On his Love of All Wisdom blog, Ethics Institute Associate Director Amod Lele argues against a nostalgic approach to ecology. He writes,
“When we think about the natural environment and how to treat it, we often assume by default that what we’re trying to do is return the nonhuman world to where it was before we started seriously messing with it. That impulse is very understandable. The world’s ecosystems functioned better, in the way that they had evolved to do and a way that was helpful to us, before we started clear-cut logging and making vast pits full of plastic waste and so on. It would be great if we could get the natural world back to where it was in 1800. The problem is we can’t do that”.
Lele reflects on Institute Director Ronald Sandler’s environmental ethics, noting feminist philosopher Sally Haslanger’s influence:
“Sandler points out that much conservation practice is still based on historical baselines and reference conditions – the idea being that the closer we can get the environment to where it used to be at some past point, the better. But this approach isn’t working well in an era where, thanks to warming waters and pollution, Caribbean coral species foundational for whole ecosystems are going extinct. Like it or not, what those ecosystems are going to be in the future is very different from what they were, so a historical baseline is unattainable.
The feminist philosopher Sally Haslanger has a very helpful way of thinking about social constructions like race and gender: she says that instead of asking ‘what are they, really?’ we should ask ‘what do we want them to be?’ Ecosystems are not social constructions in the same way or to the same extent; they were there before human sociality was. But Sandler nevertheless adapts Haslanger’s question constructively to ecology: he points out that policymakers now need to be asking the question ‘what do we want ecosystems to be?'”.
Read the full article on the Love of All Wisdom blog.
Photo by Kika Tuff/Revive & Restore, CC-BY 4.0 licence. A cloned black-footed ferret.
