5 Ecologism and
other ideologies
We now have the fundamentals of ecologism in place. We have discussed
its critique of contemporary society, we have outlined its proposals for
an ecologically sound society, and we have assessed its approach to
bringing such a society about. I have claimed that ecologism is a new
political ideology, worthy of attention in the new millennium alongside
other more familiar ones such as liberalism, conservatism and socialism.
If this is correct, then it is only natural to want to compare and
contrast this new ideology with those which it seeks to challenge. That
is what I propose to do in this chapter. In so doing, it is my intention to
deepen our understanding of what marks ecologism oﬀ from those
other ideologies. I shall be arguing that attempts by liberals, conservatives
and socialists to appropriate ecological thought for themselves
will founder, since, as I pointed out in the Introduction, ecologism is as
diﬀerent from each of them as they are from each other. The examination
carried out in this chapter should drive home this point.
In principle, the list of ideologies with which ecologism could be
compared and contrasted is a long one. In choosing to devote attention
to just four of them I might be accused of pruning that long list unduly.
There are two reasons for doing so, however. The ﬁrst is that I wanted to
give each of these four ideologies a run for its money. Broad comparisons
have been helpfully carried out elsewhere (see e.g. Hay, 1988;
Martell, 1994, ch. 5; Garner, 2000, ch. 3; Connelly and Smith, 2003,
pp. 52–65), but the range of coverage has been bought at the cost of
making it rather thin, with typically a page or two devoted to each
ideology. Particularly recently, and particularly in the cases of the four
ideologies I deal with here, some very interesting comparative work has
been done, and it is simply not possible to do this work justice in a short
space.
Second, the ideologies I have chosen for assessment might legitimately
be regarded as lying at the roots of those I have left out. This is to
say that liberalism, conservatism and socialism are widely held to be the
most fundamental ideologies of the modern era, and other less fundamental
ones can often be read through them (although never wholly
reducible to them). I hope, therefore, to have provided an indirect service
to those who would want to contrast ecologism with nationalism or
with fascism, for example, although I am acutely aware of the breadth I
have nevertheless sacriﬁced. Feminism might not generally be held to be
in the same league as liberalism, conservatism and socialism (although
I am not so sure myself), but the justiﬁcation for including a detailed
discussion of it here is that it has inﬂuenced the development of ecologism
in a way unmatched by any other ideology, with the possible
exception of socialism. This inﬂuence has also, I think, been reciprocal.
For no particular reason, the ideologies with which I compare and
contrast ecologism are in the following order: liberalism, conservatism,
socialism and feminism.
Liberalism
Ten years ago, Mark Sagoﬀ asked whether environmentalists could be
liberals (Sagoﬀ, 1988, pp. 146–70). At the time, the question appeared
rather esoteric in that the interesting ideological and theoretical relationships
seemed to be between environmentalism (or, as I want to call
it here, ecologism) and socialism, or environmentalism and feminism,
rather than between environmentalism and liberalism. It is now clear
that Sagoﬀ was more perceptive than most of the rest of us, not because
ecosocialism and ecofeminism are not interesting – they are – but
because the increasing dominance of the liberal world-view in academic
and political life has necessarily brought the environmental and liberal
agendas into close contact, with the result that some of the most intellectually
interesting (if politically questionable) work in environmental
political theory is being done in this area.
Thus Robyn Eckersley was able to write in 1992 that:
Although some emancipatory theorists, such as John Rodman,
have noted and discussed these byways in liberal thought [that is,
potential compatibilities between liberalism and radical ecology],
the general tendency has been to look to other political traditions
for the ideals and principles that would underpin an ecologically
sustainable post-liberal society.
(Eckersley, 1992, pp. 23–4)
Since then a number of theorists (e.g. Hayward, 1995; Eckersley, 1996;
Ecologism and other ideologies 149
Wissenburg, 1998a, 2006; B. Barry, 1999; Miller, 1999; Hailwood 2004)
have sought to demonstrate compatibility between liberal and environmental
themes or, more strongly, to show how the ecological political
project can be expressed more or less completely in the liberal idiom.
My own view is that the answer to the compatibility question depends
entirely on one’s terms of reference: environmentalism and liberalism
are compatible, but ecologism and liberalism are not. So even if it is
true to say that political ecology ‘draws on’ liberalism, Martell is wrong
to jump to the conclusion that this ‘shows that green political theory does
not stand alone as a new political theory’ (Martell, 1994, p. 141). The
tensions between liberalism and ecologism are by now well rehearsed.
Martell himself points out that:
there is a lot in liberal political theory that runs counter to radical
ecology. Individualism, the pursuit of private gain, limited government
and market freedom are contradicted by radical ecology
commitments to the resolution of environmental problems as a
collective good and to intervention and restrictions on economic
and personal freedoms to deal with them.
(Martell, 1994, p. 141)
The issue of liberty is crucial here. As Wissenburg says, ‘in no respect
can liberal democracy and environmental concerns be so much at odds
as where liberty is concerned’ (Wissenburg, 1998a, p. 33), and while it
would be wrong to regard political ecology as just a series of personal
and social prohibitions, there is no doubt that ecologism’s stress on
‘limits’ of all sorts amounts to the potential curtailment of certain
taken-for-granted freedoms, particularly in the realms of production,
consumption and mobility. It will not be enough for liberals to be told
that these restrictions will be oﬀset by hoped-for improvements in the
quality of life: liberty is central to the liberal prospectus, and liberals
will regard threats to it with great suspicion.
Liberals resist being told what to think as well as what to do. More
technically, they regard their felt preferences as an accurate indicator of
their interests, and they will say that attempts by the state to inﬂuence
tastes and preferences are generally unwarranted. Likewise, liberals do
not typically welcome suggestions that people do not know what is in
their own best interest. Thus, ‘From a liberal perspective, the objection
to denying the equation of people’s interests with what they think or say
they are is that this appears at the same time to be denying basic respect
for people’s autonomy’ (Hayward, 1995, p. 203). The problem from a
political-ecological point of view is that this autonomy may clash with
150 Green Political Thought
ecological objectives: ‘Liberal democracy is totally incompatible with
attempts to dictate people’s tastes and preferences, yet we may reasonably
assume that preferences are one of the determining factors of
sustainability’ (Wissenburg, 1998a, p. 7). Far from regarding people’s
preferences as sacrosanct, political ecologists seek to inﬂuence them all
the time, and if we add to this the various potential restrictions on
liberty referred to above, then the tensions between liberalism and
ecologism become palpable.
Often, autonomy for liberals is understood to mean the freedom to
develop and pursue one’s own moral goals in life. From this point of
view, ‘Liberalism is the political theory that holds that many conﬂicting
and even incommensurable conceptions of the good may be fully
compatible with free, autonomous, and rational action’ (Sagoﬀ, 1988,
pp. 150–1), and so, ‘The liberal state does not dictate the moral goals its
citizens are to achieve; it simply referees the means they use to satisfy
their own preferences’ (ibid., p. 151). It will be clear from Chapter 2 that
political ecologists have a quite distinctive view regarding our moral
relationship with the non-human natural world, and this is a view
that they will feel bound to encourage the rest of us to endorse. This
gives rise, though, to another potential tension between liberalism and
ecologism – and to the question from Mark Sagoﬀ that heads this
section: ‘If the laws and policies supported by the environmental lobby
are not neutral among ethical, aesthetic and religious ideals but express
a moral conception of people’s appropriate relation to nature, can
environmentalists be liberals?’ (ibid., p. 150).
There are two reasons why Sagoﬀ thinks they can, the ﬁrst of which
has been adopted by many people who would like to press for compatibility
between liberalism and ecologism (e.g. Barry, 1995, pp. 145–51).
This ﬁrst reason turns on the common distinction in liberal theory
between the structure of institutions and the social policies that emerge
from them (Sagoﬀ, 1988, p. 166). Sagoﬀ suggests that while liberals
must be neutral in respect of the former (that is, that the institutions be
fair between the individuals who participate in them), there is nothing
to prevent them from having decided views on social policy – even views
that are based upon ‘particular ethical, cultural, or aesthetic convictions’
(ibid.). Convictions of this sort, of course, amount to convictions
regarding the nature of the Good Life about which liberals are traditionally
supposed to be neutral. Sagoﬀ squares the circle by making
the distinction between institutions and policy, and arguing that liberal
neutrality applies only to the former and not necessarily to the latter.
Thus Sagoﬀ’s ‘liberal environmentalist’ will argue for neutrality only at
the level of institutions, while remaining perfectly free to advance and
Ecologism and other ideologies 151
defend Good Life-type views about the proper relationship between
human beings and the non-human natural world.
Sagoﬀ’s second reason for believing that environmentalists can be
liberals is based on liberalism’s ‘tolerance for competing views’ (Sagoﬀ,
1988, p. 167), and its endorsement of institutions ‘in which individuals
and groups may argue for the policies they favor and may advocate
various conceptions of the good’ (ibid.). It is a short step from here to
the conclusion that anyone with a conception of the good they wish to
advance would be well advised to endorse the liberal project because
only in a liberal political environment is there the guarantee of being
able to advance it. Nor is it just a question of ideas. Liberal tolerance of
competing views and the belief that people should be allowed to choose
their own versions of the Good Life raises the issue of the material
preconditions for living the Good Life, whatever it may be. It is virtually
meaningless to say that people are free to choose lives if the conditions
for doing so are not in place. Liberals should surely therefore be committed
to wide-ranging protection of the non-human world in case
parts of it are fundamental to the Good Lives of current people. This
point is perhaps even stronger if we take future people into account. We
cannot know what conceptions of the Good Life future people will
have, so it is incumbent on the current generation (the argument goes)
to pass on as wide a range of possible conditions for living good lives
as possible. We need only think of conceptions of the Good Life that
are land-based (e.g. animist religions) to see the potential force of this
argument. More technically: ‘liberals . . . should be in favour of strong
sustainability – and not because of any special commitment to “nature”,
but because a structured bequest package amounts to a wider range
of options from which to choose good lives’ (Dobson, 2003, p. 168).
We might even agree with Sagoﬀ by this point, not only that environmentalists
can be liberals, but that they should be liberals.
At the same time, some liberals have become less demanding in terms
of their views of what ‘neutrality’ in terms of the Good Life might
mean. More accurately, they have come to argue that some ‘ecological
principles’ may be included in ‘the set of values on which reasonable
individuals should agree’. These values ‘make social co-operation possible
and at the same time limit the areas in which individuals may
disagree on the good life’ (Wissenburg, 2006, p. 25). In other words, not
all versions of the Good Life are compatible with sustainability, and
ones that are not should be ruled out of court – even by liberals.
This second argument, though, merely conﬁrms what we knew
already: that liberalism tolerates competing conceptions of the Good
Life. What political ecologists will want to know, in addition, is whether
152 Green Political Thought
liberalism will bring about their objectives. No political system can
oﬀer such guarantees, of course, but liberalism’s thoroughgoing focus
on the means rather than the ends of political association makes it only
problematically compatible than some other political ideologies with an
end-orientated conception of political and social life such as ecologism.
Thus while it is true that ‘Liberal social policy cannot be inferred from
liberal political theory’ (Sagoﬀ, 1988, p. 166) – i.e. that liberal political
theory’s neutrality as regards institutions should not be taken to entail
morality-free social policy – political ecologists are likely to support
institutions and policies that endorse their view of what morality
should be, rather than ‘merely’ neutral ones.
Nor may it be so easy for a putative green liberalism to avoid nailing
its colours to the mast so far as a moral conception of people’s relationship
with non-human nature is concerned. As Marcel Wissenburg
surveys the likely future relationship between liberalism and ecologism,
he writes:
We may also expect the introduction of the notion of limits to
growth and resources, and with it that of sustainability, to lead to
questions of a substantive normative nature. A sustainable society
need not be one big Yellowstone Park – we can imagine a worldwide
version of Holland stuﬀed with cows, grain and greenhouses,
or even a global Manhattan without the Park to be as sustainable
and for many among us as pleasant as the ﬁrst. Hence a greener
liberalism will have to deﬁne more clearly what kind of sustainability,
what kind of world, it aims for.
(Wissenburg, 1998a, p. 81)
If Wissenburg is right about this – and I believe he is – then this
‘greener liberalism’ will be obliged to develop a moral conception of
our relationship with the non-human natural world as a necessary step
on the road to deciding what kind of world we want to hand on to
future generations. On this reading, environmental sustainability by definition
raises questions regarding the Good Life, and so if liberalism is to
have a ‘take’ on environmental sustainability then it must also have a
deﬁnitive moral conception of ‘people’s appropriate relation to nature’
(in Sagoﬀ’s words (1988, p. 150)). If this is a pill that liberalism cannot
swallow – as I suspect it cannot – then this may be where liberalism and
ecologism ﬁnally part company.
The history of liberal thought gives some succour to those who
seek compatibilities between liberalism and radical ecology. Marcel
Wissenburg, among others, has identiﬁed two types of liberal legacy,
Ecologism and other ideologies 153
one centred on the work of John Locke and the other on John Stuart
Mill and Jeremy Bentham (Wissenburg, 1998a, pp. 74–6), and he
(Wissenburg, 2001) and Piers Stephens (2001a, 2001b) have debated the
relative merits of these two types of liberalism from the green point of
view. The former type, according to most commentators, is broadly
inimical to the modern ecological project, while the latter has resources
that may be enlisted in favour of some aspects of it. In Lockean times,
writes Wissenburg, ‘Nature had two roles to play in liberal thought:
physically, it was an inexhaustible source of resources; intellectually, it
was the incarnation of the laws of nature over which humankind had
triumphed, which it had transcended’ (Wissenburg, 1998a, p. 74). It will
be clear by now that this view of the ‘role’ of nature is roundly rejected
by contemporary political ecologists: the limits to growth thesis suggests
that nature’s resources are not boundless, and the idea that human
beings can ‘triumph’ over the laws of nature is the hubris that political
ecologists blame – in part – for environmental problems surrounding
issues such as genetically modiﬁed foods (discussion of the possibility
of a more ecologically friendly reading of Locke may be found at
Hayward (1994, pp. 130–6), and Dobson (1998, pp. 144–8)).
Similarly, Wissenburg refers to ‘the crucial role of reason’ in classical
liberalism (Wissenburg, 1998a, p. 74). The idea, or category, of reason
is central to liberalism since the view that all human beings possess
reason (even if they do not always use it) constitutes ‘the beginning of
arguments for the political equality and inﬂuence of citizens, for the
individual as the source of all political authority, for the priority of
private over state interests’ (ibid.). The explosive nature of this idea in
the late seventeenth century should not be underestimated. But inclusion
and exclusion are two sides of the same coin, and just as possessors
of reason were drawn into the charmed circle, so those beings lacking it
were left outside. As Wissenburg puts it: ‘Classical liberalism recognizes
only one essential distinction in nature: the line dividing reasonable
and unreasonable beings’ (Wissenburg, 1998a, p. 75). This is an essential
and enduring distinction in one type of liberalism that legitimizes
discriminatory treatment between humans and other animals.
The second type of liberalism – that developed through the work of
Mill, Bentham and their followers – tells a diﬀerent story, however. As
Bentham famously said, ‘The question is not, Can they reason? nor,
Can they talk? but, Can they suﬀer?’ (Bentham, 1960: ch. 17, sec. 1).
This new category of ‘sentience’ clearly broadens the community of
beings entitled to moral consideration – broadens it suﬃciently, indeed,
to include some non-human animals. We saw all this in Chapter 2, and
we also saw that the game of deﬁning the ‘X’ in the question ‘What
154 Green Political Thought
faculty, X, must beings possess to be entitled to moral considerability?’
can be played interminably. For classical liberalism, ‘X’ is reason, and
this gives one kind of answer to the question. For Bentham (and utilitarians
in general), ‘X’ is sentience, and this gives another kind of
answer. Ecocentrics will answer the ‘X’ question in diﬀerent ways again;
Robyn Eckersley, as we saw (p. 42), refers to the ‘characteristic of selfreproduction
or self-renewal’ (Eckersley, 1992, p. 60). This broadens the
community of ‘moral patients’ beyond anything to be found even in
Mill and Bentham, and provides circumstantial evidence that, however
hard they try, liberals will not ﬁnd much in their historical legacy to
satisfy ecocentrics.
On the other hand, the idea of rights is inseparable from liberalism,
and this idea can be – and has been – enlisted in favour of environmental
objectives. This appropriation can take the form of piggybacking
such objectives on speciﬁcally human rights. Tim Hayward
points out that the idea of a ‘right to . . . an environment of a quality
that permits a life of dignity and well-being’ was mooted as early as
1972 at the Stockholm UN Conference on the Human Environment.
From an environmental point of view, though, there are problems
with such a rights strategy. In the ﬁrst place, as Hayward observes, the
problem with the idea of a ‘right to an adequate environment’ for political
ecologists is that ‘it does not really go beyond the view that the
environment is just a resource which humans have a right to use for
their own beneﬁt’ (Hayward, 1995, p. 144). Second, the ‘limits to
growth’ thesis suggests that ‘natural ecosystems have a limited carrying
capacity which simply cannot support all the demands of a growing
human population, and so cannot necessarily support all the rights they
might want to claim either’ (ibid., pp. 144–5).
This second objection points to the need to limit population growth.
Such a policy may itself have distinctly non-liberal implications (see
Wissenburg, 1998b), but Hayward refers to evidence which suggests
that aﬄuence is an eﬀective contraceptive, and he also suggests (along
with many others, e.g. B. Barry, 1999) that women’s emancipation is the
key to reduced birth rates. What should be noted, though, is that the
‘aﬄuence’ solution both falls foul of the limits to growth thesis and is
also the cause of the type of environmental problem associated with
wealthy societies. Likewise, the ‘emancipation’ solution comes from
feminism not from liberalism, so we are perhaps entitled to conclude that
liberalism – on its own – lacks the intellectual resources for dealing with
the problems associated with piggy-backing environmental objectives
on human rights.
Another way in which liberal rights talk can make ‘green’ sense is in
Ecologism and other ideologies 155
the context of animal rights. A ﬂavour of this move has already been
given in Chapter 2, and there is no need to go over the same ground
again. Suﬃce to say that assuming some animals can be regarded as
rights-holders (Feinberg, 1981), then rights claims can, in principle, be
as politically useful for those animals as they are for human beings. This
begs the question, of course, of whether rights claims are politically
useful, even when social and economic rights are added to the political
rights normally associated with the liberal project. Ted Benton, for one,
has deployed a Marxist critique of such rights in the context of animals,
and he suggests that the discourse of rights will always come up against
the practice of exploitation:
rights are unlikely to be eﬀective in practice unless those who have
the power to abuse them are already benevolently disposed to their
bearers. . . . Where humans gain their livelihood from a practice
which presupposes a ‘reiﬁcation’ of animals, or gain pleasure from
sports which involve systematic animal suﬀering, it seems unlikely
that a rational argument that this treatment is unjust to the animals
concerned would be suﬃcient to make the humans concerned
change their ways.
(Benton, 1993, p. 94)
The crucial thing, he concludes, is to take into account ‘the socioeconomic
and cultural positions and formations of the human agents
concerned’ (ibid.).
One ﬁnal and very promising area in which rights have been deployed
in the name of environmental objectives is in the context of future
generations. It may not be immediately apparent how the rights of
future generations and environmental sustainability are connected, but
once we realize that ‘the environment’ is one of the things we hand on
to future generations, and if we accept that future generations have a
right to a sustainable and satisfying environment, then future generation
rights and environmental sustainability may be seen to be intimately
linked. As Hayward astutely points out: ‘In talking about rights of
future generations, one is already addressing matters of environmental
concern’ (Hayward, 1994, p. 142).
In this context as in many others, the work of the most inﬂuential
(liberal) theorist of modern times, John Rawls, has proved remarkably
fecund. Rawls it was who, in his A Theory of Justice, developed a
‘savings principle’ (Rawls, 1973, p. 287), whereby current generations
are enjoined to save for future ones. Much turns on just what form
this ‘saving’ is to take, of course, but if it is understood to include
156 Green Political Thought
environmental goods and services (understood in the broadest sense),
then this liberal theory of justice, at least, appears to be compatible with
environmental objectives. Recently, Marcel Wissenburg has argued that
this is true of all liberal theories of justice: ‘liberals in general need to
include a savings principle in their respective theories of justice – and
. . . (some form of) obligations to future generations is a conditio sine
qua non of any liberal theory of justice’ (Wissenburg, 1998a, p. 134).
Once again, the nature of these obligations is crucial, but Wissenburg
believes it to be entirely compatible with a conditional view of liberal
rights that these obligations take the form of what he calls the ‘restraint
principle’:
no goods shall be destroyed unless unavoidable and unless they are
replaced by perfectly identical goods; if that is physically impossible,
they should be replaced by equivalent goods resembling the
original as closely as possible; and that if this is also impossible, a
proper compensation should be provided.
(Wissenburg, 1998a, p. 123)
From an environmental point of view this looks very promising.
Yet – as ever – the devil is in the detail: what, precisely, does ‘unless
unavoidable’ mean? Carnivores and vegetarians, for example, will have
diﬀerent answers to this question. More broadly still, the ‘unless
unavoidable’ proviso takes us back full circle to an earlier point: that the
idea of environmental sustainability enjoins us, by deﬁnition, to have a
deﬁnitive moral conception of ‘people’s appropriate relation to nature’
– precisely the kind of conception, though, that liberalism eschews.
The liberal language of rights, then, may be deployed in the service of
environmental objectives, but not with conclusive success. My own view
is that the intentions of ecologism need the idea of responsibilities to be
added to those of rights because, as Hayward remarks, this:
seems to capture the key ecological intuition that it is necessary to
change our basic attitude to the world from one which considers
‘what we can get out of it’ to one which considers ‘what we can and
must do for it’.
(Hayward, 1994, p. 163)
Whether or not animals or future generation human beings have rights,
their peculiar vulnerability to our actions ‘demands’ a responsible attitude
of care and concern (Goodin, 1985). Normally, rights and duties
are seen as reciprocal – ‘rights exist if and only if corresponding duties
Ecologism and other ideologies 157
exist’ (Hayward, 1994, p. 169) – and ecologism’s contribution (as we
saw in the discussion of ecological citizenship in Chapter 4) to this
debate lies in severing the connection between rights and duties.
In sum there will always be tensions, to say the least, between liberalism
and ecologism. Marcel Wissenburg summarizes the state of play
as follows: ‘Although liberalism has not been fundamentally changed
by its contact with green political thought, it has developed in many
important respects. To be more precise, some liberals have taken on a
shade of green’ (Wissenburg, 2006, p. 23). True though this is, pressure
points remain. To the oft-remarked diﬀerences of opinion over autonomy
and individualism we must add ecologism’s insistence on a deﬁnitive
view of the proper moral relationship between human beings and
the non-human natural world. We must acknowledge the uses to which
rights talk may be put for environmental ends, but also temper this
with the recognition that such talk can never fully express the nature
of the relationship between human beings and ‘nature’ that ecologism
seeks to establish. Finally, liberalism is ﬁrmly located in a tradition
of thought and practice that has distinguished sharply between the
human and ‘natural’ realms, both descriptively and prescriptively (but
see Wissenburg, 2006, pp. 26–9). Ecologism, by contrast, insists that
we are human animals, with all the implications that this brings in its
train.
Conservatism
In the context of modern political thought, one of ecologism’s signal
and novel contributions is the idea that our natural condition aﬀects
and constrains our political condition. This is to say that – following on
from the last remark in the previous section – our condition as human
animals constrains us in ways similar to those experienced by all animals.
There are diﬀerences, of course. Human animals are able to construct
plans for life and strategies for realizing them in ways that most, if not
all, other animals are incapable of doing. It is this capacity for autonomous
thought and action on which liberal thought focuses, as we saw in
the previous section, and this view of the human condition dominates
contemporary politics.
Political ecologists do not reject this view entirely, but they do recommend
that it be tempered by a hard-headed look at our natural
circumstances. The lesson of the limits to growth thesis, as we saw in
Chapter 3, is that human beings – like any other animal – have to
consume natural resources, and that given that these resources are
limited, human projects such as open-ended economic growth are
158 Green Political Thought
impossible to sustain. In this regard, ecologism taps into a tradition that
is closer to the conservative than the liberal sensibility. Thomas
Malthus, for example, famous for his An Essay on the Principle of Population
(1792), is widely regarded as contributing to the conservative
tradition – largely due to his belief in ‘the limits to social progress
imposed by man’s place in nature’ (Wells, 1982, p. 2).
The intellectual history of the past two hundred years is littered
with thinkers who have questioned the idea of progress as understood
by modernity, but ecologism’s reluctance to endorse modernity’s
notion of progress is not based on ‘some view of the cyclic growth
and degeneration of civilizations’, nor on ‘objections based on a
philosophical and epistemological opposition to the notion of a “scientiﬁc”
history’ (as in rejections of the Marxist notion of progress),
but on a ‘particular vision of man’s relationship to the physical and
biological world: what could be called “the ecological viewpoint” ’
(Wells, 1982, p. 3). This viewpoint is animated by the fundamentally
conservative thought that ‘the basic political question – “what should
be done?” – depends on an account of what can be done’ (ibid.,
p. 15). Conservatives generally oppose the Enlightenment view that
humans can control their environment, and while political ecologists
obviously have to believe that a modicum of control is possible, they
will probably agree that human beings’ determination to ‘interfere’
with nature is a part cause of our environmental problems. As Gray
graphically puts it: ‘Most people today think they belong to a species
that can be master of its own destiny. This is faith, not science’ (Gray,
2002, p. 3).
In ecologism, this account of what can be done turns on an understanding
of human beings’ place in nature. Moreover, the guiding idea
of political ecology is that this is an ecological place rather than an
evolutionary place, with all the implications that this entails. Most
particularly, the ecological view talks of ‘climax states’ of relative
stability, while the evolutionists’ motif is that of ‘progress’. Malthus’
ecological view was superseded by that of Darwin and Wallace, whose
ideas were grasped with alacrity by progressive thinkers such as Marx,
who:
welcomed the new biological outlook and the support it gave to an
evolutionary – and by implication, progressive – view of human
society. The idea of general, and perhaps unlimited, progress so
strongly attacked by Malthus had been restored as a dominant
theme in social and political theory.
(Wells, 1982, p. 12)
Ecologism and other ideologies 159
With the restoration of the ecological idea in politics, battle with the
evolutionary view of political progress has once again been joined.
Luke Martell has summarized the connections between radical green
and conservative thinking in the following way:
Some greens urge humans to be more humble and accommodating
before nature, adapting to its laws and rhythms and putting less
emphasis on exercising control over their environment and manipulating
it to their own advantage. They are often sceptical and
critical of Enlightenment ideas about the capacity of human
rationality and the commitment to progress and innovation.
(Martell, 1994, p. 140)
These are all recognizably conservative notions, and each one amounts
to useful ammunition for those who would claim that ecologism and
conservatism are fundamentally similar ideologies.
So similar, indeed, that a sustained attempt has been made by John
Gray, sometime supporter of Thatcherite liberal conservatism but now
an advocate of a more sceptical conservatism, to appropriate political
ecology for the conservative cause (Gray, 1993b). Roger Scruton is
another who argues that ‘conservatism and environmentalism are natural
bedfellows’ (Scruton, 2006, p. 8), and he – like Gray – asks us not
to equate conservatism with ‘the ideology of free enterprise, and free
enterprise as an assault on the earth’s resources’ (Scruton, 2006, p. 7).
So, just as there are many liberalisms so there are many conservatisms,
and some are more ‘compatible’ with environmental thought than
others. Gray urges us to reject ‘the self-image of the Greens as inheritors
of the radical protest movements of earlier times, and as making
common cause with contemporary radical movements, such as feminism
and anti-colonialism’ (ibid., p. 124). On the contrary, ‘Far from
having a natural home on the Left, concern for the integrity of the
common environment, human as well as ecological, is most in harmony
with the outlook of traditional conservatism of the British and European
varieties’ (ibid.; and see Scruton, 2006), and:
Many of the central conceptions of traditional conservatism have a
natural congruence with Green concerns: the Burkean idea of the
social contract, not as agreement among anonymous ephemeral
individuals, but as a compact between the generations of the living,
the dead and those yet unborn; Tory scepticism about progress, and
awareness of its ironies and illusions; conservative resistance to
untried novelty and large-scale social experiments; and, perhaps
160 Green Political Thought
most especially, the traditional conservative tenet that individual
ﬂourishing can occur only in the context of forms of common life.
(Gray, 1993b, p. 124)
To these similarities, Gray adds the observation that ‘both Greens
and conservatives consider risk-aversion the path of prudence when
new technologies, or new social practices, have consequences that are
large and unpredictable, and, most especially, when they [sic] are
unquantiﬁable but potentially catastrophic risks associated with intervention’
(Gray, 1993b, p. 137). This is the Greens’ ‘precautionary principle’
for decision-making in all but name – widely advocated in recent
debates regarding the experimental planting of genetically modiﬁed
crops, and supported by many political conservatives. Scruton sees a
related link between environmental thinking and conservatism in the
idea of the ‘maintenance of the social ecology’ (Scruton, 2006, p. 8). By
this he means the duty of the current generation to pass on our social
and ecological inheritance – of which we are the ‘temporary trustees’
(ibid.). He also believes that there is a link between the idea of local
loyalties that is present in some conservative thinking, and the localism
of much of the green agenda. ‘There is no evidence that global political
institutions have done anything to limit global entropy’, he writes (ibid.,
p. 16). Thus he ﬁnds it surprising that greens have not followed their
localism to its logical conclusion: i.e. the conservative view that we
‘must retain what we can of the loyalties that attach us to our territory,
and make of that territory a home’ (ibid.). Conservatives are suspicious
of cosmopolitan rootlessness, and suspicious of it when they see it in
green globalists such as George Monbiot (2004). Scruton makes the
point that rooted localism should appeal to greens on the grounds that
it solves the ‘motivation problem’: that of ﬁnding a non-egotistic
motive which may be elicited in ordinary members of society and relied
upon to serve the long-term ecological goal (Scruton, 2006, p. 13).
The evidence for congruence between radical political ecology and
conservatism, then, seems strong, but there are a number of areas where
the relationship is severely strained, and others still where it cannot be
said to exist at all. We can begin with Gray’s ‘traditional conservative
tenet that individual ﬂourishing can occur only in the context of forms
of common life’ (Gray, 1993b, p. 124), and that this is an idea shared by
‘Green theory’ (ibid., p. 136). But just what is this ‘common life’, and is
it the same for political ecologists and for conservatives? From a conservative
point of view, Gray says that people’s ‘deepest need is a home,
a network of common practices and inherited traditions that confers on
them the blessing of a settled identity’ (ibid., p. 125). The common life
Ecologism and other ideologies 161
of which he speaks is therefore deﬁned in primarily historical and cultural
terms as expressed through tradition. There are indeed radical
greens for whom culture and history are very important. Some of the
resistance to road-building programmes, for instance, is based on a
belief in the cultural signiﬁcance of features of the land which are
destroyed by building contractors. My own view, though, is that valuing
‘nature’ in the currency of ‘culture’ in this way is precisely what distances
conservative defences of nature from political-ecological ones.
The political ecologist sees value in nature in itself, and if this value
derives from history at all, it is natural history that counts, and not
human history in the form of tradition and culture.
This is as much as to say that the ‘common life’ of which radical
greens speak is an ontological and moral one that crosses species
boundaries. It is important for Gray that common cultural, conservative
forms:
cannot be created anew for each generation. We are not like
the butterﬂy, whose generations are unknown to each other; we are
a familial and historical species, for whom the past must have
authority (that of memory) if we are to have identity.
(Gray, 1993b, p. 124)
But the moral and ontological common life of political ecologists can
be created anew for each generation through the intellectual eﬀort of
grounding inter-species responsibility in a thoroughgoing naturalism
that recognizes the implications of our being human animals.
Thus the ecocentrism of radical greenery sets it apart from conservatism
just as it sets it apart from all other modern political ideologies. The
only time Gray mentions anthropocentrism, the bête noire of the political
ecologist, is in the following context: ‘Green theory is an invaluable
corrective of the Whiggish, anthropocentric, technological optimism by
which all the modernist political religions are animated’ (Gray, 1993b,
p. 175). There is no evidence adduced, though, to suggest that traditional
conservatism is anything other than as irredeemably anthropocentric
as other political ideologies. Where conservative defences of the
non-human natural world exist, they are usually rooted in romanticism
rather than in an appreciation of the independent moral standing of
non-human beings that animates much radical green thought.
The second point at which we should interrogate Gray’s agenda is on
the apparently unassailable point regarding intergenerational relations.
It is true that conservatism, unlike any other political ideology with the
exception of contemporary liberalism, talks of ‘a compact between the
162 Green Political Thought
generations of the living, the dead and those yet unborn’ (Gray, 1993b,
p. 124), and that intergenerational responsibility is a crucial feature of
the political-ecological agenda. Edmund Burke, the ‘father of British
conservatism’ whom Gray paraphrases here, and whom Roger Scruton
also recognizes as a potential source of inspiration for greens (Scruton,
2006, p. 10), puts it like this:
one of the ﬁrst and most leading principles on which the commonwealth
and the laws are consecrated, is lest the temporary possessors
and life-renters in it, unmindful of what they have received
from their ancestors, or of what is due to their posterity, should act
as if they were the entire masters; that they should not think it
amongst their rights to cut oﬀ the entail, or commit waste on the
inheritance, by destroying at their pleasure the whole original fabric
of their society; hazarding to leave to those who come after them, a
ruin instead of an habitation – and teaching these successors as
little to respect their contrivances as they had themselves respected
the institutions of their forefathers. By this unprincipled facility of
changing the state as often, and as much, and in as many ways as
there are ﬂoating fancies or fashions, the whole chain and continuity
of the commonwealth would be broken. No one generation
could link with the other. Men would become little better than the
ﬂies of a summer.
(Burke, 1790/1982, pp. 192–3)
What is striking about these remarks is that the generations in which
Burke is most interested are past generations – those from whom we
inherit what we have and to whom we owe some obligation of preservation.
The green view of intergenerational obligation is rather diﬀerent
to this: most obviously, the generations that usually interest political
ecologists are future generations. One thing the current generation can
be sure of, they say, is that our actions will aﬀect the conditions under
which future people live their lives, and this generates a responsibility
for us of which other political ideologies have no conception. Conservatism
is interested in the conserving and preserving of the past; ecologism
is interested in conserving and preserving for the future. Herein lies a
signal diﬀerence between the conservative and ecological political
imaginations. (Political ecologists might do well to bear in mind,
though, Burke’s aphoristic warning that ‘People will not look forward
to posterity, who never look backward to their forefathers’ (Burke,
1790/1982, p. 119).)
The third diﬀerence between conservatism and ecologism is rooted in
Ecologism and other ideologies 163
disputes about the nature and relevance of ‘imperfection’. It is a conservative
commonplace that human beings are irredeemably ﬂawed in
their nature, and that political aspirations should reﬂect this. This is to
say that political projects aimed at perfecting society will founder on the
rock of unalterable human shortcomings and weaknesses. In this regard,
political aspirations need to be drawn up within well-deﬁned limits. As
we have seen, the language of limits is the language of ecologism as well
as of conservatism:
The earth is ﬁnite. Growth of anything physical, including the
human population and its cars, buildings and smokestacks, cannot
continue forever. . . . The limits to growth are limits to the ability of
the planetary sources to provide those streams of materials and
energy, and limits to the ability of the planetary sinks to absorb the
pollution and waste.
(Meadows et al., 1992, pp. 8–9)
Gray refers to sentiments of this sort as evidence of an anti-Utopian
sensibility that is common to both conservatism and ecologism (Gray,
1993b, p. 127). Burkean conservatism and political ecology (as I have
been describing it) seem to be as one in their opposition to the hubristic
carelessness expressed in Utopian talk of ‘indeﬁnite malleability’. The
anti-Utopian’s principal target, says Krishan Kumar, is hubris (Kumar,
1987, p. 103), and so is the political ecologist’s. If Utopians believe
uncompromisingly that ‘[T]here are no fundamental barriers or obstacles
to man’s earthly perfection [and that] scarcity can be overcome’
(Kumar, 1991, p. 29), then the gap between Utopians and political
ecologists is as wide as it can be: scarcity is the most basic and unalterable
feature of the human condition so far as political ecologists are
concerned (for a full and entertaining analysis of the relationship
between Utopianism and political ecology, see De Geus, 1999). So,
Utopianism demands malleability, and political ecology’s interpretation
of the human condition denies its possibility. Does this apparent opposition
to Utopianism imply a deep congruence between conservatism
and ecologism?
I think not. The crucial and relevant distinction here is between malleability
of the human condition and the malleability of human nature.
It is perfectly possible to believe that the human condition is ﬁxed, while
human nature is not, and this is indeed what political ecologists believe.
Political ecologists do not possess the ‘pessimistic and determinist
view of human nature’ which is common to conservatives and antiUtopians
(Kumar, 1987, p. 100); nor do they believe in ‘original sin’
164 Green Political Thought
(ibid.), if by this we mean unredeemable sin. Tim Hayward believes
that ‘one cannot reasonably assume that people are generally motivated
to do other than what they take to be in their own interest’ (Hayward,
1998, p. 7), and proceeds to build his own environmental political
theory on the foundations of a reinterpretation of human self-interest
that will include respect for ‘(at least some signiﬁcant classes of)
nonhuman beings’ (ibid., p. 118). What makes this an environmental
political theory rather than an ecological one is its basis in human
self-interest, but political ecologists will also refuse the belief that selfinterest
itself is the only credible, or possible, human motivation. Thus
while political ecologists believe that there are (more or less) ﬁxed limits
to production, consumption and waste, they have a Utopian sense of
what is possible within those limits. Unlike conservatives, radical greens
believe that human beings are capable of transformation; that they
can, if they wish, abandon the acquisitive, instrumental and use-related
relationship with the natural environment that dominates the modern
imagination.
Acutely, John Gray observes that what he calls ‘green conservatism’ is
an instance of an:
ancient paradox, with which the modern world abounds in
examples, that conservatives cannot help becoming radicals, when
current practice embodies the hubristic and careless projects of
recent generations, or has been distorted by technological innovations
whose consequences for human well-being have not been
weighed.
(Gray, 1993b, p. 128)
In the current environmental climate conservatives may well ﬁnd
themselves opposed to much of the status quo, but radical conservatives
are not the same as radical greens, and on at least the three counts
discussed above the gap between the conservative and radical green
agenda so far as the environment is concerned is wide and deep.
Socialism
In the context of socialism and the largely successful assault launched
on it by the right over the past twenty years, the last thing it needed, so
the argument goes, was a challenge to its hegemony towards the left of
the political spectrum. Early responses to the environmental movement
from the socialist left were certainly hostile and often focused on its
middle-class nature, either so as to illustrate its marginal relevance to
Ecologism and other ideologies 165
the working class in particular and thus to socialism in general, or, more
aggressively, to cast it in the role of a positive distraction from the
fundamental battles still to be fought between capital and labour. Either
way, the nascent green movement was generally presented as a blip on
the screen of radical politics, which would probably soon disappear
and which certainly had nothing to say to the left that was worth
listening to.
In the pages that follow I shall set out what I consider to be the
principal socialist criticisms of green politics, and then show the ways in
which socialists sensitive to the ecological position have reinterpreted
their own tradition so as to accommodate it. The debate between ecologism
and socialism continues to be acrimonious at times and often there
is no debate at all. Jonathon Porritt and Nicholas Winner, for example,
refer to David Pepper’s presentation of the green movement as ‘deeply
conservative’ and ‘reactionary’, and as ‘just so much angry sputtering
from worn-out ideologues who have long since lost touch with the real
world’ (1988, p. 256). Sandy Irvine and Alec Ponton pointedly characterize
socialism as ‘fair shares in extinction’ (1988, p. 142). Elsewhere,
though, and particularly in the work of Raymond Williams (n.d.), Boris
Frankel (1987), James O’Connor (1996), Peter Dickens (1992) and Ted
Benton (1993, 1996), great strides have been taken (on the socialist
side at least) to come to terms with the green perspective without abandoning
original socialist impulses. It is also true to say that the growing
importance of social justice issues in environmental thought and
practice – the environmental justice movement in the USA, and the
so-called ‘environmentalism of the poor’ in both developed and developing
nations (Martinez-Alier, 2002) – have brought the traditionally
leftist issues of distribution and justice much closer to the centre of
ecological ground than used to be the case.
The ﬁrst area of contention between ecologism and socialism is over
the source of the ills of contemporary society. Socialists identify capitalism
as that source, while political ecologists are much more likely to
refer to ‘industrialism’. We know by now that one of the reasons why
the green movement considers itself to be ‘beyond left and right’ is
because it believes this traditional spectrum of opposition to be inscribed
in a more fundamental context of agreement: a ‘super-ideology’ called
‘industrialism’. Greens ‘stress the similarities between capitalist and
socialist countries’ (Porritt and Winner, 1988, p. 256) in that they are
both held to believe that the needs of their respective populations are
best satisﬁed by maximizing economic growth. The equating of capitalism
with socialism engendered by the identiﬁcation of ‘industrialism’ is
the aspect of green thinking attacked most often by its socialist critics,
166 Green Political Thought
and Joe Weston’s ‘It is time that greens accepted that it is capitalism
rather than industrialism per se which is at the heart of the problems
they address’ (1986, p. 5) is a typical refrain.
Socialists make remarks like this, in the ﬁrst place, not because they
don’t agree with ecologists that environmental decay is upon us but
because they argue that it is capitalism’s use of industry to produce for
proﬁt and not for need, rather than ‘industry’ itself, which causes the
problems. ‘Capitalism,’ writes David Pepper, ‘is about the accumulation
of capital through producing commodities.’ The capitalist dynamic
involves periodic crises of overproduction which are resolved ‘by creating
new wants, and by extending the system globally to new consumers
in new markets’. This dynamic of production and consumption means
that ‘[C]apitalism must inherently if not constantly and explicitly,
degrade and destroy that part of its means of production that comes
from “nature” ’ (Pepper, 1993a, p. 430). This is as much as to say that
capitalism is a precondition for the politics of ecology.
James O’Connor also famously argues, like Marx, that capitalism
may be digging its own grave, but for reasons that have as much to do
with a contradiction between the forces/relations of production and
the conditions of production as with the time-honoured Marxist contradiction
between the forces and relations of production themselves.
O’Connor calls this the ‘second contradiction’ of capitalism, according
to which ‘the combined power of capitalist production relations and
productive forces self-destruct by impairing or destroying rather than
reproducing their own conditions’ (O’Connor, 1996, p. 206). Examples
of such impairment, says O’Connor, are global warming, acid rain,
salinization and pesticide poisoning, all of which, he avers, threaten
proﬁt-making. This second contradiction, like the ﬁrst, gives rise to
opposition, not this time in the form of the labour movement, but in the
form of the new social movements which harbour the potential for
transcending the contradictions that give rise to them. The ‘second
contradiction’ thesis has given rise to a great deal of comment, particularly
in the journal Capitalism, Nature, Socialism (and see Benton
(1996, Part 3) for an extended discussion), and in our context it illustrates
the yawning gap between greens, who argue that industrialism is
the root of environmental degradation, and ecological Marxists, who
aﬃrm that capitalism is both the cause of the environmental crisis and
the horizon that needs to be transcended if we are to deal with it.
Radical greens will probably accept that a fundamental break with
capitalism is indeed a necessary condition for restoring environmental
integrity, but they do not see it as a suﬃcient condition, particularly
when they point to former communist countries which had some of the
Ecologism and other ideologies 167
worst environmental records in the entire world. Socialists respond by
pointing out that none of these countries were socialist in the sense they
want to ascribe to the word (Miliband, 1994), and that this is because
they have developed the same ‘form of demand for material goods’ as
the capitalist nations, in competition with them. In this sense, ‘capitalism
permeates the whole globe’ (Weston, 1986, p. 4). As Bahro wrote:
We have precisely learned that the Russian revolution did not
manage to break with the capitalist horizon of development of productive
forces. We have seen how right round the globe it is one and
the same technology that has triumphed.
(Bahro, 1982, p. 131)
In this way socialists side-step the green invitation to consider the
environmental problems suﬀered by socialist countries and to draw the
conclusion that there is little to choose between socialist and capitalist
management of industry (from the environment’s point of view). They
then suggest that a truly socialist society would produce for need and
not for proﬁt, and that consideration of the environment would be
integral to policy formation because the ‘traditional humanist concerns
of socialism’ inevitably involve consideration of human/non-human
nature interaction (Pepper, 1993a, p. 438).
However, in one important respect (from a socialist point of view) the
issue is not over what a socialist society might or might not do, but that
the green refusal to recognize capitalism as the root of the problem
renders ecology incapable of ﬁghting its battles in the right places. If
from an environmental perspective the socialist view of capitalism is
correct, then ecologism’s best way forward is to confront the capitalist
manifestation of industrialism rather than the many-headed hydra:
industrialism itself.
Joe Weston reminds us that this would involve the restatement of
traditional socialist principles and practices, on the basis that ‘what we
ﬁnd is that behind virtually all environmental problems, both physical
and social, is poverty’ (1986, p. 4). Pepper makes a similar point: ‘[A]s
the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio showed, the most fundamental issues
in global environmental politics revolve around social justice, wealth
distribution and ownership and control of the means of production,
particularly land’ (1993a, p. 429). Many socialists will then analyse
phenomena such as deforestation from just this point of view – the
fundamental problem is much more one of inequitable land distribution
(which produces the slash-and-burn farmers) and structural poverty
(which produces periodic but highly damaging jungle gold rushes),
168 Green Political Thought
than it is one of an insatiable and environmentally insensitive desire to
eat hamburgers. From this point of view, environmentalist (or even
ecologist) strategies will be found wanting: Weston suggests that:
Saving hedgerows does not confront capitalism in the same way as
do issues relating to poverty; poverty is, after all, of crucial importance
to capitalism and has to be maintained in order to preserve the
balance of power in market relationships.
(Weston, 1986, p. 156)
Poverty, then, is at the root of most environmental problems and a
far-reaching redistribution of wealth is the solution. Crucially, an
attack on poverty would constitute an attack on capitalism, and would
therefore be a blow against the root cause of environmental decay.
The green question now might be: Why should a redistribution of
wealth bring about improvements in the environment? Much evidently
turns on just what ‘environment’ one is talking about, and it is a socialist
strategy with respect to ecologism to accuse it of too narrow a deﬁnition
of the term. It is probably true that radical redistributions of
wealth would improve the sanitation, housing and food of millions of
dispossessed poor both here and in the so-called Third World, and that
this would constitute a signiﬁcant improvement in their environment.
But it is hard to see how a redistribution of wealth on its own would
address green warnings about the unsustainability of present industrial
practices. One can perfectly well imagine a world in which incomes
between and within countries were more or less the same, but which still
subscribed to the view that there were no limits to industrial growth.
Indeed, this is precisely the world that the dominant themes of socialism
have advertised since its inception, and it is the reason why greens
are wary of attacks on capitalism that have no ecological content. In
this sense, Weston talks past the green movement rather than to it when
he says:
The problems with which most people are now faced are not related
to ‘nature’ at all: they are related to poverty and the transfer of
wealth and resources from the poor to an already wealthy minority
of the Earth’s population.
(Weston, 1986, p. 14)
My own view is that the ‘justice’ and ‘environment’ agendas are
related in the way that the circles in Venn diagrams are related. That is
to say, there are areas of common concern but it is a mistake to regard
Ecologism and other ideologies 169
them as wholly and completely mapping on to one another. The powerful
‘environmental justice’ movement in the United States is often
deployed as evidence that the environmental and justice movements
can sing from the same hymn sheet, but a close examination of the
US movement’s aspirations shows that it is more concerned with
human justice than with environmental protection. Malcolm Dowie, for
example, has written that ‘The central concern of the new movement is
human health’ (Dowie, 1995, p. 127), and while there is obviously a link
between a healthy environment and human health, concern for the
latter will not cover all the objectives of political ecologists. Similarly,
Laura Pulido has noted Pezzoli’s important observation that ‘communities
engaged in what appear to be environmentally related struggles at
times may not be committed to an environmental agenda’ (Pulido,
1996, p. 16). This needs to be taken into account by those who argue
that the environmental and justice movements are as one (the issue of
the relationship between justice and the environment is addressed in
detail in Dobson (1998, 1999)).
A second point of disagreement between socialists and political
ecologists concerns ‘the environment’ itself. It transpired above that
Joe Weston’s argument that a redistribution of wealth would help
solve environmental problems was based upon an interpretation of
‘environment’ not usually associated with the green movement. In his
opinion, greens have policed the word into meaning ‘nature’: ‘the prime
concern of the greens is indeed ecology and “nature”, which means
that other, far more immediate environmental problems are neglected’
(Weston, 1986, p. 2). In this context it is indulgent and irresponsible for
the green movement to concentrate its ‘not inconsiderable resources
upon protecting hedgerows, butterﬂies and bunny rabbits’ (ibid., p. 12)
while the day-to-day built environments of large numbers of people are
in such urgent need of reconstruction.
Sections of the green movement appear to have taken this kind of
criticism on board – witness the Friends of the Earth’s ‘Cities for
People’ campaign – but there is still a sense in which Weston’s critique
speaks past the movement rather than to it. Greens have a very good
reason for referring so often to the biospherical environment: they are
concerned for its survival as a long-term supporter of human and nonhuman
life. From this perspective (eco)socialists are right to ask greens
to reassess their understanding of ‘the environment’, but wrong to ask
them to focus on inner city environments if the recipes for them are not
placed in the context of the search for a sustainable society.
Socialists (and others) will argue, in any case, that there is no such
thing as ‘nature’ unmediated by human beings, and therefore no great
170 Green Political Thought
diﬀerence between the urban environment and the environment created
by farmed land or deforestation: social relations and the capitalist
mode of production that underpins them ‘produce’ the environment.
Green exhortations to ‘protect’ or ‘conserve’ the environment betray
the unfounded impression that there is an ‘untouched’ nature alongside
the areas already corrupted by human beings, and it is this untouched
nature that receives the movement’s greatest attention. Pepper writes
that ‘[T]here is not a self-contained “humanity” counterpoised to and
ever battling with a self-contained “non-human” world’ but rather each
is ‘part of a unity that is composed of “contradictory” opposites’
(Pepper, 1993a, p. 440), and that the ecocentric view regarding our
supposed alienation from nature is internally self-contradictory, since it
‘rests on a dualistic conception of the human–nature relationship: a
conception it is supposed to reject’ (ibid., p. 443).
Again, I think that this speaks past the radical green point rather
than to it. Both Marxism and deep ecology are types of monism, of
course, but all monists separate out parts of the common substance for
diﬀerent purposes. It is no contradiction to hold a monist view regarding
the nature of things and to simultaneously distinguish between
human and non-human nature (indeed, Pepper himself continually
does so). Even Spinoza, perhaps the most thoroughgoing monist of
them all, allows for two ‘attributes’ (thought and extension) of a single
‘substance’ (Spinoza, 1677/1955). Marxists will make the distinction
within their monism in order, then, to theorize the dialectical relation
between the social and ‘natural’ (nearly always, for socialists, in inverted
commas) worlds. Deep ecologists will distinguish within their monism,
for example, so as to talk of the ethical relationship which should hold
between human and non-human nature.
Socialists, in any case, will argue that an awareness of the social
construction of the environment would have three eﬀects: ﬁrst, it would
lead to a healthy widening of green activity; second, it would promote
an understanding of the capitalist roots of environmental decay – both
in the countryside and in the cities; and third, it would improve the
chances of the green movement obtaining a mass following.
This latter point needs some explanation. Joe Weston argues that the
green movement as currently constituted is an expression of the ennui
of a particular section of the middle classes – the professional, educated
section. Green politics is ‘an attempt to protect the values – rather than
simply the economic privilege – of a social group which rejects the
market-orientated politics of capitalism and the materialistic analysis
made of it by Marxists’ (Weston, 1986, p. 27). These values are
reﬂected, partly, in the ‘green’ deﬁnitions of the environment most often
Ecologism and other ideologies 171
advanced by the movement, referred to above. To the extent that this is
‘a political perspective which is speciﬁc to a particular social group’
(ibid., p. 28) and, moreover, a social group that is of limited size, no
mass movement can be formed around it. On this reading ecologism
will not progress beyond its minority, subordinate status until it speaks
to the kinds of environmental problems suﬀered by masses of people,
and ‘that means developing ways to conceptualise and represent ecological
issues in ways that speak to the aspirations of the working class
movement’ (Harvey, 1993, p. 48). This it will never do, suggests Weston,
unless it breaks out of its middle-class laager and recognizes that
‘rather than conserving the environment in which most people now
live, the inner city and the shanty town need destroying’ (Weston, 1986,
pp. 14–15).
A third faultline between socialists and political ecologists may be
found in disputes over the issue of ‘limits to growth’. Indeed, the most
instructive test to carry out on would-be green socialists is to see how
far they have accepted the fundamental green position that there are
material limits to productive growth. Some have done so completely,
and in the process would appear signiﬁcantly to have reassessed the
content of their socialism. Rudolf Bahro, for example, commented
when he was still a socialist that he found it ‘quite atrocious that there
are Marxists who contest the ﬁnite scope of the earth’s exploitable
crust’ (1982, p. 60). We now know that Bahro’s dwelling on thoughts
like this led him to abandon socialism entirely. Not so Joe Weston and
Raymond Williams, but they would probably nevertheless agree with
the following remarks:
I do not believe that anyone can read the extensive literature on the
ecology crisis without concluding that its impact will oblige us to
make changes in production and consumption of a kind, and on a
scale, which will entail a break with the lifestyles and expectations
that have become habitual in industrialized countries.
(Ryle, 1988, p. 6)
Joe Weston certainly agrees, up to a point: ‘it must be stressed that
this rejection of green politics does not mean that we now believe that
natural resources are inﬁnite’ (Weston, 1986, p. 4), and adds that the left
can learn from the greens to call the project of ‘perpetual industrial
expansion’ into question (ibid., p. 5). Raymond Williams, too, accepts
the ecological position with respect to ‘the central problem of this
whole mode and version of production: an eﬀective inﬁnity of expansion
in a physically ﬁnite world’ (Williams, 1986, p. 214), and suggests
172 Green Political Thought
that ‘the orthodox abstraction of indeﬁnitely expanded production – its
version of “growth” – has to be considered again, from the beginning’
(ibid., p. 215).
Others, though, such as David Pepper, ﬁnd this sort of thing hard to
swallow: Pepper is concerned ‘not to abandon humanism by overpandering
to green assumptions about the “natural” limits to the transformation
of nature’ (Pepper, 1993a, p. 434). While Saral Sarkar, in his
extended defence of eco-socialism, calls these ‘old illusions’ (Sarkar,
1999, p. 197), David Harvey agrees with Pepper that the idea of natural
limits is too simplistic and insuﬃciently dialectical. He suggests that:
if we view ‘natural resources’ in the rather traditional geographical
manner, as ‘cultural, technological and economic appraisals of
elements residing in nature and mobilised for particular social ends’
. . . then ‘ecoscarcity’ means that we have not the will, wit or capacity
to change our social goals, cultural modes, our technological
mixes, or our form of economy and that we are powerless to modify
‘nature’ according to human requirements.
(Harvey, 1993, p. 39)
Harvey’s intention here is to damn political ecologists for their
(imputed) belief that human beings are powerless in the face of a hostile
natural world characterized by scarcity. Yet the intention is subverted
upon the realization that political ecology is actually all about doing
what Harvey claims political ecologists think is impossible. Political
ecologists do think we have the ‘will, wit and capacity to change our
social goals, cultural modes’ and so on. They even think that we have
the power to ‘modify “nature” according to human requirements’ – the
question is really over ‘How much?’, and a signiﬁcant part of the
answer is given, for political ecologists, by the fact that our actions take
place under the sign of scarcity. This, in the end, is the ‘brute fact’
(for political ecologists) which Marxist critics seek to defuse through
deployment of the sense of a dialectical relationship between human
beings and the ‘natural’ world.
The reconsiderations of socialists like Williams seem to involve them
in reconsidering socialism itself. Williams writes that ‘any socialist
should recognise the certainty that many of the resources at their present
levels of use are going to run out’ (Williams, n.d., p. 15), and that
consequently socialists should rethink their traditional belief that the
relief of poverty requires ‘production, and more production’ (ibid.,
p. 6). Mary Mellor turns this into an argument which could beneﬁt
socialism itself: ‘Where resources are limited, the question of who
Ecologism and other ideologies 173
beneﬁts and who loses cannot be passed oﬀ as a byproduct of the
“hidden hand of the market”, or some personal failure of will, risk or
eﬀort. It is clearly revealed as a question of moral and political choices,
of power relations and social justice’ (Mellor, 2006, p. 37). In other
words, scarcity puts social justice right at the heart of the debate. Promises
of plenty, and the trickle-down of wealth from the rich to the poor,
seem less persuasive in a limits to growth context. When the cake is of
ﬁnite size, the question of how to divide it up fairly cannot be avoided.
In this way, suggests Mellor, the green critique of ‘growthism’ and the
socialist critique of social injustice come together productively. Mellor
summarizes thus: ‘Resources are not inﬁnite; the rich are raising their
levels of consumption on things such as sports utility vehicles while the
poor are ﬁnding it harder to meet their needs’ (Mellor, 2006, p. 45).
Of course, socialists have always argued for an equitable distribution
of what is produced and in this sense Williams is consistent, but socialism
has no dominant tradition of production itself being called into
question, and this is what Williams is hinting at here. He appears to be
rereading socialism when he refers to ‘the pressure point on the whole
existing capitalist mode of production’ as ‘the problem of resources’
(n.d., p. 16). We will not ﬁnd this kind of analysis of the weaknesses of
capitalism in any of the dominant sources of socialist thought. To this
degree, acceptance of the green position that there are limits to productive
growth can have considerable repercussions with respect to the
content of the socialism espoused by socialists.
One of the repercussions that stands out is a rethinking of the socialist
tradition itself in the sense of emphasizing some aspects of it at the
expense of others. Not surprisingly, it is decentralist, non-bureaucratic,
non-productivist socialism to which writers like Williams most often
refer, and the Utopian socialists and William Morris are those usually
resurrected as evidence for its existence (Pepper: 1993a, pp. 431, 447,
449). Thus Rudolf Bahro suggested that ‘we shall scarcely come up
against any elements that have not already emerged in the writings of
one or other of the old socialists, including of course the utopians’
(Bahro, 1982, p. 126). By 1994 he was saying: ‘If pushed hard I couldn’t
deny that I am a utopian socialist because so many of the elements of
utopian socialism appear in my commune perspective’ (1994, p. 235).
Martin Ryle echoes this sentiment: ‘utopian socialism would seem to
be an obvious point of convergence between greens and socialists’
(1988, p. 21), while Robin Cook, once Foreign Secretary in one of Tony
Blair’s governments, is more speciﬁc: ‘the future of socialism may lie
more with William Morris than with Herbert Morrison’ (in Gould,
1988, p. 163), as is Raymond Williams: ‘The writer who began to unite
174 Green Political Thought
these diverse traditions, in British social thought, was William Morris’
(n.d., p. 9).
From the other side, Jonathon Porritt accepts such genealogies too:
‘My own personal points of familiarity and very close connection with
the Left come from the early libertarian traditions, William Morris and
so on, and from the anarchist tradition of left polities’, and he adds
a signiﬁcant point: ‘I think that form of decentralised socialism is something
that has had a pretty rough time in socialist politics during the
course of this century’ (Porritt, 1984b, p. 25).
What emerges from these exchanges is evidence for the selective way
in which both socialists and ecologists refer to the socialist tradition.
Usually, Porritt does not make the distinctions he makes above. He is
keen to dissociate ecologism from socialism because he sees the latter as
part of the old order, and so usually refers to it in its bureaucratic,
productivist guise. To the extent that there is a decentralist tradition
within socialism this is a disingenuous move, but it would be equally
disingenuous for socialists to respond to the ecologists’ challenge by
arguing (suddenly) that William Morris is what real socialism is all
about.
Sometimes socialists bend over too far backwards in their search for
compatible characters. When David Pepper refers, for example, to a
‘Kropotkin-Godwin-Owen’ tradition (in Weston, 1986, p. 120), one
wonders whether we are talking about socialism at all any more. At the
very most there is only one socialist among those three, and, although
Pepper does cover himself by positing an ‘anarchist rather than centralist’
form of socialism (ibid., p. 115), the adjective ‘anarchist’ has the
eﬀect of divesting socialism of much of the resonance usually attributed
to it. But there is little to be gained from semantics. The important
point is that claims for a convergence between socialism and ecology
rest on the resurrection of a subordinate tradition within socialism. To
this extent the question of whether or not socialism and political
ecology are compatible cannot be answered without ﬁrst asking: ‘What
kind of socialism?’, and in the end the answer will turn on whether the
Utopian/William Morris tradition argues for a sustainable society in
anything resembling a modern green sense (Lee, 1989).
In conclusion, some socialists, under pressure from greens, will
reassess the traditional goals of production and indiscriminate growth,
they will seek to rescue subordinate strains in their political tradition
and they may ponder the role of the working class in future political
transformations. Greens themselves need to listen to the socialist critique
and to think harder about the relationship between capitalism and
environmental degradation, about just what ‘the environment’ is, and
Ecologism and other ideologies 175
about the potential for social change implicit in the identiﬁcation of a
social subject. In the end, Martin Ryle is probably right to identify
political ecology and socialism as engaged on a ‘converging critique’:
they both see capitalism as wasteful of resources in terms of production
and consumption, and they both criticize it for its inegalitarian outcomes
(1988, p. 48).
Feminism
Within feminism generally there is a discussion as to the best way for
feminists to proceed: whether to seek equality with men on terms
largely oﬀered by men, or whether to focus on the diﬀerences between
men and women and to seek to re-evaluate upwards the currently suppressed
(supposed) characteristics of women. Beyond this distinction,
some ecofeminists see ecofeminism as an opportunity to refuse the
choice it implies and to opt, instead, for a reﬁgured politics that goes
beyond dualism. To the extent that ecofeminists subscribe to the ‘diﬀerence’
strategy, they do so not with a view to liberating women only but
also with a view to encouraging men to adopt ‘womanly’ ways of thinking
and acting, thus promoting healthier relationships between people
in general, and also between people (but especially men) and the
environment. In what follows, I shall take ‘diﬀerence’ ecofeminism to be
the discussion’s centre of gravity and develop the ‘deconstructive’
version through a critique of it.
‘Diﬀerence’ ecofeminism is built around three main ideas. In the ﬁrst
place, diﬀerence ecofeminists usually argue for the existence of values
and ways of behaving that are primarily female in the sense of being
more fundamentally possessed or exhibited by women rather than
by men. These characteristics may be ‘socially’ or ‘biologically’ produced,
and considerable importance attached to deciding which view is
adopted. First, to the extent that ecofeminists would like to see men
taking on these characteristics, they have to believe it is possible for
them to do so. In other words, they cannot argue that it is necessary to
be a woman to have such characteristics, although they might suggest
that men cannot know what they are unless they listen to women telling
them. Second, the belief that characteristics are biologically rooted is
open to the charge of essentialism, and thereby to the accusation that
such characteristics are unalterably attached to one or the other gender.
If we then argue that some characteristics are undesirable, then the
gender that has them is stuck with them: any possibility of ‘progress’ is
undone. Associated with this belief is the idea that female values
have, historically, been undervalued by patriarchy and that it is the
176 Green Political Thought
‘diﬀerence’ ecofeminist’s task to argue for their positive re-evaluation.
Of course, if there are female values and ways of behaving then there
are also male values and ways of behaving. In asking that female traits
be re-evaluated upwards, these ecofeminists do not necessarily demand
that male traits be policed out of existence – rather they are likely to
seek a balance of the two.
The second principle of diﬀerence ecofeminism is that the domination
of nature is related to the domination of women, and that the
structures of domination and the reasons for it are similar in both cases:
‘The identity and destiny of women and nature are merged’, write
Andrée Collard and Joyce Contrucci (1988, p. 137). The third idea –
related to and tying up the ﬁrst two – is that women are closer than
men to nature and are therefore potentially in the vanguard so far as
developing sustainable ways of relating to the environment is concerned
– ‘[E]cofeminists argue that women have a unique standpoint from
which to address the ecological crisis’ (Mellor, 1992b, p. 236). I shall
expand on these three notions and show how some feminists have
balked at the ecofeminist programme – and particularly the ﬁrst point
(in its essentialist form, at least) – because of what they believe to be its
reactionary implications. In some (‘deconstructive’) hands this has led
to a re(de)ﬁning of ecofeminism; Val Plumwood, for example, argues
that what is common to all ‘ecological feminisms’ is no more than a
rejection of the belief in the ‘inferiority of the sphere of women and of
nature’ (1993, p. 33). It is what one does next, having rejected this belief,
that distinguishes ‘diﬀerence’ and ‘deconstructive’ feminism.
With respect to values and behaviour, Ynestra King writes that
‘We [i.e. women] learn early to observe, attend and nurture’ (1983,
p. 12), and Stephanie Leland refers to ‘feminine impulses’ such as
‘belonging, relationship and letting be’ (1983, p. 71). These are the kinds
of characteristics (sometimes referred to, as I have already remarked, as
constitutive of the ‘feminine principle’) usually ascribed to women by
ecofeminists, and, although Val Plumwood rightly suggests that the
devaluation of male modes of thought and behaviour does not necessarily
entail the aﬃrmation of female traits, my impression is that
‘diﬀerence’ ecofeminists usually do make such aﬃrmations.
In support of her position, Plumwood writes: ‘What seems to be
involved here is often not so much an aﬃrmation of feminine connectedness
with and closeness to nature as distrust and rejection of
the masculine character model of disconnectedness from and domination
of the natural order’ (1988, p. 19). But this appears to be contradicted
by, for example, Judith Plant’s assertion that ‘Women’s values,
centred around life-giving, must be revalued, elevated from their once
Ecologism and other ideologies 177
subordinate role’ (n.d., p. 7), and by Hazel Henderson’s advocacy of
reassessment:
Eco-feminism . . . values motherhood and the raising and parenting
of children and the maintaining of comfortable habitats and
cohesive communities as the most highly productive work of
society – rather than the most de-valued, as under patriarchal
values and economics where the tasks are ignored and unpaid.
(Henderson, 1983, p. 207)
It is certainly the case that male values – for example, discrimination,
domination and hierarchy (Leland, 1983, pp. 68–9), and ‘a disregard for
the housekeeping requirements of nature’ (Freer, 1983, p. 132) – are
seen as positively harmful if pursued to the exclusion of other values. In
this context Jean Freer scathingly characterizes the space programme as
an exercise in which ‘Plastic bags full of men’s urine were sent to circulate
endlessly in the cosmos’, and then asks, ‘How can they claim to be
caring?’ (Freer, 1983, p. 132). Ynestra King concludes:
We see the devastation of the earth and her beings by the corporate
warriors, and the threat of nuclear annihilation by the military
warriors as feminist concerns. It is the same masculinist mentality
which would deny us our right to our own bodies and our own
sexuality, and which depends on multiple systems of dominance
and state power to have its way.
(King, 1983, p. 10)
There are several diﬃculties – apart from political-strategic ones –
associated with the assertion of female values and the desire to upgrade
them. To begin with there is the notorious problem of identifying
female traits in the ﬁrst place: we could only know what a representative
sample of ‘female’ women would look like if we already had some idea
of what female traits were, but then the traits would be announced a
priori, as it were, rather than deduced through observation. Is it not
also true to say that some men exhibit ‘female’ characteristics and some
women ‘male’ characteristics, in which case such characteristics are not
founded in gender as such but in, for example, socialization working on
gender?
Next, there is a series of what might be considered negative traits,
such as subservience, associated with women by women (including, of
course, a large number of feminists). If we are to use woman as the
yardstick for valued characteristics we are left with no room to judge
178 Green Political Thought
what we might suspect to be negative traits in what is regarded as typically
female behaviour. We can regard subservience as negative only if
we value its opposite positively and this will mean valuing positively
a characteristic normally associated with men. In other words, how are
we to decide which are positive and which are negative forms of
thought or behaviour? We may not want to say that all female characteristics
are positive and neither do we want to argue, it seems, that all
male traits are negative. However, the generalized assertion that female
traits are positive allows us no discriminatory purchase.
A related way of approaching this question may be to ask: ‘Given
that both male and female characteristics have been developed under
patriarchy, what gives us the grounds for suggesting that either form is
worthwhile?’ The separatist feminist might say that what ecofeminists
refer to as healthy traits are as tainted with patriarchy as unhealthy
ones, and that the only way to ﬁnd out what genuine female characteristics
are like (if they exist at all) would be to disengage from patriarchy
as far as possible, and to let such traits ‘emerge’. As Mary Mellor points
out: ‘Feminists have long argued that until women have control over
their own fertility, sexuality and economic circumstances, we will never
know what women “really” want or are’ (1992b, p. 237).
‘Diﬀerence’ ecofeminists do not usually adopt this strategy: they
simply identify some traits that they argue most women already have,
they value them positively, and then suggest that both we (all of us) and
therefore the planet would be better-oﬀ if we adopted such traits:
Initially it seems obvious that the ecofeminist and peace argument
is grounded on accepting a special feminine connectedness with
nature or with peaceful characteristics, and then asserting this as a
rival ideal of the human (or as part of such an ideal).
(Plumwood, 1988, p. 22)
Plumwood’s refusal of the ‘obvious’ is what sets her and others
(see e.g., King, 1989) on the road to ‘deconstructive’ ecofeminism. She
argues against the idea of accepting the feminine and rejecting the masculine
(her terms) and goes instead for rejecting them both. This is part
of a sophisticated argument locating her feminist strategy within a
general attack on dualistic thinking (Plumwood, 1993, 2006). She
argues that:
Women have faced an unacceptable choice within patriarchy with
respect to their ancient identity as nature. They either accept it
(naturalism) or reject it (and endorse the dominant mastery
Ecologism and other ideologies 179
model). Attention to the dualistic problematic shows a way of
resolving this dilemma. Women must be treated as just as fully
human and as fully part of human culture as men. But both men
and women must challenge the dualised conception of human identity
and develop an alternative culture which fully recognises human
identity as continuous with, not alien from, nature.
(Plumwood, 1993, p. 36)
In an earlier form this was presented as a ‘degendered’ model for the
human being which:
presupposes that selection of characteristics is made on the basis
of independent criteria of worth. Criteria selected will often be
associated with one gender rather than another, and perhaps may
turn out to resemble more closely the characteristic feminine rather
than the characteristic masculine traits. But they’re degendered in
the sense that they won’t be selected because of their connection
with one gender rather than the other, but on the basis of
independent considerations.
(Plumwood, 1988, p. 23)
This project would be hard to complete and its implications cannot
be followed through here; among other things it would have to ask what
such ‘independent considerations’ would look like and what it would
mean to be ‘fully human’. Suﬃce to say that Plumwood’s feminism:
would represent women’s willingness to move to a further stage in
their relations with nature, beyond that of powerless inclusion in
nature, beyond that of reaction against their old exclusion from
culture, and towards an active, deliberate and reﬂective positioning
of themselves with nature against a destructive and dualising form
of culture.
(Plumwood, 1993, p. 39; emphasis in original)
My principal interest in Plumwood’s position here is that it enables us
to mark her oﬀ from what I understand to be a pair of basic ‘diﬀerence’
ecofeminist principles: that character traits may be identiﬁed as either
male or female, and that the female traits are those that currently most
obviously need to be reasserted, both for our sake and for the planet’s.
Plumwood herself distances her position from this sort of ecofeminism
by referring to her project as a ‘critical ecological feminism’ (see e.g.
Plumwood, 1993, p. 39), or as a theory of ‘hybridity’ (Plumwood, 2006).
180 Green Political Thought
This renaming of positions within or around the ecofeminist project is
often a sign of unhappiness with the ‘diﬀerence’ feminist position:
Mary Mellor (for example) describes hers as a ‘feminist green politics’
(1992a, p. 238) rather than an ecofeminism.
It is speciﬁc to both ecofeminisms to which I refer here that their
advocates see them as good not only for women but also for the nonhuman
natural world. Ecofeminists identify a relationship between the
subjection of nature by men and the subjection of women by men. The
nature of this link may take two forms: weak and strong. In the weak
case, patriarchy is seen as producing and reproducing its domination
across a whole range of areas and anything that comes under its gaze
will be subjected to it. The link between women and nature in this case
is simply that they are two objects for patriarchal domination, without
the subjection of one necessarily helping to produce and reproduce the
subjection of the other. Thus Christine Thomas quotes Rosemary
Radford Reuther: ‘Women must see that there can be no liberation for
them and no solution to the ecological crisis within a society whose
fundamental model of relationships tends to be one of domination’
(Thomas, 1983, p. 162).
Judith Plant makes a similar point: ‘we are helping to create an
awareness of domination at all levels’ (Plant, n.d., p. 4), and then continues
with a thought that gives a ﬂavour of the strong link sometimes
identiﬁed between women and nature in the sense of their common
subjection: ‘Once we understand the historical connections between
women and nature and their subsequent oppression, we cannot help but
take a stand on war against nature’ (ibid.). This latter comment points
to connections between the exploitation of women and of nature that go
beyond their merely being subject to the generalized gaze of patriarchy.
Plant is suggesting that historical study of their exploitation leads to
the conclusion that patriarchy has posited a particular identity between
the two that produces and reproduces their common subjection. In this
sense, argue the ecofeminists, the struggle for women’s liberation must
be a struggle for nature as well and, likewise, the despoiling of nature
should not be viewed as separate from the exploitation of women. Both
have their roots in patriarchy: ‘We believe that a culture against nature is
a culture against women’ (King, 1983, p. 11).
Thus the dualism against which theorists such as Plumwood argue is
not only the dualism of men and women but also of humans and
nature: ‘The dominant position that is deeply entrenched in Western
culture constructs a great gulf or dualism between humans on the one
side and animals and nature generally on the other’ (Plumwood, 2006,
p. 56). Plumwood is as critical of deep ecologists who would oppose
Ecologism and other ideologies 181
human beings and nature as she is of essentialist ecofeminists who
would oppose men and women on the basis of immutably gendered
characteristics. To this degree her theory of ‘hybridity’ has the same
function as the radical democratization of relations between human
beings and nature that we saw Bruno Latour arguing for towards the
end of Chapter 2. It is wrong, she says, to see concern for human beings
as ‘shallow’ and concern for nature as ‘deep’ (ibid., p. 62). The problem
with deep ecology, she says, is not its focus on nature but ‘the way it goes
on to marginalize the human side, and the many hybrid forms of
environmental activism that are concerned with environmental justice
and with situating human life ecologically’ (ibid., p. 63). Likewise it
would be wrong to think that all concern for non-human life is somehow
‘deep’: ‘Some non-human concerns can be decidedly shallow,’
she writes, ‘for example those that automatically privilege human
pets like cats and dogs over other animals’ (ibid.). In sum, the double
task of hybridity is, ﬁrst, to ‘ecologize’ the human being (to locate
human beings in their preconditional ecological context), and second,
to resituate human beings in ethical terms (ibid., p. 64).
Those who suggest a strong link argue that patriarchy confers similar
characteristics on nature and on women and then systematically
devalues them. Thus both are seen as irrational, uncertain, hard to
control. Janet Biehl writes:
In Western culture, men have traditionally justiﬁed their domination
of women by conceptualising them as ‘closer to nature’ than themselves.
Women have been ideologically dehumanised and derationalised
by men; called more chaotic, more mysterious in motivation,
more emotional, more moist, even more polluted.
(Biehl, 1988, p. 12)
Just when this began to occur is a matter of dispute among ecofeminists.
Basically, the debate is between two groups – ‘those who locate the
problem for both women and nature in their place as part of a set of
dualisms which have their origin in classical philosophy and which
can be traced through a complex history to the present’ and those
who would rather refer to ‘the rise of mechanistic science during
the Enlightenment and pre-Enlightenment period’ (Plumwood, 1986,
p. 121). Indeed, because the ﬁrst group ﬁnds no necessary relationship
between the subjection of women and that of nature it is perhaps wrong
to refer to them as ecofeminists.
We have already identiﬁed the ambiguous relationship that the green
movement as a whole has with Enlightenment traditions, and it is
182 Green Political Thought
entirely consistent that some ecofeminists should see a link between the
Baconian impulse to dominate nature and the subjection of women –
especially once similar characteristics have been conferred on both. The
modern scientiﬁc project, which has its roots in Francis Bacon, is held
to be a universalizing project of reduction, fragmentation and violent
control. ‘Diﬀerence’ ecofeminists will counter this project with the
feminine principles of diversity, holism, interconnectedness and nonviolence.
‘Deconstructive’ ecofeminists will argue that the Enlightenment
further rigidiﬁed a set of dualisms that were in place long before
the Enlightenment period began, and which need to be transcended
rather than re-evaluated. The problem with the ‘diﬀerence’ position in
this context is that its adherents tend to paint too rosy a picture of the
pre-Enlightenment period. Organicism may have given way to mechanicism,
but the organicists still found reason to persecute witches. It
seems that what can be said is that the mechanicist view of nature
reinforced the subjection of women, but that this subjection has its
roots somewhere else.
Indeed, as Janet Biehl has counterfactually suggested: ‘Societies have
existed that . . . could revere nature (such as ancient Egypt) and yet this
“reverence” did not inhibit the development of full-blown patricentric
hierarchy’ (1988, p. 13). To this extent men do not need an array of
thoughts justifying the subjection of nature in order to dominate
women, although it seems likely that such thoughts have been used
since the seventeenth century to reinforce that domination. In this way,
ecofeminists who link the subjection of women and of nature cannot
provide fundamental reasons for the fact of the domination of women
by men, but they can point to the way in which, now, women and nature
are held to possess similar characteristics and that these characteristics
‘just happen’ to be undervalued.
In linking the subjection of women and nature (Merchant, 1990),
ecofeminists point out that the intellectual structures justifying both are
the same. ‘Diﬀerence’ ecofeminists go on to suggest that preventing
further destruction of the environment will involve being more ‘in tune’
with the non-human natural world, that women are habitually closer to
nature than men, and that therefore women are best placed to provide
role models for environmentally sensitive behaviour.
For some ecofeminists, the basis of this closeness to nature is biology:
‘Because of the reproductive cycle it is much harder for women to
escape a sense of connection with the natural world’, says Elizabeth
Dodson Gray (in Plumwood, 1986, p. 125), and Hazel Henderson
remarks that ‘Biologically, most women in the world do still vividly
experience their embeddedness in Nature, and can harbour few illusions
Ecologism and other ideologies 183
concerning their freedom and separatedness from the cycles of birth
and death’ (1983, p. 207). Maori women bury their afterbirth in the
earth as a symbolic representation of the connectedness of women as
life-givers, and the Earth as the source and fount of all life. Others,
sympathetic to the link between ecology and feminism but not wishing
to swallow biological essentialism, will suggest that women’s lived
experiences give them a head start so far as acquiring an ecological
sensibility is concerned:
so far as political action is concerned, it does not matter whether
sexed diﬀerences are ontological fact or historical accident. The
case for women as historical actors in a time of environmental crisis
rests not on universal essences but on how the majority of women
actually work and think now.
(Salleh, 1997, p. 6)
Mary Mellor refers to this as ‘materialist ecofeminism’, the importance
of which is that ‘it does not rest on psychological or biologically
essentialist explanations’ (Mellor, 1997, p. 169). Instead, ‘Women’s
identiﬁcation with the “natural” is not evidence of some timeless
unchanging essence, but of the material exploitation of women’s work,
often without reward’ (ibid., p. 189). According to Mellor’s version of
materialist ecofeminism, women have a special relationship with what
she calls ‘biological’ and ‘ecological’ time. She deﬁnes these as follows:
‘Ecological time is the pace of ecological sustainability for non-human
nature. Biological time represents the life-cycle and pace of bodily
replenishment for human beings’ (ibid.). In the biological realm,
women undertake usually unacknowledged work related to the reproduction
of human life, and in the ecological realm – and particularly in
subsistence societies – they are often responsible for nurturing life from
the land and for ensuring its sustainability.
For these two material reasons, women have a unique standpoint so
far as the non-human natural world is concerned, and are exploited in
quite speciﬁc ways. In particular, women’s ‘embodiedness and embeddedness’
is both the source of a new kind of politics – one which recognizes
the unavoidability and crucial nature of being ‘encumbered’ – and
the origins of men’s domination over them. As Mellor puts it, women’s
work in the reproductive and ecologically productive spheres has left
‘social space and time largely in the hands of men’ (1997, p. 189). They
have used this to quite particular eﬀect, to develop a politics and a
practice of ‘autonomy’ which is possible only so long as someone else is
doing the ‘heteronomous’ work involved in reproducing life itself:
184 Green Political Thought
The hallmark of modern capitalist patriarchy is its ‘autonomy’ in
biological and ecological terms . . . Western ‘man’ is young, ﬁt,
ambitious, mobile and unencumbered by obligations. This is not
the world that most women know. Their world is circumscribed by
obligated labour performed on the basis of duty, love, violence or
fear of loss of economic support.
(Mellor, 1997, p. 189)
This evidently bears upon the green movement’s general aspiration to
have us living more lightly on the Earth. As we saw in Chapter 2, deep
ecologists argue for a change of consciousness with respect to our dealings
with the non-human natural world. Warwick Fox wants a shift in
priorities such that those who interfere with the environment should
have to justify doing so, rather than having the onus of justiﬁcation rest
on the environment’s defenders. A precondition for this, he argues, is an
awareness of the ‘soft’ boundaries between ourselves and the nonhuman
natural world. I pointed out at the time that in this connection
deep ecologists are presented with a formidable problem of persuasion
– most people simply do not think like that, and it is hard to see how
they ever will.
Some ecofeminists, though, suggest that there are already millions of
people thinking like that, or at least potentially on the brink of doing
so – women themselves. On this reading, women’s closeness to nature
puts them in the green political vanguard, in touch with a world that
Judith Plant describes and that many members of the green movement
would like to see resurrected – a world in which ‘rituals were carried out
by miners: oﬀerings to the gods of the soil and the subterranean world,
ceremonial sacriﬁces, sexual abstinence and fasting were conducted and
observed before violating what was considered to be the sacred earth’
(n.d., p. 3).
One problem ecofeminism needs to confront in the context of the
wider aims of the green movement is the reconciliation of the demand
for positive evaluation of the activity of childbirth and the need to
reduce population levels. Of course, there is no need for such an evaluation
to imply a large number of actual births, but a culture that held
childbirth in high esteem may ﬁnd it hard to legitimize population control
policies. But again, in the properly functioning sustainable society,
people would learn to reach and maintain sustainable reproductive
rates, much as members of a number of communities (particularly in
Africa and Latin America) already do.
‘Diﬀerence’ ecofeminism, in particular, has not been without its
critics and Janet Biehl, for one, believes that the linking of women with
Ecologism and other ideologies 185
nature and the subsequent subordination of both is precisely the reason
why it is dangerous to try to use the link for emancipatory purposes:
[W]hen ecofeminists root women’s personality traits in reproductive
and sexual biology, they tend to give acceptance to those
malecreated images that deﬁne women as primarily biological
beings . . . [this] is to deliver women over to the male stereotypes
that root women’s character structure entirely in their biological
being.
(Biehl, 1993, p. 55)
Plumwood, too, makes it absolutely clear why this sort of ecofeminism
is seen in some quarters of the feminist movement as reactionary:
The concept of nature . . . has been and remains a major tool in the
armoury of conservatives intent on keeping women in their place’, and:
Given this background, it is not surprising that many feminists
regard with some suspicion a recent view, expressed by a growing
number of writers in the ecofeminist camp, that there may be
something to be said in favour of feminine connectedness with
nature.
(Plumwood, 1988, p. 16; see also 1993, p. 20)
In similar vein, Mary Mellor makes the useful distinction between
feminism and feminine values: ‘Even where male green thinkers claim
that a commitment to feminism is at the centre of their politics, this
often slides into a discussion of feminine values’ (Mellor, 1992b, p. 245;
emphasis in original), and while it ought to be pointed out that the
evidence in this chapter suggests that there are plenty of female writers
who do the same thing, Mellor’s general point is well taken: ‘[T]o
espouse a feminine principle without addressing the power relations
between men and women is to espouse an ecofeminine rather than an
ecofeminist position’ (ibid., p. 246).
Janet Biehl’s critique is principally aimed at deep ecologists who she
sees as engaged on a project that will guarantee the domination of
women by men, but her remarks are equally applicable to ‘diﬀerence’
ecofeminism. Women should not be asked, she writes, to ‘think like a
mountain’ – in the context of women’s struggle for selfhood, autonomy
and acceptance as rational beings, this amounts to ‘a blatant slap in the
face’ (Biehl, 1988, p. 14). She parodies deep ecologists (and ‘diﬀerence’
ecofeminists) who claim that ‘male’ values and characteristics are
worthless: ‘Never mind becoming rational; never mind the self; look
186 Green Political Thought
where it got men, after all; women were better-oﬀ than men all along
without that tiresome individuality’ (Biehl, 1988, p. 13).
The deep-ecological attempt to encourage us to virtues of modesty,
passivity and humility with respect to the natural world (and to other
human beings), it is argued, can only backﬁre in the context of women’s
liberation. From this point of view, the women’s movement has precisely
been about undoing modesty and humility (and refusing to bear a
child every ten or twelve months) because these characteristics have
worked in favour of patriarchy. In the context of patriarchy (i.e. now),
women cannot aﬀord to follow the deep-ecological programme, and to
the degree that ecofeminism subscribes to deep-ecological parameters it
does women no favours either: ‘it is precisely humility, with its passive
and receptive obedience to men, that women are trying to escape today’
(Biehl, 1988, p. 14).
These worries seem well founded, in that at one level ecofeminism
amounts to asking people in general to adopt ‘female’ ways of relating
to the world in the knowledge that women are more likely to do so than
men. If this happens, and if such ways of relating to the world and their
devaluation are indeed part of the reason for women’s subordination to
men, then women’s position can only get worse. ‘Diﬀerence’ ecofeminism
therefore proposes a dangerous strategy (a strategy Plumwood
calls ‘uncritical reversal’ (1993, p. 31)) – to use ideas that have already
been turned against women in the belief that, if they are taken up and
lived by everyone, a general improvement in both the human and nonhuman
condition will result. If they are not taken up, then women will
have ‘sacriﬁced themselves to the environment’, and this is a price some
feminists are clearly not prepared to pay: ‘[In] the absence of a feminist
perspective . . . there is a danger that green politics will not even produce
a de-gendered proclamation of the “feminine principle” but an
overt or covert celebration of the masculine’ (Mellor, 1992b, p. 249).
‘Deconstructive’ ecofeminism, on the other hand, is left with problems
of its own. The refusal to choose between the masculine and the
feminine has the happy consequence of avoiding the pitfalls associated
with basing a transformative politics on the latter, but it leaves the
future (arguably) too open-ended. In place of either a masculine or a
feminine rationality, Plumwood argues for an ecological rationality
that ‘recognises and accommodates the denied relationships of dependency
and enables us to acknowledge our debt to the sustaining others
of the earth’ (Plumwood, 1993, p. 196). But what does this mean, and
how will it be brought about? Until further work is done, the space
beyond dualism is occupied by a fog of indeterminacy – liberating and
simultaneously frustrating for its lack of signposts.
Ecologism and other ideologies 187
Conclusion
I said at the beginning of this chapter that the evidence produced in it
should deepen our understanding of the distinctiveness of ecologism as
a political ideology. I think it has. Ecologism cannot be ‘reduced’ to any
of the ideologies discussed here, with the faintly possible exception of
feminism, and none of these ideologies may be said successfully to have
appropriated ecologism for itself. Unlike any other ideology, ecologism
is concerned in a foundational way with the relationship between
human beings and their natural environment. More speciﬁcally, the
two principal and distinguishing themes of ecologism, its belief in the
limits to material growth and its opposition to anthropocentrism, are
nowhere to be found in liberalism, conservatism and socialism – and
they are nuanced in ecofeminism, where anthropocentrism is replaced
by androcentrism, for example. Our conclusion must be that ecologism
is an ideology in its own right, partly because it oﬀers a coherent (if not
unassailable) critique of contemporary society and a prescription for
improvement, and partly because this critique and prescription diﬀer
fundamentally from those oﬀered by other modern political ideologies.
188 Green Political Thought