Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
to biocentrism and wilderness preservation, is unwelcome, as it diminishes the needs
of humans. The real problems are cultural and economic - over-consumption by the
West and by Third World elites, growing militarization, and so on. Western
conservationists, influenced by deep ecology and including organizations like the
World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and World Conservation Union (IUCN), have
sometimes, certainly in the past, failed to appreciate how the effects of environmental
problems seriously impact on the poor, in the forms of, for example, water shortages,
soil erosion and air pollution. The annexation of Eastern religion and mysticism to
the deep ecology philosophy is also rather disingenuous, as it often serves to position
the East as pre-scientific, romantic and passive, failing to recognize the active role
traditional ecological knowledge has had in stable and effective environmental
management. Guha's stringent critique continues by noting how the National Park
Movement is intricately tied to the growing expansion of capitalism and consumerism,
with wilderness areas, practically and ideologically, becoming aesthetic antidotes to
the pressures of modern life while simultaneously functioning as emerging business
opportunities for tourist operators, now frequently commandeering the prefix 'sustain-
able'. More recently, a conscientious sustainable tourism has emerged as a significant
economic opportunity for many developing nations, but Guha's fundamental point
about ecological concerns needing a fuller integration with people's livelihoods and
work throughout the world remains pertinent. Deep ecology must not become yet
another veiled form of cultural and economic imperialism.
Eco-feminism
Deep ecology has been gender blind, and a great deal of eco-feminist thought has
been developed as a critique of this philosophy, which for many remains wedded
to the rationalist problematic of Western thought, which additionally, as Guha notes,
fails to conceptualize human beings as sufficiently social and connected. The idea
that the best way to eradicate the division between humanity and nature is through
a 'unifying process' is too extreme. As Val Plumwood remarks, in its over-generality,
deep ecology:
fails to provide a genuine basis for an environmental ethics of the kind sought,
for the view of humans as metaphysically unified with the cosmic whole will be
equally true whatever relation humans stand in with nature - the situation of
exploitation of nature exemplifies such unity equally as well as a conserver
situation, and the human self is just as indistinguishable from the bulldozer and
Coco-Cola bottle as the rocks or the rain forest.
(1996: 165)
What is really necessary is to rethink the human side of this dualism, to understand
and rearticulate the qualities that 'inferior' humans have in abundance and to see
the natural world in a non-mechanistic way. For Plumwood, much of this has to
do with various continuities of reproductivity, sensuousness, relationships and
emotionality, rather than abstract planning and calculation. It is our relationships
that make us human. Karen Warren (1996, 2004) sums up the various eco-feminist
perspectives when she writes of environmental degradation and exploitation being
