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The Incompleat
Eco-Philosopher
SUNY series in Environmental Philosophy and Ethics

J. Baird Callicott and John van Buren, editors

The Incompleat
Eco-Philosopher
Essays from the Edges
of Environmental Ethics

Anthony Weston
a
This book is dedicated to Jim Cheney and Tom Birch,
best of companions in all kinds of wildernesses.
This page intentionally left blank.
 Contents

Preface ix

1 Introduction 1

2 Before Environmental Ethics 23

3 Self-Validating Reduction: Toward a Theory of

Environmental Devaluation 45

4 Environmental Ethics as Environmental Etiquette:

Towards an Ethics-Based Epistemology in
Environmental Philosophy (with Jim Cheney) 65

5 Multicentrism: A Manifesto 89

6 De-Anthropocentrizing the World: Environmental

Ethics as a Design Challenge 109

7 What If Teaching Went Wild? 131

8 Galapagos Stories: Evolution, Creation, and the

Odyssey of Species 149

9 Eco-Philosophy in Space 163

Appendix: Complete Publication List 187

Index 193
This page intentionally left blank.
 Preface

This book is a selection from my work in environmental philosophy over

the past fifteen years or so: essays that explicitly address the question of
method in environmental ethics and this moment in environmental phi-
losophy. The opening essay, new to this volume, sketches the overarching
themes and introduces each essay in context. Eight essays follow, with
brief introductory notes, and there is an accounting of all of my work in
the field at the end.
True to its title, this book is incomplete in a variety of ways. My work
is ongoing, and anyway only some of it appears here. More scandalously,
the work of environmental ethics itself, in the view I wish to advance, is
necessarily and fundamentally incomplete. We speak of what may be one
of the most profound ethical shifts in millennia, at least for the West, and
it is, after all, barely begun. It is still young, still unformed, still bears the
deep marks of its ancestry, its long and uncertain gestation, its labor to
be born. As with any other kind of newborn and delicate thing, we can-
not even begin to glimpse the shape of a settled more-than-human ethics
without a far wider range of ethical experiments and remade practices, all
tested in turn by time and as yet barely foreseen events.
Thus in many ways we still stand, as one of my titles goes, “Before
Environmental Ethics.” All eco-philosophy is radically incomplete. But this
moment of beginnings is also—precisely as such—a moment at which we
can make an immense difference. Certain philosophical and personal practices
are discouraged, yes. Certain traditional aspirations are neither achievable,
in my view, nor desirable. By the same token, though, other truly inviting
and “edgy” new possibilities open up, both in and beyond environmental
ethics and for a transformative philosophical practice in other keys. Take
this collection as a sort of imaginative guidebook, a first survey of the new
country, and an invitation to explore it further yourself.
My previous books in the field got away from me in this regard.
For better or worse, they did not hang around arguing about the usual
conceptual boundary-markers, but ended up already a bend or two of the
trail farther along (perhaps taking the markers along with them, a trick

ix
x Preface

I learned in the actual wilderness from the venerable Tom Birch). When
I began the book that eventually appeared as Back to Earth: Tomorrow’s
Environmentalism (Temple University Press, 1994), I really did mean to
address methodological and conceptual issues as an integral part of the
project. In the end, though, Back to Earth barely speaks to the usual philo-
sophical debates and categories at all. Instead it devotes itself to exploring
the world’s possibilities, sensuous and magical, beyond the wholly human;
to understanding how we have managed to so thoroughly obscure those
depths from ourselves (simply overpowering and destroying them is only
the crudest way); and to seeking out some specific paths, partial and mod-
est enough in their ways but radical still, to recover them, to reconnect. I
came to see that this kind of exploration was quite enough (was more than
enough, in fact could itself only be sketched in the barest way) without
also having to bushwhack through all the usual methodological brambles so
very far off-road, as it were, to what after all is still only a starting point.
Instead I simply found myself speaking from a different place, never mind
how I got there.
A few years later I edited a small collection called An Invitation to
Environmental Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 1999), but here again
the main project was more to embody or enact an alternative kind of
philosophy—actually, to model of whole set of them, with varied friends
and fellow travelers—than to make its presuppositions explicit and try to
defend them against the usual (and also usually implicit) expectations.
Yet part of my hope, and a central part of my work, has always been
to contend with and for philosophy itself. Here I part from my friend and
wilderness companion Jim Cheney, who holds that we free spirits should
just re-christen ourselves “ex-philosophers” and head into the high country
with much lighter backpacks. Often enough I am right beside him. But
not always. There is another side. Why cede Philosophy Itself to the most
heavily laden? Why should philosophy be a burden at all? Isn’t it also a
necessary task to make an alternative visible philosophically? The struggle for
a truly environmental philosophy, in the long run, may also be a struggle
for the soul of philosophy itself.
In my essays, then, I have also been writing, right along, in “the
field,” struggling to make alternative ethical and philosophical presup-
positions explicit and to defend them against the usual expectations. This
work has mostly appeared in professional and other journals, however,
and consequently is somewhat scattered over both time and space. Four
of these essays reprinted here first appeared in the journal Environmental
Ethics. Some of these essays have been regularly anthologized in turn.
Others have been published much farther afield—The Canadian Journal
of Environmental Education; the multidisciplinary journal Soundings; and
 Preface xi

Jobs for Philosophers, my self-published “little book of heresies”—and the

last and farthest afield of all, “Eco-Philosophy in Space,” has only been
circulated to (mostly disbelieving) colleagues.
Until now I have not tried to bring these more methodological and
conceptual pieces together in one place. Always there was the next piece,
another trip, some other form in which an idea could be put. In the last few
years, though, a few things have changed. For one thing, I finally attained
the age at which Plato thought one could actually become a philosopher,
so perhaps a certain kind of prelude is over. There is a practical impulse
too. Students and colleagues, as well as I myself, are finding it increasingly
difficult to relocate and recopy articles or find reprints from back issues
of a variety of journals in order to put together readers for students or
to pass on the most helpful or provocative materials to other researchers
and writers. This part of my work has grown and diversified in its own
right but remains too scattered for easy use by others. I am gratified that
others share my feeling that these essays are alive; that together they lay
out the possibility of a dramatically different and still barely suspected way
of thinking about environmental values. But each separate essay needs to
add its piece. It is time they were drawn together in a single place, next
to each other at last.
I want to say for the record that I did not enter the field of envi-
ronmental philosophy with any inkling that it might in time take me into
so many wild lands around the world or bring me such dear friends. Yet
it is so, and I am grateful beyond words.
My greatest debt of gratitude is to the land, this land, almost any
land, to the country that sustains and welcomes, wherever it may be, even
right next door. For me, at least, it is an old debt, the original impulse,
all the way back to those long summers I spent on the prairie as a boy
playing in the woods and cornfields. Long nights under the stars, so cap-
tivating that my first professional ambition was to be an astronomer. A
series of wild companions opened up wider lands for me, starting with my
father when I was freshly minted from high school, whose idea of celebrat-
ing my coming of age was to go backpacking through the Great Smoky
Mountains, though neither of us had ever dreamed of such a thing before.
Ridge trails snaking through high meadow grasses, vanishing into forests
beyond; the blue afternoon mists of those hills; strange birdcalls that later
became as familiar as the plants in my garden—here was the trailhead of
many of my later paths.
Meanwhile environmental consciousness was rising—this was the
early 1970s—so much so that my second serious professional ambition
was to be an environmental lawyer. But barely embarked on that path I
found philosophy, though it was still some time before my philosophical
xii Preface

thinking found, or rather remembered, the larger-than-human world. Phi-

losophy itself is proudly and persistently “on the edge” in certain ways, but
eventually you begin to realize, when you think from the point of view
of the more-than-human world, that most official philosophy still follows
narrowly circumscribed paths, and that even the country that lies over the
first range of low hills just beyond philosophy’s usual thoroughfares may
be quite different and far more fabulous than what shows up along the
usual routes, or even on the maps.
A few years ago, backpacking in the Beaverhead Mountains in south-
west Montana, a friend and I scrambled up a steep talus slope to the very
edge of a ridge—there forming the Continental Divide—to find not only
a still more precipitous drop-away into a stunning country of conical peaks
and ragged valleys, but also a massive thunderstorm rushing up the near-
est cleft practically upon us. It had sounded much farther away from the
other side. You never know. In any case, I am wholly convinced that only
by actually going into such wild country can you also begin to enter, as
it were, this particular wild country of the mind. Scrambling half a mile
down mountaintop scree with the lightning sizzling all around us, as we
did that day; tracking up (another trip) through the rising mists and snow
clouds to a rippling little lake along the Eastern front of the Rockies on the
occasion of the first (September!) snow of the season; waking on bird time,
well before dawn, morning after morning, deep in the woods somewhere;
or simply spending time alone in the larger world, anywhere beyond the
world of mostly human sounds and sights—you inhabit a different world
as a result, everything is different, and from then on your struggle is to
stay true to it in the rest of your work and life: to give it a kind of voice,
to re-inhabit it more deeply, and to keep going back.
And what good fortune to have found such intrepid and generous
companions! Jim Cheney and Tom Birch of ZenLite Philosophical Expedi-
tions fame, first of all, my companions for a decade and a half all over the
edges and high mountain meadows of Montana and Idaho and farther afield,
sometimes even in my dreams, and through a good bit of environmental
and classical philosophy as well. Bob Jickling, Yukon philosopher of educa-
tion and intrepid guide to the land of the midnight sun. The Australians:
Val Plumwood, sharpest of thinkers on “environmental culture”—Forest
Lover, Live Forever!; Freya Mathews, panpsychist; and Patsy Hallen and the
students with whom we trekked along the Bibbulmun Track and through
the Pilbara, aboriginal lands, in 2004. Teacher-activist-writer-dreamer
extraordinaire, Patsy invited me to co-teach an eco-philosophy course she
organized out of Perth’s Murdoch University around two long backpack
trips into the Australian outback. Thus it was that my fiftieth year found
me quite literally all the way around the world from my Carolina home,
 Preface xiii

traipsing overland with students through the red desert and along the
shores of the tumultuous Southern Ocean, sleeping under the shimmering
unfamiliar stars, and later car-camping with my family up and down the
west coast and among the great monoliths of the Red Center and in the
rain forests of the Northern Territory. So much from “the bush” seems
to hover just on the other side of perception, an invitation to something
immense and powerful but seemingly just out of reach. I began to wonder
if that kind of enigmatic depth isn’t a feature of the world in general, just
more visible in the bush, closer to the surface. Australia came back home
with me like an unanswered question, and stays with me still.
My thanks as well to so many other friends and colleagues: to all of
the above not just for their companionship but also very specifically for
comments and suggestions on many of the papers included here; to my
colleagues and co-teachers in the Elon University Department of Philosophy,
especially John Sullivan; to Frithjof Bergmann, Jennifer Church, and David
Abram for long-standing inspiration of many sorts; to Carolyn Toben and
her beautifully conceived Center for Education, Imagination, and the Natural
World; to Irene Klaver, Dexter Roberts, Patti Cruickshank-Schott, Rick Kool,
Holmes Rolston III, Greg Haenel, and Tom Regan; and to my running-
mate Amy Halberstadt and our lovely children Anna Ruth and Molly, who
have now become such good wilderness companions of their own.
For permission to reprint this material here I am grateful to Gene
Hargrove, founder and longtime editor of Environmental Ethics; Bob
Jickling, founder and editor of The Canadian Journal of Environmental
Education; and the editors at Soundings. Anonymous reviewers for all of
these publications were helpful as well. J. Baird Callicott, with whom I
disagree philosophically about nearly everything, nonetheless was the soul
of generosity in shepherding this book toward publication, and Jane Bunker
and her colleagues at the State University of New York Press have been
supportive at every step. Heartfelt thanks to you all.

Anthony Weston
Durham, North Carolina
Summer Solstice, 2007
This page intentionally left blank.
 Chapter 1

Introduction

You might have thought that environmental ethics would enthusiasti-

cally embrace a naturalistic view of values. When the whole effort is to
rejoin the human enterprise to the encompassing world, mustn’t values
be accorded an organic place in that world as well? How else to picture
value except as deeply rooted in embodied perception, coalesced around
desire, need, and susceptibility, and tuned to more-than-human as well
as human rhythms?
Such a picture has another immense attraction too: it does not
make value, as such, a problem. Values so understood do not need to
be “grounded,” at least in the sense that without certain sorts of philo-
sophical self-accounting they would have no foothold in the world at all.
They may need more fertility, reconstruction, and redirection; they may
need criticism, deepening, and change; but the bottom line, regardless, is
that they are already here, quite gloriously here—all of them, of course,
the congenial along with less congenial. Values are not fragile or rare
or delicate or endangered. We do not live in an axiological desert but
in a rain forest. Everywhere the air is thick with them.
Most readers will know, however, that contemporary environmental
ethics has followed a very different path—so far, at least. In the field
as we find it, naturalism is widely mistrusted, and the very existence of
environmental values is taken to be a problem, indeed the most fun-
damental and intractable of problems. We are invited to “ground” our
ethical claims on some independent and philosophically locked-down
“intrinsic value,” or on an ethical theory of a more traditional sort
awkwardly retrofitted for broader-than-human scope. This, for better or
worse, is what seems natural to most philosophers—so natural, indeed,
that its methodological commitments often are not even articulated but
are simply left without saying. And so not only do we learn to live in
the thin air: we also come to imagine that it is, so to speak, the only
kind of atmosphere there could be.
This book is, among other things, a plea to reconsider. The essays
presented here aim to recover and elaborate a systematic alternative to

1
2 The Incompleat Eco-Philosopher

this entire conception of the proper tasks and methods of environmental

ethics. Environmental ethics emerges here in another key; in radically
different axiological biome, as it were, with thicker air and life already
abundant; and two-footedly “grounded” on the actual ground. Corre-
spondingly, this book also offers a kind of methodological complement
to other work in the field—mine and others’—already in this alternative
key. The necessary sort of work is already underway. The challenge is
partly to learn to see it as such.
Fully embraced, moreover, a thoroughgoing naturalism leads us
much further. I want to suggest that it points to a vision of philosophi-
cal engagement as “reconstructive” in the Deweyan sense—and not just
of environmental philosophy but of the environment itself. The familiar
question of anthropocentrism, for example—of human-centeredness as
a doctrine—appears in an entirely different light. I argue that the root
of the problem is not a doctrine at all, but an actual process: anthro-
pocentrization, the narrowing and relentless humanizing of the actual
world, a world that we make and that pervasively remakes itself both
experientially and conceptually. Typically we suppose that we must
determine what the philosophically mandated “nonanthropocentrism”
must look like and then rebuild the world to suit. From a pragmatic
perspective the actual challenge is the other way around: to remake—or
more pointedly to de-anthropocentrize—the actual world in such a way
that a new ethic, only barely conceivable now, might evolve.
“Nonanthropocentrism,” after all, is only a placeholder, a refusal
without content. We know that we want to escape, but only in the
vaguest way where we need to go. Instead, the task must be to enable
the emergence of a new ethic—by the kinds of settings we create, by
the larger-than-human invitations we offer both in our own bearing
and through the patterns of attention and the possibilities of encounter
we build into the world. We need an environmental etiquette, then, as
much as an ethic. Its development will be a process, an ongoing evolu-
tion rather than some form of theoretical exertion. And it must be a
genuinely multicentric process, in place of the usual moral extension-
isms that, however well-intended, still end up making ourselves the
touchstones and “centers” of an “expanded circle.” This book offers
one path in those directions.

Pragmatism

Environmental ethics’ fundamental complaint is supposed to be that the

dominant attitude toward nature reduces the entire more-than-human
 Introduction 3

world to no more than a means to human ends, and indeed only to

a few of those: to commercially provided consumption opportunities,
more or less immediate and supposedly consequence-less. This crassly
self-centered value system is often labeled pragmatism, which naturally
makes it hard to imagine that the philosophical movement called Prag-
matism in any way could be encouraging to environmental ethics.
This, though, is only the crudest and most journalistic sense of
the word “pragmatism.” John Dewey’s distinctly American philosophy
actually offers something radically different and, in my view, radically
more promising. It is on this point that my work in the field began,
now twenty-five years ago.
Notice first that only a few short and seemingly completely natural
philosophical steps lead the familiar line of environmental-ethical argument
from the rejection of that crass instrumentalism directly into a familiar and
very specific paradigm. If you think that the problem is that we reduce
everything to means to human ends, to resources for our use, then what
could be more obvious than to defend natural values by making them
intrinsic rather than “merely” instrumental? Somehow, we conclude, they
must represent another kind of value: ends rather than means; values
entirely outside of the give-and-take of everyday making-do.
It seems obvious enough. Yet the result is that a vast amount of
energy and ingenuity is spent imagining what such intrinsic values in
nature could be, how they can be kept pure and isolated from anything
instrumental, and how they might finally be “grounded.” Strenuous
and lavishly outfitted overland expeditions continue to be launched
to link them up to everything from self-interest to a variety of new
ontologies. Massive philosophical resources go into rearguard actions to
defend them against various critics and skeptics—though, for all that,
the bottom-line argument all too often is still only some re-invocation
of the original bugbear: “Well then, is nature to be left only a mere
means to our ends?”
My first article in the field took issue with all of this. “Beyond
Intrinsic Value”1 argued that Dewey’s pragmatism points toward a far
richer and more workable understanding of values. Dewey calls us “to
embrace the richness and diversity of our actual values and then to make
full use of that richness and diversity to open up a new sense of possibil-
ity in practical action. Pragmatism so understood represents a pluralistic,
integrative, even experimental approach to ethics, at once almost an
ordinary kind of practical wisdom and a philosophically self-conscious
alternative in ethics.”2 On a Deweyan view, both means and ends can
already be found everywhere: what we really need is to articulate and
re-integrate those now overlooked and marginalized.
4 The Incompleat Eco-Philosopher

Instead of the familiar insistence on “grounding” intrinsic values

in nature, then, I say that our real challenge is to develop something
more like an ecology of values: to situate natural values in their contexts,
understand their dynamics, and bring them into fuller attention and
wider play. Even the most precious experiences in and of nature, barely
noticeable to so many others and desperately needing wider play, are
already as “grounded” as they need to be, thank you. They are rooted
deep in the interplay of experience and the larger world. What they
really need is more visibility: more loving elaboration, new and recovered
kinds of language, as well as more intentional and systematic design for
their readier emergence in experience.
Put another way: just as the first task of environmentalism proper
is to bring forth a richer sense of where we actually live, of how deeply
intertwined we are and must be with the Earth, so, I argue, one of the
first tasks of environmental ethics is to bring forth a richer sense of what
we do value: of how value, down to earth, actually goes. Even those kinds
of ethics that seem on the surface so relentlessly human-centered often
bring the Earth in the back door, and a wide and mostly unguarded
back door at that. Think of our susceptibility to animals, both domestic
and wild. Think of our fascination with stars and storms. Think of the
hundred million or so Americans who claim to be gardeners, the tens
of millions who belong to a wide range of environmental organizations.
Think of the great nature poets, from Wordsworth to Wendell Berry.
Think of fundamentalist Creationists, for God’s sake, who celebrate this
world as Creation, though not a very dynamic one, I guess. Think even
of our very own professional selves, who would not be so desperately in
search of intrinsic values in nature in the first place if we were not already
persuaded that nature is (to put it in a less ontologically suggestive way)
precious in its own right. We are trying to create (what we will then
describe as “discover”) the sources and underpinnings of (what we will
then describe as a “justification for”) values and perceptions that we in
fact held long before we felt the need for such philosophical exertions.
Maybe it is time to widen the lens. Environmental ethics may have much
more leverage than we usually imagine, right where we already are.

Social Contingency and its Implications

Along with situating values in the sphere of desire I also want to bring
them emphatically into the orbit of social construction. If value is, as I
propose, deeply rooted in embodied perception and coalesced around
desire, need, and susceptibility, then particular values and indeed the
 Introduction 5

whole shape of value-systems are also—yes—contingent. They are not

“givens,” not some kind of timeless essences, but socially and culturally
shaped, and thus open to reshaping as well. I will add right away that
for me this contingency—indeed, pragmatism’s embrace of a kind of
deconstructive method, seeking out and even celebrating contingency,
foolhardy as it too may seem to many in environmental ethics—is in
fact a methodological touchstone. It is what provokes and enables the
fundamentally reconstructive turn that gives my work whatever distinc-
tiveness it may have. But it is also, I know, a rather unsettling path,
whose implications will need to be drawn out slowly in this essay and
throughout this book.
Take for instance the supposed problem of self-centeredness again—
or, more broadly, as Alan Watts famously put it, the “skin-encapsulated
ego.” As we know all too well, egoism is often supposed to be a sort
of default human condition. Indeed, from Hobbes through the theory
of the “Moral Point of View,” such a pessimism about human nature
has been made into the rationale for ethics itself. Dewey would argue,
though, that self-centeredness is no more natural or essential than its
opposite. Human nature, in general, is plastic. People have and have
had many different “natures,” and likely will have still others in times to
come. Nonetheless it may be the case that that human selves are markedly
involuted or fortified in our time. From a social-constructionist angle,
still, this fact, so far as it really is a fact, is not an invitation to keep
debating about “true human nature,” but reappears instead in another
and more challenging guise. Maybe the real danger is that this is what
we are becoming. Egoism and the crasser utilitarianisms, so far from
somehow being the default human condition, might therefore better be
pictured as radical reductions of it, end results of a long and militant
process of self-desiccation. But it is not too late to change directions.
Marx may after all have been right when he said that the real task is not
to solve certain philosophical problems but to change the world so that
such problems do not arise in the first place. It’s not that the problems
are unreal—they can be quite real, and may even have solutions, of a
sort anyway—but rather that they are unnecessary.3 The universe does
not compel us to drive ourselves, either individually or as a species, ever
deeper into our hard little shells. There are other ways, and once again
perhaps quite close beside us.
Broadly deconstructive themes arise first in my essay “Before
Environmental Ethics” (Chapter 2 of this book). Its specific project
is to argue that that contemporary nonanthropocentric environmental
ethics is profoundly shaped by the very anthropocentrism that it aims
to transcend, and therefore that we may have to go much farther afield
6 The Incompleat Eco-Philosopher

than we have so far imagined if we are to (eventually) truly transcend

anthropocentrism. Consider, for example, the question that contemporary
environmental philosophers take as fundamental: whether “we” should
open the gates of moral considerability to “other” animals (sometimes
just: “animals”), and to the likes of rivers and mountains. “Before Envi-
ronmental Ethics” comments:

[This] phrasing of “the” question may seem neutral and un-

exceptionable. Actually, however, it is not neutral at all. The
called-for arguments address all and only humans on behalf of
“the natural world.” Environmental ethics therefore is invited
to begin by positing, not questioning, a sharp divide that “we”
must somehow cross, taking that “we” unproblematically
to denote all humans. To invoke such a divide, however, is
already to take one ethical position among others.4

For one thing, this entire frame of reference is largely peculiar to modern
Western cultures. Other cultures have felt no compulsion to divide the
entire world between all humans on the one hand and all nature on
the other. Even our own immediate predecessor societies lived in mixed
communities, to use Mary Midgley’s apt term. “The” question above
may be our question, of course: the urbanized, modern, Westerner’s
question. But that is just the point. “The” very question that frames
contemporary environmental ethics presupposes a particular cultural and
historical situation, not at all the only human possibility, and which is
itself perhaps precisely the problem.
We could even reconsider the supposedly fundamental means/end
distinction in this light. Everyday experience suggests that most values
exist in the middle: both means and ends, or between means and ends,
as I put it in another early article, “Between Means and Ends.”5 Dewey
writes of “immediate” values; I speak of “values-as-parts-of-patterns,”
invoking a holistic view in place of the linearity of means-end relations.
In general, the simplest point is that nearly everything has both aspects.
Every value both takes its place in a long—indeed endless—chain of
means and also has its own gratifications in itself. Contrariwise, if we are
losing this two-sidedness—in particular, if more and more of the multiple
and modest natural values next to us are being simplified down to mere
means, a dramatically simplified “ecology of values”—then, once again,
we have a problem. Albert Borgmann and others have perceptively argued
that precisely this is the distinctive malaise of modern industrialism.6
With these last points you already begin to see, I hope, that there
is life after deconstruction: that the specific contingencies of the pres-
 Introduction 7

ent structure of values also open up specific avenues and strategies for
change. This theme especially will take time to unfold, and there are
others that come first, but at this point we should at least note that
precisely this contingency also undercuts the supposed conceptual bar-
riers to environmental ethics that are sometimes invoked from outside
the field.
Take a familiar kind of linguistic or conceptual objection. Still
widely argued is that it is conceptually confused to hold that a mountain
or forest might have some kind of right against dynamiting or clear-
cutting, or that nonconscious beings have moral interests or other any
kind of independent standing against whatever we might wish to do to
them. It is part of the very meaning of rights or interests, many critics
say, that you cannot have them without awareness or at least feeling.
Therefore, inanimate nature cannot have moral standing, and the whole
project of an environmental ethics—valuing nature for its own sake—is
simply confused, mistaken, misconceived. But it is a curiously rigid and
self-congratulatory argument. Surely the very same premise—that envi-
ronmental values are not readily conceivable in present terms—might
much more sensibly be taken to imply that present concepts must be
changed. In a world whose fundamental self-understandings are in flux,
why ever suppose that such a particular conception of interests is some-
how fixed, secure, and timelessly given, let alone somehow accessible to
philosophers in the solitude of their studies or classrooms? This concept
of interests, and indeed the conception of moral consideration that ties
it to interests in the first place, is an artifact of a very specific legal sys-
tem—and there is nothing wrong with that, either, but it is certainly
not the whole story, or any kind of necessity. Such systems are created,
they evolve, and they always must expect re-creation as well.
And we could add: of course the proposed reconceptions will
look “confused.” How else would they look to the guardians of
the established order? That is more like a sign that they are actually
getting somewhere.7

Self-Validating Reduction

A step further into the coevolution of values and world and we begin
to notice some deeper and trickier dynamics. These are the theme of
“Self-Validating Reduction: A Theory of the Devaluation of Nature”
(Chapter 3 of this book).
Often enough we encounter a world that has an apparently “giv-
en” character. And often enough, to be honest, the values for which
8 The Incompleat Eco-Philosopher

environmental ethics wishes to speak—indeed, the values for which ethics

in general wishes to speak—are genuinely hard to see in that world. The
animal inmates of factory farms are bred for such docility and stupidity, and
raised in conditions so inimical to any remaining social or communicative
instinct, that the resulting creatures are pretty poor candidates for rights
or any other kind of moral consideration. Likewise, most of the places of
power revered in the pagan world are gone—often deliberately destroyed
by command of the new, self-describedly “jealous Gods.” But as even the
faintest remnants of the great natural world’s sacredness are degraded and
even the whispers silenced, it becomes progressively harder, sometimes
even for us environmentalists, to see what all the fuss is about.
The familiar consequence is that environmental ethics (and often
ethics in general) is often perceived, even by its advocates, as sentimen-
tal, “nostalgic,” lost in some realm of abstraction and idealization only
tangentially related to “the real world.” Sometimes, I am sure, it is. But
this entire set of expectations, I argue, is also flawed to its core. The
reduced world is not somehow the limit of reality itself. It is a world
we have made—not the only possibility.
Moreover, it is a world we have made in a peculiarly self-reinforcing
way. At work here is a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy that I call “self-
validating reduction.” Those animals in factory farms, for instance: hav-
ing reduced them to mere shadows of what their ancestors once were,
we then can look at them and genuinely find any sort of moral claim
unbelievable. “See? They really are stupid, dirty, dysfunctional, piti-
able.” But then even more drastic kinds of devaluation and exploitation
become possible. Already the genetic engineers speak of chickens with
no heads at all. The circle closes completely. And the same story can
be told, of course, of the reduction of so many particular places and
of the land in general.
The implications are dramatic. For one thing, it follows that the
environmental crisis is not fundamentally the result of some kind of
error in reasoning, essentially to be engaged on the philosophical level.
Instead, it is “a slow downward spiral, a reduction in fact as well as
in thought, in which our ideas are as much influenced by the reduced
state of the world as vice versa, and . . . each stage is impeccably ratio-
nal.”8 Philosophical conceptions are not merely epiphenomenal in this
process, but they are part of a larger dynamic in which material factors
also make a difference.
For another thing—again, and crucially—this world is no kind
of given. The way things are, right now, is not the way they must
be. We are not stuck defending the world as it is or simply trying to
read values off the world we now see before us. “The world as it is”
 Introduction 9

is itself a production of multiple and sustained reductions. It is in flow,

and open to change. Ethics speaks, instead and in addition, to possi-
bilities—sometimes to thoroughly hidden possibilities, if need be, but
possibilities nonetheless. Part of the very outrage is that they remain so
hidden, that they are so insistently reduced. Ethics’ fundamental effort,
then, is to find ways to bring those possibilities forth. Its voice cannot
be one of mere reportage, justification, or “defense.” No: it must be a
call, an invitation—to assist, and join, the self-unveiling of a different
kind of world.

Environmental Etiquette

“Self-validating reduction” is the first of a series of concepts that together

begin to offer a new sort of conceptual toolbox for environmental ethics.
Two more are introduced in “Environmental Ethics as Environmental
Etiquette” (Chapter 4 of this book), an essay with my philosophical and
backwoods co-adventurer Jim Cheney. Here self-validating reduction
finds its complement in “self-validating invitation,” while environmental
ethics finds its more challenging opposite in what Cheney and I call
“environmental etiquette.”
There are musicians, now, who paddle out to the orca in open
ocean in canoes trailing underwater mikes and speakers, inviting them
to jam, working out new musical forms together. You can order the
CDs on the Internet.9 There are animal trainers whose “ways of moving
fit into the spaces shaped by the animals’ awareness,” as Vicki Hearne
elegantly puts it—and “fit” not so much consciously as instinctively.
Then and only then do the animals respond. There is a self-validating
dynamic here too, then, except headed in the other direction. On the
usual ethical epistemology,

we must first know what animals are capable of and then

decide on that basis whether and how we are to consider
them ethically. On the alternative view, we will have no idea
of what other animals are actually capable of —we will not
readily understand them—until we already have approached
them ethically: that is, until we have offered them the space
and time, the occasion, and the acknowledgment necessary
to enter into relationship.10

If the world is a collection of more or less fixed facts to which we

must respond, then the task of ethics is to systematize and unify our
10 The Incompleat Eco-Philosopher

responses. This is the expected view, once again so taken for granted
as to scarcely even appear as a “view” at all. Epistemology is prior to
ethics. Responding to the world follows upon knowing it—and what
could be more sensible or responsible than that? If the world is not
“given,” though—if the world is what it seems to be in part because
we have made it that way, as I have been suggesting, and if therefore
the process of inviting its further possibilities into the light is funda-
mental to ethics itself—then our very knowledge of the world, of the
possibilities of other animals and the land and even ourselves in relation
to them, follows upon “invitation,” and ethics must come first. Ethics
is prior to epistemology—or, as Cheney and I do not say in the paper
but probably should have said, what really emerges is another kind of
epistemology—“etiquette,” in our specific sense, as epistemology.
But then of course we are also speaking of something sharply
different from “ethics” as usually understood. We are asked not for a
set of well-defended general moral commitments in advance, but rather
for something more visceral and instinctual, a mode of comportment
more than a mode of commitment, more fleshy and more vulnerable.
Etiquette so understood requires us to take risks, to offer trust before
we know whether or how the offer will be received, and to move with
awareness, civility, and grace in a world we understand to be capable
of response. Thus Cheney and I conclude that ethical action itself must
be “first and foremost an attempt to open up possibilities, to enrich
the world” rather than primarily an attempt to respond to the world
as already known.
Cheney, true to his nature, also takes the argument on a more
strenuous path, exploring indigenous views of ceremony and ritual.
Once again the question of epistemology turns out to be central.
Euro-Americans, Cheney says, want to know what beliefs are encoded
in the utterances of indigenous peoples. We treat their utterances as
propositional representations of Indigenous worlds. But what if these
utterances function, instead, primarily to produce these worlds? Cheney
cites the indigenous scholar Sam Gill on the fundamentally performa-
tive function of language. When Gill asks Navajo elders what prayers
mean, he reports, they tell him “not what messages prayers carry, but
what prayers do.” More generally, Gill asserts that “the importance of
religion as it is practiced by the great body of religious persons for
whom religion is a way of life [is] a way of creating, discovering, and
communicating worlds of meaning largely through ordinary and com-
mon actions and behavior.”11
What then, Cheney and I ask, if this performative dimension of
language is fundamental not just in indigenous or obviously religious
 Introduction 11

settings, but generally? How we speak, how we move, how we carry

on, all the time, also literally brings all sorts of worlds into being—and
thus, again, the ethical challenge put mindful speech, care, and respect
first. Indeed we would now go even further. Here it is not so much
that epistemology comes first but that, in truth, it simply fades away.
The argument is not the usual suggestion that the West has misunder-
stood the world, got it wrong, and that we now need to “go back” to
the Indians to get it right. Cheney is arguing that understanding the
world is not really the point in the first place. We are not playing a
truth game at all. What matters is how we relate to things, not what
things are in themselves. Front, center, and always, the world responds.
The great task is not knowledge but relationship.

Multicentrism

By now we have moved far indeed from the usual frames of reference
in environmental ethics, at least as an academic and philosophical field.
Yet it remains my concern to stay in dialogue—indeed, dialectic—with
that field. Not only is the line of thought unfolding here meant itself
as a “position” of sorts in that field, but it also suggests a systematic
critique of and alternative to the field’s usual theories and conceptual
categories. Moreover, in my view, it is a very widely shared critique and
alternative—much more widely shared, and in fact much more specific
and systematic, than currently recognized. “Multicentrism: A Manifesto”
(Chapter 5 in this book) is an attempt to give it an explicit and inclusive
shape—and a name.
We know that the challenge of finding an alternative to “anthro-
pocentrism” has multiplied “centrisms” all over the map. Insisting that
more than humans alone matter—that the “center” must be bigger,
indeed far bigger, than us—we are offered ethical systems that focus
on suffering or self-awareness, and so “center” on certain forms of
consciousness in many, possibly all, other animals. Beyond these lie
“biocentrism” (life-centered ethics) or “ecocentrism” (ecosystem-centered
ethics), again in many varieties. Beyond these in turn lie Gaian ethics,
where the whole Earth moves in its own right into the great circle of
moral consideration.
Arguments between these views sometimes are taken to practically
exhaust the field itself. Yet all of these views, whatever their divergences,
take for granted a very specific set of theoretical demands. They all start
from the supposition that the post-anthropocentric task is to expand the
moral universe by highlighting some single feature, now supposed to be
12 The Incompleat Eco-Philosopher

more inclusive than anything just human, that can plausibly be argued
to justify or “ground” moral status as such. In this sense they are all,
as I put it, forms of monocentrism. We imagine larger and larger circles,
but what lies within them and what justifies moral extension across them
is supposed to be—of necessity—one sort of thing.
One problem, I argue, is that in an unnoticed but also almost tau-
tological sense, this project remains ineradicably human-centered, despite
its generous intentions. Not only is our standing never in question, but
moral standing is extended to others by analogy to our own precious
selves: to animals, maybe, on the grounds that they suffer as we do.
But here is the most fundamental worry: Can an ethic of relation-
ship actually remain so monocentric, homogeneous, single-featured?
Might we not even wonder whether monocentrism almost by definition
militates against real relationship? The eco-theologian Thomas Berry has
declared that the essential task of environmental ethics is “to move from
a world of objects to a community of subjects.” Berry’s almost Buberian
language of subject-hood is not much heard in the environmental eth-
ics we know. The phrase may call us up short. A true community of
subjects must be an interacting whole of distinctive, nonhomogenized
parts, in which no one set of members arrogates to themselves alone
the right to gate-keep or even merely to welcome, however generously,
moral newcomers. We are all “in” to start with. Thus Berry might be
read as calling not merely for an alternative to anthropocentrism but
for an alternative to the entire homogenizing framework of “centrism”
itself. And this invitation, arguably, has very little to do with the received
project of “expanding the circle” of moral consideration. What we actu-
ally need is a vision of multiple “circles,” including the whole of the
world from the start.
What I propose to call multicentrism thus envisions a world of
irreducibly diverse and multiple centers of being and value—not one
single moral realm, however expansive, but many realms, as particu-
lar as may be, partly overlapping, each with its own center. Human
“circles,” then, do not necessarily invite expansion or extension, but
rather augmentation and addition. In a similar pluralistic vein, William
James challenges us to imagine this world not as a universe but as a
“multiverse,” and thus a world that calls for (and, we might hope, calls
forth) an entirely different set of skills—even, perhaps, something more
like improvisation and etiquette, once again, in the all-too-serious place
usually accorded ethics. Certainly it would have to be a world in which
etiquette is in play: where collective understandings are negotiated rather
than devised and imposed, however sympathetically, by one group of
participants on the others.
 Introduction 13

All of these themes, I believe, are emerging from a wide variety of

work both within and outside academic environmental ethics. My own
emerging emphasis on the responsiveness of the world, and correspond-
ingly how much a responsive world can be reduced by unresponsive-
ness on the other side; Cheney’s insistence on the constitutive role of
what he calls “bioregional narrative,” co-constituted between human
and more-than-human; our mutual friend Tom Birch’s argument for
“universal consideration,” according to which moral “consideration”
itself must, of necessity, keep itself considerately and carefully open to
everything (there’s universality for you!). Many strands in ecofeminism,
from a persistent and overdue attention to actual patterns and failures
of human-animal relationships to Val Plumwood’s incisive exposure of
the whole seamy conceptual underpinnings of “centering,” whether it
be on and by males or Europeans or humans as a whole. Thomas Berry,
David Abram, Gary Snyder, Paul Shepard, Sean Kane, and many others,
cited and drawn upon in this paper, all speak of the human relation to
nature in terms of negotiation and covenant rather than the philosophical
unilateralism we have learned to expect.
There is a movement here, in short: much more than a collection of
scattered, hard-to-categorize complaints and idiosyncratic, extraphilosophi-
cal views, but a shared alternative vision of the world—and of the tasks
of anything rightly called an “environmental ethic.” “Multicentrism” is
not the perfect name for it—the chapter explores this problem too—but
for the moment I think it will have to do.

De–Anthropocentrizing the World

One more conceptual renovation completes the alternative conceptual

toolbox I have been advancing in this set of essays. To introduce it,
we may begin by returning to the closing themes of “Before Environ-
mental Ethics.”
I argue, in that essay and elsewhere, that there is no leapfrogging
the culture in thought, as if we could think our way to a thoroughly
post-anthropocentric ethic from the very midst of a thoroughly anthropo-
centrized culture. Thinking by itself will not get us out of this mess. In
fact, we live in a dramatically “reduced” world in which our very ethics is
implicated both as sometime agent of reduction (anthropocentrism, in its
many guises, dismisses and disvalues the natural world) and as one of its
many effects (for what philosophy is more natural to “read off” a wholly
humanized world?). In truth we cannot even begin to imagine what a
truly nonanthropocentric ethic would be like. As I put it elsewhere:
14 The Incompleat Eco-Philosopher

A thoroughly humanized language; the commercially colo-

nized imagination; even the physical settings in which the
question of post-anthropocentrism comes up—all of these
inevitably give our supposed post-anthropocentrisms a pro-
foundly and necessarily anthropocentric cast, though often
enough, and naturally enough, well below the threshold
of awareness.12

Whatever finally succeeds anthropocentrism will even not be called

anything like “nonanthropocentrism.” Not-X, for any X, is simply a
negation. The term itself is only a reflex of our present reaction, not a
program but more like a hedged and partial form of refusal. Anthropo-
centrism’s successor will in fact be about something else—and, like any
ethic, about something else in particular, one or a few of the infinity
of possibilities always before us. But what can we say about it? How
can we even get going? And what can philosophy—environmental ethics
or any other part of philosophy—actually contribute?
It is already quite clear, I am sure, that in my view the task is
emphatically not a matter of completing the systematization or cautious
extension of the ethical systems we already happen to have.

Today we are too used to that easy division of labor that

leaves ethics only the systematic tasks of “expressing” a set of
values that is already established, and abandons the originary
questions to the social sciences. The result, however, is to
incapacitate philosophical ethics when it comes to dealing with
values that are only now entering an originary stage. Even
when it is out of its depth, we continue to imagine that system-
atic ethics . . . is the only kind of ethics there is. We continue
to regard the contingency, open-endedness, and uncertainty
of “new” values as an objection to them, ruling them out
of ethical court entirely, or else as a kind of embarrassment
to be quickly papered over with an ethical theory.13

In fact, however, the situation of environmental ethics, at least,

calls for something entirely different, or so I claim. Here we stand
at an originary stage, and the challenge is not so much to discover or
report or defend a kind of ethic that already exists, but to construct
or reconstruct something far more ambitious and new. If values co-evolve
with entire cultural systems, the co-evolution of new values is more like
a cultural project than any form of philosophical discovery.
 Introduction 15

Philosophical method, then, along with our conceptual toolbox,

must be revised and repointed. Though we continue to imagine that the
true virtues of an ethical philosopher are the all too familiar precision,
lucidity, literalness, seriousness, and theoretical unity—all good, system-
atic virtues—the truth is that at stages closer to the beginning, to the
moments of origin, the appropriate style and standards are closer to the
opposite, to the genuinely youthful. Here we can only be exploratory,
experimental, unsystematic, open-ended, imaginative, metaphorical.14 In
ethics at such a formative stage, virtues for system-making or -remaking
are required: improvisation, curiosity, risk taking, susceptibility. Inven-
tiveness is key; a willingness to follow out unexpected lines of thought;
and multicentric pluralism: welcoming multiple voices, expecting and
encouraging them, quite likely speaking in multiple voices oneself. Eti-
quette, as Cheney and I argue, is crucial: that is, the reconstitution and
deepening of multiple relationships, and the exploration of new possible
relationships. Art, not science. Genuine experiments, open-ended, in our
own persons, and perhaps over lifetimes.
We must also take the project of “reconstruction” in its absolutely
most literal sense. To say it again: the key thing, the unacknowledged
bulk of the problem, on my view, is not the ideology, not some sort of
philosophical mistake that an appropriate critique can somehow correct,
but rather anthropocentrism’s underlying, cultural preconditions, its own
quite literal “environment”: the pervasive embodiment and ongoing
self-reproduction of the ever-more-thoroughly humanized world that
underlies and underwrites it. It is here that change work is most urgently
needed—and is most inviting and in some places already well underway.
Following out this line of thought, the character of the actual built
world figures more and more centrally. I propose therefore to shift the
conceptual focus from anthropocentrism to what I call anthropocentriza-
tion, and correspondingly from somehow “refuting” anthropocentrism or
advancing nonanthropocentrism to literally rebuilding—or, more exactly,
de-anthropocentrizing—the world.
This is the thrust of “De-Anthropocentrizing the World: Environ-
mental Ethics as a Design Challenge” (Chapter 6 in this book).

Tomorrow belongs to the designers. Tomorrow belongs to

those who are beginning to remake our ways of living, yes,
and of eating, building, celebrating, keeping time, sharing
a world with other creatures. [I] offer here a philosophical
prolegomenon to their work, then, and more: a philosophi-
cal claim to it. Here lies a different kind of invitation to
16 The Incompleat Eco-Philosopher

philosophy, a different kind of philosophical dialectic and

task: “breaking the spell of the actual” not in the service of
some already-theorized post-anthropocentric alternative, but
precisely in the service of finding our way to it.15

And the essay goes on to advance actual proposals for remaking the
culture: new kinds of architecture, of agriculture, of music-making and
art; even new, or re-understood, holidays.
De-anthropocentrizing re-designers are already seriously at work.
Large-scale and inventive “cultural tinkerers” such as Stewart Brand, for
example, with his plans for ten-thousand-year clocks and other ways of
inviting us to live in a longer—indeed vastly longer—“Now,” much as,
he says, the first Apollo photographs of Earth from Moon invited us
to live in a much larger “Here.” They became icons of global aware-
ness out of a more parochial time—a function Brand also energetically
promoted (before Apollo, which he declares was worth every penny of
its (then) $25 billion cost just for that one photo) and still promotes.
And so too, for Brand, our cultural nearsightedness, our self-reduction
to the purview of a few moments or the next business quarter, is most
fundamentally a design problem, not an invitation to begin by rethink-
ing our philosophical categories. We need to devise and enact cultural
forms that lengthen our view.
Multiply this approach many times over, vary its goals to speak to
every aspect of our narrowed and hyper-anthropocentrized world, and
you have a new and wild vision of the possibilities for what currently
takes itself to be a small academic speciality. Reconnecting with animals;
re-designing neighborhoods for contact, maximizing the margins and
“edges” where encounters are more likely; honoring and deepening
“mixed community”; re-localizing food-growing; re-contextualizing the
old holidays within the great cycles of light and dark, and generating
new holidays as well (imagine that: suppose we invented an insistently
celebratory environmentalism) . . . here we have not only an entirely
unexpected and surely far more compelling and inviting cultural program
than environmental philosophy offers at present, but also a radical path
to the reconstruction of environmental philosophy itself.

Environmental Education

We know that all is not well in the schools. What is puzzling is that,
even so, environmentalists have so readily acquiesced in—indeed have
plumped hard for—the institutionalization of “environmental education,”
 Introduction 17

a new subject that, entirely predictably, quickly became human-centered

in both its epistemological orientation and its normative assumptions, not
to mention firmly anchored within the managerial structures of school
itself: preset curricula, testable and technical skills, the works. School
as we know it is a leading standard-bearer and exemplification of both
anthropocentrism and, more pointedly, anthropocentrization. “Literacy,”
for instance, in the form of the widely promoted goal of “ecological
literacy,” the excuse for it all, is clearly a schoolish skill. But should it
not make us a little uneasy to remember that pretty much the only
people who have so far managed to live sustainably on this earth have
been illiterate? David Abram provocatively argues that the very phonetic
alphabet, of all things, is a prime agent of anthropocentrization, cutting
us off from the voices of the more-than-human all around us. We need
to have more doubts.
My first essay in this area was “Instead of Environmental Educa-
tion,”16 a kind of companion and follow-up to “Before Environmental
Ethics,” indeed arriving at much the same place. The impetus and energy
for reconnection, for love for the Earth, I argue, primarily lies outside
of school: in the life of the family, community, and ideally the practice
of a whole society, as well as in its ways of building, growing food,
celebrating, birthing and marrying and dying. This is where the juice is,
a set of practices that school at its best can augment and support but
cannot create on its own out of whole cloth. “Environmental education”
cannot somehow succeed by itself, any more than stand-alone ethical
reconceptions, as if a philosophical reorientation could ground all oth-
ers. Both require systematically transformed cultural practices. In such a
transformed world, teaching can be dynamite. In the world as we know
it, teaching can still provoke and unsettle and suggest—I sketch some
ways to do this, too—but cannot turn the corner on its own.
This challenge, and puzzle, is also close to our own everyday
practice, since most environmental philosophers are themselves university
teachers. As a teacher I am constantly challenged to rethink my pedagogy
along the lines of my unfolding environmental philosophy—a challenge
indeed, as environmental philosophy in my view diverges ever farther
from the sort of “content area” that fits most readily with the traditional
conception of teaching as the transfer of information. Environmentalism
in my thinking is taking a very different direction—but how then to
teach it? Even for more mainline environmental ethics, the challenge
arises. Almost by necessity, school cuts us off from the experience of a
larger world: from natural rhythms, natural beings, more-than-human
flows of knowledge and inspiration. In fact, we could hardly design a
worse setting for environmental education. What to do?
18 The Incompleat Eco-Philosopher

“What If Teaching Went Wild?” (Chapter 7 in this book) is the

beginning of my answer. I begin by echoing the above set of con-
cerns—the need for something vastly more ambitious than environmental
education—and then turn quickly to the classroom teacher, firmly situated
within school and our times. Us, after all. Can teaching “go wild”—can
we begin to reconnect—even here? I argue that we can. Indeed I argue
that it may even be possible to make a foil of school’s hyper-humanized
setting to this very end: we can force anthropocentrism to reveal itself,
in silhouette as it were, and to begin to draw forth alternatives not
merely “somewhere else” but right in the very belly of the beast. But
the required pedagogy is much more personally demanding and unnerv-
ing than the usual sorts of pedagogical innovations.

To be willing to remake the very space of a classroom, to

invite a kind of more-than-human wildness into a space that
started out so neat, bodiless, wholly anthropocentrized, and
in control, you must be attentive in a bodily way to the very
shape and feel of space itself. . . . You yourself must experience
the human/other-than-human boundary as more permeable
than our culture teaches us it is.17

In the end the advice is practical: students end up eating flowers,

combing the room for spiders, and even rediscovering their own selves
as animal—for the great wild world is, in at least one important sense,
right here. Not incidentally, you get a sense here for what a multicentric
environmental etiquette might look like in entirely achievable practice.
Even, after all, in school!

Farther Afield

The last two essays in this book range farther afield—through the
evolution-creation debate, and then, of all places, into outer space—with
the same set of concerns and conceptual tools.
In January of 2003 my biologist colleague Gregory Haenel invited
me to co-lead his course studying evolution in mainland Ecuador and
the Galapagos Islands. The course begins on the mainland coast of
Ecuador, with its rain forests and ragged sandstone promontories, where
the great oceanic currents last brush land before angling out across 700
miles of water to those tiny volcanic islands on the equator, another
kind of edge. All of the life that colonized the Galapagos had to fly or
swim or float there, most of it from here. Our students did their forest
 Introduction 19

and shore plant and animal inventories, waded out into the surf to toss
in a variety of seeds to see which might have a chance of floating, built
up their hypotheses of what they might find on the Islands.
Then we went to see. So many stunning, unique, immensely trust-
ing animals. Days spent traipsing over the bare lava or through thick
brush; nights seasick on the small boat on the open sea, examining the
logbooks in which previous guests express all kinds of thoughts, profound
doubts as well as deep appreciation; arguing with Greg into the wee
hours in our little cabin—I too was provoked. I came home realizing
that even here, even at the place of Darwinism’s own origins, there is
a kind of creativity at work not captured by the familiar mechanistic
metaphors of traditional Darwinism. There are other ways to think about
adaptation—there is more room to recognize spontaneity, improvisation,
intelligence—within Darwinism itself. But this is certainly no brief for
Creationism either, which simply does not engage the complex inter-
relations and dynamics of life also so evident here (and, as Greg always
insisted, in fact evident everywhere to the trained eye).
Even the current, seemingly a priori standoff between evolution
and creationism may shortly yield to a quite different set of antago-
nists, as a vision of a far more dynamic, catastrophic, and perhaps also
short-lived Earth history is coming into view—with, of course, its own
characteristic pattern of insights and oversights. The Great Mystery once
again eludes us.
Thus my essay “Galapagos Stories” (Chapter 8 of this book), an
attempt to recast the evolution debate toward, once again, a deeper love
for the Earth itself and a deeper appreciation for its dynamism. We are
not, in fact, in the end-game of a battle to the death between a goliath
called “Evolution” and another called “Creation.” It may be that the
real challenge of our time is very different: to find more productive
and revealing ways to speak to the impulses that drive both, and newly
emerging alternatives too. Again—we live in originary times.
Chapter 9 concludes this collection by going up to, and probably
over, another sort of radical edge. It pays to remember that it was the
space program that gave us our first true vision of Earth as a single,
fragile whole. Maybe it is no accident that the first Earth Day so closely
followed the first Moon landing. Likewise, the continuing and possibly
soon-to-be-reinvigorated space program opens philosophical doors that
have barely yet even been imagined. We are already engaged in deep
space exploration that frames not just the Earth as a single whole, but
the entire solar system, or even larger wholes. Profound challenges to
established ways of thinking—now including environmentalism itself—arise
once again, as we begin to recognize ourselves not merely as Earthlings
but as “Solarians,” or maybe “plain cosmic citizens.”
20 The Incompleat Eco-Philosopher

For one thing, the vast horizons of space offer a sort of express
trip beyond anthropocentrism—not so easy a voyage to get off, either
physically or conceptually. (Test case: what were/are your reactions when
you realize(d) that this book’s cover photo is in fact from Mars?) We are
also reminded that Earth’s “environment” is not a closed system. It may
turn out that we are only a local corner of a cosmic ecosystem. How
would our systems of Earth-centered ethics, themselves only recently
and so very laboriously won, look then? If, on the other hand, life is
rare in the universe, maybe it is our very own task to spread it to the
stars. Could we even imagine genetically engineered living forms, trees
maybe, inhabited by myriads of still others, pushed by the vast “solar
sails” already being tested—giant wooden sailing ships again going forth
to unknown adventure? How will environmental philosophy, or its suc-
cessors, rise to this challenge?
You see, anyway, that thinking about space may lead us to con-
template unexpected provocations well beyond environmentalism itself,
not to mention a return to (hu)manned space exploration in, perhaps, a
wildly different key. Happy to think ourselves at the very edge of radi-
calism in ethics, we may still be unprepared for the sheer spaciousness
of the philosophical challenges posed by “space.” How can we assume,
for example, that an Earth-centered ethics is somehow the end of the
line, as inclusive as ethics can get? Suppose environmental ethics itself is
only a station on the way to somewhere else? Thus a book that begins
with a chapter called “Before Environmental Ethics” ends, in a sense,
with the question of what comes after environmental ethics.
But then too: might not environmental philosophy also make its
own distinctive contribution to this most momentous of reconceptions, as
humans imagine stepping off the home planet in earnest? If the explora-
tion of space may transform environmental philosophy, so environmental
philosophy may also transform the exploration of space, again in real and
deeply engaging ways. This too is part of our task, our challenge, and the
fascination of our times and work. I don’t say that any of it is probable.
In fact, nothing is particularly probable once we are thinking out a few
centuries, let alone a millennium or two. But it is possible, aye—and who
would have thought it? Marinate space exploration in eco-philosophy for
a few centuries, and who knows what either one will end up looking
like. The only safe bet is that we are in for a wild ride.

Notes

1. “Beyond Intrinsic Value: Pragmatism in Environmental Ethics,”

Environmental Ethics 7 (1985), pp. 321–39, reprinted in Environmental Prag-
 Introduction 21

matism, edited by Andrew Light and Eric Katz (London: Routledge, 1995)
and Environmental Philosophy: Critical Concepts, edited by J. B. Callicott and
Clare Palmer (London: Routledge, 2004). Eric Katz wrote a reply to this
article, titled “Searching for Intrinsic Value,” Environmental Ethics 9 (1987), to
which I published a reply in turn (“Unfair to Swamps,” Environmental Ethics
10 [1988], also reprinted in Environmental Pragmatism). For another version
of the argument, see my book Toward Better Problems (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1992), chapter 5.
2. This is how I put it in an early work on method in ethics: Toward
Better Problems, p. ix.
3. So unfamiliar is this way of thinking that it was a struggle to get the
emphatically Deweyan title of my early monograph, Toward Better Problems, past
the publisher (Temple University Press). Yet it is, in my view, a precise capsule
of what a pragmatic or deconstructive approach offers on the constructive side:
a sense that not only solutions but also problems themselves can be reshaped.
4. P. 24, this book.
5. “Between Means and Ends,” Monist 75 (1992), pp. 236–49.
6. Albert Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
7. For a celebration of this point, see Inge Anderegg, “On the Natural
History of On the Natural History of Values,” in Anthony Weston, Jobs for Phi-
losophers (Philadelphia: Xlibris, 2004), chapter 5. Lovely as it would be to have
philosophical bedfellows of this sort, I have to admit that Inge Anderegg is only
one of my alter egos. For more on Jobs for Philosophers, see in the introduction
to chapter 6 of this book.
8. P. 59, this book.
9. Check out www.interspecies.com.
10. P. 68, this book.
11. Sam Gill, “One, Two, Three: The Interpretation of Religious Action,”
in Gill, Native American Religious Action: A Performance Approach to Religion
(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1987), pp. 162–63, 151.
12. P. 110, this book. Another pseudonymous selection, this time a
manifesto, from Jobs for Philosophers.
13. Pp. 32–33, this book.
14. This argument is much elaborated in Anderegg, “On the Natural
History of On The Natural History of Values.”
15. P. 110, this book.
16. “Instead of Environmental Education,” in Bob Jickling, ed., Proceedings
of the Yukon College Symposium on Ethics, Environment, and Education (White-
horse, YT: Yukon College, 1996), and subsequently reprinted as “Deschooling
Environmental Education” in Canadian Journal of Environmental Education
I (1996).
17. P. 146, this book.
This page intentionally left blank.
 Chapter 2

Before Environmental Ethics

I. Introduction

To think “ecologically,” in a broad sense, is to think in terms of the

evolution of an interlinked system over time rather than in terms of
separate and one-way causal interactions. It is a general habit of mind.
Ideas, for example, not just ecosystems, can be viewed in this way. Ethi-
cal ideas, in particular, are deeply interwoven with and dependent on
multiple contexts: other prevailing ideas and values, cultural institutions
and practices, a vast range of experiences, and natural settings as well. An
enormous body of work, stretching from history through the “sociology
of knowledge” and back into philosophy, now insists on this point.1
It is curious that environmental ethics has not yet viewed itself in
this way. Or perhaps not so curious: for the results are unsettling. Cer-
tain theories, in particular, claim to have transcended anthropocentrism
in thought. Yet such theories arise within a world that is profoundly
and beguilingly anthropocentrized.2 From an “ecological” point of
view, transcending this context so easily seems improbable. In part II
of this paper, I argue that even the best nonanthropocentric theories in
contemporary environmental ethics are still profoundly shaped by and
indebted to the anthropocentrism that they officially oppose.
I do not mean that anthropocentrism is inevitable, or even that
nonanthropocentric speculation has no place in current thinking. Rather,
as I argue in part III, the aim of my critique is to bring into focus
the slow process of culturally constituting and consolidating values that
underlies philosophical ethics as we know it. The aim is to broaden our
conception of the nature and tasks of ethics, so that we can begin to
recognize the “ecology,” so to speak, of environmental ethics itself, and

“Before Environmental Ethics” first appeared in Environmental Ethics 14 (1992), pp.

323–40, and was subsequently reprinted in a variety of teaching anthologies in environ-
mental ethics.

23
24 The Incompleat Eco-Philosopher

thus begin to recognize the true conditions under which anthropocen-

trism might be overcome.
One implication is that we must rethink the practice of environ-
mental ethics. In part IV, I ask how ethics should comport itself at early
stages of the process of constituting and consolidating new values. I then
apply the conclusions directly to environmental ethics. In particular, the
co-evolution of values with cultural institutions, practices, and experi-
ence emerges as an appropriately “ecological” alternative to the project
of somehow trying to leapfrog the entire culture in thought. In part V,
finally, I offer one model of a co-evolutionary approach to environmental
philosophy, what I call “enabling environmental practice.”

II. Contemporary Nonanthropocentrism

I begin by arguing that contemporary nonanthropocentric environmental

ethics remains deeply dependent on the thoroughly anthropocentrized
setting in which it arises. Elsewhere I develop this argument in detail.3
Here there is only room to sketch some highlights.
For a first example, consider the very phrasing of the question that
most contemporary environmental philosophers take as basic: whether
“we” should open the gates of moral considerability to “other” ani-
mals (sometimes just: “animals”), and/or to such things as rivers and
mountains. The opening line of Paul Taylor’s Respect for Nature, for
example, invokes such a model. Environmental ethics, Taylor writes,
“is concerned with the moral relations that hold between humans and
the natural world.”4
Taylor’s phrasing of “the” question may seem neutral and unex-
ceptionable. Actually, however, it is not neutral at all. The called-for
arguments address all humans, and only humans, on behalf of “the
natural world.” Environmental ethics therefore is invited to begin by
positing, not questioning, a sharp divide that “we” must somehow cross,
taking that “we” unproblematically to denote all and only humans. To
invoke such a divide, however, is already to take one ethical position
among others. For one thing, it is largely peculiar to modern Western
cultures. Historically, when humans said “we,” they hardly ever meant
to include all other humans, while they often did mean to include some
individuals of other species. Mary Midgley emphasizes that almost all
of the ancient life patterns were “mixed communities” of humans and
an enormous variety of other creatures, from dogs (our relation with
whom she calls “symbiotic”), to reindeer, weasels, elephants, shags,
horses, and pigs.5 One’s identifications and loyalties lay not with the
Exploring the Variety of Random
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THE EIGHTH DIVISION — TEBAT-NETERU-S 185 6. A door

called Tes-amem-mit-em-sheta-f, — »— o / \./ r~^;n . Beyond it is a
figure of the god Nu, 000, who appears to he over the "chamber of
destruction," -^^^ .
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( i86 ) CHAPTER IX. THE NINTH DIVISION OF THE TUAT,

WHICH IS CALLED BEST-ARIJ-ANKHET-KHEPERIT. Haying passed
through the Eighth Division of tlie Tuat, the boat of the sun arrives
at the Ninth Division, which is passed through hy the sun during the
Ninth Hour of the night. The opening text reads : — D ^ D ^ <=>'n
^ ^ ^ — n fv q S\ < ^ '^ I /W\NV^ '7(. rP\^ /WVW\ '^ I k • O Tliis
great god taketh up his place in this Circle,
 NINTH DIVISION — BEST-ARU-ANKHET-KHEPERU 187 "
and he addresseth words from his boat to those who "are in it. The
divine sailors join the boat of this " great god in this City. The name
of the gate of this " City through which this god entereth and taketh
up " his place on the stream which is in this City is Saa" EM-KEB ;
the name of this City is Best-aru-ankhet" KHEPERU ; the name of the
Hour of the night which " guideth this great god is Tuatet-maketet-
en-neb-s." The line of text which runs above the upper register
reads : — => O ^ ^ I' [^^^ ^ D ^ w II (Q, .6. c. c> a A r"^ r-^-^
u, Jill f^^^ CTZ] 1 ^ ^ ^ 1¥ /^^.^^^^/^ A/W\AA^^W ■ ■ ■ ^ H
AAftAAA I I II Ilii I 1 S r-^-^ ^ I I I I I I ^ ^^^=:^[r3i I y^ ^= II I
I ^ "The hidden Circle of Amentet, through whicli this "great god
travelleth and taketh up his place in the " Tuat. If these things be
made with their names " after the manner of this figure which is
depicted at " the east of the hidden house of the Tuat, and if a "man
knoweth their names whilst he is upon earth, " and knoweth their
places in Amenti, [he sluiU attain
 THE BOOK OF AM-TUAT " to] his own place in the Tuat, and
he shall stand up " in all places which belong to the gods whose
voices " (or, w^ords) are madt, even as the divine sovereign " chiefs
(tchatcha) of Ra, and the mighty ones of the "palace (Pharaohs?),
and [this knowledge] shall be of " benefit to him upon earth." In the
middle register are: — 1. The boat of tlie sun, with the god Afu
standing under a canopy formed by the serpent Mehen. The Boat of
Afu, the deail Sun-god, in the Xinth Hour. 2. The Twelve Sailors of
Efi, each of whom stands upright, and liolds a paddle in his hands ;
their names are : — 1. Khennu,\^|. , i.e., "the sailor "parrareZ/t'Hrc.
2. Akiiem-sek-f, 3. Akhem-urt-f, ^^1
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NINTH DIVISION — BEST-ARU-ANKHET-KHEPERU 189

Khennu. Akliem-sek-f. Akliem-urt-f. Akhem-hemi-f. Akhem-hcp-f.
Alihem-kheuies-f. Kheu-unnut-f. Hepti-ta-f. Hetep-uaa, Neter-ncteru.
Tcha-Tuat. Tepi.
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igO THE BOOK OF AM-TUAT 4. Akhem-hemi-f, (1 0 1\ \;^

1^1^ -^ D 5. Akhem-hep-f, (| ^ 6. Akhem-kiiemes-f, 7. Khen-
u^'xut-f, -75^^ ^ /www 0 ^ 8. Hepti-ta-f, g ^° a 9. Hetep-uaa, 10.
ISTetepv-xeteku, I I I . 11. tcha-tuat, 12. Tepi, '^ 0 The text which
refers to tlicse reads : a L) A/vvv^^ '=^ I AWVAA 1111 ^ D ^^-
(^(111 D AAVV\\ cO] .A. n i::^ ^ □ ci tJ -^ D ^^UJ ^ F=q -=> III
D _M^ [irz] t) J] © ^ 01^1
 NINTH DIVISION — BEST-ARU-ANKHET-KHEPERU IQI V o
J\ AAA/\AA fJV./\Ar\ AAAAAA A^AA'^A A^WAA AAw'VAyVy
/VNAAyVv I I I O AAAAAA A/vAAAA J] • ) I 3O I "This "great god
joiuetli those who will transport hiiii " through this City, and his
sailors join his boat " wherein he is in his hidden form of Mehen.
This "great god addresseth words to the gods who dwell " in this
City, that is to say, to the gods who are the "sailors of the boat of Ea
and to those who will " transport [him] through the horizon so that
he may " take up his position in the eastern Hall of heaven. "Their
work in the Tuat is to transport Ka through " this City every day, and
they take their stand by tlie "stream in this City whereon [saileth]
the boat, and "it is they who give water with their paddles to the "
spirits who are in this City, and they sing hyunis to "the Lord of the
Disk, and they make to arise [his] "Soul in his forms by means of
their hidden words " every day." 3. A bearded, man-headed hawk,
wearing plumes and horns on his head, seated on a basket or bowl ;
his name is MuTi-KiiEXTi-'ruAT, ^^ ^ rflk ^ ^^. 4. The ram-god
ISTESTl-KiiENTi-'ruAT, couchant on a basket or bowl.
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192 THE BOOK OF AM-TUAT 5. The cow-goddess Nebt-au-

khenti-Tuat, Ji ° ^ III (tiller^6. A Leaided god, in mmuniied form,
called HetepetNETEK, (^3)^ 3, or HeTEPET-NETERU, „ ,, ,!,,,• I I I I
^' r^ D 11 I I III t. A 11," III AVAWA li & , . V AwvsAM nai III
HAwvsAM (jnj 111 l/VVSV/t — — II— . 0 -, 0 AVVVSV/1 — — !■— .
w ^ I I I ife + " Muti-khenti-Tuat. The text which refers to these
reads : D 111 ^=0= D D ■^J-J^^ 1 1 I ^111 /^e« 10
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NINTH DIVISION — BEST-ARU-ANKHET-KHEPERU I93 /I

"^fc^ F!^ Ill r 8 Nesti-khenti-Tuat. MA-r-tl'^' ^
 194 THE BOOK OF AM-TUAT ^ mi " Those who are in this
picture in this " City are they who give offerings of food to the gods "
who are in the Tuat ; Ra decreeth for them loaves of " bread and
vessels of beer, and the gods journey on in " the following of this
great god to the Eastern horizon " of the sky, with Hetep-neteru-Tuat
[also] following " him." In the upper register are : — 1. Twelve gods,
each of whom is seated upon the symbol of linen swathings ; their
names are : — 1. Neha-ta, ra r^^^ I I 2. Teba,ci^ J^|. 3. Maati (or,
Ariti) 4. Menkhet, 5. Hebs, IJ ^^ ^. 6. Nebti, 7. Asti-xeter, jj "^ ^'^
"1 . Y8. ASTI-PAUT ■J w© 9. Hetemet-khu, K [1 ^
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Neha-ta. Teba. Maati. Menkhet, Hebs. Nebti, Asti-neter.

Asti-paut. D AAAM/VWi AVUWrt Hetemet-khu. • Neb-Pat. Temtu.
Men-5.
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196 THE BOOK OF AM-TUAT 10. Neb-Pat, d i 11. Temtu, .- I

-<2>llililUj' ^ I I I I I /^^AA^^ I JI I I I A/V\AAA o iSi-^ll D
AAAA^^ O il D O I ..- ^^111 A^/vv^A _cr^ I "^ i I ^ ^^ d til ' "
Those who are in this picture in " the Tnat are seated firmly on their
instruments for " weaving, and they are in the form of the figures "
which Horus made. Ea saith to them : — 0 ye who
 NINTH DIVISION — BEST-ARU-ANKHET-KHEPERU I97 are
swathed in your holy swathings, who are arrayed ill your garments,
whom Horus covered up when he hid his father in the Tuat, which
concealeth the gods, uncover ye your heads, 0 ye gods, unveil ye
your faces, and perform ye the things which must be done for Osiris
! Ascribe ye praise to the lord of Amentet, and make ye your word
madt against his enemies every day. These beings are the tchatcha
(i.e., divine ■ sovereign chiefs) of this god, and they avenge by their
■ words Osiris each day : and the work which they do ■ in the Tuat
is to overthrow the enemies of Osiris." 2. Twelve goddesses, whose
names are : — r-vn 1. Perit 2. Shemat-khu, 3. Nebt-shat, ^""^ id 4.
Nebt-shefsheft, 5. Aat-aatet, 6. Nebt-setau, 7. Hent-nut-s, 9 8. Nebt-
mat, ^ I I r ^ I 9. 1 esert-ant, — »— (J r^/^^
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"igS THE BOOK OF AM-TUAT 10. Aat-khu, I^ ^ '^ ^ ^ In*

11. Sekhet-metu, Y ^ 1 y^ 1 • 12. Netert-en-khentet-Ea, | I ^ / 0
The text which refers to these reads : 7^;^ '"'^'"'^ D :i ^ I I I ^
£52 A m^\\. I I I ■^^ AA/y^^ J\ I I I a i< J^ r-^^~i I A/^W\A MM
I I I Ji s^^ o f 1 -^ 1 1 1 LizD w ^ ra " Those who are in this
picture with their bodies of the " Tuat are they who are in the forms
which Horus " made. This great god crieth out to them after he "
hath arrived at the place where they are, and they " come to life and
they hear [his] voice. Their work " in the Tuat is to raise the praises
of Osiris, and to " embrace the hidden St)ul by means of their
words, "and to bring life and strength to the risings of the "god of
the Tuat [in whatsoever regions they are], and " they utter words on
[his behalf] in the chamber each "day."
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MM ca /www\rt ■k^^/) •OAeA B Perit. Shemat-khu. Nebt-

shat. Nebt-shefsheft. Ml & J I O —i^ : G A Aat-aatet. Nebt-setau.
Hent-nut-s. Nebt-mat. Teserl-ant. Aat-khu. Sekhet-motu. Nelcrt-cn-
kheutot-Ra.
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20O THE BOOK OF AM-TUAT In the lower register are : —

1. Twelve uraei, which are mounted each on its instrument for
weaving, and each pours forth fire from its mouth ; their names are
: — 1 2. Tekait, l j 4. Khut-Tuat, ,^. ^ ^^. A^W\AA 5. Tertneshek,
<=> rm '^ M\N\N\ 1 I I 6. Ap-shet, \/ ^^. C30 I I I 8. Shex-ten-
amm, 10. Aat-ai;u, — _i] "^ % 11. Nebt-uauau, ^ f] ^ f] ^ fi j • 12.
Nebt-rekeh, P I Above the uraei is a mutilated line of text, which,
according to IMaspero's restoration, reads: a^vva ^ i ]s.iP[T]:
[uaiT]iS^rf
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NINTH DIVISION — BEST-ARU-ANKHET-KHEPERU 201

Tekait. Khut-Tuat. m- -*r c»? 1 A '"T'l Tertneshen. Ap-shet. Xnkhet.
Shen-ten-amm. i-.^-ffiW.^i Aat-aru. Kcbt-uauau. Ncbt-Eekcl.i.
The text on this page is estimated to be only 24.14%
accurate

202 THE BOOK OF AM-TUAT k. W I I I Mn D D =1 ^ D f"^

^,^^1 ^ « rpj^g names ' of the uraei who kindle fires for the god
who is the ' governor of the Tuat hy means of the fire which is in '
their Tnouths. They swallow their flames after this ' god hath passed
by them." The text which refers to them reads : AAAAAA k^l ^ mM
^ nri H '^ mw. ^ i imJl I D I I 1 1 I I %%% M ^ i< I I I 'if 1%^ ^
mf:n AAAAA', I I I ■*-© I - — a I I AAA/VA/v D ^ o .^ I I ^^2P ^ J
I I I I ^^unr f\M M. " Those who are in this picture [are] in the Tiiat
[and " they have bodies of fire], and it is they who lighten " the
darkness in the Tuat for [Osiris] ... by means " of the flames of fire
which come forth from their " mouths, [and it is they who bring
about the destruc 
 NINTH DIVISION — BEST-ARU-ANKHET-KHEPERU 203 "
tioii of] those who are overthrown in the Tuat. It is " they who drive
back the serpents of every kind which " are on the ground, and
whicli are unknown in their " forms to the god of the Tuat. They
make themselves " to live by means of the blood of those whom
they hack " to pieces each day [when] those advance who endow "
with magical power the dead by the mystery of their " formulae.
Those who know this shall see their magical " formulae, and shall
not pass through their flames." 2. Nine bearded gods, who stand
upright ; each holds the symbol of " life " in his right hand, and a
staff, the upper portion of which is in the form of a wrigglmg snake,
in the left hand. These gods are imder the direction of a god in
mummied form, whose name, or description, is Heeu-her-she-tuati,
NA^ ^ ciszi -Jc "vX , i.e., " Horus who is over the lakes in the ^ _^
III' Tuat." The names of the nine gods are : —
l.SEK„X,ll||V^(«.||||||). 3. Nehebeti, -^^ 9 J 4. TCAMrx,, 2^ ^ 5.
Neb-aatti, ^^z^ (1 ^ G. Heq-neteuu-f, I ^ I Jj w 1 1 1
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accurate

204 THE BOOK OF AM-TUAT

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