Moving Beyond the Spotted Owl

The philosophy of environmentalism has unfortunately been characterized as privileging sequoias and spotted owls over human life and as advocating economically illogical and unviable strategies such as abandoning the car or the combustion of fossil fuels. Tree-huggers and rainbow warriors have been much maligned for their irrational attempts to block human development, and as such the environmental movement has often suffered discredit and marginalization. I am an "environmentalist," yet I can fully comprehend the frustration with which people view the movement.

On one hand, we protest the egregious activities of Shell Oil in Nigeria in defense of the health of local inhabitants and the local environment. Yet on the other hand, we protest the destruction of Indonesian rainforests by poverty-stricken farmers for the sake of "biodiversity." So is environmentalism a socially progressive movement that protects the little person from corporate exploitation? Or is it an imperialist project that seeks to prevent people from using their own resources due to a belief that tropical forests matter more than local welfare?

I view the movement as primarily a social and anthropocentric one, much like the struggles against poverty and hunger. For we are not really trying to save the earth for the earth but rather preserve the conditions on earth that make it most favorably inhabitable by us. Climate change is not problematic to the earth: it will not explode as a result of increasing temperatures, and other forms of life will adapt and evolve (or not) to the changing conditions. However, climate change is immensely threatening to our species, because the floods, droughts and proliferation of parasites and bacteria harm our survivorship on this planet. So although the pervasive icons of environmentalism are baby seals or coral reefs, make no mistake about it, the movement is at heart about the human species, about our nations, our communities, and our quality of life.

So given this philosophy of environmentalism, one interesting question to ponder is whether or not we humans have a moral obligation to "save our earth." Does morality exist outside the network of human interrelationships, and if so, do we have a moral duty to protect trees or other animals besides ourselves? I recall one of my professors distinctly claiming that passing down an earth depleted in biodiversity to our grandchildren would be immoral. The loss of biodiversity has been a result of human encroachment on novel landscapes: as our populations grow exponentially, so does the need for inhabitable land which leads us to colonize new environments and displace or eradicate the local animal and plant species.

Yet we do so in order to provide land and livelihoods to otherwise rootless farmers. Thus a counter-claim can be made to my professor's original claim, that it would be even more immoral for us to bequeath to posterity a world in which poverty and starvation are pervasive. We can see from these contrasting claims why many consider concern for the environment to be a luxury among those whose basic human needs are met and thus not as morally incumbent a cause as the fight against hunger and destitution.

I disagree. One way of placing environmentalism within a moral framework is to think in terms of environmental justice. This rapidly emerging field considers who are the winners and the losers of environmental change and whether that status is deserved. An illustrative example is again the topic of climate change, which is caused primarily by the increase in the content of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. An important effect of global warming is the rise of global sea levels, which is a prospect that severely threatens many small island nations and peninsulas. Bangladesh is a country whose coastline would significantly regress inland with a sea level rise of only a few centimeters, thereby decimating coastal communities.

However, the single largest emitter of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere is the United States, followed by most nations of the developed, industrialized world. This situation highlights an environmental injustice perpetrated by the industrialized world towards a poor developing nation. As such, it's not a stretch to say that we have a moral responsibility to dampen the adverse effects of climate change in order to protect the populations who are most vulnerable to those hazards. To me, this notion of environmental justice is compelling and reassures me that my attempts to protect the environment are indeed the "right thing" to do.

However, I have yet to find an answer to my original question, whether the natural world has any value in and of itself, divorced from any utility to the human species. Can birds, trees, the oceans and the atmosphere ever be more than economically or scientifically significant to us? Yuri Agrawal '00 is a biology concentrator in Mather House.