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In Defense of the Land Ethic: Essays in Environmental Philosophy
In Defense of the Land Ethic: Essays in Environmental Philosophy brings into a single volume J. Baird Callicott's decade-long effort to articulate, defend, and extend the seminal environmental philosophy of Aldo Leopold. A leading voice in this new field, Callicott sounds the depths of the proverbial iceberg, the tip of which is "The Land Ethic."
"The Land Ethic," Callicott argues, is traceable to the moral psychology of David Hume and Charles Darwin's classical account of the origin and evolution of Hume’s moral sentiments. Leopold adds an ecological vision of organic nature to these foundations.
How can an evolutionary and ecological environmental ethic bridge the gap between is and ought? How may wholes―species, ecosystems, and the biosphere itself―be the direct objects of moral concern? How may the intrinsic value of nonhuman natural entities and nature as a whole be justified?
In addition to confronting and resolving these distinctly philosophical queries, Callicott engages in lively debate with proponents of animal liberation and rights―finally to achieve an integrated theory of animal welfare and environmental ethics. He critically discusses the land ethic that is alleged to have prevailed among traditional American Indian peoples and points toward a new and equally revolutionary environmental aesthetic.
"The Land Ethic," Callicott argues, is traceable to the moral psychology of David Hume and Charles Darwin's classical account of the origin and evolution of Hume’s moral sentiments. Leopold adds an ecological vision of organic nature to these foundations.
How can an evolutionary and ecological environmental ethic bridge the gap between is and ought? How may wholes―species, ecosystems, and the biosphere itself―be the direct objects of moral concern? How may the intrinsic value of nonhuman natural entities and nature as a whole be justified?
In addition to confronting and resolving these distinctly philosophical queries, Callicott engages in lively debate with proponents of animal liberation and rights―finally to achieve an integrated theory of animal welfare and environmental ethics. He critically discusses the land ethic that is alleged to have prevailed among traditional American Indian peoples and points toward a new and equally revolutionary environmental aesthetic.
336 pages, Hardcover
Published January 1, 1989
About the author
J. Baird Callicott
30 books13 followersJ. Baird Callicott is an American philosopher whose work has been at the forefront of the new field of environmental philosophy and ethics. He is a University Distinguished Research Professor and a member of the Department of Philosophy and Religion Studies and the Institute of Applied Sciences at the University of North Texas. Callicott held the position of Professor of Philosophy and Natural Resources at the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point from 1969 to 1995, where he taught the world’s first course in environmental ethics in 1971. From 1994 to 2000, he served as Vice President then President of the International Society for Environmental Ethics. Other distinguished positions include visiting professor of philosophy at Yale University; the University of California, Santa Barbara; the University of Hawai’i; and the University of Florida.
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June 17, 2024
RELATIONAL ONTOLOGY
Our relationship to nature is probably one of the most, if not the most, important concept that we must straighten out in the coming decades. While that may be so, environmentalism as a discourse is insufferable, filled with foggy assumptions, and pierced by virtue-signalling rhetoric. Because this most important concept is clothed in the latter two characteristics, solutions to environmental concerns often degenerates into hypothetical fascism in order to solve the unsolveable. What nature is, ontologically speaking, thus must be fleshed out more clearly, so we can avoid such idiotic "solutions". Reducing the human population by 90%, treating all life as if it were identical, not having pets, converting everyone to vegans and so forth are definitively not the solutions we are looking for. Yet, logically and rationally speaking, those are often the solutions one is led to, having accepted the implicit premises underlying contemporary environmentalistic discourse.
Callicott manages to talk about caring for the environment without degenerating into the idiocy that radical teenagers - due to no fault of their own - often land in. How does he do it?
Callicott does it by walking a very thin line with the concept of "interdependence", avoiding radical environmentalism and new age holism. The western mind has been, and still is, sick with a disease called atomistic materialism, in which s/he reduces Nature and the universe to atoms, that, supposedly, follow deterministic laws that may be explicated and written out in its completeness. This disease, the western mind believes to be his, or almost his, own invention. Not recognizing that it is, in fact, 2500 years old, deriving from the Greek philosopher Leucippus. Furthermore, he believes, once again - falsely, that this idea follows from empirical data, thus indirectly, from the brilliance of modernity and our technology. Consequently then, the universe, ourselves and Nature is construed as a machine, consisting of independent parts, that may be separated form each other without loss of essense nor function. This is (obviously?) wrong, but if one never had the premises clear in his mind, one might go along with this absurd worldview for decades without noticing its obvious absurdity.
As a counter reaction to this metaphysic, the new age mystics have their holistic worldview, inspired in equal part by quantum physics and eastern religions. In that view, nature is, correctly, seen as "one" - maybe more accurately - not-two. Unfortunately however, this conceptualization also tends towards degeneration and a tautology. It is often summarised as "everything is one", or "all is connected to all", which I suppose is not wrong, but it does't really say anything neither. It is basically a tautology (or as followers of Rand like to say: a breakthrough!). You could dampen this idea slightly, by arguing that "everything is dependant on something", and thus you are rather close to Callicot's idea in this book, deriving from Aldo Leopold.
The idea is simple. To be interdependant means to be co-operative, it means to arise together, mutual being, inseparateness, co-existence, to be implicated in. Additionally, he argues that the individual is rather to be seen as a function of the environment, rather than the environment as a sum of individuals. Thus, what is Nature? It is not a machine that we stand out from, objectively observing from our transcendental point of view. Rather, man and nature are inseparable, we co-exist with a multitude of her parts. As Alan Watts has said in a million ways, for example: "the planet peoples", "the tree apples". We are something that the whole thing is doing, concentrated in this very concrete and particular place, both geographically and temporally. Or as he likes to say: "Self implies other. Other implies self. Out there implies in here, in here implies out there." Thus my skin does not absolutely separate me from the world, it is the place through which my internal and external parts flow into each other. The matrix of the environment grew me out of itself, out of its complex network of parts, I was delivered. I cannot be separated from it, I am it, I am that. What surrounds me is what constitutes me.
Alle these dualisms are interdependent, they too mutually arise together. The inspiration from the east is justified, yin-yang and so forth are clear symbolical representations of this idea. However, that being so, the west, with its tools of conceptualization and demarcation, should not devolve into copying such over-generalizations and accept the eastern ideas whole-heartedly. "The whole" is not some homogeneous whole, that is not the point, it is not some "one essence", only representionally seen as varied. "The whole" is to be understood as structured, organized, in a word, interdependant. The point is not wether there is one substance, the point is that what is, is a network of mutually-dependant parts, that exists not in spite of each other, but because each other. Actually, both is true. Both because of, and in spite of. There is friction and co-operation, but there is not separation.
The unconscious ideal of physics as the best metaphor for our metaphysical assumptions must be replaced by biology and/or ecology, which is, intrinsically, a science of interdependence. By using physics, at least atomistic physics, we necessitate upon ourselves the deterministic and mechanistic conception of nature, it is implied in that framework and in those ideas, unavoidably, and to the destruction of our environment and to ourselves.
Our relationship to nature is probably one of the most, if not the most, important concept that we must straighten out in the coming decades. While that may be so, environmentalism as a discourse is insufferable, filled with foggy assumptions, and pierced by virtue-signalling rhetoric. Because this most important concept is clothed in the latter two characteristics, solutions to environmental concerns often degenerates into hypothetical fascism in order to solve the unsolveable. What nature is, ontologically speaking, thus must be fleshed out more clearly, so we can avoid such idiotic "solutions". Reducing the human population by 90%, treating all life as if it were identical, not having pets, converting everyone to vegans and so forth are definitively not the solutions we are looking for. Yet, logically and rationally speaking, those are often the solutions one is led to, having accepted the implicit premises underlying contemporary environmentalistic discourse.
Callicott manages to talk about caring for the environment without degenerating into the idiocy that radical teenagers - due to no fault of their own - often land in. How does he do it?
Callicott does it by walking a very thin line with the concept of "interdependence", avoiding radical environmentalism and new age holism. The western mind has been, and still is, sick with a disease called atomistic materialism, in which s/he reduces Nature and the universe to atoms, that, supposedly, follow deterministic laws that may be explicated and written out in its completeness. This disease, the western mind believes to be his, or almost his, own invention. Not recognizing that it is, in fact, 2500 years old, deriving from the Greek philosopher Leucippus. Furthermore, he believes, once again - falsely, that this idea follows from empirical data, thus indirectly, from the brilliance of modernity and our technology. Consequently then, the universe, ourselves and Nature is construed as a machine, consisting of independent parts, that may be separated form each other without loss of essense nor function. This is (obviously?) wrong, but if one never had the premises clear in his mind, one might go along with this absurd worldview for decades without noticing its obvious absurdity.
As a counter reaction to this metaphysic, the new age mystics have their holistic worldview, inspired in equal part by quantum physics and eastern religions. In that view, nature is, correctly, seen as "one" - maybe more accurately - not-two. Unfortunately however, this conceptualization also tends towards degeneration and a tautology. It is often summarised as "everything is one", or "all is connected to all", which I suppose is not wrong, but it does't really say anything neither. It is basically a tautology (or as followers of Rand like to say: a breakthrough!). You could dampen this idea slightly, by arguing that "everything is dependant on something", and thus you are rather close to Callicot's idea in this book, deriving from Aldo Leopold.
The idea is simple. To be interdependant means to be co-operative, it means to arise together, mutual being, inseparateness, co-existence, to be implicated in. Additionally, he argues that the individual is rather to be seen as a function of the environment, rather than the environment as a sum of individuals. Thus, what is Nature? It is not a machine that we stand out from, objectively observing from our transcendental point of view. Rather, man and nature are inseparable, we co-exist with a multitude of her parts. As Alan Watts has said in a million ways, for example: "the planet peoples", "the tree apples". We are something that the whole thing is doing, concentrated in this very concrete and particular place, both geographically and temporally. Or as he likes to say: "Self implies other. Other implies self. Out there implies in here, in here implies out there." Thus my skin does not absolutely separate me from the world, it is the place through which my internal and external parts flow into each other. The matrix of the environment grew me out of itself, out of its complex network of parts, I was delivered. I cannot be separated from it, I am it, I am that. What surrounds me is what constitutes me.
Alle these dualisms are interdependent, they too mutually arise together. The inspiration from the east is justified, yin-yang and so forth are clear symbolical representations of this idea. However, that being so, the west, with its tools of conceptualization and demarcation, should not devolve into copying such over-generalizations and accept the eastern ideas whole-heartedly. "The whole" is not some homogeneous whole, that is not the point, it is not some "one essence", only representionally seen as varied. "The whole" is to be understood as structured, organized, in a word, interdependant. The point is not wether there is one substance, the point is that what is, is a network of mutually-dependant parts, that exists not in spite of each other, but because each other. Actually, both is true. Both because of, and in spite of. There is friction and co-operation, but there is not separation.
The unconscious ideal of physics as the best metaphor for our metaphysical assumptions must be replaced by biology and/or ecology, which is, intrinsically, a science of interdependence. By using physics, at least atomistic physics, we necessitate upon ourselves the deterministic and mechanistic conception of nature, it is implied in that framework and in those ideas, unavoidably, and to the destruction of our environment and to ourselves.
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