Radical Ecology: The Search for a Livable World. - book reviews

Radical Ecology: The Search for a Livable World, by Carolyn Merchant. New York: Routledge, 1992. 276 pp. $15.95.

Single-issue radicalism plays a distinctive role in any popular movement. On the plus side, it can tap its partisans' enthusiasm and impel them into action against the status quo. On the negative side, however, it can turn back on itself, calling into question some of its own insights and thereby reinforcing the dominant ideology.

An example in recent decades has been radical feminism, which at one level has offered a biting and desperately needed critique of the culture of male supremacy. But to the degree that radical feminists have downplayed class analysis, they have tended not only to stereotype men but to endow men in general (or at least white men in general) with a degree of social power which very few of them actually possess. The result has been a kind of essentialism about the natures of women and men that has strengthened the hold of traditional views as to supposedly innate mental/psychological differences between them.

Certain nationalistic tendencies among oppressed peoples have a similar paradoxical effect. Oppression is so readily attributed to a whole "race" of oppressors, that any internal differentiation within that race is overlooked, and the race-factor itself comes to be seen--again in essentialist fashion--as the one thing that matters. Dominance is then tied to ethnic traits alone, and a gain for one people is seen as a threat to the who1e body of another.

We should not be surprised to find a similar dynamic at work in the sphere of ecology, where the key issue is the relationship of the human species to the rest of nature. To be "radical" here, in the single-issue sense, is to think in terms of a polar opposition between humanity and the natural world. It implies being critical, if not hostile, toward any special emphasis on the needs of human beings. The old derogatory term for such emphasis was anthropocentric; the new one is homocentric. This is less bad than egocentric (the laissez-faire model), but is nonetheless counterposed to the more positive trait labeled ecocentric.

Carolyn Merchant's book is at one level a well-researched, well organized, and fair-minded survey of the various tendencies--theoretical as well as organizational--within the U.S. environmental movement. To this extent, it can be recommended as a useful guide to the terrain. At another level, however, it exemplifies some of the characteristic weaknesses of single-issue radicalism.

This is not to say that the author ignores all links between ecology and other questions. That would hardly be possible in a work of this scope. Moreover, her specific characterizations are often fight on target, as in her remark that "Economic growth is inherent in capitalism; it is not essential to socialism." (p.29) Where the single-issue perspective reveals itself, therefore, is less in Merchant's selection of subject-matter---or even in some of her formulations-- than in her acceptance of the analytic categories of the single-issue radicals. Insights such as the one just quoted then get lost in a sea of other observations that lump capitalist and socialist approaches together.

It would be hard to imagine a position more foreign to Marx than that of the nineteenth-century English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who wrote about the society of his time as though it contained no class antagonisms. For this, he earned Marx's blistering ridicule. In Merchant's genealogy, however, the traditions identified with the two writers are happily reconciled (p.64, p.73) under the shared rubric of "homocentric." Among the present-day exponents of this vantage point, Merchant names Barry Commoner (Making Peace with the Planet, 1990), the entire thrust of whose work is a search for ways to transcend the nature/humanity dichotomy.

Underlying Merchant's pigeonholing is a whole tradition of philosophical development according to which the assumptions proper to dialectics (such as the primacy of process and context) are seen as belonging principally to a doctrine of quasi-religious organic spiritualism, which she terms "holism." (p.76ff) Contrary, however, to what she implies in this passage (which she situates under the heading "Ecocentric Ethics"), the dialectical approach is shared by Marxism and is indeed one of its distinguishing features, offering among other things (as in Marx's The Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844) a view of humanity as simultaneously part of and separate from the natural world.

Merchant, curiously enough, pays attention to Marxian dialectics in a section on dialectical biology (p.150ff), but her awareness of this tendency does not affect her overall classification, in which Marxists continue to be viewed, along with capitalists, as hostile to environmental priorities. In similar fashion, her direct characterization of the views of Marx and Engels on ecology (p.235ff) gives due credit to their early awareness of the pollution threat, and her summary treatment of today's mainstream environmentalism (p.159ff) places due emphasis on its corporate sponsorship; but she does not consider how such sponsorship shapes the content of mainstream demands, nor does she discuss how a more radical environmentalism might take that sponsoring role into account.

Throughout her discussion, Merchant gives the impression that there is no way of effectively challenging the destroyers of the environment without calling into question the whole idea of a concern for the social good. Her discussion of water development (p.74) takes at face value the claim of dam-builders to be doing what is good for the human population, despite numerous cases (e.g., that of the Aswan Dam in Egypt) in which ecologically unsound dam-projects have hurt more people than they have helped. Instead of showing that most people's interests are in tune with ecological criteria rather than in conflict with them, she aligns herself with those who base their opposition to dam-building on what she calls "the river's intrinsic right to remain wild."

In her supporting argument on this point, Merchant explicitly labels adverse ecological effects (such as increased salinity and species loss) as "not part of the human-centered calculus of decision-making." She erroneously identifies human priorities with the short-run economic or political criteria of those who hold power. In reality, of course, these criteria endanger most human beings as much as they do the natural world.

By giving a quasi-religious cast to her environmentalism, Merchant overlooks the material interest of human beings in preserving the ecosystem. The perverse effect of this purist approach is to strengthen the hand of the main enemies of the environment, who never tire of arguing, in the style of George Bush, that the environmentalists are out to take away your jobs because they care more about birds--or in this case rivers--than about people.

Merchant gives further ammunition to this kind of riposte at another point (p.209), where she refers to a supposed common goal, for women, of "restoring the natural environment and quality of life for people and other living and nonliving inhabitants of the planet." [emphasis added] Here single-issue radicalism turns into its opposite. Not content with equalizing all living species, it also denies any priority to the animate over the inanimate world. And invokes "quality of life" in doing so.

To accept such an attitude would be to give up any basis for preferring one political or economic approach over another, since all are alike in requiring some human action upon the rest of the natural world. Merchant does not, of course, carry her attitude of environmental levelling to its logical conclusion. For example, she opts clearly (p.216) in favor of biological over chemical forms of insect control. What she seems not to recognize, however, is that the biological approach, for all its merits, is still--in view of the understanding it requires and the patterns it must overcome--a form of human intervention. Her categories implicitly deny this fact by requiring her to say that if you are mainly concerned with the well-being of your own species (i.e., if you are "homocentric"), then you must be in favor of chemical control.

This is, at once, inaccurate, unfair, and politically suicidal. It is inaccurate in the sense that chemical pesticides cannot harm other species without also harming humans. It is unfair in the sense that many people recognize this fact and oppose the agro-chemical complex without subscribing to geo-mysticism and without being disposed to give up the indispensable level of control, known as integrated pest management, that even Merchant says she supports. Finally, Merchant's eco/homo dualism is politically suicidal in the sense that it begins by labeling the majority of the human race as the enemy.

But why should the human species give less primacy to its own survival than do other species? And why also should the survival of the human species be seen as necessarily in conflict with that of other species? Why should it not be possible to support environmentally sound structures and policies on the basis of one's interest as a human being? Just because there are powerful forces opposed to such an approach, why should we accept them as advocates for the whole human race? Why should we have to deny our own interests in order to support those of the rest of the natural world?

We may again consider the parallel between environmental destruction on the one hand and sexism or racism on the other. The point in each of the three cases is that the interest in overcoming the abusive structure is ultimately shared by those who may have thought that they were its beneficiaries. But in order for the supposed beneficiaries to come to feel this community of interest, they cannot be expected to wish their own needs out of existence. What they can--and indeed must--be expected to do is to redefine their needs with a twofold purpose in mind: on the one hand, to cut out their oppressive/destructive behavior, and on the other, in so doing, to realize a higher level of existence for themselves as well as for their former victims.

Along all three dimensions, the point needed most urgently to be recognized is the structural obstacles to such transformation that are posed by the capitalist system.

As for the notion that abusive relationships hurt their "beneficiaries" as well as their victims, that is a characteristic insight of a dialectical mode of thought. Merchant, in her book, gives a rather good summary of dialectics under the rubric of "holism." It is unfortunate that she did not apply this approach to overcome the artificially defined conflict between a supposedly human-centered approach that degrades that environment and an "ecocentric" approach to which human needs are supposedly hostile.

Victor Wallis teaches political science at Indiana University-Purdue at Indianapolis. His article, "Socialism, Ecology, and Democracy: Toward a Strategy of Conversion," appeared in MR, June 1992.

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