Ethics, Place & Environment

ISSN: 1366-879X (Print) 1469-6703 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cepe20

A Post-environmental Ethics?

NOEL CASTREE

To cite this article: NOEL CASTREE (2003) A Post-environmental Ethics?, Ethics, Place &
Environment, 6:1, 3-12, DOI: 10.1080/13668790303542

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13668790303542

Published online: 01 Jul 2010.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 1479

View related articles

Citing articles: 17 View citing articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=cepe20

Download by: [UNAM Ciudad Universitaria] Date: 16 January 2017, At: 19:40
Ethics, Place and Environment, Vol. 6, No. 1, 3–12, March 2003

A Post-environmental Ethics?

NOEL CASTREE
Original manuscript received, 9 July 2002
Revised manuscript received, 23 August 2002

ABSTRACT This essay offers a critique of environmental ethics and argues that a
post-environmental ethics may be unavoidable. It does so by exposing and questioning
the ontological assumptions common to otherwise different modalities of environmental
ethics. These modalities, it is argued, rest upon an implicit or explicit ‘material
essentialism’. Such essentialism entails the belief that putatively ‘environmental’ entities
have discrete and relatively enduring properties. These properties ‘anchor’ ethical
claims and permit the objects of ethical considerability to be named. Against this, it is
argued that a non-essentialist ontology is preferable. This ontology presumes neither
that environmental phenomena are simply environmental nor that their properties can be
‘fixed’ under some determinate description. Drawing on recent ‘hybrid’ research in
human geography and elsewhere, it is suggested that the motility and mutability of
ostensibly environmental entities be recognised. This recognition, I conclude, desta-
bilises conventional environmental ethics and calls for a more supple mode of ethical
reasoning.

Ontology and Ethical Considerability

‘Our ontological choices’, David Goodman (2001, p. 182) observes, ‘are consequential’.
In this short essay I want to question the ontological choices made by protagonists in
ongoing debates about environmental ethics.1 These choices matter because they deter-
mine who or what is to qualify for ethical considerability. Far from being ‘merely’
philosophical, then, interrogating the ontological grounds of ethical argumentation is an
insistently practical endeavour. I argue below that environmental ethicists have see-
sawed between ontologies of division and ontologies of relation. In the first four sections
I briefly outline some different modalities of these respective ontological stances. For
each modality I present the arguments of two or three key ethicists, taking them as
indicative instances only (since I cannot be comprehensive in a short piece like this one).
Despite their erstwhile differences, I further argue that the two ontological camps
identified have one potentially problematic thing in common: namely, adherence to a
material essentialism that is explicit in the former case and implicit in the latter case. By
material essentialism I mean the idea that entities in the world—be they people, animals,
microbes, lakes or what have you—ultimately have a set of immutable properties that are

Noel Castree, School of Geography, Manchester University, Manchester M13 9PL, UK. E-mail: noel.castree@
man.ac.uk

1366-879X Print/1469-6703 Online/03/010003-10  2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd

DOI: 10.1080/1366879032000072006
4 Noel Castree

relatively or absolutely autonomous from those of other entities and relatively enduring.
Recent theorisations of technoscience suggest that a non-essentialist ontology of human–
environment relations may now be unavoidable. In the final section I present these
theorisations as a provocation for environmental ethicists to reconsider their ontological
essentialism. In so doing, I ask whether ‘environmental ethics’ is a misnomer given our
apparently ‘post-environmental’ condition.2 This condition entails the recognition that
putatively ‘environmental’ (natural or non-human) phenomena are not, strictly speaking,
environmental tout court. My overall aim is not to confront environmental ethics with
an ontological Aufhebung. More modestly, I want to scrutinise some potentially problem-
atic presumptions that environmental ethicists of otherwise different stripes share. It will
doubtless fall to others to answer some of the questions I raise here.3

The Ethics of Environmental Otherness

To hazard a simplification, the increasingly arcane debates among environmental
ethicists are, at base, debates about ontology. That is to say, they are debates about the
nature of being. I use the word ‘ontology’ in a non-technical sense here to refer to
axiomatic statements about the physical stuff of the world. These statements can be
explicit or implicit. Ethical codes, if they are to be coherent, must at some point specify
the nature and variety of the material stuff (people, animals, ecosystems, etc.) that they
purport to be about. These codes both emerge from and attach to specified material
beings, which are differentiated according to their characteristics. This is not to imply
that environmental ethicists attempt to mechanically ‘read off’ their ethics from their
ontologies. But it is to suggest that the ontological commitments these ethicists make
strongly circumscribe who or what, for them, has ethical standing. Though the word
ontology often conjures up the image of a stern foundationalism, I use it in a looser sense
to denote any and all statements about the material fabric of the world that are deployed
in ethical argumentation. As such, my discussion of the ontological choices environmen-
tal ethicists make extends not just to bio-/ecocentrists (many of whom overtly ‘ground’
their ethics ontologically) but also to anthropocentrists and those who reject the
distinction between the two these ‘centrisms’ altogether. Let me stress that I do not offer
a review of substantive ethical arguments of a descriptive or normative kind (others have
done this). Rather, I scrutinise the ontological underpinnings of those arguments. If the
propositions I put forward are very abstract and some of the distinctions I make finely
balanced, then my defence is that they ultimately speak to very worldly issues of who
and what has rights, deserts and entitlements.
I begin with the now well-established attempts to ground environmental ethics in the
properties of nature qua nature, defined as an ontological domain with characteristics that
are analytically and materially distinct from those of societies. Interestingly, this form of
ethical naturalism both criticises and yet depends upon an ontological dualism. On the
one side, the ethical invisibility of nature so characteristic of post-Enlightenment thought
and practice is attributed to an illicit value hierarchy erected upon the supposed ‘fact’ of
society–nature differences.4 Because trees, elephants or birds are not like people they
have, at least in modern Western societies, generally been absented from ethical
considerability. On the other side, and against this, several environmental ethicists have
searched for ‘principles which assert or presuppose that nonhuman natural entities
have value independently of human[s]’ (Norton, 1984, p. 132). Paradoxically, these
attempts to locate values in nature reinstate the very ontological distinction that has,
historically, rendered the non-human domain ethically invisible. The difference is that
this distinction is now deployed to accent nature’s otherness—an otherness, it is argued,
 A Post-environmental Ethics? 5

that should be valued (Dion, 2000). Some of Keekok Lee’s writings stand as especially
clear examples of this form of ethical argumentation. Lee (1984) attempts to secure
nature’s ethical considerability on an ontological basis by way of three theses. The ‘No
Teleology Thesis’ says that nature exists ‘for itself’ without reference to human
purposes; the ‘Autonomy Thesis’ says that nature is indifferent to our existence; and the
‘Asymmetry Thesis’ says that we, as humans, are dependent upon nature while nature
is not dependent upon us. For Lee, this trio of theses indicates that nature has intrinsic
or inherent value (I will not pause to consider the semantic and substantive differences
between the two terms here: see Stephens, 2000). Its right to exist or to flourish is
secured in virtue of its own properties not because of social decisions to assign it ethical
value.

The Ethics of Environmental Constructivism and Alterity

As we will see below, this modality of ethical naturalism is not the only one that has
been advocated by bio- and ecocentrists. The standard—and equally dualistic—riposte to
it is to say that it is impossible to ground ethics in the non-human domain. While this
domain assuredly exists and while its ontological properties are certainly different from
those of societies, the argument is that ethical deliberation is a distinctly human practice.
Thus, while it is possible to recognise nature’s ethical considerability—that is, while it
is possible to avoid ethical anthropocentrism—the suggestion is that it is impossible to
avoid ethical anthropomorphism. In recent years, this belief that environmental ethics
cannot be grounded in nature as such has found notable expression in debates over the
‘social construction of nature’ (Proctor, 1998). As the social constructionist bandwagon
has gathered momentum, ethical naturalists like Lee have been placed on the back foot.
To simplify, one can distinguish two types and two degrees of social constructionism.
There is ‘discursive’ and ‘physical’ constructionism and ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ varieties of
both. Discursive constructionism—taking inspiration from hermeneutics, semiotics, post-
structuralism and other theories of representation—argues that all ethics emerges from
linguistically saturated horizons of meanings (see, for example, Tester, 1991). Ethics
cannot, therefore, emanate from a non-human, non-linguistic ‘outside’ according to
discursive constructionists. Physical constructionism takes issue with the presumption
that nature remains ontologically distinct from societies. Drawing theoretical inspiration
from certain versions of Marxism (e.g. Smith, 1984) and certain theorisations of science
and technology (e.g. Sismondo, 1993), among others, physical constructivists argue that
what we conventionally call ‘nature’ is increasingly fabricated by modern societies.
Though this argument may seem to dissolve any ontological division between society
and nature, it arguably retains this division while altering the relative balance of force
between the two domains. The point then, from an ethical perspective, is that if nature
is no longer simply ‘natural’ then it is not possible to ground an environmental ethics
in its intrinsic or inherent properties.
For critics (e.g. Snyder, 1998), strong versions of both forms of constructionism take
environmental ethics to the abyss of relativism and what Haraway (1991, p. 184) called
‘the radiant emanations of cynicism’ (see Peterson (1999) for a lucid presentation of the
relativism–realism debate in environmental ethics). ‘Weaker’ versions therefore seek to
acknowledge the reality of a nature irreducible to our interpretive schemas and material
practices, while still insisting that this nature never speaks ‘for itself’ in the ethical sense
(see, for example, Hayles, 1995). However, whichever degree of constructionism is
favoured, the arguments pivot on an ontological reversal of the naturalist ethics being
6 Noel Castree

criticised. Thus, strong constructionists claim that the locus of environmental ethics is
purely social because it is an ontological property of people to be meaning-making and
world-altering entities. Equally, while weak constructionists retain a sense of nature’s
otherness, they claim it is unknowable ‘in itself’ because it is an ontological property of
nature not to be capable of ethical expression. In this sense, weak constructionism
acknowledges nature’s alterity, that is, its absolute ethical unknowability in itself despite
its very real ontological existence. As a result, the debate other whether environmental
ethics emerge from societies or nature has reached something of an impasse (Proctor,
2001). The ontological dualisms organising the debate leave the protagonists with little
room for manoeuvre.

The Ethics of Relationality

One way out of the impasse has been to dissolve the dualism in favour of relational
ontologies, which accent connections and unities over differences and distinctions. As
Delaney (2001, p. 500) puts it, ‘Neither nature nor human is a natural kind’. However,
these ontologies and the ethical standpoints they license are hardly all of a piece. In this
and the final two sections of this short essay I look at three varieties of ethical
relationalism. The first two, I argue, ultimately have much in common with the
ontologies of ethical division discussed in the previous two sections. The third, by
contrast, raises questions about the materialist essentialism that, I will claim, undergirds
both dualistic and (my first two) relational ontologies.
Perhaps the best-known modality of relational environmental ethics is the holism
variously championed by J. Baird Callicott, Arne Naess and Warwick Fox. For these
exponents of deep ecology, ontological dualisms are pernicious because they lead to
irresolvable ethical dilemmas. In Fox’s words, ‘To the extent we perceive boundaries we
fall short of a deep ecological consciousness’ (cited in Plumwood, 1991, p. 158). This
is why deep ecologists insist that people and nature are ‘inner-related’ not merely
inter-related. As Callicott (1989, p. 174) puts it, ‘nature is the self fully extended and
diffused’, while Naess (1989, p. 79) insists that ‘a human being is not a thing in an
environment, but a juncture in a relational system without determined boundaries in time
and space’. Here, then, it is moot whether humans or nature or both should have ethical
standing. Rather, because the world is an interconnected, complex whole, it follows for
Callicott and Naess that ethics must take in some or all of this more-than-human totality.
Oddly, despite their holism, these authors are usually described as bio- or ecocentrists,
implying that they give ethical priority (or at least parity) to the non-human domain. I
say oddly because strictly speaking the categories ‘human’ and ‘non-human’ are not
coherent or self-sufficient from an ontologically holist perspective. But here we come to
an ambiguity—and perhaps contradiction—in some of these attempts to expand the
ethical horizons of the human self. On the one side, as Hailwood (2000, p. 360) points
out, deep ecology threatens to be ethically indifferent to the extent that it refuses to
recognise ontological differences among related human and non-human entities. That is,
it risks a certain ethical ‘levelling’. On the other side, though, critics have detected a
residual humanism in deep ecology that seemingly contradicts its relational, holistic
credentials. As David Harvey (1996, p. 168) notes, in a discussion of Fox’s idea of
‘transpersonal ecology’, there is an intimation that people will only be ‘fully human’
once they reconnect with a natural world from which they have been alienated.5
This brings us to Harvey’s own, distinctly non-deep ecological brand of relational-
ism—a second type of ontological holism I want to briefly consider here. Drawing on
the process philosophy of Leibniz and Whitehead, Harvey’s (1996) Justice, Nature and
 A Post-environmental Ethics? 7

the Geography of Difference expounds a relationalism wherein worldly ‘things’ are both
medium and outcome of flows. As with deep ecology, this ontology emphasises ‘the
obvious solidarity of the world’ (Whitehead, cited in Thrift, 2002). Where Harvey
departs from the deep ecologists is in prioritising the motive force of one world-changing
flow: namely, capital. At the same time, he rejects the idea that values could ever reside
in nature and is unabashedly anthropomorphic in his ethical sensibilities (Harvey, 1996,
pp. 157–164). In a sense, then, he intentionally ends up where some deep ecologists find
themselves by default. That is, he argues that while we live in a world of connections,
not separations, this does not alter the fact that it is ultimately people who call the ethical
shots.6
Finally, though I hesitate to call them ontologically holistic in the deep ecology or
Harvey senses, ethicists arguing from a Deweyan and Jamesian pragmatic perspective
also forgo dualisms in the name of seamless human–non-human interconnectivities (see,
for example, Light and Katz, 1996). This is why I consider them in this first section on
relationally anchored modalities of environmental ethics. Pragmatists famously abjure
philosophical exposition and focus instead on the mundane practices of living. In Kelly
Parker’s words, pragmatism ‘emphasizes … connectedness, transactions and entangle-
ments as constitutive of reality’. Even the philosophical distinctions between ontology
and epistemology are rejected as the singularity of lived experience becomes the focus
of concern. As C. S. Lewis (1960, p. 45) put it, pragmatism elucidates ‘the daily
experience of men [sic] as practical, not speculative, beings’. This points to an
environmental ethics that is context-specific and context-variable, one where the mem-
bers of any ethical constituency are contingent on the case in question. However, as with
the deep ecologists and Harvey, environmental pragmatists must still confront the issue
of who precisely the subjects and objects of ethical considerability are in any given
instance. For all the imbrications of humans and non-humans acknowledged by pragma-
tists, when pressed they still lapse into naming discrete ethical actors or patients. Thus
Parker declares that ‘the human organism is inevitably the one that discusses
value … Humans are in fact the measurers’. Once again, we see an apparently contradic-
tory desire to insist on indissoluble relations while policing ontological boundaries by
fiat.

The Ethics of Environmental Otherness-in-relation

Subtle though the distinction is, it is possible to identify a form of relationally grounded
environmental ethics that is more attuned to differences-within-connections than those
discussed in the previous section. Hailwood (2000) and Stephens (2000) have finessed
this ‘both/and’ ontological stance that sits midway between a dualistic ontology and
modes of seamless relationalism. Hailwood contrasts it with the absolute otherness-of-
nature perspective advocated by Lee and the holism of deep ecology. Contra Lee he
insists that the irreducible otherness of nature is, in fact, a relational phenomenon. As he
puts it, ‘something, A, cannot be “other”, without something else, B, to which A is other’
(Hailwood, 2000, p. 358). To suppose otherwise, Stephens (2000, p. 272) argues, leads
to a ‘dangerous purity’ that can license ethical absolutism. However, at the same time
Hailwood and Stephens do not endorse the ontological claims of deep ecologists. For
them, the latter’s desire to stress the unity of people and non-humans actually effaces
nature’s otherness. Put differently, the deep ecological impulse to identify with nature
misapprehends interconnectivity for sameness in Hailwood and Stephens’s estimation.
Their alternative is to acknowledge that while they are ineluctably connected, people,
animals, ecosystems and so on are not the same. Though this disbars any form of
8 Noel Castree

identification of humans with non-humans, they argue that it does not mean the latter are
ethically unknowable (the alterity argument mentioned earlier). Rather, it indicates that
people must make sense of nature’s otherness in their cognitive and non-cognitive
engagements with it. So any ethics attuned to nature’s otherness is a relational ethics of
difference recognised through interconnectivity. As Mick Smith (2001) argues, nature as
other can communicate with people, but in non-verbal ways that entail practical, sensuous
and corporeal connections with embodied (not simply intellectual/cognitive) human
beings.

A Post-environmental Ethics?
I have suggested that, ontologically speaking, environmental ethicists fall into two
internally diverse camps. If I have been agnostic about the ethical arguments presented—
refusing to take sides, as it were—then it is because my concern is less with their
substantive content and more with their ontological underpinnings. Despite appearances,
it seems to me that the two camps I have grouped environmental ethicists into are not
as distinct as they seem. Once one gets beyond the manifest differences between them
it becomes possible to detect deeper ontological commonalities. In this final section I want
to highlight and then challenge these commonalities, before asking how less essentialist
ontological choices might change the face of ethical reasoning about those things
designated by the term ‘environment’.
The various ontological choices made by the ethicists I have cited above implicate them
in a materialist essentialism. This may seem an implausibly broad-brush claim at first
sight, so let me expand upon it systematically. By materialist essentialism I mean the
presumption that worldly entities—be they people, prions, spiders or what have you—
ultimately have some clearly definable properties that can be ontologically fixed. These
properties can, in the final instance, be appealed to by environmental ethicists (explicitly
or implicitly) to anchor claims about the who, what and how of ethical considerability.7
Materialist essentialism is clear enough in the case of bio-/ecocentrists like Lee, who
affirm the otherness of ‘natural’ entities precisely to safeguard their ethical status. It is
equally apparent, if less strenuously declared, in the writings of social constructionist
authors. In both strong and weak versions of the two constructionisms identified, the
specific properties of people as distinctly linguistic and nature-altering beings are
accentuated against those of non-humans. Though it is less obvious, I would argue that
materialist essentialism also undergirds the ontological claims made by the two sets of
relational ethicists distinguished above. Sometimes despite themselves, the holists resort
to ontological distinctions that separate ethical subjects (people) from objects (people and
non-humans). Likewise, the finely balanced ontology expounded by Hailwood (2000) and
Stephens (2000) is at once ethically anthropomorphic and naturalist, retaining distinctions
within unities. None of this is to imply that either band of relationalists ultimately
prioritise ‘parts’ over ‘wholes’. But it is to say that they distinguish materially irreducible
beings—most notably people—from the inter-entity connections that partly constitute
them.
Implicit in this discussion is the claim that materialist essentialism is a not altogether
legitimate means of anchoring ethical arguments. It is a claim I now want to make
good on. At one level materialist essentialism is a necessary and unavoidable element
of ethical reasoning. If ethicists are unable to attribute certain properties to certain
entities then it becomes impossible to know who belongs to any given ethical constituency
and whether all constituents are (or are not) to be treated as ethical equals. Thus even
relational ontologies must, as Hailwood and Stephens insist, accommodate material
 A Post-environmental Ethics? 9

differences among otherwise co-dependent human and non-human entities. The key
questions then become these: are all material essentialisms of a piece?; are there varieties
of material essentialism?; is a putatively ‘non-essentialist’ materialism possible and
desirable?
One way to answer these questions is to scrutinise the arguments of contemporary
‘post-environmental’ (and, for that matter, ‘post-human’) theorists. Taking their cue from
the ontological transgressions enacted by technoscience, these theorists explicate a variety
of relational thinking that is subtly—but nonetheless significantly—distinct from the two
modalities of relationalism dealt with earlier. Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour are
perhaps the best-known figures here, with Michel Callon, John Law and Michel Serres
important influences also.8 These five are theorists of the ‘post-environmental’ and
‘post-human’ in the sense that they reject the human/non-human distinction altogether,
not in the name of some ontological holism (à la deep ecology, say) but in order to
make visible a world of multiple ‘actor networks’ of varying length and complexity.9
These networks are dense knottings of myriad entities whose material capacities cannot
be separated from the knottings but, equally, are not reducible to them. It is therefore
wrong to suppose, as some have, that the project of a theorist like Latour is to enfranchise
the ‘missing masses’ (Latour, 1992) of non-humans. Though Latour is critical of the
dualistic Western thinking that has historically rendered what we call non-humans
ethically invisible, he does not propose to ‘add them in’ to an expanded ethical
constituency.
Does this mean, then, that Latour, Haraway, Callon, Law and Serres advocate the
differences-within-relations ontology favoured by Hailwood and Stephens? My answer
is no. I argued above that the latter two ethicists are material essentialists. That is, though
they stress the importance of relations they also attribute certain immutable capacities to
specific relata. For Latour et al. there are real problems with this seemingly reasonable
ontological position. First, as Haraway (1992) so lucidly explains in her essay ‘The
promises of monsters’, advanced industrial societies are increasingly filled with what
Trinh Minh-ha (1989) called ‘inappropriate/d others’. Inappropriate/d others are those
myriad part-human, part-organic, part-machinic entities that resist being represented
within the conventional taxon. They are neither one thing nor the other but admixtures
or ‘cyborgs’ (Haraway, 1991). These beings—such as genetically modified mice, people
with biologically engineered body parts and cloned sheep—challenge the categorical
distinctions that ultimately permit both dualistic and relational ethicists to anchor their
arguments.10
Secondly, even if these ethicists could ultimately find suitable categories to describe
the characteristics of these relationally constituted chimeric entities, Latour et al. argue
that they are as ontologically ‘unstable’ as those apparently stable beings we convention-
ally label as ‘human’ or ‘non-human’. What does this mean? Sarah Whatmore, Lorraine
Thorne and Steve Hincliffe provide an answer. In their research into human–elephant
relations, Whatmore and Thorne (2000, p. 186) repeat Latour’s (1996, p. 201) arresting
question from his book Aramis: ‘What is a self? The intersection of all the sets of acts
carried out in its name … how can I become a being … without them[?]’. Taking two
different actor networks involving people and elephants—one relating to captive breeding
in zoos, the other to in situ conservation in wildlife reserves—Whatmore and Thorne show
that the very nature of an ‘elephant’ is different in the two cases. This is difference not
in the absolute sense—in both networks all the elephants share basic biological
requirements for food and water, for example—but in the relative sense. Thus, to take
one instance, the social lives of individual elephants differ greatly between the openness
of the savannah and the closed spaces of the zoo, since in the latter case fewer elephants
10 Noel Castree

are involved and more humans (e.g. zookeepers) act as direct partners. These varied
networks of sociality materially impact upon the behaviour of the elephants involved:
‘becoming elephant’ is thus a contingent process. Elephants thus have a certain
‘otherness’, then, but it is relationally shifting. Taking the case of a non-mammalian
entity—transmissable spongiform encephalopathy (TSE)—and its scientific understand-
ing in the British bovine spongiform encephalopathy crisis of the late 1990s, Hinchliffe
(2001) has sought to make a related point. Also drawing upon Latour’s thinking, he
shows that prions, and other TSE agents, not only cross species barriers but take on
different characteristics according to their situational placement. Following Hetherington
and Lee (2000) he thus describes them as ‘blank figures’ that are ‘motile as well as
mobile’ (Hinchliffe, 2001, p. 192). In other words, prions ‘can exceed their known
properties. Knowing prions is therefore a knowing of indeterminacy’ (Hinchliffe, 2001,
p. 192). Though Hinchliffe is not concerned with environmental ethics as such, the
ontological side of his argument—like that of Whatmore and Thorne’s research—has
clear ethical implications. In short, it calls into question the possibility of anchoring
ethical arguments in the fixed or essential characteristics of worldly entities.
At this point it may appear that I have gone off at the ontological deep end. So let us
be clear about what is being said here. I am not suggesting that each and every thing in
the world lacks some specific material characteristics that help define what it is. What
I am arguing, though, is that the interconnections that help constitute those ‘things’ are
complex and variable, such that if the same ‘thing’ is inserted into different relational
contexts aspects of its material nature alter correspondingly. So while I endorse the
relational ontologies favoured by deep ecologists, Harvey and pragmatists on the one
side, and Hailwood and Stephens on the other, I think neither is sufficiently attuned to
the variability of the relata they ultimately want to attribute essential characteristics to.
In a sense, Laclau and Mouffe (1986) made this argument many years ago about the
‘human’ domain in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. There they argued that social
identities are not given but, instead, relational and contingent achievements. Thus the
identity ‘woman’ as expressed or claimed by any given person with female sex organs
is substantively different over space and time. Latour et al. in effect expand this
argument onto a wider terrain, suggesting that even non-humans do not simply have
fixed properties that can be universally identified (as Whatmore, Thorne and Hinchliffe’s
empirical studies show so well).
What does all this mean for environmental ethics? First, it challenges the understand-
able predilection for material essentialism among ethicists of apparently different stripes.
Secondly, it calls the epithet ‘environmental ethics’ into question. If those things we
conventionally call ‘environmental’, ‘natural’ or ‘non-human’ in fact exceed those
categories, ontologically speaking, then the question of who or what ethics is for or about
becomes very complicated indeed. So complicated, in fact, as to defy mastery by abstract
or general ethical principles. Finally, it does not mean that ethics—‘environmental’ or
otherwise—is somehow ontologically groundless. Rather, it means that the relationally
constituted, and situationally variable, members of any ethical constituency cannot be
ontologically fixed once and for all (see Whatmore, 2002). Future ethical arguments will
therefore have to be acutely sensitive to the contingent material specificities of the
constituents under consideration.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Steve Trudgill for inviting me to think out loud and two members
of the editorial board for commenting constructively on the arguments made here.
 A Post-environmental Ethics? 11

Notes
1. By environmental ethics I do not simply mean approaches that seek to locate intrinsic or inherent values
in non-humans. Rather, I use the term to signify any approach to ethics that in whatever way seeks to grant
ethical considerability to what we conventionally call ‘non-humans’.
2. As readers will see, I use the term ‘post-environmental’ in a very specific sense. It does not mean that the
environmental (or non-human) domain is somehow of no importance in advanced industrial societies.
Rather, the term signifies the inadequacy of the term ‘environment’ to capture the ‘non-environmental’
relations that help constitute those things we conventionally call environmental. I hesitate to use the prefix
‘post’ here because there are so many post-prefixed neologisms around these days that the senses are
becoming dulled by them. However, as we will see, the prefix does have the virtue of suggesting a sharp
questioning of the ontological habits of environmental ethicists.
3. I should get my apologies in early: this short essay glosses some important philosophical and conceptual
distinctions in the interests of making a plenary argument.
4. I use the terms ‘nature’ and ‘environment’ synonymously here to signify the ‘non-human’ and ‘non-social’
domain.
5. Interestingly, Harvey’s interpretation calls into question the idea that deep ecology is, in essence,
misanthropic.
6. More emphatically, Harvey (2000, ch. 1) has recently returned to the early Marx’s idea that humans have
distinct ‘species being’.
7. Note that materialist essentialism, as I define it here, is not necessarily the same as ontological
foundationalism. Foundationalism, these days, is something of a philosophical dirty word. For critics it
connotes illicit attempts to seek absolute, incontrovertible grounds for cognitive and normative reason.
Though foundationalists, on this definition, are certainly materialist essentialists, the reverse equation does
not always apply. It is possible to be a material essentialist without wishing to rigidly ‘read off’ cognitive
or normative claims from ontological tablets of stone.
8. I will not discuss the substantive differences between these authors here. Rather, I choose to emphasise
the broad commonalities in their ontological approaches.
9. Interestingly—or perhaps symptomatically—Lee’s (1999) recent book on the implications of techno-
science for environmental ethics interprets ‘artefactual natures’ as thoroughly social and non-natural
entities. Lee then goes on to develop an ethics for a fast-disappearing ‘first nature’ and effectively ignores
artefactual natures as if they do not warrant ethical considerability.
10. It is unclear how universal Latour and fellow travellers intend these ontological claims to be. Arguably,
some things in the world are what Hacking (1999) calls ‘indifferent kinds’, whose constitution is relatively
invariant.

References
Callicott, J. (1989) In Defence of the Land Ethic, Albany, NY: CUNY Press.
Delaney, D. (2001) Making nature/marking humans, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 91,
487–503.
Dion, M. (2000) The moral status of non-human beings and their ecosystems, Ethics, Place and Environment,
3, 221–229.
Goodman, D. (2001) Ontology matters, Sociologia Ruralis, 41, 182–200.
Hacking, I. 1999) The Social Construction of What?, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hailwood, S. (2000) The value of nature’s otherness, Environmental Values, 9, 353–372.
Haraway, D. (1991) Simians, Cyborgs and Women, New York: Routledge.
Haraway, D. (1992) The promises of monsters, in: Grossberg, L., Nelson, C. and Treichler, P. (eds) Cultural
Studies, New York: Routledge, 295–337.
Harvey, D. (1996) Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference, Oxford: Blackwell.
Harvey, D. (2000) Spaces of Hope, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Hayles, N.K. (1995) Searching for common ground, in: Soule, M. and Lease, G. (eds) Reinventing Nature?,
Washington, DC: Island Press, 47–64.
Hetherington, K. and Lee, N. (2000) Social order and the blank figure, Society and Space, 18, 169–184.
Hinchliffe, S. (2001) Indeterminacy in-decisions—science, policy and the politics of BSE, Transactions of the
Institute of British Geographers, 26, 182–204.
Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C. (1986) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, London: Verso.
Latour, B. (1992) Where are the missing masses?, in: Bijker, W. and Law, J. (eds) Shaping Technology/
Building Society, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 225–258.
12 Noel Castree

Latour, B. (1996) Aramis, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Lee, K. (1984) Awe and humility, in: Attfield, R. and Belsey, A. (eds) Philosophy and the Natural
Environment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lee, K. (1999) The Natural and the Artefactual, Lanham, KY: Lexington Books.
Lewis, C. S. (1960) Studies in Words, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Light, A. and Katz, E. (eds) (1996) Environmental Pragmatism, New York: Routledge.
Minh-ha, T. (1989) Woman, Native, Other, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Naess, A. (1989) Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Norton, B. (1984) Environmental ethics and weak anthropocentrism, Environmental Ethics, 6, 131–148.
Peterson, A. (1999) Environmental ethics and the social construction of nature, Environmental Ethics, 21,
339–357.
Plumwood, V. (1991 [1995]) Nature, self and gender, in: Elliott, R. (ed.) Environmental Ethics, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 155–164.
Proctor, J. (1998) The social construction of nature: relativist accusations, pragmatist and critical realist
responses, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 88, 352–376.
Proctor, J. (2001) Solid rock and shifting sands, in: Castree, N. and Braun, B. (eds) Social Nature, Oxford:
Blackwell, 225–240.
Sismondo, S. (1993) Some social constructions, Social Studies of Science, 23, 515–553.
Smith, M. (2001) Lost for words?, Environmental Values, 10, 59–75.
Smith, N. (1984) Uneven Development, Oxford: Blackwell.
Snyder, G. (1998) Is nature real?, Resurgence, 190, 32.
Stephens, P. (2000) Nature, purity, ontology, Environmental Values, 9, 267–294.
Tester, K. (1991) Animals and Society, London: Routledge.
Thrift, N. (2002) Summoning life, in: Cloke, P., Crang, P. and Goodwin, M. (eds) Envisioning Human
Geography, London: Arnold.
Whatmore, S. (2002) Spatial Formations, London: Sage.
Whatmore, S. and Thorne, L. (2000) Spatial formations of wildlife exchange, Society and Space, 18, 185–203.