Praise Darwin! By Mike Roselle

I just ran into famous Australian Deep Ecology Lowbagger Emeritus John Seed at Breitenbush Hot Springs. John was celebrating his 60^th Birthday on the Summer Solstice at the home of Michael Donnelly. John was traveling through Oregon doing what he has been doing for over thirty years, which is to build support and raise funds for the struggles of indigenous peoples in Ecuador, and else where, to save their rainforests, and to talk about Deep Ecology. He is still trying to learn how to sing.

John was an early mentor of mine. In 1984 it was Seed who convinced me to do something other than just worry about the tropical rainforests. We had just published an article in the Earth First! Journal about Burger King using rainforest beef from Costa Rica. He said Earth First! should launce a campaign. I said that sounds like a good idea, but what is a campaign? Five years later, after Burger King cancelled their beef contracts, I would be sitting in San Juan with the future president of Costa Rica while he politely asked that we suspend our boycott, as they had done everything we’d asked them to do. Since then I have done nothing but campaigns, and I am still mad at Seed for that. Before I met Seed, I actually had a life.

I was going to interview John for this piece, but at the time it seemed too much like work so we just enjoyed the sunny holiday. I plan to reconnect with him next week and get the interview to Josh like I promised. Meanwhile, I thought it might be a good idea to get a discussion going on the subject of Deep Ecology to see what people are thinking, or more importantly, to find out if we are wrong again.

Many people misunderstand Deep Ecology and I am one of them. I can’t figure out what “intrinsic value” means when used to describe nature. I even asked Famous Professor Paul Elrich once what he meant by intrinsic and he gave me a garbled answer, something about having value for its own sake. I guess this must mean everything has intrinsic value, even beer, but still I remained confused. Accepting this intrinsic value argument is a leap of faith and even seems a bit like accepting Jesus as your own personal savior. I have no faith, so I cannot know what this intrinsic value is. Maybe they are unknowable, which would let me off the hook.

For me, nature has very tangible values that require no abstract constructs to justify. We drink water, we breathe air, we eat plants and animals and all of those things come from nature. Wild nature is more productive in these respects than domesticated nature. There are always costs in the long term associated with getting nature to provide more material goods in the short term. This is robbing from the future. Nature provides ecological services that cannot be duplicated by technology, and those services include not only basic needs but also recreational and even spiritual services for many people. This seems reason enough, and when you consider that the people screwing up nature are mostly greedheads, it’s a no-brainer.

Spiritual and recreational activities are closely related to other economic activities on this planet and therefore constitute another exploitive use of nature by humans. This is not an attempt to devalue the spiritual and recreational uses of nature. Most of us would agree that these are two of our most cherished freedoms, along with the freedom to breathe clean air and drink clean water. But a spiritual approach to saving wilderness can be just as self-centered as an economic approach, and can sometimes have equally negative consequences, especially if it involves large numbers of pilgrims and facilities for their comfort. Pilgrims were arguably the first tourists, and tourists are often a plague on nature. If worshipping wilderness means making a pilgrimage than more worshipers are going to be a problem, especially if they don’t tip.

It is possible to worship nature and not visit it, as the popular support for the Arctic Wildlife Refuge demonstrates. Many supporters of permanent protection for the refuge have little desire to go there, but nevertheless want it left alone. That’s how I feel and I don’t really know if that has anything to do with the refuge’s intrinsic value. I certainly don’t understand the ecology or the geology that well, but I just want it left alone, and I especially don’t want a bunch of oil companies running around with bulldozers, drilling wells, laying pipelines, pumping the oil to who knows where and more people burning the gas. I don’t have to sanctify the refuge in order to want to protect it. I don’t even have to understand it.  I just like the idea of it being left alone.

The other thing about Deep Ecology that confuses me is the issue of the duality of nature and humans. In Deep Ecology all life has intrinsic value, and nature is not a hierarchy as once thought, so therefore humans and mosquitoes have equal status. I have no problem sharing the Earth with the mosquitoes. After all, they were here first and they presumably have a purpose, such as providing food for other organisms, spreading diseases and sucking our blood, but I cannot assume that swatting one is akin to the murder of a human. Mosquitoes are like teenagers; I like them OK, but you don’t want to be in the middle of a bunch of them, and as much as you might want to smack one, it will do no good. It will only make their parents angry. But couldn’t the mosquito just infect us without all the buzzing, and why does it take so damn many of them to put a few thousand microscopic bacteria or viruses in our veins? This is the kind of thing that makes you think nature is an evil force, out to get us from birth, which is how many hunter-gather societies understood it to be. Sometimes they were so afraid of nature that they made human sacrifices to appease the gods and goddesses.

My view is that humans are no longer part of nature, and are something different altogether. I think most plants and animals would agree with me on this. Animals cannot stare at the sky and wonder if there is life on other planets. They cannot contemplate an afterlife, and therefore animals cannot be spiritual in the same sense that humans are spiritual. Animals evolve within their environment while humans evolve in their heads. We have remained anatomically unchanged for over a million years and only a hundred thousand years ago did we suddenly began to talk to each other for the first time. It must have been a female on the ancient African savannah that first looked at her mate over a dinner of antelope carrion and said “Grog, why don’t we ever talk?” The next subject discussed must have been a lack of better groceries and the drab living room, because before long tools for killing animals went from being crudely modified stones to skillfully crafted works of art, and these improved weapons freed up time to redecorate the cave. Many of these lifestyle changes seem to have happened in a very short period of time and since then we have adapted this new ability to make a more secure and comfortable life for ourselves, while somewhat less secure for the animals.

We could have had no concept of a separate nature during this time, but we were already living in one. The journey from spear to the Hydrogen Bomb, from the first planted beans to cloned sheep, from handprints on cave walls to The Scream was a scant 60,000 years. Of course since the dawn of the industrial revolution things have accelerated at such a snappy pace that many scientists are now seriously questioning our ability to survive much longer into the future without a drastic reordering of our priorities. One can easily use science and reason to arrive at this position. A relatively shallow ecology should be adequate for most people to understand that we face mass extinction and catastrophic global climate change unless we drastically alter our priorities.

It is popular today to believe that early societies and indigenous people have always had a biocentric worldview and an ecological understanding of nature, and were the first deep ecologists but there seems to be little evidence to support this. Simply holding the Earth to be sacred is not an expression of biocentrism. Creation may be sacred and unequal at the same time. You can still kill and eat the sacred, especially when everything is sacred. When everything is sacred, so is the grocery store and even the Wall Mart. People see nature primarily as a source of material goods and there is no evidence that many humans have ever seen things much differently, the only difference between now and then is a matter of scale.

Before Darwin, it would be all but impossible to understand evolutionary processes and before 1970 the term ecology was all but unknown to anyone but a few scientists. As frightening as it seems, it was most likely a bunch of hippie biologists on mushrooms in the sixties that formulated what today is the widely held scientific and spiritual belief system of ecology. Ecology is a scientific discipline, while spiritual ecology; by assigning rights and values to nature, is a belief system. So now we have a new field of science with doctorate degrees in Ecology and a biocentric school of philosophy and religion that didn’t exist 40 years ago. Still it is hard to say weather there are any truly any biocentric thinkers around today because biocentrism is an expression of faith, and science can neither prove nor disprove matters of faith, just as an individual cannot prove one’s faith.

I am not arguing here that we are superior to other animals or even plants, or for a materialistic view of nature, because as an unlicensed ecologist I understand that we are members of the same community and are all interdependently connected to one another. This connection doesn’t prevent us from eating animals or plants, or prevent them from eating us, and it doesn’t make us the same as them either. We are physically almost identical to chimpanzees, cetaceans have more complex brains and frogs have more genes than us, but for some reason we are on this trajectory alone, a uniquely self aware species able to form abstract thoughts and manipulate the environment on a scale unimaginable for a wild species.

An entirely new entire evolutionary process is unfolding in our heads, and rather than passing down new DNA, we are passing down ideas, and most of them, like bell bottom pants, are not so brilliant as they may have seemed at first. But take away human children at birth and raise them without adult contact and you will have your chimps, only able to communicate by grunt and gesture. It is not so much our brains but what is in our brains and how we use them that makes us so different from these funny looking animals and the rest of nature. It would seem now that are brains are being used for some un-natural purpose and some are now calling for a rewilding of our spirit. I’m not sure this can be done without actually returning to the wild, and anything short of that amounts to a sort of charade, and gets into matters of spiritual beliefs that leaves all reason behind.

Returning to a state of nature has been a pursuit of many humans over the centuries and this is still true today. Mostly folks turn to nature as a way of rejecting civilization, and this says more about civilization than it does about nature. Nature is what civilization isn’t, but after that it gets a little fuzzy. Some still think that civilization can somehow harmonize with nature, and human economics can be ecologically sustainable, but all of our experience seems to be saying that it will take less technology and not more to reach this goal.

People are reluctant to give up technology and few would live the life of a hunter-gatherer if they had a real choice. Societies only return to hunting when they have no other option, and although many hunters from the Arctic to the Tropical Rainforests understand agricultural technology, they reject it outright while still wanting better guns and means of transportation. Guns and motors, just like better spears and arrows, make a hunter’s life easier but increased hunting pressure upsets the balance of predator and prey and can cause prey species to become scarce or go extinct altogether. This kind of behavior is no more or less biocentric than that of the swidden farmer or the factory worker and it is the population density that is the key factor here, as is the case with almost any of our technologies. No matter what technology is used, the equation remains the same; more people, the less nature. This is why we have mosquitoes in the first place, I suspect, and why they carry fatal disease. Mosquitoes lack much of a central nervous system and therefore don’t know a band of humans from a herd of wild jackasses, but if the heard gets weak from overgrazing or other environmental stress, the mosquitoes will help cull it down, as would a wolf or other any other large predator. 

If it follows that more people mean less nature, than there must be some difference between the two. If we are not a higher or more privileged species, than what are the differences that we are talking about? I would like to suggest that we are a separate but equal species. This was a bogus argument when applied to racial segregation under Jim Crow, but isn’t this different? We humans have no exclusive right to exploit nature, but we also have no choice to do otherwise. Unlike animals, we humans must consciously exploit nature in order to survive. Animals do not have to ask what is right or what is wrong. They may feel many emotions, but guilt is probably not one of them. Humans however are consumed with guilt, and this guilt is institutionalized in all of our major religions, and is not limited to the religious alone. Humans deal in moral and ethical questions all of their waking hours. This struggle to be moral, I believe, is the way we fight our DNA, which we must somehow overcome and control lest we destroy ourselves. No animal or plant has to worry about this. Or maybe they are just better at doing it.

Just as animals sometimes have organs and appendages that are no longer needed for their survival, or may even make their survival more difficult, humans likely retain genetically programmed impulses as vestiges of a very different past life. What I am talking about is greed, aggression and genocide. These traits have been breed into us through millions of years of evolution and once may have served us well when we were outnumbered by large predators on the distant savannah. Now the same traits threaten not only to destroy us but also threaten to take a lot of creation with us. We are suppressing genetically encoded behavior every moment of our life, including but not limited to the urge to mate, the urge to fight, the urge to pilfer, horde and steal, and the tendency to see other homo sapiens as non-human. Nowadays, these things are not only considered immoral, but unless you live in Nevada, they are illegal. Just read your Ten Commandments (I lost my copy in Las Vegas). We have only lately in our history come to see some of these actions as unjust or downright evil, and they are now codified in the International Declaration of Human Rights. (If only George W Bush would read this great document, or at least have someone read it to him). But this treaty is only between humans. As usual, nature gets left out and has to rely on the few of us who care to fight on for her rights. Maybe this is because we posses a nature gene or maybe we are fulfilling the prophecy of the Warriors of the Rainbow or maybe we are just off our meds.

Extending rights to animals is in vogue these days but why are so few talking about the rights of plants save the lone conservationists. Wilderness areas are the only safe refuge for wild plants. If they have any rights at all it should be the right to not have roads and development in their critical habitat. If animals cannot defend their rights and we must do it for them, and this must be true for plants as well. But what kind of rights are we talking about giving to plants and animals? Certainly these are not rights the animals or plants have asked for or even care about.

Once we recognize rights for nature we will become the de facto planetary lawgivers. You’ll excuse me if this smells like elitism and hierarchy, because it is. Laws are all about humans; only we can make them and only we can break them, and it is only we who can extend them, as we must, to non-humans. Actually accomplishing the task of codifying the rights of nature will take some creative jurisprudence, but I think we as a species are quite up to the task if we could just muster the will to do it. Choosing juries could be a problem. But ultimately we may have to push for natural sovereignty, and give nature enough room to run its own affairs unmolested by human greed. This is what the science of Conservation Biology is about, and it seems to me the most rational approach. It’s the humans that need the law, not nature, which answers to a higher law that we can’t hope to ever fully understand.

We could change the laws to protect nature and still swat a mosquito or even club a bunny rabbit without going to The Hague for an international criminal tribunal, or asking Gia for her forgiveness. Meanwhile, the mosquitoes are undoubtedly still genetically and morally capable of as well as highly motivated to doing their job, which is to reduce our bloated numbers. And the real irony is that it isn’t even the mosquitoes that are out to get us, but the tiny one celled organisms that have hijacked the mossie’s airframe, like little Ossamas bent on a suicide mission. It is indeed hard to feel superior to mosquitoes and viruses when they may yet have the last word. An extinct species cannot brag about its supremacy.

I like much about John Seed’s Deep Ecology, but as a godless heathen I cannot commit to it. I just hope everybody else buys into it, because that would be good for nature. Most folks feel like they need a little religion so this shouldn’t be a big problem. But religion scares me because I always think about those giant penguins at St. Peter’s that terrified my early years. I fear that much of this type of ecology is new age mumbo jumbo and amounts to little more than Espcapaganism, with only the names of the deity changed while many of the rituals remain the same. I prefer a secular movement devoid of religious undertones. This is a much more inclusive strategy.

I once attended a pagan wedding in San Francisco. About a hundred of us were sitting on the ground in a circle under the hot sun chanting some druid incantations. I noticed several of African American guests sitting on a picnic table  in the shade under a large oak tree smoking Cool cigarettes. I grabbed the hands of the hippies sitting on either side of me and joined them together so I could get out of the circle without disrupting the energy flow and went over and bummed a smoke. I asked them why they were not in the circle. They asked me if I had ever read the First Commandment against idolatry. “We are not supposed to worship pagan gods, it’s a sin”. I then realized that being a good Christian could keep you out of those tediously long prayer circles without appearing rude, but this was not enough in of itself to convince me to convert. Now, I just profess my devout Darwinism.

 Praise Darwin!

So if you are a Deep Ecologist, please pray for my salvation. 

Mike is on the road again in greater-America. Darwin forbid you should find this shaggy Lowbagger on your doorstep.