When I started reading about the degrowth movement in order to smite it at Liberal Currents, I fell down a rabbit hole. I got super interested in environmental ethics and political theory, with an eye toward figuring out what an ecoliberalism would look like.
I got interested in ecomodernism, which I think is straightforwardly a liberal approach. I read Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Discipline over a decade ago and I loved it, stuck it on the shelf, and didn’t think about environmentalism for years. Ecomodernism seems right on the merits if a bit too obsessed with nuclear power (I’m a big fan of nuclear though, to be clear), but there also seem to be some goofy to shady characters and I’m quite uncomfortable with ecomodernists positioning themselves as against environmentalists. Dunno, seems counterproductive.
But along this vein I read Jonathan Symons’s Ecomodernism: Technology, Progress, and the Climate Crisis. Good stuff and I recommend it. Broadly sympathetic, he positions ecomodernism in the social democratic tradition. A global communitarianism seems a little contradictory to me though.
So I read Robyn Eckersley’s Environmentalism and Political Theory: Toward an Ecocentric Approach. Ecocentrism is a funny word. It sounds like it means centering environmental value, but in the literature it just means nature has its own value, neither reducible to human values nor merely instrumental for advancing human value. That’s radical enough, I guess.
Eckersley dismisses liberalism entirely. But she also describes ecocentrism this way:
An ecocentric perspective may be defended as offering a more encompassing approach than any of those so far examined in that it (i) recognizes the full range of human interests in the nonhuman world (i.e., it incorporates yet goes beyond the resource conservation and human welfare ecology perspectives); (ii) recognizes the interests of the nonhuman community (yet goes beyond the early preservationist perspective); (iii) recognizes the interests of future generations of humans and nonhumans; and (iv) adopts a holistic rather than an atomistic perspective (contra the animal liberation perspective) insofar as it values populations, species, ecosystems, and the ecosphere as well as individual organisms.
My emphasis. If that’s not enough, she says elsewhere ecocentrism is consistent with specifically human forms of excellence, and that human individuals and human culture deserves to blossom alongside nonhuman nature. But then, she also says a litmus test for ecocentrism is promoting human population control. Maybe we can just disagree about that.
I read Simon Hailwood’s How To Be a Green Liberal because how could I not with a title like that? Hailwood provided a lot of good background theory but I found his whole approach a little misguided. He wants to value (ecocentrically) “nature as other.” There’s definitely something to nature having independent purposes. Without humanity, natural entities would keep pursuing natural ends. So far so good, but Hailwood tries to get extra mileage out of natural purposes being alien to human purposes. But I don’t see why humans should value something we can’t relate to at all. Surely we have to see something of ourselves in nature to properly value it? Also, blah blah Rawlsian, eyeroll.
I skipped Marcel Wissenburg’s Green Liberalism: the Free and the Green Society. I had started watching a video lecture of his and was turned off for some reason. The book is also hella expensive. Just want you to know I’m aware of it.
A name that popped up a few times in both Eckersley and Hailwood was J Baird Callicott. The discussions made him seem worth looking into, so I watched a couple of his lectures and picked up his Thinking Like a Planet. Callicott, like Aldo Leopold before him, is the real deal. Callicott certainly doesn’t think of himself this way—he reckons he’s doing biotic communitarianism—but he is exactly what a good ecoliberal looks like.
Take Adam Smith’s sociological, non-ideal liberalism—we should pursue our respective ends and better our conditions, but we also value each other; the legislator should promote the general welfare and disrupt oppression—and add the intrinsic natural value of animals, plants, and holistic natural entities like species, ecosystems, and the ecosphere itself.
Here’s Leopold: “A land ethic, then reflects the existence of an ecological conscience, and this in turn reflects a conviction of individual responsibility for the health of the land. Health is the capacity of the land for self-renewal. Conservation is our effort to understand and preserve this capacity.”
But see Callicott putting the land (or earth) ethic in relation to all of the rest of our ethical and political commitments.
[I]ndividual Homo sapiens also remain members and sometimes citizens of other communities—clans (extended families), tribes, nations (ethnic groups), nation-states (countries), the global village (the international community)—each with its own associated ethic. … The land ethic thus does not replace all the previous steps in the ethical sequence; it is an addendum to them. The land ethic may well require the subordination of some individual human interests to the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community—those that are weak or trivial—but the ethic of democratic nation-states and that of the global village uphold the rights of individual human beings to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness.
I have an essay submitted for publication about Adam Smith and the land ethic. Stay tuned. Now I’m working on a broader essay (to be published at Liberal Currents) about the various ways liberals can think about value in nature independent of human value. I do genuinely find this as a bit of a puzzle, even though I think it’s possible. I mean, it’s demonstrably possible, because it turns out liberals the world over just do care about nature and it hasn’t stopped them from being liberals.
What I would really like to see is a book about the political philosophy of the Green New Deal, something along the lines of how Deva Woodly assembled the political philosophy of the Movement for Black Lives by observing that philosophy in practice.
But for now I’m really, really looking forward to reading Sharon Krause’s new book, coming out in May, Eco-Emancipation: an Earthly Politics of Freedom. You can listen to a preview in this short talk.