Postmodernism and environmental ethics

Environmental ethics are a set of norms that a society accepts as a foundation for mediating and guiding their behavior towards the environment . In Western society, we have used our science, as well as other traditions (e.g. capitalist economics, humaneness, aesthetics), to form the foundation of our environmental behavior. We are in the midst of a search for new ethical foundations. Deep ecology has offered one possible route, Eastern religions have been another source for advancing our ethics, and yet none of these has proved palatable in our Western social systems.

Western science has guided the environmental interactions of our society which in turn has dominated global development processes, but this pattern has some definite shortcomings. While science has served to develop our understanding of nature and enhanced our knowledge of the ecological difficulties that we have created for ourselves, the system of which science is part has been very slow in responding to what many suggest is an ecological crisis. Sorting the science from the politics and the ethics of our society is not an easy task. Yet, science has been the target of criticism in the environmental arena because, while it has the power to expose the depth of our ecological crisis, it has done little in that regard. Critics point to that inaction as a negative structural attribute of how embedded science has become in our society.

An alternative proposed from within the humanist tradition in the social sciences suggests that science can only produce a false construction of nature. From this viewpoint science is tied to traditions that inevitably create an end product related to the position from which the observer views nature. Further it holds that all views of nature are constructed by humans who cannot step outside of ourselves to view the reality we think exists. Thus, no views are more or less closer to reality; they are all merely our creation. This alternative approach falls under the rubric of postmodernism and is elucidated through one of the principal methods in the postmodernist tool kit, deconstruction.

The deconstructionist approach of the postmodernist suggests that, even thought the views of all are equally worthy, an imbalance of power has been created by the dominant classes. The disempowered classes attempt to create a balance, a struggle which proceeds by dissecting everything down to its bare power relationships, so that having been revealed the wrong can be corrected. Deconstruction is a term that does not differ significantly from any other critical analytical method, but it pays particular homage to power and position, supposedly more conscientiously than other methods.

Nature "out there" then becomes a series of constructions made by humans with different positions within a continuum of power relations. Nature is the invention of humans in power and is constantly reinvented by people in those same positions. To the postmodernist, the present invention of nature, held by the current cadre of largely male, largely Caucasian scientists has given us a biased view of nature. The postmodernist wish is to level all points of view, so that life is seen as a struggle of words and nature becomes another, albeit large, "text" (a metatext). A rather curious outcome of this view of life is the idea that things in nature are doing what they do only because we think of them doing it. Furthermore, those who wish to protect nature may then become a force of oppression against those of other social orders who are struggling to gain power. Thus, a thinly disguised structuralist approach emerges. Power creates a framework within which the powerful struggle to remain empowered, and the remainder struggle to gain power. Environmental views supported by science are the handmaiden of the power elite and can only succeed in supporting the status quo.

While there is undoubtedly a cultural context in which nature is understood and in which science operates, this does not necessarily mean that context is equivalent to the content of nature. Even though reality may be seen as having been invented by words and the human shaping of sensory data, nevertheless there is much commonality across cultures regarding what we see in nature. The postmodernist view appears to be remote from the natural world, occupying an anthropocentric stronghold where humans are dominant. Interestingly, while humanists thus refer to a nature made by humans, scientists have since Darwin referred to humans as having been created by nature through natural selection.

The diametrically opposed view points under discussion here are not new; they merely reflect the range of opinions humans have always held about their relationship with nature. However, the postmodernist expression of human opinion about nature outlined above seems to be a position that is distinctly unhelpful, especially at this time in our existence. The heart of the environmental problems we currently experience has been blamed to a large degree on humanity's separation of itself from nature, and any proposal that maintains or widens that gap may exacerbate the problems. The postmodernist critique seems to ignore the power and influence that nature has on us, and instead uses an intricate semantics to describe the power we have over each other.

Most naturalists and ecologists are immediately struck by the apparent naiveté of a position that denies the creative strength in nature and the complex architecture of life provided by natural selection. A postmodern view is that our knowledge of distributions of organisms is a construct of the way we have studied distributions, and the whole idea of species is merely a human distinction. The notion of objective criteria devised by, critiqued by, and used by scientists is rendered unusable. The postmodern view renders the concept that ecological tolerance of the organisms, historical events, and climate create a relationship based on a combination of determinist relationships and stochastic events a mere artifact regardless of how many people agree to the concepts. This of course leads to a conclusion which provides little guidance for environmental ethics.

That does not mean that the entire postmodernist critique leads to the same less than useful conclusions. Rather, the very aspect of a critique that causes us to examine our position may be an important and valuable tool. We have relied heavily on science and found at the center of ecology some powerful, yet largely incorrect, metaphors firmly rooted in our conception of nature. The ideas of balance, succession , and homogeneity in nature have all fallen by the wayside in the past two decades. Those readjustments have given ecologists pause because they are strong examples of how viewpoint can influence our interpretation of nature, one that was originally thought to have been discovered by an objective science. Are there more misconceptions that we hold about ecology and environment that need to be examined? Clearly the possibility exists, and it serves us well to search for those by any and all reasonable methods. That postmodernism creates the notion that all human perspectives are inherently equal may create an obstacle to clear thinking about proposing a comprehensive ethic towards the environment. At this time we need to synthesize a more positive relationship between nature and humanity to bring all of our cultures into an integrated understanding of nature. However, a revised ethical foundation for humanity's relationship with the environment may benefit from the tradition of critical thinking that various philosophical positions bring. An examination of biases linked to our present position.

[David A. Duffus ]