The New Enlightenment

A few weeks ago, a 1/8-acre of property next to my father's house was advertised for $225,000. Within days, it sold for $335,000, and subsequently the new owners came down to level the thick grooves of sprawling black lava, pine trees and primrose in favor of the "haute" cosmopolitan look of white concrete and manicured lawns.

This was such a shock to me as I was raised there, in Hawaii, a place rich with bio-diversity and breathtaking landscape that remained as such because it was largely untouched. But time has shifted and finds us hurtling into a direction largely consumed with the "net worth" of everything. Particularly recently, the meteoric rise of real estate sales have heightened the frenzy over the commodity of land as a good "investment" choice. The worth is not about the lives of the natural surroundings: the thick pungent Koa trees or intoxicating aroma of Plumerias and night blooming jasmine, it is neither concerned with the intrinsic, nor even the aesthetic qualities of nature. It is overwhelmingly driven by the "commodity" value of a concrete driveway and trimmed, imported grass, overlooking what used to be unmarred by any evidence of human landscaping.

The recent ruling by a majority of Supreme Court Justices in favor of eminent domain demonstrates the official legal stance that the value of nature is not so important as the value of capital. The United States is, after all, a capitalist country. The environment is just not as important as the dollar - and is thus often handled as a commodity to be profited from the buying, selling, and developing of it. The question asking whether or not nature is intrinsically valuable is irrelevant; Imagine a McDonald's developer rejecting a piece of property for its overwhelming beauty. Not gonna happen.

But social paradigms and axioms do shift, giving way to new social awareness and a change of human behavior. Let's not forget that our race - for the majority of its existence - believed that the earth was flat ,and that slaves were not actually human. Just as all "common knowledge" at some point endures a period of dramatic shift, the social norms in regard to the natural world are being considered with increasing scrutiny. Laws have been employed regulating the emissions of green-house gases and toxic chemical production, protestors take to demonstrating at logging sites, governmental officials even employ such words as "green" and "conservation" when lobbying for the majority vote. All of this would have been unheard of at the turn of the 19th century, when humanity became enthralled with, and subsequently whisked away by, the Industrial Revolution. Nature was regarded as a source of plenty in terms of its usefulness to humans, and was even conquered at a rate that our curious race could make more things, and faster, at whatever cost to the external, natural world.

The inevitable expansion of humanity's increasing self-consciousness is stirring a change in the awareness of the environmental impact that this capitalistic frenzy has driven us into. If we examine the instrumental worth of nature alone, it is quite clear that the existence of man depends on it. On a very basic level, we need water to drink, food to eat, and good soil for our food. But we have become so far removed from nature in our daily existence, and are often blindsided by the extravagances that this removal has provided: high-tech insulation gear to keep us warm, ergonomic shoes to keep our tootsies happy, automatic fireplaces were invented so as to keep us toasty without us ever having touch a piece of kindling. At some point, however, this total disregard for the impact humanity has had, and continues to have, on the environment has raised many a red flag from many members of this "brave new world."

Howard Lyman illuminates some of this growing social awareness in his piece Mad Cowboy: The Cattle Rancher Who Won't Eat Meat. He was of the vast majority of commercial farmers in this country, who profit from the extreme overuse of the natural landscape; organic farming is just not as profitable as chemical agriculture. Chemical fertilizers and growth hormones for unsuspecting cows are the norm for the agricultural industry that is evidently wary of the increasing public view that such practices are detrimental to not only their own bodily health but also the biological environment. Lyman himself was such a farmer, and very vividly captures an ugly side-effect of the disregard for non-human lives:

I learned how to alter my cattle's natural dietary habits . . . and fed them only roughage, grain, and protein concentrates . . . This diet also, unfortunately, upsets the cow's natural digestive system, which was designed for grass, not grain. As a consequence, many of my animals suffered vaginal and rectal prolapses - organs that belonged on the inside of the cow fell out. ¹

But the soil, too, was affected by the years of herbicides and pesticides, becoming nothing more than a wasteland of "asbestos" like sand that was so far removed from its once "dark, loamy, worm-laden" self. As the soil is the basis for plant life, no longer could plants survive in this wasted dirt, nor could animals thrive on a landscape barren of plant life from which many of them depend on. The effects of one man's enterprise to reign dominant over the earth in exchange for monetary values had become painfully obvious.

Assuming Lyman's rendition of commercial farming is true to the nature of this endeavor world-wide, then there must be some affect to the natural world that is detrimental to it - and therefore to humans - in the long run. So what can be done about any of it? What, if anything, can we learn from Lyman's experiences? It was not until Lyman discovered that his lifestyle and practices were a menace to his own health and to that of his farmland that he decided to act. He decided to make the public aware of this issue through writing and lobbying to anyone that would listen.

So what change must be stirred for the realization to spread across the social stratosphere? Lyman would not have changed, had he not been invoked by concerns about his own health, and the realization that this kind of rapid degredation of nature is more widespread than we would like to believe. His realization, in turn, provoked him to examine the issue under a new light: that of philosophical reflection, or "the study of truths about reality; the search for wisdom" ². Lyman endeavored to apply the knowledge and reasoning he had gleaned from his philosophical reflection, and reached out to the public through writing and demonstrations. But none of this would have been possible without him taking that first step into "the study of truth and reality."

As long as humans have been aware of themselves, their actions, and their affect on things around them, there has been philosophy. We would not be so concerned if we weren't so aware of ourselves, nor would we be if we weren't so self-conscious, neither still - if all conceivable laws of the universe were borne upon us at the dawn of our evolution. But it is this self-conscious nature of humanity that has driven us to constantly seek and define and redefine our conceptions of our perceptions. When considering our biosphere, this ability to thoughtfully examine our affects to the world is what eventually drives us into action. If nature is instrumentally valuable, and we are harming it, we are putting ourselves at risk of a sort of self-inflicted danger, and therefore we ought to do something about it in the interest of self-preservation. This sort of thinking eventually leads one into action - just as Kate Rawles contests: "philosophy can contribute to activism by motivating it."³ Or hear from the mouth of the father of philosophy himself, Aristotle:

man perfected by society is the best of all animals; he is the most terrible of all when he lives without law, and without justice.

Lyman was induced to act because he thoughtfully examined his own moral law, which endeared him into turning these new concepts of "truth" into a propellant for justice on the natural world.

Would it be morally wrong for the last human to chop down the last redwood? This question, around which the basis of environmental philosophy revolves, seeks to find a value in nature regardless of its instrumental worth to humanity - that is the intrinsic value of nature. What rights ought we to grant to the plants and animals co-habiting this planet? This question is a constant source of debate among those that seek to find a compatible solution to the common practices of a world largely based on economic values. It is difficult to find compromise on a smaller scale, and much more so when dealing with the implications of worldwide economic and political interests. It has already been established that a normative conclusion can be drawn that depleting our natural resources will have a negative effect on the livelihood and welfare of humans. In other words, harming nature is not a good thing.

Engaging in the debate over this "last man" question, or, the worth of nature on an intrinsic level - a subject of undying debate - enables a constant dialogue between all societal beliefs. Callicot argues that finding value in nature for what it is and not for what it can do for us, will enable us to reconsider and accordingly change our behavior in regard to the natural world. He brings up the attitude once widely accepted that "it was once permissible to own human beings"⁴, and suggests that the shift away from this belief was instigated by the consideration of the equal value of the lives of all humans - sparked by the era of "Enlightenment ethics". Callicot then turns this point into the following suggestion:

With the eventual institutionalization of a holistic, nonanthropocentric environmental ethic. . . the wanton destruction of the nonhuman world will, hopefully, come to be regarded as equally unconscionable⁴

Perhaps the endeavor of environmental ethics is useful in not only providing insight into why one ought to respect nature for the sake of human interests alone, but also for the fact that it may be morally wrong for us to do so. In both cases, the social axioms in regard to how one ought to treat nature endure a change. Environmental philosophy, just as with all philosophies, demands that we keep ourselves in check by questioning the effects humanity has on the world - in both an immoral and moral context. Perhaps it will lead us to create a planet more sustainable to human life and to other life simultaneously. Perhaps still, in this thought revolution that philosophy necessarily invokes, people will not be so hasty to chop down those palm trees and slab on the concrete.

WORKS CITED

1. Lyman, Howard F. and Merzer, Glen "Mad Cowboy: The Cattle Rancher Who Won't Eat Meat." Environmental Ethics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. 524 - 529.

2. Google.com < http:// www.google.com/search?hl =en&lr=&oi= defmore&defl= en&q= define: philosophy>. November 30, 2005.

3. Rawles, Kate. "The Missing Shade of Green" Environmental Ethics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. 535 - 546.

4. Callicot, J. Baird. "Environmental Philosophy is Environmental Activism: The Most Radical and Effective Kind". Environmental Ethics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. 546 - 555.