OK, officially back from the holidaze now. The next issue of MP should be coming out quite soon, so look out for that. In the mean time let’s get back to blogging.
Journalist Johann Hari has a thought-provoking piece over at Slate. Ostensibly it’s a review of a recent book of American environmental writing edited by Bill McKibben. However, like me, Hari uses the review as a jumping off point for expounding on his own views. The crux of his essay is that many influential American environmentalists, though united by a common cause, come from fundamentally different intellectual and philosopfical backgrounds that cause them to arrive at radically different policy prescriptions. Hari and other rationalists (like myself) follow the Enlightenment tradition. Careful and objective analysis of scientific data clearly reveal anthropogenic environmental degredation and provide a framework for remediation. It is difficult for me to farily describe the Romantic position since it sounds like sophisticated, but nevertheless confused, nonsense to me. I think that the basic point is that humans have an essential, spiritual connection to nature, and that we commit injury to both ourselves and the earth through contemporary, technological living.
One point Hari makes is that individual environmentalists do fit neatly into one camp or another, nor do they often realize the distinction:
Wes Jackson offers the most romantic fantasy of the book—but he is a distinguished scientist. Al Gore offers the most lucid popular summary of hard climate science we have—and then attributes the disaster, in an unexplained leap of logic, to a “spiritual crisis.”
As a biology graduate student, I can attest to the fact that many scientists working in ecology, evolution, conservation, and related fields are similarly confused and often contradictory about the environmental philosophy. The schizophrenia emerges, I think, from the fact that many scientists working in environmental fields arrive at their career choice through a love of nature that stems from the Romantic tradition. The choice to pursue a scientific career enforces the methodology and rigor of the Rationalist tradition, and much of one’s ebullient love of nature is recast in this framework. Most biologists adopt materialism and philosophical naturalism, but never quite get over the sense a “spiritual” connection with nature. I imagine the situation is far worse for the contemporary environmental writer who, similarly Romantically inspired, reports on but never conducts scientific analyses.
In a perfect world, the Romantics, Rationalists, and all those in between would recognize their differences, but nevertheless arrive at similar practical solutions to environment problems. Unfortunately, like two planes that arrive together at a hub and then go their separate routes, environmentalists from different philosophical traditions promote not merely different, but mutually exclusive ways of mitigating against anthropogenic insults. Hari mentions the fact that Romantics in the US (I think Michael Pollan fits here) emphasize the need to move out of cities and reenter a pastoral, agriculture-based lifestyle (the 2st century version of Rousseau’s noble savage), while the data indicate the densely populated cities like New York have the lowest carbon footprint per capita. Many environmentalists believe that transgenic or GMO crops are “unnatural”, while data conclusively show that transgenic technology has and will reduce chemical inputs and increase yield. Environmentalists of a religious bent believe that nature is a gift from god and that we are earth’s stewards, yet environmental successes seem to be the result of quite material incentives – government regulation and taxes. Thus, the problem for me of compromising with well-meaning, but irrational environmentalists is not a stubborn defense of ideals. Compromise may mean subscribing to policies that have the exact opposite of their intended effect. Argh.