretsky help orient us. A robust ecohumanism, Scranton writes, should hew to human reasoning while acknowledging that the world is finally too complex for humans to fully comprehend. We must, he explains, “ground humanistic values in reverence toward—and submission to—that unknowable totality which, lacking a better term, we call nature.” Radical environmentalists cherished humility as a cardinal virtue, as Scranton clearly does, and I think that this was one of their most admirable ideals.

Human communities are also endlessly complicated in ways that environmentalists have frequently ignored. Zaretsky ends her comment with a view from spring 2020 as climate change accelerates, as national and global politics grow increasingly embattled, and as a worldwide pandemic has profoundly circumscribed our lives. Zaretsky wrote her comment well before the killing of George Floyd, but since then millions of people around the world have taken to the streets to protest racial injustice and particularly state-sanctioned violence against African Americans. All of this is connected, and Zaretsky stresses how Black Americans have been disproportionately exposed to and suffered harms from Covid-19, just as nations and communities around the world will endure the injuries of climate change unevenly and according to deeply entrenched structural inequalities.

Zaretsky ends by remarking on the sometimes eerie, sometimes consoling stillness that the pandemic has imposed: clear and empty skies in Los Angeles, groundhogs in the open streets of Philadelphia, coyotes wandering through downtown Chicago. Like Rinn’s happy whales, these images suggest a reinvigoration of nonhuman nature as human activity ebbs, including a reduction in the use of some natural resources and the emission of some pollutants. Zaretsky feels at once reassured that nature can renew itself and wary of where thinking in these zero-sum terms might lead. I share her ambivalence. It is all too easy to see wildlife in city streets and conclude that the pandemic offers us some simple wisdom; at the same time, studying environmental thought fosters a useful but perhaps overly reflexive suspicion of anything that smacks of romanticism. I hope that these months of lessened human activity can simply serve as a reminder of the many others who live just out of sight and too often out of mind.

An opportunity to see things a bit differently is an opportunity to imagine them much more so. The naturalist Aldo Leopold once wrote, “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.”[3] What would it mean to live in a world of healing? That’s another question that is impossible to answer but essential to ask, and that ecocentric thought—or at least non-anthropocentric thought—might help us to think through.

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[1] Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1968), 214-215.

[2] Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35 (Winter 2009).

[3] Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (New York: Ballantine, [1949] 1966), 197.