THE CHALLENGE OF A WORLD ENVIRONMENTAL ETHIC

Author(s): J. Baird Callicott

Source: American Journal of Theology & Philosophy, Vol. 18, No. 1, ECO-JUSTICE AND THE
ENVIRONMENT (January 1997), pp. 65-79
Published by: University of Illinois Press
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 THE CHALLENGE OF AWORLD
ENVIRONMENTAL ETHIC

J.Baird Callicott /University ofNorth Texas

Environmental ethics, as a distinct subject of disciplined inquiry, came into

in the
being in the early 1970s in response to the sudden recognition,
1960s, that industrial civilization had engendered an environmental crisis.

However, vernacular environmental ethics have existed implicitly inmany

a time.
indigenous and traditional cultures throughout theworld for very long

I.

Since ethics is a relatively new addition to our

the phrase environmental
vocabulary and the concept that itdenotes is not familiar, letme begin by
more commonplace social
informally comparing environmental ethics to the
sort of ethics and to themore pedestrian concept of environmental law to help
locate the concept on a cognitive map and obviate misunderstanding of both
the enterprise and its efficacy. Then I shall go on to suggest how the environ
mental ethic based upon contemporary ecology and those implicit in the
world's many indigenous and traditional cultures can conspire to generate a
unified but multifaceted international environmental ethic.
In "The Land Ethic," the seminal classic of contemporary ecology
based Western environmental ethics, the distinguished American conservation
ist Aldo Leopold understood ethics to impose "limitations on freedom of
action in the struggle for existence."1 Though typically terse, Leopold's char
acterization is sound and gets at something fundamental. Our familiar social
ethics would impose limitations on interpersonal freedom of action and on
as a whole. Lying to a friend and
personal freedom in relation to society
are regarded as
falsifying scientific data are examples, respectively. Both
case the victim is an
equally unethical or immoral: though in the former
individual; and in the lattera community?the scientific community, or society

1
Aldo Leopold,^ Sand CountyAlmanac: and SketchesHere and There (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1949), 202.

65

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66_American Journalof Theology &
Philosophy_

itself (among those societies at least that venerate science), or, still more
holistically, an institution, science per se. Similarly, an environmental ethic
would impose limitations on human freedom of action in relationship to non
human natural entities and to nature as a whole.
Ethical ormoral limitations, especially inWestern cultural traditions,
are formulated as behavioral rules or, more generally and abstractly, as pre

cepts and principles. In non-Western traditions theymay be articulated as

mutual social expectations, customs, taboos, rites, or implicitly exemplified in
myth, story, and legend. In political cultures, themost vital moral limitations
on human freedom, those upon which the very existence of
society rests, are
encoded into statutes or laws.
We may conceive of a prohibitive law as a moral injunction that is so
broadly agreed upon and perceived as so vital that it has been formally
adopted, institutionalized, and specifically sanctioned by society. Ethics pro
per, by contrast,may be conceived as those remaining restraints, rules, or prin
ciples, not formally encoded or formally punished, but that are, nevertheless,
recommended and sanctioned by social approbation and disapprobation. Eth
ics, in short, at once lie at the basis of laws and complement and supplement
laws.

Environmental ethics?however novel and exotic the idea may seem,

and however incipient and inchoate our ambient environmental moral sen
sibilitiesmay be?undergird, I therefore suggest, the body of current national
and international environmental law and regulation.
But inwhatever way institutionalized, ethics exist by convention, not
by nature. They are culturally (and sometimes personally) generated and sanc
tioned. It is not possible to disobey a law of nature, but of course it is possible
to disobey a statute, ignore a custom, transgress a taboo,
disregard an ethical
principle, or violate a moral rule.
This difference between natural and moral limitations on human
behavior is so obvious as hardly towarrant mention, but I do mention itbe
cause it entails a fundamental consequence important to bear in mind:
Compliance with an ethic, even one hardened into law, is voluntary. An ethic,
therefore, is never perfectly realized on a collective social scale and very rarely
on an individual personal scale. An ethic constitutes, rather, an ideal of human
behavior.

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 _Vol. 18, No. 1, January, 1997_67

In themore familiar context of human social intercourse, if society is

toflourish, even strictobedience to the letterof the law must be complemented
and supplemented by moral sensibility and by conscience. Similarly, in the
environmental arena, if a mutually enhancing relationship between human
civilization and the natural environment is to evolve, environmental law and
regulationmust be complemented and supplemented by environmental moral
sensibility and by what Aldo Leopold called an "ecological conscience."2
Social ethics?ideals ofmutual forbearance, justice, compassion, and
so on?are immemorial in human experience. But there does not exist today,
nor has there ever existed a perfectly benign, just, and compassionate human

being and certainly not such a society. Why then bother to envision ide
als?either shining cities on hills ? laRonald Reagan or pristine emerald for
ests ? la the
WorldWide Fund?
Although an ethic?whether
environmental as here envisioned, or
familiarly social?is never perfectly realized in practice, itdoes, nevertheless,
exert a very real force on practice. Ideals, in other words, do measurably in
fluence actual behavior. In envisioning, inculcating, and striving to attain
moral ideals we make some progress, both individually and collectively, and
gain some ground.We are just as unlikely ever to attain a complete and perfect
harmony with nature as we are to realize a Utopian society, but the existence
and institutionalization of an environmental ethic, partly encoded in laws, part
ly a matter of ethical sensibility and conscience, may draw human behavior in
the direction ofthat goal.
A moral ideal also functions in another practical way. It provides a
standard, a benchmark, in reference towhich policies and actions may be ap
plauded or criticized. An ethic thus is said to bear a normative, rather than
descriptive relationship to human behavior.
Because theyattempttodistilland articulateidealsfromculturally
ambient but inchoate moral sensibilities, rather than truck and trade in the
"real world" of politics and policy, and because they assume a normative
rather than descriptive posture, environmental ethics?as an exercise in

speculative moral philosophy?may appear hopelessly quixotic. But broad

cultural change?pace Marx and other materialistic interpreters of cultural
dynamics?is drawn along by a cognitive dialectic no less than pushed about

2
Ibid., 207.

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68_American Journalof Theology & Philosophy_

by a dialectic of economic forces and evolving technologies. Speculative moral

historically,
philosophy, new ethics
has notbeen in thebusinessof inventing
out of scratch. Rather, ithas more typically served to define, systematize and
defend emergent collective conscience. Speculative moral philosophy assists
thebirthofnew ethics(to adapt a Socraticmetaphor),or (to shift
metaphors)
itheralds their arrival.Hence moral philosophy in general, and environmental
ethics more especially, can be eminently, albeit indirectly, of the greatest
practical moment.
Finally, it is important to note that an ethic?despite the profession
ally decreed divorce between fact and value, is and ought?does not exist in
a cognitive vacuum, hermetically sealed from larger systems of ideas (or, for
that matter, from the rough and tumble of the real world). Ethos and world
view aremarried by common law, even if their union has not been celebrated
by thehighpriestsofmodernmoral philosophy.
At the farthest limits of practicality, changing world views open up
Half amillennium
or explicitly.
and shutdownpossibilities,eitherimplicitly
ago, discovery that the Earth is round opened up the possibility of arriving in
the east by sailing west and vice versa. In our time, discovery of global
ecological systems shuts down the possibility, dreamed by Mill, Marx, and
other nineteenth centuryNewtonian Utopians, of a wholly
industrialized planet.
Changing philosophical-anthropologies?reflections on human nature
and theperennial question of "man's place in nature"?periodically recast the
human self-image, the archetypal human being that, consciously or uncon
sciously, we emulate and strive to realize in our own lives. At the beginning of
thenow obsolescing modem period in theWest, Descartes, Locke, and Hobbes
variously articulated a modern image of human nature as essentially individ
ual, rational, and autonomous?a free-moving social atom that complemented
the more general picture of nature simultaneously taking shape inWestern
natural philosophy.3 The seductive power of thismodel needs no argument. A
new, more organic image of human nature is presently assuming definite out
line?one in which people are essentially connected to the environment

(throughecological dependencies) and to one another(throughsocial re

lationships). The twenty-firstcenturyWestern edition of human nature, albeit

3
Philip Mirowski, Against Mechanism: Protecting Ecomonics from Science (Savage, MD:
Rowan andLittlefield,1988).

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 Vol. 18, No. 1, January, 1997 69

will hardlybe conceivedtobe ruggedlyindependent.

stilluniquelyindividual,
Rather itwill be conceived as a knot in a net of dynamic relations, both social
and ecological, an intersection in an everchanging, four-dimensional, eco
social web of life.4
In sum, then, ethics are embedded in larger conceptual complexes, in
comprehensive world views?which more largely limit and inspire human
behavior. And although idealistic, ethics exert influence on behavior, they
provide models to emulate, goals to strive to achieve, norms in reference to
which actual behavior may be evaluated.

II.

hough the people of the Earth are all members of one species and share
A one ecologically integrated planet, we live, nevertheless, inmany and
diverse worlds. Each contemporary society at once lives in a planetary culture
united by economic interdependency, jet transport, and in a separate reality
satellite communication systems and in a separate reality shaped by its for
merly isolated cognitive cultural heritage. The revival and deliberate construc
tion of environmental ethics from the raw materials of indigenous, traditional,
and contemporary cognitive cultures represents an important and essential first
step in the futuremovement of human material cultures toward a more sym
biotic relationship, however incomplete and imperfect, with the natural
environment. The effort tomutually tune the resulting diverse environmental
ethics?to achieve some orchestration of the chorus of voices singing of a
human harmony with nature?represents an important and essential second
step toward the same goal.
Criticism and strategies for reform of the economic and political

impediments to the expression of the world's many peoples' rediscovered

environmental values is also of the utmost importance ifwe are to really

change our human relationswith the natural environment. For example, in the
United States thedestructionof the last standsof old growthforestin the
Pacific Northwest grinds on despite the recent emergence of an ecological
conscience so widespread that environmental issues head the national political

4
Fritjof Capra, The Turning Point: Science, Society and the Rising Culture (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1982).

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70_American Journalof Theology & Philosophy_

agenda. The implementation of this nascent, grass-roots sentiment for envi

ronmental salvation is thwarted by a complex web of economic and bureau
cratic exigencies: leveraged acquisition of forests by multinational cor

porations, forwhom thousand year-old trees, like a large inventory of widgets,

are only a liquidable economic asset; an attractive foreign market for high

quality unmilled logs; a Forest Service bureaucracy bedded with the timber
industry; and elected officials who are politically indebted to the few who
stand to gain by cutting the trees. Such factors as these conspire against the
realization of the popular will to protect the endangered northern spotted owl
and,more generally, preserve the region's natural beauty and ecological integ
rity. In Brazil, forest destruction is encouraged by, among other forces, the
World Bank and the sort of capital intensive development projects it funds;
government subsidies for cattle ranching; the need to export forest products
to earn hard currency to repay a staggering foreign debt; and, in order to avoid

genuine land reform, a policy inducing landless homesteaders to clear virgin

forests and plant their crops.5 In Southeast Asia, ecologically benign tradi
tional agricultural practices are being driven to virtual extinction by the eco
nomies of scale associated with the agro-industrial Green Revolution.6 Just as
a few philosophers have begun to respond to the environmental crisis by

criticizing the prevailing environmental attitudes and values and exploring and
articulating alternatives, a few agronomists, economists, political scientists,
and sociologists are beginning to respond by exposing and outlining alterna
tives to the social, political, and economic regimes that fan the flames of
environmental destruction.7
Environmental philosophy and environmental social science are com
plementary. Human social, economic, and political organizations are embed
ded in and arise out of human values and intellectual constructs Both do
mains?the cognitive and the structural?are dialectically intertwined and
interactive.The U. S. Forest Service, theWorld Bank, theGreen Revolution,

5
Susanna Hecht and Alexander The Fate
Cockburn, of theForest: Developers, Destroyers,
andDefenders of theAmazon (London:Verso, 1989).
6
Vandana Shiva, The Violence of the Green Revolution: Third World Agriculture, Ecology,
and Politics (London:Zed Books, 1993).
7
Richard Norgaard, "Economic as Mechanics and the Demise of Biological Diversity,"
Ecological Modeling 38 (1987): 107-21; andRobert Paelke,Environmentalismand the
Future of American Politics (New Haven: Yale Press, 1989).
University

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 Vol. 18, a 1, January, 1997 71

and capitalism are all, one way or another, expressions of the pre-ecological
modern world view. The emerging postmodern ecological paradigm will, we
can be confident, gradually transform today's social, economic, and political

institutions?just as surely as themodern paradigm gradually, but thoroughly,

transformed medieval social, economic, and political institutions. Mean
while?just as lingeringMedieval social, economic, and political institutions
delayed the fullfloweringof themodern industrialattitudesand values
?modern social, economic, and political realities currently thwart the expres
sion of incipient postmodern ecological attitudes and values.

III.

ntil recently, itmay seem, human material culture, human technology,

X^J was impotent to affect seriously the natural environment for better or
worse. Since preindustriai Homo sapiens apparently posed no serious threat
to thenatural environment, one might suppose that indigenous and traditional
environmental ethics did not exist?because theywould have been otiose and
unnecessary.
a reexamination of human history and prehistory from an
However,
ecological perspective reveals a longstanding, but changing pattern of anthro
pogenic environmental degradation. Paleolithic hunter-gatherers armed with
stone-tipped spears and arrows, snares and traps, and (not least) firemay have
caused local extirpation and, in some cases, may have played a role in the
global extinction of other animal species.8 Certainly, in any case, prehistoric
Homo sapiens profoundly altered the character of biotic communities. Neo
lithic, ancient,medieval, and modern agriculturalists caused soil erosion, silta
tion of surface waters, deforestation, salinization of both arable lands and
fresh waters, and desertification.9
A
reexamination of human history and prehistory also reveals the
existence of culturally evolved and integrated environmental ethics that served
to limit the environmental impact of pre-industrial human technologies. In
many indigenous cultures nature was represented as enspirited or divine (the

8
Paul Martin, Quaternary Extinctions: A Prehistoric Revolution (Tuscon, AZ: University of
Arizona Press, 1984).
9
EdwardHyams, Soil and Civilization (NewYork: Harper andRow, 1952).

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72_American Journalof Theology & Philosophy_

ancient Japanese kami are a leading example) and therefore the direct object
of respect or of reverence; in some traditional cultures (among theHebrews,
for example, in theMiddle East) nature was the creation of God and hence
should be used with care and passed on intact; in others (ancient Chinese Tao
ism is a leading example), man was thought to be part of nature and a good
human lifewas understood therefore to be one in harmony with nature; in still
others, a oneness of all life was envisioned (called Brahman in Advaita
Vedanta) together with an attitude of ahimsa (or non-injury) in respect to all
living things; and so on. In a book that I edited with Roger T. Ames, entitled
Nature in Asian Traditions of Thought, the conceptual resources for
environmental ethics inHinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and other intellectual
traditions are explored and developed by a number of distinguished scholars.10
I have expanded this process of intellectual recovery in a more recent work
entitledEarth's Insights. AMulticultural Survey of Ecological Ethics from
u
the
Mediterranean Basin to theAustralian Outback

IV.

civilization, of course, has polluted the environment with synthetic

toxic
Industrial chemicals and radioactive elements, as well as intensified the kinds of
environmental mischief already afoot in the activities of pre-industrial people.
With the emergence of an industrial human culture of global reach, the human
impact on nature has so increased in force, intensity, and ubiquity that under
theworst possible scenario imaginable, thermonuclear holocaust, people may
utterly destroy the biosphere (at least as we now know it) along with ourselves.
Short of this cataclysmic and apocalyptic event, the global ecosystem may
graduallybe degradedto theextentthatmany higherformsof lifepresently
Homo
existing(including will
sapiens) no longerbe adapted to itsradically
changed conditions.

10
J.Baird Callicott and Roger Ames, eds., Nature inAsian Traditions and Thought (Albany:
StateUniversityofNew York Press), 1989.
11
J.Baird Callicott,Earth's Insights:AMulticultural SurveyofEcological Ethics,from the
Mediterranean Basin to the Australian Outback (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1994).

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 _Vol. 18, No. 1? January, 1997_73

The emergence of global industrial human culture was, unfortunately,

accompanied by a loss of the sorts of preindustrial environmental ethics just
mentioned. The secularism, humanism, and materialism of industrial culture
demystified and undermined earlier environmental ethics, aggravating the
destructive impact of industrial technology. Here thus is an irony: Justwhen
we need an environmental ethic more than ever, global industrial civilization
with its infinitely greater power for environmental destruction eclipsed the
environmental ethics (along with many other traditional cultural values) that
prevailed in the past and that served to restrain traditional human patterns of
resource exploitation.
The secularism, humanism, andmaterialism characteristic of contem
porary industrial culture has, on the other hand, evolved a protean social ethic
peculiar to itself. The moralconcept lying at its core is the intrinsic value,
autonomy, and dignity of individual human beings (as glossed by Descartes,
Hobbes, Locke, and other early modern philosophers). Two complementary
(and just as often competing) streams of moral philosophy have flowed from
this central source: utilitarianism
(first set out by Jeremy Bentham), which
emphasizes human welfare; and deontology (first set out by Immanuel Kant),
which emphasizes human dignity as a basis for human rights.12
A latter-daymodern secular environmental ethic may be developed as
an addendum to themoral implications devolving from consideration of human
welfare and human rights.With the emergence of the science of ecology7 and
related sciences, it is now painfully clear that human actions that have direct
deleterious effects on the environment often also have indirect deleterious
effects on human beings. For example, cutting and burning a moist tropical
forest in order to create pasture directly destroys an ecosystem and its
nonhuman native denizens, but it may also indirectly adversely affect
aggregate human welfare because of the now well understood ecological,

climatological, hydrological, and erosional effects of deforestation.

From a classical utilitarian point of view, massive tropical deforesta
tionwould appear tobe unethicalbecause itbenefitsa fewpeople (lumber
barons and theirwealthy customers) in the short run at the expense of many
people (indigenous forest dwellers, the local landless population, and, less

12
Lawrence Becker and Charlotte Becker, eds., A History of Western Ethics (New York:
Garland Press, 1992).

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74 American Journalof Theology & Philosophy

directly, ordinary people everywhere in theworld) now and in perpetuity. From

a classical human rights point of view, the immorality of deforestation is less
clear because of the historical conflation of human rights generally with human
property rights more particularly and with "free enterprise." But again, the
exercise of one person's rights, in theory, are limited by those of others. And,
ifmy moral sensibilities are not in error, increasingly these days, "human

rights" are construed more broadly to include, in addition to the right to

political liberties and unfettered economic activity, the right to certain amen
ities?subsistence with dignity, access to rudimentary education and basic
health care, and a viable, livable natural environment.13
One might thus go on to develop a modern secular environmental
ethic erected upon the twin pillars of human welfare and human rights. Envi
ronmental ethicswould thus consist of a thorough integration of environmental
science and technical expertise with the conventional values of contemporary
industrial civilization. A contribution to a mature environmental ethics, so
conceived, would attempt to predict the effects on human welfare and human
rights (broadly construed) of human behaviors that have environmental
impact. State-of-the-art utilitarian and rights theory is only a little less com
plicated and sophisticated than state-of-the-art environmental impact asses
sment. By combining the two?no small task?human environmental behavior
could be ethically evaluated.

V.

he biologicalsciences,especiallythetheory
of evolutionand ecology, in
A tandemwith thetheoriesof special and generalrelativityand quantum
mechanics (together sometimes called the "new physics") are creating a new
postmodern scientific world view. There is another, stronger,more direct ap
proach to environmental ethics that ismore resonant with this emerging new
scientific world view?and with most of the traditional environmental ethics
of pre-industrial cultures. Such an approach to environmental ethics would
make the effects of human actions upon individual non-human natural entities
and nature as a whole directly accountable?irrespective of their indirect ef

13
Henry Shue,Basic Rights:Subsistence,Affluence,and U. S. Foreign Policy (Princeton,
NJ:
PrincetonUniversityPress), 1980.

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 Vol. 18, No. 1, January, 1997 75

fects upon human welfare. Such an environmental ethic would be stronger, as

well as more direct, since it could ethically assay environmentally destructive
human action that has little or no negative effect on human beings.
Conservation biologist David Ehrenfeld, in a justly celebrated classic

appeal for a non-anthropocentric approach to environmental ethics, cites the

case of the endangered endemic Houston toad {Bufo houstonensis) as an

example.

This animal has no demonstrated or conjectural resource

value toman; [ifit should be rendered extinct] other races of
toad will replace it [hence it plays no vital, irreplaceable
functional role in its associated ecosystem]; and its passing
is not expected tomake an impression on theUmwelt of the
city of Houston or its suburbs [i.e., it even lacks significant
cultural, aesthetic, and scientific interest].14

Thousands of species could be cited as similar cases of threatened

environmental entities which, ifdestroyed, would have no appreciable dele
terious effect on human welfare or would abridge no significant human rights.
Yet many people, Ehrenfeld prominently among them, feel morally uneasy
about willy-nilly anthropogenic extinction of natural non-resources. Tradi
tional anthropocentric ethical theory is unable persuasively to articulate and
underwrite such environmental ethical intuitions as those of Ehrenfeld and his
ilk.Yet they clearly lie behind theU.S. Endangered Species Act, which, al
though justified in a strictlyanthropocentric preamble, "operationally" extends
rights15 to the endangered species listed under its provisions.
An environmental ethic that takes into account the impact of human
actions directly upon non-human natural entities and nature as a whole is cal
led an ecocentric environmental ethic. An ecocentric environmental ethic is

supported by the evolutionary, ecological, foundational, and cosmological

dimensions of the presently evolving postmodern scientific world view.

14
David Ehrenfeld, "The Conservation ofNon-Resources," American Scientist 64 (1976): 648.
15
Christopher Stone,Should TreesHave Standing? Toward Legal Rightsfor Natural Objects
(Los Altos, CA: William Kaufman, 1978).

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76_American Journalof Theology & Philosophy_

Among human beings and other social mammals, themoral senti

ments evolved to enable the formation of communities. From an evolutionary

point of view, Homo sapiens is a part of nature, not set apart from it.We are
kin toall otherformsof life.
literally we sharetheEarth,whichwe
With them
now know to be a small and precious planet, like a tropical island paradise in
an otherwise desert ocean.
Further, ecology presently portrays nature as a congeries of societies
or biotic communities. From the subatomic to the biological realms, all reality
is interconnected, internally related, and mutually defining. But relationship,
kinship, and community membership, traditionally, imply strong moral obli
gations. Aldo Leopold rested his seminal and now classic land ethic upon these
new postmodern scientific foundations.
Most indigenous and traditional environmental ethics also fit the
ecocentric mold. Indeed, Western philosophers looked initially to traditional
Eastern wisdom in their search, begun in earnest in the late 1960s, for an
environmental ethic located in a deep ecological consciousness.16 And in fact
Eastern philosophy has historically shaped the gradually emerging environ
mental consciousness in theWest. The American Transcendentalism of Ralph
Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau?who were among the first
Americans thinkers to look upon nature as something more than an obstacle
to progress and a pool of natural resources?was inspired by Hindu thought.17
Further, distinguished Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess18 was inspired by
theVedantic doctrine of nonduality tomake cultivation of the experience of
oneness with nature the core practice of his ecocentric environmental ethic,
now known as Deep Ecology.
In themid-twentieth century the emerging contemporary environmen
talmovement was profoundly influenced by Japanese Zen Buddhism. Zen had
been powerfully and persuasively represented in theWest by D.T. Suzuki19 in

16
Huston Smith, "Tao Now," in Ian Barbour, ed., Earth Might Be Fair: Reflections on Ethics,

Religion, and Ecology (EnglewoodCliffs,NJ: Prentice-Hall,1972).

17
Catherine Albanese, Nature Religion inAmerica: From the Algonquin Indians to theNew

Age (Chicago:UniversityofChicago Press, 1990).

18
AmeNaess^co/ogv, Community, Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy, trans, and ed. David

Press, 1989).
19Rotherberg(Cambridge:CambridgeUniversity
D. T. Suzuki,Essays inZen Buddhism, 1st,2nd, and 3rd series (London: Luzak, 1927,
1933, and 1953).

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 Vol. 18, No. 1, January, 1997 77

the early twentieth century.Alan Watts20 popularized Suzuki's somewhat more

academic representation. The American nature poet, Gary Snyder, inspired by
Watts, studied Zen Buddhism inKyoto. In his eventual work a raw and un
cultivated American love of and sensitivity to nature was integrated with the
very advanced natural aesthetic cultivated for centuries in Japan.21 Gary
Snyder was a charter member of themid-century American counter-culture
that called itself theBeat Generation?romanticized by the enormously popu
larnovelist, Jack Kerouac,22 in the book Dharma Bums. Hence when Ameri
cans awakened to the environmental crisis in the late 1960s, they turned for

philosophical guidance to the cultural alternatives then popular, and Zen

Buddhism was by far the most in evidence.23 Since then, the attention of
Western environmental philosophers has gravitated more to Taoism.24 The
concept of living in accordance with the tao of nature complements the

evolutionary and ecological axiom that human beings are part of nature and
must conform human ways of living to natural processes and cycles. Especially
in the Taoist concept of wu wei, Western environmental ethicists have found
a traditional Eastern analogue of what they call appropriate technologies
?technologies thatblend with and harness natural forces as opposed to tech
nologies that resist and attempt to dominate and reorganize nature.25

VII.

ith the current and more ominous second wave of the twentieth
V V century's environmental crisis now upon us, environmental philosophy
must strive to facilitate the emergence of a global environmental consciousness
that spans national and cultural boundaries. In part, this requires a more
sophisticated cross-cultural comparison of traditional and contemporary con
cepts of the nature of nature, human nature, and the relationship between
people and nature thanhas so far characterized discussion. I am convinced that

20
Alan Watts, The Way ofZen (New York: Pantheon, 1957).
21
Gary Snyder, Earth House Hold: Technical Notes and Queries toFellow Dharma Revo
lutionaries (New York: New Directions, 1969).
22
Jack Kerouac, Dharma Bums (New York: American Library, 1958).
23
LynnWhite, Jr.,"TheHistorieRoots ofOur Ecological Crisis Science 155 (1967): 1203-7.
24
Callicott and Ames.
25
Russell Goodman, "Taoism and Ecology," Environmental Ethics 2 (1980): 73-80.

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78_American Journalof Theology & Philosophy_

the intellectual foundations of the industrial epoch inworld history are an

aberration. I agree with Fritjof Capra that a new paradigm is emerging thatwill
sooner or later replace the obsolete mechanical world view and its associated
values and technological esprit. I agree furtherwith Capra,26 as he broached
theidea inboththeTao ofPhysics andThe TurningPoint, thattheemerging
twenty-first century paradigm has many conceptual affinities with preindus
trial natural attitudes and values, especially those of the East. Thus, detailed
cross-cultural comparison of traditional concepts of the nature of nature,
human nature, and the relationship between people and nature with the ideas
emerging in ecology and the new physics should be mutually reinforcing. On
the one hand, traditional environmental ethics can be thus revived, and just as
validatedorverified
importantly of theirfoundationalideaswith
by theaffinity
themost exciting new ideas in contemporary science. On the other hand, the
otherwise abstract and arcane concepts of nature, human nature, and the
relationship between people and nature implied in ecology and the new physics
can be expressed and articulated in the rich vocabulary of metaphor, simile,
and analogy developed in the traditional sacred and philosophical literature of
theworld's many and diverse cultures.
What I envision for the twenty-first century is a single univocal
international environmental ethic based upon ecology and the new physics and
expressed in the cognitive lingua franca of contemporary science. Comple
menting such an international, scientifically grounded and expressed environ
mental ethic?global in scope as well as focus?I also envision the revival of
a multiplicity of traditional cultural environmental ethics that resonate with it
and that help to articulate it. Thus we may have one world view and one
associated environmental ethic corresponding to the contemporary reality that
we inhabit one planet and that we are one species and that our deepening
environmental crisis is common and global. And we may also have a plurality
of revived and renewed traditional world views and associated environmental
ethics corresponding to the historical reality thatwe are many peoples in
many and diverse
habitingmany diverse bioregionsapprehendedthrough
cultural lenses. But this one and these many are not at odds. Each of themany
world views and associated environmental ethics may crystallize the global

26
Capra,The Tao ofPhysics:An Exploration of theParallels between
Fritjof Modern Physics
and Eastern Mysticism (Boulder, CO: Shambhala, 1975), and The Turning Point.

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 _Vol. 18, No. 1? January, 1997_79

international ecological environmental ethic in the vernacular of a particular

and local cultural tradition. Let us by all means think globally and act locally.
But letus also think locally ss well as globally and try to tune our global and
local thinking as the several notes of single and common chord.

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