Editor's Note
Daniel Wayne Rinn’s essay is the fourth installment of a roundtable on The Ecocentrists by Keith Makoto Woodhouse (Columbia UP), the 2019 winner of the Society for US Intellectual History’s award for best book of intellectual history. An introduction to the roundtable can be found here. Roy Scranton’s essay can be found here. Natasha Zaretsky’s essay can be found here. Paul Murphy’s essay can be found here. A response from Woodhouse will be posted tomorrow.
Daniel Wayne Rinn is a historian of ideas and the environment. He completed his PhD at the University of Rochester in May 2020.
— Anthony Chaney
We are in the midst of a pandemic. Covid19 is killing people, destroying jobs, and exacerbating a long list of social problems. Yet “nature” seems to be enjoying something of a respite. As we engage in social distancing practices, seismic activity has declined, whales have become less depressed, and carbon emissions have dropped. I have no doubt that we will make up for these small environmental victories once our economy fully reopens; still, I can’t help but think “the whales are happy.” And I mean it. No sarcasm intended.
Does this make me an ecocentrist?
As Keith Woodhouse illustrates quite clearly in his book, the ecocentrists tended to identify as the more radical wing of the postwar environmental movement. Theirs was a philosophy anchored in deep ecology and predicated on the belief that the tenets of liberal democracy and reform environmentalism were flawed. Faith in human reason, individualism, and democratic institutions proved misguided when confronted with the severe environmental destruction wrought by the industrialized world. Thus, American environmentalism suffered a “radical break” as organizations such as Greenpeace and Earth First! turned away from litigation, lobbying, and policymaking—the modes of conventional reform central to the professionalized, mainstream movement—in favor of direct action.
Enter figures such as Dave Foreman and Edward Abbey, both of whom advocated civil disobedience, monkeywrenching, industrial sabotage, and sometimes violence in the fight to protect nature. They represented a departure from the anthropocentrism that defined both the environmental mainstream and postwar society more generally.
Ecocentrism implies a level of ideological fervor and commitment that borders—and sometimes completely devolves into—misanthropy. Activists sought to protect wilderness from civilization. They regarded human beings as the most significant threat to wild nature. As ecofeminists and social ecologists would point out, ecocentrism ignored important factors such as race, gender, and class. Ecocentrism implied that a singular, undifferentiated “humanity” was culpable for the destruction of the environment. There was, of course, an element of dualism here, too. Woodhouse writes, “To understand wild nature as existentially threatened by human presence was to understand the two as mutually exclusive” (183). An apotheosis of “pristine” wilderness was coupled with a tendency to see humanity as not only homogenous but somehow unnatural.
Yet the ecocentrists proved more complicated than this. Their commitment to protecting nature actually yielded a degree of ideological flexibility. Sure, a coarse-grained analysis of ecocentric thought does reveal the presence of misanthropy, dualism, as well as a firm commitment to direct action and a radical critique of liberal democracy, but, zooming in, one also finds evidence of nuance and tension within individual activists and the movement generally.
Ecocentrists did not always privilege untouched nature. For Earth First!ers, “wilderness served more as a general orientation than as an absolute” (127). Radicals did not write off productive or mixed landscapes. In fact, it was the Forest Service that held tightly to a strict definition of wilderness, not the ecocentrists. As the fight over Black Mesa and other mixed landscapes in the Southwest and on the West Coast indicated, radicals worked hard to protect lands already denuded by ranching, mining, logging, and other industries.
If wilderness essentialism was not fundamental to an ecocentric outlook, then perhaps it is less surprising to learn, also, that radicals took a broad view in their understanding of activism. After Earth First!’s confrontation with Yates Petroleum failed to save New Mexico’s Salt Creek Wilderness from drilling operations in the early 1980s, Foreman himself recognized that direct action must serve as a compliment—not an alternative—to the methods of the environmental mainstream. Without the cooperation of organizations such as the Sierra Club, the Wilderness Society, and the National Audubon Society, Earth First! failed to apply significant legal pressure on industrial interests (162). Critical of inaction from mainstream groups, Foreman wrote, “We must make sure that establishment conservation groups are playing their proper role while we are out on the front lines.”
Ecocentrists also found common cause with organizations and ideas otherwise presumed to be antithetical to environmentalism. In the fight to reign in unsustainable ranching practices on public lands in the West, Don Schwarzenegger and other Earth First!ers found themselves joining forces with free market enthusiasts in Reagan’s Office of Management and Budget in a bid to challenge the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). In the 1980s, they sought a consistent application of Reaganomics in order to force the BLM to raise below-market grazing fees on public lands (174). It was a useful tactic. Indeed, radicals would find themselves flirting with “free market environmentalism” as they fought clearcutting and other forms of mismanagement sanctioned by the Forest Service.
Adamant in their resistance to the co-optive potential of the environmental mainstream as well as federal agencies, industrial interests, and democratic processes, the ecocentrists, surprisingly, mirrored many of the practices and ideas associated with these very institutions. A varied and dynamic movement, ecocentrism was not monolithic. It was influenced by many competing personalities, ideas, and practices as it evolved within as well as across changing historical contexts.
As a result, it is difficult to detail the essential or core beliefs that comprise the center of an ecocentric philosophy. An emphasis on direct action and a distrust of liberal democracy as well as mainstream environmentalism suggest a gravitational center, true, but these revolve around questions of method, not a deep consideration of ethics or metaphysics. What, to the ecocentrist, is nature? And how does this view of nature set ecocentrism apart from less radical environmentalisms?
Unlike the professionalized environmental movement, the ecocentrists sometimes proved too “holistic.” Rendered in slightly idiosyncratic terms drawn from William Cronin, holism is indicative of a failure to see humanity as a mosaic. Radical environmentalists focused on the whole—our species—over its constituent and varied members—individual humans—as chiefly responsible for the decline of nature. All humans were equally culpable and equally unnatural. Simultaneously one-dimensional and dualistic, it was an extreme outlook that portrayed “humanity” and “nature” as separate, generalizable blocks.
In metaphysics, however, holism suggests something more complex. It is premised on an ontology of emergent properties. When assembled in the right manner, atoms, cells, and etc. give rise to a second-order existent: the living organism. According to the environmental philosopher J. Baird Callicott, ecocentrism builds on this logic by highlighting the existence of a third-order whole, the ecosystem. The landscape is not merely a collection of individual objects—biotic and abiotic alike—but, rather, is an integrated relational web that displays unique characteristics and behaviors otherwise not found among its constituent parts.
In a sense, ecocentrism did privilege the ecosystem over the individual. “Biospherical egalitarianism,” as the deep ecologist Arne Naess framed it, held that all matter existed within a “biospherical net or field of intrinsic relations.” A total-field view, he wrote, “dissolves not only the man-in-environment concept, but every compact thing-in-milieu concept.” But as Warwick Fox explained, the total-field concept did not erase the individual; it extended the bounds of selfhood by acknowledging the ways in which identity is shaped by a larger “unfolding reality” in nature. In other words, deep ecology engaged in a difficult balancing act in acknowledging the existence of both individuals and the larger web of relations. It did not suggest, according to Fox, “that all entities are fundamentally the same nor that they are absolutely autonomous.”
Ecocentrism thus had profound ethical implications. In the modern era, it was clear that humanity not only lacked a proper metaphysical outlook that could capture the existence of the “total-field,” it also failed to value the rest of nature. If relationships between individuals prove equally as real as the individuals themselves, then it stood to reason that we have a moral obligation to a larger ecological network. Thus, ecocentrism acknowledged the moral standing of nature’s relational web—but it did not posit a single, fixed center in this web. Individuals (whether human or non-human) are just as real and morally significant as the larger ecosystems to which they belong.
Consequently, as Woodhouse illustrates, the center of ecocentrism shifts in important ways as we move between different analytical lenses. Are we using the definitions provided by environmentalists such as Murray Bookchin or Ynestra King, both of whom offered critical perspectives from outside the movement? Or are we defaulting to the sense of the word implied by Earth First!ers? If the latter, then we need to steer a course that accommodates changing perspectives from within the movement as it evolved over decades. We need a definition that can capture competing personalities—from Dave Foreman to Judi Bari—as well as account for changing contexts—from the Southwest to the Pacific West. Another important consideration is whether or not we want to focus on the ecocentric methods of political action or the intellectual landscape of ecocentric philosophy.
After reading Ecocentrists, it is clear to me that radical environmentalism was (and is) exceedingly complex. Eugene Hargrove’s contention that “nature, rather than being included, is given priority” in Earth First!’s philosophy appears only half correct (141). The ecocentrists were fervent, single-minded even, in their activism. They loathed the half measures and compromises of the environmental mainstream. They challenged the co-optive pull of humanism. Yet none of these attributes marked philosophical absolutes. Radicals were not anti-human nor anti-democratic—at least not fundamentally. If that is the case, then perhaps the body of traits that comprises “ecocentrism” might be more accurately termed “non-anthropocentrism.” If so, then I would gladly count myself a supporter.
5 Thoughts on this Post
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Thank you for this reading of Keith Woodhouse’s book. It brought up much of my own reaction to “The Ecocentrists.* As both you and other roundtable participants have mentioned, William Cronon’s essay, “The Problem with Wilderness,” was a seminal text for Keith. That essay came out of a seminar held at UC-Irvine in the 1994s. Seminar participants included Donna Haraway and Katherine Hayles along with others whose thought is associated with or influenced by postmodern theory. When I read *Uncommon Ground,” the book that came out of the seminar, I didn’t know Cronon’s work, except that he was at one of the deans of Environmental History, at the pinnacle of the field. So I took the essay as that of a traditional historian coming to grips with what the postmodern theorists had to say to that field. From that perspective, the essay was consequential because Cronon seemed to be giving ground. Wilderness was a “human construction,” a “cultural construct.” Because all of reality was mediated by language and situated historically, the difference between the human and the natural became “the central dilemma,” “the central paradox” (25, 51).
Keith refers to the paradox often in his book. The tension in the interactions between the Earth First!ers and their critics revolves around it, and it comes up in various forms. He gets at it when he quotes Joel Kovel on page 202, that, “humans are very much a part of nature, but there is something in us that is never content with nature.”
This is not so different, to my mind, from Reinhold Niebuhr writing that humans can both transcend and never transcend their “creatureliness.” One form of transcendence was discontenment, denial of being a creature embedded in nature. That discontentment was a source of sin, another word that signals that the central paradox is being approached and confronted. Social environmentalists in the Bookchin tradition don’t like the word sin, with good reason. Yet the humility called for by the Deep Ecologists (and by Roy Scranton’s ecohumanism described in his roundtable essay) requires at least some secular version of it. It requires acknowledgement that humans, despite their embedded condition, can act on and protect premises that are in error as to who they are in their relations. They can act to protect status and privilege–to put it in the terms that Natalie Zaretsky refers to in her essay.
The systems theorist Gregory Bateson didn’t use the terminology of the postmodern theorists. He didn’t use the word sin much, certainly not in any doctrinal way. But this central paradox was one of his big topics, and he, too, expressed it in multiple ways and in different contexts. At one point, he saw it as a return to the fundamental tension between realism and nominalism in Western thought. He believed systems thinking—what many call today the systems view or the ecological imagination—offered a new way to negotiate that tension. It didn’t settle the tension but it offered more accurate information, better organization, better data, as it were. Part of the result was what you very beautifully describe in your paragraph about “moral obligation” and “nature’s relational web.”
Thanks for your comment Anthony. “The Trouble with Wilderness” is certainly an essay that is hard to avoid — it is indeed central to so much of the discussion about the methods of environmental history. And the tension Cronon puts his finger on is absolutely present elsewhere, as you note.
Reading your thoughts actually made me realize that I meant to call attention to a different Cronon essay: “Modes of Prophecy and Production: Placing Nature in History” (1990).
In this essay, Cronon worries about the risks of an overly narrow conception of environmental history. He is specifically worried about the materialist bent in Worster’s “agroecological mode-of-production” framework and the closely related tendency, among environmental historians, to draw on simplistic characterizations of nature (as being “balanced,” “stable,” “self-equilibrated,” “sustainable” and so on) and human culture/agency (as being disruptive, damaging, destabilizing, unsustainable, etc.).
This is a very quick and shoddy summary, but the reason I bring it up is because Keith cites this essay (on p. xi of his preface) when he provides the definition of “holism” that he works with throughout the book. Cronon suggests holistic analysis is 1) great for “encouraging historians to see nature and humanity whole, to trace the manifold connections among people and other organisms until finally an integrated understanding of their relations emerges[;]” and 2) also bad because it “discourages us from looking as much as we should at conflict and difference within groups of people” (p. 1128 of Cronon).
Generally speaking, Keith defaults to the second part of the definition as he analyzes the activism and ideas of the ecocentrists.
Holism, then, enters the conversation as a matter of historical method and is then applied to environmental thought. Although there is some overlap in meaning of this term between these two contexts, it sometimes feels like something is lost in translation. I found it hard to square this use of the term with the subject(s) of Keith’s book. Holism in environmental philosophy seems to be a different beast.
As I say in my essay, this understanding (part 2 of Cronon’s definition) of holism does work for a coarse-grained analysis of radical environmentalism (especially as it applies to political activism), but not so much once you dig into the details of ecocentric philosophy. Holism has different, though closely related, implications for both metaphysics and ethics. And while it may intuitively seem otherwise, it need not imply special ontological status for the “whole” as somehow *more real* than the “part(s)” nor does it necessitate an elevated sense of moral obligation to “nature” over and above the “individual.” And making matters still more complex, holism in metaphysics does not actually require holism in ethics (and vice versa). Although it is easy to conflate the two, I suspect you can actually have one without the other.
In any case, this is what was on my mind when I mentioned the “slightly idiosyncratic” definition of holism in *The Ecocentrists.* And I highly recommend the earlier Cronon piece… I really enjoyed reading it and can see why it had such staying power/influence in Keith’s book.
This really helps clarify, Daniel, thank you. As much as I appreciated and enjoyed *The Ecocentrists,* I kept wondering about what seemed a too narrow definition of holism. You put your finger on the distinction that was bothering me and offer a persuasive explanation: “Holism, then, enters the conversation as a matter of historical method and is then applied to environmental thought. Although there is some overlap in meaning of this term between these two contexts, it sometimes feels like something is lost in translation. … Holism in environmental philosophy seems to be a different beast.”
Reading the roundtable and thinking about the meaning of “holism,” I happened to pick up a recent 44-page pamphlet called *Creating City Portraits.* It’s a guide to apply current ecological economics to Amsterdam and other cities, a a collaboration of the organizations Doughnut Economics Action Lab, Biomimicry 3.8, C40 Cities, and Circle Economy.
It strikes me that Doughnut Economics is a reframing of economics in a way that merges the concerns of deep ecologists and the concerns of social ecologists, that tension that is the subject of much of Keith’s book. If we want to honor both concerns, suggests Doughnut Economics, we must place ourselves and our economy “between the social foundation and the ecological ceiling … to meet the needs of all people within the means of the living planet – an ecologically safe and socially just space in which humanity can thrive.”
This approach is identified, over and over, as “holistic.” I’m much more comfortable with this use of the word. Although its use may be inspired by environmental philosophy, we find it here used in a very practical setting.
Incidentally, the merger I refer to above seems to be typical of today’s most vital ecological movements (most if not all of which are found outside the United States). I wonder if we wouldn’t find models in these advocacies for the ecohumanism Roy Scranton called for in his essay.
These are great points. You’re right, Daniel, that Cronon talks about “holism” as historical method and I talk about it mainly in terms of environmental thought. I probably should have been more clear about that distinction. In the end I’m not sure how different these beasts are, though; both environmental historians and environmental philosophers/activists wrestle with the categories “nature” and “human” and the relationship between them (as do all people, in one way or another).
As was the case for many key terms in this book I had to define “holism” in a way that did the most work for what I was after, and I stuck pretty closely to Cronon’s definition on 1129 of his essay: that holism tends to flatten social categories like race, class, and gender. This was the meaning that I felt spoke most to how environmental thought—narrowly construed—has and has not considered urgent questions about environmental justice and climate change. If I suggested that holism involved “an elevated sense of moral obligation to ‘nature’ over and above the ‘individual,'” that was less a claim about philosophical consistency than a description of where holistic thought has tended to lead.
You’ve wisely pointed to two outcomes of holism, one encouraging integrated and interconnected understandings of humans and the nonhuman world and the other glossing over social difference. And you’re absolutely right that I default to the second when discussing radical activists. But I hope I’ve done justice to the first as well. On pages 286-287 of The Ecocentrists I try to make this point explicitly, largely through Dipesh Chakrabarty’s notion of “species thinking” (a kind of holism). And in many ways the major claims of the book concern what is admirable about holism even while acknowledging what is problematic. I continue to think that this is a deep and essential (although not at all fatal) tension within environmental thought.
Anthony, I’ve never heard of Doughnut Economics and it sounds fascinating. I like the idea that there is a sweet spot between deep ecology and social ecology and “between the social foundation and the ecological ceiling” as the doughnut economists apparently put it. That said, a sentence like “to meet the needs of all people within the means of the living planet—an ecologically safe and socially just space in which humanity can thrive” is abstract enough to be inoffensive. I would imagine that once you get down to defining terms—what exactly qualifies as “the needs of all people” and “the means of the living planet,” and what it means to be ecologically safe and socially just and what it looks like for humanity to thrive—you would find wildly different ideas. It’s holistic in that it takes into account human need and planetary limits, but also in the way that it assumes singular conceptions of need, justice, and thriving even though those conceptions would inevitably be greatly contested.
As I wrote in the roundtable I think these are questions without answers, but contending with them is still useful and necessary. Thanks for being such great interlocutors!
The Foreman comments on working with establishment conservation groups is such an interesting contrast with the EarthFirst! reputation for uncompromising radicalism. That stereotype is a reminder of the persistent narrative of the “radical 60s” and “left-wing Democrats.
In your conclusion, Daniel, you portray the ecocentrists as politically radical but philosophically moderate or at least nuanced or multifaceted. So it seems their multiple facets supported more intellectual pluralism than they would support in convictions of their politics.