Saving Nature, Feeding People, and the Foundations of Ethics

8/8/2019 Saving Nature, Feeding People, and the Foundations of Ethics

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Saving Nature, Feeding People, and the Foundations ofEthicsHOLMES ROLSTON, IIIDepartment ofPhilosophyColorado Stale UniversityFort Collins, CO 80523. USAI welcome my thoughtful critics. If there is to be progress in environmentalethics, it will result from interchanges such as these. I start with my recentexperience in Nepal, using that to bring to initial focus where I think mydifferences with Attfield, Brennan, and Minteer lie. Later I tum, in too summarya way, to some more specific complaints.Royal Cbitwao.National Park in Nepal is a primary sanctuary for Bengaltigers and the Asian rhinoceros, both extremely endangered species. Otherendangered species protected in the area are the sloth bear, the pygmy bog, theswamp deer, the blackbuck, the Asian rock python, and the gharial crocodile (theworld's most endangered crocodile). The park exists because the region, inlowlandNepal, was too malarious to live in yearrounduntil the 1950's. In earlieryears, wbat is now the parkarea was keptasahunting preserve for the Rana rulersofNepal in the dry season. Oddly, the tigers and rhinos survived becauseoftbemosquitoes.Following a mosquito erndication campaign in mid-century, Nepalis beganto move into the region. The migrants cleared the forests and started cultivatingcrops, .also poaching animals. In 1973, to increase protection, the buntingpreserve was designated a national park. Nepalis were surrounding it. Thepopulation of the Terai (lowland) region was 36,000 in 19S0; in less than adecade it was one million. With one of the highest birthrates in the world, andwith the influx continuing, the population in 1991 was 8.6 million, 90 percent ofthem poor, 50 percent of them desperately poor (Nepal and Weber 1993;Sbrestba 1997).No one is allowed to live in the park. People complain that they cannot cutgrasses, graze cattle and buffalo, or timber the park at will. They are allowed tocut thatch grasses severnl days a year, and 30 percent of park income is given toVillage Development Committees. The Royal Nepalese Army is responsible forpreventing poaching, grazing, cutting grasses, pilfering timber, and permanenthabitationof the land. They also do what they can to improve the lotoftbe people.But being hungry i not a sufficient reason to sacrifice the park. That problemmust be fixed by attacking its root social causes, even though, alas, in my visitto Nepal during January and February of this year, I did not fmd any answers insight.Environmental Values 7 (1998): 349-57


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The Smithsonian Institution and tbe World Wide Fund for Nature conducteda TIger Ecology Project there from 1973 to 1981, using Nepali and Americanresearchers. No doubt they were concerned about the pressures of the poor 00tiger habitat. No doubt also they spent money on preserving the tigers that migbthave been spent relieving poverty. One of their principal recommendations wasto increase the size of the protected habitat.I am arguing (contra Attfield) that such conservation dilemmas are verymIlCh with us in developing countries, are likely to remain so for some time tocome, and tbat such conservation efforts can be morallyjustified. Iargue(contraBrennan) that, complex tbough tbe social factors that produce poverty may be,there is no particular cause here to fault transnational corporations or development agencies. About one-half of the government's revenue depends on foreignaid andborrowing; one-thtrdof the hard currency entering thecountry is aid. Nordo I fault as 'brutal and ruthless' the Nepali military forces that police tbe park,eventbougb military powers can sometimes be so, as Brennan worries (p. 330).Maybe those who eradicated the mosquitoes caused all the trouble; maybe theyand their international aid-granting supporters were attacking Nepal's poverty inthe wrong way. Meanwhile, today we ('we' who decide bow to belp in Nepal)have a tough decision.I put the tigers fust, have financially supported WWF efforts to save Asianand African species, and morally approve the present policies, on grounds thattigers as a species ought not to be sacrificed on the altar of human mistakes,regardless ofwhat persons made mistakes where in the complex chainsofevents.Moved by the lack of medical care in the region, I also sent, upon my return, a$5,000 contribution to one oftbe very few hospitals nearby, whicb I visited.

If I did not believe (contra Minteer) that tigers have intrinsic value, if I'didnot believe that species Hoes are morally considerable, i f I thougbt the values oftigers were only those that this or that culture chooses to assign to them, or not,I would not be making such efforts to protect them. I puzzle to know wbatarguments (or forces), if any, Minteer would use encountering the Nepalis whowisb to sacrifice the park to relieve their poverty. Since I am so insensitive to theloggers in the PacificNorthwest, he will think worse of my defense of the tigersover the poor of Nepal. But why should I accept his views? They are without'foundations'; they only come from whatever 'cultmally-occupied' subculturehe belongs to.Next, I turn to a selected few of my critics' more specific complaints.Faced with adilemma, we frrst try to find away outby showing that it is notthe dilemma supposed. No bard choices need to be made. We can have ourcakeand eat it too. That is essentially the strategy taken by Attfield. If there were anideal development process, Nepal could have itsmillions in the Teraiand its tigersanctuary as well. Africa could have its present human populations, which aretypically three times what they were at mid-century, and the rhinos r e s t o ~ which have declined to 2,500 in a quarter century from a population of 60,000,a decline of 96 percent (Cunningham and Berger 1997).


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351SAVING NATIJRE.. .Or if not so many people, rhinos, or tigers, compromising these numbers,there is Some way to solve the problemby which people need not get hurt. Thereis no dilemma. Or at least 'such conflicts would be rare' ( A t t f i e ~ p. 296). Thatis n o however, what the World Health Organization bas found: 'Priority givento human health raises an ethical dilenuna if "health for all" conflicts withprotecting the environment.... Priority to ensuring human survival is taken as a'

fU"St-order principle. Respect for nature and control of environmental degradation is a second-order principle, which mustbe observed unless it conflicts withthe ftrst-order principle of meeting survival needs' (WHO Commission onHealth-and Environment 1992: 4). That is quite humane; it also means 00 tigersor rhinos.Has Attfield forgotten that I began by saying: 'One ougbt to seek win-winsolutions whenever one can' (1996: 249)1 I conceded that some strategies thataremorallydesirable are not politically possible. My analysis is not ofsome idealworld, butof the real world where win-lose decisions face us daily. As mucb asanyone else, I will convert such a situation into win-win if I can. Only I face tbereality tbat they do not so easily or so soon convert. 'Population policies (i fvoluntary, and integrated with policies of development) have the potential foreventually limiting the incidence of conflicts between preservation and humanneeds' (Attfield, p. 296). Eventually, but the incidence of conflicts has beenescalating for the last half century, and shows little sign of slacking off,especially conflicts threatening the charismatic megafauna.It is well enougb to conclude that 'the kind of policies needed in tbe ThirdWorldare ones which enlist people's energiesfor producing food andpreservingnaturealike' (Attfield, abstract). No dilemma- if andwhen we get those neededpolicies. Meanwhile, there is a dilemma now at Royal Chitwan, and i f we waitfor those kinds of policies to work, the tigers and rhinos will be gone. 1 The factof the matter is that what sustainably gets humans fed in Nepal can and probablywill sacrifice a great deal of biodiversity. Nature co-opted to feed people isseldom wild nature saved.With Attfield's complaints about my calling the tentb-cbild, tenth-childm u l t i p ~ i c a t i o n factor a tragedy, I stand by my claims. These numbers areadmittedly provocative tropes for the real world, where often a women doesproduce five children, on average (as bas been true in rural Nepal). Likewise theterm 'cancer' is deliberately provocative, a shocking teon, but there are analogies enough to make it sting, as it did botb Attfield and Brennan. 'Uncontrolledgrowth' (sometimes named "cancer and sometimes 'population explosion') isgrowth gone berserk, p a t h o l o g i ~ l , self-defeating, eventually tragic. Even withhumans there is a good-better-best fallacy. One human is good; more are better.And the most is the best?Attfield doesn't believe that; he has only three children. Humans too aresubject to the constraints of exponential growth. Where there are too manychildren, make the best of a bad situation. But do not suppose that it is not a badsituation, and learn from it for the next generation. Attfield concedes: 'This could


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still be a tragedy, all things considered' (p. 299). The reason for tbe tnlgedy isuncontrolled growth (aka cancer'). The uncontroUed growth is not always inbead count. It can also be in desires for profits, for capital, or the size of one'sfishing fleet on Lake Victoria, as Brennan notes. It can also be in unnecessaryconsumption.Wherever the unregulated human growth, do not suppose that, in such a badsituation, one should always solve the problem by sacrificing e n d a n g ~ r e d species and their habitat. There are better ways to be bwnane, as bumane as onecan, butstopping shortof extinguisbing species, else we lose tbe species only tocontinuethe human tragedy.Thatbringsagonisingdecisions; itbringsBrennan'swrath as 'astonishing misanthropy' (p. 326). On this spectacular planet, withmany millions of species, maybe it is astonishing antbropocentrism to hold thatpeople always come first, no matter what their mistakes, no matter where theiruncontrolled growth.Attfield twists and turns to escape the dilemma, by hoping that poor parentsmight find ways to care for increasing numbers of children with their limitedresources (tbe tenth child-cooks at the same fife as the flfst child) (p. 298). Buthe cannot always escape the dilemma, as he himselfrecognises. He and Imostlydiffer in that I think, in the real world of inflating populations, these dilemmaswill be common; he thinks, in his more ideal world, they will be rare. I amaccused of the Malthusian delusion; in reply, I cite the Nepali Terai as evidencethat tbere is truth enough there to produce moral agony."Development', Attfield wants to stipulate, shouldonly mean "changew hichis genuinely for the better, and not just change believed by someone to be such'(p. 293). In that case, "bad development' is an oxymoron, and 'sustainabledevelopment" is a tautology. Meanwhile, we do need some term for what hasbeen taking place in Nepal, India, Africa, East Asia and South America over thelast half century, indeed some term for what bas been happening in NorthAmerica and Europe since the Enlightenment, where many changes, brougbtabout by people called "developers' of one kind or another, have brought amixture of good and bad results.Depending on one's view of sustainability, there can be much sustainabledevelopment that sacrifices endangered species and their habitats, which seldomna:d to be kept preserved for these species in order to keep people healthy.Typically agriculture introduced to previously wild areas, nonnally called adevelopment, does destroy wildlife habitat. 'Development which is unsustain-able ... will undennine itself, Attfield assures us (p. 293). Yes, but by the timeit does, the tigers in Nepal, the rhinos there and in Africa, and the lemurs inMadagascar, will be extinct. One of my main points is that the 'feeding people'gained by "sacrificing nature" is, in most cases, only a temporary solution to aproblem that needs to be solved at its roots in the birthrate patterns or socialinequities thatresult in hunger. Else, one will find, adecade later, that the peopleare hungry again, because the problem was not attacked in the right place.


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353SAVING NATURE ...Brennan is anxious to get the problems attacked in the right places. That iswhat upsets him about my use of "we'. I adopt ..t b e m ~ ~ and ~ ' u s " strategies' (p.324). Elitist Puritan 9 that I am, I cannot see the connections between their

povertyandour responsibility.My analysis 'overlooksrelevant layersofagencyand o m i ~ significant historical data9 (p. 329). My 'we9 is speaking from the FltStWorld; it editorially collects those of us who are involved in deciding where toplace ourefforts andouraid. "They' are, colleetively, those in needof such help.Brennan laments that my account, dichotomised so into 'we' and 'they', isimpoverished by 'the absence of any discussion of the politics of i n t e m a t i o n ~ relations, the ethics of holarcbies and tbe forces which simultaneously drivehuman impoverishment, disease and enviromnental destruction.' Pending a'detailedanalysis9 ofall these factors, which might findus as implicatedas them,we oughtnot to advocate"sealing off tbe lastremainingwildplaceswhile hungrypeopledie at tbe fences' (p. 324).I am much faulted for my "silence' about these complexities, these otheractors lurking further back who are more responsible than the up front poor.Well, Icouldonly do somuch in one article. Brennan'spaperis much longer thanmine tbat he critiques, and he concludes with an apology that his own analysislacks detail. I warned, in the third paragraph, about 'abstracting from thecomplexcircumstancesofdecision' (1998: 248-249). I thought I bad saidclearlyenough that the problem had to be fixed where it arose, in social structures, andcould not really be fixed by sacrificing wild nature (1998: 255). I diagrammedmy disapproval of the five-to-one inequitable distribution of resources, NorthversusSouth, G-7 versus G-77, rich versus poor(1998: 256). I censuredmilitaryspending (1998: 251-252). I noted that exploitersare amply ready to exploitbothpeople and nature, both in the U.S, where people go hungry, and abroad. Howis this a simplistic individualist stance'? (Brennan, p. 324).I nowhere said that 'we' are guiltless. I did say that 'we' Americans (andeverybody else) sometimes correctly give priority to other values besidesfeeding the poor, as Brennan likewise does, when be educates his children, orflies regularly from Australia to Norway and Belgium to serve as a visitingprofessor. One minute Brennan is complaining that I know no guilt in my'American culture; the nex' he is calling me a reversed Puritan Romantic(whatever that means) because I see so much sin in society and none in nature.I tbought I complained about escalating consumerism. I advocated 'taxing thewealthy to feed the poor', "using the produce of the already domesticatedlandscape justly and charitably' (1998: 255).

Brennan and I differ, as nearly as Ican make out, in that, until he can analyseand fIX the Nepali problem by remedying these complicated networks at manylevels, he will let people into Chitwan National Park, on grounds. that sealingthem out is not morally defensible. Of course, long before be gets the problemfIXed, there will be no tigers in bis morally improved world, as there will be nonein Attfield's world. He doesn 9 t want to be a Pwitan, and there be may succeed.


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But tbe people in his tigerless worldmay stillbe hungry. Waiting for his proJ!f3Dlto work, he has decided against tbe tigers by default.Turning to Minteer, whose concern - on fIrSt appearances at least - isradicaUydifferent,consider the foundationsof theseethics thatAttfield, BrelllUlD,and I have been debating. I, for one, do not mind having an environmental ethicswith some "foundations.' Does Minteer want one without foundations? Yes, beurges us, in coRclusion, to become comfortable witb the contingency of ourvalues' (p. 346). But then again, 00 , be wants his foundations to be in culture, notin nature. He wants environmental ethics to be 'more culturally-occupied' (p.335). His ethics places human cultural experience into the foreground' (p. 335,p. 344).Iwant, be tbinks, to 'retreatfrom culture' Retreat', like 'foundationalist',(and like Brennan's "Romantic Puritanism' fleeing evil culture) is being usedpejoratively. IfI were choosing the words, 1would say that Iwant to 'go beyond'culture, or be more "inclusive' tban building an ethic ollly on contingent hmnanpreferences..1do not want to be too purely culturally-occupied.' I am not sure (contraMinteer) that Ineed tbepurest .... foundationalism' either(p. 337). ButIdowantto know enough about the natural world, independently of human cultures, toform some judgments about whether there are intrinsic values present which,when I encounter them, 1ougbt appropriately to respect. I fmd that this respectfor nonbuman values does at times shape my behaviour when dealing with thenatural world. Most of our decisions are made, I concede, with culture in theforeground; but some should bemade bringing into focus this 'background' thatis, after all, our life-support system, and not only ours but that ofmany millionsof other species. Now we can see that Minteer's concerns about whether to putsociety ornature up front do connect with Attfield's and Brennan'sconcerns thatI sometimes prioritise nature over culture.Should our environmental ethics be more culturally-occupied' (aka culturally constructecJ)? Ought it to be built up when various parties, choosing theirvalues in nature, meet together democratically and put their puzzle piecestogether? Elsewhere, I have addressed the question of the social consbUctioD ofnature, an analysis that Minteer seems not to koow. Readers wbo wisb to explorethis issue in more depth may wisb to consult my argument, whicb is, briefly, that'we cannot correctly value what we do not to some degree correctly know'(Rolston, 1997: 40). ' N ~ t u r e ; "environment', 'wilderness', 'science', 'Earth',and 'value' - so we are being told by post-modernists - are social constructs, bysome accounts nothing but social constructs. Our language so colours up whatwe see that we do not really see what is there at all. We frame up whatever is outthere in some context, ' constitutingitout ofour interactive experience. Ido wantto retreat from tbis avant garde in cultural studies.I seek indeed to put humans 'in context', not only with other humans, but asmembers with myriads of otber species in a biotic community of life on Earth.I am resisting putting everything else on Earth in 'om- context', on the flimsy


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355SAVINO NATURE .. .grounds that we really cannot know anything in any otherway. Within cultures,analogously, I do not seek to deal with Mricans only in my American c o n t e x ~ on grounds that I cannot know their alien culture in any other way. Our human"context' is both ecological and social, both natural and cultural. We haveconsiderable powers, enhanced in both science and ethics, to see more disinter-estedly.We are able, to some degree, to separate out culture from wild nature, as wedo when we designate awilderness, and set it aside as aplace wbere humansonlyvisit and do not remain, where the works of humans are substantially unnotice-able. I dO notneed "immutable fust principles which enjoy a universal currency'(p. 334) (higb class language, used with a pejorative twist). But Ido need naturethere io, with, and underculture, nature as the environmentofculture. Ineed thatmuch foundation. I do not need 'Truth' (p. 337) (again witb a high sounding,pejorative capital T). I do need in some degree correctly to know something'objective (what is the case apart from my subjective 'borizonof significance' [p.341]) about the fauna and flora tbat Minteer is so ready to evaluate without anysure know ledge of these things at all. Far from impoverishing the values we seekto o p ~ i s e in ethical decisions, I would like to 'thicken and deepen' this ethic(Minteer, p. 344) to count nonbumans morally, in ways in which Minteer, withhis limited socially constrained epistemic capacities, will be incompetent todo.He can only be pragmatic about it.I puzzle over Minteer's complaint that my ethic is somehow not 'experience-based', not 'historical'. In m} EnvironmentalEthics (1987), the opening chapterlists a taxonomy of fourteen types of values carried by nature, of which most areexperientially based. The closing chapter, on persons in natural history, con-cludes insisting on a need for "personal backing' to an environmental ethic bythose who live in "storied residence' on their landscapes (Rolston 1987).Minteer complains that I do not address conflicts between environmentalprotection and moral commitments to humans 'in any significant sense' (p. 342).Needless to say, having been taken to task by Attfield and Brennan for arguingthat we ought sometimes to save nature rather than feed people, I can onlyconclude that Minteer has not adequately readmy other work.I do not find it "curious' to speak of 4a world beyond the hmnan mind', asMinteer laments (p. 337). Every time he seeks to couple up both social andnatural values, Minteer concedes that there is a world out there, outside thehumanmind, ofwhich we can take some account I would find itcmious to knoW'bow Minteer makes his way around if he does not believe in such a world, anddoes not know something reliable about it (where the trees are and the tigersaren't).

Minteer, I am sure, knows where the trees and the tigers are; his problem isthat bedoes not know how to value them except insofaras he, or his culture, orsubculture, chooses to take up some attitude toward them. Other cultures maytake up other attitudes. The Nepalis might choose to burn the Cbitwan sal forest


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for fuel, shoot the tigers, and graze their cattle and buffalo in the former park. Ifthat is their cultural occupation, well and good. Or, if within our Americanculture, "everyday citizens' did see lttbe great forests of the Northwest as 8resource to be taken possession of, exploited' (8 characteristic view, I stillmaintain, of lumbennen who have cut the redwoodsandDouglas-fmovermanydecades) (Minteer, p. 338), nobody thinking otherwise could complain, neitherMinteer nor environmentalists who think that these old growth forests migbtcontain values being overlooked. Nobody knows whether there is any intrinsicvalue out there )Vorth respecting. There are no 'privileged' views, only 'ideologies'., Minteer's included (cf. Minteer, p. 336, p. 343).Minteer will reply that he wants to take account of a pluralism of values inhuman experiences. He wants a democratic debate among contesting parties (p.347). I think he is left in a muddle. Talk about a debate that is a 'non-starter'! (p.343). In this one, there are no grounds (aka 'foundations') for argument;'tbeoutcome willbe onlybe the resultant in apowerstruggle, whichmay be disguisedas ltpragmatic' .One thingofwhichMinteercannottake adequateaccount is whatwas there before these contingent human valuers, sometimes exploiters, camearound, such as those rhinoceros and tigers, or the old growth forests, and wbatmight still be there, even if only in relics. should humans choose to preserve it.With that (againstBrennan) Iconfess to find in my nature 'Puritanism', not moralvirtue, not "purity 'I , butvalue worthy ofrespect in wild things, sufficientat timesto take priority over hmnan needs. I run the risk of being misanthropic; that isbetter than to risk being an arrogant humanist. And I welcome continuing debateabout how, in these dilemmas, to be most humane.

NOTE1 The Vitousekclaimabouthumanscapturing 40% of theterrestrialprimaryproduct is notessential to my argument, as Attfield recognises. Sagoff s easy dismissal thatallofNorthAmericawasco-optedalready in 1492, since the Indiansroamedover all of it, is no seriousresponse. Modem agriculture. range management, timbering, irrigation, road-building,and so on have dramatically co-opted the American landscape, easily 40% of t, as nativeAmericans never did. Hennan Daly, in his response to Sagoff judges the Vitousekcalculation 'a reasonable estimate to put some quantitative dimension on the scale of thehuman economy relative to the total ecosystem' (1995: 623).

REFERENCESCunningham, Carol. and Berger. Joel 1997. The Hom ofDarlcness: Rhinos on the Edge.New York: Oxford University Press.Daly, Herman 1995. "Response to Mark Sagofrs "Carrying Capacity and EcologicalEconomics",' BioScience 45:621-624.


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Nepal, Sanjay Kumar and Weber. Karl E. 1993. Struggle for Existence: Park-PeopleConflict in the Royal ChiIWan National Parle, Nepal. Bangkok. Thailand: AsianInstitute of Technology.

Rolston. Holmes. III 1987. Environl1lental Ethics: Duties to and Values in the NaturalWorld. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.Rolston, Holmes. In 1997. Nature for Real: Is Nature a Social Construct?' Pages 38-64in T.O.J. Chappell. ed . The Philosophy of the Environment. Edinburgh: Universityof Edinburgh Press.Rolston. Holmes, III 1996. 'Feeding People versus Saving Nature?' Pages 248-267 inWilliam Aiken and Hugh LaFollette. eds., World Hunge r andMorality, 2nd edition.Upper Saddle River. NJ: Prentice-Hall. Reprinted in Roger S. Gottlieb, ed., TheEcological Conupunity (London: Routledge. 1967). pages 208-225. Reprinted inHugh Lafollette.ed., Ethics in Practice:An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, Ltd, 1997), pages 619-630. Also reprinted in Donald VanD eVeer and ChristinePierce, eds. The Environmental Ethics and Policy Book: Philosophy Ecology.Economics, 2nd ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publish ing Co., 1998). pages 409420. Translated into German as 'Menschen Emihren oder Natur Erhalten?' inConceptus: Zeitschrift fUr philosophie 29(nr. 74, 1996):1-25, with reply, 'Natur'Erhalten oder Menschen Eromen?' ('Saving Nature or Feeding People'?') by RobinAttfield (Philosophy, University of Wales), Conceptus 29: 27-45.

Shrestha, Nabina 1997. Protected Species ofNepal. Kathmandu: IUeN Nepal.World Health Organil.ation. Commission on Health and Environme nt 1992. Our Planet,

Out Health. Geneva: World Health Organization.

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Saving Nature, Feeding People, and the Foundations of Ethics