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Real Anthropocene Politics

Simon Hailwood

Hailwood@liverpool.ac.uk

DRAFT WORK: please don’t quote without permission!

This paper critically discusses the Anthropocene discourse by exploring parallels with the realism v

moralism debate in political theory. Realism is the denial of ‘ethics first’ approaches to politics; a

rejection of political philosophy conceived simply as a form of ‘applied ethics’. Different versions of

realism are more or less plausible but the central insight seems correct: politics is not well-

understood as simple conformity to a prior, independently defined moral standpoint. But this is

something of a strawman. Realism can overstate the extent to which ‘moralists’ define moral

standpoints independently of politics and in so doing obscure the way ethics and politics may be

intertwined without being reducible to each other. The Anthropocene discourse also emphasises

something true: the degree of human impact on the earth makes it impossible to view nonhuman

nature as a ‘prior’ source of normativity, values or principles fully independent of humanity. But this

is something of a strawman too: by no means all ‘traditional’ environmental ethics has that view of

nature. As with strong forms of ‘realism’ in the context of the relation between ethics and politics,

strong forms of Anthropocene advocacy obscure the intertwining of humanity and nonhumanity.

The Anthropocene discourse is also vulnerable to ‘realist’ critique of the ideological ramifications of

deploying such a homogenising frame without due regard to ‘by whom, to whom, for whom’

questions.

I

Over the past couple of decades a critique of mainstream political philosophy has developed under

the heading of ‘political realism’. This has various components and points of emphasis. I take the

central one to be a complaint that political philosophy too often adopts a posture of ‘applied moral

philosophy’. It adopts a moralistic standpoint prior to and independent of actual politics which is

then expected simply to conform to that standpoint. For example, Bernard Williams distinguishes

two versions of political moralism. The enactment version ‘formulates principles, concepts, ideals,

and values; and politics (so far as it does what the theory wants) seeks to express these in political

action through persuasion, the use of power and so forth’ (Williams 2005, p.1). Utilitarianism is the

paradigm of this kind of political moralism. The structural version ‘lays down moral conditions of co-

existence under power, conditions in which power can be justly exercised’. Rawls’ Theory of Justice

is Williams’ paradigm of this. What makes each a form of moralism is their shared commitment to

the ‘priority of the moral over the political’; enactment makes the political the instrument of the

moral; the contrasting structural version takes morality to constrain what politics ‘…can rightfully do.

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In both cases, political theory is something like applied morality’ (Williams 2005, p.2). The thought

is that in full moralist mode political philosophy proceeds ‘unrealistically’ by ignoring features

internal to ‘the political’ (such as disagreement, legitimacy, order and stability) that aren’t a matter

simply of ‘doing the right thing’ as defined by the independent moral standard.

As Enzio Rossi and Matt Sleat point out (2014, pp.690-3), the dichotomy here between morality and

politics can be drawn more or less strictly, depending on the degree of autonomy the political is held

to have from the moral or ethical1. The strongest realism asserts full autonomy: there is a specifically

political form of normativity that should guide politics, where moral normativity is unsuitable.

Raymond Geuss perhaps holds this view (Geuss 2008). A weaker form of realism doesn’t deny a

place for morality in politics, but claims that political philosophy should give greater weight than it

normally does to the autonomy of distinctively political concerns and constraints. This is probably

Williams’ view. I take it that this weaker version is most defensible and that its central claim is

plausible: political philosophy shouldn’t proceed simply as applied moral philosophy without regard

to more distinctively political concerns. I am not going to defend these claims. I am going to argue

though that the figure of the political moralist is at least often something of a strawman and discuss

the parallels with the picture of traditional environmental ethics set up by those who strongly

advocate the Anthropocene.

II

Associated with the proposal to rename the current geological epoch the Anthropocene is an

apparently paradigm-shifting programme of environmentalism, which I shall call strong

Anthropocene advocacy. Many of those enthusiastic about the Anthropocene proposal have

commitments well-summarised by Piers Stephens in a review of a recent collection of papers, called

Keeping the Wild (Wuerthner et al, 2014), by opponents of strong advocacy. Strong Anthropocene

advocates2

1 I am taking these to be synonymous. There are differences between them and one might, for example,

consider the extent to which Williams’ political anti-moralism is continuous with his earlier critique of ‘morality, the peculiar institution’. I don’t think the differences bear importantly on my argument in this paper. 2 A.K.A. ‘neo-greens’, ‘pragmatic environmentalists’, ‘new conservationists’, ‘Anthropocene boosters’,

‘postmodern greens’ (see Butler 2014, p.x). They include Erle Ellis, Peter Karieva, Stewart Brand, Emma Maris, Ted Norhaus, Michael Scheller and others associated with the Breakthrough Institute and journal. It should be noted that not everyone caught up in the Anthropocene discourse holds all these views. For example, Dale Jamieson uses the Anthropocene label to underscore the unprecedented nature of our environmental

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‘… attack traditional environmentalists as woolly-minded misanthropic Romantics obsessed with

mythically pure wilderness, embrace the idea of humans as de facto planetary managers, repudiate

the notion of nature’s fragility, support anthropocentrism and economic growth, and advocate

partnerships with corporate capitalist institutions to maintain ecosystem services and human-

managed landscapes so as to serve human aspirations.’ (Stephens 2015, p.121)

Here there is a parallel with the stronger type of anti-moralist political realism. As for the latter

political moralism woefully misunderstands the real character of the political so, for the strong

Anthropocene advocate, traditional environmental ethics is hopelessly out of touch with the

properly anthropocentric programme that fits with the increasingly anthropogenic character of our

actual environmental situation. As the political moralist polishes her moral standpoint in the hope

that real political life will somehow conform to it, so the environmental ethicist polishes her idea of

independent nature as some sort of source of value or ground of normativity to which

environmental practice is supposed to conform – and so is a reactionary and irrational obstacle to

the unfolding of the actual anthropogenic/anthropocentric situation of the Anthropocene.

However, as Stephens goes on to say, by the end of Keeping the Wild ‘…it is hard to deny that [such]

attacks on traditional environmentalism have overwhelmingly operated by setting up more

strawmen than an international scarecrow-making contest’ (p.122). One strawman in particular

stands out to me: respecters, protectors and conservers of nature, notably in the form of wilderness,

hold a view of nature as ‘pure and untouched’, where this is hopeless: in the Anthropocene there is

no longer any such thing (if there ever was). It is pointless and counterproductive then to waste

thought, time, money and effort trying to respect or conserve it. The way to go is to direct

‘conservation’ efforts to the moulding of eco-systems and processes to best serve human interests.

There is something in this, of course; just as there is in political realism. The pursuit of ecological

security (in some suitable sense of that) for humans must be a crucially important environmental

goal. And let us agree that there are no parts of Earth’s surface that have not been more or less

affected by human activity. As Manuel Arias Maldonado says, our environmental situation is one of

profound ‘socio-nature entanglement’ (Arias Maldonado 2015). But the picture of the traditional

enterprise of environmental ethics as committed to the notion of pure nature (or wilderness

completely apart from any entanglement with the human) and hostile to human interests is no less

of a strawman than is that of the political moralist moralizing away regardless of problems inherent

to political reality. One main point of emphasizing the strawman issue involved in both the

situation as calling for a new ethic, but without denying there is still some (relatively) independent nature, ‘respect’ for which is to be a virtue of the new ethic (Jamieson 2014, p.188ff).

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Anthropocene discourse and the realism debate in political theory is that doing so precisely does

point to important matters of nonreductive intertwining: of humanity and nature in the one case,

and ethics and politics in the other case. I discuss this in relation to political moralism in the next

section and in relation to strong Anthropocene advocacy in the section after that.

III

As I have said, what has come to be called ‘political realism’ encompasses a range of interrelated

objections to mainstream Anglo-American political philosophy. Rossi and Sleat (2014) usefully

distinguish four main areas of criticism3. One is that moralists tend to focus on particular moral

values (most often justice, as in Rawls’ case) to the detriment of ‘specifically political’ values such as

legitimacy, order and stability, and this distorts their understanding of politics. Another is that

moralism under-appreciates the extent to which it (or the values it asserts or intuits as fundamental)

may be ideological. A third is that moralists under-appreciate the importance of strongly contextual

forms of political judgement sensitive to the concrete conditions of political decision making and

action. This is badly served by abstract ‘grand theories’ apparently supposed to generate

prescriptions for all possible political situations and actions.

These issues are interrelated and I will be touching on each of them, especially, towards the end the

paper, the matter of ideology. But, again, I take the main one to be the further charge that much

political philosophy has degenerated into an exercise in abstract moralizing with little or no regard to

the particular concerns, stresses and strains of political reality as a realm more or less autonomous

from morality and yet apparently supposed somehow to conform to the principles and

pronouncements of ‘high minded’ moralizing political philosophy. However, the realist picture of a

purely moralistic political philosophy is something of a strawman. The political philosophers John

Rawls and Robert Nozick (along with others such as Ronald Dworkin), whose work has been so

(philosophically) influential since the 1970s, are generally supposed to count as arch-moralists

particularly ripe for realist critique, but neither of them actually does define a purely ethical

standpoint entirely prior to politics or untouched by any characteristically political considerations.

One might argue that it does so badly – in a strangely distorted and truncated fashion, say, as

something to be sorted out once and for all through a universal, de-contextualised solution that

arbitrarily prioritises specific values – but politics does enter into the starting points of their theories.

3 See also Galston (2010) for a useful account of the range of realist concerns.

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For example, although Nozick is indeed an intensely moralistic thinker the infamous declaration at

the start of his Anarchy, State and Utopia looks both deeply ethical and deeply political: ‘Individuals

have rights and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights).

So strong and far-reaching are these rights that they raise the question of what, if anything, that

state and its officials may do’ (Nozick 1974, p. ix). It might be deeply wrong too of course; but if so

this is hardly because it seeks to define a ‘purely ethical’ perspective, entirely divorced from issues of

political power and legitimacy, and then apply that to politics. If it is wrong then this is probably

partly because both its moral and political content are too ahistorical, too thin and universalist;

abstracted too far from the actual intertwining of the ethical and political to which Nozick seems

almost perversely indifferent.

At least in ‘political’ liberal mode Rawls is less vulnerable to the charge of ahistorical universalism

because he explicitly emphasises the historical contingency and salience of its central commitments,

as in his claim that centuries of political developments, especially in response to religious conflict

and disagreement, make his conception of justice as fairness an appropriate ‘political’ conception for

modern liberal democracies, and one able to be stable through time (Rawls 1996). His earlier

formulation of justice as fairness lacked that ‘political liberal’ focus but still its guiding notions (such

as the ‘basic structure’ as a structure of force that may impede or enhance life chances) are not

purely ethical notions in the sense of devoid of contact with political reality. This is not to deny that

Rawlsian political philosophy is vulnerable to other forms of realist critique, for example in giving

justice permanent political priority (as the ‘first virtue of social institutions’) and in being

insufficiently aware of its own ideological status with respect to actual politics. It is to emphasise

that the picture of Rawls as a philosopher who first works out a moral theory independently of any

political considerations and only then turns to politics as the field of application of that theory, is a

strawman.

Let’s take it that political philosophy needs to be historically sensitive and contextualised. That’s

partly an ethical point too. So, for example, Williams emphasizes the audience issue: the audience of

a piece of political philosophising is always historically located, no less than its author (pp.12-13).

The author needs to remain mindful of both locations. Precisely because political philosophy needs

to be historically sensitive and contextualised it also needs to be suspicious of a strong dichotomy

between the ethical and something else: a non-ethical realm of politics. A historically sensitive and

contextualised political philosophy will be mindful of actual problems and situations from the very

beginning. But what Williams calls the ‘first political question’ (a Hobbesian concern to secure the

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conditions of peaceful cooperation without which other desiderata remain moot (pp.3-4)) is only

one such problem.

Another is that of disagreement arising from a plurality of reasonable values. It is a mistake for us to

treat consensus as a main (much less the) goal of political theorising, given that a major, definitive

problem of modernity is the fact of pluralism and disagreement. This is a reason not to associate

political philosophy with a comprehensive ethical standpoint. Many are bound to disagree. How

then are we to understand the requirements of such values as justice, stability, development and so

on, given disagreement about their content and relative weight? It is pointless to posit a merely

theoretical consensus and derive normative conclusions about what we actually ought to do on the

assumption that we agree about matters that we don’t in fact agree upon. This is another realist

complaint against liberals like Rawls, despite the latter’s emphasis on the ‘non-comprehensive’

character of his political conception. As the great pragmatist philosopher John Dewey argued, a final

consensus is a foolish goal or assumption because disagreement is fundamental to politics (‘for us

around here’, as Williams would say); political thought is needed to consider how to cope with

pervasive disagreement and how to secure the legitimacy of coercive institutions despite it. This is a

central, ‘first’, political question of modernity. But it is a moral question as much as a political

question.

Charles Larmore has usefully developed this point to argue that political philosophy must move

beyond the realism versus moralism contrast as an either/or contest (Larmore 2013, pp.279-80).

Realists have part of the truth exactly because deep and widespread moral disagreement is a central

feature of empirical political reality. The import of this as a historical lesson, unavailable to Aristotle

for example, who did see politics as the extension of a single comprehensive view of the good, is

that political philosophy must be significantly autonomous from moral philosophy (p.300). Matters

of justice or the right are no less contentious than claims about the good, Larmore points out, and

consequently a view of political philosophy as properly focused on conditions of legitimate authority

in the face of moral conflict and disagreement is superior to a view of political philosophy as

properly about ‘mapping the structure of the ideal society’ (p.289). On the other hand, it is not

possible to see how such central features of political life are to be addressed without appealing to

moral principles taken to be ‘antecedently valid’. A purely Hobbesian view of legitimacy is

‘incomplete’. To secure the (perception of the) legitimacy of a political system it is necessary to refer

to principles taken to be ‘right’ independently of the system itself. Thus the moralist also has part of

the truth: the realist must take ‘some bearings from elements of morality’ (p.290) and so cannot

adopt the strongest form of realism. Although significantly autonomous from one another there is

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interplay between morality and politics, an intertwining in which neither side is ultimately

fundamental.

We are agreeing here that there are other values than the standard moralist fare of rights,

distributive justice and so on that are relevant to the emphatically political side of life. But if we

were to take this as the basis of a strongly realist defence of the full autonomy of the political from

the moral then we would need to be precise about what exactly is ‘the political’. How should we

individuate the political and its distinctive, autonomous values? One suggestion is that we contrast it

with raw domination on the one hand and with personal interactions on the other hand (c.f. Rossi

and Sleat, p.695). That might look promising but it is important to note that these are contrasts with

ethical saliency. For example, contrasting the political with raw domination presumably involves the

value of legitimacy again so that, to use Williams’ picture, answers to the first political question are

seen by those subject to them as part of the solution and not part of the problem (Williams, p.4).

Williams (ibid.) calls this the ‘basic legitimation demand’ (BLD). Yet it seems strange to say that

legitimacy is a ‘non-moral’ political value. It is surely a matter of moral relevance whether a given

attempt to secure through force the conditions of peaceful cooperation is felt to be legitimate by

those subject to it. Williams claims that if the BLD (the demand for the state to offer each of its

subjects a story legitimating its power over them) is a moral demand then it is one inherent to

politics as such and not a demand that is prior to politics (p.5). But, as Larmore argues, the point is

not

‘… so much the BLD as rather the justification of state power, whatever it may be, in which satisfying

the BLD is said to consist, that must express a “morality prior to politics”: it has to embody an idea of

what constitutes a just political order – specifically, an idea of what constitutes the just exercise of

coercive power – and that is not only a moral conception but one whose validity must be

understood as antecedent to the state’s own authority by virtue of serving to ground it. I do not

say, obviously enough, that this idea must be correct, that the moral principles invoked must truly be

valid. But they must be regarded as being so if they are to be taken as justifying the state’s exercise

of coercive power.’ (p.291)

This does not imply the fully moralist view of political philosophy as applied moral philosophy. The

necessary moral ideas needn’t amount to a comprehensive morality, and nor is it necessary to ‘refer

to justice as a purely moral ideal in the sense of defined in advance of any concern for how its

requirements are to be made authoritative’ (Larmore, p.292, his emphasis). Larmore also points out

that none of this means that thinking about justice as a ‘purely moral ideal’ is wrong or pointless.

Considerations of who ideally is owed what, regardless of issues of legitimate coercion, are an

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important part of moral philosophy. What transforms them into political philosophy, for Larmore, is

explicit explanation of the conditions under which such considerations can be properly authoritative

or legitimately enforced (Larmore, p.295). That is, the moral questions are viewed as interacting

with the political questions.

To reinforce this point consider Adam Swift’s (2008) robust defence of ‘pure, context-free

philosophical analysis’ of concepts such as justice. This, he says, has a crucial role in clarifying the

relations between, and relative weight of, the values involved, so as to inform the evaluation of

options whose feasibility and methods of realization are to be determined by the social sciences

(pp.369ff). In Larmore’s terms the philosophical component of this division of labour looks like (non-

political) moral philosophy. It might be interpreted as a rather pure form of political moralism: the

philosopher analyses the values as they are ‘in themselves’, independently of political considerations

of power, legitimacy and so on, and then shows her workings to social scientists who determine if

and how they can be realized in a given concrete political situation. Politics then looks like applied

moral philosophy. But, as Swift points out, one can take the formulation and analysis of

‘fundamental’ principles of justice to be logically independent of issues of ‘feasibility’ and also think

that normative theorizing in the light of those principles should be ‘integrated with an appreciation

of the empirical realities of one’s own society’ (p.371). Presumably such empirical realities include

feasibility constraints imposed by ‘where we are now’; social and psychological constraints and

political constraints in the sense of whether or how the results of the ideal theorizing could be

regarded as authoritative, their coercive implementation legitimate. This latter informs ‘what ought

to be done’, not simply the analyses and principles arrived at in de-contextualised abstraction. If

what the philosopher comes up with flies in the face of what the evidence shows to be political

reality, or any foreseeable development of that reality, she will have to think again4.

The point here is that even someone who gives a vital role to political philosophy in abstract ideal

theory mode need not think that the way to go is 1) formulate abstract principles; 2) ‘apply’ them to

political reality regardless of the extent to which the empirical circumstances match the idealizing

assumptions (full moral powers, compliance, ideal rationality and so on) employed in the course of

the abstract formulation5. Swift’s division of labour between pure, abstract philosophising and the

4 Perhaps Cohen’s defence of ‘fact-independent’ principles is a counter-example here. In which case realist

criticism of him as a pure moralist doesn’t set him up as a strawman. See Larmore (2013) for critical discussion of Cohen’s position. 5 As Swift notes, even Rawls explicitly acknowledges as ‘obvious’ at the beginning of Theory of Justice that ‘the

problems of partial compliance theory are the urgent and pressing problems. These are the things that we are faced with in everyday life’ (quoted by Swift, p.381). What he, Rawls, is doing, however well or badly, is beginning with the ideal theory required to give provide a secure grasp of the shape of the problems.

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empirical investigation of empirical reality may be drawn too sharply to be fully convincing.

However, the overall enterprise encompassing that division of labour embodies the belief that, in

reality, the moral and political are intertwined. This is the point I want to emphasise.

To be clear, this is not merely a matter of stipulative definitions of the moral and the political (or of

political, as against moral, philosophy); it is about the intertwining of the moral and political. We

don’t want to reduce politics to morality (understood as an account of normative relations minus

any considerations of power, coercion and do on); nor do we want to reduce morality to politics

(understood as normative account of power relations somehow minus any moral considerations).

Surely the moral and political are intertwined, informing each other without either being fully

reducible to the other. Moreover, if normative political theory is to be historically sensitive and

contextualised we shouldn’t expect or seek fixed universalised versions of these contrasts. For

example, a strong contrast between the political as legitimately structured coercion and a realm of

personal interaction shaped by ethical (but not political) requirements seems quite distinctively

liberal and contingent upon modernity. It is also open to ethical, and not just non-moral political,

critique.

Notice that purity is an important issue here. Consider again strong versus weak forms of the claim

that politics is autonomous. How does this contrast relate to the intertwining point? The strong

realist sees politics altogether autonomous from morality. This suggests a picture of separation

rather than intertwining. So I am objecting to the strong version of political realism, not just for

setting up a strawman, but also for setting up a cleavage between ethics and politics by defining

morality as independent from (if not prior, in the sense of normatively prior, to) politics no less than

does the pure moralist. The weaker version of realism is not vulnerable to this criticism: it remains

consistent with explicit emphasis of the intertwining of ethics and politics whereas the strong form

serves this badly. My larger point though is that there is a parallel between the latter and strong

Anthropocene advocacy which, I argue, does not well serve the non-reductive intertwining of

humanity (society, culture) and nonhuman nature.

IV

Neither pure moralism nor pure political realism seems tenable: the moral and the political are

significantly intertwined. I brought this out above by emphasising that much realist criticism is based

According to Swift, Rawls allows considerations of feasibility too much weight in his therefore less than fully ideal theory (Swift, p.382).

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upon a strawman. This situation is paralleled in the Anthropocene debate. Here the strawman is the

defender of pure nature or wilderness. The strawman political moralist decrees the conformity of

politics to an extra-political source of normativity that is to colonise politics regardless of the latter’s

distinctive concerns, rather than inform (and be informed by) those concerns. The strawman

wilderness defender is also highly moralistic. She decrees that environmental thought and practice is

to conform to independent nature as an extra-human source of normativity to be imported within

human culture regardless of the latter’s own inherent concerns. In reality though, as the ‘fact’ of the

Anthropocene underlines, there is no such pure nature independent of humanity, and so this project

is impossible (see e.g., Ellis 2011a)

There are important differences between the two debates, of course, not least regarding issues of

autonomy. Where the political realist stresses the autonomy of the political from the moral, the

Anthropocene advocate denies the autonomy of nature from humanity. But underlying this

difference there is an important shared commitment. The strong Anthropocene advocate has no

truck with impure, relative or qualified autonomy6. Nor does the strong political realist. Here then is

the shared commitment: autonomy is strong and pure or it is nothing. I emphasise that this is shared

ground between strong forms of these positions. It is not shared by everyone who accepts there is

something in the realist critique of political philosophy as applied moral philosophy (for example,

Larmore7). Nor is it accepted by everyone who finds it convenient to talk of the Anthropocene8.

However, the moralistic environmentalist who takes untouched wilderness as something to be saved

in its pure state and regarded as a fully autonomous source of normative imperatives with which to

shape human endeavours is a very rare animal9. The notion and project of wilderness conservation

are entirely consistent with a view of wilderness and nonhuman nature generally as a matter of

degree, and with the point that humanity and nonhuman nature are deeply intertwined within the

earthly environment. Things can be strongly affected by human action and still be significantly wild –

6 One wonders then whether or how autonomy is supposed to apply in the case of persons, where, if it has any

application at all it must be in a relational form dependent on an array of interpersonal and institutional conditions. See Heyd (2005, p.5). 7 It might be questioned whether anyone really does hold the strongest political realism and asserts the

complete autonomy of politics from morality. If not then this character is a strawman too. That would not matter for my argument against strong Anthropocene advocacy – it would not help the latter if its analogue in the political realism debate, insofar as this debate turns on autonomy (pure political realism), turns out to be too pure for this world. 8 See note 2 above. Dale Jamieson uses the Anthropocene label to underscore the unprecedented nature of

our environmental situation as calling for a new ethic, but without denying there is still some (relatively) independent nature, ‘respect’ for which is to be a virtue of the new ethic (Jamieson 2014, p.188ff). 9 Perhaps not completely extinct. For example, some forms of primitivism might be interpreted this way, as

might positions, such as Peter Reed’s (1989) ‘Man Apart’ account, that express an excessively strong sense of nature’s otherness.

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independent and autonomous from humanity. Insofar as Anthropocene talk emphasises ‘socio-

natural entanglements’ then it has things right in my view. But the picture of traditional

environmental ethical preoccupations with respecting nature, wilderness conservation and so on as

inconsistent with this is at least largely a strawman. Here are some grounds for this claim:

The totemic 1964 U.S. Wilderness Act does not define wilderness as pristine untouched nature. As

Howie Wolke puts it ‘[t]he authors of the Wilderness Act wisely recognised that, even in 1964, there

were no remaining landscapes that had completely escaped the imprint of humanity… That’s why

they defined wilderness as “generally appearing to have been affected primarily by the forces of

nature with the imprint of man’s work substantially unnoticeable”’ (Wolke, 2014, p.199, his

emphasis). Similarly, the political scientist David Johns says ‘[t]he U.S. Wilderness Act of 1964… does

not use the term pristine but instead deliberately uses the term untrammelled, a term very close to

the original meaning of wildlands as undomesticated or self-willed land but not necessarily pristine.

Many conservation groups around the globe do focus on protecting largely intact lands and waters –

often high in biodiversity – from further damage, including loss of native species, but they are not

concerned with purity, any more than civil libertarians cease defending the U.S. Bill of Rights just

because they are routinely ignored by governments’ (Johns, 2014, pp.34-5, his emphasis). Aldo

Leopold, hero of ‘traditional’ conservationism, was not concerned with pure untouched wilderness

either. Conservation biologist and historian Curt Meine points out that ‘the effort to integrate the

wild and the human is at least as old as the [conservation] movement itself’, and that Leopold ‘saw

the reality of human environmental impacts and ecological connections more clearly than most…

That did not deter him from his lifelong efforts to protect, sustain and restore wildness, at any and

all scales, in any and all places’ (Meine 2014, p.47).

More recently environmental philosophers have discussed how the ‘nonhumanity’ or ‘autonomy’ of

wilderness and nonhuman nature in general is a matter of degree and yet still a matter of

importance10. Indeed, Ned Hettinger has argued, plausibly enough, that the more nature is

humanised the more precious is the remaining relatively autonomous nature, as it becomes

increasingly rare (Hettinger 2014, p.178). This is an obvious position available to ‘traditional’

environmental ethicists committed to respecting relatively autonomous nature in the context of the

comprehensive anthropogenic impacts inspiring the Anthropocene proposal. Rejecting that position

requires rejecting that commitment. But on what grounds should that commitment be rejected? Of

course, particular accounts of what it is that makes it right to respect relatively autonomous

nonhuman nature may be more or less (im)plausible, just as particular accounts of what it is about

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For example, Heyd (2005), James (2009), Plumwood (e.g. 2006), Stephens (2000). I discuss the issue at some length in Hailwood (2015).

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humanity that makes it worthy of respect vary in plausibility. I am referring to grounds for ruling out

the very idea of nonhuman nature’s value or ethical significance in general. Is it a prior commitment

to unqualified anthropocentrism as a given commitment with which to structure environmental

decision-making – a piece of pure anthropocentric moralism to be shielded by repeated reference to

how the Anthropocene dramatically demonstrates the untenability of its supposed rival: the

strawman pure wilderness fanatic? This raises the matter of strong Anthropocene advocacy as

ideology - discussed in the next section.

Notice also that the complex entanglement of humanity with nonhuman entities and processes,

whose valued autonomy from humanity is therefore a matter of degree, does not rule out what

Hettinger calls ‘the potential for humanization to flush out of human-impacted natural systems and

the real possibility for greater degrees of naturalness to return’ (Hettinger 2014, p.179). Projects of

restoration, rewilding or ‘just letting naturalness come back on its own’ need not involve a

presumably impossible attempt to ‘return’ nonhuman nature to ‘some original baseline state or

trajectory’ before any significant human involvement (ibid.)11. It might be argued that decisions to

pursue such projects (or not) are human management decisions: there is no escape from the ‘fact of

human management’, as it were, and de facto human management negates nonhuman autonomy

by definition. This argument is mistaken. Obviously, decisions to restore, re-wild, or to allow

‘naturalness to return’ are human decisions – including when not made on entirely anthropocentric

grounds. Even the decision not to manage some thing or some process and so, to that extent, let it

‘do its own thing’ is itself a management decision. This does not make it an impossible or

paradoxical decision. Consider a couple of examples. If having held you captive in my cellar for a

decade I come to my senses and decide to free you from that captivity, that it is my decision to

release you and me who removes the chains and unlocks the door does not mean that when you

walk away you remain no less subject to my will than when confined in my cellar. On the contrary,

you now have significantly more autonomy (at least with respect to me); even supposing you will

never get over the experience, will always remain profoundly affected by it and will never be the

11

Granted that restoring an ecosystem (E) to its earlier state is impossible because of anthropogenic climate change, in and of itself this does not preclude ‘restoring nature’ there. To think that it does is to confuse a type (nature) with an occurrence of that type (E). Anthropogenic impacts might rule out the restoration of E, yet not the encouragement of another, relatively wild, ecosystem F. Restoration is itself a matter of degree, whether focused on 1) restoring overall naturalness, or 2) restoring the historical occurrence of naturalness, as embodied in a particular ecosystem, for example. Depending on the situation 2) might not be possible at all; but even so that does not show that 1) is impossible. See also Hettinger’s useful (2012) discussion of the preservation vs restoration controversy where he argues against pure versions of each position (held by Eric Katz and William Jordan respectively). Both can be called for, though restoration should not be thought of as an ideal or paradigm of human-nature relations. Rather it is a ‘fundamentally regrettable’ necessity in some cases given the ‘past abuse of nature’. ‘Put forward as an ideal for the positive human relationship to nature it is grandiose, hubristic, and insensitive to the value of wild nature’ (Hettinger 2012, p.41).

13

person you would have been had the whole thing never happened. Similarly, there may be

overwhelmingly powerful reasons not to abandon a particular very large and old city (as with the

previous example, I am crudely describing a scenario to make a conceptual point, not advocating the

practice described). But if the decision is made to do that and to ‘let nature take its course’ then

building the following facts into the scenario does nothing at all to show the resulting course would

not involve a significant increase in wildness: the decision is a human decision; there is a managed

re-location of the human population and introduction of some (relatively) wild species; what

develops there will still be significantly affected by human activity elsewhere; there can be no

‘reversion’ (even on geological timescales) to the purely natural state that would have obtained had

there never been a human presence there at all. Thus the fact of human management does not

preclude respect for (relatively) nonhuman nature, and associated conservation and restoration of

wilderness ideas and policies. Nor do the latter rely upon rejecting the entanglement picture in

favour an alternative false picture of an entirely autonomous nature.

Nor indeed do they require us to deny or ignore the fact that the protection of remaining relatively

wild nature and the protection of human interests are themselves profoundly entangled. Consider

this principle: If x and y are intertwined or entangled and the preservation of the entanglement is

important then so is the preservation of both x and y also important, even though qua wrapped up

together in a complex entanglement neither x nor y are ‘purely themselves’, as it were. Preservation

of the intertwining of nonhuman nature and humanity is important; at least because of the

dependence of humanity on the nonhuman elements of the entanglement (as ‘ecosystem service

providers’ and so on). Therefore the preservation of the (relatively) nonhuman nature component of

the entanglement is also important12.

But now one might be tempted to put all the weight on the fact of humanity’s dependence here as a

purely anthropocentric agenda-setting thought - let’s forget the preservation of (relatively)

nonhuman nature as a goal in its own right and think instead of managing the environment in strong

Anthropocene advocacy mode with environmental imperatives reduced to that of building a

sustainable human(ised) nature: ‘We most certainly can create a better Anthropocene... The first

step will be in our own minds. The Holocene is gone. In the Anthropocene we are the creators,

engineers and permanent global stewards of a sustainable human nature’ (Ellis 2011b). Here we see

the parallel with strong political realism as insufficiently sensitive to a non-reductive picture of the

intertwining of x and y: in the environmental case the aim to reduce all environmental imperatives

12

This is not to say that the nature component could or should be preserved for all time in some completely fixed state. Fixed and finished versions of the nature/human entanglement should not be expected any more than fixed and finished versions of the ethical/political entanglement.

14

to anthropocentric imperatives focused on nature only insofar as it has already been or could be

humanised. Here sensitivity is badly served by a perspective that takes itself to be ‘realistic’ and yet

is predicated on knocking down a strawman (a foolish and moralistic hankerer after pristine nature)

so as to present itself as the only real option - a matter simply of facts it would be irrational to deny

and to which conformity is required.

V

This brings us to another element of the realist critique of political moralism that is relevant to the

Anthropocene discourse: political moralism is insufficiently aware of its own ideological status. As

Geuss puts it, ‘ethics is usually dead politics; the hand of a victor of some past conflict reaching out

to try to extend its grip to the present and the future’ (Geuss 2008, p.42). Presumably, as Geuss

acknowledges, there is nothing inherently wrong with this. If our present ethical values were once

those of the victors of a past power struggle this need not show they are the wrong values for us to

hold. The problem is that (allegedly) moralistic political philosophy shows no awareness of how its

prized values might embody historical power relations, rather than intuitions of a moral reality prior

to politics and to which politics ought to conform. ‘Crystallised power can pass itself off as morality

and so even as a critique of power’, as Rossi and Sleat say (2014, p.692). So this objection to political

moralism as ideology highlights that the putatively independent, ‘pure’ moral perspective to which

politics is to conform is really politics by underhand means: the perspective of the powerful passed

off as the simple, normatively fundamental truth or deliverance of pure reason.

It might be thought that traditional respect for nature and wilderness conservation approaches

count as ideological moralism in this way13. Perhaps some versions do, and doubtless some

wilderness conservation projects have merited the criticism that they represent a form of

unexamined cultural imperialism by powerful groups within rich nations. But the view of traditional

conservationism as typically committed to imposing nature-loving ways, based on the unexamined

value commitments of the powerful and regardless of the interests of local peoples, is another

strawman (c.f. Meine, pp.51-2). Take for example the following principles of the Earth Charter

quoted by ecologist Brendan Mackey:

13

See for example, Ben Minteer’s criticism of intrinsic value claims in ‘traditional’ environmental ethics as ‘conversation-stoppers’ seemingly designed to fix in place a nonanthropocentric worldview prior to any process of deliberation (Minteer 2012). For critical discussion of Minteer’s position see Hailwood (2015).

15

‘(1a) Recognise that all beings are interdependent and every form of life has value regardless of its

worth to human beings’;

‘(16f) ‘Recognise that peace is the wholeness created by right relationships with oneself, other

persons, other cultures, other life, Earth and the larger whole of which all are a part’ (Mackey 2014,

p.134).

Whatever else might be wrong with them14 it is difficult to interpret these principles as the interests

of the powerful dressed up as unanswerable universal truths of moral reason or the like that are

supposed to wholly colonise environmental political consciousness. The perspective they embody

doesn’t seem all that powerful in real world political terms. And, given that advocates tend to

recognise a range of important values (including considerations of political legitimacy and

anthropocentric environmental values), it seems better to interpret it as intended to inform the

ethical dimensions of ethical/political entanglements as these relate to nature/human

entanglements. Strong Anthropocene advocacy, on the other hand and in interesting contrast to its

affinity in other ways with strong political realism, does seem to fit the bill as a piece of ideological

political moralism. Environmental politics is to conform to an unqualified anthropocentric value

perspective presented as the simple normatively fundamental truth asserted in the name of

scientific reason. Actually existing dissenting voices, perspectives and traditions are put out of play

through assimilation with the irrational (or ‘cognitively dissonant’15) and ‘irrelevant’16 strawman

pure wilderness advocate17.

Notice also that it is part of strong Anthropocene advocacy to declare that the ‘old’ (strawman)

environmentalism has failed: there is no longer any such thing as fully autonomous nature or

pristine wilderness, so environmentalism as such should get with the programme and focus on

managing, engineering, or, more gently, ‘gardening’ the Earth sustainably for the sake of human

interests. It is difficult not to see this as ‘crystallised power passing itself off as morality and so even

as a critique of power’, where the morality is what Curt Meine calls the ‘dominant assumption of

human social and economic development’. As Meine says, the claim that the ‘old movement’ has

failed is false: ‘Over the last century and a half … it has effectively challenged the currently dominant

14

That they seem a little bland might be because they are the result of an attempt at consensus, being ‘the product of a decade-long worldwide, cross-cultural dialogue on common goals and shared values’, originally initiated by the U.N. (Mackey, p.134). 15

Steffen et al (2011, p.861). 16

‘Environmentalist traditions have long called for a halt to human interference in ecology and the Earth system. In the Anthropocene the anthropogenic biosphere is permanent… making the call to avoid human interference in the biosphere irrelevant’ (Ellis 2011a, p.1027). 17

See Wissenburg (2016) for a discussion of the political complexities, pluralities and disagreements ignored in much Anthropocene advocacy.

16

assumption of human social and economic development that humans are the sole source of meaning

and value in the universe and that other people and nature exist to be exploited for maximum

individual and corporate economic development’ (Meine 2014, p.521 my emphasis). Not all that

effectively of course. Meine points out that it is also true that the old movement has failed; in the

same way that movements for civil rights, economic justice and gender and racial equality have also

failed: the world is not now free of prejudice, inequality and injustice. In some ways it has got worse

in these terms. However, ‘[t]hinking that movements work in this way – that they emerge, do their

work, triumph, and then disappear – reveals a superficial understanding of history and social change,

and the complexity of the human condition. Every movement involves steps forward, steps

backward, and steps to the side – and an occasional leap to a new level’ (ibid.).

Anthropocene advocacy needs to distance itself from ideological strong moralism if it is to play a

constructive role in the ethical/political entanglement that is the environmental cause. But there is

a further problem here. Anthropocene advocacy is in a difficult position conceptually because it

needs to think about and, in my view, reconsider the Anthropocene notion itself, insofar as it has

normative significance over and above a technical ‘value free’ revision of geological terminology. If

the Anthropocene designates a more than narrowly geological reality then what it designates is

largely an exercise in power. In this respect it is indeed keyed to the political element in the

ethics/politics entanglement. To think in terms of that element is to think at least largely ‘about

agency, power and interests and the relations amongst these’ (Geuss 2008, p.25). As Guess says,

thinking about these can be organised around an expanded version of Lenin’s ‘who whom’ question:

who is doing what to whom for whose benefit (Geuss 2008, pp.22ff). But the abstract term

‘Anthropocene’ smooths over the who/what/to /for whom questions, presenting power as exercised

by unified Anthropos – ‘Mankind’ – as such (Malm & Hornberg 2014); and, for strong Anthropocene

advocates, to be exercised for the benefit of that same abstraction. This obscures the actual

inequalities in such power of different groups and classes of humans, all of whom are equally

subsumed under the Anthropocene enterprise. If the Anthropocene is being ‘done’ it is being done

by some humans to themselves and to other humans and to nature. For whose benefit? This is

unclear. A full answer would need to step down from these abstractions – Humanity, Nature – and

refer to particular groups of relatively powerful and powerless people and of concrete (relatively)

nonhuman populations, processes and systems. But then insofar as it is a move within a normative

political discourse, as opposed to a technical revision within a narrowly scientific discourse,

Anthropocene advocacy looks highly suspicious precisely because it serves to smooth away those

differences in power and obscures those questions.

17

More than this though, a further ground for suspicion is that the supposed wider normative

implications of the (strongly advocated) Anthropocene as they concern our tangled relationship with

nature is that they have swung away from its technical meaning. Technically, the Anthropocene is

defined in terms of ‘Earth system science’: has Mankind (sic) made an impact on the functioning of

the Earth system such that ‘we’ count as one of the ‘great forces’ shaping that system? If the answer

is ‘yes’ then, it is argued, the Anthropocene label is justified. But what is that system? As Clive

Hamilton (2015) has pointed out in a critical discussion of some proposed definitions of the

Anthropocene and suggestions for its inaugural date, the Earth system ‘is not “the landscape”, it is

not “ecosystems”, and it is not “the environment”’. Rather, in these words of Charles Langmuir and

Wally Broecker, quoted by Hamilton, the Earth system has various parts

‘- rock, water, atmosphere – [that] are all involved in interrelated cycles where matter is continually

in motion and is used and reused in the various planetary processes. Without interlocked cycles and

recycling the Earth could not function as a system…In the last fifty years or so we have come to

recognize the movements in all Earth’s layers, including the plates at the surface, the mantle and the

core as well as the atmosphere and ocean.’ (Hamilton 2015, p.2)

Hamilton complains that equating this system of circulation and recycling of matter with other

things (landscape, ecosystem, environment) is misplaced, changes the subject and so obscures the

issues. This applies also to the tendency to equate it with nonhuman nature. The Earth system is a

theoretical model to help explain large-scale planetary processes as the functioning of an overall

system. Because these processes are largely nonhuman and they condition other nonhuman

processes (e.g. evolution), anthropogenic impacts upon them are (by definition) anthropogenic

impacts upon terrestrial nonhuman nature. But one cannot properly reduce (even terrestrial) nature

to (its role in) the Earth system any more than one can properly reduce humanity to its role in the

Earth system. Both are more than and less than their role in that system. More because there is

more to each than being a component of that system. Not everything true of humanity (that we are

capable of self-consciously political relations, for example) can be expressed in terms of Earth

system science. Nor is everything true of (terrestrial) nonhuman nature expressible in terms of Earth

system science (that nonhuman species seem incapable of self-consciously political relationships, for

example). Less because each is part, but not the whole, of the Earth’s system of cycling and recycling

matter. To speak of the Anthropocene as signalling the impossibility of traditional environmental

concern for nature (for example, conservation of remaining relatively autonomous nonhuman

nature) is therefore misplaced, changes the subject and obscures the issues. In this respect too it

seems ideological, not so much (or only) because it represents the perspective of past victors or the

18

currently powerful, but because it removes by sleight of hand obstacles to an anticipated techno-

future of unqualified Earth system management (c.f. Baskin 2015).

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