1
Real Anthropocene Politics
Simon Hailwood
DRAFT WORK: please don’t quote without permission!
This paper critically discusses the Anthropocene discourse by exploring parallels with the realism v
moralism debate in political theory. Realism is the denial of ‘ethics first’ approaches to politics; a
rejection of political philosophy conceived simply as a form of ‘applied ethics’. Different versions of
realism are more or less plausible but the central insight seems correct: politics is not well-
understood as simple conformity to a prior, independently defined moral standpoint. But this is
something of a strawman. Realism can overstate the extent to which ‘moralists’ define moral
standpoints independently of politics and in so doing obscure the way ethics and politics may be
intertwined without being reducible to each other. The Anthropocene discourse also emphasises
something true: the degree of human impact on the earth makes it impossible to view nonhuman
nature as a ‘prior’ source of normativity, values or principles fully independent of humanity. But this
is something of a strawman too: by no means all ‘traditional’ environmental ethics has that view of
nature. As with strong forms of ‘realism’ in the context of the relation between ethics and politics,
strong forms of Anthropocene advocacy obscure the intertwining of humanity and nonhumanity.
The Anthropocene discourse is also vulnerable to ‘realist’ critique of the ideological ramifications of
deploying such a homogenising frame without due regard to ‘by whom, to whom, for whom’
questions.
I
Over the past couple of decades a critique of mainstream political philosophy has developed under
the heading of ‘political realism’. This has various components and points of emphasis. I take the
central one to be a complaint that political philosophy too often adopts a posture of ‘applied moral
philosophy’. It adopts a moralistic standpoint prior to and independent of actual politics which is
then expected simply to conform to that standpoint. For example, Bernard Williams distinguishes
two versions of political moralism. The enactment version ‘formulates principles, concepts, ideals,
and values; and politics (so far as it does what the theory wants) seeks to express these in political
action through persuasion, the use of power and so forth’ (Williams 2005, p.1). Utilitarianism is the
paradigm of this kind of political moralism. The structural version ‘lays down moral conditions of co-
existence under power, conditions in which power can be justly exercised’. Rawls’ Theory of Justice
is Williams’ paradigm of this. What makes each a form of moralism is their shared commitment to
the ‘priority of the moral over the political’; enactment makes the political the instrument of the
moral; the contrasting structural version takes morality to constrain what politics ‘…can rightfully do.
2
In both cases, political theory is something like applied morality’ (Williams 2005, p.2). The thought
is that in full moralist mode political philosophy proceeds ‘unrealistically’ by ignoring features
internal to ‘the political’ (such as disagreement, legitimacy, order and stability) that aren’t a matter
simply of ‘doing the right thing’ as defined by the independent moral standard.
As Enzio Rossi and Matt Sleat point out (2014, pp.690-3), the dichotomy here between morality and
politics can be drawn more or less strictly, depending on the degree of autonomy the political is held
to have from the moral or ethical1. The strongest realism asserts full autonomy: there is a specifically
political form of normativity that should guide politics, where moral normativity is unsuitable.
Raymond Geuss perhaps holds this view (Geuss 2008). A weaker form of realism doesn’t deny a
place for morality in politics, but claims that political philosophy should give greater weight than it
normally does to the autonomy of distinctively political concerns and constraints. This is probably
Williams’ view. I take it that this weaker version is most defensible and that its central claim is
plausible: political philosophy shouldn’t proceed simply as applied moral philosophy without regard
to more distinctively political concerns. I am not going to defend these claims. I am going to argue
though that the figure of the political moralist is at least often something of a strawman and discuss
the parallels with the picture of traditional environmental ethics set up by those who strongly
advocate the Anthropocene.
II
Associated with the proposal to rename the current geological epoch the Anthropocene is an
apparently paradigm-shifting programme of environmentalism, which I shall call strong
Anthropocene advocacy. Many of those enthusiastic about the Anthropocene proposal have
commitments well-summarised by Piers Stephens in a review of a recent collection of papers, called
Keeping the Wild (Wuerthner et al, 2014), by opponents of strong advocacy. Strong Anthropocene
advocates2
1 I am taking these to be synonymous. There are differences between them and one might, for example,
consider the extent to which Williams’ political anti-moralism is continuous with his earlier critique of ‘morality, the peculiar institution’. I don’t think the differences bear importantly on my argument in this paper. 2 A.K.A. ‘neo-greens’, ‘pragmatic environmentalists’, ‘new conservationists’, ‘Anthropocene boosters’,
‘postmodern greens’ (see Butler 2014, p.x). They include Erle Ellis, Peter Karieva, Stewart Brand, Emma Maris, Ted Norhaus, Michael Scheller and others associated with the Breakthrough Institute and journal. It should be noted that not everyone caught up in the Anthropocene discourse holds all these views. For example, Dale Jamieson uses the Anthropocene label to underscore the unprecedented nature of our environmental
3
‘… attack traditional environmentalists as woolly-minded misanthropic Romantics obsessed with
mythically pure wilderness, embrace the idea of humans as de facto planetary managers, repudiate
the notion of nature’s fragility, support anthropocentrism and economic growth, and advocate
partnerships with corporate capitalist institutions to maintain ecosystem services and human-
managed landscapes so as to serve human aspirations.’ (Stephens 2015, p.121)
Here there is a parallel with the stronger type of anti-moralist political realism. As for the latter
political moralism woefully misunderstands the real character of the political so, for the strong
Anthropocene advocate, traditional environmental ethics is hopelessly out of touch with the
properly anthropocentric programme that fits with the increasingly anthropogenic character of our
actual environmental situation. As the political moralist polishes her moral standpoint in the hope
that real political life will somehow conform to it, so the environmental ethicist polishes her idea of
independent nature as some sort of source of value or ground of normativity to which
environmental practice is supposed to conform – and so is a reactionary and irrational obstacle to
the unfolding of the actual anthropogenic/anthropocentric situation of the Anthropocene.
However, as Stephens goes on to say, by the end of Keeping the Wild ‘…it is hard to deny that [such]
attacks on traditional environmentalism have overwhelmingly operated by setting up more
strawmen than an international scarecrow-making contest’ (p.122). One strawman in particular
stands out to me: respecters, protectors and conservers of nature, notably in the form of wilderness,
hold a view of nature as ‘pure and untouched’, where this is hopeless: in the Anthropocene there is
no longer any such thing (if there ever was). It is pointless and counterproductive then to waste
thought, time, money and effort trying to respect or conserve it. The way to go is to direct
‘conservation’ efforts to the moulding of eco-systems and processes to best serve human interests.
There is something in this, of course; just as there is in political realism. The pursuit of ecological
security (in some suitable sense of that) for humans must be a crucially important environmental
goal. And let us agree that there are no parts of Earth’s surface that have not been more or less
affected by human activity. As Manuel Arias Maldonado says, our environmental situation is one of
profound ‘socio-nature entanglement’ (Arias Maldonado 2015). But the picture of the traditional
enterprise of environmental ethics as committed to the notion of pure nature (or wilderness
completely apart from any entanglement with the human) and hostile to human interests is no less
of a strawman than is that of the political moralist moralizing away regardless of problems inherent
to political reality. One main point of emphasizing the strawman issue involved in both the
situation as calling for a new ethic, but without denying there is still some (relatively) independent nature, ‘respect’ for which is to be a virtue of the new ethic (Jamieson 2014, p.188ff).
4
Anthropocene discourse and the realism debate in political theory is that doing so precisely does
point to important matters of nonreductive intertwining: of humanity and nature in the one case,
and ethics and politics in the other case. I discuss this in relation to political moralism in the next
section and in relation to strong Anthropocene advocacy in the section after that.
III
As I have said, what has come to be called ‘political realism’ encompasses a range of interrelated
objections to mainstream Anglo-American political philosophy. Rossi and Sleat (2014) usefully
distinguish four main areas of criticism3. One is that moralists tend to focus on particular moral
values (most often justice, as in Rawls’ case) to the detriment of ‘specifically political’ values such as
legitimacy, order and stability, and this distorts their understanding of politics. Another is that
moralism under-appreciates the extent to which it (or the values it asserts or intuits as fundamental)
may be ideological. A third is that moralists under-appreciate the importance of strongly contextual
forms of political judgement sensitive to the concrete conditions of political decision making and
action. This is badly served by abstract ‘grand theories’ apparently supposed to generate
prescriptions for all possible political situations and actions.
These issues are interrelated and I will be touching on each of them, especially, towards the end the
paper, the matter of ideology. But, again, I take the main one to be the further charge that much
political philosophy has degenerated into an exercise in abstract moralizing with little or no regard to
the particular concerns, stresses and strains of political reality as a realm more or less autonomous
from morality and yet apparently supposed somehow to conform to the principles and
pronouncements of ‘high minded’ moralizing political philosophy. However, the realist picture of a
purely moralistic political philosophy is something of a strawman. The political philosophers John
Rawls and Robert Nozick (along with others such as Ronald Dworkin), whose work has been so
(philosophically) influential since the 1970s, are generally supposed to count as arch-moralists
particularly ripe for realist critique, but neither of them actually does define a purely ethical
standpoint entirely prior to politics or untouched by any characteristically political considerations.
One might argue that it does so badly – in a strangely distorted and truncated fashion, say, as
something to be sorted out once and for all through a universal, de-contextualised solution that
arbitrarily prioritises specific values – but politics does enter into the starting points of their theories.
3 See also Galston (2010) for a useful account of the range of realist concerns.
5
For example, although Nozick is indeed an intensely moralistic thinker the infamous declaration at
the start of his Anarchy, State and Utopia looks both deeply ethical and deeply political: ‘Individuals
have rights and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights).
So strong and far-reaching are these rights that they raise the question of what, if anything, that
state and its officials may do’ (Nozick 1974, p. ix). It might be deeply wrong too of course; but if so
this is hardly because it seeks to define a ‘purely ethical’ perspective, entirely divorced from issues of
political power and legitimacy, and then apply that to politics. If it is wrong then this is probably
partly because both its moral and political content are too ahistorical, too thin and universalist;
abstracted too far from the actual intertwining of the ethical and political to which Nozick seems
almost perversely indifferent.
At least in ‘political’ liberal mode Rawls is less vulnerable to the charge of ahistorical universalism
because he explicitly emphasises the historical contingency and salience of its central commitments,
as in his claim that centuries of political developments, especially in response to religious conflict
and disagreement, make his conception of justice as fairness an appropriate ‘political’ conception for
modern liberal democracies, and one able to be stable through time (Rawls 1996). His earlier
formulation of justice as fairness lacked that ‘political liberal’ focus but still its guiding notions (such
as the ‘basic structure’ as a structure of force that may impede or enhance life chances) are not
purely ethical notions in the sense of devoid of contact with political reality. This is not to deny that
Rawlsian political philosophy is vulnerable to other forms of realist critique, for example in giving
justice permanent political priority (as the ‘first virtue of social institutions’) and in being
insufficiently aware of its own ideological status with respect to actual politics. It is to emphasise
that the picture of Rawls as a philosopher who first works out a moral theory independently of any
political considerations and only then turns to politics as the field of application of that theory, is a
strawman.
Let’s take it that political philosophy needs to be historically sensitive and contextualised. That’s
partly an ethical point too. So, for example, Williams emphasizes the audience issue: the audience of
a piece of political philosophising is always historically located, no less than its author (pp.12-13).
The author needs to remain mindful of both locations. Precisely because political philosophy needs
to be historically sensitive and contextualised it also needs to be suspicious of a strong dichotomy
between the ethical and something else: a non-ethical realm of politics. A historically sensitive and
contextualised political philosophy will be mindful of actual problems and situations from the very
beginning. But what Williams calls the ‘first political question’ (a Hobbesian concern to secure the
6
conditions of peaceful cooperation without which other desiderata remain moot (pp.3-4)) is only
one such problem.
Another is that of disagreement arising from a plurality of reasonable values. It is a mistake for us to
treat consensus as a main (much less the) goal of political theorising, given that a major, definitive
problem of modernity is the fact of pluralism and disagreement. This is a reason not to associate
political philosophy with a comprehensive ethical standpoint. Many are bound to disagree. How
then are we to understand the requirements of such values as justice, stability, development and so
on, given disagreement about their content and relative weight? It is pointless to posit a merely
theoretical consensus and derive normative conclusions about what we actually ought to do on the
assumption that we agree about matters that we don’t in fact agree upon. This is another realist
complaint against liberals like Rawls, despite the latter’s emphasis on the ‘non-comprehensive’
character of his political conception. As the great pragmatist philosopher John Dewey argued, a final
consensus is a foolish goal or assumption because disagreement is fundamental to politics (‘for us
around here’, as Williams would say); political thought is needed to consider how to cope with
pervasive disagreement and how to secure the legitimacy of coercive institutions despite it. This is a
central, ‘first’, political question of modernity. But it is a moral question as much as a political
question.
Charles Larmore has usefully developed this point to argue that political philosophy must move
beyond the realism versus moralism contrast as an either/or contest (Larmore 2013, pp.279-80).
Realists have part of the truth exactly because deep and widespread moral disagreement is a central
feature of empirical political reality. The import of this as a historical lesson, unavailable to Aristotle
for example, who did see politics as the extension of a single comprehensive view of the good, is
that political philosophy must be significantly autonomous from moral philosophy (p.300). Matters
of justice or the right are no less contentious than claims about the good, Larmore points out, and
consequently a view of political philosophy as properly focused on conditions of legitimate authority
in the face of moral conflict and disagreement is superior to a view of political philosophy as
properly about ‘mapping the structure of the ideal society’ (p.289). On the other hand, it is not
possible to see how such central features of political life are to be addressed without appealing to
moral principles taken to be ‘antecedently valid’. A purely Hobbesian view of legitimacy is
‘incomplete’. To secure the (perception of the) legitimacy of a political system it is necessary to refer
to principles taken to be ‘right’ independently of the system itself. Thus the moralist also has part of
the truth: the realist must take ‘some bearings from elements of morality’ (p.290) and so cannot
adopt the strongest form of realism. Although significantly autonomous from one another there is
7
interplay between morality and politics, an intertwining in which neither side is ultimately
fundamental.
We are agreeing here that there are other values than the standard moralist fare of rights,
distributive justice and so on that are relevant to the emphatically political side of life. But if we
were to take this as the basis of a strongly realist defence of the full autonomy of the political from
the moral then we would need to be precise about what exactly is ‘the political’. How should we
individuate the political and its distinctive, autonomous values? One suggestion is that we contrast it
with raw domination on the one hand and with personal interactions on the other hand (c.f. Rossi
and Sleat, p.695). That might look promising but it is important to note that these are contrasts with
ethical saliency. For example, contrasting the political with raw domination presumably involves the
value of legitimacy again so that, to use Williams’ picture, answers to the first political question are
seen by those subject to them as part of the solution and not part of the problem (Williams, p.4).
Williams (ibid.) calls this the ‘basic legitimation demand’ (BLD). Yet it seems strange to say that
legitimacy is a ‘non-moral’ political value. It is surely a matter of moral relevance whether a given
attempt to secure through force the conditions of peaceful cooperation is felt to be legitimate by
those subject to it. Williams claims that if the BLD (the demand for the state to offer each of its
subjects a story legitimating its power over them) is a moral demand then it is one inherent to
politics as such and not a demand that is prior to politics (p.5). But, as Larmore argues, the point is
not
‘… so much the BLD as rather the justification of state power, whatever it may be, in which satisfying
the BLD is said to consist, that must express a “morality prior to politics”: it has to embody an idea of
what constitutes a just political order – specifically, an idea of what constitutes the just exercise of
coercive power – and that is not only a moral conception but one whose validity must be
understood as antecedent to the state’s own authority by virtue of serving to ground it. I do not
say, obviously enough, that this idea must be correct, that the moral principles invoked must truly be
valid. But they must be regarded as being so if they are to be taken as justifying the state’s exercise
of coercive power.’ (p.291)
This does not imply the fully moralist view of political philosophy as applied moral philosophy. The
necessary moral ideas needn’t amount to a comprehensive morality, and nor is it necessary to ‘refer
to justice as a purely moral ideal in the sense of defined in advance of any concern for how its
requirements are to be made authoritative’ (Larmore, p.292, his emphasis). Larmore also points out
that none of this means that thinking about justice as a ‘purely moral ideal’ is wrong or pointless.
Considerations of who ideally is owed what, regardless of issues of legitimate coercion, are an
8
important part of moral philosophy. What transforms them into political philosophy, for Larmore, is
explicit explanation of the conditions under which such considerations can be properly authoritative
or legitimately enforced (Larmore, p.295). That is, the moral questions are viewed as interacting
with the political questions.
To reinforce this point consider Adam Swift’s (2008) robust defence of ‘pure, context-free
philosophical analysis’ of concepts such as justice. This, he says, has a crucial role in clarifying the
relations between, and relative weight of, the values involved, so as to inform the evaluation of
options whose feasibility and methods of realization are to be determined by the social sciences
(pp.369ff). In Larmore’s terms the philosophical component of this division of labour looks like (non-
political) moral philosophy. It might be interpreted as a rather pure form of political moralism: the
philosopher analyses the values as they are ‘in themselves’, independently of political considerations
of power, legitimacy and so on, and then shows her workings to social scientists who determine if
and how they can be realized in a given concrete political situation. Politics then looks like applied
moral philosophy. But, as Swift points out, one can take the formulation and analysis of
‘fundamental’ principles of justice to be logically independent of issues of ‘feasibility’ and also think
that normative theorizing in the light of those principles should be ‘integrated with an appreciation
of the empirical realities of one’s own society’ (p.371). Presumably such empirical realities include
feasibility constraints imposed by ‘where we are now’; social and psychological constraints and
political constraints in the sense of whether or how the results of the ideal theorizing could be
regarded as authoritative, their coercive implementation legitimate. This latter informs ‘what ought
to be done’, not simply the analyses and principles arrived at in de-contextualised abstraction. If
what the philosopher comes up with flies in the face of what the evidence shows to be political
reality, or any foreseeable development of that reality, she will have to think again4.
The point here is that even someone who gives a vital role to political philosophy in abstract ideal
theory mode need not think that the way to go is 1) formulate abstract principles; 2) ‘apply’ them to
political reality regardless of the extent to which the empirical circumstances match the idealizing
assumptions (full moral powers, compliance, ideal rationality and so on) employed in the course of
the abstract formulation5. Swift’s division of labour between pure, abstract philosophising and the
4 Perhaps Cohen’s defence of ‘fact-independent’ principles is a counter-example here. In which case realist
criticism of him as a pure moralist doesn’t set him up as a strawman. See Larmore (2013) for critical discussion of Cohen’s position. 5 As Swift notes, even Rawls explicitly acknowledges as ‘obvious’ at the beginning of Theory of Justice that ‘the
problems of partial compliance theory are the urgent and pressing problems. These are the things that we are faced with in everyday life’ (quoted by Swift, p.381). What he, Rawls, is doing, however well or badly, is beginning with the ideal theory required to give provide a secure grasp of the shape of the problems.
9
empirical investigation of empirical reality may be drawn too sharply to be fully convincing.
However, the overall enterprise encompassing that division of labour embodies the belief that, in
reality, the moral and political are intertwined. This is the point I want to emphasise.
To be clear, this is not merely a matter of stipulative definitions of the moral and the political (or of
political, as against moral, philosophy); it is about the intertwining of the moral and political. We
don’t want to reduce politics to morality (understood as an account of normative relations minus
any considerations of power, coercion and do on); nor do we want to reduce morality to politics
(understood as normative account of power relations somehow minus any moral considerations).
Surely the moral and political are intertwined, informing each other without either being fully
reducible to the other. Moreover, if normative political theory is to be historically sensitive and
contextualised we shouldn’t expect or seek fixed universalised versions of these contrasts. For
example, a strong contrast between the political as legitimately structured coercion and a realm of
personal interaction shaped by ethical (but not political) requirements seems quite distinctively
liberal and contingent upon modernity. It is also open to ethical, and not just non-moral political,
critique.
Notice that purity is an important issue here. Consider again strong versus weak forms of the claim
that politics is autonomous. How does this contrast relate to the intertwining point? The strong
realist sees politics altogether autonomous from morality. This suggests a picture of separation
rather than intertwining. So I am objecting to the strong version of political realism, not just for
setting up a strawman, but also for setting up a cleavage between ethics and politics by defining
morality as independent from (if not prior, in the sense of normatively prior, to) politics no less than
does the pure moralist. The weaker version of realism is not vulnerable to this criticism: it remains
consistent with explicit emphasis of the intertwining of ethics and politics whereas the strong form
serves this badly. My larger point though is that there is a parallel between the latter and strong
Anthropocene advocacy which, I argue, does not well serve the non-reductive intertwining of
humanity (society, culture) and nonhuman nature.
IV
Neither pure moralism nor pure political realism seems tenable: the moral and the political are
significantly intertwined. I brought this out above by emphasising that much realist criticism is based
According to Swift, Rawls allows considerations of feasibility too much weight in his therefore less than fully ideal theory (Swift, p.382).
10
upon a strawman. This situation is paralleled in the Anthropocene debate. Here the strawman is the
defender of pure nature or wilderness. The strawman political moralist decrees the conformity of
politics to an extra-political source of normativity that is to colonise politics regardless of the latter’s
distinctive concerns, rather than inform (and be informed by) those concerns. The strawman
wilderness defender is also highly moralistic. She decrees that environmental thought and practice is
to conform to independent nature as an extra-human source of normativity to be imported within
human culture regardless of the latter’s own inherent concerns. In reality though, as the ‘fact’ of the
Anthropocene underlines, there is no such pure nature independent of humanity, and so this project
is impossible (see e.g., Ellis 2011a)
There are important differences between the two debates, of course, not least regarding issues of
autonomy. Where the political realist stresses the autonomy of the political from the moral, the
Anthropocene advocate denies the autonomy of nature from humanity. But underlying this
difference there is an important shared commitment. The strong Anthropocene advocate has no
truck with impure, relative or qualified autonomy6. Nor does the strong political realist. Here then is
the shared commitment: autonomy is strong and pure or it is nothing. I emphasise that this is shared
ground between strong forms of these positions. It is not shared by everyone who accepts there is
something in the realist critique of political philosophy as applied moral philosophy (for example,
Larmore7). Nor is it accepted by everyone who finds it convenient to talk of the Anthropocene8.
However, the moralistic environmentalist who takes untouched wilderness as something to be saved
in its pure state and regarded as a fully autonomous source of normative imperatives with which to
shape human endeavours is a very rare animal9. The notion and project of wilderness conservation
are entirely consistent with a view of wilderness and nonhuman nature generally as a matter of
degree, and with the point that humanity and nonhuman nature are deeply intertwined within the
earthly environment. Things can be strongly affected by human action and still be significantly wild –
6 One wonders then whether or how autonomy is supposed to apply in the case of persons, where, if it has any
application at all it must be in a relational form dependent on an array of interpersonal and institutional conditions. See Heyd (2005, p.5). 7 It might be questioned whether anyone really does hold the strongest political realism and asserts the
complete autonomy of politics from morality. If not then this character is a strawman too. That would not matter for my argument against strong Anthropocene advocacy – it would not help the latter if its analogue in the political realism debate, insofar as this debate turns on autonomy (pure political realism), turns out to be too pure for this world. 8 See note 2 above. Dale Jamieson uses the Anthropocene label to underscore the unprecedented nature of
our environmental situation as calling for a new ethic, but without denying there is still some (relatively) independent nature, ‘respect’ for which is to be a virtue of the new ethic (Jamieson 2014, p.188ff). 9 Perhaps not completely extinct. For example, some forms of primitivism might be interpreted this way, as
might positions, such as Peter Reed’s (1989) ‘Man Apart’ account, that express an excessively strong sense of nature’s otherness.
11
independent and autonomous from humanity. Insofar as Anthropocene talk emphasises ‘socio-
natural entanglements’ then it has things right in my view. But the picture of traditional
environmental ethical preoccupations with respecting nature, wilderness conservation and so on as
inconsistent with this is at least largely a strawman. Here are some grounds for this claim:
The totemic 1964 U.S. Wilderness Act does not define wilderness as pristine untouched nature. As
Howie Wolke puts it ‘[t]he authors of the Wilderness Act wisely recognised that, even in 1964, there
were no remaining landscapes that had completely escaped the imprint of humanity… That’s why
they defined wilderness as “generally appearing to have been affected primarily by the forces of
nature with the imprint of man’s work substantially unnoticeable”’ (Wolke, 2014, p.199, his
emphasis). Similarly, the political scientist David Johns says ‘[t]he U.S. Wilderness Act of 1964… does
not use the term pristine but instead deliberately uses the term untrammelled, a term very close to
the original meaning of wildlands as undomesticated or self-willed land but not necessarily pristine.
Many conservation groups around the globe do focus on protecting largely intact lands and waters –
often high in biodiversity – from further damage, including loss of native species, but they are not
concerned with purity, any more than civil libertarians cease defending the U.S. Bill of Rights just
because they are routinely ignored by governments’ (Johns, 2014, pp.34-5, his emphasis). Aldo
Leopold, hero of ‘traditional’ conservationism, was not concerned with pure untouched wilderness
either. Conservation biologist and historian Curt Meine points out that ‘the effort to integrate the
wild and the human is at least as old as the [conservation] movement itself’, and that Leopold ‘saw
the reality of human environmental impacts and ecological connections more clearly than most…
That did not deter him from his lifelong efforts to protect, sustain and restore wildness, at any and
all scales, in any and all places’ (Meine 2014, p.47).
More recently environmental philosophers have discussed how the ‘nonhumanity’ or ‘autonomy’ of
wilderness and nonhuman nature in general is a matter of degree and yet still a matter of
importance10. Indeed, Ned Hettinger has argued, plausibly enough, that the more nature is
humanised the more precious is the remaining relatively autonomous nature, as it becomes
increasingly rare (Hettinger 2014, p.178). This is an obvious position available to ‘traditional’
environmental ethicists committed to respecting relatively autonomous nature in the context of the
comprehensive anthropogenic impacts inspiring the Anthropocene proposal. Rejecting that position
requires rejecting that commitment. But on what grounds should that commitment be rejected? Of
course, particular accounts of what it is that makes it right to respect relatively autonomous
nonhuman nature may be more or less (im)plausible, just as particular accounts of what it is about
10
For example, Heyd (2005), James (2009), Plumwood (e.g. 2006), Stephens (2000). I discuss the issue at some length in Hailwood (2015).
12
humanity that makes it worthy of respect vary in plausibility. I am referring to grounds for ruling out
the very idea of nonhuman nature’s value or ethical significance in general. Is it a prior commitment
to unqualified anthropocentrism as a given commitment with which to structure environmental
decision-making – a piece of pure anthropocentric moralism to be shielded by repeated reference to
how the Anthropocene dramatically demonstrates the untenability of its supposed rival: the
strawman pure wilderness fanatic? This raises the matter of strong Anthropocene advocacy as
ideology - discussed in the next section.
Notice also that the complex entanglement of humanity with nonhuman entities and processes,
whose valued autonomy from humanity is therefore a matter of degree, does not rule out what
Hettinger calls ‘the potential for humanization to flush out of human-impacted natural systems and
the real possibility for greater degrees of naturalness to return’ (Hettinger 2014, p.179). Projects of
restoration, rewilding or ‘just letting naturalness come back on its own’ need not involve a
presumably impossible attempt to ‘return’ nonhuman nature to ‘some original baseline state or
trajectory’ before any significant human involvement (ibid.)11. It might be argued that decisions to
pursue such projects (or not) are human management decisions: there is no escape from the ‘fact of
human management’, as it were, and de facto human management negates nonhuman autonomy
by definition. This argument is mistaken. Obviously, decisions to restore, re-wild, or to allow
‘naturalness to return’ are human decisions – including when not made on entirely anthropocentric
grounds. Even the decision not to manage some thing or some process and so, to that extent, let it
‘do its own thing’ is itself a management decision. This does not make it an impossible or
paradoxical decision. Consider a couple of examples. If having held you captive in my cellar for a
decade I come to my senses and decide to free you from that captivity, that it is my decision to
release you and me who removes the chains and unlocks the door does not mean that when you
walk away you remain no less subject to my will than when confined in my cellar. On the contrary,
you now have significantly more autonomy (at least with respect to me); even supposing you will
never get over the experience, will always remain profoundly affected by it and will never be the
11
Granted that restoring an ecosystem (E) to its earlier state is impossible because of anthropogenic climate change, in and of itself this does not preclude ‘restoring nature’ there. To think that it does is to confuse a type (nature) with an occurrence of that type (E). Anthropogenic impacts might rule out the restoration of E, yet not the encouragement of another, relatively wild, ecosystem F. Restoration is itself a matter of degree, whether focused on 1) restoring overall naturalness, or 2) restoring the historical occurrence of naturalness, as embodied in a particular ecosystem, for example. Depending on the situation 2) might not be possible at all; but even so that does not show that 1) is impossible. See also Hettinger’s useful (2012) discussion of the preservation vs restoration controversy where he argues against pure versions of each position (held by Eric Katz and William Jordan respectively). Both can be called for, though restoration should not be thought of as an ideal or paradigm of human-nature relations. Rather it is a ‘fundamentally regrettable’ necessity in some cases given the ‘past abuse of nature’. ‘Put forward as an ideal for the positive human relationship to nature it is grandiose, hubristic, and insensitive to the value of wild nature’ (Hettinger 2012, p.41).
13
person you would have been had the whole thing never happened. Similarly, there may be
overwhelmingly powerful reasons not to abandon a particular very large and old city (as with the
previous example, I am crudely describing a scenario to make a conceptual point, not advocating the
practice described). But if the decision is made to do that and to ‘let nature take its course’ then
building the following facts into the scenario does nothing at all to show the resulting course would
not involve a significant increase in wildness: the decision is a human decision; there is a managed
re-location of the human population and introduction of some (relatively) wild species; what
develops there will still be significantly affected by human activity elsewhere; there can be no
‘reversion’ (even on geological timescales) to the purely natural state that would have obtained had
there never been a human presence there at all. Thus the fact of human management does not
preclude respect for (relatively) nonhuman nature, and associated conservation and restoration of
wilderness ideas and policies. Nor do the latter rely upon rejecting the entanglement picture in
favour an alternative false picture of an entirely autonomous nature.
Nor indeed do they require us to deny or ignore the fact that the protection of remaining relatively
wild nature and the protection of human interests are themselves profoundly entangled. Consider
this principle: If x and y are intertwined or entangled and the preservation of the entanglement is
important then so is the preservation of both x and y also important, even though qua wrapped up
together in a complex entanglement neither x nor y are ‘purely themselves’, as it were. Preservation
of the intertwining of nonhuman nature and humanity is important; at least because of the
dependence of humanity on the nonhuman elements of the entanglement (as ‘ecosystem service
providers’ and so on). Therefore the preservation of the (relatively) nonhuman nature component of
the entanglement is also important12.
But now one might be tempted to put all the weight on the fact of humanity’s dependence here as a
purely anthropocentric agenda-setting thought - let’s forget the preservation of (relatively)
nonhuman nature as a goal in its own right and think instead of managing the environment in strong
Anthropocene advocacy mode with environmental imperatives reduced to that of building a
sustainable human(ised) nature: ‘We most certainly can create a better Anthropocene... The first
step will be in our own minds. The Holocene is gone. In the Anthropocene we are the creators,
engineers and permanent global stewards of a sustainable human nature’ (Ellis 2011b). Here we see
the parallel with strong political realism as insufficiently sensitive to a non-reductive picture of the
intertwining of x and y: in the environmental case the aim to reduce all environmental imperatives
12
This is not to say that the nature component could or should be preserved for all time in some completely fixed state. Fixed and finished versions of the nature/human entanglement should not be expected any more than fixed and finished versions of the ethical/political entanglement.
14
to anthropocentric imperatives focused on nature only insofar as it has already been or could be
humanised. Here sensitivity is badly served by a perspective that takes itself to be ‘realistic’ and yet
is predicated on knocking down a strawman (a foolish and moralistic hankerer after pristine nature)
so as to present itself as the only real option - a matter simply of facts it would be irrational to deny
and to which conformity is required.
V
This brings us to another element of the realist critique of political moralism that is relevant to the
Anthropocene discourse: political moralism is insufficiently aware of its own ideological status. As
Geuss puts it, ‘ethics is usually dead politics; the hand of a victor of some past conflict reaching out
to try to extend its grip to the present and the future’ (Geuss 2008, p.42). Presumably, as Geuss
acknowledges, there is nothing inherently wrong with this. If our present ethical values were once
those of the victors of a past power struggle this need not show they are the wrong values for us to
hold. The problem is that (allegedly) moralistic political philosophy shows no awareness of how its
prized values might embody historical power relations, rather than intuitions of a moral reality prior
to politics and to which politics ought to conform. ‘Crystallised power can pass itself off as morality
and so even as a critique of power’, as Rossi and Sleat say (2014, p.692). So this objection to political
moralism as ideology highlights that the putatively independent, ‘pure’ moral perspective to which
politics is to conform is really politics by underhand means: the perspective of the powerful passed
off as the simple, normatively fundamental truth or deliverance of pure reason.
It might be thought that traditional respect for nature and wilderness conservation approaches
count as ideological moralism in this way13. Perhaps some versions do, and doubtless some
wilderness conservation projects have merited the criticism that they represent a form of
unexamined cultural imperialism by powerful groups within rich nations. But the view of traditional
conservationism as typically committed to imposing nature-loving ways, based on the unexamined
value commitments of the powerful and regardless of the interests of local peoples, is another
strawman (c.f. Meine, pp.51-2). Take for example the following principles of the Earth Charter
quoted by ecologist Brendan Mackey:
13
See for example, Ben Minteer’s criticism of intrinsic value claims in ‘traditional’ environmental ethics as ‘conversation-stoppers’ seemingly designed to fix in place a nonanthropocentric worldview prior to any process of deliberation (Minteer 2012). For critical discussion of Minteer’s position see Hailwood (2015).
15
‘(1a) Recognise that all beings are interdependent and every form of life has value regardless of its
worth to human beings’;
‘(16f) ‘Recognise that peace is the wholeness created by right relationships with oneself, other
persons, other cultures, other life, Earth and the larger whole of which all are a part’ (Mackey 2014,
p.134).
Whatever else might be wrong with them14 it is difficult to interpret these principles as the interests
of the powerful dressed up as unanswerable universal truths of moral reason or the like that are
supposed to wholly colonise environmental political consciousness. The perspective they embody
doesn’t seem all that powerful in real world political terms. And, given that advocates tend to
recognise a range of important values (including considerations of political legitimacy and
anthropocentric environmental values), it seems better to interpret it as intended to inform the
ethical dimensions of ethical/political entanglements as these relate to nature/human
entanglements. Strong Anthropocene advocacy, on the other hand and in interesting contrast to its
affinity in other ways with strong political realism, does seem to fit the bill as a piece of ideological
political moralism. Environmental politics is to conform to an unqualified anthropocentric value
perspective presented as the simple normatively fundamental truth asserted in the name of
scientific reason. Actually existing dissenting voices, perspectives and traditions are put out of play
through assimilation with the irrational (or ‘cognitively dissonant’15) and ‘irrelevant’16 strawman
pure wilderness advocate17.
Notice also that it is part of strong Anthropocene advocacy to declare that the ‘old’ (strawman)
environmentalism has failed: there is no longer any such thing as fully autonomous nature or
pristine wilderness, so environmentalism as such should get with the programme and focus on
managing, engineering, or, more gently, ‘gardening’ the Earth sustainably for the sake of human
interests. It is difficult not to see this as ‘crystallised power passing itself off as morality and so even
as a critique of power’, where the morality is what Curt Meine calls the ‘dominant assumption of
human social and economic development’. As Meine says, the claim that the ‘old movement’ has
failed is false: ‘Over the last century and a half … it has effectively challenged the currently dominant
14
That they seem a little bland might be because they are the result of an attempt at consensus, being ‘the product of a decade-long worldwide, cross-cultural dialogue on common goals and shared values’, originally initiated by the U.N. (Mackey, p.134). 15
Steffen et al (2011, p.861). 16
‘Environmentalist traditions have long called for a halt to human interference in ecology and the Earth system. In the Anthropocene the anthropogenic biosphere is permanent… making the call to avoid human interference in the biosphere irrelevant’ (Ellis 2011a, p.1027). 17
See Wissenburg (2016) for a discussion of the political complexities, pluralities and disagreements ignored in much Anthropocene advocacy.
16
assumption of human social and economic development that humans are the sole source of meaning
and value in the universe and that other people and nature exist to be exploited for maximum
individual and corporate economic development’ (Meine 2014, p.521 my emphasis). Not all that
effectively of course. Meine points out that it is also true that the old movement has failed; in the
same way that movements for civil rights, economic justice and gender and racial equality have also
failed: the world is not now free of prejudice, inequality and injustice. In some ways it has got worse
in these terms. However, ‘[t]hinking that movements work in this way – that they emerge, do their
work, triumph, and then disappear – reveals a superficial understanding of history and social change,
and the complexity of the human condition. Every movement involves steps forward, steps
backward, and steps to the side – and an occasional leap to a new level’ (ibid.).
Anthropocene advocacy needs to distance itself from ideological strong moralism if it is to play a
constructive role in the ethical/political entanglement that is the environmental cause. But there is
a further problem here. Anthropocene advocacy is in a difficult position conceptually because it
needs to think about and, in my view, reconsider the Anthropocene notion itself, insofar as it has
normative significance over and above a technical ‘value free’ revision of geological terminology. If
the Anthropocene designates a more than narrowly geological reality then what it designates is
largely an exercise in power. In this respect it is indeed keyed to the political element in the
ethics/politics entanglement. To think in terms of that element is to think at least largely ‘about
agency, power and interests and the relations amongst these’ (Geuss 2008, p.25). As Guess says,
thinking about these can be organised around an expanded version of Lenin’s ‘who whom’ question:
who is doing what to whom for whose benefit (Geuss 2008, pp.22ff). But the abstract term
‘Anthropocene’ smooths over the who/what/to /for whom questions, presenting power as exercised
by unified Anthropos – ‘Mankind’ – as such (Malm & Hornberg 2014); and, for strong Anthropocene
advocates, to be exercised for the benefit of that same abstraction. This obscures the actual
inequalities in such power of different groups and classes of humans, all of whom are equally
subsumed under the Anthropocene enterprise. If the Anthropocene is being ‘done’ it is being done
by some humans to themselves and to other humans and to nature. For whose benefit? This is
unclear. A full answer would need to step down from these abstractions – Humanity, Nature – and
refer to particular groups of relatively powerful and powerless people and of concrete (relatively)
nonhuman populations, processes and systems. But then insofar as it is a move within a normative
political discourse, as opposed to a technical revision within a narrowly scientific discourse,
Anthropocene advocacy looks highly suspicious precisely because it serves to smooth away those
differences in power and obscures those questions.
17
More than this though, a further ground for suspicion is that the supposed wider normative
implications of the (strongly advocated) Anthropocene as they concern our tangled relationship with
nature is that they have swung away from its technical meaning. Technically, the Anthropocene is
defined in terms of ‘Earth system science’: has Mankind (sic) made an impact on the functioning of
the Earth system such that ‘we’ count as one of the ‘great forces’ shaping that system? If the answer
is ‘yes’ then, it is argued, the Anthropocene label is justified. But what is that system? As Clive
Hamilton (2015) has pointed out in a critical discussion of some proposed definitions of the
Anthropocene and suggestions for its inaugural date, the Earth system ‘is not “the landscape”, it is
not “ecosystems”, and it is not “the environment”’. Rather, in these words of Charles Langmuir and
Wally Broecker, quoted by Hamilton, the Earth system has various parts
‘- rock, water, atmosphere – [that] are all involved in interrelated cycles where matter is continually
in motion and is used and reused in the various planetary processes. Without interlocked cycles and
recycling the Earth could not function as a system…In the last fifty years or so we have come to
recognize the movements in all Earth’s layers, including the plates at the surface, the mantle and the
core as well as the atmosphere and ocean.’ (Hamilton 2015, p.2)
Hamilton complains that equating this system of circulation and recycling of matter with other
things (landscape, ecosystem, environment) is misplaced, changes the subject and so obscures the
issues. This applies also to the tendency to equate it with nonhuman nature. The Earth system is a
theoretical model to help explain large-scale planetary processes as the functioning of an overall
system. Because these processes are largely nonhuman and they condition other nonhuman
processes (e.g. evolution), anthropogenic impacts upon them are (by definition) anthropogenic
impacts upon terrestrial nonhuman nature. But one cannot properly reduce (even terrestrial) nature
to (its role in) the Earth system any more than one can properly reduce humanity to its role in the
Earth system. Both are more than and less than their role in that system. More because there is
more to each than being a component of that system. Not everything true of humanity (that we are
capable of self-consciously political relations, for example) can be expressed in terms of Earth
system science. Nor is everything true of (terrestrial) nonhuman nature expressible in terms of Earth
system science (that nonhuman species seem incapable of self-consciously political relationships, for
example). Less because each is part, but not the whole, of the Earth’s system of cycling and recycling
matter. To speak of the Anthropocene as signalling the impossibility of traditional environmental
concern for nature (for example, conservation of remaining relatively autonomous nonhuman
nature) is therefore misplaced, changes the subject and obscures the issues. In this respect too it
seems ideological, not so much (or only) because it represents the perspective of past victors or the
18
currently powerful, but because it removes by sleight of hand obstacles to an anticipated techno-
future of unqualified Earth system management (c.f. Baskin 2015).
References
Arias-Maldonado, M. (2015) Environment and Society: Socionatural Relations in the Anthropocene.
London: Springer.
Baskin, J. (2015) ‘Paradigm Dressed as Epoch: the Ideology of the Anthropocene’. Environmental
Values 24(1): 9-29.
Butler, T. (2014) ‘Lives Not our Own’, in Weurthner et al (eds), ix-xv.
Ellis, E, A. 2011a. ‘Anthropogenic transformation of the terrestrial biosphere’. Philosophical
Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering
Sciences. 369: 1010-1035.
2011b. ‘A world of our making’. New Scientist. 210 (2816): 26-7.
Galston, W. (2010) ‘Realism in political theory’. European Journal of Political Theory. 9(4): 385-411.
Geuss, R. (2008) Philosophy and Real Politics. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Hailwood, S. (2015) Alienation and Nature in Environmental Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Hamilton, C. (2015) ‘Getting the Anthropocene so wrong’. The Anthropocene Review. 1-6.
Hettinger, N. (2012) ‘Nature Restoration as a Paradigm for the Human Relationship with Nature’, in
Allen Thompson & Jeremy Bendik-Keymer (eds), Ethical Adaptation to Climate Change, MIT
Press, 27-46.
(2014) ‘Valuing Naturalness in the “Anthropocene”: Now More than Ever’, in Weurthner et
al (eds), 174-179.
Heyd, T. (ed.) (2005) Recognizing the Autonomy of Nature, Theory and Practice. New York: Columbia
University Press.
James, S., P. (2009) The Presence of Nature: A Study in Phenomenology and Environmental
Philosophy. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan.
Jamieson, D. (2014) Reason in a Dark Time: why the Struggle against Climate Change Failed
and what it Means for our Future. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Larmore, C. (2013) ‘What is Political Philosophy?’ Journal of Moral Philosophy, 10: 276-306.
Mackey, B. (2014) ‘The Future of Conservation: an Australian perspective’, in Weurthner et al (eds),
126-136
Malm, A. and Hornborg, A. (2014) ‘The geology of mankind? A critique of the Anthropocene
19
Narrative’. The Anthropocene Review 1(1): 62-69.
Meine, C. (2014) ‘What’s So New About the “New Conservation”?’ in Weurthner et al (eds), 45-54.
Minteer, B. (2012) Refounding Environmental Ethics: Pragmatism, Principle and Practice.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Nozick, R. (1974) Anarchy, State and Utopia. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Pattberg, P & Zelli, F. (eds) (2016) Environmental Politics and Governance in the Anthropocene:
Institutions and Legitimacy in a Complex World. Abingdon: Routledge.
Plumwood, V. (2006) ‘The Concept of a Cultural Landscape: Nature, Culture and Agency in the
Land’, Ethics & The Environment. 11(2): 115-150.
Rawls, J. (1996) Political Liberalism. 2nd Edition. New York: Columbia University Press.
Rossi, E & Sleat, M. (2014) ‘Realism in Normative Political Theory’. Philosophy Compass, 9, 10: 689-
701.
Reed, P. (1989) ‘Man Apart: An Alternative to the Self-Realization Approach’, Environmental Ethics,
11, pp.53-69.
Steffen, W., Grinevald, J., Crutzen, P. and McNeill, J. (2011) ‘The Anthropocene: Conceptual and
Historical Perspectives’. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 369: 842-867.
Stephens, P.H.G. (2000). ‘Nature, Purity and Ontology’. Environmental Values 9(3):267-294.
(2016) Review of Keeping the Wild, Environmental Values, 25(1): 121-3.
Swift, A. (2008) ‘The Value of Philosophy in Nonideal Circumstances’. Social Theory and Practice,
34(3): 363-389.
Weurthner, G., Crist, E., Butler, T. (eds.) (2014) Keeping the Wild: Against the Domestication of the
Earth. Washington DC: Island Press.
Williams, B. (2005) In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument. (G.
Hawthorn, ed.) Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Wissenburg, M. (2016) ‘The Anthropocene and the Body Ecologic’, in Pattberg & Zelli (eds), 31-46.
Wolke, H. (2014) ‘Wilderness, What and Why’, in Weurthner et al (eds), 197-204.
Top Related