People. What a bunch of bastards.

Brendan wrote a post criticizing deep ecologists and environmentalists for being misanthropes. Sigh. This was my response:

Thanks for this post, Brendan. I see where you're coming from, and you're definitely not the first person to accuse ecologists and environmentalists of being misanthropic or anti-human. But I do have a few problems with your characterization of the deep ecologist's position on this.

First of all, I've never heard any environmentalist or deep ecologist seriously propose killing or sterilizing individuals as a solution to the population crisis. (Except maybe out of frustration or despair, speaking in an emotional and intentionally hyperbolic way. Do you have any citations for where you've seen this claim being made as a serious proposal?) There's one very good reason for this: the study of population dynamics in the science of ecology clearly links population growth to resource availability. This applies to humans as well. In other words, the problem of human over-population is directly related to our ability to, and even our obsession with, extracting increasing value out of our available resources. An organized campaign to kill or sterilize humans in order to decrease our numbers would be just as ineffective as similar attempts to control animal and plant populations through limited hunting or harvesting (in other words, not very effective at all).

Second of all, as Naess says in his principles of deep ecology, the flourishing of human life and cultures is compatible with a substantial decrease of the human population. Since no one seriously believes that a society that sanctions organized killing or forced sterilization of individuals could be considered a flourishing culture in any respect (and, by definition, human life cannot flourish if it is prevented or prematurely ended), this to me immediately suggests that Naess has in mind some other solution than the one you ascribe to him. (In fact, your claim that he is a misanthrope is directly contradicted by his very first principle, which affirms that human life and well-being have value in and of themselves.) He talks at length about what this alternate solution is, namely a fundamental change in our worldview from one that sees resource extraction and endless growth as the primary goal of human society, to one that sees the natural world as valuable in its own right and emphasizes quality of life over quantitative measures of "progress." He is explicitly concerned for the quality of life for humans as well as nonhuman beings and believes that the quality of human life can be greatly improved by adopting principles of deep ecology; that by adopting these principles, the human population will naturally bring itself into proper balance with its supporting environments (just as happens with every other species on the planet). This does not sound like misanthropy to me, unless we assume that misanthropy means promoting a philosophy or worldview that happens to be at odds with the one that is currently held by the mainstream. In other words, if this is misanthropy, then we might as well say that refusing to let a child have ice cream every night for dinner is child abuse.

Thirdly, you rightly say that "the idea that curbing or reversing population growth, is all we have to do to fix global warming, species extinction, and climate change, is pure misanthropy." But you yourself point out that, among those ecologists and environmentalists you quote, over-population is only one concern among many and that curbing over-population is only one of several different suggested changes that need to be made. Naess, for instance, lists changes to "policies [that] affect basic economic, technological, and ideological structures" in his sixth principle. Foreman mentions the problem of over-population only once among his sixteen principles, and even when he does so he does not make any explicit suggestion about how this problem should be dealt with, only that it must be acknowledged to be a problem. So again, I am not sure who you are referring to, other than a straw man, when you argue that we can't reduce all environmental issues to the problem of over-population. I'm not aware of anyone who says that we can or should. Even your very first quote, from Ehrlich, does not suggest that all of these various problems, which can be traced back to over-population, therefore have only one single solution -- rather, he is pointing out what he sees as being a common cause. To use another emotionally charged metaphor, this would be like saying that because we can trace STDs, unwanted pregnancies and rape back to sex, that sex is therefore inherently bad and the "only solution" to all of these problems is abstinence-only education. We know that this kind of simplistic thinking does not work. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't acknowledge a common thread that runs through all of these related issues; in fact, acknowledging what these problems have in common can give us the perspective necessary to approach these related problems in more practical ways.

Fourthly, in general I think that the accusation that nature writers in the American tradition are "anti-civilization" is problematic because it takes for granted that American society is the prototype of civilization. It's important to place these writers in context and realize that they were critiquing the society in which they lived, and not necessarily "civilization" as a whole in all its possible forms. Many of them were in fact challenging their contemporaries to work towards new ways of living in society. Again, Naess explicitly points this out in his principles of deep ecology by stating that we need to rework the way we imagine human culture and that, if we are successful, society will look very different from how it does today. I tend to give these writers and thinkers at least enough credit to believe they are intelligent enough to recognize they are writing from a particular perspective and in a particular context. I also happen to agree with many of them that we should be critical of certain aspects of our current society. Again, this is only misanthropy if we assume that criticizing the way humans currently live in some cultures (namely, Western industrialized cultures) is equivalent to rejecting all possible forms of human society.

I agree with you that there are underlying class and race issues here, and that the problem is not how many of us there are, but how resources are distributed. I find it kind of weird that you are criticizing some of the very writers who have put principles of simple living and voluntary poverty at the center of their critiques of current society, for the very sake of emphasizing a better quality of life for everyone. (There are some people who would claim that simple living is itself misanthropic, because it represents a withdrawal from society and a refusal to engage in relationships of trade via the market economy that dominates most social interactions today. Needless to say, I think those people are full of shit.) There's plenty of evidence that principles of simple living, coupled with access to education and equal opportunities (especially for women) along with adequate medical care, play a very big role in decreasing population growth naturally. In fact, projections of population growth have repeatedly over-estimated -- back in the 1980s, for instance, it was believed that we were going to hit 10 billion people three years ago. It turns out that providing for the health and well-being of humans is a far more effective curb on population growth than any campaign of killing or sterilization. (And this is true among other animals as well -- for instance, the hunting of cougars in the Pacific Northwest in order to curb the population actually resulted in an increase in injuries and deaths during human-cougar encounters because such hunting destabilized familial and territorial relationships, whereas when the cougar population was left to regulate itself without the interference of human hunters, the result was an increase in the cougar population but a decrease in human-cougar encounters because there were fewer "rogue" young male cougars wandering into suburban neighborhoods in search of new territory.)

Jeff tells me that I really need to end this comment by emphasizing that I value our friendship and that your blog is one of the only ones I actually still read these days. :) Seriously. Sorry for the comment-dump. It's just, deep ecology has been a bit of an obsession for me over the past few years, and it seems to me that accusations of misanthropy leveled at environmentalists outnumber actual instances of misanthropy among environmentalists by at least 100 to 1 (but probably closer to 10,000 to 1 or maybe even 1 million to 1). So.... it made me a little sad to see you doing it. :( Again, I value our friendship. Please don't be mad at me.

Seriously, though. Who takes potshots at John Muir or Arne Naess? Naess spent the end of his life basically living in a hut on a mountain -- hardly an example of extravagant living at the expense of exploited developing countries. And Muir actively worked to establish a national parks system that would preserve natural wilderness environments all over the country and make them available for free (or almost free) to everyone. There are way better targets than these guys if you want to complain about classism and racism in modern Western society.

Sunrise/Sunset Language: Further Thoughts

Jeff sent me this reply after reading my previous post:

Completely agree with all your points, and yes, as far as I know, all languages basically refer to the Earth, sun, moon, and stars as if we were standing on a dinner plate, and the sky were a concave shell above us.

That said...

Some part of my subconscious has been kicking around ideas about what is 'natural' for humans insofar as we *do* strive to improve ourselves, and in particular to see things from other points of view, and consciously (and subconsciously) change ourselves based on that. There's no question that one of the great strengths of humans is that we *can* (when we try) understand other points of view, and even, to some extent, adopt them. You mention, for example, the coyote: naturally we wouldn't expect a coyote's perspective to be like a human's, and we would not expect a coyote to try and adopt a human perspective (although certain dogs do a very good job of it), and we would not ever expect any human to completely grok a coyote's perspective. But some humans, with years of study, do come to understand coyotes extremely well -- better than, say, rabbits understand coyotes, or bees understand coyotes. And because of this plasticity of mind (which goes hand in hand with the neoteny of our physiology), the question of what is 'natural' for human beings is rather complex.

To be specific: for humans who grew up and lived all their lives on a space station orbiting the moon, it would be completely natural for them to adopt new words for the motion of the sun, words that might have more in common with the 'objective' perspective than what most languages use. (Or perhaps not: they might still use perspective-centric language, e.g. the sun is "coming out", i.e. from behind the Earth or the Moon.) This wouldn't mean that they were unnatural humans, nor yet that they were less anthropocentric. But they'll have adopted a perspective quite foreign to any other species of Earth life.

So... since this is probably rather muddled, let me summarize. I completely agree with you, AND I think it's interesting to note that we humans have this plasticity of mind that makes it difficult to say exactly what is 'natural' for a human being. And as we alter our environment through developments in technology and culture, our neoteny and plasticity will only increase. It will be fascinating to see what strange ways of being human we develop in the next ten thousand years. :-)

Very excellent points. I don't think I have anything to add, other than that I think appreciating the plasticity of human nature and human language means, to a certain extent, explicitly allowing and making room for that plasticity. While that might mean sculpting and shaping our language consciously in some ways, it also means allowing language to evolve naturally. In this case I do not think it means excising certain terms completely and attempting to replace them with others in accordance with a predetermined ideology, especially not one that posits that it is fundamentally problematic to even acknowledge our human perspective.

In the other comments responding to Rua Lupa's post, some readers have offered very poetic alternatives, and poetry is exactly the right place where this type of language play is at its best. (There are plenty of examples where poetry has been the source of new words or phrases, too, so in that way poetry is not only the perfect place for language play, but the most nourishing soil for the evolution and growth of language as well.) I am by no means saying we shouldn't experiment with language or explore its depths or flexibility. Please yes, let's do.

Sunrise/Sunset: Can We Even Be Less Human?

Over on No Unsacred Place, Rua Lupa has a post up that pretty much epitomizes one of the problems with much of modern environmentalist rhetoric: the existential angst of being human.

She is specifically looking at the (supposedly problematic) language of saying "sunrise" and "sunset," which takes for granted an earth-centric perspective rather than acknowledging the scientific fact that the earth revolves around the sun and not vice versa.

If I'd wanted to be a real dick, I could have pointed out that according to Einstein's theory of relativity, we are in fact perfectly justified in talking about the sun (and indeed the entire cosmos) as revolving around the earth, if that happens to be our perspective. But I restrained.

The real issue is that many environmentalists are still stuck in the inherited worldview that says humans are "naturally" fallen and sinful creatures and can't do anything right. Therefore, what humans do is bad, and the problem with the planet is humans. Not the specific things that humans do, but simply the humans themselves. Thus, you get existential angst (or politically correct righteousness, or both) over something as innocuous as language that describes the sun as rising and setting.

This was the comment I left on the post:

I haven't heard of any ecocentric folks raising objections to the terms sunrise/sunset -- in fact, this is the first I've heard of it being a problem. I happen to agree with "Nobody" in the first comment above.

Acknowledging that humans have a particular perspective and that human language will reflect that perspective is not inherently anthropocentric.

Artificially trying to surpress our natural, intuitive relationship with our surroundings by adopting constrained language is unlikely to fix the problem, either, in my opinion. Language is itself a living, evolving thing, not a construct that we can meddle with and manipulate as we like. That's not to say that trying to craft more conscientious language isn't sometimes helpful, but I have my doubts about how effective it would be to try to force unnatural/awkward phrasings into the language to replace ones that already serve perfectly well. Words, like organisms, fill niches when they are needed, and a word without a niche to fill is not going to survive for very long.

I'd also point out -- and this might be rocking the boat a bit -- that for most of the hundreds of thousands of years since the evolution of the human species, we've largely been ignorant of the facts of modern science. But that has not necessarily resulted in us being worse human beings, or even worse animal citizens of the planet. We don't worry if the coyote has a coyote-centric perspective of the world, and we tend to assume that it does and that this is perfectly fine. In fact, we can't help but have a view of the world that is defined by our own humanness -- trying to have any other kind of view would be, well, inhuman. And one thing the planet does not need us to be is any more inhuman than we already act. (So many of our screw ups have come from us thinking that we can engineer ourselves into being better humans than the species the planet made us.)

Let's root out the actual ideologies that are problematic and destructive and put our energies into deconstructing those, rather identifying our humanness itself as the problem.

I should check this with Jeff, but it might even be that this is a problem specific to the English language (or a handful of related languages) and not universal to all human languages. If it is universal (which, given just how basic an experience it is to not just humans but pretty much everything on the planet, is the most likely), it tells us something fascinating and valuable about how we experience the world. I think we're better off learning from and appreciating that perspective, rather than trying to surpress it.

ETA: I couldn't help but follow up, in response to Rua Lupa asking another commenter to define (without reference to a dictionary) what a sunrise/sunset actually is:

Arguably, the terms "sunrise" and "sunset" refer to the specific event of the sun rising above or sinking below the horizon line from the perspective of a particular point on the surface of the earth.

In other words, the event itself is place-specific, it is necessarily related to a particular location and the perspective of (e.g. the horizon as viewed from) that location. It would be nonsensical to talk about the position of the sun in relation to the horizon without referring to a specific location.

So I'm not clear how you plan to replace these words/concepts with terms that are place-nonspecific. The very attempt to do so is a kind of ideological blinder, an attempt to universalize what is inherently and by definition a localized event.

I've done too much flying this year. I've experienced firsthand that sunrise/sunset is relative to your location, and to try to talk differently about it is bound to cause problems.

Diary - Druidry and Environmentalism

Days of Note: New Field Poppy Moon

Sun: cancer (cardinal water), 5:53 AM - 8:54 PM
Moon: new moon, cancer (cardinal water), VoC
Earth: gorgeous, sunny, not to hot, clear and bright day, gentle breeze, couldn't be more perfect, really

Below is a response I posted to a thread about Druidry and Environmentalism on the TC Neo-Druidry SIG.

Druidry seems to have the reputation of being a "green" religion, taking a special interest in the natural world and our place in it. From ancient harvests of mistletoe from oak trees to modern celebrations of the solstice at Stonehenge, nature often plays a special role in how Druids see the world today.

Does environmentalism play a role in your Druidic path? How do you relate to nature, to both the environment around you and greater planetary concerns? Would you agree or disagree with the perception that Druidry is a "green" religion? Has increased nature awareness/environmentalism inspired you to make certain changes in your life (in your diet, recycling, spontaneous tree hugging, etc)?

Love this and the community service thread! Thanks for starting them. :)

I think you're right on the mark about Druidry's relationship to environmentalism. The Druid Revival began, along with the Romantic Period of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, at least in part in response to the Industrial Revolution and its dehumanizing, world-devouring influences. The Romantics (artists, poets, intellectuals, philosophers, etc.) were responding to the kind of Cartesian dualism that split the mind/spirit from the physical body and the material world. Valuing the aesthetic and spiritual qualities of the natural world was a big part of how they countered this dualism and sought to overcome it. I think these days folks have a tendency to dismiss Revival Druidry as "romanticism" (lower-case) as though to suggest that it's naively idealistic or inaccurate. There are some inaccuracies in it, of course, but Romanticism (upper-case) was a hugely important philosophical movement in the evolution of Western civilization, and modern day environmentalism and conservation (not to mention ecosophy and deep ecology, and even the scientific study of ecosystems to some extent) owe their existence to ideas first explored by the Romantics. If you really wanted to get technical, you could probably argue that any person today who uses the name "Druid" owes at least some thanks to the Romantics for their part in the revival of that spiritual archetype.

But it's not just Druidry's connection with the Romantics that suggests it has some "green" tendencies. From my understanding of ancient Celtic culture, the Celts tended to be much more concerned with the earth and (what we would call) "nature spirits" than some of the other ancient religious traditions of the time. In fact, that was one of the arguments the Romans used in support of their belief that the Celts were mere uncivilized barbarians - that they held their rituals outside among the trees in sacred groves and seemed to worship nature, instead of worshipping "proper" gods in elaborate temples full of refined sculptures. A deep connection with and respect for the natural world runs deeply through Celtic spirituality in general - and actually, it seems to me that the Wiccan focus on the natural world might actually stem from its early relationship (via Gerald Gardner and Ross Nichols) to Revival Druidry and Celtic spirituality. I think it's kind of a shame that some Reconstructionists I've met and talked to these days try to distance themselves from Wicca by dropping this nature-focus and focusing instead on polytheism as of primary importance. (That was actually a discussion we had on another thread, so I don't want to rehash it here! ;))

Personally, the focus on the natural world and environmentalism is so central to my understanding of Druidry, it's fair to say that it's the primary (if not entire) reason I became a Pagan to begin with. I had struggled all my life with the ambivalent role that nature and the earth played in Christianity, looking to saints like Francis of Assisi to try to ease my discomfort with how often world-denying the Christian tradition could be. In the end, though, it just wasn't enough - and when I discovered Druidry, it came as such a relief that here was a religious path where my love of the earth could take a central role. My relationship with the natural world and its wildernesses had always been my main way of connecting with the sacred, and here was a community where that was not only tolerated, but supported and encouraged! Fantastic! :)

My environmentalism has remained a central aspect of my Druidry ever since. My partner and I live very frugally and simply, to lessen our impact on the earth in every way we can. We do all the small stuff - washing our clothes in cold water, refusing to use the car unless absolutely necessary, walking or biking most places, eating a vegetarian diet of mostly local, organic foods, reducing our plastic use to almost nothing, composting in the backyard, etc. We also participate in local environmental activism when we can, and we try to get away into the woods of the local state park to camp at least every few months during reasonable weather. We also both write regularly to advocate for environmental awareness (I'm the blog project coordinator for No Unsacred Place). And since we're getting married in two and a half months, we've spent the past year planning a "green" wedding and we're going for Platinum Certification for our wedding through the Live Green Live Smart Institute.

But maybe one of the most important ways that we blend our environmentalism with our spirituality is by actually trying to cultivate and nurture our relationship with the local landscape. I've been studying deep ecology and eco-philosophy for the past year or so, and slowly been learning more and more about our bioregion and its needs and moods. My spiritual practice challenges me to move away from an anthropocentric worldview and learn to see the world and all its beings as part of a "ecology of Spirit," all interconnected and valuable in their own right.

Wow! I didn't mean for this to get so long! But it's such a great topic, and a really important one, too. :) Thanks again for starting the thread!