0415403510.Routledge.Green.Political.Thoughts.May.2007

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There was a time, then, when deep ecology was associated primarily
with the belief that the non-human world could have (and did have)
intrinsic value. This appeared to be a radical move within traditional
ethical discourse, with far-reaching practical implications for the rela-
tionship between human beings and their environment. In ethical terms
38 Green Political Thought
it was (and is) an attempt to move beyond human-prudential arguments
for concern for the biosphere. However, as I have indicated above, a
number of deep ecology theorists have balked at the implications of
developing a cast-iron intrinsic value theory. This has led them to pro-
pose the necessity for an ethics proceeding from a changed state of
consciousness, rather than hoping that it might be developed from
within the present dominant one.
The state of being position begins from the following sort of premise:
that an ecological consciousness connects the individual to the larger
world (Bunyard and Morgan-Grenville, 1987, p. 282), and it has been
developed in its most sophisticated form by Fox (1990). This ecological
consciousness serves as a new foundation on which a different (eco-
logical) ethics and new (ecological) forms of behaviour would be built.
The idea involves the cultivation of a sense of self that extends beyond
the individual understood in terms of its isolated corporal identity. To
this is added the notion that the enrichment of self depends upon the
widest possible identification with the non-human world. Naess puts
this in the following way:
Self-realisation cannot develop far without sharing joys and sor-
rows with others, or more fundamentally, without the development
of the narrow ego of the small child into the comprehensive struc-
ture of a Self that comprises all human beings. The ecological
movement as many earlier philosophical movements takes a
step further and asks for a development such that there is a deep
identification of all individuals with life.
(quoted in Fox, 1986a, p. 5)
Ecological consciousness, then, has to do with our identification with
the non-human world, and the understanding that such identification
is a premise for our own self-realization. It is not hard to see how an
environmentally sound attitude emerges from this. Fox writes:
For example, when asked why he does not plough the ground, the
Nez Perc� American Indian Smohalla does not reply with a closely
reasoned explanation as to why the ground has intrinsic value but
rather with a rhetorical question expressive of a deep identification
with the earth: Shall I take a knife and tear my mother s breast?
(Fox, 1986a, p. 76)
In other words, the ethics issues naturally from an alternative vision
of reality, and this is the reason for the rejection of the primacy of ethics:
Philosophical foundations 39
I m not much interested in ethics and morals, [writes Naess] I m
interested in how we experience the world. . . . If deep ecology is
deep it must relate to our fundamental beliefs, not just to ethics.
Ethics follows from how we experience the world. If you experience
the world so and so then you don t kill.
(quoted in Fox, 1986a, p. 46)
Fox himself observes that his transpersonal ecology sense of self
has the highly interesting, even startling, consequence that ethics
(conceived as being concerned with moral oughts ) is rendered
superfluous! The reason for this is that if one has a wide, expansive,
or field-like sense of self then (assuming that one is not self-
destructive) one will naturally (i.e. spontaneously) protect the nat-
ural (spontaneous) unfolding of the expansive self (the ecosphere,
the cosmos) in all its aspects.
(Fox, 1990, p. 217)
There are three points to make about this notion of ecological con-
sciousness and its implications. In the first place: How far does it involve
a reversion to the original sin of anthropocentrism? It seems clear that
the principle of self-realization described above, although it generates
concern for the non-human world, generates it for human-prudential
reasons. To this extent, the development of an ecological consciousness
as foundational to an environmental ethics may avoid the problems
associated with producing the latter from conventional discourse, but at [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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