by human acquisitiveness, which is fed by, for example, advertising. Since the
achievement of a sustainable society depends on a change in motivation, a great
deal depends on the plausibility of this view of human nature. Furthermore,
ecologists must show that it is impossible to create and maintain a sustainable society
without a change in motivation: technology will not fix environmental problems,
and coercion is unacceptable and will lead to authoritarian regimes. Ecologists must
argue either that the real human nature will emerge fairly quickly as we move
towards sustainability, perhaps because the human benefits of such a society will
soon be apparent, or that changing human beings will be a major task.
Are ecologists hostile to reason and rationality?
It was argued that ecologists have to make some concession to human-centredness:
for nature to have intrinsic value there must exist beings capable of evaluation. Yet
there is, arguably, a further concession to be made to anthropocentrism: the capacity
to evaluate depends upon complex rational machinery that seeks to connect together
different values, experiences and actions. Rationality depends on language and not
simply a non-linguistic observation of nature. The idea of interconnectedness, which
is a core doctrine of ecologists, is made possible by human reason; arguably, there
is no interconnectedness in the world, except what the human mind connects
together. This is not say that there is no physical world external to the mind, nor
that its value depends on the subjective attitudes of individual human beings, but
rather that the human mind, defined as a set of capacities shared by individual
human beings, and made possible through language, is the means through which
the world is viewed as interconnected.
More specifically, ecologists have an incoherent attitude to natural science. A
major aspect of natural science is the acquisition of knowledge through repeatable
experiments – experiments that must take place in a controlled environment. Science
necessarily abstracts from the ‘particular’, and seeks to acquire knowledge by finding
something which is not unique to a particular thing – the individual rat in the
laboratory is only of scientific interest insofar as its physiological or psychological
behaviour is generalisable, meaning that its behaviour must not be peculiar to that
particular rat. This observation is not about the ethics of vivisection, but rather
about how we acquire knowledge of the world: natural science is advanced through
distance from nature, and not by being in touch with nature. Yet at the centre of
ecologism as a political movement is continual appeal to the scientific evidence of
environmental degradation – evidence acquired through a fundamentally anti-
ecological rationality.
In part, the ambivalent attitude to natural science has its roots in the ecologists’
conflation of science and technology, and, relatedly, of human rationality in general
with a particular variant of it: instrumental rationality. Science developed in the
early modern period as the result of changes in humans’ understanding of their
place in the world – only once the material world is seen as lacking in intrinsic
spiritual qualities is it possible to treat it in an experimental way (Kuhn, 1962:
111–35). Technology, on the other hand, dates back to the earliest human activity
- it is simply the marshalling of natural processes to serve human ends. Of course,
advances in scientific understanding have aided technological advance, and many
Chapter 16 Ecologism 373