I’m delighted to introduce a roundtable, starting on the blog tomorrow and continuing throughout the week, on Keith Makoto Woodhouse’s The Ecocentrists: A History of Radical Environmentalism (Columbia University Press), the 2019 winner of the Society for US Intellectual History’s award for best book of intellectual history.
In this book, Woodhouse examines the effect of a philosophy—ecocentrism—on the environmental movement in the United States in the late twentieth century. Ecocentrism is the belief that nonhuman nature has value and meaning apart from any relation to human nature or the human world. Ecocentrists believe the non-human world should not be valued merely as a resource for human flourishing; that the human is neither more important nor superior to the non-human. Thus, ecocentrism challenges what many see as the worst of what the modern world has produced: a reckless and catastrophic exploitation of the natural world. But in doing so, it also challenges what many agree is the best of the modern legacy—humanism itself.
Although ecocentrism has roots in earlier periods of American thought and history, the primary story Woodhouse tells begins in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Environmentalism was growing, becoming mainstream, and the same conflicts between reformists and radicals occurring within the movement for civil rights broke out between environmentalists. For the radicals, longstanding organizations such as the Sierra Club, dedicated to creating change within the political system, were losing the fight to protect the nation’s wilderness. These radical environmentalists, armed with ecocentric ideas, organized themselves and set out to craft and apply a more militant agenda of direct action on behalf of wilderness.
Earth First! was one of these new radical groups, and it gets the spotlight in Woodhouse’s book. Through the remaining decades of the century, Earth First! would experiment with a variety of tactics and a variety of political and disciplinary partners to protect the nation’s remaining forests, deserts, and rivers, particularly in the American West. Woodhouse uses legal and institutional archives, correspondence, and mainstream publications, to trace the conflicts, accomplishments, and inevitable compromises an ecocentric activism met in its struggle against an anthropocentric hegemony.
If ideas drove this radical movement, they also disturbed it. As the members of Earth First! and other radical environmentalists wrestled the forces of economic growth and refuted the accommodations of mainstream environmentalists, they were challenged by other radicals. Social environmentalists and the advocates of environment justice accused the ecocentrists of ignoring how exploitation within the human world was of a piece with that of the environment.
Nature, wilderness, humanism, social environmentalism—and a tricky term, “holism”: these are some of the concepts a distinguished set of scholars take up as they offer comments this week on The Ecocentrists.
Roy Scranton will start us off with an essay tomorrow, Tuesday, August 11. Scranton is the author of Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, among other books. He is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, where he is director of the Environmental Humanities Initiative.
Natasha Zaretsky’s essay will be published Wednesday, August 12. Zaretsky is a Professor of History at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She is the author of No Direction Home: The American Family and the Fear of National Decline, 1968-1980 (The University of North Carolina Press, 2007) and Radiation Nation: Three Mile Island and the Political Transformation of the 1970s (Columbia University Press, 2018).
Paul Murphy’s essay will appear Thursday, August 13. Murphy is a Professor of History at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan. He is the author of The New Era: American Thought and Culture in the 1920s (2012) and is currently working on a history of humanist thought in the U.S. in the early twentieth century entitled “The Dividing of the American Mind: The Search for a New Humanism and the Debate over the Role of Intellect in the United States, 1900-1950.”
Daniel Wayne Rinn’s essay will be published Friday, August 14. Rinn is a historian of ideas and the environment. He completed his PhD at the University of Rochester in May 2020.
The roundtable comes to a close on Saturday, August 15, with Keith Makoto Woodhouse’s response. Woodhouse is an Associate Professor at Northwestern University where he teaches in the History Department and directs the Environmental Policy and Culture Program. He is the author of The Ecocentrists: A History of Radical Environmentalism and is at work on a project about the California desert.
My deep appreciation and gratitude go out to all of them for their efforts and expertise in contributing to an important and thought-provoking conversation. I hope readers will join in.
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Anthony,
Thanks for hosting this roundtable (it’s definitely a book I hope to acquire soon).
Do ecocentrists view their ideas as constituting a “philosophy” (in a positive sense) or as an effort to remove the ideological scales that have covered the eyes of humans as a result of some subjective criterion they’ve created over the centuries that has excluded the objective world of nature (or possibly disenchanted this world by wiping away vestiges of animism)? After this cleansing is initiated, the “reality” of nature as meaningful in itself would emerge leading to: a kind of long-term pragmatic result?
I’m also wondering if they view techne in the older sense of doing anything that involves artificial creation and entanglement in/with the natural world?
If you have time, do you have any recommended canonical works relating to this topic that would allow one to engage with Woodhouse’s book (before reading it)?
Mark, thinking about your questions, one book that comes to mind is Michael Zimmerman’s *Contesting the Earth: Radical Ecology and Postmodernity* (University of California Press, 1994) This is a book that analyzes various radical environmentalisms as philosophies, separates them out, compares them to each other and considers how they do or don’t align with the the main streams of postmodern theory, and with Heidegger’s thought in particular.
Mark, thank you for these questions. I’m using the term philosophy in a very broad sense here. A way of thinking. A set of ideas. Nothing fixed or necessarily systematic. In introducing Keith’s book, I wanted to emphasize the ‘idea’ part. Before weighing in on your other questions, I’m going to leave them open until the roundtable is over. Keith is reading and may be commenting, too. You’ll see some useful books mentioned and footnoted in Roy Scranton’s essay tomorrow. Thank you for your interest!
Anthony,
Thanks for the book recommendation. I admit that this is a field I’ve had to neglect while completing my dissertation, but the connections with my topic (evolutionary psychology and the origins of a “science of love” in the United States) have appeared at various places and times.
Yes, I’m sure this coming roundtable will shed light on some of my inquiries.