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). 

The banality of the Tragedy?

As promised, I'm going to post on some of the articles that were published as part of the issue of Theoretical Inquiries in Law on "The Tragedy at 50", which I co-edited with Carol Rose. These articles attempt to provide historical context for the modern commons discourse.

First up is Stuart Banner's "The Banality of the Commons: Efficiency Arguments Against Common Ownership Before Hardin". The abstract:

The Tragedy of the Commons tends to be remembered today as the canonical statement of the idea that commonly-owned resources will be overused. But this idea was well known for centuries before Hardin wrote. Hardin acknowledged that he got the example of cattle in a common field from the early nineteenth century economist William Forster Lloyd, and by Lloyd’s time the idea was already familiar and was already being applied to the analysis of overpopulation, Hardin’s primary concern. This paper will trace the history of the idea that common ownership is inefficient, and will suggest why  The Tragedy of the Commons nevertheless quickly attained its canonical status.

On the other hand, Nathaniel Wolloch has a different view, as evidenced in his "Before the Tragedy of the Commons: Early Modern Economic Considerations of the Public Use of Natural Resources":

John Stuart Mill

This article distinguishes between the precise legal and economic approach to the commons used by Hardin and many other modern commentators, and the broader post-Hardinian concept utilized in environmentally-oriented discussions and aiming to limit the use of the commons for the sake of preservation. Particularly in the latter case, it is claimed, any notion of the tragedy of the commons is distinctly a modern twentieth-century one, and was foreign to the early modern and even nineteenth-century outlooks. This was true of the early modern mercantilists, and also of classical political economists such as Adam Smith and even, surprisingly, Malthus, as well as of Jevons and his neoclassical discussion aimed at maximizing the long-term use of Britain’s coal reserves. One intellectual who did recognize the problematic possibility of leaving some tracts of land in their pristine condition to answer humanity’s need for a spiritual connection with nature was J. S. Mill, but even he regarded this as in essence almost a utopian ideal. The notion of the tragedy of the commons in its broader sense is therefore a distinctly modern one.

Banner and Wolloch come from different disciplinary backgrounds, which may affect their understanding of what exactly the "tragedy of the commons" is supposed to mean. (I, for one, am with Banner on this.)

Grotius and Kant on original community of goods and property

The latest issue of Grotiana (noted by Legal History Blog) has an article by Sylvie Loriaux, "Grotius and Kant on Original Community of Goods and Property". The abstract:

Immanuel Kant

This paper is interested in the critical potential of the idea of original common possession of the Earth. On the basis of a comparative analysis of Hugo Grotius and Immanuel Kant, it shows how different the meaning of this idea can be within a theory of property or territory. The first part is devoted to Grotius’s account of why and how the institution of property was progressively introduced. It highlights the importance this account attaches to the intention of the first distributors for a good understanding of property laws, and in particular, for an understanding of their non-application in situations of extreme necessity. The second part takes the opposite path and shows that although Kant rejects the very existence of a right of necessity, the idea that one might be liberated from a law is not completely absent from, and even plays a crucial role in, his account of property. Clarification of this role ultimately leads us back to the idea of original possession in common of the Earth.

Forest regulation and its critics in early China

The latest Environmental History has an article by Ian Matthew Miller, "Forestry and the Politics of Sustainability in Early China", with some fascinating discussion of arguments for and against regulation in Chinese philosophy. The abstract:

Between the sixth and second centuries BCE, Chinese states developed offices to oversee the sustainable use of forest resources. This era, often cited as a period of rampant environmental degradation, also saw the emergence of a discourse of sustainability. The early philosopher texts criticized the environmental and moral degradation of their era in order to promote specific policy interventions. In response to the deforestation they depicted, moralist and pragmatist philosophers alike argued for regulations on land use as the basis of a sustainable political order. Early states used these ideas to justify state forestry, culminating in extensive forest bureaucracies under the Qin and Han empires in the second and third centuries. These forestry institutions were among the earliest in the world, preceding state forestry programs in Europe and Japan by nearly two millennia. Yet even at the early apex of state forestry, many thinkers criticized government regulation as immoral or ineffective and promoted the self-sufficient community as an alternative basis of conservation. These early texts were established as the core of the Chinese philosophical tradition, and their arguments for and against state regulation became the basis of many later debates over sustainability and institutional forestry.

9th century version of the character yu (hunter or forester)
(Chuan Cao, 2016, from the article)

Materialism and legal historiography

Environmental history has been debating its relationship with materialism. Now Chris Tomlins calls for legal history to turn toward the material in his recently posted "A Poetics for Spatial Justice: Materialism and Legal Historiography, from Bachelard to Benjamin". The abstract:

As the linguistic/cultural turn of the last forty years has begun to ebb, socio-legal and legal-humanist scholarship has seen an accelerating return to materiality. This paper asks what relationship may be forthcoming between the “new materialisms” and “vibrant matter” of recent years, and older materialisms – both historical and literary, both Marxist and non-Marxist – that held sway prior to post-structuralism? What impact might such a relationship have on the forms, notably “spatial justice,” that materiality is assuming in current legal studies? To attempt answers, the paper turns to two figures from more than half a century ago: Gaston Bachelard – once famous, now mostly forgotten; and Walter Benjamin – once largely forgotten, now famous. A prolific and much-admired writer between 1930 and 1960, Bachelard pursued two trajectories of inquiry: a dialectical and materialist and historical (but non-Marxist) philosophy of science; and a poetics of the material imagination based on inquiry into the literary reception and representation of the prime elements – earth, water, fire, and air. Between the late 1920s and 1940, meanwhile, Benjamin developed an idiosyncratic but potent form of historical materialism dedicated to “arousing [the world] from its dream of itself.” The paper argues that by mobilizing Bachelard and Benjamin for scholarship at the intersection of law and the humanities, old and new materialisms can be brought into a satisfying conjunction that simultaneously offers a poetics for spatial justice and lays a foundation for a materialist legal historiography for the twenty-first century.

Might legal history be ready for an environmental turn?

Jan Brueghel the Elder & Hendrick de Clerck, Abundance And The Four Elements (c. 1606)

Trump, Carl Schmitt, and climate change denial

Over at the Niskanen Center blog, Mark Weiner recently posted the very interesting "Climate Change Denial as the Historical Consciousness of Trumpism: Lessons from Carl Schmitt". Some excerpts:

We need to understand Trumpism as a philosophical movement even better than its own adherents do, and with full interpretive sympathy, and we need to be prepared to confront it along all its philosophical axes.

The most central of these axes is Trumpism’s approach to history, because the identity of a political movement, like that of a nation, becomes fully apparent only once it possesses a self-conscious understanding of the past.

*****

As a framework for interpreting the past, climate change denial grows logically from the core metaphysical commitments of contemporary populist nationalism in its confrontation with trans-Atlantic, cosmopolitan, individualist liberalism.

In this respect one might thus regard it as the distinctive form of anti-liberal historical thinking of our era. 

*****

Two principles of Schmitt’s writing are especially relevant to understanding the place of climate change denial in Trumpism’s historical consciousness, and they’re worth discussing at some length. Each principle links Trumpian domestic and international politics as two sides of the same philosophical coin.

The political is inviolable

First, for Schmitt a community’s ability to draw the friend-enemy distinction can—by definition—brook no conceptual or institutional restraint.

Most notably, the distinction can’t be predicated on other domains of human value, such as morals, aesthetics, or economics. Ideals from these fields may be used to enhance public feelings of opposition. Enemies are regularly portrayed as ugly, for instance—a practice at which Trump personally excels.

But the object of a community’s political dissociation is made on the basis of criteria independent from judgments about good and evil, beauty and ugliness, or profit and loss.

Liberals today regularly violate this principle. They seek to circumscribe national sovereignty within generally-applicable legal norms such as individual human dignity—consider Article I of the German Basic Law—and to restrict it through institutions like the United Nations.

Schmitt views such liberal projects not simply as naïve, but also as a recipe for social chaos at home and unrestrained, imperialistic violence abroad. 

Sir Matthew Hale and the moral law of stewardship

Today we're fortunate to have an interesting guest post from Erin Drew, of the University of Mississippi English department:

Sir Matthew Hale is frequently credited with a key role in establishing the public trust doctrine in modern environmental law—a claim that has been contested by multiple scholars on the basis of both the legal relevance to American law and whether his claims for public rights in De Jure Maris can be taken as a statement of public trust at all. Whatever Hale’s relationship to public trust doctrine as a principle of law, however, his religious writings show that he relied upon legal metaphors of trusts and stewardship as the basis for moral arguments for the human obligation to care for their environment. References to human stewardship were not uncommon in religious writing of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but Hale elaborates on the moral implications of the steward’s fiduciary role in a more extensive and legally detailed way than most, emphasizing the human obligation to account to the proprietary “lord,” God, for the responsible and proper use of that which has been entrusted to them.

In a chapter in his posthumously published Contemplations Moral and Divine entitled “The Great Audit, with the Account of the Good Steward,” Hale uses the Book of Matthew’s parable of the talents to imagine God calling humans to “account” for their use of the “blessings and talents” that God “committed to [their] trust and stewardship, to manage … for they ends they were given.” While the “blessings and talents” Hale discusses are broad and comprehensive, he gives special attention to the implications of human beings’ “stewardship” of creation for their duties to nonhuman creatures. In the section subtitled “Touching Thy Creatures,” Hale writes: “I received and used thy creatures as committed to me under a Trust, and as a Steward and Accomptent for them; and therefore I was always careful to use them according to those Limits, and in order for those Ends, for which thou didst commit them to me.” Hale frames the “Limits” to human control in terms of justice: God “has given us a Dominion over thy Creatures, yet it is under a Law of Justice, Prudence, and Moderation; otherwise we should become Tyrants, not Lords.” That “Law of Justice” requires using the nonhuman world with “Temperance and Moderation,” for the “Support of the Exigencies” of human life, yet with “Mercy and Compassion” for the “Powers of Life and Sense” which non-humans possess. To fail in either temperance or compassion would constitute a “Breach of that Trust under which the Dominion of the Creatures was committed to us, and a Breach of that Justice that is due from Men … to be merciful to [their] Beasts.” Cruelty and mistreatment of other creatures is therefore “a Tyranny inconsistent with the Trust and Stewardship that thou [God] has committed” to humans.

Thus Hale imagines a contractual relationship existing among God, humans, and non-humans, making humans morally responsible for the well-being of present and future generations of beings. Though Hale, like any contemporary moralist, stresses the sinfulness of the “Luxury and Excess … Lusts … vain Glory or Ostentation” that spur humans to mistreat and misuse the non-human creatures in their power, for him the fundamental sin is the violation of man’s fiduciary duties as God’s steward. Thus using creatures to excess is not simply a sin of personal gluttony. It breaks the terms under which God granted humans their limited dominion, by (in this case, literally) eating into God’s resources: whenever eating or drinking, Hale says, “I checked myself, … still remembered I had thy Creatures under an Accompt; and was ever careful to avoid excess or Intemperance, because every excessive Cup and Meal was in Danger to leave me somewhat Insuper and Arrear to my Lord.” The sin of mis- or over-use of God’s creatures, for Hale, lies in the violation of the contract between man and God to care for his creation according to the stipulated terms, and the failure to maintain God’s creation as a steward ought, by taking more from it than can be sustained. Hale believes the power granted to humans as the stewards of the world to be by its very nature subject to a law whose primary purpose is to ensure that justice and happiness is, overall, extended to each creature. That is, after all, the rationale that licenses human sovereignty over the world: that they maintain God’s ideal balance among the competing needs of various creatures for the optimal happiness of all. Only by justly fulfilling the duties laid out for them by God can humans legitimately claim “dominion” over the nonhuman world.

It makes sense for Hale to rely on the language of law and justice to reinforce moral obligations, since as biographer Alan Cromartie points out, Hale’s legal philosophy was based upon the premise of a legislating God who was “the basis of all natural moral knowledge,” as well as the premise that “the rule that all contracts should be kept was much the most important natural law.” In this, Hale was a part of a longstanding tradition of contractarian natural law, which drew moral principles from the nature of the fundamental contract between God the creator and his creations. Not all those who shared Hale’s belief that human beings were the trustees and stewards of God’s gifts extended their obligations to nonhuman creatures, but there is reason to believe that his opinions on that subject had a long and lasting influence on English morality, if not law: “The Great Audit” was excerpted, condensed, and reprinted regularly as a pamphlet from the 1690s to the 1790s, and the sub-section “Touching Thy Creatures” was the longest of the eight sub-sections included in those condensed editions, taking up five of a total of around twenty-five pages.

Ecological & Environmental Politics, Philosophies, and Worldviews: a basic transdisciplinary bibliography

(Bibliography Society of UVA)

Nearly two years ago we noted Patrick O'Donnell's bibliography on ecological and environmental worldviews. He's now posted an updated version, over 20 pages of English-language sources.