PART ONE: A POLITICAL THEORY OF ECOLOGY
CHAPTER ONE: IntroductionThis work does not examine real pollution problems, nor does it suggest answers to them. It looks for the roots of political ecology, and traces a school of thought up to the present day.
My theory about ecological ideas falls into three parts. Firstly, their strength is not directly linked with actual problems. The issue I examine here is not the cause of soil infertility or pollution, or suggestions for preserving forests, but why it was only from the mid-nineteenth century on that the European 'thinking classes' worried about such matters. The ecology movement represents a new political consciousness and direction. It has been struggling to see the light of day since the third quarter of the nineteenth century. Like all half-smothered things, it wailed sometimes for mother, sometimes for food, sometimes for companionship. Or, to put it less picturesquely, ecological ideas borrowed different political labels from time to time. Secondly, propounders of ecological ideas came from the educated Western classes; thinkers, intelligentsia, what you will. To make full political ecology possible, many conditions had to be fulfilled, and combined at the right time. That is why I locate the origins of normative ecology in the latter half of the last century. In doing so I must, since people so wilfully refuse to fit into a clear chronological framework, omit interesting individuals; Cobbett and Thoreau come to mind. Thirdly, two key shifts in mentality were needed, in the biological and in the physical sciences. Because these are the crucial roots of ecologism, other subsidiary but important elements of the ecological ethic, such as the animal rights movement and vegetarianism, are omitted from my discussion.
As I concentrate on those phenomena which are involved in my theory, I occasionally include material which may offend purists. Fears about finite resources have spilled over into utopian novels, science fiction and popular fiction. I have drawn on works of this kind where they were relevant to my theme. I have not attempted to quote every reference to the beauties of nature, or to the pleasantness or bestiality of peasants. In order to qualify for inclusion, such works have to be 'ecological' in nature. Even given this limitation there are too many recent science fiction novels to be included. [1] These show how, like a brush fire, the ecological world-view has spread and taken hold.
This book is a political and spiritual history of the tributary streams that now flow together in the ecological movement. The final river is already polluted. It is remote from the purity of its origins. Nonetheless, the creation of a large-scale ecological political movement represents a significant break from the past. The egg is hatched.
DEFINITION OF ECOLOGYThe distinctive qualities of ecologism arose in the late nineteenth century, and consisted of two distinct strands. One was an anti-mechanistic, holistic approach to biology, deriving from the German zoologist, Ernst Haeckel. The second strand was a new approach to economics called energy economics. This focused on the problem of scarce and non-renewable resources. These two strands fused together in the 1970s. The scientific element in energy economics gave impetus to the biologically based ecological movement, which had lost credibility because of its links with Germany. The two categories, biological and economic, had a certain degree of cross-membership. There was contact between individuals, and forefathers are still cited. It is the combination of the intensely conservative moral and cultural ecological critique with the full apparatus of quantitative argument that has rendered ecologism the powerful force it is today.
The word ecology is widely used today in the normative sense, not in the biological sense. The science of ecology is one that considers energy flows within a closed system. The normative sense of the word has come to mean the belief that severe or drastic change within that system, or indeed any change which can damage any specie within it, or that disturbs the system, is seen as wrong. Thus, ecological ideas have come to be associated with the conservation of specific patterns of energy flows. These patterns can be relatively small in scale, such as a one-acre wetland site; or it can be the weather pattern resulting from the Amazon rain forests, or larger patterns that affect the continuity of human existence.
The place of man within this hierarchy of patterns is no longer seen by ecologists as predominant. A recent theory is that the earth is not just a dead planet which contains a valuable closed system, but is itself alive. According to this belief, 'Gaia', the earth, has its own serene ecological balance, its own will to live. It is capable of preserving its own existence. It can shrug off disturbing intrusions, whether from comets or from man. Like any other species, Gaia has its own natural term. It lives and it will die. [2]
The countries where ecological theories have been most prominent are Britain, Germany and North America. Although the intellectual community responsible for disseminating and provoking these theories included French and Russian scientists and political activists, England and Germany today present the most striking picture of mobilised environmental groups. North America has both inspired radical, alternative ideas and received them again, in somewhat altered form, from Europe.
The persistence of this 'ethnic map' of ecologists, which has been noted by several observers, deserves comment? Britain, Germany and North America all had different rates of industrialisation. In their demography and patterns of land settlement, too, they have little in common. North America in 1890 was a small town continent, as rural as Russia. Germany had many provincial capitals, the largest being Berlin. England alone was heavily urbanised overall. However, all three had a large, educated middle class, possessed of a strong liberal and Protestant culture. These cultural roots will emerge as a constant theme in my exposition.
The historical manifestations are, of course, profoundly different in the different countries under review. In Germany, there existed a dissatisfaction with and uncertainty about German identity. The shifting political and territorial boundaries of the nation led to a search for a more 'authentic', earth-bound identity. The hunt for anti-mechanistic values meant opposition to big institutions and size as an end in itself. German ecologism well predated National Socialism. It formed part of a generic cultural phenomenon that was in part diverted into the Third Reich as an underlying theme. It re-emerged, well after the Second World War, in more obviously left-oriented groups. The insecurity of German national identity had no exact parallel in Britain, but the British political ecologists also demonstrate a sense of a lost folk heritage, as well as a cultural criticism. The North American radical tradition, of which its ecologism is a native development, differs in its optimism. Theories of post-scarcity abundance, and a libertarian anarchic trend, characterise the American commune movement. In all three countries there was a sense of loss of the past, associated with, but not confined to, the passing of the old, rural world. This fused with critiques of orthodox, liberal economics and mechanistic biology to produce the ecologists, and their later flowering, the Greens.
THE ECOLOGICAL CRITIQUEMany aspects of ecological ideas have now impregnated our collective unconscious. Claims which, a few decades ago, would have demanded an analytical response now quickly become cliches, part of our mental furniture. Clearly ecologism met a need.
Ecology was the science which could interpret the fragments of evidence that told us something was wrong with the world - dead birds, oil in the sea, poisoned crops, the population explosion ... What it meant was - everything links up ... Here was a new morality, and a strategy for human survival rolled into one. [4]
This was written in 1972. On the other hand, ecologists claim that the sense of something wrong has resonated over the centuries. How recent is cultural criticism? We find the same kind of criticism in the early nineteenth century. Did it refer to the same kind of wrongness? Or has there been, as I will argue, a change in the way in which we look critically at the world? A sense that something is wrong is not a reliable guide for constructing specific and revolutionary policies. On the other hand, it is an intuition which needs investigation. No matter how many explanations there may be for the location and growth of ecologism, they would in the last resort be irrelevant to the value of their claims.
What are these claims? Man's vision of his place in the world, the question of the objective existence of that world and his relation to it, is fundamental to Western intellectual life, with its awareness of transience, the tension between past and future, being and becoming, ego and other. It affects the largest questions: the source of historical change, the nature of man, the why and how of man's history. It is intimately bound up with the problem of causality, affecting especially the question of the source of innovation and creativity. The validity of objective science, and the possibility of a social science, these all hinge on the stance taken towards man's place in nature.
Further, there are political implications. Over the centuries, Nature has oscillated between being hero and villain. A study of the changing attitudes to nature and environment, and the vision of balance between them known as ecology, shows that the axis man-nature provides a set of political categorizations which are fruitful, useful and relevant to today's political scene. But the picture is not a simple one.
Put baldly, nature-based ideas are seen as legitimising social Darwinist, red-in-tooth-and-claw beliefs. The role of nature in
German vitalist philosophy and philosophical anthropology between 1890and 1933has been associated with the growth of National Socialism, while irrationalist and 'cranky' movements have claimed a special relationship with Nature and Mother Earth. Conservative and reactionary movements have often looked back to the peasant-landowner relationship as a source of national strength. However, the essential characteristic of ecology, while it does not fit happily into anyone ideological category, is that it draws many of its conclusions from scientific ways of thinking, and is not conservative.
Political ecology, which began towards the late nineteenth century, started as a progressive, science-based, anti-democratic movement. Kropotkinite anarchists as well as Spencerian individualists, all based their politics on recent theories about biology and physics. Between the wars, a number of positions were associated with ecological ideas, dominated this time by a fear of erosion and famine, and including, in England, the High Tory movement of Hugh Massingham and Lord Lymington. Technophiles and technophobes have always warred within ecologism. Technological optimism was more common in North America, where the late 1960s saw an anarcho-communard green movement. The most successful green movements today, though, are of the radical Left, and there are Greens today who feel unease at some of their ideological forebears.
The complexity is this; it is possible to assert that if man is part of the natural world, subject to the same laws as the animals, then he is, like them, entitled to compete to survive. Because he cannot hope to escape from his animal nature, he is justified in aggression. This is the social Darwinist argument associated by many with a politics based on nature. It assumes that man's survival cannot be taken for granted; he is never secure. The counter-image is that man is so special, so malleable and adaptable in his nature that the laws of the natural world no longer apply to him. Man's intellect and self-awareness, in this mode, meant a qualitative change in his status, and removed him from the biological law of selection and evolution. If his behaviour is not controlled by instinct, then man is adaptable enough to be made over in any image. The model of improvement through social and environmental change is generally a progressive and left-wing model.
However, one can also argue that it is precisely because man partakes of the earthly burden that he should help nurture the earth, rather than despoil it. His 'natural' role is that of a shepherd. Nature embodies stasis and harmony. Man should therefore accept, runs this argument, his limitations, and fit into the given pattern of energy flows. This is, on the whole, the ecological viewpoint, that man is the shepherd of the earth. And an ecological conclusion has been drawn from the premise that man does not have inbuilt limitations. This conservative variant points out that it is precisely man's lack of a fixed genetic inheritance that makes stable institutions essential as a substitute. Because man's culture has to be learnt afresh with each generation, those traditions, such as the family, which embody memory and habit, must be preserved. The belief that man is born without a genetic template for, say, the Church of England, makes continuity in social institutions more important and not less; makes progressive aims more dangerous, precisely because man can be stripped of his non-genetic endowment, his cultural heritage, by well-meaning destruction of existing structures. So man's capacities for improvement and change are finite, and he should beware of attempts to strain the boundaries of what is natural to him.
Thus, it is an over-simplification of ecological politics to think that nature-based thinkers have to be social Darwinist, while believers in man's malleability must reject nature from their analysis. The political stance of ecologists has been more complex, just as other political categories shift and change over time.
ECOLOGISTS AND GREENSThe cultural and political criticism known as political ecology involves substantial ethical and moral claims, and proposes drastic and apocalyptic remedies. Today's green parties have carved out a political niche which receives between seven and eleven per cent of national party votes. The European Parliament has a Green section which has more members than has the Communist Party. Green parties have flourished in Northern and Central Europe, in a wedge stretching from Finland to Austria, to Belgium. Britain, too, has a Green Party (formerly the Ecology Party, and the first to be so named, founded in 1973), and there has been growing 'entryism', especially within the Liberal Party and middle-class Labour constituencies. The Conservative Party is under considerable pressure to protect rural values, and the National Front went Green in 1984. Greens have to be moles in Britain, because of the two-and-a-half party system; but even so, in Britain alone some three million people are alleged to be members of environmental and other ecological groups. [6]
The green tendency has aroused unease in some political quarters, dismissal in others. The Right today tends to be pro-American, pro-nuclear power and conservative. It suspects enthusiasm. The hard Left, despite recent efforts to capture green ground for Marxism, has tended to write off ecologists as trivial, irrelevant, or doomed to failure. One social historian describes Richard Jefferies, the nineteenth-century self-educated farmer's son and naturalist, as 'the Tory transcendentalist writer', and sees his ideas as 'a refuge from unpleasant realities'. [7] In one typical structuralist criticism, ruralist ideas are seen as having 'a fatal flaw ... like ecological ideas, they were not made to mobilise the masses'. [8] A fatal flaw indeed, but the evidence seems to be that the masses are being mobilized none the less. When cultural criticisms are combined with political action, it is time to examine the phenomenon seriously. The best way to start is to create a history of ecologism. Surprisingly, this has not yet been done.
For many young, uncommitted observers, the idea that ecologists pre-date the 1970s would come as a surprise. Others, working for environmental causes for decades, see the recent growth of media interest in the Greens with some cynicism, or even irritation. Ecologists themselves locate their roots variously. Some believe there has been an alternative, holistic tradition running through Western culture since the Middle Ages. There is already a substantial literature, dominated by American feminists, which propounds the virtues of an alleged pre-patriarchal, pre-exploitative Golden Age, run by female market gardeners and moon worshippers.
Academic studies usually confine their studies to one country. Armin Mohler, historian of recent German conservatism, thinks the ecological 'package-deal' (Gedankengut) derives from the conservative romantic reaction of the 1920s. He cites Friedrich Georg Junger, brother of the better-known Ernst, as a key figure.9 The historian of geography, David Pepper, finds two main roots of environmentalism in Britain, a scientific root derived from Malthus and Darwin, and an unscientific romantic concept stemming from Matthew Arnold. [10] The American Donald Worster, in the most comprehensive work of its type to date, concentrates on America, and the influences of Thoreau and Emerson. He also finds two strands of ecologism: an Arcadian theme and a more classificatory, dominating attitude. [11] Juan Martinez-Alier's history of energy economics deliberately confines itself to authors who offer specific calculations of calorific values and resources. This naturally excludes biological ecologism, as well as philosophical or mystical ruralism. [12] A standard work on modern British environmentalists, by Jane Lowe and Philip Goyder, notes the parallel developments in North America, Europe, Britain and the White Dominions, but they confine their study to British politics. [13] There is no work which ties together the geographers, land planners and biologists in all three countries, and relates them to the present. Although the present study, too, cannot expect to be comprehensive, it will, I hope, provide a broad framework in which to consider our heritage of ecological ideas.
Almost a third of this book concerns the German connection. In one way this is not surprising. Ecology was formulated in Germany, and many 'alternative' ideas, in the field of medicine, sun-worship, vitamins and homeopathy come from German-speaking countries. During the Third Reich, refugees brought to Britain that tradition of holistic medicine, often bound up with an anti-liberal criticism surprisingly similar to that enunciated by those who remained and were thus associated with the Third Reich. But it is not this connection which will be found in the literature to date. When ecologists sit down and muse about their origins, the scope can be breathtaking but inaccurate. The place of Germany within their framework typifies this, but points to an intriguing problem.14 Nietzsche, for example, is frequently described as an important figure. Why should this be? In reality, he does not conform at all to the model ecologist, nor is he a German Romantic, - he espoused anti-nationalist and rationalist causes for most of his life. But misinterpretations of Nietzsche are an important force. The symbolic misuse of Nietzsche means: - values, extreme individualism, nationalism, the blood, anti-modernism, Dionysian irrationalism and the superman. It is illiberalism based on existentialism. For many ecologists, these ideas are alien. Yet still Nietzsche hovers, worrying but relevant. For he puts man in God's place, with the responsibility as well as the fun that implies. He is a forerunner of vitalism, and these ideas, attacked by the intellectual establishment, do have a perpetual appeal. They fill a lack. Goethe, Nietzsche, Bergson, Driesch and Heidegger together form an anti-analytical, holistic canon, and escapees from the arid desert of linguistic philosophy often find themselves wandering in their epistemological ether.
Although he spoke against science, especially dismal science, Nietzsche picked up a scientific image of his time when he described man as a flame-like being.
Yes! I know from whence I spring, Never sated, like a fire, Glowing, I myself consume. All I seize and touch makes light, All I leave behind me ashes, Surely, flame is what I am. [15]
Man the creator, man the destroyer; man whose touch produced light and death - what clearer image could there be of the exploitative, dominating Promethean? It was a later German philosopher, Martin Heidegger, described by George Steiner as the 'metaphysician of ecologism' who wrote a surprisingly modern-sounding critique of consumerism in 1944; he called on man to be the shepherd of the earth, to accept his humble role as part of the world, to avoid technology, domination and the role of exploiter. 16 Clearly, a philosophical tradition which produces such opposed interpretations of man as the Promethean and the Shepherd is a complex one. It seems worthwhile, therefore, to examine the recent German nature tradition and its various strands, and its experience in tragic practice.
The question of National Socialist absorption of ecological ideas arises here. I touched on it in a previous book, where I pointed to the existence of ecological arguments so similar to today's in the Third Reich and asked whether it was significant or just an embarrassing accident. [17] Although I examined the issue seriously, and offered supporting evidence, still I did not do more there than outline the problem, and urge that it be taken seriously. This is a suitable work in which to re-examine the problem, with all its implications for our view of Nazi ideology, and for the future of support for the Greens. As this is not a specialised book on Nazi history, I will concentrate on two questions; why, as one historian has already asked, the Nazis were the first 'radical environmentalists in charge of a state'; [18] and secondly whether the Nazis succeeded in their attempt to keep the small farmer on the land. This is an ambition of today's Greens, especially those concerned with the Third World. So is autarky, another concern of the German agrarian radicals. It is important to separate the effects of non-specific historical phenomena from the effects of the peasant experiment. I therefore compare various European fascist doctrines, including those of Mosley's fascists in Britain, to see whether the ecological component in Germany can be seen as ethnically specific rather than politically contingent.
Recent years have seen an increasing trend towards the historicisation of National Socialism. Comparative studies have been carried out in fields such as welfare policy, crime, policing and architecture. [19] Various observers, including Thomas Mann, have already pointed to the rural values lying, as a style or rhetorical tendency, behind much of Nazi ideology. [20] There is now concrete evidence to support this intuition. However, there were distinct strands of agrarian ruralism, ecologism and agrarian modernism which need to be differentiated clearly, while it is also important to distinguish between essential and accidental similarities.
Because of the alternative nature of the ecological criticism it has already been subject to a certain degree of polemical criticism which the evidence here may help to fuel. The pacifism and hostility to nuclear power inherent in the Greens renders them the automatic enemy of today's Right. Further, today's Right fears what it perceives as an element of anti-rationalism, together with the inherently destabilising and oppositional nature of ecologists, with their conservative moral values and non-conservative means. The frequent attacks on alternative science, medicine and evolutionary theories launched by luminaries from the scientific establishment clearly display this fear; together with its corollary, that the oppositional, anti-establishment and radical nature of the Greens could lead to revolutionary phenomena. [21] Of its essence, the fear of anti-rational revolution is the fear of a Pol Pot as opposed to a Lenin. A Lenin is seen as working, however destructively, within a recognised and familiar Western framework. The revolt of the peasant, however, is boundless, formless and terrible. Yet ecologism is based on a belief in objective truth and values. Ecologists reject the humanist act of faith for the best of reasons - because their humanism is grounded in what they perceive as immutable natural law. For this reason alone it has been attacked under its guise of social Darwinism as sinisterly anti-progressive. [22] An argument which is used by both establishment- oriented conservatives, together with members of the socialist academic establishment, is that ecologists are a danger because they reject reason and a danger because they believe in reason. This is either deeply wrong or profoundly right. To attack a philosophy because it claims to overthrow progressive aims through its objectivity and closer grasp of reality, and to attack it because it appears to do away with rationality, does seem to mean that there is a confusion somewhere. It may be a valuable pre-paradigm-breaking confusion, or perhaps a sign that existing institutions are under attack, - but certainly it is something that warrants investigation.
My own hypothesis is that the apparent contradictions of the ecological movement can be resolved by seeing it as forming a new political category in its own right, with a history, right wings and left wings, with leaders, followers and a special epistemological niche all to itself. In this book I seek to provide the evidence to prove this theory.
THE ECOLOGICAL BOXTo explain what I mean by a political theory of ecology I must define an ecologist, and explain his beliefs. Then I must show how he occupies a special political niche, and what are the epistemological consequences of that occupation. One way to do this would be to assume that we are all agreed on who and what were ecologists. No such agreement exists. The history of ecologism is not only in its infancy, but what exists has largely been written by believers. Its historiography is divided into uninvolved histories and very much involved histories. This is not to criticise involvement in itself. A philosophy should affect the life of its time, while a subject is only of interest if it relates to our sense of values, whether aesthetic or political or moral, or all three. However, engagement produces problems for the historian of ideas. It means that some works are considered as subjects for academic dissection, while others are written by co-dissectors. This distinction between comrades and victims does not reflect any difference in quality, but in objective and in self-definition. In defining what an ecologist is, what he thinks is his own history is obviously relevant. Here, then, a specific historiography becomes part of the syndrome it defines.
Ecologism is a political box. It is a new box, into which many distinguished and important thinkers fit who fit only partially into other, better-known boxes. 'Thinkers' they must be, since an acquaintance with scientific ideas, available to specialists in other disciplines but not widely disseminated, is an essential part of ecologism. The box began to attain its current shape and size around 1880in Europe and North America. Self-definition about belonging in this box arose later, in the 1920s. It was not until the early 1970s that the box acquired a proper name, and earlier ecologists saw what they had thought their very own box expropriated. Over the last hundred years the clarity of the box's outlines was obscured by the presence of other, bigger, better- known boxes, some of whose corners were tucked into our ecological box - that is, they shared policies and aims, but temporarily, and variably, since non-ecological boxes fluctuate in their degree of concern for ecologism.
How is one to define a man-made category, and how far back is one to trace its ancestry? At what stage does it cease being pre- or proto-, and become, as it were, sapiens? Conservatism, Socialism and Communism too go back only so far. How far is a matter of dispute, and depends on whether one accepts self-definition by members of these categories. Such self-definition is itself a constantly changing, live political issue. The argument for continuity of ecological opposition is held by many ecologists. They believe that an alternative ecological idea dates back millenia. How is one to judge the validity of such a claim? One may feel that some violence is done to a historically specific concept by linking together disparate cultures and eras, by spotting collectivism among Pythagoreans and laissez-faire ideology among the victims of Diocletian. We realise that each historical epoch is unique, and we do not, therefore, expect to find duplicates of historical phenomena in each period. At the same time, we know that there are human constants and similarities. Much of ecologism lies in looking for these. We know that continuities exist. The historian walks a tight-rope between these two conflicting realities, both of which are true. We step and step not into the same river.
However, change and development there must be. Therefore, new fusions can be created from ancient human instincts and habits. In normal terminology, the political categories mentioned earlier are confined to the recent past. We trace Conservatism and Socialism back certainly to before the exact definitions and party systems as we know them today arose. Not too far back; probably to a few decades at most, a short time before people recognised themselves as being 'it', and we allow for the fact that full-blown 'its' can still change substantially within the usable time-span, as Tories changed to Conservatives, and Marxist Social Democrats changed to liberal Socialists. By analogy, therefore, one would expect the ecologist to emerge shortly before the word became used normatively. As the first normative use of the word that I have found dates to 1915, it seems reasonable to place the creation of the ecological box in about 1880, some thirteen years after the scientific term was first coined. [23]
Conservatism and Socialism have, in general usage, an association with the words which form their root: conserving and sozial. Similarly, ecologism arises from the concept of Oekologie. Ecologism does not involve the web of life alone; it was used originally as co-terminous with ethology, the study of animal behaviour in its environment, and with oekonomie, the concept of 'economical' household management. This implies that the use and conservation of resources is a moral activity as well as an economic one; and a morality closely bound up with the survival of the group.
But, although the terms rest on Greek roots - some ecologists find this link with early classical Greece itself significant - the words refer to a set of biological, physical science and geographical ideas that arose separately around the mid-nineteenth-century. Biological holism showed that man and animals were interdependent in and on a balanced environment. It implied that there was a scientific truth that lay outside man's perceptions, but on which man depended. The physical sciences learned that the dissipation of energy might endanger man's existence, or even that of the planet itself. Geographers examined land settlement and use from the aspect of resources. Land itself became perceived as endangered, and its finiteness, always known as a truism, began to matter.
How and when did ecologism manifest itself? A theory about this is not provable in the scientific sense. The method I propose to follow is to describe, explain and analyse together. I start from the position that we are aware that something exists which is to be examined, using observation, common sense and empathy. The form of the examination will help to define the phenomenon. At this stage I want to sketch out the qualities of an ecologist, and show what the potential political consequences were.
The First World War brought apocalypse to a generation already intellectually alienated. It showed that real disaster, real loss, was possible. In the 1920s ecologists began to define themselves as such. It had taken about that long for the scientific roots of ecologism to merge into a political discipline, to become an ideology.
The existence of this ideology has been obscured because it took on varied political forms. Most controversially, in the 1920s and 1930s, an alternative, anti-capitalist stance meant that the apparently alternative, anti-capitalist 'Third Way' National Socialist and Fascist parties attracted ecologists. After the Second World War the ideal lay dormant for a period. It then revived, still in an alternative anti-capitalist form, with similar ideas, programmes and beliefs, but with a self-defined leftwards tinge. The political shift was partly because the 'soft centre' moved from right to left during this time. It was also because American anarchists and Marxists in the late 1960s took up ecological ideas as part of 'alienation'.
Ecologists themselves are divided between those who believe that ecologism sprung up fully formed in the late 1960s, and those who see an underground, green tradition that always existed in Western history. Some place its origins in early Greek times; some in the Bronze Age. Heidegger believed that society went wrong in the transition from Greek to Latin, so that Greek concepts were translated into Latin but misunderstood. To give an account of beliefs that rationality has always battled with intuition as a source of our civilization would take too long at this stage; I will only say that it is ecologists themselves who argue this. The belief itself is a symptom of being an ecologist, and will be treated here on that level. Similarly, the hunt for a scapegoat who made society go wrong is a symptom of ecologism. Much of the literature consists of accusation and counter-accusation hurled to and from the scapegoats of other ecologists' Manichaean analyses. It is unusual for the historiography to be part of the subject itself.
Ecologists believe in the essential harmony of nature. But it is a harmony to which man may have to be sacrificed. Ecologists are not man-centred or anthropocentric in their loyalties. Therefore, they do not have to see nature's harmony as especially protective towards or favouring mankind. Ecologists believe in an absolute responsibility for one's actions, and for the world in general. There is no God the Shepherd; so man becomes the shepherd. There is a conflict between the desire to accept nature's harmonious order, and a need to avert catastrophe because ecologists are apocalyptical, but know that man has caused the impending apocalypse by his actions. Ecologists are the saved.
As part of their sense of responsibility, ecologists know that there is no free lunch. Everything has a cost; everything a place. The saved are better able to plan man, space and the environment than existing institutions. Bureaucracies are wasteful and slothful, as Kropotkin pointed out; but man's unplanned actions are destructive and can be aesthetically unappealing.
For, although non-anthropocentric, ecologists are not passive in their stance towards the world. They care intensely about how things look, feel and are, and feel a responsibility to indicate the way to the truth. Aesthetic values, then, are vital to ecologism. But not only the sensuous pleasures of nature, the importance of which to ecologists varies from decade to decade and from to country to country. There is hostility to the elaborate, the formal, despite the belief in benevolent planning. The civilization of the latifundia is resented as much as the civilization of megalopolis. The aesthetic values of the ecologists include the spiritual value of the one-to-one contact between man and object; between the history and meaning of a thing and the thing's maker, and the user or purchaser or owner of the thing. Ecologists prefer a direct link between man and object; both the object and the contact with it are then seen as more real. This opposition to 'reification', as the Marxists call it, involves in Marxist terminology the alienation between man and what he makes, and is an attack on the factory system, as well as alienability of land and property. Here, Marx was tapping a pre-capitalist vein of social criticism. But the criticism is deeper and a more spiritual one than Marx makes, and is not confined to the factory system or to capitalist society. The poet Rilke in one of his letters refers to his belief that the thingness of things was dying away, through mass consumerism.
If there is to be no interposing mechanism between man and man, man and thing and man and nature, neither must there be any wasteful, artificial state mechanisms, no bureaucracy, no unproductive 'Thing', in Cobbett's words.Since the ideal moral and aesthetic relationship between man and the world is what is local and intimate, trade is the part of the market economy, or indeed, any economy, that is most alien. Production can be in the form of small-scale craftsmanship, but trade cannot be anything other than a distancing between man and product. Most ecologists are opposed to trade as such, for moral reasons. Given that belief, programmes are erected to show that trade damages buyer and/or seller. But the belief is not dependent upon the rationale.
Some of the apparent contradictions of ecologism can be reconciled by perceiving its underlying moral stance. Ecologists are optimistic, in the sense that there is no original sin and nature is harmonious. However, they are also pessimistic, fearing waste, irreversible decline and the ruin of the environment, because nature is harsh, not man-centred and is unforgiving, as reality is unforgiving. And there is no God of the kind needed to step in and put things right.
Most ecologists are not formally religious. Ecologists who began in irreligious rebellion are sometimes converted to a 'strong' religion, but a pantheistic religious feeling is the norm. Mediaeval Christian mystics are cited; such as Joachim di Fiore and Francis of Assisi. Ecologists often tend towards the Asiatic religions, Buddhism and the Way of Lao-Tzu. Confucius is too worldly. In a post-religious culture, some ecologists who have religious yearnings choose Catholicism, be it Roman or Anglo-. The leftwards politicization of ecologism, together with its alternativeness, has brought in the Quakers. Regeneration of the countryside and Back-to-the-Land were Liberal Quaker causes in late nineteenth- century Britain.
The ecologist believes that nature embodies eternal reality, and also that the scientific method provides a means of uncovering the truth. There is a scepticism about 'traditional' science, but no rejection of objectivity. There are philosophical problems concerned with the fact that man's standpoint does not comprise that of the universe. But even if truth can only be attained incrementally, it is still possible eventually to get there. Any holy lies or golden myths that lurk in the way to the truth are seen as merely lumber.
This rejection of the existing, traditional system, whatever it might be, together with its upholders, does not seem conservative, despite the similarity in some values between the conservative and ecologist. What political beliefs reject the interposing mechanism, of owner or of state? Anarchism, of course, and individualism; a dislike of involvement in party systems, and a rejection of any existing mechanism for mediating and legitimising the claims of interest groups on the production of others. It is an alternative, apolitical stance, but placed here at the service of a larger unit than man, namely the world.
Politics can be defined in many ways. It is the legitimation of structured force, or of a monopoly of force located in one area. It is the description of the processes by which men conduct their affairs. It is the way in which men rule themselves or each other. It is the ordering of disorderly impulses. It is war by any other means. It is a way to distributive justice, the maintenance of the polity. It is the shadow on the cave. Whichever definition you may choose, ecologists go outside the political process. But, like Marxists, whose revolutionary dialectic is equally unpolitical, their non-political nature becomes itself a new political category. Ecologists strain at the bounds of ordinary political discourse, and in doing so extend it.
The categories 'Right' and 'Left', or 'Conservative' and Socialist', have constantly shifted in their attitude to nature, and its acceptance or transcendance, what one might call the naturist axis. In Table 1 I give an example of how the axis Nature/Transcending Nature shifted political contexts at the end of the last century. Similarly, Table 2 shows how apparently straightforward political issues, like equality, have represented different things to ecologists.
Table 1
DATE / NATURE / TRANSCENDING NATURE
1860 / Conservatives / Liberals, Socialists
1870 / Individualists (e.g., H. Spencer) / Collectivists (e.g., T.H. Green)
1880 / Socialists (e.g., Duhring) / Marxists (e.g., Engels)
1890 / Scientific biologists (Haeckel, Alfred Wallace) / Scientific Utopians (Shaw, Wells) 1900 / Co-operative Anarchists (Kropotkin) / Individualists (Maine)
Table 2
DATE / NATURE / TRANSCENDING NATURE
1890-1960 / Inequality / Equality
1965-80 / Equality / Creative inequality
The need for an unequal, though not necessarily hierarchical society, was earlier derived from nature. Equality as a priority for human survival in a world of finite and shrinking resources is a more recent derivation. Equality used to be the progressive technocratic ideal; but a creative inequality emerges from Jacques Monod and Noam Chomsky's work as 'natural'. I am not arguing that Chomsky is either an ecologist or sympathetic to conservative, hierarchical societies. However, his work on the inbuilt, genetic language programme entails the need to develop it, with the concomitant risk of unequal development. The theoreticians of capitalism, accused for so long of relying on nature to back up their chosen form of society, now reject instinct and other - as they see it - non-rational residues in man. Libertarians such as Ilya Prigogine classify themselves as humanists. Humanism is a typically transcendentalist concept. He argues that the law of the universe, which by definition incorporates man, is one of infinite change and adaptability. He concludes that no static system, such as an eco-system, can exist, and that consequently attempts to adapt man to a static nature are useless. Third-World Marxist intellectuals, perhaps as part of their rejection of Western culture and values, appropriate nature as their own special property, and with it, equality. The left wing of the ecological movement is egalitarian, demanding an equality of sacrifice and withdrawal from the exploitation of nature.
But, is it necessary to dwell on the theoretical political implications of ecologism? After all, the ecological movement does today have a voice and a movement in the shape of the Green Party in England and Germany, and similar parties and groups elsewhere. Unfortunately, things are not so simple. Party and ideology are not always the same. Ideologies change as parties acquire or approach power, and as their constituency changes. Party spokesmen may not be the most reliable or truthful sources for information on policies or their implications. It may not matter for the party faithful who their forebears are, or forebears may be useful for conferring legitimacy on difficult or apparently unideological policies. An example here is the use of Disraeli to legitimise interventionist Tory policies in Britain in the 1960s and early 1970s. Of course, it can be argued that without a party and programme ideology and forebears are irrelevant. To those who see politics purely as the mediation of interests by structures my arguments will appear meaningless. Yet, there are parties which depend more than others on ideas, and radical parties in their inception are among them. Any attempt to explain green parties in terms of their sociological component would imply that their ideas were secondary to the real question, 'who whom?' (not that I wish to attribute such a coarse phrase to political scientists). Another objection to identifying party and ideology is that the green parties have already split, and after a mere few years they have no united policy. In Germany the Green Party first lost its more conservative component. More recently it split into fundamentalists and realists. Some 'fundos' have now abandoned party politics altogether. The green voice is fractured along lines of party, country and activity. There is not yet a homogeneous set of spokesmen, although it may develop soon. But in any case ideologists cannot always be relied upon to present their own ideology. They may not understand it; they may be lying or they may have been deceived. They may be more interested in converting than in analysing.
Forebears have been cited by today's Greens, sometimes to explain policies, more often to help express ideas; they are brought forward as if contemporaries, to bear witness. But the forebears are selected carefully. A fear of the past has helped shape the present German green policy. For Greens may be ecologists, but not all ecologists are Greens.
Many of those who espoused ecologism, and who will be discussed here, were originally radicals of various kinds, Marxists, anarchists or National Socialists. (I will argue later that fascism did not have or attract a green component, and am distinguishing here between fascism and national socialism, a distinction not valid in all spheres but important here.) These radicals managed to drop out even from their own radical allegiances. So putting one's individual judgment ahead of party allegiance, even of the most fanatical kind, is another hallmark of the ecologist. As well as being saved, he is a Protestant. As marginalised escapees from Lutheranism, that is not surprising.