The Rights of Nature: Has Deep Ecology Gone Too Far?

A specter is haunting the French humanist mind these days--a radical ecology movement that threatens to replace the idealization of humanity with an idealization of nature. Already we see "the passing of the humanist era," writes Luc Ferry, a philosopher at the Sorbonne and the University of Caen, in this prize-winning critique of that movement, a book all environmentalists ought to read. It is by turn witty and sneering, brilliant and disturbing, wildly alarmist and, in the end, surprisingly conciliatory. Ferry recognizes that we need a new relationship with nature but hopes we can get there without sweeping changes in Western humanism and liberal society. Yet he exaggerates the danger radical environmentalists pose and resists the changes that are needed.

In 1587 the village of Saint-Julien brought suit against a colony of weevils attacking the vineyards. The villagers lost in court, the judge declaring that the insects, being creatures of God, possessed the same rights as people to live in the place. Ferry is amused that such a trial could ever have occurred, but he is not amused by today's animal liberationists, deep ecologists, greens of the left or right, or ecofeminists, all of whom seem to have too tender a regard for weevils, even to the point of preferring them over humans. Ferry calls this brigade the "ecologists," a term that refers not to the quantitative science of ecology, with its computer models of plant and animal dynamics, but to a moral philosophy that would give rights to the whole ecosphere, the entire natural environment.

The origins of this specter lie in "the Anglo-Saxon world," a quaintly out-of-date phrase used by French politicians as well as intellectuals to refer to England, Canada, and the United States (though mainly the latter, an irrational country prone to sudden strange enthusiasms), which together constantly challenge France's cultural hegemony, and in Germany, the old nemesis, the dark home of anti-modern romantics. Ferry acknowledges that these foreigners have their French counterparts in writers like Michel Serres; nonetheless, he fears that it is France itself, the great font of modern humanism, that is under attack by the eco-revolutionaries.

THE NEW HUMAN BEING

A major source of the global environmental crisis, say the radicals, is the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, which promoted a new vision of human beings as set apart from, and above, the rest of nature by their capacity for reason. Through reason, humanists sought to transcend the earth in two ways: an ethical triumph over brute egotism and a technological domination over nature that would make human life richer and more comfortable. Although these ideas sprang up all over Europe--and it was near Edinburgh that one of the most important figures of the age, Adam Smith, the founding ideologue of capitalism, appeared--France was certainly a world center of the Enlightenment. From its philosophe-inspired revolution of 1789 emerged a modern democratic society enshrining the rights of all humankind, or, as Americans like to say, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The utopianism in that revolutionary era was palpable. A new human being was expected momentarily to arrive. Freed from tradition, which Ferry describes as "second nature," akin to natural instinct and just as confining, that person would make up his own ethics, without divine guidance, becoming as it were his own god.

Ferry still believes in that noble dream. We humans have no nature, he argues, but are proudly "unnatural." We alone have a history. We alone pursue a future, constantly tearing down the old, moving on to the new. Unique among species, we create moral ideals and try to live up to them.

While no thoughtful person would disagree that humans are distinguished from the rest of nature by their moral consciousness, the history they have made over the past 200 years has not demonstrated much realization of Ferry's ideal. Ecologists have not been the first to make this point; it has been gathering force for a long time, through a succession of world wars, totalitarian regimes, and, most recently, weapons of annihilation. The hydrogen bomb, that dreadful and arrogant product of some of the most intelligent minds ever, has been particularly hard to square with humanism. Following hard on those events have come dying rivers, lakes, and forests, the wholesale extermination of species, and global warming. Unfortunately for nature, there are now six billion of us gods around, swallowing resources at a ferocious rate; our vaunted economic freedom has been won at the expense of all other living beings. Is it misanthropic to see and regret such destruction, or to question the Enlightenment project of environmental conquest, or to denounce that old notion of freedom when it is unchecked by compassion or responsibility? The religion (if such it has been) of humanism has shattered against the dark facts.

I SUFFER, THEREFORE I AM

The first section of Ferry's book deals with the crusade for animal liberation, which has little to do with ecology, aimed as it is at protecting individual animals rather than the integrity of the ecosphere. The Australian philosopher Peter Singer argues that because animals can suffer, or have their "interests" damaged, they should be given legal rights. Ferry disagrees, holding that animals cannot be liberated at all because true freedom involves rising above instinct. Animals can be let out of their cages, but they cannot become other than what they are. Yet he understands that they deserve better treatment than having their eyes poked out by callous experimenters or their pain made into sport. We need rules to stop unnecessary cruelty--protective rules for animals, rights for humans. It is a fine line, and the courts are likely to find it harder and harder to draw.