the everyday sense that there is a distinction: imagine looking out of the window
at a tree-lined street of apartment blocks. Human beings have constructed the
apartments and planted the trees, but because the apartments function according
to human design, whereas the trees, despite being planted in neat lines, develop
according to processes understood, but not set in motion, by human beings, we
reasonably enough say the trees are part of nature, and the apartments are part of
the artificial, human world.
That distinction is valid, but difficulties arise for ecologists when they make
further claims: (a) that the natural world forms an interconnected whole set apart
fromthe human world, and on which the human world is dependent; (b) that the
natural world has intrinsic value, whereas the human world does not. The
interconnectedness–separateness thesis can be challenged in the following way: there
is no part of the globe untouched by human activity, and therefore insofar as there
are connections, these are between the two worlds. Of course, the ecological critique
rests precisely on accepting as a fact that human beings have transformed the world,
and for the worse! Their point is that we depend on the natural world, understood
as a whole connected together through complex processes, such that the human
world is secondary. This claim could be accepted by environmentalists: certainly,
if we do not allow, say, fish stocks to be replenished because of overfishing or marine
pollution, there will be no fish in the supermarket, and no profits to be made from
fish.
An ecologicalargument would require accepting not simply (a), but also (b): the
natural world is separate and valuable in a way the human world is not. This is
open to challenge. Venice is clearly one of the great human creations – a world
heritage site – built on a lagoon, and requiring considerable human intervention in
the natural environment. That city, or at least the part of it most people understand
as Venice, is under threat of sinking due to the combined effects of subsidence and
rising sea levels; in addition, the lagoon is polluted through heavy industrial activity
in the region. That there are natural processes at work, which are in part the result
of a global environmental crisis, can be accepted by environmentalists, but that
Venice itself has less value than naturally occurring phenomena is surely open to
challenge. That, however, is the conclusion that an ecologist must draw.
The priority given to the natural world by ecologists rests in part on a ‘hierarchy
of needs’, with physical reproductive needs at the base, and other needs, or ‘wants’,
of lesser importance. For example many ecologists regard food production as more
important than tourism, and indeed many are hostile to tourism. Yet in an advanced
capitalist system tourism satisfies the needs of those economically dependent on it.
Ecologists sometimes suggest that we can have the benefits of the modern human
world even if we remove the material conditions – industrialism – for modernity.
Kirkpatrick Sale argues for a self-sufficient community, which does not engage in
significant trade with other communities; such a community would ensure ‘a wide
range of food, some choices in necessities and some sophistication in luxuries, [and]
the population to sustain a university and large hospital and a symphony orchestra’
(Sale in Dobson, 2000: 118). Setting aside economic considerations about whether
a low-trade world could sustain a high level of medical care, the social world that
gives rise to relatively cosmopolitan institutions such as universities or orchestras
has been one in which there is interaction between communities and cultures.
Perhaps the argument is that we should preserve the cultural achievements of a
Chapter 16 Ecologism 371