The Ecocentrists

U.S. Intellectual History Blog just finished a very interesting roundtable, organized by Anthony Chaney, on Keith Makoto Woodhouse's The Ecocentrists: A History of Radical Environmentalism (Columbia UP, 2018), the 2019 winner of the Society for US Intellectual History’s award for best book of intellectual history. The roundtable includes insightful essays by Roy Scranton, Natasha Zaretsky, Paul Murphy, and Daniel Wayne Rinn, as well as a response by Woodhouse.

An excerpt from Zaretsky's piece demonstrates the relevance of the series to legal and environmental historians and practitioners alike:

[The] fantasy of a world emptied of people casts humans as an invasive species and the non-human world as bouncing back once we have exited the scene. In The Ecocentrists, Keith Makoto Woodhouse terms this thinking “holism”—a tendency to portray human civilization as comprised of an undifferentiated mass of people bearing down on a planet with finite resources and capacities. This proclivity toward holism was at the heart of radical environmentalism, where it played a paradoxical role. On the one hand, it gave the movement its teeth and empowered activists to reject the incrementalism of mainstream environmental organizations and engage in direct action, often at personal risk. On the other hand, at its worst, holism could shade into misanthropy, a blindness to social and economic inequality, and even anti-immigrant nativism.

Woodhouse is keenly aware of this paradox, and the portrait of radical environmentalists that emerges are nuanced. This book neither pathologizes nor romanticizes radical environmental activists. Much of the book centers on the story of Earth First!, and at one point, Woodhouse stresses that Earth First!ers saw themselves as part of a movement rather than an organization. It is worth taking a moment to reflect on the depth of that distinction. Earth First! was founded in April 1980 at the start of a decade when the radical energies of many social movements of the 1960s and 1970s would be routed into a dense and well-funded liberal apparatus comprised of non-profit organizations, think tanks, and lobbying groups that sought to reform the system from the inside. Modern environmentalism was particularly vulnerable to this kind of institutional capture because of its reliance on litigation strategies. But Earth First!ers were “movement” people. To be a movement person is to set oneself apart from the dominant society, to feel swept up by the forces of historical change, and to place political commitment at the center of your everyday life in ways that people outside the movement often find baffling and inexplicable. These tendencies arguably ran even deeper for radical environmentalists, who were motivated by a sense of urgency predicated on the prediction that the planet was running out of time. The Earth First! slogan—“no compromise for Mother Earth”—captured the movement’s single-minded drive.

But that single-mindedness also created contradictions that dog radical environmentalism to this day. The portrait of an existential standoff between an imperiled earth and “human civilization” overlooked the histories of global capitalism, colonialism and imperialism, enslavement and coercive labor structures, the appropriation of indigenous lands, concentrations of wealth and resources in the global north, and widening social and economic inequality. When radical environmentalists simplistically argued that “people were the problem,” they failed to grapple with how these histories were entwined with assaults on land, air, and water. This critique of a “universal humanity” will be familiar to anyone who has followed the more recent debate about the Anthropocene, the geoscientific term used to mark the moment when human activity became traceable in the geological record. Scholars such as Jason Moore, Andreas Malm, and Donna Haraway reject the term “Anthropocene” for its universalizing tendencies, introducing instead clumsier but more precise designations such as the Capitalocene, the Chthulucene, and the Plantationocene. Woodhouse’s book reminds us that the current Anthropocene debate has deep historical roots. It has long proven difficult for radical environmentalists to simultaneously combat both the planetary threats posed by humans and the inequalities that exist among humans. (Radical environmentalists are not the only ones who struggle with this. Activists focused on human inequality have also tended to subordinate the non-human world, but that is a different–if not unrelated–story). 

Equal access to justice or to obstruction?

As environmentalists deliberate the extent to which the courts can be used to stymie the anti-environmental agenda of the current American regime, the latest issue of Environmental History has a book review by Steve Vanderheiden of Lowell Baier's Inside the Equal Access to Justice Act: Environmental Litigation and the Crippling Battle over America's Lands, Endangered Species, and Critical Habitats (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016). Baier's book apparently makes a strong argument, and Baier is appreciative but critical:

Adopted in what Lowell E. Baier describes as “the earliest legislative manifestation and harbinger” of the Reagan Revolution (p. 79), the 1980 Equal Access to Justice Act (EAJA) authorizes reimbursement of legal fees for prevailing parties suing the government. While originally designed to serve a deregulatory agenda that would limit state power over business and persons, the EAJA has frequently come to support environmental groups pressing the federal government through the courts for greater environmental regulation, rather than less. According to Baier... the litigiousness of these groups has paralyzed the administrative state and eroded its capacity to manage the nation’s resources, to the detriment of the environment that such groups set out to protect.

Baier, as a lawyer and historian, is sharply critical of this policy evolution of the EAJA, through which courts and civil society groups came to play an increasing role in environmental policy, challenging the actions or omissions of resource management agencies. Part narrative history of the development, passage, and later evolution of the act, and part polemic against the US environmental movement and its legal strategy, the book is bound to attract two different sets of readers. Historians and other scholars of US environmental politics will find a scrupulously narrated account of the political milieu from which this legislation emerged, along with its evolution over recent decades, in the book’s first four chapters. Assembled from an impressive array of interview notes and archival texts, these accessible chapters detail the original objectives for and later impacts of this important statute.

More polarizing is the polemic that follows, with Chapters 5 and 6 painting the majority of organized environmental groups with a crude and uncharitable brush, Chapters 7 and 9 launching a relentless series of accusations against environmental litigants and their legal strategies, and Chapter 8 offering an alternative to this kind of adversarial politics in the form of “cooperative conservation,” through which polluting industry and the state are touted as better able to protect the environment in the absence of legal accountability to civil society groups....

Environmental views on the US Supreme Court

A year ago we noted Jed Purdy's review of Jonathan Cannon's Environment in the Balance: The Green Movement and the Supreme Court (Harvard UP, 2014). Now we have Anthony Penna's review of the same in Environmental History. An excerpt:

Jonathan Z. Cannon’s Environment in the Balance argues that the majority of the Supreme Court’s decisions regarding environmental legislation reflected a struggle between competing and conflicting beliefs and values. Environmental laws embraced “an ecological model of the world” (p. 1) that posits interconnections among humans and the natural world and seeks to protect it from potentially harmful human activities across place and time. In contrast, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority during the last forty years (highlighted by the appointment of Associate Justice Scalia in 1986) represented a different set of values and beliefs, stressing individualism, property rights, economic growth, and limited government.

*****

It is difficult to imagine a more complete analysis of the Supreme Court’s conservative direction when interpreting environmental legislation. Chapter 2, “Environmental Law, the Court, and Interpretation,” provides the background for thirty selected cases from a group of 150 significant environmental cases decided between 1970 and 2014 and an interpretive guide for categorizing majority and minority positions. Chapter 3, “Environmental Urgency and Law,” reinforces the author’s thesis that the deep-seated beliefs and values of justices inform their decisions when interpreting environmental laws.

Chapter 4, “Law for the Environmental Other,” explores the Court’s findings when the rights of the other conflicts with human use and benefit. In cases in which species protected by the Endangered Species Act, 1964 and the Marine Mammal Protection Act, 1972 were litigated, the Court rejected arguments that reflected Aldo Leopold’s ecocentric perspective.

In Chapter 5, “Efficiency,” Cannon notes that from 1972 to 2007 the Court resisted using cost-benefit-analysis in environmental and worker safety statutes. 

Worster on the Wilderness Act

The last year has seen a lot of reflection of the US Wilderness Act of 1964, including a symposium, a special issue of Environmental Law, a website, and books. The October issue of Environmental History includes several pieces on the Act as part of its Reflections and Gallery sections. First is environmental historian Donald Worster's "The Higher Altruism", which moves from history to thoughts on ecocentrism and environmental justice:

Only the human species could mourn another creature’s extinction or work to protect earth’s ecosystems. It is our unique contribution to conservation. The conservation of energy and matter for the sake of survival are common behaviors throughout the plant and animal kingdoms, but not the conservation of otherness, of wholeness and balance, of endangered communities of life. Those require the evolution of what we might call the higher altruism, an intentional selflessness that may have an element of self-interest but expands to find moral purpose in the act of preservation. Aldo Leopold called it a “land ethic,” but we can also call it a more thoughtful and ambitious preservation of diversity, ecological integrity, and wildness on the planet.

America reached a high point of ecological altruism in 1964 with the passage of the Wilderness Act. Like most moral visions, this one was layered over with vestigial language from the past: wilderness as a “resource,” wilderness as a place to “use and enjoy,” wilderness as an opportunity for “solitude or a primitive and unconfined type of recreation.” Those well-worn justifications were the result of more than sixty revisions needed to gain the approval of two houses of Congress, as well as various conservationist groups, who often were still thinking in anthropocentric and utilitarian terms. But unmistakably the act changed the focus of conservation, away from human needs and material demands to the needs of the other than human world.

Signs in Kalmiopsis Wilderness (Rene Casteran, wilderness.net,
reproduced on front cover of Environmental History) 

Further on:

The moral cause of preservation remained politically strong until the presidency of Ronald Reagan, who led a backlash that tried to brand preservation as a kind of selfishness that would prevent the majority of Americans from improving their standard of living. True, Reagan signed bills adding nearly 11 million acres of protected wilderness. At the same time, however, he appointed to office people who worked relentlessly to open all public lands to oil, gas, and coal development, to tree cutting, mineral extraction, road building, and motorized recreation, who were determined to block the change in moral perspective that wild lands preservation signified. The subsequent rise of neoconservatism in American society has tended to accept conservation for narrow economic purposes while rejecting conservation for more altruistic ends. The Reagan legacy has often forced preservationists to reemphasize more human-centered goals (e.g., wilderness protection for its tourist potential) and to pursue their more radical goals on private instead of public lands.

More surprisingly, the moral vision of the preservation movement, its commitment to saving and freeing the earth’s community of life, has recently come under fire by critics on the left, who make strange bedfellows with the neoconservatives. Preservationists, we are now told by a growing number in the “save the humans” party, lack a sense of social justice. They want to protect nature from exploitation not only by capitalist ranchers, oil companies, and real estate developers but also by those who are relatively weaker in terms of power or money, whether they are American Indians or peasant farmers in Africa. Anyone who pursues a preservationist vision stands accused of indifference toward the economic needs of the world’s poor. Protecting wilderness and wildlife has become, by this reasoning, an act of aggression against vulnerable people who want and need to exploit the oil, wood, or game that nature offers. To exclude people from any part of the natural world, it is argued, is to deny those people’s rights and to collude in their mistreatment.