In Island (No 86, Winter, 2001), the poet John Kinsella gives a moving account of the cruel and violent killing of feral cats where he grew up in south west Australia.[1] As a result, though aware of the damage cats do to native fauna, he argues, 'The answer to the problem is not as simple as eradication. For something closer to the truth we should look much closer to home that is, within ourselves.' (Kinsella, 58) I sympathise but suggest that:
1. his argument is too species orientated and needs broadening out;
2. a feral cat eradication program is an important part of a holistic approach to conservation management; and
3. the scale of environmental degradation needs further acknowledgement.
Genetic studies suggest cats reached Australia in the 17th C on Dutch shipwrecks and even earlier from Indonesia. Feral cat colonies were recorded in Australia 150 years ago and John Gould expressed concern that cats were reducing native fauna as early as 1863.[2] There is plenty of evidence that cats impact on native fauna though hard to quantify.[3] It is not just a matter of being digested, toxoplasmosis is transmitted by cats and is a disease which can damage the central nervous system of native wildlife (and humans). However, feline appetites can be gauged from Marion Island where five cats were introduced in 1949. By 1975, their descendants were estimated to be eating 450,000 burrowing petrels annually.[4] Extinctions caused by cats have been recorded, for example, the Macquarie Island red-fronted parakeet and land rail. Already, since European settlement, about 27 NSW mammals have become extinct and over 400 plant species are considered either endangered or vulnerable – it is the worst record in the world, this trend needs to be reversed.[5] Native species are at risk of extinction from cats throughout Australia. In John Kinsella's patch - south-west Australia, 15 Australian Nature Conservation Agency (ANCA) listed species are categorised as at risk from cat predation.[6]
According to Sue Taylor, ‘In Australia, cats are known to feed on more than 347 native species: that's 186 species of birds, 64 mammals, 86 reptiles, at least 10 amphibians and numerous invertebrates.' [7] She calculates that, ‘A cat eats 300 grams of meat each day. A male blue wren weighs 8.9 grams. A male brown antechinus weighs 35 grams. So, a feral cat surviving on blue wrens and brown antechinus would need to kill the equivalent of seven antechinus and six blue wrens each day.‘ This is obviously a worst case scenario.[8] In one Sydney national park, it is estimated that 25 feral cats are resident with a further 680 domestic cats living within 100 metres of the park boundary.[9] Conservative estimates suggest that Australia has over 5 million feral cats. So what do we do – nothing? Morality only involves choices, usually difficult ones, often due to conflicting priorities.
Kinsella's argument
As a young man, John Kinsella was traumatised by the savagery of the 'sport' of killing feral cats on farms in the wheatbelt of south-west Australia. These visceral experiences led him to veganism and the main thesis he presents: 'The feral cat, I said, is a scapegoat. It has been used to carry the sins of the invaders.' (Kinsella, 56). It is a valid insight. Cats are used to externalise the problem and provide a target to hold responsible. Can we learn from recent history here?[10] Scapegoating though, is not the only reason why, 'Some of the most vehement conversations I've had with fellow Australians have been over the feral cat situation.'(55) Cats are widely recognised as destructive, ('killing machines', Kinsella writes) and not always eating the kill.
I agree when Kinsella writes, 'In reality it [abhorence of feral cats] symbolises the inability of the invader to control his/her environment, to consolidate the conquest effectively. Out of control, it shows the destruction such settlement has brought to the land. It is a symbol of failure. To appease the conscience, this stain on the land must be removed but it . . . [cannot] eradicate the crime because the destruction is all around us.' (56) The problem is not caused by feral cats alone, farming practices, land clearing, urban lifestyles are also to blame. There's no simple technical solution, the perilous situation for our wildlife is a crisis of politics, of values and lifestyle.
But he then writes, 'But to kill the cats and leave the farm would be hypocritical one brings the other. They are part of the same destructive machine.' (58) There is a difference. Farming is destructive but does produce food and wealth which through taxation contributes to schools, roads etc. Raymond Williams argued that agriculture must come back into focus.[11] The fact that cats alone are not to blame is no reason not to make a start given what we know. And if farming was at the heart of the issue, we should be arguing for the consumption of those kangaroo species that have flourished since European farming was introduced and which provide a sustainable resource (unless we are vegan or vegetarian). This is primarily to conserve the fragile soils of this ancient continent and minimise soil erosion, weed infestation and salination. Chris Dickman regards sheep as one of the worst threats to biodiversity.[12]
Kinsella seems plain wrong when he writes, 'The death of any creature is equivalent to the death of another. A life for a life doesn't add up for me.' Does this mean life cannot be measured but death can? In which case, and IF one cat eats seven antechinus and six blue wrens daily, then it is 17 to 1 – in measures of life and death. Of course, this makes little sense, the reason being not only that we do value a human life over an ant's but also that life is not available to arithmetic. As Aristotle argued (contra Plato’s form of the Good), honour, practical wisdom and pleasure are separate and different goods. The world is packed with incommensurables - but IF you had to choose (and morality involves choice, sometimes under duress) between saving the lives of a breeding pair of toolache wallabies (Macropus greyi) last recorded in 1927 or a pair of feral cats – which would you save? Or if you had to kill a pair – which would it be? Life may be absolute but it is embedded in a large picture – the process of biodiversity which I discuss below.
Your purring eating machine
Cats were probably domesticated by humans (or vice versa) about 8,000 years ago in Egypt and the Indus Valley with the introduction of farming, surplus, food storage and subsequent jumps in rat populations. The domestic cat, pictured as early as 3600BP in Eighteenth Dynasty Egyptian art, is a killer. 'A domestic cat will hunt and kill no matter how well fed it is. One study estimated that on average each pet cat kills 32 vertebrates each year. It is estimated that there are 3-million pet cats in Australia. This adds up to a total of 96-million birds, mammals and reptiles killed each year by domestic cats alone.’ (Sue Taylor). Dickman notes that evidence from suburban Adelaide suggests that 'predation by cats will remove at least 50% of the standing bird populations or destroy all the young being hatched.' (Dickman, 10). It is not just a feral cat problem.
Susan Bratton distinguishes forms of love, she writes, 'Without agape, human love for nature will always be dominated by unrestrained eros and distorted by extreme self-interest and material valuation.'[13] I'd argue that human love for their pets is eros, not agape (nor philia) while indigenous relations to the land being tied through responsibility is agape.[14] Konrad Lorenz loved dogs but realised they were poor substitutes for their ancestor, the wolf, having diminished brains, serious congenital defects from inbreeding and lacking the intelligence and independence that 'wild' engenders.[15] Persistent inbreeding began in England in the 18th C as a means of fixing a breed's traits – this was the age of improvement of nature.[16] Here I agree with Kinsella, 'One of the most distressing aspects of the feral cat situation is the vanity of domestic cat owners. The desire to fetishise their animals, to own a pet as part of their home entertainment system.' (58).[17]
Then there's the small matter of killing. There is no moral absolute, we can at least argue about scenarios of self-defence or euthanasia or survival (the straws in a lifeboat scenario). Peter Doherty points out that, 'Like all life, we depend on an energy web that requires the consumption of other species. Should we eat meat if we have so many genes in common with cattle, pigs and sheep? Well we also share genetic similarities with potatoes: If we did not eat our more distant relatives we would starve to death. Could human beings have ever moved off the African veldt to inhabit the colder parts of Europe without the access to the portable high energy source provided by meat and animal fat? In fact I believe that it's worth asking very seriously whether any useful moral or ethical system can operate in denial of either our place in the natural world or the part played by our evolutionary history in determining what we are.' [18]
Pete Singer, the most well known animal rights theorist, believes that it is all a matter of diminishing pain. He writes, 'It must be admitted that the existence of carnivorous animals does pose a problem for the ethics of Animal Liberation . . . Assuming humans could eliminate carnivorous species from the earth, and that the total amount of suffering among animals were thereby reduced should we do it?'[19] He answers 'We cannot and should not try and police all of nature.' But his position offers no support for this statement, whereas, my position which I will outline below can.
We must take responsibility for our survival and consumption. It is only in the last hundred years or so that we have separated food from animals. William Cronon notes that, 'In a world of farms and small towns, the ties between field, pasture, butcher shop, and dinner table were everywhere apparent . . . [later] it was not easy to remember that eating was a moral act inextricably bound to killing.'[20] This is part of our alienation from 'nature' discussed below.
I'm not arguing that we must kill cats to ensure our survival. Whether I would shoot a feral cat is an unknown. I have only shot ducks at a fairground and they were made of metal. I divide hunting into three categories:
1. traditional hunting; which typically involves a close relationship between hunter and prey.[21]
2. hunting for sport; 'They hold hunting to be part of life. They feel this is part of being a man . . . This is a huge male bonding experience.'[22]
3. hunting for work; for example, a national park ranger doing a job, with varying degrees of skill, enthusiasm and job satisfaction.
I assume there is a hierarchy for animal rights thinkers, that sports hunting is considered worst, that hunting for food is separated from sport or traditional ceremonial killings - with differing views on the rights of indigenous peoples to hunt.[23] These categories all have blurred boundaries. Matt Cartmill has shown that as Western culture became modern, moral approbation of hunting began.[24] Ted Kerasote has examined modern hunting cultures and his own personal journey from vegetarian to wild meat eater due to his commitment to a place which would, in his judgement, be more harmed by converting natural habitat to agricultural land than by killing animals for food.[25]
Then there is the use of baits and traps to kill cats which I would certainly use (though not cruel steel-jawed traps). Reigning in the slaughter of our unique heritage seems to me a step we must take quickly. Research is being undertaken to improve the effectiveness of baits and traps to control feral cats. Biological control, such as fertility control, is also being investigated. However, Sarah Hartwell of 'The Feral Cat Coalition' favours 'Trap-neuter-return methods'.[26] This is ludicrous - too expensive and logistically impossible in Australia. Kinsella's objection seems to be about pain as much as life – but pain is ephemeral,, and impossible to weigh - does one cat feel 100 times the pain of a blue wren? [27] And how to weigh the worth of a life – the question asked in the old balloon game (or back on the lifeboat).
There are always complications - are exotic species that are self introduced less worthy of our attempts at extermination?[28] Can reason help us here? Benjamin Franklin gave up eating meat then on board a ship he saw and smelt a plate of fish – 'I balanced some time between Principle and Inclination: till I recollected, that when the Fish were opened, I saw smaller Fish taken out of their Stomaches. Then thought I, if you eat one another, I don’t see why we mayn’t eat you. . . So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable Creature, since it enables one to find or make a Reason for every thing one has a mind to do.'[29]
'Such a marvel is this fifteen billion year process; such infinite numbers of stars in the heavens and living beings on Earth, such limitless variety of flowering species and forms of animal life, such tropical luxuriance, such magnificent scenery in the mountains, and such springtime wonders as occur each year. Now we are experiencing the pathos of witnessing the desecration of this sublimity. We now need to tell this story, meditate on it, and listen to it as it is told by every breeze that blows, by every cloud in the sky, by every mountain and river and woodland, and by the song of every cricket. We have lost contact with our story.’ Thomas Berry[30]
For more than ninety-nine percent of the time Homo sapiens has lived on Earth, human culture worked through palaeolithic gatherer-hunter-fisher forms of living. Their cultural and psychological patterns appear cross culturally similar. Understanding natural processes and cycles was essential to survival, and their sense of their environment approaches the phenomenological part of the our notion of ecological consciousness, an identification of the self and humans as belonging to a complex natural environment.[31] This was a sacred narrative that manifested in reverence for life. One possible ethical implication of this form of environmental consciousness was the Pythagoreans' refusal to kill any form of life, or to eat any food that was the result of killing. But pre-Socratic thought began in urban areas – already the separation from nature had begun.
I'd argue that whichever Biblical creation account one chooses, the 'hard' command to ‘rule’ and ‘subdue’ the land or the 'softer' stance – the command to ‘work’ and ‘take care of’ the land (in Genesis 1 & 2), both acknowledge the power humans bring to bear upon the world. We no longer have 'one story' and the grand narratives that are crucial to the process of 'legitimation' of institutions now face 'incredulity' or suspicion.[32] Any text or representation is subject to deconstruction, hermeneutic forensics and professional expertise.
The two main causes for our contempt for natural environments are:
· Our Judeo-Christian heritage.[33] and
· the 17th Century call for the 'domination of nature' – the rule of science and technology, and instrumental rationality[34]
Both have been associated variously with:
§ the aestheticisation of nature, 'one of the most profound revolutions in thought that has ever occurred';[35]
§ the de-aestheticisation of nature, from the close relation of painting, landscape gardening and landscapes, art came to be seen as superior.[36]
§ the domination of humans which, from the Frankfurt School perspective, involves domination of nature;[37]
§ the technologisation of the world;[38]
§ patriarchy - ecofeminists have made both anthropocentric and androcentric (male-centred) critiques;[39]
§ capitalist modes of production, including agriculture;[40]
§ urbanisation and our physical removal from natural environments and increased division of labour;[41] and
§ writing.[42]
In reaction, environmental thinking began in the 1860s with three interwoven strands: the back to the land movement, the scientific conservation movement, and the wilderness movement.[43] It is a long way from deep ecology coined by Arne Naess in 1972 to describe the ecocentric approach to Nature a paradigm shift which questions Western presumption of human superiority over nature and suggests that spiritual transformation is required.[44]
Biodiversity - a very recent concept
Environmental pioneers like John Muir and Thoreau lacked the concept of biodiversity - a key concept poorly understood, as I discovered while co-drafting the NSW biodiversity strategy. Cultural diversity is appreciated widely, why not biodiversity? It appeared as a keyword in Biological Abstracts as recently as the early 1990s. The concept is more precise than 'nature' and more holistic than 'endangered species' and was developed by conservation biologists to hone a sharp normative edge to a nebulous scientific core.
The definition of a concept so fundamental to the ongoing survival of life mutates readily. David Takacs in The Idea of Biodiversity complains that the concept is poorly defined but does little to rectify the situation. His provides a rather anthropomorphic definition, ' . . . the multitude of real-world organisms, species and processes commingled with biologists' factual, emotional, political, aesthetic, spiritual, and ethical values of the natural world, all combined to shape public perceptions, actions, and feelings.' [45]
My definition, which I'll raise to be knocked down, is: the continually changing array of life forms, plants, animals and micro-organisms, their genes and the resulting ecosystems that form a unique, never to be repeated, evolutionary process that connects all life originating from the energy and matter at the beginning of the universe.
Biodiversity is more than the exotic set of all varieties of species - it includes genetic and ecosystem diversity. All three layers depend on each other. This ties in with what dialectical biologists propose as a relational model of nature. Developmental biologist Susan Oyama explains that genotypes are one interacting influence 'ecologically embedded developmental systems' in levels (physiological, psychological, ecological, etc.) which all contribute, none is more real or causally determining than others. We live inside living, dynamic, interactive 'entanglement' of interdependencies.[46]
Species diversity is the simplest approach and one most readily understood and empathised with. Most of us have seen the shaky black and white images of the last thylacine, the Tasmanian tiger, pacing its cage in Hobart zoo.[47] The importance of extinction leans on the notion of biodiversity and though extinction is a natural part of evolution, the rate of extinction has increased dramatically due to human activity.[48] Continuing damage to ecosystems, particularly the destruction and fragmentation of habitat, represents a major threat to biodiversity.
From this perspective:
§ extinction may be a natural process but it is a tragic one.[49]
§ there is no reason to think that our own species will not suffer this fate.[50]
§ current extinctions lead to extinctions of experience.[51]
§ human actions that cause or exacerbate extinctions are immoral.[52]
§ each individual life is unique and valuable as part of this total process.[53]
Peter Doherty situates us both inside and outside the process. He explains, 'What the comparison of the human and other genomes does show us beyond any reasonable doubt is the validity of Darwinian natural selection. We are part of nature, and have evolved with nature, and that really can now be in no doubt. For us as scientists, natural selection and Darwinism are essentially synonymous. We have to be clear that contemporary human societies are not undergoing natural selection at the moment. The rule of law, social support systems, vaccination, the practice of modern medicine, all serve to neutralise possible selective forces.'[54] We must take responsibility because we now find ourselves, in a sense, outside the loop.
Aldo Leopold's 1949 book, A Sand County Almanac, both anticipated the concept of biodiversity and founded the notion of a 'land ethic' giving respect to plants, animals, and humans.[55] Leopold's most explicit statement on this ethic is, ‘In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such.’ (Leopold, 204). The concept of Land Ethic has led to the notion of ecocentrism (or biocentrism) which broadens the ethical beyond human society (and further than animal rights people might want to go). In this context, the concept of 'bioregion' help to locate us in the world and develop a sense of place. Bioregions are determined initially by use of descriptive natural sciences but essentially understood in terms of a phenomenology of experience of place and living in that place in a sustainable way.[56]
The north American writer, J. Baird Callicott offers a realistic definition of 'sustainable development' - 'the initiation of human economic activity that is limited by ecological exigencies; economic activity that does not seriously compromise ecological integrity; and, ideally, economic activity that positively promotes ecosystem health.[57] Animal and human populations do not naturally follow these guidelines. In Richard Dawkin's phrase, 'the selfish gene' is at work. Australian land management practices has not followed these rules either through the radical change in its patterns of land management in the past two hundred years, compared with more than 10,000 years in the Middle East.[58]
The land ethic implies that we are not free to kill cats on a whim but is cited by Callicott in defence of killing feral cats, ‘[I]t would also be wrong for the federal fish and wildlife agency, in the interest of individual animal welfare, to permit populations of deer, rabbits, feral burros, or whatever to increase unchecked and thus to threaten the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic communities of which they are members. The land ethic not only provides moral considerability for the biotic community per se, but ethical consideration for its individual members is pre-empted by concern for the preservation of the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. The land ethic, thus, not only has a holistic aspect; it is holistic with a vengeance.'[59] Such an ethic has close ties with indigenous practices and beliefs about country where responsibility to country is a key tie.
Kinsella is opposed to protecting endangered species if individuals of non-endangered species are killed in the process. This follows the utilitarian animal rights philosophy of Pete Singer and natural rights philosophy of Tom Regan in terms of individual organisms being what counts in ethical discourse and not natural systems.[60] I hold Callicott's position.[61] And this is the key to our disagreement – the choice made from three ethical perspectives: anthropocentrism; animal rights; environmental holism. Clearly, the traditional ethical categories of the good, of value, duty etc. developed for human society, are not applicable for confronting environmental destruction.
The term 'ecology' relates to the study of ecosystems and green politics to a view that everything is interconnected which has ethical dimensions.[62] Les Murray has suggested, ‘[E]cological consciousness . . . is a new form of a very ancient sense of the interrelatedness of all things.’[63] The 'balance of nature' concept includes 'interelatedness' but suggests that animal and plant communities undergo a predictable linear pattern of change that results in a stable but diverse 'climax community', representing virgin landscape (Eden). A different paradigm pictures continually changing, dynamic configuration of natural elements - an ecosystem. This concept emphasises that the plants, animals, micro-organisms and environments all interact with each other and create change the 'flux of nature' that emphasises the importance of processes within the system and unpredictable nature of these changes. Human actions effect all natural systems in unique, highly variable, and historically contingent ways.[64] A weak sense of the social construction of nature is lurking in that there are various ways of living in natural environments and of shaping these environments and the fact that we have no unmediated direct access to 'Nature'.
The founding father of deep ecology, the Norwegian Arne Naess argues that, ‘a human being is not a thing in an environment, but a juncture in a relational system without determined boundaries in space and time.’[65] The processural view of the nature of things involves a fundamental shift in our understanding of nature and is expressed as 'flux of nature' rather than the 'balance of nature' metaphor.[66] To quote the Marxist geographer David Harvey, 'I think it far more consistent with both the better sorts of environmental thinking and Marx's dialectical materialism to construe ourselves as embedded within an on-going flow of living processes that we can individually and collectively affect through our actions, at the same time as we are profoundly affected by all manner of events (some self-induced) within the world we inhabit.'[67] Metaphor is a way of connecting to the world. Mark Johnson argues that, ‘[M]eaning and rationality are grounded in recurring structures of embodied human understanding.’[68] At the heart of language is metaphor and the physical experiential world. Our experiences provide image schemata, ‘recurring, dynamic pattern[s] of our perceptual interactions and motor programs that give . . . coherence and structure to our experience.’[69]
From within this fluid paradigm, one cannot agree when Kinsella writes, 'I pray for the native animals. I am on their side as well. But this [feral cats] is the order of things there now . . .' (58). There is no order, no great chain of being, just a contingent history of human expansion into almost every ecological niche on the planet, imperialism writ large. However, I don't share such a deep-time systems view Sagan and Margulis champion, the Gaia hypothesis, that challenges us to abandon our 'extraordinarily short-sighted mammalocentric view' by realizing how recent a species human beings are (three million years compared to 700 million years of existence of marine and other animals). They suggest that rather than viewing ourselves as the end-point of evolution, we should see ourselves as 'a very small and very recent part of a much larger and older system.'[70] But not all biotas are created equal. The life on this planet is life we co-evolved with, which we belong to and have affinities and phobias with (from cats to viruses). We still place humans above flies in terms of value.[71][72] Difference has been scrutinised lately and we are aware of its role in racism and the role of anthropologist Franz Boas. His student Margaret Mead wrote, ‘We have stood out against any grading of cultures in hierarchical systems which would place our own culture at the top and place the other cultures of the world in a descending scale according to the extent that they differ from ours.’
Thus I'd argue that I am a speciesist, but to a much lesser degree than Kinsella. Speciesism is a term Pete Singer uses to describe anthropocentricism which we can all be found guilty of. Eric Katz quotes Naees, 'More is open to the human ecological self than can be experienced by any other living being.' And comments, 'It is difficult to interpret this last statement in a nonanthropecentric way.' [73][74] Christopher Stone is not interested in such distinctions, 'That trees are not afforded rights is an indication that we have failed correctly to see what trees are like, what needs and interests they have and how they can themselves be benefited and harmed.'
There may be reason to risk one's life or liberty for the trees as a few green activists do or to ignore trees, as Pablo Neruda wrote:
And you'll ask: why doesn't his poetry
speak of dreams and leaves
and the great volcanoes of his native land?
Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see
The blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood
In the streets![75]
One possible argument against killing feral cats (which Kinsella does not use) is the danger (and hubris) of meddling in complex ecosystems. The introduction of the Cane Toad to the cane fields of North Queensland from Hawaii in 1935 to control a beetle pest is a well-known disaster. Consequences - foreseen and unforeseen - dog every action we take.[76] The new discipline of ecological restoration is well aware of these problems and is not wanting to 'control the environment' (Kinsella, 56). It is also on a very different footing to the 18th century's 'new morality of improvement' of nature as evinced by Daniel Defoe in his Tour of England and Wales (1720) which avoids any hint of a pastoral or general empathy to nature.[77]
Deep ecologists warn of attempting to manage nature, '[I]ncreasingly intensive management produces a host of unintended consequences which are perceived by the managers and public, and specially the environmental/ecology movement, as real and severe problems. The usual approach, however, is to seek more intensive management, which spawns even more problems.' [78]
The issues arising from this new discipline borrow philosophical and technical arguments from the art world. Resulting ecosystems have been described as 'analogous to an art forgery' (Robert Eliot), or even 'an unrecognised manifestation of the insidious dream of the human domination of nature.'[79] We should not be so fixated on abstract categories. As Pickett & Parker emphasise, there is no unique and knowable reference state, the climax or primeval community, that can guide the restoration process and that intervention must be an ongoing process. [80] There is no pristine authentic condition. Australia had been already substantially modified by thousands of years of Aboriginal occupation, particularly through the use of fire.[81] However, a healthy biodiversity with natural habitats and ecosystems is the most efficient means of preventing land degradation and maintaining healthy soils and water supplies which are essential for the survival of life forms including humans. Ecological integrity may be assessed in terms of dynamic processes that maintain the functional interactions and is compromised when elements (biodiversity) are lost and functions (energy flow, nutrient cycles) are altered. Eliot has since worked on evaluating various kinds of restoration and maintains that significant values can be added to a restoration project particularly through extrinsic restoration (removing something, e.g. cats) compared to intrinsic restoration (adding something that has gone).[82]
European cultures see people as separate from nature, whereas many indigenous peoples see themselves as living in nature with 'Wilderness' a part of everyday life, rather than a romanticised external nature tasting of the sublime. [83] William Cronon argues that we must learn to live responsibly in nature, and that legislating for wilderness areas is no solution.[84] Supporters of ecological restoration tend to ignore cultural aspects and view humans as external to nature or as threats to nature. Wilderness is less a priority since it was realised that wilderness areas require management. How much interference is allowable? Managed wilderness areas are an artificial construct, a construction of imagined naturalness.[85] Nonetheless such habitats offer irreplaceable and valuable experiences and enjoyment.
Australia is an ancient continent, a unique environment and cultural landscape - Terra Nullius is a lie. The range of possible relations to this land vary from Aboriginal spirituality, to pig-shooting to coastal retirement developments. The historian and commentator Humphrey McQueen suggested a deracinated Australia could approach Aboriginal understanding of the environment and develop a real relationship with the land by learning about the land and appreciating its aesthetics.[86] And I argue biodiversity is a magnificent rich ongoing source of aesthetic pleasure and fulfillment. Wild animals and wilderness provide 'peak experiences' connected to aesthetic experience whether from drugs, devotion or music, which Lyell Watson describes as ‘a sense of openness and freedom, a feeling of belonging, just for a moment to something bigger . . . surrender to the sympathy of all things.’ [87]
Bill McKibben pessimistically wrote, 'By changing the weather, we make every spot on earth man made and artificial. We have deprived nature of its independence and that is fatal to its meaning.'[88] One cannot equate nature with wilderness as McKibben does. 'Nature' is everywhere and I don't want to see nature opposed to techne. The power of humans to destroy emerges through techne and poetike but is also linked to the power to create through art as well as science & technology. We must take responsibility for our creativity, hunger and aggrandisement. We have no choice – we have used all three to destroy the natural environment and now have to be proactive to restore habitats and ecosystems – our interference from the beginnings of agriculture and the subsequent development of cities has made this a necessity.[89]
To save biodiversity we must think beyond the boundaries of national parks and nature reserves to our cities, to our local council practices and to our gardens and our consumption and what we do (and what we write) in daily life.[90] Our aesthetic practices (landscape painting, literature and gardening) may link to ecological perspectives. Paul Shepard writes, 'We may come to see the landscape as the story of our being. It represents the idea of a context once described as the ground of a gestalt in which being alive and being human is the figure. But that metaphor relies on a static contrast or opposition. New and better metaphors are emerging.'[91] These metaphors derive from the new ecological paradigms outlined above which must influence our social, economic and political relations.
In his pastoral poem 'Penshurst', Ben Jonson appreciates the aristocratic estate fecund with game birds, 'The painted partrich lyes in every field / And, for they messe, is willing to be killed.'[92] In fact, his host Sir Robert Sidney, was in debt and what really counted was class, 'Thou are not, Penshurst, built to envious show / Of touch or marble, nor canst boast a row / Of polished pillars . . . but stand’st an ancient pile . . .' For Jonson, social order is the natural order. I have already argued that there is no 'order' but within a new ecological framework, perhaps new social relationships can evolve and democracy reinvigorated. Raymond Williams writes, 'The world of Penshurst or of Saxham [Thomas Carew] can be seen as moral economy only by conscious selection and emphasis.'[93] Just as Jonson ignored the labouring classes, the real work – so too Kinsella closes his eyes to the larger picture of what is really happening outside our windows. It is easy to do, Edward Hoagland criticises Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez, one of my favourite books exploring cultural negotiation of a natural environment, on related lines.[94]
The Romantics attended to nature but with more self-consciousness than ecological consciousness. I disagree with Jonathan Bate when he calls Wordsworth an 'eco-poet'.[95] In the real work, writing is a part of the total ecology of our living:
sharp wave choppy line –
interface tide-flows –
seagulls sit on the meeting
eating;
we slide by white-stained cliffs.
the real work.
washing and sighing,
sliding by.
Gary Snyder, 'The real work' [96]
In a 1976 interview, Snyder (neglected as an eco-philosopher) expands on the theme (quoting the last three lines which makes him sound more fey and romantic than he is, e.g. use of 'sighing'):
Snyder: 'The real work is what we really do. And what are lives are. And if we can live with the work we have to do, knowing that we are real, and it's real, and that the world is real, then it becomes right . . . The real work is eating each other, I suppose.
Geneson: This is beginning to sound like the Auden quote – that poetry changes nothing.
Snyder: Yes. Well in that sense poetry does no more than wood-chopping, or automobile repair, or anything else does because they're all equally real.' [97]
There's also a place in all this reality for the empiricism of Francis Bacon and rationalism of Rene Descartes, though they helped develop our view of the natural world as a commodity of instrumental use only. In a democracy, in a complex evolving world, processes of decision-making require careful analysis and technological inputs. But we must remain open to the experiences of engaging with the issues we have discussed. To do this we must spread our empathy, which is problematic, as David Orr succinctly writes, 'I do not know whether it is possible to love the planet or not, but I do know that it is possible to love the places we can see, touch, smell and experience.' [98] Through agape or philia (not eros), we can link a sense of place and its biota with Gray Snyder's, Arne Naess's and Erich Fromm's notions of self-realisation suggest that we can be at home in nature if we become aware of nature. Thoreau, Leopold and Carlson were scientists of varying professionalism who recognised that such knowledge should be 'supplemented by personal acquaintance, appreciation, and celebration of wild things and wild places.[99] This is an increasingly limiting option, Anthony Weston points out that 'Although wild experiences may be the starting point . . there are only a few, ritualised and hackneyed ways to speak for it in a culture that does not share it.'[100] This is where art can work.
For Wendell Berry, ‘The real work of planet-saving will be small, humble, and humbling, and (insofar as it involves love) pleasing and rewarding. Its jobs will be too many to count, too many to report, too many to be publicly noticed or rewarded, too small to make anyone rich or famous.’[101] The real work involves politics at some level and may involve killing and may involve writing. Lawrence Buell, a leading eco-critical theorist, argues, ‘the potency of the environmental text consisted not just in the reader’s transaction with it but also in reanimating and redirecting the reader’s transactions with nature.’([102]) Bryan Norton, a pragmatic environmentalist, argues for a consensus-building approach among differing green attitudes, e.g. between Conservationists, tending to an anthropocentric wise use of nature and Preservationists, more biocentric attitude to nature. Many share both approaches, we must see what can be achieved.[103] I am no 'deep ecologist' and believe the notion of 'cultural landscape' has some part to play.[104]
Aristotle thought ethics is not a science or a theory but a form of practical reasoning to reach practical wisdom, phronesis. Aristotle wrote 'The mark of a prudent man [is] to be able to deliberate rightly about what is good and what is advantageous for himself; not in particular respects, e.g. what is good for health or physical strength, but what is conducive to the good life generally.'[105] An updated naturalistic ethics should take into account the needs of homo sapiens in the broadest sense.[106] Thinking, feeling, imagining and living one’s life within a community and the larger structures of sociology and history and politics are all relevant. What ought to be done depends on what can be done and the old vocabularies of 'duty' or 'the good' seem archaic.[107]
With regard to the killing of cats, Leopold offers a simple moral criteria for action, '[a] thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong if it tends otherwise.' (Leopold, 224-5).[108] To follow Leopold's maxim we must take responsibility for knowing what happens on our behalf, not just for our actions (or refusal to act), and then act accordingly. This is on an individual basis - moral acts are non-rational, non-rule guided, personal and potentially anarchic.[109] Apart from which Antonio Damasio has demonstrated, using case studies of patients with neurological deficits, that without emotional responses, reasoning is impossible. Rationality requires making choices and predicting outcomes but if these choices cannot be rationally made if the outcomes have no meaning for these patients.[110] This is a basic difficulty for utilitarianism. I believe virtue based ethics fits better with our sense of morality.
An ethics of place could be valuable and for that we must 'live in such a way that we may gradually become attuned to the place . . . [and] place must be experienced differently.'[111] This may include hunting as a good way to become attuned – 'They reacted to the faintest signals of sound and smell, intuitively relating them to all other conditions of the environment and then interpreting them to achieve the greatest possible capture of game.'[112] David Rothenberg talks of deep ecology as 'thinking of the landscape first, before human needs, and then devising technologies, and management, that stem from a rootedness in place and nature.' [113]
A processural view sees life as part of an ongoing process, so that we have moral responsibilities and debts to the process that engendered us though feeling for a process is abstracted (one can feel for Timmy, one's pet cat or feel for cats known or imagined, but feeling for a species of cat, or cat genes or cat habitats gets further from the emotional significance and poses difficulties of value). William Grey asks how far can a land ethic go? '[T]here are limits to how far the sense of a moral community can be extended. There is plenty of significant organisation and structure at microscopic and cosmic levels, but there is no plausible sense of community that includes quarks and quasars.' [114] Without God, without Kantian imperatives, without jurisprudence, can life be this simple? Can death be so accommodating? I believe so if we hold to a naturalistic ethics and open ourselves to experiencing natural environments, wide open if we are without the framework of Christianity for Wendell and Thomas Berry or Buddhism for Gary Snyder.[115]
It depends on which story we tell. The anthropologist Tim Ingold writes, ‘Far from dressing up a plain reality with layers of metaphor, or representing it, map-like, in the imagination, songs, stories, and designs serve to conduct the attention of performers into the world, deeper and deeper, as one proceeds from outward appearance to an ever more intense poetic involvement.’[116] Poetry is often omitted from such lists.[117]
Osip Mandelstam said Darwin ‘possessed the courage to be prosaic precisely because he had so much to say and did not feel obliged to express rapture or gratitude to anyone.’[118] Darwin's legacy has evolved to biodiversity - the current story with so much to say – a rich concept opening up vast narratives which we are still exploring.[119] Poetry still has a crucial role to play – poetry works language hard to cross epistemological and imaginative gaps and overcome habitual perception.[120] Philosophy cannot help us here as Rorty admits.[121][122] But other stories weave in and out, I have focussed on wildlife whereas animal rights arguments focus on domesticated animals and the cruelty of sating our appetite. This is an argument against the orphic model, against symbolist or Platonic ideas – the ordinary is what is miraculous.
Kinsella writes pointedly, 'Returning land to bushland, cessation of the farming of hooved animals which chop and destroy the topsoil, the end to chemical abuse, the abandonment of genetic modification, the winding down of polluting industries these are all part of what s necessary. Do those things and get back to me. Otherwise, it s not even worth broaching as a subject.' (57) I hope to have shown that the problem of feral cats is worth broaching as a subject but realise that Kinsella will be waiting a long while to hear what he wants to hear.
CODA
I started the following poem immersed within a habitat rich in biodiversity and species numbers while recognising that my presence was as a tourist – I was not hungry, not killing anything and not fully involved or alert (dependent physically, socially, emotionally). The arts are a way of involvement, of becoming aware of environments, of one's practice in them. It is not just about aesthetics but also about a sense of well being in the present within a sense of the future.
Doors wide open
Northern Territory, 2000
The scene is a mixture
of the commonplace and rare
of the terrestrial and aerial.
The sky is widening and lifting,
its floodplains glitter
with bright objects of dawn -
spoonbills, egrets, herons, ibis,
dipped in candescent leavening lux.
It’s too easy, I’ve eaten.
Above a lone jabiru, magpie geese fly
a military formation into the fierce sun.
Cane toads have breached Mataranka.
'I write a poem by dint of mighty celebration [the bird] walks a better one just by lifting his foot.' Leopold (162).
Responsible cat ownership (NSW NPWS guidelines)
Keep your cat at home, either inside the house or in an enclosed outside 'cattery' during the day and particularly at night.
Provide sufficient food and shelter for your cat.
Identify your cat with a collar, tag, or microchip.
Put three large bells on your cat's collar as a warning to wildlife.
Desex your cat to prevent unwanted litters.
Never feed a stray cat unless you intend to care for it as a pet.
Build a cat-proof boundary fence to keep your cat in the yard.
Provide cat-free environments in your garden by building a cat-proof area for wildlife.
Explain to friends and neighbours how to look after their cats to protect native wildlife.
John Bennett is a former policy officer with NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service.
For a recent view of the feral problem in Australia, see Tim Low’s, Feral Future, Penguin Books Australia, 1999.
The National Strategy for the Conservation of Australia's Biological Diversity, Dept of the Environment, Sport and Territories, 1996. Available at http://www.ea.gov.au/biodiversity/publications/strategy/index.html
[1] John Kinsella, 'Scapegoats and feral cats', Island, No 86, Winter, 2001.
[2] Chris Dickman, Overview of the Impact of Feral Cats on Australian Native Fauna, Australian Nature Conservation Agency, 1996, p15.
[3] ‘According to the Victorian Department of Natural resources and Environment in that State today there are 27 species of wildlife threatened by the cat. There are 14 birds, 11 mammals and 2 reptiles.’ Sue Taylor, ‘The Effect of Domestic Cats on Australian Wildlife’, Ockham’s Radio, ABC, Radio National, 7.11.1999. Unfortunately, no references were available from the radio program. Factors for risk of native fauna to cats include, cat density, body weight, behaviour, mobility, and fecundity. See Dickman, table 10, p50 for native vertebrate vulnerability scales. There is never a one on one relation between predator and prey, ecologies are vastly more complex. John Warmsley is the man who controversially mistook a cat for his hat. He has set up 'earth sanctuaries' behind fences to try and do something about our endangered native species.
[4] Geof Copson & Jennie Whinan, 'Review of Ecological Restoration Programme on sub-antarctic Macquarie Island: Pest management progress and future directions,' Ecological Management and Restoration, V2 No2, August 2001, p134.
[5] I think it is a crisis. David Takacs suggests that 'conservation biologists have, in a sense, created 'the biodiversity crisis', and the cataclysmic urgency they attribute to our current predicament preys on the fears and interests of the audience they are luring. If effected, some biologists' prescriptions would usher in sweeping, radical, and sometimes coercive and harsh changes in how people everywhere live their lives.' David Takacs, The Idea of Biodiversity: Philosophies of Paradise, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996p111. There is a totalitarian side to some extreme deep ecologist groups.
[6] Dickman, p59-61. Western Shield is the name given to Western Australia's CALM's project to contain the feral problem. For further information see http://www.calm.wa.gov.au/projects/west_shield_article.html. Professor Harry Recher from Edith Cowan University has been researching birds in remnants of the wheat belt. He predicts that we will lose 50% of bird species in next century, mostly due to native vegetation clearance. Earthbeat, ABC Radio, 3.4. 1999.
[7] Sue Taylor, ibid.
[8] Evidence shows that removing feral cats can lead to problems, for instance, an increase in rats, or rabbits with unwanted consequences. An integrated approach is needed. (Dickman, 63) On the other hand, once a primary prey species like the rabbit is introduced, native species are at risk as bycatch. See Copson & Whinan, ibid, p136.
[9] These figures are from NSWNPWS and based on previous trapping of feral cats and surveys that indicate 37 percent of households keep at least on cat. http://www.npws.nsw.gov.au/help/catswild.htm
[10] Dominick LaCapra argues that the recent notion that the Holocaust is a modern bureaucratic and industrialised process fails to explain the Nazis' frantic scapegoating of the Jews. Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz, Cornell University Press, 1998. The Nazis called Jews UNGEZIEFER, vermin; they spat the word out.
[11] If we are to survive at all, we shall have to develop and extend our working agricultures. The common idea of a lost rural world is then not only an abstraction . . . It is in direct contradiction to any effective shape of our future, in which work on the land will have to become more rather than less important and essential. It is one of the most striking deformations of industrial capitalism that one of our most central and urgent and necessary activities should have been so displaced in space or in time. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City, Oxford University Press, 1973, p300.
[12] James Woodford, 'A load of hot air’, Sydney Morning Herald, Spectrum 29. 9. 2001. Dr Chris Dickman is currently chair of the NSW Scientific Committee that advises the government on listing threatened species.
[13] Susan Bratton, 'Loving Nature: Agape or Eros?', Environmental Ethics, 14 (1) Spring, 1992, p11. Agape is a self sacrificing love, eros a possessive love, philia the love between friends. Our word love tries to do too much.
[14] Erich Fromm describes an ideal love as 'an experience of sharing, of communion, which permits the full unfolding of one's own inner activity….If I love, I care - that is, I am actively concerned with the other person's growth and happiness; I am not a spectator. I am responsible, that is, I respond to his needs . . .' The Sane Society, Henry Holt, 1955, p31-33.
[15] Konrad Lorenz, Studies in Animal and Human Behaviour, Vol 2, Harvard UP, 1971. Incidentally, I would argue that the same applies to the way prose and the novel has replaced poetry and share, in this instance, Dorothy Porter's plea for 'wild poetry'. Paul Shepard also believes that pets have a deleterious effect on humans, 'My focus is on the effect of the replacement of domestic for wild animals in our psychological development . . . The colossal upsurge of the pet as an industrialised healer brings the issue of our inner life before us, along with the planet's diminishing wild abundance and diversity.' Paul Shepard, 'Our Animal Friends' in Stephen R. Kellert & Edward O. Wilson, The Biophilia Hypothesis, Island Press, 1993, p287.
[16] See Harriet Ritvo, 'Barring the Cross', in Human all too Human, Ed. Diana Fuss, Routledge, 1996, p50-51.
[17] It is more than entertainment, Marjorie Garber suggests, 'Anthropomorphism is itself a kind of transference. It transfers human properties onto dogs, and, in the process, finds in the dog an idealised, improved humanity – human, more than human, showing signs of 'intelligence', 'happiness' and a 'hidden life.' 'Heavy Petting' in Human all too Human, Ed. Diana Fuss, Routledge, 1996, p32.
[18] Peter Doherty, 'The Map of Life' - Professor Peter Doherty at the National Library of Australia.
Producer Kirsten Garrett, RN Background Briefing,19.08.2001. He notes how close we are to a spectrum of life forms, 'However we already know that the overall DNA sequence similarity between humans, chimpanzees and white mice is 99% and 83% respectively. We have about the same number of genes as white mice. Humans have some 30,000 protein coding genes, compared with 6,000 in baker's yeast, 13,000 in the fruit fly, 18,000 in a worm and 26,000 in a plant. Some 60% of the predicted proteins from the fruit fly, 43% from the little worm and 46% from yeast, have human equivalents . . . We are very closely related to them. Complexity is not necessarily a function of size.'
[19] Pete Singer, Animal Liberation, Jonathan Cape, 1976, p238-9.
[20] William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, W.W. Norton, 1991, p256.
[21] Henry Feit notes that the Waswanipi Cree of Canada 'say that they only catch an animal when the animal is given to them.' 'The ethnoecology of the Waswanipi Cree' in Cultural Ecology: readings on the Canadian Indians and Eskimos, Ed. B. Cox, McClelland & Stewart, 1973, p116. This is widespread among hunter-gathers. Animal rights theorists may think this is wishful thinking, but the prayers, rituals that are undertaken for successful hunting reveal the sense of belonging and inclosure in the totality of life and the natural environment they feel.
[22] Krystal Joplin, 'Discourse Community: The Natural Hunter',
http://www.ecok.edu/dept/english/faculty/lrp/langa/kkjla/diskan2.html
[23] For discussion of this issue see Christopher Belshaw, Environmental Philosophy: Reason, Nature & Human Concern, Acumen, 2001, p201-2.
[24] Matt Cartmill, A view to a death in the morning, Harvard University Press, 1993,
[25] Ted Kerasote, Bloodties: Nature, Culture, and the Hunt, Random House, 1993
[26] Sarah Hartwell, 'Eradication methods, even if implemented humanely, cannot solve the feral cat problem.' With current methods, of trapping, shooting or poisoning, she is correct. However then she argues, 'Trap-neuter-return methods sometimes seem like a drop in the ocean, but offer a longer-term solution, giving healthy ferals the chance of a decent life and freedom from the otherwise endless cycle of breeding while those which cannot be re-released can at least be given a humane and painless escape from their predicament.' Sarah Hartwell, 'Why Feral Eradication Won't Work', the Feral Cat Coalition, http://www.feralcat.com/sarah2.html
[27] The exception might be a cat that lived at Lam Rim a Tibetan Buddhist Monastery in Wales. The Rimpoche told me that the cat was a reincarnation of the previous owner of the house.
[28] 'The cat is a scapegoat. The subtext of non-indigeneity is placed under pressure in a landscape devastated by colonisation.' (Kinsella, 55). The notions of indigeneity and authenticity are too complex to be discussed here.
[29] Quoted by Matt Cartmill, ibid, p108.
[30] Thomas Berry, ‘The Ecozoic Era: Eleventh Annual E. F. Schumacher Lectures,' October 1991, http://www.schumachersociety.org/lec-tber.html.
[31] David Abram provides examples of how indigenous people to live in an animate world in The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than Human World, Pantheon, 1996.
[32] Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, (1979) Manchester University Press, 1984, pxxiii.
[33] The Kings of Jerusalem tried to obliterate nature worship and transferred official worship in the city. King Hezekiah cut down sacred groves, King Josiah burnt remaining sacred groves and killed the pagan priests. The historian Lynn White famously argued that Christianity is partly to blame for our environmental problems and picked out those traditions with the greatest neoplatonic influence. Lynn White, 'The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis', reprinted in Classics in Environmental Studies, ed. N. Nelissen, J. V. D. Straaten, and L. Klinkers, (1962), Utrecht, 1997.
[34] Bacon, Descartes and Locke are seen as founding, as Borgmann puts it, ‘the modern project whose elements are the domination of nature, the primacy of method, and the sovereignty of the individual.’ Albert Borgmann, Crossing the Postmodern Divide, U of Chicago P, 192, p5. Thomas Hobbes should also be mentioned in this context.
[35] Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite, (1959) University of Washington Press, 1996 2nd Ed, p3. The new rationalism allowed nature to be domesticated.
[36] Kant criticised Germans who corrupted sense of aesthetic to mean taste but had succumbed by 1790 through the work of Baumgarten. The aesthetics of nature has been ignored for the reification of fine art.
[37] Herbert Marcuse's late essay 'Ecology and the Critique of Modern Society' suggests that until aggression and violence among human diminished, destruction of natural environments will continue.
[38] Back in the late fifties, Jacques Ellul believed the world was increasingly being dominated by ‘technique’ which he defines as ‘the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency in every field of human activity. Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, Vintage Books, 1964, pxxv. Technology began with the machine, abstracted principles from it, became independent and is now a political, economic, and social reality. Technique has created a collective sociological reality independent of the individual, and decisions are always made within the framework of this new reality. I too believe that there has been a rupture with techne.
[39] Carolyn Merchant believes the central cause is that between 1500 and 1700 the older organic world view was replaced by a reductionist 'mechanistic world view of modern science.' 'Two new ideas, those of mechanism and of the domination and mastery of nature, became core concepts of the modern world.' The Death of Nature; Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution, 1980, Harper and Row, p2. Val Plumwood, argues that rationalism is the cause. And that this goes back to Greek philosophy which led to the human / nature dualism that then spawns others, masculine/feminine, reason/emotion, body/spirit. Val Plumwood, 'Nature, Self, and Gender: Feminism, Environmental Philosophy, and the Critique of Rationalism', in Ecological Feminist Philosophies, Ed. Karen Warren Indiana UP, 1996, p155-180.
[40] See John Bellamy Foster, Marx Ecology: Materialism and Nature, Monthly Review Press, 2000.
[41] While Thoreau was writing ‘A Week’ and the first draft of ‘Walden’ at Walden Pond, the population of Britain shifted critical mass, now over half lived in urban areas. Jefferson had thought it would take 500 generations to ‘conquer’ America; it took a handful. By the year 2015, it has been estimated that half the world will live in cities or towns.
[42] David Abram believes that with the invention of writing, literate cultures have lost being at home in nature integral to the oral traditions. David Abram, ibid.
[43] Ramachandra Guha, Environmentalism: A Global History, Longman, 2000. Thoreau's essay on walking and his discovery of wilderness on Mt Ktaadn are as important as Walden.
[44] Arne Naess, 'The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movements', presented as a paper in Bucharest in 1972, published in Inquiry, 16, 1973.
[45] David Takacs, ibid, p120.
[46] Susan Oyama, The Ontogeny of Information, Cambridge University Press, 1985, p168. Examples of dialectical thought are: R. C. Lewontin, Steven Rose, & Leon J. Kamin, Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology, and Human Nature. 1984, Pantheon. Or Yrjö Haila & Richard Levins, Humanity and Nature: Ecology, Science, and Society, Pluto Press, 1992.
[47] It has only recently been discovered that this particular extinction was a significant loss. DNA analysis reveals that the thylacine roamed on its own evolutionary branch and valuable genetic resources have now been lost.
[48] Dorian Sagan & Lynn Margolis, ask us, [L]et us remember that the Chinese ideogram for crisis combines the sign of 'danger' with that of 'opportunity' . . . Two billion years ago cyanobacteria, newly evolved micro-organisms that used the hydrogen of water for photosynthesis, plunged the biosphere into crisis mode. Their 'waste' – the free oxygen that sent thousands of varieties of organisms to early graves – altered the previous planetary habitat forever' Dorian Sagan & Lynn Margolis, 'God, Gaia and Biophilia' in Kellert & Wilson, ibid, p350. Wilson defines biophilia as 'the innate tendency to focus on life and life-like processes.' E.O. Wilson, Biophilia: The Human Bond with Other Species, Harvard UP, 1984, p1. He thinks there is a genetic link.
[49] Thirty billion species of plants and animal are estimated to have existed in our planet's history; about 30 million now exist, which means that 99.9% of all species that have ever existed are extinct.
[50] John Leslie, The End of the World, The Science and Ethics of Human Extinction, 1996. Through probability theorising rather than anticipating nuclear terrorism, he concludes that we, as a species, are likely to die out sooner rather than later.
[51] Robert Pyle warns that local extinctions cause 'the extinction of experience' in, 'Intimate Relations and the Extinction of Experience' Left Bank 2, 1992, p65. David Abram writes, '[A]s we drive more and more of the land's wild voices into the oblivion of extinction, our own languages become increasingly impoverished and weightless, progressively emptied of their earthly resonance.' ibid, p86
[52] There are intrinsic and extrinsic values in any normative notion (and defence) of biodiversity which I have not the space to examine. Bryan Norton strongly attacks deep ecology's use of intrinsic value. For ref. see ft 96.
[53] This is where vegans might argue, that I have come up with one short. If life is unique, it is immoral to end it. But not all animals are equal and as Dorian Sagan & Lynn Margolis point out, 'If we were serious about saving all other organisms we would follow Jainist principles and filter our water to save the paramecia. We would surgically implant chloroplasts in our skin in order to photosynthesise ourselves and not uproot lettuce or carrot plants.' 'God, Gaia and Biophilia', in Kellert & Wilson, ibid, p358.
[54] Peter Doherty, 'The Map of Life' ibid.
[55] Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (1949), OUP, 1968 p204. He was influenced by Walden and, in turn, as influential as Rachel Carson. Her Silent Spring (1962) shocked Americans into realising how they were destroying natural environments.
[56] Ecological sustainability is problematic in definition and quantification but can be seen as systems/processes that should not: use non-renewable resources faster than substitutes are found; use renewable resources faster than nature can regenerate them; generate pollution faster than earth's planetary sinks can absorb or dissipate; but should safeguard inter-generational equity. (What legacy are we leaving our children?). See Meadows, Meadows and Rander, Beyond the Limits, Chelsea Green Publishing Co. 1992, p3.
[57] J. Baird Callicott, 'The Wilderness Idea Revisited: The Sustainable Development Alternative' in Christopher Key Chapple, Ed. Ecological Prospects: Scientific, Religious, and Aesthetic Perspectives, Ed. SUNY, 1994, p53.
[58] R. J. Hobbs, & A. Hopkins, 'From frontier to fragments: European impact on Australia’s vegetation' ,Proceedings of the Ecological Society of Australia, 16, 1990, p93 -114.
[59] J. Baird Callicott, ‘The Conceptual Foundations of the Land Ethic’, in Planet in Peril: Essays in Environmental Ethics, Dale Westphal and Fred Westphal, Eds. Harcourt Brace, 1994, p85.
[60] Peter Singer, Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals, Prentice Hall, 1975. Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights, University of California Press, 1983. Carl Cohen and Regan argue whether animals have rights, though both are anti-utilitarian and talk in terms of rights. They agree that the central question for animal rights is whether animals have 'the right not to be killed to advance the interests of others [humans] . . no matter how important we think those human interests to be.' Carl Cohen and Tom Regan, The Animal Rights Debate, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2001, p22. Neither has an answer to how to decide when competing rights are at issue, as they arein the question we are looking at. Regan’s view opens Kant’s belief that only autonomous, rational persons have inherent value to animals. What is wrong remains treating a life as having only instrumental value, without an individual’s 'inherent value'. In fact, Luc Ferry argues that the animal liberation movement only makes sense on the basis of a utlitarianism that views animals as capable of suffering as humans. Luc Ferry, The New Ecological Order, (1992), U of Chicago Press, 1995.
[61] See J. Baird Callicott, In Defense of the Land Ethic: Essays in Environmental Philosophy, SUNY, 1989. He has been termed a subjective nonanthropocentric intrinsic value theorist, if that is any help.
[62] Coined in 1866 by Ernst Haekel as the study of the interrelationships between living and non-living, in German Okologie from oikos – house & logos. Raymond Williams noted that the term ecology had escaped its scientific roots and now covered, 'a central concern with human relations to the physical world as the necessary basis for social and economic policy.' Keywords, A vocabulary of Language and Culture, Flamingo, 1976, p111.
[63] Les Murray, ‘Eric Rolls and the Golden Disobedience’, The Quality of Sprawl, Duffy & Snellgrove, 1999, p199.
[64] There are parallels here with utopian thinking of the left or anarchist – the idea that an ideal community can be established an maintained – the equivalent to ecological 'climax community'.
[65] Arne Naess's Ecology, Community, and Lifestyle,1989, p79. One of the seminal works of the Deep Ecology movement. Harvey agrees that the individual is formed by innumerable vectors of converging influences and relations. David Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference, Blackwell, 1996, p167.
[66] See Pickett, S.T.A., Parker, V.T., and Fiedler, P.L., 'The New Paradigm in Ecology: Implications for Conservation Above the Species Level', in Fiedler, P.L. and Jam, S.K. (eds.). Conservation Biology. Chapman and Hall, 1992.
[67] David Harvey, 'Marxism, Metaphors, and Ecological Politics', http://www.monthlyreview.org/498harve.htm. This essay is written in terms of, 'It has, unfortunately, taken far too long for Marxists to take environmental issues seriously.'
[68] Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily basis of Meaning, Imagination and Reason, Uni of Chicago Press, 1987, p209.
[69] Johnson, ibid, pxiv.
[70] Dorian Sagan & Lynn Margolis, 'Gaian Views' in Christopher Chapple Ed. ibid, p5.
[71] Paul Taylor argues that 'humans are not inherently superior to other living things', Respect for Nature, Princeton UP, p100. A whole essay could address this unlikely claim.
[72] Quoted by Robert Wright, Non-Zero: The Logic of Human Destiny, Pantheon, 2000, p14.
[73] Eric Katz, 'Against the Inevitability of Anthropecentrism', in Eric Katz, Andrew Light & David Rothenberg, Beneath the Surface: Critical Essays in the Philosophy of Deep Ecology, MIT, 2000, p37. Christopher Belshaw tries to tease out the meanings, 'Speciesm occurs when we draw unwarranted distinctions, but the distinction between animals that do an do not feel pain, or that are and are not self-conscious, are, first real distinctions, and secondly, of evident moral relevance.' Christopher Belshaw, ibid, p115. Tom Regan attacks Singer and others utlilitarians for speciesm see Belshaw p118.
[74] Christopher Stone, 'Should trees have standing', (1972) in L. Pojman ED. Environmental Ethics, Jones & Bartlett, 1994, p181.
[75] 'I'm explaining a few things' (tr. Nathaniel Tarn), Pablo Neruda: Selected Poems: A Bilingual Edition, Nathaniel Tarn Ed. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1990.
[76] One good news cat story goes back to the 1950s. To reduce malaria which was infecting 90% of the population of Borneo, the World Health Organization (WHO) began a program of spraying a powerful insecticide, to kill mosquitoes. It worked. Malaria was almost eradicated BUT all insects were affected and lizards died after feeding on them - cats began dying eating the lizards, and without cats, rats reached plague proportions with the danger of sylvatic plague. In response, WHO parachuted healthy cats into the island – apparently with successful results. 'Windows on the Wild', World Wildlife Fund (WWF), http://www.worldwildlife.org/windows/.
[77] See Raymond Williams, 'Their Destiny Their Choice', The Country . . .ibid, p59. A generation earlier Celia Fiennes had toured England widely and recorded detailed observations, more of new architecture and new economies and innovations (such as the new toilet at Hampton Court) than rustic traditions which were even then disappearing. Both were writing before the enclosures and industrial revolution got up a full head of steam. Christopher Morris, Ed., The Journeys of Celia Fiennes, Cresset Press, 1947
[78] Bill Devall & George Sessions, Deep Ecology: Living as if nature Mattered, Perigrine Smith, 1985, p146
[79] R. Elliot, 'Faking Nature', Inquiry 1982, 25:81-93; E. Katz, 'Restoration and Redesign: the Ethical Intervention in Nature,' Restoration and Management Notes 9, 1991, p90-96.
[80] Pickett, S.T.A., and Parker, V.T. 'Avoiding the old pitfalls: opportunities in a new discipline' in Restoration Ecology, 2, 1994, p75-79.
[81] Tim Flannery has caused controversy by additional claims that Aborigines caused the extinction of the Australian megafauna. Tim Flannery, The Future Eaters, An Ecological History of the Australian Lands and People, Reed Books, 1994.
[82] Robert Elliot, Faking Nature: The ethics of environmental restoration, Routledge, 1997.
[83] Jonathan Adams & Thomas McShane, The Myth of Wild Africa: Conservation without Illusion, W. W. Norton, 1991.
[84] William Cronon, 'The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature', in Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, Ed. William Cronon, W.W. Norton & Co. 1995. Dave Formen, Gary Snyder and others attack Cronon's assault on the notion of wilderness.
[85] D. M. Graber, 'Resolute biocentrism: the dilemma of wilderness in national parks', in Reinventing nature? Responses to postmodern deconstruction. M.E. Soul & G. Lease, Eds. Island Press, 1992.
[86] ABC Radio RN, Books and Writing, 5 September, 1997. From a forum at the 1997 Brisbane Writers Festival. Aboriginal cultural landscapes have fuzzy boundaries dependant on spirituality, cultural tradition and practice, language, kinship, social relationships, interactions with the landscape and its flora and fauna. There are no clear boundaries though Western culture loves to insert clear boundaries with sometimes deleterious effects. Australia is the most urbanised of countries. Like most ‘Western’ countries, 95% of rural jobs have been lost over the last hundred and thirty years. Ninety-nine percent of Australians cannot have as intimate a relationship with the land as hunter gatherers have had. So what kind of relationship can we have? Aesthetics, I believe is an answer in the Greek sense - that which is perceivable as opposed to conceivable, of the senses as opposed to reason.
[87] Lyell Watson, Lifetide, Bantam, 1980, p306.
[88] Bill McKibben, The End of Nature, Random House, 1989, p58. He thinks the idea of nature as 'the separate and wild province, the world apart from man' has died. (p48) All is not doom – see Bill McKibben, Hope, Human and Wild: True Stories of Living Lightly on the Earth, Little Brown, 1995.
[89] I agree with Meg Holden's criticism that Abram is anti-science and technology – she positions him in the phenomenology camp compared unfavourably to the pragmatism of John Dewey. I still think there is room for both approaches at different scales. Meg Holden, 'Phenomenology versus Pragmatism: Seeking a restoration environmental ethic,' Environmental Ethics, V23/1, Spring 2001, p37-56.
[90] 'Over a lifetime each person in the United States uses on average 540 tons of construction materials, 18 tons of paper, 23 tons of wood, 16 tons of metals, 32 tons of organic chemicals--10 to 15 times as much as people in the "underdeveloped" world use.' David. W. Orr, The Greening of Education, Schumacher Lecture, Bristol, UK, 1994,
http://www.eco-action.org/dt/orr.html
[91] Paul Shepard, Man in the Landscape: A Historic View of the Esthetics of Nature, (1967) A&M Press, 1991, 2nd Ed. pxxviii.
[92] See Raymond Williams, 'Pastoral and Counter-Pastoral' in The Country and the City, Chatto & Windus, 1973.
[93] Raymond Williams, 'Pastoral .. 'ibid, p31.
[94] Hoagland criticises Lopez for leaving out the suffering of the peoples of the Arctic (the young men have one of the highest suicide rates. He also complains that Lopez does not reveal his position regarding material wealth and power when travelling amongst these deprived people. Edward Hoagland, 'From the Land where Polar Bears Fly: Review of Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape', New York Times Book review, 16 Feb, 1986. It is not an exact parallel.
[95] Jonathan Bate, The Song Of The Earth, Picador, 2000, see p139-152. This book follows on from his Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition, Routledge, 1991. For discussion of eco-poetry see Leonard Scigaj, Sustainable Poetry: Four Ecopoets, University Press of Kentucky, 1999. Incidentally, Wordsworth wrote his worst poetry, 'Sonnets Upon the Punishment of Death' (1839-40), in support of capital punishment.
[96] Gary Snyder, Turtle Mountain, New Directions, 1974. Snyder celebrated work in his early poems in Myths and Texts (1960). He worked in the woods and mourned the loss of clear-felled forests, but celebrated hard outdoors work, 'If you're gonna work these woods / Don't want nothing / That can't be left out in the rain.' (Poem 12).
[97] Gary Snyder, 'The Real Work' interview with Paul Geneson, in The Real Work: Interviews and talks, 1964-1979, New Directions, 1980, p82.
[98] David W. Orr, 'Love it or Lose it: The coming biophilia revolution' in Kellert & Wilson, ibid, p432.
[99] Philip Cafaro, 'Thoreau, Leopold, and Carlson', Environmental Ethics, V22/1, Spring 2001, p14.
[100] Anthony Weston, 'Beyond Intrinsic Value: Pragamatism in Environmental Ethics' in Andrew Light & Erick Katz Eds. Environmental Pragmatism, Routledge, 1998, p142.
[101] Wendell Berry, 'Caring for the Land: 27 short propositions on global thinking and resource sustainability', (XXIII) The Atlantic Monthly, February 1991. Two others are relevant here: 'XVIII. In order to make ecological good sense for the planet, you must make ecological good sense locally. You can't act locally by thinking globally. If you want to keep your local acts from destroying the globe, you must think locally. XIX. No one can make ecological good sense for the planet. Everyone can make ecological good sense locally, if the affection, the scale, the knowledge, the tools, and the skills are right.'
[102] Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture, Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 1995, p97. William Rueckert has asked, 'How can we move from the community of literature to the larger biospheric community which ecology tells us (correctly, I think) we belong to even as we are destroying it? 'Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism', 1978. .in The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Eds. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm. University of Georgia Press, 1996. 105-23. This essay introduced the term 'ecocriticism'.
[103] See Bryan Norton, Toward Unity Among Environmentalists, Oxford University Press, 1991, p12,13.
[104] Defined as 'a geographic area, including both cultural and natural resources and the wildlife or domestic animals therein, associated with a historical event, activity, or person or exhibiting other cultural or aesthetic values.' C. A. Birnbaum, 'Preservation Brief 96: Protecting Cultural Landscapes: Planning, Treatment and Management of Historic Landscapes', National Parks Service: Washington, D.C., 1994.
[105] Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics,Trans. J. A. K. Thomson, Penguin, 1976, p209.
[106] Eric Fromm, influenced by Marx, Hegel and Freud, argued that as we use rational thought and conscious choice to survive our needs are not only physical. We have a need for - relatedness, to share one’s life with others; creativeness and transcendence; rootedness – to feel at home in a community; a sense of identity and individuality; a unique, authentic and coherent self; and a story or frame through which we make sense of the world and identify projects for our lives to have meaning. It's self realisation really. Erich Fromm, Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics, Henry Holt and Company, 1947 & The Sane Society, Henry Holt, 1955.
[107] Mary Warnock points this out in Ethics since 1900, Oxford University Press, 1966.
[108] Belshaw queries, 'For even supposing there is available some coherent account of the biotic community's health or well-being, there is still the question as to why this is something we should care about.' ibid, p173. I hope to have answered this question.
[109] Zygmunt Bauman writes, ‘We are not moral thanks to society, we are only ethical or law abiding thanks to it; we live in society, we ARE society, thanks to being moral. At the heart of sociality is the loneliness of the moral person.’ Postmodern Ethics, Blackwell, 1993, p61.
[110] See first part of Antonio Damasio, Descartes' error: Emotion, reason, and the human brain, Grosset/Putnam, 1994.
[111] Daniel Berthold-Boud, 'The Ethics of 'Place': Reflections of bioregionalism', Environmental Ethics, V22, Spring 2000, p21.
[112] Manuel Cordova-Rios of his Amazonian experience, quoted in Abram, ibid, p141-2. Leopold was a keen hunter, Snyder has a 'Hunting Section' in Myths and Texts.
[113] Intro, Arne Naess, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, Ed. David Rothenberg, CUP, 1989, p15. He fails to distinguish the very different notions of place and landscape.
[114] William Grey, 'A Critique of Deep Green Theory', in Eric Katz, Andrew Light & David Rothenberg, ibid p45.
[115] Morality is never clean. Few choices are unambiguously good. Most moral choices are made between contradictions – hence Sartre’s emphasis on choice. Moral impulses leads to immoral consequences. Morality is not universaliseable. This is not moral relativism but accepts the contingent, embodied, autonomous sources of moral judgement. From the perspective of logic, morality is irrational but it provides the raw material of our being as social beings living inside a world that is our home.
[116] Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays in livelehood, dwelling and skill, Routledge, 2000, p56. Alasdair MacIntyre argues that stories are how we position ourselves in the world and in society, 'I can only answer the question 'What am I to do?' if I can answer the prior question 'Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?'' Alisdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, Notre Dame UP, 1984, p216. Virtue ethics expands ethical questions from rights and duties to questions of what should I do. Thales and the Ionian school asked ' 'What is the world made of?' The Pythagoreans asked, 'What is its structure?' Socrates asked what is a life devoted to elenchos, an examined life?
[117] Richard Rorty talks of expanding the sense of 'we' for his notion of social solidarity. Yet in an important passage on creating social solidarity, he fails to mention poetry, ‘this process of coming to see other human beings as ‘one of us’ rather than ‘them’ is a matter of detailed description of what unfamiliar people are like and of redescription of what we ourselves are like. This task is not for theory but for genres . . . especially the novel . . . the novel, the movie, and the TV program have, gradually but steadily, replaced the sermon and treatise as the principal vehicles of moral change and progress.’ Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Cambridge University Press, 1989, pxvi. To provide a context, Rorty cites Kundera's fiction as preferable to philosophical works of Heidegger because, ‘What the novelist finds especially comic is the attempt to privilege one [set of] descriptions, to take it as an excuse for ignoring all the others.’ Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers, v 2, Cambridge University Press, 1991, p74. There is an alternative which Val Plumwood explains in terms of, 'Naess proposed foundations formulated basically in terms of identity and unity: [Peter] Reed's counteradvocacy, in a powerful essay published posthumously, of basing respect not on sameness but on difference, could hardly have presented a stronger contrast.' Reed argued that it is 'our very separatedness from the Earth, the gulf between the human and the natural, that makes us want to right by the earth.' She asserts, 'the basic concept required for the appropriate ethic of environmental activism is not that of identity or unity (or its reversal in difference) but that of solidarity – standing with the other in a supportive relationship in the political sense.' Val Plumwood, 'Deep Ecology, Deep Pockets and Deep Problems', Eric Katz, Andrew Light & David Rothenberg, ibid, p61, p66.
[118] Quoted by Iain Bamforth, 'Is there life on Earth?', Parnassus 23, (1&2), 1998.
[119] Mark Turner argues that concepts do not structure thought but are a feature of thought. He claims, ’Concepts are not given to us by the world, but are the product of our attempts, as a species (with a phylogenetic past) and as individuals (with a personal past), to make sense of our worlds.’ Mark Turner, Reading Minds: The Study of English in the Age of Cognitive Science, Princeton UP, 1991.
[120] Mathew Arnold suggested that lyric poetry consoles and sustains us as it replaces religion and philosophy with sincerity and deeply felt views of life. I open this out, poetry is capable of dealing with information and have argued for the possibilities of a documentary poetics in a line from Lucretius and Hugh MacDiarmid. 'Poetry as Weed: Invasion through Hypertext', paper delivered at ASAL conference, Hobart, 2000.
[121] Richard Rorty thinks philosophers should 'help their readers, or society as a whole, break free from outworn vocabularies and attitudes, rather than to provide 'grounding' for the intuitions and the customs of the present.' Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Princeton University Press, 1994, p12.
[122] No longer do we accept the 'sublimation model' according to which 'the function of art is to sublimate or transform experience, raising it from ordinary to extraordinary, from commonplace to unique, from low to high.' Rosalind Krauss, October 56, Spring 1991, p3.