The Politics of the Environment: Ideas, Activism, Policy, 2nd Edition

THEORY

2.2 The roots of anthropocentrism

1. The Bible?
   The ‘historical roots of our ecological crisis’
   can be located in the despotic
   Judaeo-Christian world-view, which
   interpreted Genesis as regarding nature as
   existing solely to serve mankind and
   therefore ripe for exploitation (White 1962 ).
   A different reading of the Bible identifies a
   strong tradition of stewardship, conservation
   and concern for non-humans that is ‘at least
   as representative of Christian history as any
   despotic view’ (Attfield 1983 : 45). Nor can
   the Judaeo-Christian thesis explain why a
   non-Christian country, such as Japan, has
   an equally strong technocratic-industrial
   culture and similar levels of environmental
   damage as Europe and North America.


2. The Enlightenment?
   The dominance of anthropocentrism in
   Western culture is often blamed on the
   Enlightenment ideas and the scientific
   revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth
   centuries. Francis Bacon, for example,
   argued that by analysing nature
   atomistically – breaking it into parts and
   reducing it to basic components – scientific

knowledge could give us mastery over

nature, which could then be manipulated for

our own ends. Greens are critical of the

Enlightenment legacy for encouraging the

misconceived belief that humans can

master nature and for the apparent lack of

concern towards nature that it has

engendered – attitudes that, for example,

inform scientific enthusiasm for genetically

modified products.

A contrary view points to the great

achievements of the Enlightenment: the

triumph of reason over traditional authority

and the ascendancy of liberal values such

as rights, freedom and justice. There is

nothing wrong with a disinterested scientific

attempt to master nature in order to

understand how it works. Without science,

how would we even know about global

environmental problems such as climate

change and ozone depletion? The problem

arises when scientific achievements and

technologies are misused through

ignorance or for immoral reasons.

See Hayward ( 1995 : ch. 1) for a discussion of

ecology and the Enlightenment tradition.

robust to support a strong environmental ethic. For example, anthropocen-

tric arguments generally place the onus on those wishing to protect the

environment to make their case, rather than on those wishing to intervene

in nature to justify their actions.

One of the key themes in environmental ethics has been the attempt to

develop a non-anthropocentric, orecocentricethic (Eckersley 1992 ). Ecocen-

trism rejects the ‘human chauvinism’ of anthropocentrism and argues that

Sentience:The capacity to suffer or to

experience enjoyment or happiness.

non-human entities also have intrinsic value. Pre-

cisely which entities or categories in the non-

human world have value varies according to the

writer, ranging through animals, trees, plants and other non-sentientliving

things (both individuals and species), and even inanimate objects such as

rivers or mountains. A common thread linking all ecocentric arguments is

thebelief that to show that some or all of nature has intrinsic value may

prove a powerful instrument for defending the environment.