Thomas Princen, Treading Softly: Paths to Ecological Order (The MIT Press, 2010)

Times Higher Education

22 April 2010

In Arthurian legend, when Sir Perceval comes upon the castle of the wounded Fisher King, he is given the chance to restore fertility to the Waste Land. All he has to do is speak. Upon being granted a vision of the Holy Grail, he should pose the ritual question: “Whom does it serve?” That would release the healing power of Christ’s blood, and the kingdom would be restored to health. On his first visit, he fails to do so.

As we ponder our chances of restoring our own Waste Land, we would do well to ask the same question of any publication with “ecological” in the title. Does it serve the gloom and doom brigade, who relish the catastrophe to come? Or does it serve the advocates of business as usual, who say that all we have to do is to “green” our production and consumption?

Happily, Thomas Princen’s salutary and beautifully simple book does neither. What we need, he tells us, are “images of the possible” that may help us envisage what is involved in “living well by living well within our means”.

His aim, he says, is to lay the groundwork for an ecological order: one based on a “home economy” that would be “grounded in place”, would be guided by respect for resources and so would involve minimum consumption.

Whom, then, does this book serve? Speaking frankly, one would have to say that, in the first instance, it serves the impractical green theorists among us who need to bring our ideas, as it were, down to earth; more generally, it serves people of goodwill who realise we are at a turning point, but don’t know which way to turn.

This emphasis on groundwork and economy is a reminder that Karl Marx used the metaphor of a building to explain the workings of a given society. He proposed that its real foundations were the means and relations of production. Now, of course, we must wake up to the fact that the foundations that are even more important are those of nature itself. Notoriously dismissed by Marx as humanity’s tool house, it is now in a perilous condition.

Marxism does not get a mention in Treading Softly. So what philosophy does Princen espouse? “Principles”, he declares, are successful if “they fit the needs of the times”. Yesterday “the issue was prohibiting competitive trade practices and preventing economic collapse all via international cooperation and economic growth”. Today? “Now the issue is saving the planet’s life-support system.” This reads very much like pragmatism, and is none the worse for that, given the urgency of his task.

Of course, labelling his approach is useful only if it helps us to grasp what he is saying, and to think and act accordingly. Thus: “We do not so much need a revolution as we need well-defined problems, networks of diverse peoples, and good old hard work. It is possible and it will happen.” The ideal proposed will lead us back to reality.

Existing “realism”, says Princen, tells us that the existing economy, “the Great Industrial Edifice”, is “the one and only path”. Its premises are twofold: “consumers rule” and “technologies save”. The bizarre assumption is that “the planet, aided by clever technologies and well-functioning markets, can withstand yet more abuses, more mining, more consuming, more disposing; we just have to do it better”. In other words, realism turns out to be fantasy, and the industrial edifice turns out to be a house of cards.

The need now, Princen suggests, is to articulate a “new normal” beyond the “old normal”. The latter assumes that “endless material expansion on a finite planet is possible” and is dedicated to cheap energy and consumer demand; it assumes also that risks can be managed, indeed that “economic, technological and demographic growth will solve all problems, including the problems of economic, technological and demographic growth”. Against this muddled thinking, the premise of the new normal stands out crystal clear: “the era of ‘protecting the environment’ is over, and the era of ensuring life support has begun”.

How to proceed? We need to find the right words before we can enact the right deeds. We need to define the problems that confront us in a new kind of language: a language that “has ecological content and a long-term ethic”. Hence Princen is more anxious that we get our “metaphors of the environment” right than he is that we understand statistics, scientific reports or specific forecasts. His list of potential images includes “network (complex and with emergent properties)”, “homestead (crops, shelters, neighbours)” and “gift (precious, non-proprietary)”.

Because Treading Softly is about words, it is also about world views – those frames, constructed in language, through which we see reality. According to Princen, today we have four dominant world views of what we call the environment. First, there is the “naturist”: environment as non-human nature, which needs to be understood in its own right. Second, there is the “mechanistic”: environment as nature as machine, which can be manipulated and even redesigned for human use. Third, there is the “agrarian”: environment as nature as a source of produce for humanity, which must be managed but which takes time to understand. Fourth, there is the “economistic”: environment as a world of human exchange, production and consumption.

The important thing is not to opt for one world view exclusively, but to think in terms of creative clusters, and to allow the different world views to play off one another. For example, the naturist has a helpful notion of limits (how much an ecosystem can withstand without collapsing), which can readily be combined with the agrarian, which has a helpful notion of husbandry (caring for natural elements so as to supply human necessities).

The economistic may yet bear some fruit, if adapted to a genuinely ecological economy. Princen lists various financial maxims that may prove useful: “Spend within one’s means. Diversify the portfolio. Draw on the interest, not the principal. Balance the budget.”

As for the mechanistic, that is even now being tested and queried – for instance, by extreme weather that exposes the ineffectiveness of flood defences – and so will have to be radically redefined in relation to the other world views.

Such an inclusive, adaptive approach may lead some readers to dismiss Princen’s proposal as all too modest. Yet there are many interesting trails leading off from his paths to ecological order. To cite just one: suggesting that because natural sources have no substitutes, they must be regarded as “ultimate”, he adds: “Spiritually speaking, ultimate sources are sacred. To sacrifice an ultimate resource is a sacrilege. In contrast, to sacrifice the benefits otherwise derived from using up an ultimate source – to refrain from stripping topsoil, from draining an aquifer, from driving an organism to extinction, from opening the ozone layer, all for commercial gain – to sacrifice these benefits is to elevate human action.”

Princen says no more, but it suggests that there may be a fifth world view of the environment available to us, namely the spiritual. Part of the ecological task must surely be to challenge those who would demean nature by honouring the sacred as a remote, transcendent state, quite distinct from the profane, and to promote what Michel Serres calls a religion of the world. Like Sir Perceval, we have to find the right words with which to do it justice. Only now, the crucial question is not “Whom does it serve?” but “How may I serve?” Let us hope that, like him, we succeed in due course.

 Laurence Coupe

The Handbook of Sustainability Literacy: Skills for a Changing World, edited by Arran Stibbe (Green Books, 2009)

Times Higher Education

26 November 2009

In 1933, F.R. Leavis and Denys Thompson’s Culture and Environment: The Training of Critical Awareness was published. Now widely regarded as unpardonably elitist in its assumptions, it was in fact designed for use by schools, teacher training colleges and the Workers’ Educational Association. The idea was to offer a means of resisting the “standardisation” of life caused by mass production and entertainment.

Looking again at the title of Leavis and Thompson’s volume, it is clear that by “environment” they meant two different things. First, they meant the social structure of modern, urban England. This they saw as having suppressed a living culture – the rural way of life that had been expressed most powerfully in the language of William Shakespeare, and the demise of which was documented by writers such as George Sturt, author of Change in the Village (1912) and The Wheelwright’s Shop (1923). Because the worlds of Shakespeare and Sturt were rooted in a way of life that itself had roots in the land, they saw culture as an embodiment of the environment in a second sense: the rhythms of a natural order, manifest in a specific (English) locality.

Turning to The Handbook of Sustainability Literacy, an important collection of essays produced in a situation far more daunting than that faced by Leavis and Thompson, we can still trace some continuity. In his introduction, editor Arran Stibbe addresses the need for people to “become empowered to read society critically”. Moreover, he advocates starting not with the problems that are undermining the ability of the Earth to support human life, but with what has gone wrong with our culture in order for those problems to arise.

What is required is something contributor Stephen Sterling calls “ecological intelligence”: that is, an understanding of the interrelationship of all living things. This is the principle informing Karen Blincoe’s case for “re-educating the person”, and Kate Davies’ model of a “learning society”. If ecological intelligence is to survive and flourish, we need to resist what Stibbe calls, in his essay on advertising, “the pseudo-satisfier discourse” of the contemporary mass media. One stratagem might be the “ecocritical” approach to everyday experience, as persuasively set forth by Greg Garrard.

We are also reminded that the forces that are oppressing nature are simultaneously repressing our humanity. We are exhorted to “find meaning without consuming” (Paul Maiteny), to widen our aesthetics to include natural beauty as a “way of knowing” (Barry Bignell), and to discover new ways of “being-in-the-world” (John Danvers). This last initiative involves regarding the self as “open work”, as process rather than as object. As such, it is continually emerging and merging with “the unfolding communal mind”, itself inseparable from the whole “web of being”. In that sense, we may say that the self makes sense only when it is viewed in the context of a human culture that is tied to a more-than-human nature.

Leavis and Thompson had too limited a view of both these spheres, and reading Danvers’ essay, along with many others in this volume, brings into focus just how far we have to move beyond them. Again, although Leavis and Thompson’s intuition that to promote a way of life that is in touch with the Earth demands critical awareness was sound enough, it has to be understood in a much wider and deeper sense. Sustainability Literacy helps us to do just that, and in doing so equips us to confront the unprecedented challenges to come.

Laurence Coupe

Harriet Ritvo,  The Dawn of Green: Manchester, Thirlmere, and Modern Environmentalism (University of Chicago Press, 2009)

Times Higher Education

12 November 2009

Prior to picking up The Dawn of Green, I had been re-reading Edward Abbey’s novel The Monkey Wrench Gang. First published in 1975, it concerns the activities of four misfits with a shared love of wilderness. They wage a war on behalf of nature by using monkey wrenches to disable any machinery that is being deployed to degrade, pollute or destroy the environment. Having some success in this venture, they decide on their ultimate project: to destroy the Glen Canyon Dam, which Abbey believed had had disastrous consequences for the Colorado River and its surrounding ecosystem. Abbey, the self-styled “desert anarchist”, wanted the novel to have an impact on global environmentalism, even though in the real world, Glen Canyon was a lost cause. But he was not disappointed. Four years after the novel appeared, a group of “wilderness warriors” called Earth First! was founded with the express aim of realising his dream of direct action: that is, violence against the machine but not against people. It is still going strong.

After such excitement, the case scrupulously documented by the historian Harriet Ritvo in her new book may seem very tame, and even irrelevant. In 1875, the Waterworks Committee of Manchester planned to transform Thirlmere, a lake in Cumberland, into a reservoir, thereby ensuring a plentiful supply of clean water for Mancunians. News of the plan led to the formation of the Thirlmere Defence Association, a highly respectable body comprising landowners, small farmers, residents, regular visitors and journalists. The association failed, the work was undertaken (after a series of delays) and, by 1894, the reservoir was functioning.

There were no crazy activists involved, there was no sabotage and there was no positive outcome. So why should we be interested? One good reason is the quality that may initially seem unpromising: Ritvo’s attention to detail. Her book conveys in vividly minute particulars how difficult and frustrating the campaign must have been, and how divided the campaigners were in their loyalties. Without such detail, lessons cannot be learnt. Nor is documentation allowed to obscure the larger picture. Ritvo shows the whole business to be, in contrary ways, representative of its times: “if Manchester was the icon of the Victorian future, the Lake District was the icon of nature, poetry and heritage”.

It was in the spirit of the poet William Wordsworth that the Victorian cultural critic John Ruskin spoke out passionately against the Thirlmere scheme. Inspired by both, Canon H.D. Rawnsley took a leading role in the Thirlmere Defence Association. He found, in the end, that compromise was the only answer – coaxing concessions to the environment from the committee here and there – but it was his experience of this campaign that prompted him to go on to help found the National Trust in 1895. All this material is clearly and carefully narrated here, with the added interest of copious illustrations.

But what of the wider significance of Ritvo’s painstaking scholarship? In her penultimate chapter, she informs us that, in the first decade of the 20th century, the city planners of San Francisco designated the spectacular Hetch Hetchy Valley as the site of the city’s future water supply. The fact that the valley was part of the Yosemite National Park did not deter them. To counter a well-orchestrated protest campaign, the planners turned to Manchester for advice. The advice worked, and the project was completed. As Ritvo remarks: “The defenders of Thirlmere … never stood a chance, and the same was true of the defenders of Hetch Hetchy Valley.”

I began reading this book with the assumption that Edward Abbey would have thought life too short to bother with it. But I ended it by reflecting that he may well have read it carefully, resolved to learn its sombre, scholarly lesson – and then renewed the struggle more vigorously than ever.

Laurence Coupe

Terry Eagleton,  Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (Yale University Press, 2009)

Times Higher Education

10 September 2009

With this witty and polemical book, Terry Eagleton finally fulfils the promise of his early years as a left-wing Catholic. Here at last is his defence of Christianity as a radical movement comparable to, and compatible with, Marxism. It is prompted by his sense of outrage at the arrogant pronouncements on religion made by those self-appointed guardians of rationality, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, whose names he satirically conflates into one entity, “Ditchkins”.

Ditchkins believes that religion is infantile, superstitious nonsense that deserves no respect because it provides a false explanation of the world. In doing so, Ditchkins declares himself to be nothing more than a throwback to the 19th-century school of liberal rationalism and, beyond that, the Enlightenment.

He still has not woken up to the fact that scripture is not the same sort of thing as a scientific treatise. Thus, Ditchkins – here, specifically, Hitchens – claims that “thanks to the telescope and the microscope, (religion) no longer offers an explanation of anything important”.

This is risible enough as it stands, but Eagleton was never one to resist a humorous analogy: “Christianity was never meant to be an explanation of anything in the first place. It is rather like saying that thanks to the electric toaster we can forget about Chekhov.”

So much for the “reason” in the book’s title. What about the faith? The very conviction that reason offers all the answers is itself a matter of belief, persuasion … and faith. For we are dealing with a language that is “performative rather than propositional”, and that goes for liberal rationalists in their colleges as much as for devout believers in their churches.

While religious piety can escalate into fanaticism, so too can the secular fetish of pure reason. Here theology has a distinct advantage: reason, for St Thomas Aquinas, is inseparable from ethical commitment, from communal responsibility, from fellow-feeling – in short, from “love”.

And so we come, in a roundabout way, to the third term in the book’s title: revolution. What Eagleton’s reading of the Gospels tells him is that we should not be anticipating the Messianic kingdom (Jesus himself refused to play the expected role of Messiah), any more than the forcible and final establishment of a classless society. Rather, we should be following Jesus’ example in identifying with the poor and the persecuted, trying to ensure that there is no more exploitation, hunger, war or torture.

Eschewing violence himself, Eagleton cannot avoid addressing the atrocities carried out in the name of Islam. What he concludes is this: “The solution to religious terror is secular justice.” Here he might seem to hover around a contradiction, since he could be read as giving succour to those who say that the Enlightenment would be acceptable if only it had worked. In this connection, he is not apologetic enough for my liking about Karl Marx himself, who notoriously praised capitalism for its rapid process of industrialisation because it fitted into his own progressive scheme.

That said, it is reassuring to see Eagleton conclude his book with a brief defence of the “tragic humanism” that he sees as the necessary alternative to the absurdly confident “liberal humanism” of Ditchkins.

Moreover, as someone who agrees with Michel Serres that what we need is an ecologically informed “religion of the world”, I am particularly pleased to see Eagleton express more than once his concern about the damage that humanity is doing to nature in the name of progress.

Perhaps in his next book, we may see him espouse a politics that is as much green as red, and a theology based not only on Aquinas but also on St Francis of Assisi and Hildegard of Bingen.

Laurence Coupe