Imagine yourself on a walk, having just finished a soda and wondering whether you should drop the bottle in a nearby bush. Imagine yourself planning a flight to see your family and wondering whether it’s worth the carbon dioxide emissions. Or Imagine yourself wanting to pluck a flower for your mother and wondering whether that’s really fair to the flower. What do you do? These sound like jobs for an environmental ethicist. And what—if we are to speak very generally on all sorts of questions like the ones I’ve just asked—should the ethicist recommend?
Let me answer in a rather roundabout way. Here is a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, entitled “Binsey Poplars”.
felled 1879
My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
All felled, felled, are all felled;
Of a fresh and following folded rank
Not spared, not one
That dandled a sandalled
Shadow that swam or sank
On meadow & river & wind-wandering weed-winding bank.
O if we but knew what we do
When we delve or hew—
Hack and rack the growing green!
Since country is so tender
To touch, her being só slender,
That, like this sleek and seeing ball
But a prick will make no eye at all,
Where we, even where we mean
To mend her we end her,
When we hew or delve:
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.
Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve
Strokes of havoc unselve
The sweet especial scene,
Rural scene, a rural scene,
Sweet especial rural scene.
There is much concern in the environmental ethics literature to establish grounds for duties of environmental responsibility. We ask where intrinsic value is located. Is it in humans only, or is it in trees, or landscapes, or ecosystems as well? Then we must establish that these values ground duties. Do we have duties to promote the value (as a consequentialist might prefer to put it) or perhaps duties to respect it (as a deontologist might prefer to put it)? Are the duties individual or collective? Are they strong or weak? Are they duties of aesthetic sensibility, or duties against the patriarchy, or duties arising from an extension of the Self into the environment? Move out of the theory, into practice and politics. What factors contribute to this or that negative environmental effect? How much would it help if we could stop individual short-range transportation, or the burning of coal, or cow farts? What can we do to mitigate these factors (if only in part)—what policies, what personal habits? What if we devote most of our time to arguing with deniers on the internet? Etc., etc.
My aim is not to speak against any of these questions and concerns. I only want to speak for something else. And what I want to say is this: we would do well to think of environmental concerns (in our own lives and in our conversations with others) as concerns of love. Our theories and conclusions ought to come alongside a simpler and a prior attitude: a love for the things of our world because they are good.
Consider what Hopkins says. His language about the trees is the language of appreciation. The trees are beautiful, precious—“dear”, he says. And in his descriptive images he conveys to us his sense of this beauty, as only a poet can, till we can almost see it for ourselves. And the form of the poem, its running on and its repetition (“felled”; “rural scene”) are expressive of his distress—distress, which is what a lover feels when he loses what he loves. There is no ethical theory here. Just a look at the trees, enough to reveal that they are lovely. Immediately there follows a care for their continued life, and a distress at whatever is hurtful to them.
How does this thought help us? Well, I will not pretend it will answer every question and guide every policy decision. But it does do a few things.
First, it gives us an honest way of expressing many of the motivations and hesitations we already have. Would you refuse to drop an empty bottle on an isolated trail? Why? Will it harm a squirrel? Well, no—just as likely it will collect some water that a squirrel will drink. Will it contribute to a large pile of bottles, and will that harm the forest? Well—maybe not. There is, and perhaps there never will be, any such pile of bottles. You are welcome to try counterfactual explanations, virtue explanations, Kantian explanations, and so on, and so on. But why not just be honest? The forest is lovely. The bottle is a stain on its loveliness. That is reason enough. Why avoid eating chicken? Chickens are woefully mistreated, and appreciating them as good creatures means being uncomfortable associating with such mistreatment. Why avoid cutting down this old tree? I mean—look at it. It’s lovely. Why rest your actions on rationalizations when you could rest them instead on a perfectly rational concern of love?
Second, and similarly, it gives us an honest framework for many of the more difficult discussions we’re already having. Should we, say, produce nuclear energy? Well, it leaves behind spent core material, and that can be poisonous to our land and water. But it is also a very efficient method of producing energy, and efficiency is necessary for economic stability and thus for the continued life of many people, the poor especially. We care about the land, and we care about the poor, and the conflict of these two legitimate concerns is what gives our question its difficulty. What do we do? Well, whatever else we do, we try our best not to hurt what we love. It’s true that this thought does not resolve the conflict—but at least we now have a sense of what’s at stake. And we also have the sense that our actions should be balanced, just as our loves are balanced: we should neither abandon the poor entirely nor abandon the land entirely, and, though one is clearly of greater importance than the other, we should not allow a grave and irreversible harm to one for the sake of a minor benefit to the other. And what’s more (I will assert without here being able to prove it), these questions of love are the prior questions: if we do not agree in our love for our natural world, we will agree on how we should treat it only by accident, if we agree at all. In this way, love is not just helpful for discussion—at some point it is also necessary.
But these reasons I have given are reasons to speak in terms of love, not to love. Love is never commendable primarily because it is useful. It gives us frameworks for our own thoughts and for our discussions with others, and that is good news, to be sure, but that is not why we love things. (Not to mention that, if your goal is just to be convincing, you can find equally effective tools for that in judgmental peer pressure or alarmist messaging.) No, we love because it is accurate. This world is lovely. Lovely things are to be cared for. The standard human way of encoding that thought—that concern for the good of good things—is love.
It remains to ask, then, how we might go about beginning to love. The answer can be said simply, though, admittedly, it is less simple to enact it. We look at things. We love by seeing that things are lovely.
I will therefore finish with another poem by Hopkins. This one is entitled “God’s Grandeur”. In some ways it is unlike our first poem. It is more structured, more confident—less a cry of dismay and more a song of praise and of hope. It is something more in the vein of Saint Francis’s “Canticle of the Sun”, or the Nineteenth Psalm.
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.