The Struggle For Nature: A Critique of Environmental Philosophy

STRUGGLE FOR NATURE

Struggle for Nature charts the scientific traps and the social pitfalls of current environmental philosophies, such as deep ecology, social and political ecology, eco-feminism and eco-anarchism, and argues for a ‘post-naturalistic’ turn in environmental philosophy. Jozef Keulartz presents a critique of environmental philosophy from two complementary angles. First, he examines the theory of power outlined in the work of Foucault and Donzelot and demonstrates how environmental philosophy can contribute to a strengthening of bio-power. Second, the author explores the philosophy of language developed in the writings of Habermas and Lyotard and shows how current environmental philosophy can form a threat to communicative power. Now available in English, Struggle for Nature provides a provocative and stimulating evaluation of environmental philosophy. Jozef Keulartz is Associate Professor in the Department of Applied Philosophy at Wageningen Agricultural University. He has published extensively in different areas of environmental philosophy, such as environmental ethics, aesthetics and politics.

ENVIRONMENTAL PHILOSOPHIES SERIES Edited by Andrew Brennan Philosophy, in its broadest sense, is an effort to get clear on the problems which puzzle us. Our responsibilities for and attitude to the environment is one such problem which is now the subject of intense debate. Theorists and policy analysts often discuss environmental issues in the context of a more general understanding of what human beings are and how they are related to each other and to the rest of the world. So economists may argue that humans are basically consumers sending signals to each other by means of the market, while deep ecologists maintain that humans and other animals are knots in a larger web of biospheric relations. This series examines the theories that lie behind the different accounts of our environmental problems and their solution. It includes accounts of holism, feminism, green political themes and the other structures of ideas in terms of which people have tried to make sense of our environmental predicaments. The emphasis is on clarity, combined with a critical approach to the material under study. Most of the authors are professional philosophers, and each has written a jargon-free, non-technical account of their topic. The books will interest readers from a variety of backgrounds, including philosophers, geographers, policy makers and all who care for our planet. Also available in this series ECOLOGY, POLICY AND POLITICS John O’Neill WHY POSTERITY MATTERS Environmental policies and future generations Avner de-Shalit ECOLOGICAL FEMINISM Karen Warren FAKING NATURE The ethics of environmental restoration Robert Elliot

STRUGGLE FOR NATURE A critique of radical ecology

Jozef Keulartz

London and New York

First published in Dutch (Strijd om de natuur: Kritiek van de radicale ecologie) 1995 by Boom: Amsterdam This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003. First published in English 1998 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1995 Jozef Keulartz © Translation 1998 Rob Kuitenbrouwer The right of Jozef Keulartz to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-20152-3 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-26588-2 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-18093-7 (hbk) ISBN 0-415-18094-5 (pbk) This publication was supported by NWO, the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research

CONTENTS

Prologue: Towards a post-naturalist environmental philosophy The anarchist solution 2 The ecocentric proposal 6 The other Kehre of Hannah Arendt 11 Biopower and communicative power 13 The power theory perspective 14 The broken light of truth 16 The language philosophy perspective 19 PART I Between biology and biopower Archaeology of the ecological gaze 23

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The discovery of the environment Natural history 25 The Janus face of physico-theology 27 The epistemological precedence of botany 30 The birth of biology 32 The struggle for life 35 Biology enters the political arena 38

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The emergence of biopower From sovereign power to biopower 40 The family between coercion and seduction 43 Hygeia and Victoria 45

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Two types of pseudo-sciences Foucault’s blind spot 49 3

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From Patrick Geddes to Lewis Mumford Sociology on a biological foundation 53 Anabolism and catabolism 54 The natural region as the cradle of the town Palaeotechnics and neotechnics 59 Urbane and rustic intelligence 62 The cuckoo chick Mumford 63 The city in history 65 Mumford’s influence 68 Letchworth in Limburg The Garden City 71 The twin god Howard—Geddes 74 Sodom-on-the-Maas 75 The miners’ colony as a management tool Anarchy=order 81 Dream or nightmare? 86

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PART II Between science and ideology A critique of ecological reason 91

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Scarcity and equality From organic to ecological society 94 The scales of justice 97 Gender and sex 98 Mimetic desire and the scapegoat mechanism 100 Revelation 103 Only violence? 107

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Classical anarchism and eco-anarchism Freedom as moral self-direction 110 Science as the master of ethics 111 Between anachronism and scientism 114 vi

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Neo-Stoicism in social and deep ecology 116 From positivism to holism 120 7

Holism and totalitarianism Whitehead’s organicism 125 Smuts and holism 130 Holism and ecology 135 The totalitarian temptation 140

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Separate ways Climax or civilization 143 ‘New Ecology’ 147 Social ecology as pastiche 150 The fable of the climax 152 Stability versus persistence 153 Ostrich politics 154

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Epilogue: Towards a democratic landscape Power to the primitive imagination 159 The paradox of nature development 161 The new coalition 164 The smothered differend 165 Suppressed litigation 169 Concluding remarks 173

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Bibliography Indexes

175 182

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PROLOGUE: TOWARDS A POST-NATURALIST ENVIRONMENTAL PHILOSOPHY The pure light of truth can be seen by us only in variously broken rays. (Dilthey, 1931:VIII, p. 222)

Environmental philosophy is a young discipline that has swiftly gained international academic status. This success is undoubtedly in large part due to the rapid growth of a strong consensus among the most prominent environmental philosophers on the basic tenets of the discipline, a consensus which has enabled them to close ranks and unite into a single front. The other side of this coin is a certain degree of dogmatism and a certain amount of intolerance of dissident voices. In spite of variations in emphasis, the various ‘canonical’ texts of environmental philosophy display a sufficient number of common characteristics to allow one to speak of a single family. This family is a direct descendant of radical ecology, which originated primarily in America. Within radical ecology it is possible to distinguish four broad currents that can be found, in some configuration or other, in the work of nearly all environmental philosophers: Arne Naess’ deep ecology, in which the current environmental crisis is attributed to modern man’s anthropocentrism; Murray Bookchin’s social ecology, which ascribes our hostile behaviour towards nature to the existence of hierarchical relationships among human beings; Ivan Illich’s political ecology, which follows René Girard in holding man’s mimetic desire responsible for the degradation of the environment; and ecofeminism, which points to androcentrism rather than anthropocentrism as the main culprit. In recent years, radical ecology has put down firm roots outside the alma mater as well. It supplies ideological ammunition to pressure groups such as Greenpeace and Earth First!, to influential associations like the Sierra Club and to a variety of ‘green’ political parties. Moreover, 1

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it has firmly established itself on the European continent. Curiously, the advance of radical ecology has so far been limited to the Protestant North—countries like Norway, Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands—while the Catholic South remains cold to its ideas, with the sole exception of France, where Michel Serres found a receptive audience for his book Le contrat naturel, published in 1990. In Eastern Europe and in the Third World, where environmental issues are as yet overshadowed by economic concerns, the radical ecological seeds have so far fallen on barren ground (see Ferry, 1995, pp. xxiii, xxv and 61). As is already evident from the labels which they use to mark their positions, radical ecologists are constantly appealing to ecological science to back up their case. However, such an appeal to ecology is misleading in several ways. It ignores the fallible and contingent nature of this science and, what is more, it ignores the fact that ecology, too, is a battlefield of competing paradigms and research programmes. The radical ecology discourse in current environmental philosophy can at best be characterized as a pastiche of old, long outdated conceptions of a ‘true essence’ of nature. However, environmental philosophy’s appeal to ecology is not only untenable from a scientific point of view, it also entails a number of undesirable social effects. In fact, it has a stifling effect on the debate about where we as a society want to go with nature. Stifling, because the emphasis on ecology considerably narrows the scope for other language games, genres or styles of argumentation that are not consistent with ecology. At the same time, all manner of new forms of social control are stealthily proposed and introduced on the cognitive authority of ecology. This book maps out the scientific traps and social pitfalls that invariably confront radical ecology on account of its naturalistic slant and argues the case for a ‘post-naturalist’ turn in environmental philosophy. In its critique of naturalism it aligns itself with a number of promising trends in feminism (Donna Haraway), science studies (Bruno Latour) and sociology (Ulrich Beck). In order to give some insight into the grounds for my critique of radical ecology, I propose to sketch the contours of my post-naturalist alternative to established environmental philosophy in this Prologue. But before doing so, I shall first give a brief character sketch of radical ecology, from both a political and a normative perspective. The anarchist solution In order to present the political affinities of radical ecology I 2

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have availed myself of the typology devised by Tim O’Riordan in his 1976 book Environmentalism, a typology which according to Dobson (1990, p. 82) no one has yet been able (or needed) to improve upon. O’Riordan distinguished four ideologically diverse propositions for tackling the current environmental crisis by means of institutional reform. For the sake of clarity, these four propositions can be ordered as follows. In the first place, a distinction can be made between statist and anti-statist propositions. The anti-statist propositions can then be divided into proposals for global or for local (communal or regional) policies. Finally, the proposals for local policies can be divided into authoritarian and anti-authoritarian solutions. O’Riordan considers only one position centred on the nationstate, centralised authoritarianism. This is the position represented in particular by William Ophuls who, together with Paul Ehrlich and Garret Hardin, ranks as a prominent advocate of so-called ‘lifeboat ethics’ according to which rich countries should not be too ready to help poor countries lest the world population continue to grow and put even greater pressure on already scarce food supplies and strategic resources. In the light of ecological scarcity, frugality is a must, says Ophuls; we should be aiming for a ‘steady-state society’ in which the population and the means of subsistence are in balance. Liberal democracy is not equipped to achieve this aim, however; what is needed is a Hobbesian sovereign, a ‘green’ Leviathan. Ophuls leaves us in no doubt as to who shall be in charge of this future state. The ecological complex steady-state society may… require, if not a class of ecological guardians, then at least a class of ecological mandarins who possess the esoteric knowledge needed to run it well…. The steady-state society will not only be more authoritarian and less democratic than the industrial societies of today…but it will also in all likelihood be much more oligarchic as well, with only those possessing the ecological and other competences to make prudent decisions allowed full participation in the political process. (Ophuls, 1981, p. 163) In view of the authority enjoyed by ecologists in Ophuls’ steadystate society, his position could also be described as ‘eco-cratic’. Although well-received at first, this position has now receded into the background and no longer plays any appreciable role in environmental philosophy. 3

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O’Riordan’s schema makes no mention of either the ecolibertarians or the eco-socialists. Eco-libertarians, such as the wellknown neoclassical economist Milton Friedman, seek a solution for environmental problems not in a strong state but in a free market. They advocate withdrawing environmental resources from government control and handing them over to private ownership or management. The responsibilities of the state could then be reduced to safeguarding property rights, acting against violence, fraud and breach of contract, and national defence. Somewhere midway between these free-market enthusiasts and the proponents of a strong state are the eco-socialists, who defend the concept of a democratically supervised planned economy. Among the anti-statists, two very different parties can be distinguished, one that seeks to establish a new global order and another that, by contrast, gives priority to the local level as the appropriate stage for ecologically inspired policy-making. As an example of the first tendency, O’Riordan cites the book Only One Earth (1972) in which Barbara Ward and René Dubois focused on the transnational character of most environmental problems, arguing that responsible environmental management could best be placed in the hands of an extended version of the United Nations. While authoritarian statism has since lost most of its original charm, global thinking has clearly been sailing with the wind since the mid-1980s. This is undoubtedly related to the fact that political attention has shifted from regional problems such as urban smog, chemical pollution, resource depletion, the risks of nuclear energy and acid rain, to problems of a distinctly global nature, such as the depletion of the ozone layer, the greenhouse effect and the world-wide decline in biodiversity. Andrew Dobson (1990, p. 82) rightly adds Gro Harlem Brundtland to O’Riordan’s list of globalists. Our Common Future, the report prepared under her leadership in 1987, marks a turningpoint in thinking about environmental problems, witness the emergence of new policy instruments such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the growing public support for supranational NGOs such as the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). Curiously enough, radical ecology seems to have remained virtually oblivious to this global shift, generally clinging to the local level as the locus standi of environmental politics. As ever, the true revolutionary subject of radical ecology is the homo communitas. It should be noted, however, that its ideal differs significantly from 4

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that of the authoritarian community, a notion which according to O’Riordan was introduced by the economist Robert Heilbronner. In his 1974 book An Enquiry into the Human Prospect he presented as a remedy against the environmental crisis a combination of religious orientation and military style discipline, modelled on the medieval monastery or the Chinese commune. Referring to the latter, O’Riordan writes: ‘While the Chinese experience must be unique to the Chinese culture and temperament, doubtless much can be learned from this example that is pertinent to a world threatened by the double ogre of scarcity and injustice’ (O’Riordan, 1981, p. 307). Since the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall, such a statement is no longer greeted with any approval. Authoritarian solutions, be they centralist or de-centralist, are definitely passé. Which brings us to the fourth and final position distinguished by O’Riordan: the anarchist solution. The idea of self-reliant and selfsustaining communities along anarchistic lines is central to all radical ecological tendencies in environmental philosophy. According to O’Riordan, the originators of this idea of ‘postindustrial tribalism’ were Peter Kropotkin, Patrick Geddes, Ebenezer Howard, Leslie Abercrombie and Lewis Mumford, and its modern-day evangelists include Theodore Roszak, Murray Bookchin and Ivan Illich (ibid., pp. 7 and 307). One name that could be added to this list is that of ‘deep’ ecologist Arne Naess, since he too advocates the ‘cultivation of life in community (Gemeinschaft) instead of in society (Gesellschaft)’ (Zimmerman, 1994, p. 28). And it is because of this emphasis on the importance of community spirit, of interdependence instead of independence, that many ecofeminists feel attracted to deep ecology (see Cheney, 1989, p. 117). In his discussion of O’Riordan’s typology, Dobson concludes that ‘green’ political forces have adopted the ‘anarchist solution’ propagated by radical ecology. Or, inversely: ‘The Green sustainable society can be negatively defined by saying that it will not be reached by transnational global cooperation, it will not principally be organized through the institutions of the nation-state, and it is not authoritarian’ (Dobson, 1990, p. 84). Dobson is no doubt right in underlining the magnitude of the influence of radical ecology in ‘green’ politics, but his assertion that this political trend is leftistliberal at heart is one beside which this book will place a very large question mark. Certainly, it is an assertion that reflects the selfimage of all but a few radical ecologists, but the picture is too rosy and will not hold up under close scrutiny. Like the classical anarchists, the radical ecologists are certainly 5

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opposed to any religious or worldly authority, even and especially in the shape of a green Leviathan, but they are blind to the fact that the sovereign power they so adamantly oppose has meanwhile been joined by new, more subtle forms of power which Michel Foucault— in a happy choice of phrase—has termed ‘biopower’. Because of this same blindness radical ecology risks developing into a prime vehicle of biopower itself, as I shall attempt to demonstrate in some detail in the first part of this book. Radical ecology’s appeal to the ecological laws of the biosphere, though made in the name of autonomy, decentralization and self-direction, actually amounts to an apologia for law and order in society (see also Oechsle, 1988, p. 80). The ecocentric proposal In order to be able to characterize radical ecology from a normative point of view I will give a brief outline of environmental ethics, the best developed sub-discipline of environmental philosophy. Environmental ethics centres on the antithesis between anthropocentrism and non-anthropocentrism. Whenever man sets himself up as the measure of all things, so runs the critique of anthropocentrism, nature, including human nature, ceases to be an independent and inexhaustible source of value and becomes instead a mere resource to be disposed of at will, with all the detrimental consequences for the environment this entails. If we are to prevent the environmental crisis from ending in catastrophe, environmental ethicists agree, we must convert to non-anthropocentrism and judge life forms on their intrinsic value (an sich) instead of their instrumental value (für uns). In addition to the opposition of anthropocentrism to nonanthropocentrism, the opposition of holism to individualism also plays a constitutive role in environmental ethics. The main representative of the individualist current of thought is dubbed ‘animal ethics’. A well-known protagonist of animal ethics is Peter Singer who follows utilitarian precepts in his proposal to admit all those life forms capable of suffering into the circle of morally relevant creatures. His position could also be designated as ‘sentientism’ (after the Latin word for feeling, sentire). Another position in animal ethics is that of Tom Regan who has developed a theory of animal rights on deontological lines. In addition to these animal ethicists, ‘biocentrists’ like Kenneth Goodpaster and Paul Taylor, who would extend the circle of moral ‘patients’ to include all living beings, can also be reckoned as belonging to the individualist camp. 6

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The holists among the environmental ethicists only accord moral relevance to populations, to biotic communities and, above all, to ecosystems. The prime inspiration of these ‘ecocentrists’ is Aldo Leopold’s ‘land ethics’. The underlying philosophy of land ethics, which is also embraced by radical ecologists, was elaborated and further refined by Baird Callicott who, more than anyone else, has taken Leopold’s creed for his own: ‘A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise’ (Leopold, 1949, p. 224). Around 1980, a fierce contest for precedence arose between the advocates of individualist animal ethics and those of holistic ecoethics. Until then, it had been expected that an adequate environmental ethics would emerge automatically as an extension from animal ethics. After all, both Singer’s animal liberation theory and Regan’s animal rights theory discarded traditional morality as ‘chauvinist’ and ‘speciesist’ in view of its anthropocentrist principles. Now that man had been knocked off his exclusive moral pedestal, was not the time ripe for a moral rehabilitation of the rest of living nature? Even in 1983, Regan still claimed that his individualistic ‘rights-based view’ would fully satisfy the needs of the nature protectors. After all, ‘Were we to show proper respect for the rights of individuals who make up the biotic community, would not the community be preserved?’ (Regan, 1983, p. 362). This rhetorical question was evidently aimed at Callicott who, like Leopold, had elevated the vicissitudes of the biotic community to the ultimate standard by which to judge the moral value of our actions. In 1980 Callicott had written a highly polemical article, ‘Animal Liberation: A Triangular Affair’, in which he had denounced as an illusion the attempt on the part of animal ethicists to build a bridge between their own position and that of environmental ethics. Both Singer and Regan were wrong in presenting the debate as one between two parties, the spokesmen for the traditional, strictly anthropocentrist ethics and the proponents of animal liberation and animal rights. A third party was involved, that of land or eco-ethics, and according to Callicott it held all the aces. In Callicott’s view animal ethicists mistakenly focus exclusively on domesticated animals. Mistakenly, since these animals are creations of man, living artefacts which in the perspective of land ethics constitute a similar or even greater threat to nature than a fleet of ‘four-wheel-drive offroad vehicles’ (Callicott, 1989, p. 30). Regan responded to this attack in 1983, in his well-known book The Case for Animal Rights, saying that Callicott was guilty of 7

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‘environmental fascism’ in the sense that he subordinated the rights of individuals to the fancied interests of the greater whole of which they are an integral part. ‘Environmental fascism and the rights view are like oil and water’, Regan concluded, ‘they don’t mix’ (Regan, 1983, p. 362). And one year later, in 1984, Mark Sagoff, an ally of Callicott’s, wrote off the relationship between animal and eco-ethics as ‘Bad Marriage, Quick Divorce’. The nature protectors’ main concern, according to Sagoff, is the preservation of natural processes, and processes such as natural selection cannot after all be expected to show a great deal of respect for the ‘rights’ of individual animals. This exchange of fire seemed to have put the lid on the issue and environmental ethics seemed destined for a definitive separation of the minds. But in 1988 Callicott made an attempt to refloat the stranded marriage by offering the animal ethicists an ‘olive branch’ in the form of his article ‘Animal Liberation and Environmental Ethics: Back Together Again’. In this article Callicott identified different communities that embrace each other like concentric circles: the community of human beings, the mixed community of humans and domesticated animals and finally the wider biotic community that includes wild animals as well. From a moral point of view, these different communities are hierarchically structured: obligations to the community of humans rank as priorities, followed by the obligations to the mixed community and finally by those to the biotic community. According to Callicott, such a hierarchical ordering makes it possible to weigh moral claims and solve conflicts in a systematic way. However, such a hierarchical ordering threatens to subvert the whole land ethics position and to open the door to a return of traditional anthropocentrist ethics. In order to take the edge off this obvious objection, Callicott added that the more recent obligations imposed by the wider community must have repercussions for the older obligations arising from the narrower community. One can certainly deny one’s children the fun of a trip to Disneyland or shower fewer Christmas presents on them if that would help alleviate famine elsewhere. One can equally impose restrictions on oneself or on animals belonging to the mixed community in the interests of ecological integrity. ‘Dairy cattle, for example, can be very destructive of certain plant communities and should be fenced out of them when other pasture or fodder is available—despite their own preferences and the economic interests of dairy farmers’ (Callicott, 1989, p. 59). By adding this clause Callicott tries to close the door on anthropocentrism again but at the same time undermines the idea of 8

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a hierarchical order that would allow conflicts to be solved in a systematic way. The question of how the various moral claims can be weighed in practical terms remains unanswered. A similar embarrassment is felt in the attempt by philosophers such as Holmes Rolston to arrive at a synthesis of individualistic and holistic approaches by assigning intrinsic value to both individuals and aggregates of individuals. Rolston and company are looking to solve moral conflicts by elaborating a system of priorities, but they are highly unlikely to succeed. The idea of a system of priorities presupposes the availability of one single standard by which the relative weight of the various moral claims can be measured. But would it be at all possible, in view of the huge difference in complexity between individuals, species, communities and ecosystems, to translate conflicting claims into scores, as it were, and simply set them off against each other within one single metric system? To believe that there could be one moral scale, standard or metric system is an idea that testifies to the monistic character of prevailing environmental ethics. It shares this monistic character with the selfsame traditional ethics that it aims to overcome. The fact that the moral monism of traditional ethics was never seriously disputed follows from the subject it concentrated on, namely human beings and their mutual relationships. Such a monism only becomes problematic when all sorts of exotic entities enter the moral arena: future generations, the dead, embryos, animals, trees, rocks, robots, etc. The majority of environmental ethicists respond to this challenge with some kind of ‘moral extensionism’: the traditional framework is extended to the point where it can accommodate such exotic entities besides people and their mutual relationships. Christopher Stone, in his magnificent book of 1987, Earth and Other Ethics, calls such attempts ‘forced’ and argues that the new challenge can be met by putting a moral pluralism in the place of moral monism. He refuses to accept the idea that all moral activities in all contexts are subject to a single all-embracing principle (or composite of principles) like Kant’s categorical imperative, Bentham’s ‘greatest good for the greatest number’ or Leopold’s ‘integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community’. Stone does away with extensionist metaphors such as Singer’s expanding circle or Callicott’s image of the year-rings of a tree and replaces them with the metaphor of the map. In much the same way as one could draw a number of empirical maps of a certain area—topographical, geological, sociogeographical—one could also draw a number of ethical maps of the same area, which differ in terms of ‘logical texture’. In a map 9

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centring on the individual animal one would scan the area for such features as consciousness, intelligence, understanding of the situation and capacity to suffer. In a map of species one would look for such features as breeding and mating habits, population size and genetic variability. A map of ecosystems would focus on features like rarity, stability, persistence and energy flows. In order to acquire a total view of the ethical situation in a particular area, these different maps have to be superimposed. The advantage of such an approach is that all morally relevant claims are given equal treatment, so that justice is done to the existing plurality of views and convictions. The downside is that this ethical charting method offers no handles for clear-cut prioritization. It can only sharpen one’s awareness of the moral complexity and stratification of the problems and foster the necessary sensibility among those involved to the delicate choices they have to make. But then again that is quite a lot, and perhaps the most that one can from an ethical theory. Which decisions are actually made will ultimately remain a matter of political struggle. But charting the ethical issues at stake will make it possible to keep that struggle within morally and socially acceptable limits. Such a charting project would force animal and nature protectors to sit down at the table and seriously consider each others’ points of view. It would increase the likelihood of a fair balance being made of the moral costs and benefits involved in the pursuit of individual well-being on the one hand and in clearing the way for natural processes on the other. Stone’s book failed to upset the prevailing consensus among radical ecologists. This consensus, as assessed also by Andrew Light and Eric Katz in their introduction to Environmental Pragmatism, continues to be that an adequate and workable set of environmental ethics should be non-anthropocentrist, holistic and monistic. Those who wish to defend or develop different positions are rarely heard or taken seriously, and are always assumed to have the burden of proving just cause for deviating from the norms of current theory. It seems that anyone who still is questioning which is the correct side in the debates over individualism/holism, anthropocentrism/non-anthropocentrism, instrumental/intrinsic value and pluralism/monism is seen as being unnecessarily obfuscatory. According to the consensus, it is time to move to other projects—namely the unification of theories on the right side of these divides. (Light and Katz, 1996, p. 2) 10

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These authors denounce such dogmatism as sterile and impractical and, like Stone, argue the case for a pluralistic environmental philosophy, ‘for experimentation in the expression and language of environmental thought’ (ibid., p. 10). They conclude their introduction by calling for an approach in which environmental philosophy is seen as a ‘contested terrain’ within which a multitude of widely varying positions fight one another for precedence. Such a plea for a pluralistic environmental philosophy forms an important backdrop to Part II of this book, in which I aim to demonstrate that holism, or ecocentrism, exhibits signs of totalitarianism and does not mesh well with a democratic culture that thrives on debate and polemics. The other Kebre of Hannah Arendt The main source of inspiration for my post-naturalist alternative to the dominant trend in environmental philosophy is the work of Hannah Arendt, which, as Kerry Whiteside (1994) once remarked, has been totally ignored by the radical ecologists. Not that this should surprise us since Arendt’s work is to a great extent antithetical to that of her former mentor and lover Martin Heidegger, one of the most prominent philosophers cited time and time again by the radical ecologists (see, for instance, Naess, 1973; Zimmerman, 1983; Devall and Sessions, 1985). Heidegger owes this status to his exceptionally staunch opposition to the anthropocentrism of Western metaphysics. The price that Western man has had to pay in order to evolve into a fully autonomous and autarchic subject is the objectivization and concomitant instrumentalization of both his inner and outer nature. In Heidegger’s view, the history of metaphysics culminates in the triumph of the will. This history, which began with Plato’s idealism, reached its penultimate stage in Nietzsche’s nihilism. The final stage is planetary technology. Raging at the heart of modern technology, the will to power, which is essentially a ‘will to will’, has razed the world to the ground and robbed all objects of their last little shred of individual life. In Heidegger’s view, a turn for the better can only come about if the will to will makes way for a will to not-will: we should no longer approach objects in terms of their utility and availability to our insatiable will to power but instead adopt an attitude of responsiveness and releasement. Man should learn to behave more like a guardian or a shepherd than as the lord of Being. The 11

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significance of this view for environmental philosophy becomes clear when we realize that Heidegger effectively equates ‘Being’ with the Greek pbysis, which the Romans translated as natura. While Arendt sided with Heidegger in resolutely opposing the anthropocentrism of Western metaphysics, she regarded his way out of subject philosophy as a blind alley. Heidegger tried to free himself from the bonds of this philosophy simply by standing it on its head. Even though Heidegger repeatedly underlined the subjectless nature of Being, many of his pronouncements nevertheless give the impression that Being is a power imbued with a will and a consciousness of its own, existing independently of beings. Being speaks to us ‘in a silent voice’ and demands that we answer its call; it gives us food for thought and demands that we accept this favour or gift with gratitude. Although Being relies on man to utter its ‘unspoken word’ and thus protect its essence and preserve its truth, it remains a ‘Geschick’ (destiny) to which man has no option but to conform. Whereas Heidegger sought recourse to an anonymous Being as a shield against the anthropocentrism of Western metaphysics, Arendt argued for a Kehre (turn) from subjectivity to intersubjectivity. Arendt reproached metaphysics for having taken ‘man’ singular as the principal object of all its reflections, while in reality people exist only in the plural. Hence, ‘plurality’ became the cornerstone of her philosophy. The public space that is created or constituted as people act and speak in concert can only open up by virtue of a multiplicity of diverging perspectives and positions. Wherever this variegated plurality is made by force or discipline to give way to bleak uniformity, to uniform behaviour and unanimous opinions, any sense of reality is lost and the collective experience is shunted onto a side-track. Arendt’s turn from subject philosophy towards communication theory has had a tremendous impact on the development of Jürgen Habermas (see Keulartz, 1995, pp. 190–194). Habermas, too, holds that Heidegger has simply stood subject philosophy on its head by detaching Being from beings and turning it into a quasi-autonomous entity. Heidegger opposed the fundamentalism in subject philosophy by taking the route of abstract negation, only to arrive at an ‘inverted foundationalism’ himself (Habermas, 1985, p. 181). The problem with this inverted foundationalism, according to Habermas, is the utter contingency of the ‘Geschick’, which can only be discussed in the vaguest of terms. Such an indeterminate manner of speaking invites the listener to obey a pseudo-sacral authority that is as invisible 12

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as it is intangible, it calls for ‘blind submission to the Higher’ (ibid., p. 168). This same criticism applies to radical environmental philosophy. ‘The critique of an anthropocentrist world-view’, as Mechtild Oechsle rightly comments, ‘all too often serves to defend a naturalism that is nothing but an abstract negation of the anthropocentrism that is being criticized’ (Oechsle, 1988, p. 101). In the end, she continues, instead of the accursed dominance over nature, submission to nature is demanded. As a consequence, a qualitatively different approach to nature, going beyond dominance or submission, becomes unthinkable. ‘Marx’s Utopia of the “resurrection of nature”, of “naturalism realized in man and humanism realized in nature”, is reduced to a naturalization of man, while the humanization of nature is no longer on the agenda’ (ibid., p. 102). Here, Oechsle accurately captures the tone and tenor of the radical ecology discourse. It is a discourse which calls incessantly for a humble holism and a submission of the individual to the greater whole while at the same time using ‘the’ ecology to silence dissenting voices and thus smother the debate on alternative future scenarios. Meanwhile, we are left completely in the dark as to the true essence of nature and confronted time and time again with the now familiar litany of mantras about the whole that is greater than the sum of its parts, about balance and harmony, stability and diversity, etc. Biopower and communicative power Apart from the notion of ‘communicative power’ that is central to the work of Habermas, Hannah Arendt also contemplated the notion that was to be given such prominence as ‘biopower’ by Foucault in the 1970s. Like Foucault, Arendt focused on the way the biological life process had started to invade the public space and the domain of political techniques around 1800. By way of explanation, Arendt cited the steady growth of the realm of labour and work at the expense of the realm of action and speech. As this process advances, the fragile web in which people’s personal identity is shaped as they interact begins to tear, resulting in the problems of social integration so typical of modern societies. Against the backdrop of Arendt’s work, the affinity between Habermas and Foucault stands out clearly. Although the notion of ‘biopower’ does not figure as such in Habermas’ reflections, it does bear an unmistakable resemblance to his concept of the ‘system’. After all, the purpose of the system, governed by the steering media 13

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of ‘money’ and ‘power’, is to safeguard the material reproduction of society and the biological survival of humanity. This is why, in Habermas’ view, the system has priority over the communicatively structured life-world, while he ascribes superiority to the life-world over the system. The life-world can be said to be colonized by the system if the system, which ought to serve as the basis of society, assumes a superior position while at the same time reducing science and technology, law and morality, art and erotics to the status of mere instruments. Foucault, conversely, does not literally use the term ‘communicative power’. However, Habermas has shown that Foucault’s critical account of biopower rests on a normative foundation that Foucault himself, as a ‘gay positivist’, chooses to cloak in darkness, but which can be readily brought to light with the help of the theory of communicative action. This is evident in passages where Foucault describes how biopower causes individuals to change from subjects of communication into objects of observation, while symmetrical relationships are replaced by asymmetrical, and horizontal connections by vertical. When one compares Habermas and Foucault against the backdrop of Hannah Arendt’s self-confident Kehre from subject philosophy, their common diagnosis can be summarized in the following formula: it is the ‘lopsided growth’ of biopower at the expense of communicative power that is responsible for the problems confronting modernity; it is the preoccupation with survival which time and time again threatens to disorganize and disrupt social life. This diagnosis allows for a critique of the radical ecology discourse from two different yet complementary points of view. A power theory perspective, as developed chiefly by Foucault and Jacques Donzelot, makes it possible to formulate an answer to the question of whether and to what extent this discourse and its attendant social practices have contributed to a strengthening of biopower. A language philosophy perspective, as developed in diverse ways by Jürgen Habermas and Jean-François Lyotard, can serve to answer the complementary question of whether and to what extent this discourse and these practices constitute a threat to communicative power in modern societies. The power theory perspective In nearly all his writings, Foucault emphasized the centrality of medical science in modern societies. Medicine serves as a pivot, as it were, between the disciplining of the body and the regulation of 14

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the population. In this regard, medical science is akin to environmental science, and not just because they both originated in biology. Both hinge on the opposition of the normal to the pathological, with medicine concentrating on the internal metabolism of the human organism while environmental science concentrates all its attention on the external metabolism, that between man and nature. In view of this relationship, the thesis will be advanced in the first part of this book that medicalization and ecologization are two sides of the same developmental process in which new forms of social control were introduced and tested. This thesis can only be substantiated by means of historical analysis. In taking this route, however, we venture into territory which is a veritable terra incognita for current environmental philosophy. With the exception of Donald Worster’s ground-breaking work, there has been virtually no cross-border traffic between environmental philosophy and environmental history to date. As a result, the lack of historical awareness among environmental philosophers is nothing short of amazing. They rejoice in speculations as to when our civilization began its downhill course. Some see Bacon, Galileo and Descartes as the principal evil-doers. Others point to the Bible, alleged to have proclaimed man’s dominion over nature. Still others go back even further and identify the neolithic revolution as the root of all evil. An occasional individual even goes so far as to equate the birth of mankind with original sin according to a well-worn Christian recipe. But such soporific speculations have little in common with historical research. Given the actuality and urgency of the environmental problematic, historical research is perceived as postponement and thus as abandonment. The danger of such a short-sighted attitude, leading to an almost daily succession of ecocratic or ecotopian Sofortprogramme (Nowprogrammes), is something that Magnus Enzensberger warned against as early as 1973, in his essay ‘Zur Kritik der politische Ökologie’. In charging forward to meet the crisis one tends to overlook the social effects produced by one’s own discourse. Even a cursory glance at history shows that the problem of the environment and the movement responding to that problem did not spring up only recently but have attended industrial society ever since its inception. This is confirmed for instance by Hajer (1994) in his review of Samuel Hays’ study of the American environmental movement around the turn of the century. Hays demonstrates that the environmental movement played into the hands of a group of environmental managers whose measures went directly 15

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against the environmentalists’ own intentions and interests. Something similar to this, as will be shown in the first part of this book, happened to the radical ecological ideas of people like Peter Kropotkin, Patrick Geddes, Elisée Reclus, Ebenezer Howard and Lewis Mumford. No one would deny that these radical ecologists avant la lettre left a distinct mark on modern planning, urban development and landscape architecture. But when it came to translating their ideals into bricks and mortar, it was done by the same state they so bitterly detested. Call it ironic, call it perverse if you will, the fact remains that these radical ecologists contributed willy-nilly to what Foucault has termed the ‘political biology of the population’. We could also approach the issue from another angle, not so much that of the strengthening of biopower but the (complementary) point of view of the weakening of communicative power. This point of view, which is the main focus of the second part of this book, calls for a language philosophy approach. I will devote more attention to the language philosophy approach in this introduction than to the power theory approach, not only because the work of Foucault and Donzelot will be discussed more extensively in the rest of the book, but more particularly because the language philosophy approach contains the positive nucleus of my post-naturalist alternative: a meta-ethical concept of justice that allows for a critical assessment of the radical ecology discourse as well as a principled defence of a pluralistic environmental philosophy. As an introduction to Habermas and Lyotard I shall give a brief outline, intended mainly for the philosophically informed or inclined reader, of the Kantian tradition, in which pluralism played a prominent role from the very outset for both epistemological and ethical reasons. The broken light of truth Kant was the first to tread the ‘royal road’ of pluralism. Parallel to his famous critiques, he distinguished three types of judgement that cannot be reduced to one another and therefore possess autonomous status: empirical (or theoretical), moral (or practical) and aesthetic (or reflexive) judgements. Influenced by the faculty psychology of his time, Kant believed the origins of these types of judgement could be found in particular mental ‘faculties’, namely the faculty of cognition, the faculty of desire (or will) and the capacity to feel pleasure and displeasure. The neo-Kantians of the Baden school, Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert, reviewed Kant’s critical philosophy from an 16

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axiological (or value theory) perspective. They distinguished a number of absolute (i.e. independent of time and space) values: truth, virtue, beauty, happiness and personal and impersonal holiness. To these correspond a number of value spheres: logic, ethics, aesthetics, erotics, religion and mysticism. The absolute values belong not to the realm of ‘Sein’ but to that of ‘Sollen’: they are not reality claims but validity claims. Their status is not that of natural laws, which one must obey whether one wishes to or not, rather it is that of norms that merit observance, which implies they can also be departed from. The Baden neo-Kantians drew a sharp distinction between the quaestio juris, inquiring after the transcendental justification of values, which only philosophy can answer, and the quaestio facti, inquiring after their empirical origins and development, which lies entirely in the domain of science. The quaestio facti was enthusiastically taken up by the sociologist Max Weber, Rickert’s most famous student. He interpreted the modernization process in Western societies as a process of rationalization that could only have come about as a result of the growing independence of spheres of value or domains of validity. Via the work of Max Weber, the neo-Kantian value theory left a distinct mark on Jürgen Habermas’ theory of communicative action, as is also evident from the title of his most recent major work: Faktizität und Geltung (Between Facts and Norms). But before going into this I would first like to draw the reader’s attention to Wilhelm Dilthey who, like Windelband and Rickert, was a major exponent of the ‘back to Kant’ movement that drew widespread support in the second half of the last century. The philosophical thrust of Dilthey’s whole oeuvre is directed against metaphysics. According to Dilthey, its pretension of providing an objective representation of the whole of reality has been declared permanently null and void by the court of history. Between contemporary historical consciousness and every form of metaphysics as a scientific world-view there exists a contradiction. An argument far more powerful than any systematic furnishing of proof against the objective validity of a particular world-view is the observation that an infinite number of such systems have emerged in the course of history, that they have always excluded and opposed one other and that no resolution could be enforced until the present day. (Dilthey, 1931:VIII, p. 3) 17

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In Dilthey’s Weltanschauungslehre (world-view theory), Kant’s triad returns in the light of a philosophy of life. The point of departure of the philosophy of life is the ‘total’ human being, not only the theorizing, cognitively endowed human being but also, and above all, the practical human being endowed with feeling and will. Analogous to the three basic attitudes to the world that human beings can assume as cognitive, evaluative and purposive beings, Dilthey identifies three types of world-view that can be found throughout history. Naturalism centres on the cognitive aspect; everything is subordinate to the search for causality and ‘there is no place for a contemplation of the world from the viewpoint of value or purpose’ (ibid., p. 105). In objective idealism the evaluative aspect reigns and reality is assessed in terms of its value for the satisfaction of desires and the promotion of happiness. In subjective idealism, finally, the emphasis is on the conative aspect and reality is judged in terms of freedom and responsibility, of inclination and obligation. In Dilthey’s view, all scientific world-views suffer from some kind of ‘insufficiency’ with regard to reality. They are inevitably one-sided, each taking one particular basic attitude as its point of departure and subjecting the other basic attitudes to it, with the result that multi-faceted reality is distorted. Categories such as ‘cause’, ‘value’ or ‘purpose’, which correspond to the different basic attitudes can neither be reduced to one another nor deduced from some higher principle. ‘We can only conceive of the world through one of the basic categories. We can always discern one aspect of our relationship to it, as it were, never the whole relationship as determined by the coherence of these categories’ (Dilthey, 1924:V, p. 405). Dilthey’s warning that we can only see the pure light of truth in variously broken rays applies directly to radical ecology which, as a (quasi) scientific world-view, can be ranked among those of the naturalist type. After all, radical ecology is in the habit of making an appeal to the cognitive authority of ecology—under the motto ‘Nature knows best’—on the understanding that ecology can provide social and personal rules of conduct. ‘If humanity is to live in balance with nature’, writes Bookchin, for instance, ‘we have to turn to ecology for the essential guidelines of how a future society should be organized’ (Bookchin, 1987, p. 29). As I shall contend in this book we would do better to ignore this advice and familiarize ourselves with the idea that nature, too, is multi-faceted and can be contemplated and judged from different angles. I have discussed Dilthey in some detail here because his work, 18

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even more than that of Kant and the neo-Kantians, contains a metaethical notion of justice that is vital to the defence of a pluralistic concept of environmental philosophy. This notion is especially evident in Dilthey’s judgement that any attempt to understand or explain the world ‘in its totality’ distorts the multi-dimensional reality instead of doing justice to it. This notion of justice, which is implicitly rather than explicitly present in Dilthey’s work, has been accorded a prominent position in the work of Habermas and Lyotard. The language philosophy perspective As a consequence of his turn towards a philosophy of language Habermas no longer locates the various claims to validity in mental faculties, in absolute (‘unreal’) values or basic attitudes to life, but in language. At this point the influence of Wittgenstein makes itself felt. In his later work (for the most part published posthumously) Wittgenstein distanced himself from a view that he, too, had previously defended, namely that words and statements derive their meaning from the objects and states in reality to which they are assumed to refer. To retrieve their meaning, according to the later Wittgenstein, we must pay attention to the use people make of language. This use is anything but arbitrary, since it takes place in the context of so-called ‘language games’. These are defined by Wittgenstein as linguistic activities or ‘life forms’ governed by conventions and requiring particular competencies. Examples of language games are: giving and following orders, reporting events, telling stories, solving riddles, etc. These language games have no common core or essence, though they do display a number of ‘family resemblances’. The influence of the views of the later Wittgenstein is visible in John Austin’s ‘speech act theory’. Austin uses the term ‘speech act’ to indicate that people do something when they say something, for instance make a promise, give evidence, issue a warning, open a meeting or enter into matrimony. On the basis of Austin’s work John Searle drew up a classification (or taxonomy) of speech acts which was adopted in a slightly amended form by Habermas. Habermas distinguishes constative, regulative and expressive speech acts, an arrangement in which it requires no great effort to recognize the classical Kantian triad. By these ‘pure’ speech acts the speakers raise the following claims to validity, respectively: the truth about the objective state of affairs in reality; the rightness of the social relations of the interlocutors; and the truthfulness or authenticity of 19

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the subjective intentions with which the speakers make public their private experiences. On this linguistic foundation Habermas has erected an imposing edifice of which it would be impossible to sketch even the basic plan here. Very simply put, these types of speech acts constitute the nucleus or crystallization point of the following three complexes of rationality: the cognitive-objectifying (science and technology), the ethical-normative (law and morality) and the aesthetic-expressive (art and erotics). The point of the theory is that the Western process of modernization is characterized by a proliferation of the cognitiveobjectifying rationality complex at the expense of the ethicalnormative and aesthetic-expressive rationality complexes. The ideal situation that Habermas has in mind is one of ‘harmonious interplay’ between the different forms of rationality. A similar meta-ethical argument for the equivalence of diverse perspectives on reality can be found in the work of Jean-François Lyotard. Lyotard, too, takes the royal road of pluralism and has with great fanfare proclaimed the end of the grand narratives (‘meta-ecrits’); his philosophy marks the culmination of the development from unity to multiplicity—to differentiation, decentring, dissemination, deconstruction and discontinuity, to name just a few of the terms in circulation to describe this process. Like Habermas, he refers both to Kant’s ‘battle of the faculties’ and to Wittgenstein’s language game theory. However, Lyotard dismisses Habermas’ pursuit of harmony and consensus as nothing less than totalitarian and terrorist and instead argues for the recognition of dissension and conflict. Lyotard’s criticism of Habermas appears somewhat overdone since his own idea of justice is very similar to Habermas’ ideal of free and untrammelled intercourse between diverse forms of discourse and argumentation. Lyotard, too, presupposes the existence of various autonomous language games, types of discourse or ‘genres’ such as science, ethics, aesthetics, economics and erotics. These genres are heterogeneous since they are governed by different rule systems. In Lyotard’s view there simply are no ‘meta rules’ which apply to all genres. Pursuing this thought he distinguishes between two forms of struggle. If a conflict arises between parties practising the same genre, one can speak of litigation (‘litige’). Such a conflict can be brought before a judge who can pass judgement according to the rules applying to that genre and in this way any damage (‘dommage’) incurred by one of the parties can be redressed or compensated. However, if a conflict arises between parties practising different 20

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genres, the absence of meta-rules makes it impossible for an authority to issue a legal verdict. In such a case Lyotard speaks of a ‘differend’. In practice, a differend is often accompanied by injustice (‘tort’). This is the case when a certain genre has gained supremacy, thereby preventing complaints originating from other genres from being heard. The plaintiff is unable to bring his complaints before the seat of justice of the dominant genre and is literally ‘struck dumb’. As a result, the differend is ‘smothered’ in litigation, as Lyotard so expressively puts it. My critique of the radical ecological discourse can be further refined in terms of these two forms of struggle. In the first place one could say that the prevailing environmental philosophy is the scene of repressed litigation. After all, environmental philosophy makes highly selective use of ecological findings. It orients itself one-sidedly towards systems ecology’s account of nature, thereby doing scant justice to the multiplicity of views of nature circulating both in science and in society. In the second place, we can identify a smothered differend in environmental philosophy. The repeated appeals to ecology is not only misleading in view of the selective use made of this science, it also has a stifling effect on all those voices trying to make themselves heard in the social debate about a future sustainable society that base their case on other than ecological considerations. The two go hand-in-hand. The ease with which the social differend can be smothered in scientific litigation is in fact due to the forceful repression of scientific litigation. Conversely, it is possible to breathe new life into the differend by stirring up the litigation. If it could be demonstrated that ecology—as a true empirical science— accommodates not one but several views of nature, a breach would have been made in the hegemony of radical ecology within environmental philosophy. This would create openings for a fairer and more equitable debate on future nature and environmental policies, with room for a wide variety of positions and perspectives, bearing in mind Hannah Arendt’s insight that the richer and more colourful this multiplicity, the broader and deeper our common experience.

21

Part I BETWEEN BIOLOGY AND BIOPOWER

Stones can make people docile and knowable. (Foucault, 1979, p. 172)

Archaeology of the ecological gaze In this Part, I want to analyse the history of environmental science, a conglomerate of disciplines such as geography, geology, evolution theory and, above all, ecology, taking Foucault’s approach as my frame of reference. During the first period of his work, in which he focused on the ‘archaeology of knowledge’, Foucault referred more than once to the emergence of biology around 1800. During the second period, in which the archaeology of knowledge was linked to the ‘genealogy of power’, he concentrated on biopower, which also appeared on the historical scene around 1800. Both analyses, which will be discussed in turn in Chapters 1 and 2, are relevant to an ideologically critical approach to the history of ecology; like medicine, environmental science is a subdiscipline of biology and, also like medicine, it has unmistakably contributed to the advent of biopower. The fact that biology and biopower appeared simultaneously is anything but a coincidence. In Foucault’s view, biology and biopower are mutually dependent and mutually reinforcing. However, biology does not influence biopower in a direct way, but via a wide range of ‘dubious’ sciences that have come to be known as the ‘psycho’sciences. These sciences, which include psychology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, pedagogy and penology, emerged in the wake of 23

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medical science. If we look at environmental science, as I do in Chapter 3, an entirely different series of ‘dubious’ sciences looms up, namely the ‘socio’-sciences such as sociogeography, socioecology and sociobiology. These ‘socio’-sciences, I shall contend in Chapter 4, have contributed as much to the ‘political biology of the population’ as the ‘psycho’-sciences.

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1 THE DISCOVERY OF THE ENVIRONMENT

This chapter describes the transition from natural history to biology with reference to Foucault’s writings of the 1960s. It shows that from an epistemological point of view medical science is closely related to environmental science. This raises the question of whether, parallel to the medicalization process in Western societies, an ‘ecologization’ process of sorts has also taken place. This question will be the subject of subsequent chapters in Part I. Natural history Judged by contemporary concepts of history, natural history as it existed from Aristotle until around 1800 was profoundly ahistorical. The notion of historia stems from ancient jurisprudence and amounts to an ‘eye-witness account’. Throughout this period it stood in stark contrast to the notion of philosophia, which referred to the search for fundamental principles and systems. As a consequence, the ‘philosophy of nature’ and the ‘science of nature’ were always regarded as synonymous and set in opposition to ‘natural history’. The natural historian was not intent on finding any coherent laws of nature but on collecting and describing what he had learned from direct observation. Of course, this does not imply an entirely unstructured process. In collecting and describing phenomena from the world of minerals, plants and animals, the natural historian could not avoid making use of certain selection criteria, whether consciously or unconsciously, explicitly or implicitly. In this section, I shall concentrate on ideological selection criteria; a number of instrumental criteria will be discussed in the next section. From the second half of the seventeenth century onwards, natural 25

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history was dominated by ‘providentialism’. Providentia was the key concept in the attempt to reconcile the theological truths of Christianity with the scientific findings of natural history. Providentialists saw a divine plan at work in nature, a plan to which man ought to conform. By propounding the exemplary character of nature as a well-ordered cosmos, natural historical research served a primarily educational purpose. The best-known work in this tradition was written by the Anglican canon William Derham and published under the title Physico-Theology in 1713. As its subtitle indicated, the book was primarily intended to provide proof of the existence of God and to deduce his qualities from Creation. Derham’s book was so successful that all future providentialist literature was presented as physico-theology. A famous contemporary book in this genre was the Insecto-Theologia of 1738, written by the German clergyman Friedrich Christian Lesser. One of the reasons for the great resonance enjoyed by Derham’s book was the fact that he was the first to use the concept of equilibrium to describe the harmony of nature. God, according to Derham, has taken certain precautions to ensure that nature remains in balance. For instance, he has made sure that relatively long-lived animals (such as certain predators) produce only a limited number of offspring, whereas animals that are very fertile and multiply very rapidly (such as insects) do not grow very old and serve other animals as food. Note that in physico-theology the ‘struggle for life’ is portrayed as an integral and essential element of natural harmony. This struggle, which takes place not so much within as between species, notably between predators and prey, guarantees that a balance will be maintained among the various species (see Schramm, 1984). In addition to the idea of harmony, another idea played a prominent role in physico-theology, namely the conception of ‘the great chain of being’. As Arthur O.Lovejoy demonstrated in his famous 1936 study, this conception rests on three closely interrelated principles. The first principle, advanced by Plato, is that of plenitude. According to this principle, God has created the maximum number of creatures that the world can accommodate. The second principle, which goes back to Aristotle, is that of continuity. According to this principle, all creatures form an unbroken chain. Even between the different classes of minerals, plants and animals there are creatures, such as polyps and anemones, that serve as links, for nature tolerates no voids and makes no leaps. The third principle, which also goes back to Aristotle, is that of gradation. The great chain of creatures is 26

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hierarchically structured, with mankind occupying a middle position in between the most insignificant of things and the ens perfectissimum. According to Lovejoy, the conception of the cosmos as a great chain of being found its most widespread acceptance in the eighteenth century. No history of the biological sciences in the eighteenth century can be complete which fails to keep in view the fact that, for most men of science throughout that period, the theorems implicit in the conception of the Chain of Being continued to constitute essential presuppositions in the framing of scientific hypotheses. (Lovejoy, 1936, p. 227) Indeed, the conception of the great chain of being continued to play a significant role long after that and it appears to be the forerunner of a number of notions in modern ecology. Not just the fairly obvious one of the ‘food chain’, but also the idea that the stability of ecosystems is dependent on their diversity and the concept of the ‘niche’, which holds that, given the right conditions, each place on earth will be occupied by a particular species. The Janus face of physico-theology The image of a chain of beings, according to Lovejoy, has an egalitarian character. By way of illustration, he cites the following lines by Alexander Pope: From Nature’s chain whatever link you strike, Tenth or ten thousandth, breaks the chain alike. (Lovejoy, 1936) As links in the great, but breakable, chain of nature, all beings are equally dependent on one another. Mankind must know its place and respect its fellow creatures. This message is characteristic of what Donald Worster has called the ‘arcadian’ side of physicotheology. It should not be forgotten, though, that physico-theology had another, more ‘imperialist’ side as well. The providentialist study of nature served not only to orient behaviour in a Christian sense, but also to justify human control over nature in a Baconian sense. The chief model adopted for the description of the natural cosmos was that of the national economy, which at the time of absolutism 27

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had not yet detached itself from the monarch’s domestic economy. In conformity with this patriarchal model, physico-theologians observed nature primarily with an eye to maximum profit. Such a conception is perfectly reflected by the notion of an ‘economy of nature’. Although the phrase was used as early as 1658 by the providentialist Sir Kenelm Digby, it undoubtedly owes its fame to Linnaeus’ 1749 treatise Oeconomia Naturae. It reappears in the work of Ernst Haeckel, a zoologist and renowned propagandist for Darwin’s theory of evolution, who gave ecology its name. In his Generelle Morphologie der Organismen of 1866, Haeckel defined ecology as ‘the science of the economy, the way of life and the external life relationships between the organisms’. And in a speech delivered in 1869 he described it as the ‘theory of the economy of animal organisms’ (Küppers et al., 1978, p. 51). If we focus on the imperialist rather than the arcadian side of physico-theology, we also observe a shift in the meaning of its most basic principles. In keeping with the model of the patriarchal family economy, the notion of equilibrium then acquires the ‘bookkeeping’ connotation of a balance between income and expenditure, while the representation of the great chain of being acquires an elitist rather than an egalitarian aspect. This elitist aspect shines through in the following quotation from the very same Alexander Pope previously cited in order to demonstrate the egalitarian aspect: Order is Heav’n’s first law: and this confest, Some are, and must be, greater than the rest, More rich, more wise. (Lovejoy, 1936) As God’s likeness on earth, mankind is empowered to exploit the economy of nature entirely for his own benefit. Making proper use of reason and hard labour, man must achieve dominion over nature. It is here that we encounter the second type of criteria that played a role in the selection of observed phenomena. This type of criteria was of an instrumental rather than an ideological nature. Originally, naturalists were interested in discovering herbs that could be used medicinally. From the eighteenth century onwards, their sphere of interest widened to include a host of problems connected with agriculture, horticulture, forestry, fishing and hunting, with the improvement of plant and animal species and with pest control. This proliferation of new areas of study was largely the result of 28

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two related developments. The first of these was the agricultural revolution, which accompanied the industrial revolution like a shadow. The two revolutions should in fact be seen as interacting processes: the industrial revolution and concomitant migration from the countryside to the new industrial conglomerations would have been impossible without the intensification and mechanization of food production, while the transition from subsistence to marketoriented agriculture could not have come about without the machinery and sources of energy supplied by the emerging industry. The second development was that of geographic exploration which took place in the context of colonial expansion. The exploratory expeditions undertaken in the eighteenth century had little in common with the quasi-piratical forays of earlier days. They were scientifically well prepared and well equipped expeditions undertaken, among other things, in order to catalogue the flora and fauna of overseas, mostly tropical, territories. One example that still appeals to people’s imagination is the ill-fated voyage of the Bounty in 1789, the original intention of which was to introduce the South Pacific breadfruit tree to the West Indies. In order to properly fulfil its Baconian mission, physico-theology had to enter into an alliance with physiology. The revival enjoyed by both physiology and anatomy during the Renaissance was, if we are to believe Foucault, short-lived. In fact, Foucault believed that physiology stagnated during the ‘classical’ age between 1650 and 1800, only to blossom again later on. Still, physiology did make some progress during this period. In fact, the early development of physiology can be broadly divided into two stages. In the first stage the focus was on the study of blood circulation, and the body was seen primarily as a hydraulic machine consisting of bellows, pumps and valves. In the second stage, the focus shifted from circulation to respiration and the body was viewed in analogy with a combustion engine. This shift in perception was made possible by the ‘pneumatic revolution’ in chemistry which focused attention on the study of gases. After Joseph Black had ‘discovered’ carbon dioxide—which he himself called ‘fixed air’—Joseph Priestly demonstrated that sunlight causes green plants to convert this gas into oxygen, a gas which he referred to as ‘dephlogisticated air’, in accordance with the phlogiston theory. In addition, Priestly demonstrated that this gas is consumed both in combustion and in respiration. Thus, the animal organism behaved like a combustion engine, using food and oxygen as fuel, whereas in plants the process was reversed, with waste gas being used to build live tissue and oxygen. This process, which later came 29

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to be known as ‘photosynthesis’, was described by Jacob Moleschott as a process whereby ‘life is woven from air by light’. The next step in the development of physiology was made by Lavoisier. He not only repudiated the phlogiston theory but was the first to base physiology on strictly quantitative principles. However, Lavoisier’s primary concern was to construct a classification of chemical elements, for which he devised a new nomenclature. His model in this attempt was Linnaeus’ work in botany. As we will see later on, it was these natural history studies which Foucault considered to be exemplary of the ‘epistemological space’ in which the sciences developed during the classical era. And in such a space, to sum up his views on the matter, the development of physiology was bound to stagnate. The epistemological precedence of botany Natural history was not only steered by the combination of instrumental and ideological factors mentioned above, it was also conducted within a certain epistemological framework. This framework is the focus of two of Foucault’s books, The Birth of the Clinic (1963) and The Order of Things (1966). The first book, subtitled ‘An archaeology of medical perception’, describes the transition from classic medical science based on classification to modern clinical medicine. In the second book, subtitled ‘An archaeology of the human sciences’, this transition is located within a wider development, namely the transition from natural history to modern biology that gave rise to both clinical medicine and ecology. In The Birth of the Clinic Foucault identifies two types of space in which, according to the traditional medicine of the eighteenth century, a disease manifests itself: a primary and a secondary space. The primary space is the analytical space of taxonomy, the secondary space is the body of the patient. For traditional medicine, the location of the disease in the body was less important than its location in the taxonomic tableau in which the diseases had been classified according to a hierarchy of families, genera and species. Classificatory medical science perceived diseases as independent essences, the nature of which can be ascertained on the basis of differences and similarities. A disease retained its essence, even when it migrated from one organ to another. Between the taxonomical space occupied by nosological essences and the space of the body there is opposition rather than convergence 30

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in classical medicine. The age, way of life and physical peculiarities of the patient were seen primarily as factors liable to disrupt the nosological essences and their ideal order. Intervention on the part of the physician was also liable to cause such disruption. Accordingly, the doctrine of nosological essences called for the utmost restraint and discretion with regard to treatment and therapy. It was the physician’s task to see that a disease could develop uninterrupted and in the purest fashion, in keeping with its essence. As Foucault indicates more than once, classical nosology bore the stamp of natural history, to which subject he devoted a separate chapter in The Order of Things. The physicians behaved like botanists in the field of disease and many of them had high hopes of becoming the ‘Linnaeus of disease’. Foucault ascribes paradigmatic significance to Linnaeus’ natural history studies. His taxonomic method and binary nomenclature served as models not only for botanists and biologists, but for scientists of medicine and chemistry as well. The key Linnaeus used for his classification of plants was their flowers, which is to say, their sexual organs. He distinguished four variables by which structural differences and similarities could be established: form (figura), number (numerus), location in space (situs) and relative size (proportio). Linnaeus did not choose the sexual organs because of their functional importance but because of their visibility and numerical suitability: in combination with these four morphological variables, the 38 different types of sexual organs in plants yield almost 6,000 different configurations, more than enough to allow a precise identification of all then known plant species. One of the most important preconditions governing the use of the taxonomic method is the immediate visibility of certain structural characteristics. And because the organs of plants are far more easily visible than those of animals, Foucault wrote, botany enjoyed ‘epistemological precedence’ over zoology in natural history. We must therefore reverse what is usually said on this subject: it is not because there was a great interest in botany during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that so much investigation was undertaken into methods of classification. But because it was possible to know and to say only within a taxonomic area of visibility, the knowledge of plants was bound to prove more extensive than that of animals. (Foucault, 1973, p. 137) 31

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The epistemological significance of this taxonomic area of visibility also explains the stagnation of anatomy and physiology which, after all, focus on things internal and hidden. The epistemological precedence of botany had already been noted in 1962 by Georges Canguilhem, Foucault’s tutor in the history of the life sciences. In a lecture on the epistemological function of the unique in biology, Canguilhem quoted Lamarck who, in comparing plants to animals, characterized the former as ‘outward beings’ because their most important organs are highly visible. The second reason given by Canguilhem for the epistemological precedence of botany is the immobility of plants. Animals react to the presence of human beings by either fleeing or attacking. ‘The struggle for survival thwarts the contemplative approach and, consequently, the theoretical rapport between man and the animal’ (Canguilhem, 1979, p. 63). Only after Darwin had caused this struggle itself to become the focal point par excellence of biology did epistemological precedence shift from botany to zoology. In The Order of Things, as in The Birth of the Clinic, Foucault distinguishes between a primary and a secondary space. The primary space is of course that of taxonomy, while actual existing earthly space is identified as the secondary space. And, as in his earlier book, Foucault describes the secondary space as a source of confusion, for the history of the earthly kingdom is racked with revolutions and catastrophes, such as earthquakes and floods, that hopelessly disrupt the network of species and genera. In The Great Chain of Being, Lovejoy quotes the naturalist Maupertuis who compares nature to a house struck by lightning: ‘It presents to our eyes only ruins in which we can no longer discern the symmetry of the parts nor the design of the architect’ (Lovejoy, 1936, p. 225). So the role of history is a purely negative one. In the classical age, time was seen not as an internal principle of development, but purely as an external element that only sows confusion. Obviously, there is no room in natural history for something like an evolution theory. The birth of biology In the closing quarter of the eighteenth century, according to Foucault, a new epistemological framework emerged and natural history made way for biology. The focus of attention shifted from the external characteristics of plants and animals to their internal organization. The visible structures, rather than being compared 32

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only among themselves in order to establish their differences and similarities, started to be related to invisible functions. It was no longer a question of to what extent lungs and gills were morphologically similar, instead they were now seen as two variants of the same function: respiration in general. Another example: the classification of mammals on the basis of the form of their hooves was informed by the insight that there is a functional relationship between the shape of the hoof, the locomotive system and the digestive organs. The hoof’s relevance no longer lay in the fact that it shared certain visible characteristics with other hooves, but in the fact that it was the outward manifestation of a certain internal organization, a functional unity. The shift from structural variables to functional relationships inevitably brought with it the concept of ‘environment’. After all, functions such as respiration and digestion refer directly to certain environmental elements such as air, water and food that organisms need in order to survive and develop. The organism as the sum of life forces and the environment as the sum of life conditions are in a state of permanent interaction. In The Birth of the Clinic Foucault showed that thinking in terms of the environment spelled the end for the doctrine of nosological essences. Instead of being seen as an autonomous essence, a disease was now seen as a phenomenon that could only be studied meaningfully in relation to the external environment that affects the organism and causes it to react. Foucault quoted the physician Broussais to illustrate this novel point of view: After many hesitant steps, medicine is pursuing at last the only road that can lead it to the truth: observation of the relations between man and external modifications, and between men’s organs. (Foucault, 1975, p. 188) Clinical medicine, as Foucault summarizes his findings a bit further on, has adopted ‘the idea of a relationship of the organ with an agent or an environment, that of a reaction to attack, that of an abnormal functioning, and, finally, that of the disturbing influence of the element attacked upon the other organs’ (ibid., p. 191). This new interest in the interaction with the environment led to a radicalization of the distinction between the organic and the inorganic, the living and the dead. Nature had previously been divided into three or four ‘realms’: the realm of rocks and minerals, the realm of plants, the realm of animals and that of human beings. 33

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This ancient division was now superseded by a new one, namely the division between the living and the non-living. ‘Life’ ceased to be just one characteristic among the many by which natural ‘essences’ could be distinguished and was elevated to the status of an autonomous state of being peculiar to organisms seeking to maintain themselves amid a constantly changing environment. Biology was the new science that arose to study this autonomous life. Elsewhere in The Birth of the Clinic Foucault pointed out that this development went hand in hand with the integration of death into medical knowledge. Clinical medicine defines life as the sum of functions that permanently resists the absence of life. Death is no longer an absolute end but permeates life, offering medicine a viewpoint from which to study the course of a disease. Instead of being what it had so long been, the night in which life disappeared, in which even the disease becomes blurred, it is now endowed with that great power of elucidation that dominates and reveals both the space of the organism and the time of the disease. (Foucault, 1975, p. 144) As a manifestation of death in life, disease has left the taxonomic realm of nosological essences and taken up residence in the body. The shift in attention from visible structures in a taxonomic sense to hidden functional relationships led not only to the discovery of the environment, a radicalization of the distinction between the organic and the inorganic and the integration of death in life, but also to a historicization of life. In traditional natural history, history was in fact seen primarily as a disruptive factor, throwing the network of families, genera and species into disarray. Insofar as development was acknowledged, it was assumed to proceed in accordance with the various essences, following paths laid down by the tableau of possible variants. It referred to an unfolding of pre-existing potential, not the emergence of anything qualitatively new. This conception now began to change. History ceased to be viewed as a series of events that occur in a space external to that of the essences and now came to be regarded instead as something inherent to life struggling to maintain itself in a changing environment. Without some such view of history, a theory of evolution was literally ‘unthinkable’. In the transition from natural history to biology, epistemological precedence was transferred from botany to zoology. Plants, because 34

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of their observability and immobility, had been ideal objects of classificatory thought. But once these ideas gave way to the notion of functional relationships, animals, with their hidden bone structure and invisible organs, were given precedence over plants. If living beings are a classification, the plant is best able to express its limpid essence; but if they are a manifestation of life, the animal is better equipped to make its enigma perceptible. Rather than the calm image of characters, it shows us the incessant transition from the inorganic to the organic by means of respiration or digestion, and the inverse transformation, brought about by death, of the great functional structures into lifeless dust. (Foucault, 1973, p. 277)

The struggle for life At first sight Foucault’s assertion that the emergence of biology went hand in hand with a revaluation of animals seems to be at odds with the undeniable fact that up until about 1920, botany contributed far more to ecology than zoology (see, for example, McIntosh, 1991, p. 31). On reflection, however, it is clear that this head start was mainly quantitative; it was zoology that provided the real conceptual innovation. Such innovation was in large part due to the work of Darwin. David Worster has rightly called him by far the most important figure in the history of ecology. ‘No-one else contributed as much to the development of the idea of ecology into a flourishing field of science, and no other individual has had so much influence generally on western man’s perception of nature’ (Worster, 1992, p. 114). As Worster describes in detail, Darwin was influenced in his development of a theory of evolution by the work of three people in particular: Alexander von Humboldt, Charles Lyell and Thomas Malthus. During the transition from natural history to biology around 1800, the emphasis in the classification of plants shifted from their taxonomic relationships to the natural conditions in which they lived. Only when the Earth ceased to be seen as a perennial source of disruption to the taxonomic system, but instead as the environment that encompasses all the conditions of life, did it become an important object of ecological study (see Claval, 1981, p. 237). The first person to make this step from taxonomy to geography was Alexander von 35

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Humboldt. Together with Carl Ritter, he was instrumental in making the first half of the nineteenth century the third flowering of geography after classic antiquity and the Renaissance. In a treatise on the geographical distribution of plants, published in 1807, Humboldt identified climate as the main determining factor for the nature and composition of the vegetation in a particular area or location. In Humboldt’s view, the appearance of specific communities or ‘associations’ of plants was related to local light, temperature, precipitation and soil conditions. In addition to climate, the mutual dependence of the different plant species was also identified as playing a role in the formation of plant associations. Humboldt called the plant associations after the plant species that gave a particular landscape its ‘countenance’. His approach was an essentially aesthetic one; following in the footsteps of landscape painters and garden architects, he laid great emphasis on the ‘physiognomic’ character of vegetations. As such, this shows to what extent his work was affected by the prevailing crisis in classic natural history. Searching for an alternative for the now-obsolete taxonomy, he reverted, like Goethe, to the physiognomy of Johann Caspar Lavater in an attempt to get a grip on the relationship between life forms and the conditions of life. Even though the influence of his work on the development of ecology should not be underrated, his students gradually traded the physiognomic point of view for a purely physiological one. Humboldt had made the step from taxonomy to geography. The second step in the direction of Darwin’s evolution theory was made by Charles Lyell. He saw the geographical spread of plants and animals as a function of hidden geological forces that shape the history of the earth. Most of the geologists of his time adhered to the idea that this history was marked by catastrophic events. They were divided in two camps, that of the ‘Neptunists’, who ascribed the catastrophes to floods, and that of the ‘Plutonists’, who blamed them on earthquakes. Lyell dismissed the catastrophe theory altogether and replaced it with his own ‘uniformitarianist’ theory, according to which past activity in the earth’s crust can only be explained by forces that are still active today. Lyell’s work caused the perspective within geology to shift from revolutionary upheaval to evolutionary development. This change of perspective was of great importance for ecology. Previously, it had been thought that the different plant and animal species inhabited a location assigned them by God and remained there ever after. In Lyell’s evolutionary perspective this 36

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physicotheological premise was untenable. If the crust of the earth was subject to constant change, if mountain chains rose and fell, if land bridges between continents emerged and crumbled, if rivers changed their course, this could only mean that existing plant and animal associations could not always have occupied precisely the same place. Instead of fixed places of residence, a permanent migration of organisms over land and sea now seemed more likely. Lyell’s evolutionary perspective also shed new light on the struggle for existence. The followers of Linnaeus had focused exclusively on one type of struggle, namely the struggle between predator and prey. The notion that all species are constantly on the move focused attention on the struggle between all these species, forced as they are to compete for scarce resources. Indigenous species are continually confronted with a possible invasion by exogenous species that have been forced to migrate by geological transformations. The third and final step in the direction of Darwin’s evolution theory is marked by the work of Thomas Malthus. Malthus, as is generally well known, assumed that whereas food production increases according to an arithmetical progression (1:2:3:4:5, etc.), the population increases according to a geometrical progression (1:2:4:8:16, etc.). Population growth consequently outpaces the production of foodstuffs which become increasingly scarce, so leading to an ever-fiercer struggle for survival. While Lyell’s geological reflections shed light on the struggle between species, Malthus’ demographic reflections also drew attention to competition within populations. Charles Darwin, in his famous work On the Origin of Species, published in 1859, highlighted the struggle both between and within populations. Darwin perceived evolution as a process of natural selection. In order to explain the origin of new species, he seized on the individual differences or variations that always exist within a certain species, a fact that had been blatantly ignored by the natural historians of the old school. New species evolve from varieties that are better equipped to cope with the pressure of selection than all other varieties. The selection pressure is exerted by two types of environmental factors, abiotic and biotic. Abiotic environmental factors, according to Darwin, are of only indirect consequence in the evolutionary process. Geological and climatic influences merely determine the conditions in which the struggle for life takes place. Only those varieties best adapted to the demands of a constantly changing environment emerge victorious from the struggle for scarce resources. 37

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The fact that the evolution theory had its origins in zoology is scarcely surprising if one keeps in mind that competitive relationships are easier to study in animals than in plants. It was not until the end of the nineteenth century that Darwin’s theory penetrated botany, where it led to a veritable paradigmatic revolution. This can be clearly seen in the work of Danish botanist Eugenius Warming, who is seen by many as the ‘father of modern ecology’ (see Trepl, 1987, p. 138). Warming turned his attention from the adaptation of organisms to their inanimate environment, emphasized by all previous botanists, to the adaptation of organisms to one another. As a result, his research concentrated increasingly on various forms of parasitism, helotism and mutualism. Biology enters the political arena This revolution in thinking led to an entirely new perspective on plant associations and on biological communities in general. It meant that the composition of such communities was no longer seen exclusively as the result of external conditioning but also, and above all, as the result of internal regulation. This made it possible to treat biological communities as organisms of a higher order, developing just like individual organisms: from birth, through flowering and maturation to old age and death. As functional units striving to maintain their internal organization in the face of their external environment, biological communities acquired a place in the epistemological framework so aptly described by Foucault. The concept of biological communities as organisms of a higher order serves as the basis for the intensive interaction between ecology and sociology that developed during the second half of the last century (see also Jonas, 1968, pp. 88f.). A good example of this interplay is the work of Herbert Spencer, who can be regarded as the forerunner of structural functionalism in sociology. According to Spencer there is a ‘real analogy’ between an individual and a social organism. This analogy is based on the functional interdependence between the various parts of the organism that exists in both cases. As super-organisms, societies develop according to semi-biological development principles. They display a tendency towards ever-increasing differentiation and integration, and evolve in the direction of a dynamic equilibrium with their environment. Spencer’s sociology is just one of the many forms of social Darwinism to emerge during the Victorian era. Gertrude 38

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Himmelfarb rounds off her discussion of social Darwinism with the following striking observation on the proliferation of ideas in this field: Laissez-faire and socialism, racism and anti-racism, segregationism and desegregationism, militarism and pacifism, imperialism and anti-imperialism, Marxism and evolutionary socialism, social engineering and eugenics— surely they cannot all legitimately claim descent from the same ancestor. Yet, like the evolutionary tree itself, with its many branches and off-shoots, they are all related—not directly to each other but to the parent doctrine, each deriving from a different part of that doctrine, each with a lineage and legitimacy of its own. (Himmelfarb, 1968, p. 327) Himmelfarb distinguishes between two basic versions of social Darwinism. In the first version the emphasis is on the struggle between the individuals of a species. This version is to be found in authors such as Spencer who worked within the tradition of classic liberalism; their argument against state intervention and in favour of a policy of ‘laissez-faire, laissez-passer’ took its cue from the intraspecific struggle for life in social evolution. The second version, which emphasized the struggle between the species as such, was espoused by authors of decidedly anti-liberal and anti-individualist persuasion; their plea for a renewed community spirit and the submission of the individual to the greater whole was based on the conviction that the inter-specific struggle could only be won by curbing the intra-specific struggle. Within this second version centring on inter-specific competition, two widely diverging positions can in turn be distinguished: whereas anarchists and Utopian socialists saw the human species as a single whole, racists and imperialists viewed humanity as a motley assortment of races, peoples and nations all fighting bitterly for supremacy. The emergence of social Darwinism testifies, as no other phenomenon, to the process described by both Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault as the invasion of the public domain and the field of political technique by the biological life process. This process is examined in more detail in Chapter 2, with special attention being paid to the strategic position occupied by the ‘socio’-sciences inspired by social Darwinism, a position midway between biology and biopower. 39

2 THE EMERGENCE OF BIOPOWER

Foucault’s analysis of the birth of biology turns out to be as relevant to ecology as it is to medicine. The emphasis on functional relations rather than structural variables, the discovery of the environment, the historicization of life, the shift in epistemological precedence from botany to zoology—all these changes were just as formative for modern ecology as they were for clinical medicine. The archaeology of the medical and of the ecological gaze are two sides of the same coin, minted at the transition from natural history to biology. This prompts the question of whether the genealogical theory of power Foucault developed after his archaeological theory of knowledge can also be said to apply to ecology. In other words: has the medicalization process that has taken place in Western societies been accompanied by something like an ecologization process? From sovereign power to biopower In the 1970s, Foucault gave up explaining the production of discursive formations, which the archaeologist must uncover layer by layer, solely in terms of the notion of epistemological spaces. The focus of his attention shifted from ‘epistèmes’ to ‘dispositifs’, which is to say the various techniques and tactics of power, which he then attempted to chart by means of a Nietzschean genealogical approach. Thereafter, Foucault’s analysis of the origins of the human sciences— the real theme of his work—centred not on the transition from the classic to the modern epistème but on the transition from the classic to the modern form of wielding power. In the classical era, power took the form of sovereign power. This power, originally vested in a monarch and later in a 40

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representative body of the people, was an essentially negative and repressive power capable only of saying ‘no’ and of setting limits. It was exercised with the help of the law, perceived as a system of bans and commands, compliance with which was enforced by means of physical violence. Breaches of the rule of law, which was seen as an extension of the sovereign will, incurred mutilation or destruction. Around 1800, sovereign power gave way to biopower. This type of power is not transcendent and is not applied from above or from the outside, it is immanent and omnipresent; it weaves a network of power relations and is exercised from innumerable points. Biopower is not negative and prohibitive but positive and productive; its aim is not to curtail and restrict life with the help of numerous do’s and don’ts but, conversely, to protect, support and propagate life. Under its regime, death fell into discredit: public executions were abolished, the death bed was hidden in the wings and suicide was surrounded by taboos. The cult of noble blood shed in defence of the sovereign was replaced by the cult of healthy sex in the service of life. And because biopower operates not via the formulation of rules and laws but via the formulation of codes of conduct or norms, the social sciences now came into their own, gradually ousting the juridico-political discourse from its privileged position. Foucault detected a link between the transition from sovereign power to biopower and the problems arising from population growth and expanding production. Demographic developments meant an increase in the number of people needing to be supervised and controlled, such as vagrants, the unemployed, hospital patients, students and soldiers. In addition, economic developments led to a rising demand for docile and able-bodied workers. Sovereign power, which rested exclusively on physical violence and repression, was unable to cope with these problems. A different type of power was required to deal with this new situation: biopower. This new type of power developed along two lines. The first line is referred to by Foucault as the ‘political anatomy of the body’, based on the so-called disciplines. Foucault defines the disciplines as all the techniques by which individual bodies are subjected to detailed and permanent coercion at minimal cost, thereby continually raising both their economic utility and their political docility. The second line along which biopower developed is the ‘political biology of the population’, in short biopower. Biopower is directed not at the individual body but at the regulation of the social body by means of measures in such areas as fertility, procreation, housing and hygiene. In the course of the eighteenth century the population 41

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became, for the first time in Western history, an object of analysis and a target of intervention. The population is more than the sum of a nation’s subjects, it constitutes a separate entity which displays distinct features and characteristic variables: a birth, morbidity and mortality rate, average fertility and life expectancy, specific living and working conditions, dietary habits and migration patterns. In Discipline and Punish, published in 1975, Foucault had described the emergence of a ‘disciplinary society’ as reflected in changes in judicial procedures and punishment. Only one year later, however, he turned his attention to the emergence and development of biopower, in The History of Sexuality, Volume 1. In this later book Foucault showed that the phenomenon of sexuality was the key to population policy and that this was why the family had become the prime target of major biopolitical strategies, causing profound changes in the structure and function of this social unit. The modern family was no longer merely a means of determining kinship relations and safeguarding the transfer of names and property; its primary purpose now was to provide a sound environment for the care and upbringing of children. The family became a union between parents and children, whose main aim was to maintain and promote health, in particular the health of the children. The rectangle of parents and children must become a sort of homeostasis of health. At all events, from the eighteenth century onward, the healthy, clean, fit body; a purified, cleansed, aerated domestic space; the medically optimal siting of individuals, places, beds, and utensils; and the interplay of the ‘caring’ and the ‘cared-for’ figure among the family’s essential laws. And from this period the family becomes the most constant agent of medicalization. (Foucault, 1984, p. 280) This new family type did not evolve evenly across society. It first reached maturity among the economically privileged and politically dominant classes. The bourgeoisie began by medicalizing and psychiatricizing the sexuality of its own children, adolescents and women. The idea was to fortify the health, strength and vitality of its offspring and thus ensure that it would retain its leading position in future. It was not until the demand for a disciplined and qualified labour force and the need to direct the swelling tide of population into safe channels became increasingly pressing that initiatives were taken to promote the bourgeois family model among the proletariat— all the while taking great care to avoid jeopardizing the dominance 42

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of the bourgeoisie in any way. The great ‘campaign for the moralization of the poorer classes’ was only nominally aimed at their emancipation; its real aim was to ensure a frictionless insertion of the proletariat into new economic and political systems of control. All in all, the first volume of The History of Sexuality is a programmatic work: it delineates the domain under study, lays down specific methodological principles and formulates a number of hypotheses. The programme was not carried through, however. The book’s publication was followed by a period of reconsideration that culminated in a Kehre or ‘turning away’ from the genealogy of power to the ‘hermeneutics of the subject’. The focus shifted once again, this time from dispositifs to ‘aesthetics of existence’ or ‘selftechniques’. The family between coercion and seduction One of the writers who did pursue the course charted by Foucault in The History of Sexuality is Jacques Donzelot, whose La Police des Familles (The Policing of Families), published in 1977, rapidly found a wide audience. In Donzelot’s view, family policies have traditionally exhibited one and the same pattern: they first target the child, then appeal to the woman-as-mother on behalf of the child and end up steering all of family life in the desired direction. This pattern first became clearly visible in the campaign to improve infant health in the second half of the eighteenth century. Both physicians and pedagogues denounced the then widespread tendency of parents to leave their infants to be reared by either domestic nurses or foundling hospitals, a practice that had resulted in a huge infant mortality rate. Their aim was to bring child-raising back into the family and make it the exclusive responsibility of the mother. Following on from Foucault, Donzelot discerned two strategic lines along which this aim was pursued, one directed towards rich families and one towards poor families. In the case of rich families, the aim was to free the child of physical constraints (such as swaddling and corsets) and to protect it from harmful influences (nurses, domestic servants and tutors). The family was supposed to create a sanitary cordon, as it were, within which the child could fully realize both its physical and its mental potential. The pursuit of this aim called for a tactical alliance between the mother and the doctor. It was an alliance profitable to both parties: with the women’s help, the doctors succeeded in barring the nurses and ‘old wives’ from the domestic scene and establishing 43

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themselves as a professional group, while for their part the women used the doctors to strengthen their social position, not only within the family but also outside it. In their role as the promoters of new medical and pedagogic norms, women gained admission to new occupations (in the spheres of care and nursing) and public positions (particularly in philanthropy). This heightened social status did not, however, alter the fact that in the alliance between women and doctors, the women occupied a subordinate position: the doctor prescribes, the mother executes! Intervention in the affairs of poor families was aimed at combating the excesses of pauperism (such as vagrancy, banditry and insurrection) and creating a healthy and docile labour force. The point of the policy was not to free the child from oppressive constraints but rather to limit its freedom; not to enact discreet protection, but to establish direct surveillance. The philanthropists and hygienists who swooped down on the families of the poor with true missionary zeal saw this as the mother’s task. It was her mission to create a pleasant domestic atmosphere that would enable her to keep her children off the streets and her husband out of the pub. The working-class women who took on this task knew that they could rely on both material and moral support from upper-class women. The policies with regard to poor families were pursued by means of a dual strategy. In the first place an effort was made to pressurize these families into accepting child-care and hygienic norms. If they resisted, they were placed under guardianship and so lost a number of fundamental rights over their children. The work of assessing and watching over these unwilling families gave rise to a profusion of institutions in the fields of child protection, juvenile law and child psychiatry, the so-called ‘tutelary complex’. In the second place an effort was made to seduce poor families into adopting certain norms, playing on their desire to improve their miserable living conditions. One of the main ‘lures’ was financial support, now based on an entirely new set of principles. Traditional forms of charity functioned poorly. They put a premium on unemployment and were open to large-scale abuse, causing an artificial increase in the number of indigents needing help. The money disappeared into a bottomless pit without producing any gains. To put an end to this squandering of money, the philanthropists began to tie financial support to regular supervision in the form of house visits, initially by women volunteers from the upper classes and later by social workers. The purpose of these house visits was 44

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to investigate the work ethics and thriftiness of poor families. If they were found to be wanting, the mother would be given advice on how to handle her husband and children, how to organize her household and balance the family’s resources against the cost of living. If such advice was not or only reluctantly followed, the charitable institution could threaten to withdraw its support and have the family placed under tutelage. Another important attraction was social housing. Social housing in France was to replace both the hovels and caves that dated back to the ancien régime and the barracks that had risen up in the wake of forced industrialization and urbanization. The hovels and caves were a thorn in the flesh of the hygienists because of their lack of light and ventilation. They also constituted almost impregnable bastions of resistance and lent the proletariat a certain measure of autonomy. By concentrating large numbers of people in a small space, the barracks were highly conducive to the spread of contagious diseases, to prostitution and ‘political radicalism’. The objective of the social housing policy was to exclude from the dwelling all ‘outsiders’ not belonging to the family proper (the so-called ‘nuclear family’), such as apprentices, colleagues, friends or relatives; there was to be no room for lodgers in the new type of working-class housing unit. A further objective of this policy was to put an end to the promiscuous co-habitation of the generations and sexes. Separate bedrooms were to be set aside for parents and children, boys and girls. This would allow the parents to keep an eye on their children without themselves being observed or interrupted in the performance of their ‘matrimonial duties’. Guarding these objectives became the task of women employed as housing inspectors. These inspectors interfered with literally every aspect of domestic life, from the choice of furniture or furnishings, the maintenance of the garden and the preparation of food to child care. Here, too, sanctions were kept in reserve: eviction and tutelage. Hygeia and Victoria Social housing, then, is one of the cornerstones of biopolitics. Remarkably, however, both Foucault and Donzelot analyse the advent and development of social housing exclusively from the perspective of the hygienists, who focused on such matters as sanitation, cleanliness, good ventilation and a healthy division of space. Seen from this perspective, architecture appears to be no more than an expedient for converting the hygienists’ housing norms 45

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into actual buildings. And although this view of architecture undeniably played an important role, particularly in the first half of the last century, it is certainly not the only one, nor even the most important one in the history of modern architecture, as I shall illustrate with a brief look at the Utopian literature. The hygienist movement did in fact contribute its own ideal town to the Utopian literature that enjoyed a tremendous upsurge in the nineteenth century. This was Hygeia, City of Health, as it was called in the title of the work published in 1876 by the physician Benjamin Richardson. The spatial structure of Hygeia was modelled on Amaurote, the capital of Thomas More’s Utopia. Two east—west boulevards serve as the main traffic arteries, with railway lines running under them. The other roads run at right angles to these boulevards. The entire organization of the town is geared to providing its inhabitants with the best possible health care. There are public launderettes all over the place, the town has no fewer than twenty model hospitals and physical exercise takes up a sizeable part of the school programme. Hygeia was only one of many Utopian conceptions of the ideal town that were to have a significant impact on the architecture of the industrial era. A wholly different conception was that of James Buckingham, the author of National Evils and Practical Remedies. Published in 1849, the book sketches a blueprint for a centrally governed, planned society organized on cooperative principles. The blueprint was presented as a remedy for all social evils such as ignorance, intemperance, rivalry, war and pauperization. Buckingham’s model town, patriotically named ‘Victoria’, is similar in spatial structure to Johann Valentin Andreae’s Christianopolis. It consists of seven concentric squares intersected by four radially laid out boulevards. Each square is allocated to a particular social class. In the centre, where the boulevards meet, there is a vast square with a 100-metre-high tower. Encircling this square is a zone for public buildings. The next zone is reserved for the residences of wealthy capital owners and people of high social standing. They are shielded from the other social classes by the ‘winter garden’, a roofed promenade offering shelter against the climate and open all year round. The workshops and dwellings of the workers are located on the periphery and the entire city is surrounded by a green belt of agricultural and horticultural land. Buckingham advocated a wellbalanced interplay between town and country and between agricultural and industrial production. Buckingham’s design is in more than one respect a forerunner of 46

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Ebenezer Howard’s garden city concept, a concept that was to leave an indelible mark on modern architecture. As I will show in detail in the following chapters, medical viewpoints were not the primary concern of the architects inspired by Howard; in addition to political and artistic considerations, their designs were, from the very outset, based on socio-geographical and socio-ecological considerations. The fact that both Foucault and Donzelot failed to recognize this aspect of modern architecture points to a blind spot in their analysis of biopower and it is this I wish to concentrate on in the next section. Two types of pseudo-sciences It was no accident that biology and biopower should have appeared together on the historic scene; indeed, Foucault saw them as mutually supportive and reinforcing phenomena. ‘It is a double process, then: an epistemological “thaw” through a refinement of power relations; a multiplication of the effects of power through the formation and accumulation of new forms of knowledge’ (Foucault, 1979, p. 224). The influence of the life sciences on the establishment and spread of biopower was, however, indirect and mediated by the human sciences. Among these, Foucault was particularly interested in the ‘psycho’-sciences, such as psychology, psychiatry, pedagogy and penology. The life sciences supplied the human sciences with a number of efficient conceptual instruments for disciplining the body and regulating the populace. Far and away the most important of these instruments was the conceptual opposition between the normal and the pathological. It is this opposition that took the place of the opposition between the permissible and the forbidden on which the old power regime had rested. The long arm of the law gave way to the nimble fingers of the norm that left no soul untouched. From the very beginning, Foucault viewed the scientific merits of the ‘psycho’-sciences with distrust. In The Birth of the Clinic he had remarked that these sciences make only metaphysical use of the concepts they have derived from the life sciences, a criticism that was applied more specifically to sexology in The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 where he distinguished between two registers of knowledge about sex: a biology of reproduction, which developed continuously according to a general scientific normativity, and a medicine of sex conforming to quite different rules of formation. From 47

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one to the other, there was no real exchange, no reciprocal structuration; the role of the first with respect to the second was scarcely more than as a distant and quite fictitious guarantee: a blanket guarantee under the cover of which moral obstacles, economic or political options, and traditional fears could be recast in a scientific-sounding vocabulary. (Foucault, 1980, p. 54) Sexology has acquired for itself a ‘guarantee of quasi-scientificity’ with an appeal to biology and physiology but without having derived anything substantial from these sciences save for some vague analogies and notions (ibid., p. 155). As a partly biological and partly psychological drive, sexuality was invested with an unlimited and multiform causality. Sex was seen as a hidden power with intrinsic qualities and laws. Since the dangers to which it is permanently exposed are almost boundless, it was felt that research into sex should also cover virtually all aspects of life. As a result, says Foucault, there was scarcely any abnormality, disorder or disease for which the nineteenth century did not devise an etiology at least partially implicating sex. Unfortunately, Foucault limited himself in his reflections on biopower to one branch of life science, medical science. From the moment the norm became the primary criterion by which people were judged, says Foucault, medical science acquired tremendous influence in society. In a disciplinary society ‘medicine, par excellence the science of the normal and the pathological, assumes the status of a royal science’ (Foucault, 1996, p. 197). Having limited himself to medicine, Foucault’s field of vision was also limited to a single type of human sciences, namely the ‘psycho’-sciences. However, if we broaden Foucault’s analyses to include environmental science, an entirely different type of pseudo-sciences appears. These ‘socio’sciences—sociogeography, socioecology, sociobiology—proceeded to avail themselves of the cognitive authority of the life sciences in order to fulfil their own disciplinary and regulatory mission. Among the many similarities between the two types of pseudosciences there is one that immediately catches the eye. As we saw above, Foucault claimed that sexology had detached itself from biology by postulating the existence of a particular drive to which it ascribed unlimited causative power. Something similar occurs repeatedly in socioecology. Here, too, a particular force was singled out as a primary force possessing intrinsic qualities and irreducible 48

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laws. The counterpart of the energetism of sexology was the vitalism of socioecology. Freud’s libido served the same function in sexology as did Bergson’s élan vital in socioecology. Patrick Geddes, the most prominent founding father of socioecology, whose ideas are the focus of Chapter 3, was a great admirer of Bergson, whom he met at the 1900 world exhibition in Paris and with whom he thereafter kept up a regular correspondence (see Meller, 1990, pp. 19 and 39). Although the opposition of the normal to the pathological plays a key role in both types of pseudo-sciences, there is a difference in emphasis: whereas the medically oriented pseudo-sciences concentrate on individual organisms, the ecologically inspired pseudo-sciences direct their attention primarily to social organisms. Although Foucault is undoubtedly right in stating that the disciplining of the body and the regulation of the population are interconnected and as such inseparable, it is nevertheless true to say that the ‘psycho’sciences operate primarily in the context of the ‘political anatomy of the body’, whereas the ‘socio’-sciences are primarily active in the context of the ‘political biology of the population’.

It would be difficult to overestimate the impact on the history of one of the cornerstones of biopolitics, modern social housing, of the socioecological views put forward by Patrick Geddes and company. Together with the ideas of Ebenezer Howard these views have left an indelible stamp on the work of entire generations of architects and planners who bear much of the responsibility for the spatial structuring organization of our industrialized society. Foucault’s blind spot The existence of a peculiar blind spot in Foucault’s analysis of power is readily demonstrated by an interview with Paul Rabinow, published in 1982 under the title ‘Space, Knowledge and Power’. In the interview, Foucault acknowledged that architecture has acquired new political significance since the early nineteenth century, when rampant urbanization and urban decay and the appearance of railways and electricity revolutionized the relationship between space and power. However, he refused to rank the modern architect alongside the doctor, 49

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the psychiatrist or the prison guard. The architect, Foucault believes, belongs to another category because he does not personally exert any power over people: ‘If I want to tear down or change a house he built for me, put up new partitions, add a chimney, the architect has no control’ (Foucault, 1984, p. 247). This is an astonishing utterance coming from the author of Discipline and Punish, in which the advent of the disciplinary society was directly linked to a ‘panoptic’ structuring of space. Indeed, Foucault described Bentham’s Panopticon as an experimental machine for training and correcting human individuals, a laboratory of power and a godsend for the political order (‘a case of “it’s easy once you’ve thought of it” in the political sphere’—Foucault, 1979, p. 206). It is an utterance, in point of fact, that testifies to an excessively one-sided view of the achievements and significance of contemporary architecture. According to Foucault, it is not the architects who determine the spatial organization of modern society but the civil engineers responsible for building bridges, viaducts, roads and railway lines (Foucault, 1984, p. 244). In saying this, Foucault invokes the age-old distinction between architecture (the art of building) and engineering (the science of building) that was institutionally enshrined by the establishment of two separate educational institutes, the ‘Academie Royale d’Architecture’ in 1677 and the ‘École des Ponts et Chaussées’ in 1747. In modem times, however, this distinction has lost all significance. Architects do not work in artistic isolation but in intense interaction with civil and construction engineers. In the Netherlands this cooperation was formally acknowledged as long ago as 1904 with the founding of the influential ‘Sociaal-technische Vereeniging van Democratische Ingenieurs en Architecten’ (Social-Technical Association of Democratic Engineers and Architects). Moreover, the framework of cooperation within which architects have to operate extends even further. Since the emergence of modern planning, architects have not only had to meet the technical demands made by engineers and the medical norms set by hygienists (a group Foucault no longer even mentions in 1982), they are also required to take account of corporate interests and government policies and, last but not least, to refer to the insights of sociogeographers and socioecologists. In short, it is a long time since architects have been able to devote themselves exclusively to the design of individual buildings, as Foucault suggests in the interview. They are now involved in largescale, multi-disciplinary projects set up to reconcile the demands of a wide variety of professional and interest groups. 50

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Foucault’s use of a Utopian architectural concept, Bentham’s panopticon, in his book on the birth of the prison was widely acclaimed as an eye-opener. The panopticon was a Utopian concept of one individual building, one institution. But seen in the light of what Foucault was trying to analyse—the disciplinary power that is brought to bear on the individual body—its choice as a model, though surprising, was in the end completely logical and natural. However if one seeks to analyse the biopolitical regulation of the social body, the choice of another architectural Utopia, i.e. the Utopia of the ideal town, seems equally natural. Unfortunately, Foucault did not make this choice and consequently omitted from his reflections on population policy the wealth of material the nineteenth century has to offer on this issue. At the end of his interview with Foucault, Paul Rabinow asked him about the cognitive foundations of architecture: ‘What do you think is particular about this form of savoir? Is it more like a natural science, or what you have called a “dubious science”?’ (ibid., p. 255). Foucault replied that he still considered the distinction between the two types of science to be valuable, but that he would now—in 1982—prefer to emphasize what the Greeks called techne. This concept refers not only to the control of natural processes but also to the governance of individuals and groups and especially to ‘selfgovernance’, Foucault’s central concept after his Kehre from the genealogy of power to the hermeneutics of the subject. I believe that if one placed the history of architecture back into this general theory of techne, in this wide sense of the word, one would have a more interesting guiding concept than by considering opposition between the exact sciences and the inexact ones. (Ibid., p. 256) In the following chapters I would like to show that the other road leading to the history of architecture, the one that Foucault deliberately did not take, does in fact open up some interesting prospects. It is a road that can make us see that architects and planners can be compared in at least one respect with psychiatrists, pedagogues, etc. Both professional groups often make an improper use of the cognitive authority of biology: the environmental sciences serve the same ideological purpose for this group as the medical sciences do for the other. It is a road, moreover, that leads us from the panopticon, the disciplinary device for the individual, to its biopolitical counterpart: the Garden City. 51

3 FROM PATRICK GEDDES TO LEWIS MUMFORD

This chapter focuses on the sociologically oriented ‘dubious’ sciences which emerged around the turn of the century at the interface between biology and biopower. The Scottish reformer Patrick Geddes (1854–1932), the central character in this chapter, was active both in the field of sexuality and in that of public housing policy. The titles of his best-known works, The Evolution of Sex (1889) and Cities in Evolution (1915), are themselves indication that Geddes was moving simultaneously along the lines of ‘the political anatomy of the body’ and that of ‘the political biology of the population’. His work is therefore an excellent illustration of Foucault’s proposition that the two lines are inextricably entwined, that disciplinary and biopolitical strategies always support and reinforce one another. Although Geddes was a considerable influence on both modernday environmental philosophy and the environmental movement, his name has long since been forgotten. Geddes was a great reformer who hardly allowed himself any rest or time to commit his ideas to paper. He set up project after project and was constantly on the lookout for disciples to carry them out and report on them. ‘I am like the cuckoo bird that lays her eggs in other birds’ nests. The main thing is that the egg should develop—not that the cuckoo’s ego should be gratified’ (in Miller, 1989, p. 52). The bestknown cuckoo chick is undoubtedly Lewis Mumford, who repeatedly referred to Geddes as his ‘master’ and even named his only son after him (Geddes Mumford). It is mainly via the work of Lewis Mumford that Geddes’ views have found a wide audience. Mumford is the vital link between this pioneer of social ecology and Murray Bookchin, whose ideas will be studied in greater detail in Part II. 52

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Sociology on a biological foundation Patrick Geddes took up biology at the Royal School of Mines in London in 1875, studying under Darwin’s ‘Bulldog’, Thomas Henry Huxley, for whom he was to harbour a life-long admiration. Among the subjects he specialized—and excelled—in were evolution theory, cell theory, embryology and oceanography. In 1877 he attracted the attention of biologists worldwide for his discovery that chlorophyll was to be found not only in plants but in lower animal species as well. The publication of this discovery in the authoritative journal Archives de Zoologie Expérimentale et Générale even prompted some people to call him the ‘Scottish Darwin’. But such fame was not to be his lot. Indeed, this first discovery was also the last to be regarded by his fellow scientists as a contribution to biology in a strict sense. Due to lengthy periods of uninterrupted work at the microscope he was struck by an attack of blindness while on an expedition to Mexico. Although he soon recovered his sight, he was no longer able to work with microscopes for any length of time. With a career in biological research ruled out, Geddes’ interest turned to social reform. Already as a student, and in spite of his genuine admiration for his teacher, Geddes had crossed swords with Huxley over the latter’s view of nature as a gory spectacle (hence his motto: ‘Nature, red in tooth and claw’). He felt more attracted to the evolution theory of Herbert Spencer which was inspired by Lamarck rather than Darwin and which emphasized cooperation instead of competition. Huxley, who had warned Geddes not to take Spencer’s work too literally, took a particularly dim view of the latter’s attempt to link biology to sociology (see Chapter 1). But it was this very attempt that aroused Geddes’ curiosity and prompted him to embrace unreservedly Spencer’s view of society as a super-organism that develops according to quasi-biological principles. His interest in sociology having been aroused by Spencer, Geddes soon discovered the work of Auguste Comte. The scion of a strict Presbyterian family, Geddes was attracted above all to Comte’s ideal of sociology as a ‘religion of humanity’, stimulating the individual to serve society, and for a time he even attended the services of the ‘Positivist Church’ in London with some regularity. Geddes was struck by the miserable living conditions of the urban proletariat and became active in the circles of reformers who advocated improvements in the overlapping areas of health and housing. He was a great admirer of the famous philanthropist Octavia Hill and in 1886 married Anna 53

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Morton, who had acquired a name for herself doing charitable work in Liverpool. Another thing that attracted Geddes to Comte was his theory of the logical hierarchy and historical development of the sciences, a theory that bore a strong resemblance to that of Spencer. According to Comte, all sciences progress through three stages. In the theological stage, phenomena are understood as divine interventions, in the metaphysical stage philosophical thought comes to the fore, while in the positive stage philosophical thought is replaced by scientific knowledge based on observation and experiment. The sequence in which the various sciences pass through these stages depends on their complexity. The least complex science in Comte’s view is mathematics. Mathematics underpins physics, which in turn forms the basis for chemistry. Chemistry is followed by biology and, finally, crowning the whole edifice of the sciences, sociology. Only when sociology, too, has left behind the theological and metaphysical stages and entered the positive stage, can social development be undertaken by rational means, under the motto: ‘Savoir pour prévoir, prévoir pour pouvoir’ (knowledge serves foresight, foresight serves power). Geddes remained loyal to Comte’s view that sociology is directly grounded in biology. Before applying this biological point of view to housing policy, Geddes first set out to use his biological knowledge to resolve the sexual issue. Anabolism and catabolism Underlying Geddes’ views on both women’s rights and the housing issue is the idea taken from Spencer that evolution does not proceed exclusively through the natural selection of the best adapted variations, but is largely the result of two incommensurable and antithetical processes, namely anabolism and catabolism. In the former process energy is built up and stored, in the latter energy is dissipated and squandered. Two different regimes can be distinguished in organic nature, namely the vegetable regime, which is of a predominantly anabolic nature, and the animal regime, dominated by catabolic processes. In The Evolution of Sex of 1889 Geddes also attributed the original differentiation of the sexes to this basic difference in metabolic rhythm. In Geddes’ view, secondary differences between male and female qualities were a direct result of the fact that ovum cells behave in an anabolic and sperm cells in a catabolic manner. Men expend their energy in outbursts of physical and cerebral activity, 54

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aimed at exploration and conquest; they are more rational than women and have greater independence and courage. Women, on the other hand, are passive and emotional, oriented towards nurture and care; they are altruistic, self-sacrificing and possess greater social talents than men. Geddes believed that evolution towards a co-operative and peaceloving society was only possible if male and female qualities were kept in balance, complementing rather than excluding each other. However, forced industrialization and concomitant urbanization meant that this precarious balance was in danger of being tipped to the side of the male qualities. If the balance between egoistic and altruistic tendencies was to be maintained, and where necessary restored, the participation of women in social life would have to be considerably increased. Such participation, however, must not be at the expense of the distinct sex roles, for these were not acquired but hereditary. Rather than being encouraged to enter the labour market, women must in fact be prevented from doing so, since this would force them into competition with men. Nor did Geddes see any point in the struggle for female suffrage. The struggle for political equality not only posed a threat to social progress, it was doomed to fail: ‘What was decided among the prehistoric Protozoa can not be annulled by an act of parliament’ (Geddes and Thomson, 1890, p. 247). So in Geddes’ view the women’s issue could not be solved by granting women equal rights and access to the job market or the political arena. His own solution was birth control, which would enable women to devote more attention to each child, leave them more time to develop and use their social talents for the benefit of society and thus contribute to its further development in a more cooperative direction. However, in order to achieve this goal, the female sources of social progress needed to be kept ‘pure’ lest they lose their emotional and intuitive qualities. The task of directing their capacity for socialization and social integration into rational channels must therefore be left to men, whom nature had after all designated as the pioneers of the evolutionary process. Geddes’ book on the evolution of sex fits in perfectly with Foucault and Donzelot’s reading of nineteenth-century biopolitics (see Chapter 2). Thanks to biopolitics, the family changed from a mechanism for the transfer of names and goods into an environment for the creation of healthy offspring. In the modern family, child-rearing became the exclusive province of women. True, women gained access to occupations in the care sector and to responsibilities in the sphere 55

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of charity, but these out-of-doors activities were always performed under male supervision. At the very moment when this division of roles came up for discussion in the debate on women’s rights, Geddes’ evolution theory provided it with a new scientific foundation and justification (Conway, 1970, p. 54). Later in his life, Geddes turned his attention to the issue of housing, but there is a clear continuity between his views on sexology and on planning. The opposition of vegetable, female anabolism to animal, male catabolism re-emerged in his writings on urban planning as the opposition between rural and urban. The central idea of Cities in Evolution (1915) is quite simple: each time the town spreads out at the expense of the countryside and the balance between the urban pioneer and its rural breeding ground is upset the evolutionary process grinds to a stop and even the most magnificent metropolis irrevocably turns into a horrifying necropolis. The natural region as the cradle of the town Owing to his formal and informal contacts with prominent planners and architects, Geddes was the key figure behind the introduction of the Town Planning Act of 1909. This Act, which was intended to create the conditions necessary for improving the physical health, morality, character and social conditions of the populace, marks the beginning of the era of ‘professional paternalism’ in English housing policy (Knox, 1982, p. 33). Geddes was the founding father of a new branch of sociology called ‘civics’, which he defined as a practical and experimental science aimed at improving life in the city. It is this branch of sociology that studies the origins and development of the town, its internal and external functioning from both a mental and material point of view. In England, and also in Cyprus, India and Palestine, Geddes advocated and applied a small-scale approach to slum improvement in keeping with the needs and desires of the occupants. This approach, which he termed ‘conservative surgery’, stood in stark contrast to such large-scale interventions as Haussmann’s reorganization of Paris. This approach to urban renewal could only succeed, Geddes felt, if it went hand in hand with a revitalization of the countryside which was being bled dry by the exodus to the cities. In this respect he showed himself to be a firm supporter and promoter of the garden city, the brainchild of Ebenezer Howard, to which I shall return in greater detail in Chapter 4. The two developments, urban 56

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renewal and rural revitalization, had also to be integrated into the broad framework of a regional reconstruction programme, for which Geddes designed a socio-geographic and cultural-historical survey method that can be considered his chief contribution to the science of planning. The greatest influence sociology exerted on Geddes’ development into a town and country planner stemmed from Frédéric Le Play, the founder of social geography. According to this arch-conservative, the basic units of socio-geographic research were the triad of ‘Lieu’ (place), ‘Travail’ (work) and ‘Famille’ (family). Lieu stood for the physical environment which determined what type of work prevailed in a particular area. Travail stood for the chief determining factor of family life and Famille for the most fundamental unit of society. Le Play considered the traditional patriarchal family to be the chief agent of moral education and the basis of stable social relationships. As a result of the industrial revolution, this type of family was giving way to the isolated and unstable nuclear family. Le Play first observed this shift in and around the greatest coalfields in Europe where forced mobility had turned the miner into a ‘landless nomad’. The divorce of occupation and land fundamentally weakened people’s attachment to the region, to the established family structure and the corresponding complex of morals and traditions. As compensation for the erosion of traditional customs and habits, Le Play pinned his hopes on the informal leadership of ‘social authorities’ who would adapt to technical progress while simultaneously facing up to the social disintegration that was its inevitable result. Le Play’s influence was not restricted to left-leaning thinkers like Geddes, who was strongly attracted to the anarchism of Peter Kropotkin and to the kindred guild socialism of William Morris, but also extended to right-wing figures such as Maurice Barrés, Charles Maurras, Salazar and Mussolini. He even set an indelible stamp on the social doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church, via Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical letter ‘Rerum Novarum’ (see Chapter 4). Geddes admired Le Play’s ‘bio-social’ approach and adopted his triad in a slightly altered form, speaking of ‘Place’, ‘Work’ and ‘Folk’. What is more, he translated these terms into physiological jargon, where they came to read ‘Environment’, ‘Function’ and ‘Organism’, abbreviated to EFO. In order to avoid any impression of geographic determinism, he occasionally turned the formula around—OFE—a reversal that also attests to his ecological orientation. For what Geddes was interested in was the interaction between the environment and 57

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the organism. He rejected a one-sided emphasis on the environment as being too mechanistic, but he also rejected the one-sided emphasis that vitalists such as Hans Driesch and Henri Bergson placed on the organism. Geddes felt that the two positions, mechanism and vitalism, should be connected and reconciled within an ecological perspective. As such he anticipated philosophical holism, which flourished from the second half of the 1920s up to World War II (see Chapter 7). Like Le Play, Geddes chose the region as the framework in which to study the interplay between the three basic units of sociogeographic research. The quintessential ‘natural’ region, both believed, was the river valley which had given birth to all the great civilizations in the world. In order to illustrate his theory of the regional origin of urban civilization, Geddes sketched a cross-section of a river valley, the so-called ‘Valley Section’. From the mountains to the sea, this section charted the following ‘natural occupations’: miners, woodmen, hunters, shepherds, peasants, gardeners and fishermen. These different occupational groups lived in hamlets or villages, each with their own characteristic family structure and folk culture. Each of these occupational groups contributed to the evolution of urban civilization. Development flowed down the valley, parallel to the river, from high ground to low. It sprang from the mountains and ended at the sea, where the town burst into life. Geddes distinguished two broad phases in this development. In the palaeolithic phase, the miners, hunters and woodmen played the leading part.

Figure 1 The Valley Section Source: Hall (1988) 58

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Within this group of occupations, it was the hunters who set the tone: their nomadic and bellicose lifestyle left an unequivocally male and catabolic stamp on palaeolithic civilization. In the neolithic phase, the shepherds, peasants and fishermen took up the torch. Here it was the peasants who were dominant. Owing to their sedentary and peaceful lifestyle, neolithic civilization displayed a markedly feminine and anabolic character. In the town the two forms of civilization flowed together and the various regional occupational groups, which until then had existed more or less in isolation from one another, began to make contact. As a result, the original occupations underwent a transformation: the miner became a blacksmith or toolmaker, the hunter a sportsman and warrior chief, the woodman a builder or civil engineer, the shepherd a spiritual-cultural mentor, caravan leader and finally ‘railway baron’, the farmer developed into a manager in banking or insurance, or into a great agriculturalist and politician, the fisherman into a merchant-adventurer, emigrant, pirate or mariner. The viability of urban society, according to Geddes, depends on its ability to maintain a balance between the various regional cultures, in particular between the two main groups distinguished above: the originally palaeolithic civilization type, which is active and dynamic, and the neolithic type, which is passive and static. If the balance tips too far towards the first type, the town will behave like a cancerous tumour and destroy its own breeding ground. If it tilts towards the second type, its development will stagnate and the town will sink into lethargy. Palaeotechnics and neotechnics Geddes disagreed with Le Play on one point only: he had no sympathy whatsoever for the idea of an authoritarian solution for the problems brought on by the industrial revolution; instead, he banked wholeheartedly on a solution along anarchistic lines. He had found kindred spirits and friends in two anarchists who both carried out important geographic work—the Russian prince Peter Kropotkin who, like Geddes himself, had trained as a biologist, and the Frenchman Elisée Reclus, who gave social geography its name. Kropotkin wrote his famous book, Mutual Aid: a Factor of Evolution (1902), with the explicit aim of refuting Huxley’s version of the evolution theory. In it Kropotkin proffered a great number of examples in an attempt to demonstrate that cooperation is more important in nature than competition. Mankind, he felt, should take 59

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a lesson from nature on how to construct society. Only by studying nature and obeying its laws, could mankind hope to reach a higher level of civilization (see also Chapter 6). In his book Kropotkin described the history of mankind in terms of a number of broad phases, the primary aim being to highlight the constructive talent of the masses at work in successive institutions of mutual aid. Just like the higher mammals, Kropotkin wrote, primitive people lived in communities based on kinship. However, ‘this tribal community was undermined from within by the rise of the patriarchal family and its tendency to amass individual power and wealth. It was also threatened from without by the great migration movements which forced the community to admit strangers of disparate origins. The tribal community reacted to the threat of disintegration by evolving into a village community. In the village community, which was based on joint land ownership, new forms of civilization emerged: agriculture reached a level that has hardly been surpassed since, home industry was perfected, the wilderness was opened up for cultivation and traffic, market places came into being and places for public worship were established. According to Kropotkin, people then began to think about larger communities made up of multiple families of various descent. However, this development was in danger of being nipped in the bud due to the actions of warmongering groups. For a while it looked as though Europe would forever be subjected to the tyranny of thousands of little warlords, but thanks to the constructive talent of the masses, life took a different turn, and headed in the direction previously taken by the towns of ancient Greece. The fortified enclosure of the medieval city, too, gave rise to entirely new forms of communality. The most important of these was undoubtedly the guild, an occupational association for mutual aid that served its members in word and deed. The medieval city, conceived as a federation of village communities and craft guilds, was Kropotkin’s ideal of an anarchist state. This ideal perished when, slowly but surely, the town began to distance itself from the surrounding countryside. By denying the farmers equal rights and, instead, leaving them to their own devices or even suppressing them, the citizens drove the farmers into the arms of the gentry, as a result of which the free cities were overrun around the end of the fifteenth century by powerful states organized along the lines of the old Roman model. But, concluded Kropotkin, even this development did not succeed in fully and permanently extinguishing the creative spirit of the 60

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masses, and to prove his point he cited the examples of farmers’ cooperatives and workers’ associations in which the heritage of mutual help was jealously guarded and preserved. In his Fields, Factories and Workshops Tomorrow, published in 1901, Kropotkin indicated that this heritage might once again bear fruit in the near future, namely on the basis of the revolution in transport and communication brought about by the use of new energy sources such as electricity and water power (‘white coal’). This revolution had freed industry from the shackles of the coal mine, the railway and the large cities. It also promised to help relieve the isolation of the countryside and to bring the scientific, organizational and cultural achievements of the city to the rural population. Thanks to this technological revolution, the local community could once again follow the example of the medieval city and grow into a bastion of political liberty, freed from the galling bonds of state bureaucracy and monopoly capitalism. Indeed, the future community would be at an advantage in comparison with the medieval city in that the new technological achievements would enable it to do away for good with the once so fatal alienation of the town from the country. In the small-scale communities envisaged by Kropotkin, the benefits of urban life could be effortlessly combined with those of rural life. More advanced technology and increased productivity, both in the industrial and the agricultural sectors, could go hand in hand here with a stronger community spirit and more intimate contact with the surrounding nature. Like Le Play, Geddes considered the mining town to be a source of all sorts of trouble. But like Kropotkin he believed that much of this trouble could be overcome with the help of the new technological inventions introduced in the final quarter of the nineteenth century. On the analogy of the distinction between the palaeolithicum and the neolithicum, Geddes divided the industrial age into two periods, that of palaeotechnics, dominated by male catabolism, and that of neotechnics, in which new opportunities would arise for female anabolism. The palaeotechnic age is characterized by the use of coal, steam power and railways. It is an age of mass production and militarism, of dissipation of energy and pollution of the environment, of’Smog’ and ‘Slums’. In the neotechnic age, coal is replaced by electricity and water power, the diesel engine supersedes the steam locomotive and ‘Kakotopia’ is replaced by ‘Eutopia’. In some writings, Geddes identified yet a third period, namely the biotechnic age, in which all the emphasis is on healthy progeny and a clean environment. 61

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Urbane and rustic intelligence Gedde’s saw the advent of the neotechnic age as the rebirth of the neolithic village community. He was vehemently opposed to the morbid picture of brutality and promiscuity that anthropology had painted of this early community and to which it clung so obsessively. The picture Geddes opposed to this was certainly a rosy one: the neolithicum by his account was a ‘golden age’ of peace and prosperity; people lived in an earthly paradise, a true Garden of Eden, amid lovingly cultivated flora and equally lovingly domesticated fauna. True, Geddes admitted, we possess no written sources testifying to this blissful era, but its spirit lives on in fairy tales and folklore. The heralds of the new age, in Geddes’ view, were the ‘thinking farmers’ amongst whom he included himself. While the urbane intellect occupied itself with physical nature from a mechanist perspective, the rustic intellect directed its attention to organic nature from a vitalist point of view. Of the two types, Geddes said, the urbane intellect is undoubtedly the more alert, sharp and precise, but also the more authoritarian and complacent. Not surprisingly, then, the urban intelligentsia looked on the country-dwellers with a certain disdain. That surviving slow, heavy-footed peasant, behind his plough, or gazing over the fence at his growing corn— what blank stupidity! That shepherd striding back from the snowdrift with the lamb within his plaid—what pretty sentiment! That is what the mechanicals and moneyers and paperists of cities see in these silent servitors of Life. (Geddes and Thomson, 1911, p. 230) This would only change when these growers, gardeners and breeders began to articulate their knowledge in a self-conscious way. As an example, Geddes cited the work of Louis Pasteur, the farmer from the Jura mountains. One rare advantage he had, and this it was which made him the world’s master-peasant—the daintiest ultra-feminine eye for dirt, and as its direct and woman-like application a super-housewifely passion for cleaning. Out of these simple conditions, these homely and humble antecedents, came discoveries and applications revolutionizing industries, agriculture, medicine, and surgery. (Ibid., p. 225) 62

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Geddes rounded off the passage quoted here with a call to the naturalist not to limit himself to the urbane point of view, but to follow Pasteur in advancing the rural point of view. Summarizing, it is safe to say that all of Geddes’ work revolved around the antithesis between anabolic and catabolic processes and the corresponding dichotomies of vegetable—animal, femininemasculine, rural—urban, neotechnic—palaeotechnic, vitalist— mechanist, etc. All these dichotomies, without exception, reappear in the work of Mumford. The cuckoo chick Mumford ‘My principal debt’, Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) wrote at the end of his Technics and Civilization, ‘has been to my master, the late Patrick Geddes. His published writings do but faint justice to the magnitude and range and originality of his mind; for he was one of the outstanding thinkers of his generation, not alone in Great Britain, but in the world’ (Mumford, 1934, p. 475). At the end of The Culture of Cities he wrote: ‘Even more than in “Technics and Civilization”, my chief intellectual debt is to my master, Patrick Geddes’ (Mumford, 1938, p. 495). And elsewhere: ‘Geddes gave me the frame for my thinking: my task has been to put flesh on his abstract skeleton’ (quoted in Boardman, 1978, p. 345). In Technics and Civilization, Mumford adopted Geddes’ distinction between a palaeotechnic and a neotechnic age and added an earlier, so-called eotechnic, period of his own invention. This blissful era, which was characterized by the sustained use of clean energy sources, such as wind and water, covered the entire Middle Ages. The largest part of the book, however, was devoted to the palaeotechnic era, which culminated in the nineteenth century in ‘carboniferous capitalism’. This age was dominated by the occupational groups whose natural origins lay in the upper reaches of the river valley, the birthplace of all urban civilization: the miners, woodmen-turned-engineers and hunters-turned-soldiers. The closing part of the book focused on the neotechnic age which Mumford believed to be imminent. This age was a reprise of the eotechnic period at a more advanced level, and was made possible by the discovery of new sources of energy (oil and electricity) and the invention of new materials (steel and new alloys). Technics and Civilization was written, as was The Culture of Cities, before World War II. After the war, Mumford effectively ‘rewrote’ these two complementary works. Even though his tone in The City in 63

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History and The Myth of the Machine is much more pessimistic than in his pre-war writings, they are little more than old wine in new bottles, as Mumford’s biographer Donald Miller rightly remarks. The most significant alteration concerns the time frame of Mumford’s historiography of technics and the urban civilization. He now made a point of including Greco-Roman civilization in his considerations, thus going back much further into history than in his pre-war writings, which had their point of departure in the Middle Ages. It is here that the influence of Oswald Spengler can be felt. His bestselling Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West) was welcomed in 1926 by Mumford as an ‘audacious, profound, exciting and magnificent’ work, and as ‘one of the most capable attempts to order the annals of history since Auguste Comte’ (quoted in Miller, 1989, p. 300). Even Spengler’s support of Hitler’s seizure of power did nothing to tarnish this admiration, as is evident from the fact that Mumford— himself a militant anti-fascist—chose Spengler’s book as his contribution to the Books that Changed our Minds anthology published in 1939Spengler divided the history of the world into eight closed cultures which, like organisms, germinate, flourish, decline and die. The lifespan of these super-organisms numbers on average a thousand years. The final two centuries, which Spengler referred to as the ‘civilization phase’ of a culture, are an age of ossification and fossilization and irrevocably end in destruction. In his work the emphasis is on the antithesis between the ‘Apollonian’ culture of the Greeks and the Romans and the ‘Faustian’ culture that came onto the North-European scene around the year 1000. In Spengler’s view, the history of a culture coincided with the history of its cities which invariably go through the same life cycle. It begins with the birth of the city from the spirit of the countryside; this is followed by the struggle between the city and the countryside which is eventually decided in favour of the city; this urban victory, in turn, heralds the decline of a culture. The ancient roots of life wither away under the stoneheaps of the metropolitan civilization, where the originally soil-bound people are permanently pushed aside by a mass of ‘new nomads’, ‘parasites’ with no respect for tradition and a deep loathing for both farmers and landed gentry. Mumford praised Spengler for being one of the first of his generation to do justice to the vital significance of the city in the development of culture. Inspired by Spengler, he described this development as a cycle of growth and decline in which, building on Geddes’ terminology, he distinguished six phases: eopolis, polis, metropolis, megapolis, tyrannopolis and necropolis. Like Spengler, 64

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he saw Greek antiquity and the Middle Ages as ‘simultaneous’ cultural phases of youthful flourishing in a fresh spring breeze, while pointing out the similarities between the decline of the Roman Empire and the post-1800 era, the era of carboniferous capitalism. Unlike Spengler, though, Mumford was not convinced that the West was doomed but believed instead in a bright post-Faustian future. If modern society could only be converted to his organic philosophy of bio-regionalism, it could be confident that the current brief winter would soon be followed by a new spring. After World War II, though, little was left of this confidence. Mumford was now a lot more pessimistic and felt that it would take some-thing close to a miracle to turn the tide. The city in history To show the extent of Mumford’s permanent intellectual indebtedness to his master, I will briefly discuss what is undoubtedly his most important work, The City in History published in 1961. Right at the beginning of the book, Mumford states that life takes place between two poles, movement and rest. ‘The contrast between these modes may be traced back to the original break between the mainly free-moving protozoa that formed the animal kingdom and the relatively sessile organisms that belong to the vegetable kingdom’ (Mumford, 1961, p. 5). This sets the tone for a description of the birth of urban culture, a birth which Mumford literally regards as the outcome of the marriage between the nomadic and bellicose hunters’ culture, typical of the palaeolithicum, and the sedentary and peaceful farmers’ culture of the neolithicum. Although the palaeolithic civilization already contained the seeds of future urban life, it lacked the soil to nourish them. This need was met by the neolithic revolution which, in Mumford’s view, was preceded by a sexual revolution: A change that gave predominance, not to the hunting male, agile, swift of foot, ready to kill, ruthless by vocational necessity, but to the more passive female, attached to her children, slowed down in movement to a child’s pace, guarding and nurturing the young of all sorts. (Ibid., pp. 11–12) In the new economy, therefore, women occupied a central place. 65

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The neolithic village, too, was their creation, with ‘home and mother’ written all over it. Neolithic village communities gave rise to a new technology. Next to the masculine weapons and tools of the hunter and miner— the spear, the bow and arrow, the hammer, the axe and the knife— there appeared typically feminine forms. The bones and muscles of the male dominate his technical contributions: even his limp penis is useless, sexually speaking, until it is hard as a bone—as vulgar speech recognizes. But in woman the soft internal organs are the centre of her life: her arms and legs serve less significantly for movement than for holding and enclosing, whether it be a lover or a child; and it is in the orifices and sacs, in mouth, vulva, vagina, breast, womb, that her sexually individualized activities take place. (Ibid., p. 15) Hence, the feminine contribution to technology consists in containers of all sorts and sizes: baskets, panniers, jars, jugs, barrels, vases, drums, troughs, water butts, granaries, dwellings— not forgetting collective containers such as irrigation works and villages. Many elements of urban life were already present in the neolithic village, be it in a latent form. The village behaved more like an unfertilized ovum than like a developing embryo. ‘It needed a whole set of complementary chromosomes from a male parent to bring about the further processes of differentiation and complex cultural development’ (ibid., p. 20). The village community needed an external impulse to disrupt its exclusive preoccupation with nutrition and reproduction and give it a goal that went beyond purely vegetative survival. At this point the evolutionary stage was once again stormed by a transformed version of the palaeolithic culture. The hunter evolved into a political leader, generating a new dynamism which aroused the village from its somnambulism and opened up wider horizons. The hunter’s exploratory mobility, his willingness to gamble and take risks, his need to make prompt decisions, his readiness to undergo bitter deprivation and intense fatigue in pursuit of his game, his willingness to face death in coming to grips with fierce animals—either to kill or be 66

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killed—all gave him special qualifications for confident leadership. (Ibid., p. 32) The fertilization of the well-nourished village cell by the periodically or permanently famine-threatened hunter’s culture gave birth to the city. Initially, the marriage between the two cultures was a bond between two equal partners, but their relationship became increasingly unequal, dominated as it was by the male half. Mumford sees evidence of this in such phenomena as the emergence of masculine symbols and abstractions. ‘They show themselves in the insistent straight line, the rectangle, the firmly bounded geometric plan, the phallic tower and the obelisk, finally, in the beginnings of mathematics and astronomy’ (ibid., p. 27). As a result of this onesided development, mutual support, the mainstay of the original village community, increasingly gave way to the pursuit of conquest and domination. A paranoid psychic structure came into being which found its fullest expression in the new institution of organized warfare. This fatal dialectic of masculine and feminine mechanisms provided the framework, or rather the template, for Mumford’s 500page description and evaluation of the history of urban civilization throughout the ages. He returned to this dialectic in the closing résumé of the book: In every organism, the anabolic and the catabolic processes, the creative and the destructive, are constantly at work. Life and growth depend, not on the absence of negative conditions, but on a sufficient degree of equilibrium, and a sufficient surplus of constructive energy to permit continued repair, to absorb novelties, to regulate quantities, and to establish give-and-take relations with all the other organisms and communities needed to maintain balance. The negative factors in metropolitan existence might have provided the conditions for a higher development if the very terms of expansion had not given them the upper hand and tended to make their domination permanent, in ever more destructive processes. (Ibid., p. 556) If we are to prevent our current metropolises from turning into necropolises, says Mumford, invoking Geddes and Kropotkin as his 67

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witnesses, we must take a lesson from history and avail ourselves of the opportunities that neotechnics offer us. ‘We must restore to the city the maternal, life-nurturing functions, the autonomous activities, the symbiotic associations that have long been neglected or suppressed. For the city should be an organ of love’ (ibid., p. 575). Mumford’s influence Mumford’s work has had an enormous influence on the New Age movement and on radical ecology, which is in many ways related to New Age. This is mainly due to the fact that he sought to develop a new, holistic world-view, following in the footsteps of Alfred North Whitehead whose philosophy he ranked alongside that of Geddes. In The Myth of the Machine (1967) in particular, Mumford described the history of the world as an eternal battle between mechanism, which has led to utter despair and spiritual poverty, and organicism that must save us from imminent doom. Leo Marx (1990) has rightly proclaimed Mumford ‘the prophet of organicism’. The ‘gospel according to Mumford’ will be subjected to a critical analysis in Chapters 7 and 8. Mumford’s work has also had an influence on ‘eco-feminism’. This brand of feminism is opposed to the pursuit of emancipation, to the extent that it envisages an equalization that requires women to adapt uncritically to standards set by men. By placing heavy emphasis on the alterity and difference of women, however, ecofeminism runs the risk of lapsing into the opposite mistake, thus unwittingly perpetuating existing role patterns. This risk is all too present in the work of Mumford. Although Mumford deserves credit for his extensive and loving description of the still underrated contribution of women to technology—the first of its kind—he places these contributions explicitly in the context of a stereotypical division of roles, in which women are only allotted the task of keeping the engine of evolution running with their energy, whilst the operation of the engine is seen as a task best left to men. I shall deal with this issue in greater detail in Chapter 5 with reference to the views of Murray Bookchin and Ivan Illich on the relation between (sexual) equality and (environmental) scarcity. Finally, the radical-ecological ideas of Mumford have left an indelible mark on modern planning, urban development and landscape architecture, both in the United States and in Europe. Mumford was not only Geddes’ closest acolyte, he was also one of Howard’s most prominent ‘lieutenants’. In Chapter 4 I shall demonstrate that 68

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the garden city, which Mumford propagated so passionately, can in fact be regarded as the biopolitical counterpart of that other policing instrument geared towards the disciplining of the individual—the panopticon. Indeed, seen from a Foucauldian perspective, the social ecology that formed the basis for Geddes’ and Mumford’s ‘organic’ conceptions of the ideal construction of society was just one more pseudo-science, sailing under the false flag of biology but promoting the establishment of bio-power with just as much force as the accursed ‘psycho’-sciences. This contention will be illustrated in the following chapter by a representative historical example: housing policy in the Limburg mining area of the Netherlands during the early decades of the twentieth century.

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In Geddes’ view the neotechnical age created the conditions for new and more responsible town planning and housing policies. Like Kropotkin, he sought a revitalization of the countryside, a return to the rural and the rustic. As a consequence of his socioecological approach, Geddes ascribed all the ills of the ‘machine and mammon’ age to the modern town. As the town severed its roots in the countryside, thereby cutting itself off from its vital lifeblood, it irrevocably turned into a necropolis. Geddes, who saw himself as the advance guard and forerunner of a coming generation of ‘thinking farmers’, aimed to turn this tide (Meller, 1990, p. 225). Although Geddes did not come up with any elaborate ideas of his own about the design of new towns, he did show himself to be an avid admirer and promoter of the garden city concept introduced by Ebenezer Howard, who in turn held Geddes (and Kropotkin) in great esteem. Like Geddes, Howard, who had been trained as a stenographer, saw the modern metropolis as a cancerous tumour and strove for an alliance, a ‘marriage’, between the urbane and the rustic. In 1898 he published the only book he would ever write, Tomorrow: a Peaceful Path to Real Reform, which was reissued under a new title, Garden Cities of Tomorrow, in 1902. In this book, wrote Mumford, Howard re-introduced into city planning the ancient Greek concept of a natural limit to the growth of any organism or organization…. Against the purposeless mass congestion of the big metropolis, with its slums, its industrial pollution, and its lengthening journeys to work, Howard opposed a more organic kind of city. (Mumford, 1961, p. 515) 70

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The Garden City Howard derived the architectural structure of Garden City directly from Buckingham’s ideal town of Victoria (see Chapter 2), the main difference being that he took the circle rather than the square as his basic form. Howard’s Garden City is made up of five concentric avenues, the middle one of which, Grand Avenue, is a green zone no less than 420 feet wide with six sites containing schools, churches and other institutions. Six, 120-feet-wide radial boulevards divide the city into six equal parts, or wards. At the centre is a garden with numerous water features, surrounded by six public buildings: town hall, concert and lecture hall, theatre, library, museum and art gallery, and hospital. These civic buildings are in turn encircled by a 145acre public park. Then follows a Victoria-style winter promenade, the Crystal Palace, a wide circular glass arcade which also serves as a covered shopping mall. Workshops and factories are located on the outer ring of the town, all fronting on a circle railway that connects up with a fine-meshed network of fast railway lines linking the various garden towns. All machinery is driven by electricity, thus ensuring that the ‘smoke fiend’ is kept well within bounds. The city as a whole is surrounded by a green agricultural belt composed of private allotments, pastures, woods and large farms. This green belt is also dotted with charitable and philanthropic institutions such as children’s homes, convalescent and nursing homes. Thus, the basic features of Buckingham’s Victoria reappear in Howard’s Garden City: the central park, the radial avenues, the winter promenade, the peripherally located industry and the green belt. Like Buckingham, Howard aspired to a society organized on co-operative principles and with closely intertwined industrial and agricultural activity. However, Howard was opposed to the ‘castiron’ discipline that would be imposed on the inhabitants of Victoria and sought to achieve a balance between personal freedom and private endeavour on the one hand and central planning and direction on the other. The Garden City as built, however, presented a rather different picture from the one originally envisaged by Howard. The credit, or perhaps the blame, for this goes to the architect and planner Raymond Unwin, who designed the first garden city, Letchworth. Although fully subscribing to Howard’s goals, Unwin had little or no sympathy for his rationalistic and strictly geometric approach to town planning. Instead, he envisaged the garden city as an ‘organic whole’ and 71

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Figure 2 The Garden City Source: Howard (1898).

rejected the overly mechanist impression created by the symmetry of Howard’s original plan. Unwin drew much of his inspiration from the medieval style of building that Geddes, too, held up as an example for the Garden City (Fishman, 1977, p. 67). This orientation clearly reveals the influence of William Morris, the motor of the ‘Arts and Crafts’ movement. Morris, who had trained as an architect, was an accomplished printer, designed furniture and wallpaper, wrote poems and was a well-known publicist. Following in the footsteps of John Ruskin, he advocated a revaluation of the guild system, handicrafts and home industry, in short the medieval form of production in which workmanship still coincided with artistic expression. In 1883 he became a member of the Marxist Social Democratic Federation, from which he detached himself some years later to co-found the Socialist League. Morris owed much of his fame to News from Nowhere, a true ‘Arts and Crafts’ Utopian tale published in 1891. The romance is set in London in the year 2191 and portrays an anarcho-communist society in which private property and money have been abolished, along with the state and statutory law. In this Utopia, shot through with an idyllically distorted vision of the medieval model, Morris 72

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projected an image of the future that departed sharply in terms of architecture and spatial planning from the ideals put forward by Buckingham and Howard. Morris replaced their rigid street plan with an asymmetrical and irregular pattern that is suggestive of spontaneous, ‘organic’ growth. The London of Morris’ Utopian tale is totally unlike the drab, pauperized and run-down industrial metropolis of 1891. Only the British Museum has survived the revolutionary turmoil intact. The Houses of Parliament are still standing but now serve as a commodities market and repository for manure. Radical reconstruction has totally erased the distinction between town and country. Morris takes the reader on a walk that leads through a labyrinth of open fields interspersed with small hamlets, parks, market squares and gardens. All the houses are brick or half-timbered, decorated with gothic patterns. Raymond Unwin, like his architect brother-in-law Barry Parker with whom he collaborated on the Letchworth design, grew up in a spiritual climate that was heavily influenced by Morris’ ideas. They believed that creativity came from an imaginative understanding of the past; that the Middle Ages provided an historic standard; that old buildings grew out of the ground they stood on; that the village was an organic embodiment of the small, personally related community; that the architect and planner were guardians of social and aesthetic life, maintaining and enhancing the traditional values of the community for future generations. (Hall, 1988, p. 97) Unwin embraced William Morris-style socialism from an early age. He joined the Sheffield circle around Edward Carpenter, one of the founders of the Fabian Society. It was here that he first heard Kropotkin (thereafter a firm friend) speak about the integration of handwork and brainwork. Like Morris, Kropotkin idealized the medieval style of communal life, but in contrast to Morris he was confident that their shared ideal of a small-scale settlement pattern would grow more or less automatically from the opportunities offered by modern transport and communication technology. At Letchworth, Unwin remained faithful to Howard’s concept in a number of respects, as witness the central square with public buildings and the avenues radiating from it. But he combined these formal elements with informal elements styled entirely in the spirit of Morris: curved roads, vistas, ‘culs-de-sac’, a variegated pattern of 73

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open and confined spaces and, above all, a careful landscape architecture that took advantage of the natural features of the site. The design of Letchworth was to have a decisive influence on the look of future garden cities and villages. Letchworth soon became a magnet for architects and town planners from all over the industrial world, many of whom went on to copy Unwin’s design with almost slavish devotion. The twin god Howard—Geddes As was mentioned in passing above, Geddes developed the concept of ‘conservative surgery’ as an instrument for improving and renewing existing towns. Its aim was to bring open green spaces back into the town. In Geddes’ view, the town had to stop spreading out like an ink blot or grease spot and, instead, grow in a more ‘botanic’ fashion. Ideally it should unfold like a flower, leaving room between the star- or finger-shaped leaves for a variety of green spaces. It was a concept of urban renewal that Geddes believed to be ideally suited to Howard’s concept. The construction of new garden cities, to which a part of industry and its workforce could be moved, would allow for the demolition of the slums in the overcrowded cities, which could then be replaced by gardens and parks. That Howard shared this hope is obvious from his discussion of the future of London in the final chapter of his book. The correspondence between the two concepts also becomes evident in the further development of the garden city movement. At the 1924 International Town Planning Congress held in Amsterdam in the presence of Howard, Unwin called for urban development in the form of satellite towns as a means of halting the steady disappearance of nature from the centre. Following this plea, the Belgian Raphaël Verwilghen launched a loudly applauded concept for a green penetration of the town, the concept of the ‘finger city’ that appears to hark back directly to Geddes. In short, whereas Geddes introduced rural elements into the town, Howard transferred urban elements to the countryside. However, their ideas were complementary in another, though related, respect as well: Geddes’ bioregionalism provided a suitable planning framework for Howard’s Garden City. In his influential book Town Planning in Practice of 1919, Unwin devoted a separate chapter to the significance for the design of garden cities of the survey method developed by Geddes (Unwin, 1914, pp. l40ff.). Another prominent architect who swore by Geddes’ survey method 74

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was Leslie Patrick Abercrombie, whose works include the design of a cluster of eight small garden towns in the east Kent mining district. The most impressive bridgehead between Howard and Geddes was the RPAA (the Regional Planning Association of America) of which Lewis Mumford was the theoretical mastermind. Mumford, together with Raymond Unwin, Barry Parker and Howard’s successor Frederic Osborn, was one of the so-called ‘lieutenants’ of the garden city movement. Already in 1917, at the age of twenty-two, Mumford had written a treatise on industrial decentralization, ‘Garden civilizations in preparing for a new epoch’, which was never published. Not only was Mumford one of Howard’s lieutenants, he was also Geddes’ foremost acolyte. Under his influence the RPAA adopted a programme in June 1923, while Geddes was visiting New York, which centred on the creation of Garden Cities within a regional plan. If, therefore, the RPAA had a god, it was the twin god Howard—Geddes. Sodom-on-the-Maas Foucault’s contention with regard to sexology, namely that it acquired for itself an aura of scientific respectability on the authority of biology and physiology, applies equally to Geddes’ socioecological reflections on urban planning and housing policy. Geddes, too, invokes the cognitive authority of the life sciences without actually deriving anything substantial from them, save for a few vague analogies and notions. That his views have willy-nilly contributed to the campaign to discipline the body and regulate the population can be illustrated by the development of housing policy in the mining district in the Dutch province of Limburg. The mining industry that sprang up in the south of Limburg in the early twentieth century had a profound impact on the area. First, there was the socioeconomic impact. Until the turn of the century, the area had been entirely dominated by agriculture. The arrival of the mining industry soon changed that. The entire occupational structure underwent a dramatic change, with the share of agriculture and horticulture in total employment shrinking rapidly. Moreover, the new economic structure was strikingly one-sided. Even in 1930 there was not a single industrial company in the entire area outside the mining industry that had more than 100 employees. Among other things, this meant that large-scale employment was available only to men. 75

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Second, the emergence of the mining industry brought about a demographic revolution. The influx of workers resulted in a rapid growth in population. Increasing concentration of the population in turn led to urbanization. In addition, the age structure changed as a result of a significant increase in the productive age groups (20–40 years). As well as rejuvenating the population, this led to an enormous surplus of men since most of the (male) immigrants were unmarried. Finally, large-scale immigration put an end to the area’s high degree of ethnic and religious homogeneity. For instance, in 1930 the town of Heerlen (which was to become the centre of the mining district) had a total population of 46,886. Apart from the 36,563 Dutch-born inhabitants there were: 6,253 Germans, 526 Belgians, 509 Austrians, 1,209 Poles, 226 Italians, 62 French, 250 Czechoslovaks, 789 Slovenians, 256 Hungarians, 20 Russians, 13 Romanians, 2 Americans, 6 Luxemburgers, 6 Englishmen, 2 Swiss, 3 persons of unknown and 211 of no nationality. In addition to the dramatic population growth, the increase in mobility, the so-called Freizügigkeit of the young miners, deserves mention. Mineworkers were almost constantly on the move from one mining town to another. The municipality of Brunssum is a classic example: between 1915 and 1920 thirteen times as many people settled there or moved away than had lived there in 1915— a mobility of 1,300 per cent! The local clergy were particularly critical of Freizügigkeit. This constant moving about from one place to another, from one country to another, tears such folk from the salutary influence of their native soil, family and acquaintances and turns them into cosmopolitans of the worst kind, a nomadic people with all the faults and vices peculiar to that ilk: an excessive love of freedom and independence; insolence and rudeness; contempt for local customs and traditions; indifference to their own as well as their adopted homeland; always living on credit and never paying up; when there is no more work for them in one place they move on to another, to seek their fortune there; moral and religious degeneracy; loss of decency, honour and a sense of right and wrong; ‘mine and thine’ are not taken too seriously in a foreign country—after all, they are unknown there and will only be around for a while. (Vianen, 1908, p. 31) 76

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This Freizügigkeit, combined with the huge build up of a young, predominantly male population, led to all kinds of ‘unlawful’ cohabitation. At one point a cluster of 24 dwellings in Heerlen was found to accommodate 7 cases of unlawful cohabitation, 3 of them in one four-roomed house alone. They included all conceivable forms of concubinage: divorced men living together, having abandoned their lawful wives and children in their homelands or elsewhere abroad, divorced women who had done the same with their husbands and children, concubinage between young boys and girls, in a word an assortment of the sorriest kind. (Ibid., p. 33) Churchlessness, prostitution, forced marriages, abortions, venereal disease, ‘relentless propaganda for Neo-Malthusianism’, alcoholism and not forgetting political radicalism—in short: Sodom and Gomorrah on the Maas. It was with fearful hearts that the mine directors, local authorities and clergy witnessed the signs of growing mutual acceptance between the autochthonous population and the immigrants. The first cause of this was the work underground itself, which required intense co-operation on the basis of mutual trust. The second cause was the so-called ‘boarding system’ whereby immigrant workers lodged with local families. Such close contact naturally increased the opportunities for mutual influence. Families taking in five or six boarders were no exception and beds were not infrequently rented out to different people on a morning-afternoon-night shift basis corresponding to the working hours of the workers themselves. In the early decades of the twentieth century this combination of demographic and socioeconomic developments gave rise to a situation in south Limburg which illustrated all the shortcomings of sovereign power analysed by Foucault. Sovereign power was too costly and arbitrary, was exercised too haphazardly and provoked too much resistance to be able to cope with the problems arising from this new situation. If the accumulation of people was to be tailored as painlessly as possible to the accumulation of capital, the Limburg mining district needed a new type of power—biopower. Here, as elsewhere, housing policy became one of the cornerstones of this new type of power. The immigrants, ‘the nomads of largescale modern industry’, had no roots in the Limburg soil, no home anywhere, no ‘Heimat’. This was precisely what the housing policy 77

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devised by mine directors, local authorities and clergymen was intended to change. The miners’ colony as a management tool The prime mover of this housing policy was Henri Poels, leading priest-pioneer of the Roman Catholic workers’ movement in the Netherlands and also one of the most prominent architects of the budding Christian-Democratic movement, whose influence would be felt far beyond the Dutch borders. He was, in succession, honorary chamberlain, private chaplain and Protonotary Apostolical to the Pope. Poels was an avid protagonist of Modernism, a current of thought that sought to adapt Catholicism to the new age. Poel’s main source of inspiration during his stint as senior chaplain of the South Limburg mining district was the encyclical letter Rerum Novarum issued by Pope Leo XIII in 1891. Based on an organicist perspective on society, this encyclic laid out a social doctrine that was intended as a third, middle road between liberalism and socialism. A doctrine that owed a great deal to the ideas of the social geographer Frédéric Le Play, later decorated by Leo XIII for his services to the Catholic church. As we have already seen in Chapter 3, Le Play pinned his hopes on the informal leadership of ‘social authorities’ to combat the social disintegration that appeared to be the inescapable result of progressive industrialization and urbanization. Wholly in line with Le Play’s thinking, Rerum Novarum put the case for both a Christianization of modernity and a modernization of Christianity. Poels welcomed this encyclical letter, which inaugurated a new direction in Catholic thinking on social issues, as a ‘constitution for the new era’. ‘Christianity must be alive’, he told his audience in a famous lecture, even in the factories and workshops, and in between the whistling locomotives and down in the mines. We may not withdraw from the jostling of the seething masses, we must go into the world and demonstrate that our religion continues to be the leaven of civilization and the salt of the earth. (Quoted in Van de Pas, p. 28) In another speech Poels chastised conservative Catholics for indulging in nostalgic and ‘woodsman-like’ reminiscences of the good old times and failing to recognize that technical progress and the 78

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concomitant social changes would not halt at the borders of Limburg. ‘Large-scale industry has entered our Limburg for good, bringing with it dangers that can only be fended off by timely, effective and daring social action’ (ibid., p. 59). Under the motto: ‘heaven is difficult to reach if the earth is difficult to live in’, Poels threw himself wholeheartedly into the problem of public housing. In 1911 he founded the ‘Ons Limburg’ (Our Limburg) housing association federation. Its aim was to coordinate the work done by the many housing associations formed in the wake of the 1901 Housing Act. As its guide, ‘Ons Limburg’ used Howard’s Garden Cities of Tomorrow. Jan Stuyt, the Amsterdam-based architect chosen to direct the building programme, was asked by Poels to undertake a study tour of the first garden city at Letchworth which, it was believed, could serve as the model for most mining colonies in south Limburg. The mining colonies were to corroborate Geddes’ contention that in the neotechnical era even a thoroughly palaeolithic industry like mining could be integrated into a rural context. All 8,000 dwellings completed by ‘Ons Limburg’ up until 1935 were single-family dwellings and nearly all of them were provided with the ‘natural extension of the dwelling’: a garden. The dwellings were distributed as much as possible among the various village communities so as to avoid creating one great mining town. In 40 jaren arbeiderswoningen in Limburg (40 Years of Public Housing in Limburg), a regular apologia for Poels, Father Dieteren summarized the underlying philosophy thus: The natural unity of the one-family dwelling with a garden and the necessary storage space enables the occupants to make of their dwelling a ‘Heim’, a home, a place of their own as it were, to which they become attached. (Dieteren, 1951, p. 114) ‘Ons Limburg’ dispensed a number of important services. One of these was maintenance. Father Dieteren wrote of the overseers of this service: In the performance of their duties they are permanently in close contact with the tenants. This often enables them, in addition to their regular duties, to serve as social workers. It was not without reason that Dr. Poels sometimes called the maintenance overseer the ‘assistant chaplain’ of the parish. The pedagogic task of the housing corporations lies 79

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to a large extent in their hands. A profound sense of responsibility is therefore an absolute requirement. With a well-chosen word, a fine gesture, a good deed, they can exert an inestimable influence. (Ibid., p. 123) Another important service was the housing inspection. According to the regulations of the housing association federation, the women employed as housing inspectors were supposed ‘to promote the cleanliness of the dwelling and a generally well-run household among the workers, so that they may become attached to their “home”’ (ibid., p. 124). The housing inspectors concerned themselves with each and every aspect of the daily lives of the miners and their wives and had specific instructions to deter people from taking in boarders, who were to be housed instead in working men’s hostels where strict discipline was enforced. In some colonies the inspectors awarded premiums for the best-kept gardens. Finally, the integration of the inhabitants of the mining colonies into the village communities was also promoted by means of spiritual care. In addition to the pastoral workers, Poels managed to secure the services of a large number of Franciscan monks who paid regular house visits to foster integration. Moreover, foreign pastors were brought in from countries with a large number of nationals working in the mining area. The aim of this comprehensive housing policy was to raise a ‘healthy mining stock’ as the saying went. Maintaining a feudal structure of attachment to the soil on the one hand and paternalism on the other led to at least partial success (although one should not lose sight of the ‘salutary effect’ of the economic crisis). In any case, the second generation of miners proved to be a lot tamer and more amenable than the first. Poels and company had heeded Friedrich Engels’ message as formulated in The Housing Question: In order to create the modern revolutionary class of the proletariat it was absolutely necessary to cut the umbilical cord which still bound the worker of the past to the land. The hand weaver who had his little house, garden and field along with his loom was a quiet, contented man, ‘godly and honourable’ despite all misery and despite all political oppression; he doffed his cap to the rich, to the priest and to the officials of the state and inwardly was altogether a slave. (Marx and Engels, 1988, vol. 23, p. 323) 80

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The architectural historian Nic Tummers summarized the effects of this housing policy as follows: The revolutionizing contradiction between the town and the country had been suppressed; the concept of a town had been sidestepped; the coal-mining district was clad in the image of an agrarian countryside; the ‘colony’ housing unit was a manageable instrument of control. (Tummers, 1974, p. 19) Tummers quoted Father Von Bodelschwingh, one of the founding fathers of public housing in the German Ruhr area, to show how deliberate this housing policy had been: I remain convinced that we have no more powerful weapon to drive a wedge into the workers’ party than a forceful preservation and promotion of the still intact and deeply rooted attachment to ‘Heimat’ and especially to one’s native soil. (Ibid., p. 19) Albert Speer, the architect of the Third Reich, noted somewhere in his diary that Robert Ley, the leader of the German ‘Arbeitsfront’, had seen a number of mining settlements during a trip to Limburg, ‘that struck him because of their painstakingly meticulous layout and well-groomed green surroundings’ (Speer, 1969, p. 70). They provided Ley with the model for his ‘Beauty of Labour’ programme for the reorganization of the entire German industrial sector. Anarchy=order As his central motive for writing Cities of Tomorrow, a highly informative sketch of the major town planning developments during the twentieth century, Peter Hall cites the ‘monstrous perversion of history’ that occurred when the ideals of the planning pioneers were translated into reality. The really striking point is that many, though by no means all, of the early visions of the planning movement stemmed from the anarchist movement, which flourished in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first years of the 81

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twentieth. That is true of Howard, of Geddes and of the Regional Planning Association of America, as well as of many derivatives on the mainland of Europe…. The vision of these anarchist pioneers was not merely of an alternative built form, but of an alternative society, neither capitalistic nor bureaucratic-socialistic: a society based on voluntary co-operation among men and women, working and living in small self-governing commonwealths… When however the time at last came for their ideals to be translated into bricks and mortar, the irony was that—more often than not—this happened through the agency of state bureaucracies, which they would have hated. (Hall, 1988, p. 3) But was what happened here really a diabolical distortion that turned the anarchists’ good intentions into their pernicious opposites? From a Foucauldian perspective, there is reason to doubt it. The anarchists’ struggle was directed, in Kropotkin’s words, against the ‘Triple Alliance’ of lords, judges and priests who, together with the capitalists, control and subjugate the population from above. Such a view of social power relations, which accords a privileged position to sovereignty and state power, to legislation and justice, had in Foucault’s view been overtaken by historical reality. In political thought and analysis, we still have not cut off the head of the king. Hence the importance that the theory of power gives to the problem of right and violence, law and illegality, freedom and will, and especially the state and sovereignty. (Foucault, 1980, p. 88) Foucault’s claim that political theory in general had still not succeeded in beheading the king also applies to anarchism, whether of the classic or contemporary variety. Anarchism is still obsessed with a form of power—sovereign power—which in actual fact has long been superseded by another sort of power, namely biopower. The question that I raised in response to Hall’s observation about the irony of planning history can therefore be rephrased as follows: if anarchism was nominally fighting a sovereign power that had already vanished to the point of extinction, was it not then in reality involved, unconsciously and certainly unintentionally, in strengthening the 82

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hold of biopower? Before we can answer this question we first need to take a brief look at the views traditionally held in anarchist circles on the maintenance of social order in the ideal society of the future. The first thing that strikes us is the anarchist preoccupation with social order. Contrary to what popular opinion would have us believe, anarchism does not stand for chaos as opposed to order. PierreJoseph Proudhon, the father of continental anarchism (and, incidentally, a notorious racist and sexist), coined not only the wellknown phrase ‘property is theft’ but also the less well-known one ‘anarchy is order’. Social geographer Elisée Reclus, a friend of Kropotkin and Geddes, later went one better than Proudhon by saying that anarchism should be regarded ‘the highest form of order’. Not order but hierarchy is the enemy of the anarchists. It is the inequity of the power relations that the anarchists hold responsible for the blatant unfairness and chaotic confusion into which they see the existing society slowly but surely sinking. It goes without saying that they vigorously reject the legal system that legitimatizes and sanctions these conditions. But what do they want to put in its place in order to safeguard social order? As will be discussed later in greater detail (in Chapter 5), the anarchists place themselves explicitly in the tradition of classic natural law. Wholly in keeping with this tradition, they regard a codified order as conventional and artificial. True order on the other hand, of which anarchism is the highest expression, is a natural order— genuine, original, spontaneous, native and innate. The better the social order reflects the natural order, the more conducive it is to general harmony and to a reduction in the number and intensity of social conflicts, and the less need there is for legislation or litigation. In the anarchist Utopia, it seems, social order arises automatically. But if there is no law, how are incorrigible asocial or antisocial elements to be handled? The anarchists’ answer to this thorny question is ‘public opinion’. The English utilitarianist and anarchist William Godwin wrote that public opinion is an equally powerful means of correcting deviant behaviour as whippings and chains (Marshall, 1992, p. 650). In Godwin’s anarchy, neighbours are required to keep a constant watch over each other; such permanent surveillance is exceptionally effective, for ‘there is no terror that hits vice so hard as the terror that comes from being exposed to the public eye’ (Ritter, 1980, p. 9). Where arguments fail, said Godwin, emotional pressure may be brought to bear on the deviant. Public denunciation is a very suitable 83

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means because it leads to despair and if necessary to ‘Voluntary’ emigration (Crowder, 1991, p. 70). Proudhon, too, recommended public surveillance as a force that can make the individual choose the right course. Society must act as a collective conscience to shape the moral awareness of its members. According to Proudhon and his follower Bakunin, social pressure is exerted via internalization, like ‘a sort of secret command from the self to the self. In his unpublished Treatise on Political Economy, Proudhon suggested appointing a secret ‘vigilance committee’ responsible for social surveillance. Although he renounced this proposal in his later work, he did so not as a matter of principle but on strictly pragmatic grounds (Marshall, 1992, p. 250). Bakunin, too, believed that the ‘one great and almighty authority’ that the anarchists ought to respect was the ‘collective and public spirit’. In Bakunin’s ideal society there was both compulsory school attendance and the obligation to work. Those who did not comply were to be regarded as ‘parasites’ and dealt with accordingly. Such anti-social elements were to be subjected to public censure, their political rights withdrawn if necessary, and if that too failed, their behaviour was to be explained as a symptom of some type of disease requiring clinical treatment. Finally, Kropotkin, the last of the classic anarchists, also recommended using public opinion as a means of gaining emotional leverage over anti-social elements such as work dodgers (ibid., pp. 278, 299 and 329). In short, social order under the anarchists is to be brought about by means of constant mutual surveillance by the members of a community, intended to produce an internalization of behavioural precepts. All anarchists therefore attach great importance to education, the responsibility for which they would transfer from the family to the community. Where upbringing fails, public opinion steps in and the deviant is brought before a popular tribunal. In contrast to the bourgeois-liberal legal system, the popular tribunal does not operate on the basis of abstract, uniform and universal rules. Verdicts are reached on a case-by-case basis, which renders the judicial process unpredictable and creates uncertainty as to what is permissible and what is not (Ritter, 1980, p. 20). This presents the additional, grave danger that the popular tribunal, not inclined to limit itself to a number of clearly defined punishable acts, may extend its jurisdiction to the moral character of the individual in question (Miller, 1984, p. 177). This permanent exposure to the public eye, which all anarchists 84

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accept as the foremost guarantee of social order, was ranked by Foucault among ‘the means of correct training’. And its very effectiveness, Foucault agreed, lay in its capacity to induce internalization: He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection. (Foucault, 1979, p. 202) The arsenal of weapons used by the anarchists to safeguard social order also contains that other instrument, the ‘normalizing judgement’, employed by the disciplinary society to keep its subjects in line. The anarchists throw away the statute book and replace formal rules of law by informal rules of conduct which apply not just to a limited number of well-defined acts but to the whole person. As regards the source of these rules of conduct, however, Foucault’s analysis does not entirely apply to the anarchists. A slight qualification is needed, such as has already been made in several places above. In Foucault’s view it is the medically oriented ‘psycho’-sciences that provide the norms used to regulate people’s behaviour. The anarchists, however, tap a different source. They derive their norms primarily from social geography and socioecology. Their motto is not ‘medicalization’ but ‘regionalization’. The anarchists denounce the state as an artificial creation that fosters unlimited growth. Its chief product is the town which, like some giant cancer, rapidly blights and ultimately destroys the natural environment. The anarchists counter the metropolitanism of the modern state with bioregionalism which sets limits on the growth of the town. The ‘natural’ region is the quintessential framework within which communal life can be geared to the demands of the environment. This bioregional decentralization advocated by anarchists is embodied in small-scale communities, villages, districts and neighbourhoods subject to strict limits on size and density. For the great majority of the anarchists, the medieval town serves as the model for such small-scale communities. It is portrayed as the perfect example of an ‘organic’ community, living in peace with 85

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itself and in harmony with its natural environment. The comparison of the medieval community with a biological organism which relies for its health on the degree to which its components form a genuine unity, is highly misleading, obscuring as it does the class character of this type of society. As Mumford’s biographer Donald L.Miller has rightly observed: What social cohesion and consensus he found in the Middle Ages was probably attributable less to the age’s universal cultivation of a balanced way of life than to a religiously sanctioned, hierarchical class structure that kept the lid on social mobility and class tension. (Miller, 1989, p. 362) The anarchists’ preference for small-scale communities stems straight from their desire to put an end to the unbridled and chaotic growth that is so characteristic of the metropolises of the modern state. In their view, the emotional satisfaction of living in close-knit communities in touch with nature is sufficient compensation for the Spartan austerity that marks life in ecotopia. However, smallness is also a vital precondition for the success of the informal behaviour regulation favoured by the anarchists. In an open society characterized by multiformity and mobility, informal behaviour regulation is out of the question and the public tribunal doomed to failure. The garden city modelled after the medieval example seems to have been tailored to this type of social control and can therefore be considered a true counterpart of the panopticon. Dream or nightmare? In his book on the birth of the prison Foucault advanced the proposition that in the age of sovereign power architecture was at the service of the spectacle. Its task was to find a solution to the problem of how to render the individual visible to the many. Characteristic products of this type of architecture are the temple, the theatre, the circus and the triumphal arch. Spectacle also dominated public life, which was rife with wild festivals and raw physicality. The crisis of sovereign power demanded that the direction of the gaze be reversed: it was no longer the single individual at the top but the many at the bottom of the social pyramid who were to be exposed to the full glare of public scrutiny. The spectacle was to make way for inspection, for permanent and meticulous examination. 86

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Architecture solved this brand-new problem by creating a centre, ‘a perfect eye that nothing would escape and a centre towards which all gazes would be turned’ (Foucault, 1979, p. 173). The garden city ranks alongside the panopticon as the perfect embodiment of this solution. The correspondence between the two is striking; their basic structures—the circular layout, the central space, the radial visibility—are virtually identical. The garden city, too, clears the way for what Godwin called ‘the terror of the public eye’. Critics of the garden city were quick in pointing out the peculiar emptiness and lack of liveliness of the city centre (Creese, 1966, pp. 205 and 314). Ironically, Mumford too was disappointed at the complete lack of cultural diversity and vitality he encountered when he visited Letchworth and Welwyn Garden City (Howard and Co.’s second experimental town); a disappointment, incidentally, that he never made public but only noted in his personal correspondence

Figure 3 The panopticon Source: Bentham (1841). 87

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(Miller, 1989, p. 470). In fact this emptiness at the centre is characteristic of an architecture in which spectacle has been replaced by supervision. The centre is ‘both the source of light illuminating everything, and a locus of convergence for everything that must be known’ (Foucault, 1979, p. 173). The power that emanates from the centre is just as anonymous and therefore operates just as automatically as the power that emanates from the central tower of the panopticon: one can never be sure whether one is actually being watched but one is fully aware that this might at any given moment be the case. When the journalist Carrie de Swaan investigated the Dutch garden village of Tuindorp Oostzaan (built in the 1920s by the socialist municipal council of Amsterdam), she found that the residents were all agreed that the most salient feature of their neighbourhood was that they all knew one another and everything about one another. ‘It’s just like Peyton Place, with all the trouble and strife,’ said one woman, ‘the important thing is not to lose any sleep over what the people say’ (Schreijnders, 1991, p. 251). There is a great sense of togetherness and neighbourliness, but also a lot of intolerance and xenophobia. Newcomers have a rough time, as one playground attendant found out: ‘They sound you out at first. I talk differently, I’m from Doorn. I was sort of kept out of things’. ‘Yes,’ a bystander retorted, ‘newcomers aren’t accepted straight off, but after a while they are. Unless they’re really antisocial’ (ibid., p. 254). A born-andbred Tuindorper complained about the fact that there were people in the neighbourhood who did not even know how to tend a garden. ‘Look at this vegetable garden; I suppose that Moroccan means well, it’s a different culture. But if you don’t put a stop to that sort of thing…The city council should have the power to select the people or tell them what it means to live in a garden village’ (ibid., p. 256). The Tuindorpers, a politically active resident had noticed, are fearful of ‘imported elements’: The last time I helped to count votes, the (radical rightwing) Centrumpartij got six hundred out of about seven thousand votes. I think that’s terrible. For a long time I used to remove racist slogans from the school wall, you should have heard the comments. (Ibid., p. 253) De Swaan’s account unintentionally reveals the effects of the terror of the public eye—unintentionally, since it was included in a book 88

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published as an anniversary gift for the Amsterdam Housing Corporation and intended as a celebration of ‘garden village thinking’. The title of the book was Howard’s Dream. Given all that has been said above, the fact that this dream also appealed to Roman Catholic anti-socialists and even to fascists cannot be brushed aside as mere ‘perversion’. André Gorz was undoubtedly right when he remarked on the subject of ecotopia: Communal autarky always has an impoverishing effect: the more self-sufficient and numerically limited a community is, the smaller the range of activities and choices it can offer to its members. If it has no opening to an area of exogenous activity, knowledge and production, the community becomes a prison… Only constantly renewed possibilities for discovery, insight, experiment and communication can prevent communal life from becoming impoverished and eventually suffocating. (quoted in Dobson, 1990, p. 124)

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Part II BETWEEN SCIENCE AND IDEOLOGY Nature is writing its own nature philosophy and ethics (Bookchin, 1982, p. 355)

A critique of ecological reason In the first part of this book social ecology was portrayed as a discipline that invoked the cognitive authority of biology in order to secure for itself a scientific seal of approval. All the emphasis has been on how this ideological backing enabled social ecology to play a significant role in the emergence and preservation of population policy. In this part the focus is no longer on the role of ecology in strengthening biopower but on the question of whether and to what extent the radical ecological discourse may also have played a role in undermining communicative power. Does this discourse have a liberating effect on its audience, as the radical ecologists themselves believe, or does it in fact have a stifling effect on the social dispute about where we as a society want to go with nature and technology? In order to answer this question, I shall in this part take a closer look at Murray Bookchin’s social ecology. I have elected to discuss Bookchin’s work not only because of his influence in the environmental movement and environmental philosophy but also because of all the radical ecologists he is the most faithful successor to the tradition discussed in Part I. His social ecology rests on two pillars, the strength of which will be examined in this part: a social theory (eco-anarchism) and a philosophy of nature (dialectical 91

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naturalism). By way of introduction, Chapter 5 begins with a brief description of Bookchin’s views and then proceeds to point out the similarity between his social ecology and the political ecology of Ivan Illich, whose primary aim is a strategic alignment between the environmental and women’s movements. The two authors share a particular brand of ‘eco-feminism’, in which (gender) equality is linked to (environmental) scarcity. In Chapter 6 the eco-anarchism propagated by Bookchin is compared with classical anarchism. This comparison will reveal that while Bookchin continues to embrace the positive and perfectionist ideal of freedom of his illustrious predecessors, he has resolutely replaced their scientific positivism by metaphysical holism, a source of inspiration also tapped by the deep ecologists. Since metaphysical holism plays such a central role in both social and deep ecology I shall be taking a closer look at it in the second half of Part II. In Chapter 7 I shall attempt to demonstrate that, due to its worldview pretensions, metaphysical holism must be regarded as profoundly problematic in a social perspective. Metaphysical holism blossomed during the interwar years, in an ideological climate rife with totalitarian tendencies. Although it quietly departed the scene after World War II it did not disappear for good: it embarked on a new career within radical ecology in the 1970s. This recent comeback prompts the question of whether contemporary holism is equally vulnerable to the totalitarian temptation, a question I shall attempt to answer with the help of the views of Hannah Arendt and Claude Lefort on the origin and nature of totalitarianism. In Chapter 8 I will demonstrate that, owing to its unconditional adherence to metaphysical holism, radical ecology is also deviating further and further from academic ecology, thereby rendering it dubious and questionable from a scientific as well as an ideological point of view. The radical ecological discourse, this chapter will conclude, can best be characterized as a pastiche of old, long superseded conceptions of a ‘true’ essence of nature.

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Murray Bookchin is a co-founder and former director of the Institute for Social Ecology in Rochester, Vermont and a (retired) professor at the School of Environmental Studies of Ramapo College, New Jersey. In recent decades he has published a large number of compilations and books in which subjects like anarchism, technology and the history of the city are recurring themes. His magnum opus is undoubtedly The Ecology of Freedom, published in 1982. It was applauded in the San Francisco Chronicle by the guru of the ‘counter-culture’, Theodore Roszak, as perhaps the most significant contribution to the contemporary environmental debate. With this book, Roszak wrote, Bookchin had joined the ranks of eminent American political philosophers which included not only Henry David Thoreau and Paul Goodman but also Lewis Mumford. Bookchin’s work does indeed display an uncanny similarity to that of Mumford, both in his choice of subjects and in his approach, so much so in fact, that it is difficult to pinpoint any particular original contribution on Bookchin’s part (Zimmerman, 1994, p. 151). Bookchin strikes a tone that tends even more to the prophetic than Mumford, but he lacks not only the latter’s originality—which, bearing in mind the influence of Patrick Geddes and Oswald Spengler, should not be overrated anyway—but also the visionary power and sovereign mastery with which Mumford sketched the major historic lines and drew surprising links between them. Although he certainly added a personal touch here and there, Bookchin should be seen, first and foremost, as an heir to the tradition established by Geddes and Mumford, one who updated their thoughts with great feeling for the spirit of the times.

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From organic to ecological society Bookchin thoroughly disagrees with all those philosophers who explain the power people exert over one another in terms of the need to control nature. Such philosophers portray nature as ‘frugal’ and hold that the resultant scarcity of means of subsistence continually rekindles the struggle for survival between the human beings. As a result of this outlook, they make the struggle for freedom from power dependent on the struggle for the perfection of technology. Bookchin believes that these philosophers, among whom the Marxists and neo-Marxists are prominent, turn things upside down and give a twisted account of reality. In his view, as long as people live in peace with one another they also live in harmony with nature; only when they begin repressing one another do they also begin to adopt a hostile stance towards nature. Some ten thousand years ago, communities came into being which Bookchin characterizes as ‘organic’. The nomadic way of life based on hunting and warfare made way for a sedentary way of life centring on agriculture and horticulture. This shift from the camp-fires to home-fires, from the predator to the procreator, was accompanied by the emergence of a matricentric culture founded on an ethic of complementarity. This ethic was not limited to the intercourse between people but also extended to their intercourse with nature. The differences between the sexes and between the generations, like the differences between human beings and the natural multiplicity of animate and inanimate forms and phenomena, were seen in terms of ecological differentiation, as unity-in-diversity, and not in terms of hierarchical opposition. Bookchin approvingly quotes Mumford’s remark that life in the neolithic village communities had ‘home and mother’ written all over it (Bookchin, 1982, p. 58). Bookchin’s hymn in praise of women is no less exuberant than Mumford’s. Women are the ‘proto-plasm’ of society, they are the ‘arché’ of the community and its immanent capacity for solidarity. ‘Her nurturing sensibility helped create not only the origins of society but literally the roots of civilization’ (ibid., p. 60). In the light of this hymn it is no wonder that some women find Bookchin’s work highly appealing. It has become an inspiration for a particular brand of feminism christened ‘ecofeminism’ by Françoise d’Eaubonne in her 1974 book Le Féminisme ou la Mort. One feminist with a strong sympathy for Bookchin is Chiah Heller. ‘By extending Bookchin’s extremely innovative concept of nature as a realm of potential freedom to a feminist critique, we will open 94

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up the possibility for a “radical eco-feminism”’ (Heller, 1990, p. 156). A prominent feature of this radical eco-feminism is its plea for a particular type of sisterhood. Every woman, says Heller, should be prepared to call herself a ‘lesbian’, if only symbolically, regardless of her sexual preference. Women should also create rituals aimed at the natural rather than the supernatural, for instance rituals in celebration of women’s historical and biological bond with the lunar cycle. The idea of such a sisterhood can be traced directly to Bookchin. Like Geddes and Mumford, he distinguishes a feminine and a masculine source of development and progress. The two are by nature complementary and should therefore always remain strictly separate. Ideally, these two sources keep each other in check, but without ever becoming intermingled. As the reproducers of life, says Bookchin, women should never be forced to assume the role of producers of commodities. Yet—so runs the anti-emancipation message contained in Bookchin’s eco-feminism—this is precisely the danger courted by misguided attempts to raise women’s incomes, professional status or career opportunities (see Bookchin, 1990, p. 136). Bookchin’s interpretation of the subsequent course of history holds no surprises now. The advent of the warrior in the Bronze Age disturbed the balance of brotherhood and sisterhood and sounded the death-knell of the matricentric village culture. The centre of gravity shifted once again, now in the opposite direction, from hearth and home to the military battlefield. Egalitarian relationships gave way to authoritarian relationships, competition replaced complementarity, dominance replaced difference. The new hierarchical mentality also produced a change from a harmonious to an antagonistic relationship with nature. Where once there had been a holistic view of nature, inclusive of humankind, now a pyramidal point of view predominated and all phenomena were divided into high and low, superior or inferior. Bookchin’s account departs from that of Geddes and Mumford in one respect only. According to Bookchin, the dominance of men over women was preceded by the dominance of the old over the young. Contrary to that between the sexes, the relationship between the generations is not of a complementary nature. This is presented as a natural fact by Bookchin, and it is indeed his only explanation for the transition from organic to hierarchic societies. Because of their vulnerable position, the older generation would have felt obliged to seize power over the young. ‘They are the architects par 95

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excellence of social life, of social power, and of its institutionalization along hierarchical lines’ (Bookchin, 1982, p. 81). Gerontocracy is the earliest form of hierarchy, followed by patriarchy and, finally, state bureaucracy. The transition from a matricentric to a patricentric culture (here Bookchin dutifully returns to the well-trodden paths), was accompanied by the decline of the village and the rise of the town. A positive feature of the town, in Bookchin’s view, is its cosmopolitan spirit which breaks out of the narrow-minded village mentality and welds the different tribes into one unified humanity. His verdict on the town is predominantly negative, however. Amassing gerontocratic, patriarchal and bureaucratic power, the town grows into a cancer that bleeds the country dry and in so doing undermines its own breeding ground, with all the fatal consequences for humankind and the environment that Bookchin’s predecessors had already identified. The remedy that Bookchin offers as a cure for this fatal disease is hardly new either: a return to the organic community, living at peace with itself and with nature. The ideal society as envisaged by Bookchin differs from the organic community of yore only in the absence of xenophobia, which has been dispelled by the noisome but nevertheless liberating city air. In order to highlight this difference, Bookchin speaks of the ‘ecological’ rather than the ‘organic’ society. Its core features are smallness of scale and clarity of structure. Aristotle’s dictum, which Bookchin repeats time and time again in this context, speaks volumes: in terms of size and magnitude the ideal polis should conform to the rule that it ‘can be taken in at a single view’ (Bookchin, 1980, pp. 102 and 143; 1987, p. 36). Bookchin’s ecological society is made up of communes in which the rupture between town and country, industry and agriculture, has been healed. To solve any supra-communal problems these ‘eco-communes’ may join together periodically or permanently in federations or confederations. In keeping with the well-known anarchistic prescription, the government of these communes is to be based exclusively on ‘face to face’ relations: ‘direct’ democracy in other words, with limited scope for delegation and none at all for representation. Such a form of government demands a type of technology that can be understood and controlled by anyone and everyone and which must also be geared to the specific demands of the natural region. Such ‘eco-technology’ is within reach, Bookchin believes, as is evident from the following quote in which there is an audible echo of Kropotkin: 96

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Modern technology has now reached so advanced a level of development that it permits humanity to reconstruct urban life along lines that could foster a balanced, well-rounded, and harmonious community of interests between human beings and between humanity and the natural world. (Bookchin, 1980, p. 169) The scales of justice In Bookchin’s view, the ecological crisis is due to the spirit of competition and rivalry that is characteristic of the capitalist market economy. Capitalism has removed all the moral barriers that used to keep the growth of production and consumption within ecologically acceptable limits. Under capitalist conditions the selfless homo collectivicus of the organic community is permanently ousted by homo economists whose sole motivation is self-interest. Accordingly, the image of a fertile and abundant nature gives way to that of a poor and ‘stingy’ nature characterized by the new notion of ‘scarcity’. While scarcity is generally perceived as a natural fact, says Bookchin, it is actually socially induced. Apparent scarcity is merely the result of the artificially generated need for an ever swelling stream of consumer goods of increasingly doubtful usefulness. The myth of scarcity is not only upheld by liberal ideologists and their socialist counterparts but also by environmental philosophers such as Garrett Hardin and William Ophuls who argue the case for enforced austerity. Their ‘lifeboat ethic’, Bookchin believes, marks the first step on the road towards eco-fascism (Bookchin, 1982, p. 72; 1986, p. 74). Bookchin draws a connection between the emergence of the concept of scarcity and the emergence of a particular brand of equality. Organic societies are characterized by an ‘equality of unequals’. They are composed of a great variety of individuals and groups that fit together, like the pieces of a mosaic, in a ‘unityindiversity’. To indicate that this unity is not uniform or homogeneous but rather multiform and heterogeneous, Bookchin also tends to speak of ‘Wholeness’ instead of ‘Oneness’. He illustrates this interpretation by describing the relationship between the sexes, each of which has its own fully autonomous domain in organic communities. Both sexes occupy a distinctly sovereign role in their respective spheres, and their roles are much too 97

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complementary economically to make the domination of women by men the comfortable social norm that biased white observers served up generations ago to allay the guiltfeelings of Victorian patriarchs. (Bookchin, 1982, p. 76) In modern societies, the ‘equality of unequals’ is replaced by an ‘inequality of equals’. Here, people are each others’ equals in name only whereas in fact they differ greatly in terms of income and status. As an illustration of this transition Bookchin uses the image of the goddess of Justice, set on a pedestal by modern society. Her blindfold is a symbol of impartiality: she judges and treats everyone— ‘without fear or favour’—as equal in the sight of the law. However, the goddess is depicted not only with a blindfold but also with a set of scales. This symbol is derived from market imagery and expresses the idea that impartial judgement is a weighing of exclusively quantitative or quantifiable differences between people. Modern societies apply a uniform standard by which people can be compared and, consequently, ranked. Thus, Bookchin concludes, modern equality produces hierarchical relationships that would be unthinkable in organic societies. It turns co-operative creatures who respect each other’s limits into rivals mercilessly fighting each other in the battle over ‘scarce’ resources. To stop this dead-end struggle we must learn once again to experience ‘otherness’, ‘not hierarchically on a “scale of one to ten” with a continual emphasis on “inferior” and “superior”, but ecologically, as variety that enhances the unity of phenomena, enriches wholeness, and more closely resembles a food-web than a pyramid’ (Bookchin, 1986, p. 67). Gender and sex The Ecology of Freedom appeared in 1982. In that same year Ivan Illich published his book Gender. Both books relate the current environmental crisis to the emergence of the modern ideology of equality and the concomitant introduction of the modern concept of scarcity. The theme of Illich’s book is the transition from the realm of gender to the regime of sex. As the subtitle to the German edition of the book indicates, Illich’s project is a ‘historical critique of equality’. His definition of the two main terms ‘gender’ and ‘sex’ already betrays his critical stance. Illich defines gender as ‘the eminently local and time-bound duality that sets off men and women under circumstances and conditions that prevent them from saying, 98

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doing, desiring, or perceiving “the same thing”’. He refers to ‘sex’ as ‘the duality that stretches toward the illusory goal of economic, political, legal or social equality between women and men’ (Illich, 1982, p. 20). In the realm of gender men and women each have their own domains, their own tasks and tools, their own manner of speaking, of movement and gesture, of perception and experience. Under the regime of sex the differences between men and women are regarded as deviations from an abstract genderless norm: ‘the universally human’. Once this norm has been made into the central criterion, women irrevocably get the worst of it. ‘They are forever handicapped in games where you play for genderless stakes and either win or lose. Here both genders are stripped and, neutered, the man ends up on top’ (ibid., p. 178). Defined as a neuter being, the human being is in fact modelled after the image of the man. Under the guise of equality, the ‘other’ sex is actually transformed into the ‘second’ sex, says Illich, which leads him to condemn the pursuit of emancipation as a ‘sexist’ strategy. It is hardly surprising, then, that the American women’s movement should have called for a boycott of Gender. Illich presented this book as a first step towards a ‘history of scarcity’ that he was planning to write. It is his belief that the target of his attack, the ideology of scarcity, is the cornerstone of the contemporary scarcity-based economy—homo economicus has become homo aequalis. Scarcity does not exist until men and women begin to experience one another as rivals in the labour market and elsewhere, and this can only happen if they meet as equal legal persons and therefore as genderless beings. The genderless individual is by definition an envious individual, constantly comparing itself to others. Under the regime of sex, the relations between men and women lose their complementary nature and take on a competitive nature. The ‘modernization of envy’ that is the result of this transition goes hand in hand with the emergence of hierarchical relations. To borrow Bookchin’s metaphor: from now on, people are judged by the same uniform standard regardless of sex and women are generally found wanting. Illich certainly does not want to deny that women were frequently suppressed by men in the realm of gender, but this suppression was kept within bounds by the ban on entering each other’s domains. This ‘asymmetrical complementarity’ should not be confused therefore with the modern power that can circulate freely between the sexes. The sometimes ‘cruel truce’ of yesteryear has since made way for a total war of all against all. Women are not the only victims in this war; in Illich’s view, the 99

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environment also suffers, which is why his book is aimed explicitly at achieving a strategic alignment between the women’s movement and the environmental movement. Illich’s ‘radical political ecology’ can therefore be understood as a form of eco-feminism. Because gender limits growth, the destruction of gender is inextricably bound up with the destruction of the environment. And this is also why sexism, which is an effect of the destruction of gender, can only be fought successfully by pushing back economic growth. Illich says that political ecology will only reach maturity when it stops ignoring the difference between complementary gender-bound domains and a genderless space. Only when we stop regarding scarcity as a natural fact and begin to acknowledge its historical and social causes can we prevent ‘the coming steady state society (from being) an oligarchic, undemocratic, and authoritarian expertocracy governed by ecologists’ (ibid., p. 19). This admonition is addressed in particular to William Ophuls, who subtitled his book Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity (1977), ‘Prologue to a political theory of the steady state’; but of course it also applies to Garrett Hardin and all the other advocates of authoritarian ‘lifeboat ethics’. Although Illich’s political ecology is very similar to Bookchin’s social ecology when it comes to the relationship between (gender) equality and (environmental) scarcity, their theoretical foundations differ considerably. Whereas Bookchin’s position is based on a holistically coloured philosophy of nature, Illich draws on the theologically inspired work of René Girard. Bookchin’s holism will be addressed in depth in the following chapters. The remainder of this chapter will be devoted to a closer examination of Girard’s work in an attempt to shed light on the problems faced by Illich’s political ecology. Mimetic desire and the scapegoat mechanism Every social order, according to Girard, is based on imitation, or ‘mimesis’. People are not independent and self-contained beings, from the cradle to the grave they rely and depend on others. They need each other in order to learn how to live. If people were to stop imitating and emulating one another, all forms of culture would instantly go up in smoke. Mimesis changes from a binding into a disintegrative force, however, when it extends to desire. Our desire for certain objects, says Girard, is never spontaneous, but always indirect and mediated. Between the subject and the object of desire there is always another subject that indicates the desirability 100

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of the object and arouses and fans the desire for that object. So there is always a triangular relationship, a relationship between an object and two rival subjects, in which one of the subjects has the role of a mediator or model and the other that of a follower. The model becomes an obstacle if the mimetic desire is aimed at objects that are indivisible or in limited supply. The fascination for the original object is then transferred to the model, the rival that has to be defeated, conquered or dethroned. This produces the threat of what Girard calls a ‘mimetic crisis’. Such a crisis becomes unavoidable particularly when, chiefly as a result of a breakdown of social barriers, distinctions between people are blurred or obliterated. The distance between the model and the follower then becomes so slight that they experience one another as actual competitors. Whereas traditional societies had institutions that maintained social distinctions and so averted the outbreak of mimetic crisis, modern societies are characterized by the pursuit of equality with the result that the mimetic crisis is constantly lying in wait, as it were. In order to show how traditional societies curbed mimetic violence, Girard delves way back into history to reconstruct a primeval situation in which mimetic rivalry threatened, infectionlike, to spread in concentric circles across entire communities. As soon as man learned to compensate for his biological deficiencies by developing artificial teeth and claws, his natural inhibitions failed in the face of conflict and the violence produced by a mimetic crisis could no longer be curbed by instinct. The escalation of reciprocal violence, the chain reaction of revenge and counter-revenge, only comes to a halt, according to Girard, when the war of all against all turns into a war of all against one. Only after the community has vented its fury on a scapegoat do peace and order return and can life resume its orderly course. The devil of mimetic violence is thus driven out with the help of Beelzebub. The choice of the scapegoat is entirely random. In closed communities without racial or ethnic minorities the preferred object of stigmatization and victimization will be someone with a physical defect, like a hump or a clubfoot. The community’s feelings toward the scapegoat, says Girard, are profoundly ambivalent. The scapegoat is not only held responsible for the original outbreak of dissension and chaos, it is also seen as the cause of the renewed social peace and harmony. Once slaughtered, the scapegoat is soon canonized and turned into an object of religious adoration and worship: the ‘sacrificium’ becomes a ‘sacramentum’. Religion, itself rooted in the violent resolution of the mimetic crisis, is the source of all taboos, rites and myths. While taboos serve to prevent 101

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the outbreak of a mimetic crisis, the function of rites is to enact and reproduce this crisis with the sole purpose of directing the pent-up aggression into safe channels. The primeval crisis is also reenacted in myths: they recount the original event from the perspective of the perpetrators and thus serve to justify the collective murder. In Girard’s view, all religion is rooted in violence. Via religious taboos, rites and myths, this primeval violence bifurcates still further, from hunting and cattle breeding, marriage and barter to the administration of justice, political authority, art and philosophy. In traditional societies all these institutions play an explicitly anti-mimetic role; they impose restraints on mimetic violence because they erect social barriers and legitimatize and sanction conditions of inequality. Since the transition from traditional to modern societies, the structures that served to maintain distinctions have crumbled, making it harder and harder for people to interact without falling victim to rivalry and envy. Nor is it only the sacred that has declined; the earthly models, too, have gradually lost their force: the king has ceased to function as a model for the aristocracy, the aristocracy as a model for the bourgeoisie and nowadays even the word ‘bourgeois’ has become a term of abuse. In modern conditions, people increasingly find themselves at loggerheads with one another, they become doppelgängers, unable to live either with or without the other. Since the prestige of the model is in constant decline, the object that it refers to also becomes less and less desirable. A gap opens up that can only be filled by the hunt for new objects. It is evident that this ‘merry-go-round of desires’ must lead to scarcity and ultimately to the destruction of the environment. Now that the barriers between men and women have also been eradicated for good, as Illich echoes Girard in saying, nothing more stands in the way of a war of all against all and we find ourselves in a situation which closely resembles the primeval situation that led up to the mimetic crisis. ‘What is considered economic progress, appears as the institutional spread of triangular, or “mimetic”, desire. The history of economic individualism coincides with the modernization of envy’ (Illich, 1982, p. 12). The urgent question of what is to be done in this precarious situation to restore peace, overcome scarcity and save the environment is deliberately left unanswered by Illich, as is clear from the concluding paragraph of his book: I have no strategy to offer. I refuse to speculate on the probabilities of any cure. I shall not allow the shadow of 102

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the future to fall on the concepts with which I try to grasp what is and what has been. As the ascetic and the poet meditate on death and thus gratefully enjoy the exquisite aliveness of the present, so we must face the sad loss of gender. I strongly suspect that a contemporary art of living can be recovered, so long as our austere and clearsighted acceptance of the double ghetto of economic neuters then moves us to renounce the comforts of economic sex. The hope for such a life rests upon the rejection of sentimentality and on openness to surprise. (Ibid., p. 179) The prophetic tone of this final passage fails to conceal a certain degree of embarrassment. This embarrassment is by no means fortuitous or incidental, rather it is the inescapable consequence of the view that increasing equality between the people is the prime cause of all our misery. Such a view implies that the tide of contemporary violence can only be stemmed by undoing the levelling trend and erecting new social barriers between people. Understandably, Illich shies away from such an implication and merely issues a call to renounce the comforts of economic sex. But Illich cannot endorse Girard’s diagnosis without realizing full well that such a call must remain unheeded. After all, according to Girard’s diagnosis, our entire culture was built on violence from the very outset and is permeated by violence to its furthest extremities. Since people are violent creatures through and through and sensitive only to violence, they cannot but turn a deaf ear to Illich’s moral appeal. To change this state of affairs would require something like a miracle in which humankind shakes off the old Adam and converts to nonviolence. And in fact, this is precisely the conclusion that Girard comes to in the end: human beings are not capable of averting their fate on their own and must rely instead on divine intervention. This conclusion is grounded in a daring—‘anti-sacrificial’—reading of the Bible. Revelation Contrary to non-Biblical myths, says Girard, Biblical myths display a tendency to exchange the perspective of the perpetrators for that of the victims. Seen in this light, the primeval event loses the lustre of a victory over evil and is revealed as a gross injustice, as the shedding of innocent blood. According to Girard, this anti-sacrificial 103

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tendency, though already present in the Old Testament, is at its most intense in the New Testament. Girard’s main contention is that Jesus was the first to disclose the truth about the scapegoat mechanism. Jesus’ suffering was no sacrifice demanded by God to wash away the sins of the world. Nor did it spring from a morbid craving for self-sacrifice. His suffering was simply the inescapable consequence of his revelation of fundamental violence, a revelation that was unbearable to those who witnessed it. Jesus, Girard argues, preached unreserved conciliation. The kingdom of God that he proclaimed entailed a complete and final prohibition on any act of revenge. The message was that we must unconditionally and, if need be, unilaterally renounce the right to retaliation. If someone strikes us on the cheek, we must turn to them the other cheek; if someone steals our shirt, we must let them have our coat as well. The people, however, refused to leave the kingdom of violence and nailed Jesus to the cross. The crucifixion resembles all those earthly rites that reproduce the primeval event of the collective killing in order to bring about unity and solidarity. Nothing that happens, from the initial show trial up to and including the humiliating execution outside the holy city, is unusual or unique. What sets the crucifixion story apart is that it portrays the suffering of Christ as an outrageous injustice; the gospel ‘shatters’ the myth of the scapegoat and reveals its true gory origin. Jesus is the last scapegoat in a sense, because his sacrifice did not produce the expected salutary effects. Indeed, the crucifixion paradoxically confirmed Jesus’ message and put a spoke in the scapegoat mechanism. ‘Violence is unable to bear the presence of a being that owes it nothing—that pays it no homage and threatens its king-ship in the only way possible. What violence does not and cannot comprehend is that, in getting rid of Jesus by the usual means, it falls into a trap that could only be laid by innocence of such a kind because it is not really a trap: there is nothing hidden. Violence reveals its own game in such a way that its workings are compromised at their very source; the more it tries to conceal its ridiculous secret from now on, by forcing itself into action, the more it will succeed in revealing itself (Girard, 1987, p. 209). Without sacral backing and sacrificial safety valves, humanity is henceforth exposed to its own continuously unleashed naked 104

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violence. This is the theme of the apocalyptic texts in the New Testament. These texts tell us what the world will come to if mimetic violence is allowed to evolve according to its own logic. If we need proof of the correctness of these predictions, says Girard, we need only think of the part we have all played in the arms race. In an increasingly desacralized world only the permanent threat of total destruction prevents people from destroying each other. In our times peace can only be maintained by wielding the atomic weapon. To end the crisis, however, we can no longer rely on violence. For violence to be capable of carrying out its cyclical development and bringing back peace, there must be an ecological field that can absorb the damage done in the process. Nowadays, this field covers the entire planet, but even that has probably ceased to be enough. The environment can no longer absorb the violence humans can unleash. (Ibid., p. 258) Two thousand years ago Jesus Christ proclaimed the Kingdom of God. At the time, the people dismissed his preaching, thus cutting off the short and easy road and leaving open only the long and winding road via the crucifixion and the apocalypse. In the face of a nuclear holocaust and environmental destruction, humanity is once again presented with a choice, only this time it cannot in all conscience be called a true choice, because humanity can no longer harbour any illusions with regard to violence. The truth of what Jesus said is inescapable, the conversion to non-violence inevitable. Humanity could have opted for non-violence at any time, but even if it continues to choose violence this does not ultimately make a great deal of difference: ‘whether humanity wishes to or not, it always moves in the same direction, toward the same goal’ (ibid., p. 402). Having initially rejected Jesus’ offer, humanity must as yet be forced to its knees, via the roundabout route of the crucifixion and the apocalypse, on the principle that ‘he that will not be counselled cannot be helped’. It is evident that Girard’s anti-sacrificial reading of the gospel is anything but anti-religious. Indeed, he is careful to reassure all those who fear that his line of thinking compromises divine transcendence. ‘Nothing in these words risks making the divine too accessible to humankind’ (ibid., p. 215). Girard is a practising Roman Catholic and subscribes to the Church dogmas on the dual nature of Christ, 105

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the Holy Trinity, the Immaculate Conception and so on. What is more, he is convinced that his anti-sacrificial reading of the Bible offers the only valid corroboration of the truth of these dogmas. It is a conviction that is nothing but consistent with his own premises. After all, humankind itself knows only violence, the mimetic violence of all against all that can only be constrained by the scapegoat mechanism, the violence of all against one. Therefore the truth about violence and its workings cannot possibly come from human beings. This truth must come from someone who owes nothing to violence, someone who is capable of exposing it while at the same time staying outside it. This is why Girard believes that the first Church councils were right in stating that Christ was born of immaculate conception. Saying that Christ is God, born of God, and saying that he has been conceived without sin is stating over again that he is completely alien to the world of violence within which humankind has been imprisoned ever since the foundation of the world: that is to say, ever since Adam. (Ibid., p. 223) The conversion to non-violence demands a complete reversal of the way we see things, an unparalleled spiritual metamorphosis in the history of humankind. Our intellectual skills are no help to us here, says Girard. No single experience of a philosophical nature is capable of bringing humankind even the slightest victory over mimetic desire and the predilection for violence and victimization. The spiritual metamorphosis which lies in wait for us whatever we do, demands a religious experience. Since man is constitutionally incapable of turning his back on violence, this metamorphosis can only be understood as an act of submission to a higher being. At this point Girard acknowledges his affinity with the later Heidegger and concedes that the development he describes cannot in all respects be regarded as the work of humankind. What Girard dislikes in Heidegger is the latter’s paganism. Against the pagan Logos of Heraclitus, Girard sets the Christian Logos of St John. But even this conversion to non-violence requires a big stick. In the last instance, it is the pressure of violence itself that will cause people to renounce the use of violence: the apocalypse hanging over us in the form of nuclear holocaust or environmental catastrophe. Violent through and through, man responds only to violence, and an abundance of 106

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violence is what he reaped after Jesus put a spoke in the scapegoat mechanism. Only violence? Girard’s solution to our global problems can only be successful, as he himself admits, if we all renounce violence collectively and simultaneously. If not, we are faced with the following dilemma: ‘Either you are violently opposed to violence and inevitably play its game, or you are not opposed to it, and it shuts your mouth immediately’ (ibid., p. 218). As long as we do not convert to nonviolence en bloc, we have no other option but to kill or be killed. But in view of his own diagnosis, such a conversion en bloc is highly problematic. Like Illich’s call to renounce the comforts of economic sex, his call for non-violence is bound to be ignored. Both appeal to insights that essentially violent creatures simply do not have. But Girard has an answer to this obvious objection. The conversion to non-violence, he says, is inevitable; it will come about in any case, if not by hook then by crook. In the face of the approaching apocalypse, humankind simply has no alternative. But if it is true that violence will ultimately turn against itself and undermine itself, why does Girard take the trouble to write books at all? If the conversion to which he calls and urges us is going to come about anyway, without his intervention, his entire work is an exercise in futility. Girard’s work demonstrates in an exemplary manner that any analysis that points to violence as the sole source of all human culture must inevitably culminate in a religious dénouement. The drama is exciting and compelling, it is true, but once the curtain has fallen we are left empty-handed, unless we are ready to pin all our hopes on a miracle, a deus ex machina. Those who are unwilling to wait for a miracle will have to look for a theory that credits humankind with greater capacities and skills for resolving conflicts than the open or veiled use of violence. An interesting example of such a theory is that of Hannah Arendt. Arendt draws a distinction between power and violence. Power appears as soon as and as long as people act and speak together. Unlike violence, power can never be appropriated and in fact is increased by sharing. This distinction between violence and power reappears in the work of Jürgen Habermas in the form of a distinction between strategic and communicative action, between system and life-world. Like Girard, Habermas also focuses on the desacralization process 107

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but, unlike Girard, he emphasizes the role of language and describes this process primarily as a ‘Versprachlichung des Sakralen’ (‘verbalization of the sacral’). The more language succeeds in freeing itself from sacral bonds, Habermas asserts, the better able we are to arrive at a shared understanding by ourselves. Habermas sees desacralization as opening the door to non-violent interaction without our first having to be brought to our knees. This is because he rates the semantic potential of religious world-views more highly than Girard does. Influenced by Jewish and Protestant mysticism, Habermas holds ‘that, together with the disfiguring violence, society reproduces in its inner self, time and time again, the promise of non-violent agreement’ (Keulartz, 1995, p. 14). Unlike Girard, Habermas is no Manichaean. In Habermas’ view, violence and nonviolence should not be understood as two principles that are only externally related and can therefore be opposed to each other without any mediation whatsoever. Hence the maxim that Habermas quotes so often that it can be seen as the motto of his entire philosophy: ‘Contra Deum nisi Deus ipse’. The obverse of this maxim, which states that only God can turn against God, is, to put it crudely: we must learn to fend for ourselves. This seems to me a far more promising starting-point for environmental philosophy than the catechism of admonitions that Girard and Illich shower on us.

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The parallels between Illich’s political ecology and Bookchin’s social ecology go no further than the connection both draw between the emergence of an ideology of equality and the introduction of the premise of scarcity. There is a yawning abyss between their respective views on the true essence of human nature. Whereas Illich follows Girard in his definition of man as a thoroughly violent being, Bookchin takes the more cheerful view that man is naturally disposed to co-operate peacefully with others. This optimistic view is characteristic of the anarchist tradition to which Bookchin belongs and which he attempts to bring up to date by aligning it with the ecological body of thought. In this chapter I shall highlight Bookchin’s position by comparing his eco-anarchism with classical anarchism. For this purpose I shall draw on George Crowder’s Classical Anarchism (1991), an astute analysis of the dilemma in which this political movement became entangled as a result of its attempt to elevate nature to the status of an objective ethical guideline. Crowder points to two aspects which in his view have not been given the attention they deserve in the various histories of the classical anarchists: their stoic conception of freedom and their positivist conception of science. Crowder saw the tremendous tension that exists between these two concepts as the eventual cause of the collapse of classical anarchism: the stoic notion of freedom rests on a ideological conception of nature which positivism dismisses as obsolete. Bookchin’s eco-anarchism manages to escape from the dilemma between scientism and anachronism because, although he sticks unreservedly to the notion of freedom advanced by the classical anarchists, he has resolutely replaced their positivism by a metaphysically coloured holism, the drawbacks of which (social as well as scientific) will be discussed in Chapters 7 and 8. 109

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Freedom as moral self-direction As already noted in Part I, anarchism is commonly associated with chaos rather than order (see Chapter 4) and assumed to harbour a negative conception of freedom, in which freedom is seen as the absence of obstacles to the fulfilment of actual or potential desires. It is hard to imagine how, on the basis of such a negative conception of freedom, social order can come about without external constraint. In reality such a problem does not arise, says Crowder, since anarchism is based on a positive conception of freedom, in which freedom is seen as a form of self-realization that is both rational and moral. The self that assumes control of moral life on the basis of rational awareness is the true or authentic Self, which need not coincide with the empirical self and its actual or potential desires. Social order can be brought about without external constraint, according to the classical anarchists, because the morality by which the true or authentic Self is guided is neither subjective nor arbitrary but objective. Morality is objective because it emanates from the essence of human nature which in turn is seen as an integral part of a universal order. On this view, man is free as long as he follows his own nature. Here one man’s licence does not infringe on the other man’s liberty since every human being takes part in a cosmic nature characterized by perfect harmony. The personality of a human being reflects this harmony to the extent that he realizes his own nature. Thus perceived, the anarchistic conception of freedom is not only positive but perfectionist. Crowder points out that the perfectionist conception of freedom is rooted in the tradition of natural law which originated in the philosophy of classical antiquity. The Sophists distinguished between physis and thesis, between the eternal and indestructible law of nature that applies to all humankind and the artificial, conventional law that is valid only for a particular place and time. The Sophists availed themselves of this opposition in order to underpin their demand for a profound revolution of social life. They held that all legal distinctions between individuals are purely arbitrary since by nature all human beings are entitled to equal rights. On the basis of this idea Lycophron called for the abolition of the privileges enjoyed by the aristocracy, Alcidamas set out to abolish slavery, Phaleas demanded equality with regard to property and education for all citizens and Hippodamus was the first to sketch the contours of an ideal polity. The Sophists even used the physis/ thesis opposition to formulate a demand for political equality between men and women. The disparity between conventional laws and natural 110

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law was explained by pointing to the interests of those who formulated and proclaimed these laws. Positive law was regarded by some as an instrument for subjecting the weak to the strong, while others saw it as a means for protecting the weak from the strong. After the Sophists, it was the Stoics in particular who elaborated the theory of natural law. The Stoics saw the universe as pervaded by a divine ‘logos’. As proof of this they pointed to the efficacy, beauty and perfection of nature, a style of reasoning which since Derham has come to be known as ‘physico-theology’ (see Chapter 1). According to the Stoics, man as a microcosm is a faithful reflection of the macrocosm and therefore shares in the divine ‘logos’. As such he has an understanding of the lex natura, which the Stoics equated with the lex divina. This law served as a touchstone by means of which the rationality and morality of social and political life could be determined with absolute certainty. The Stoics’ ideal society was a community of all human beings without national boundaries or civic distinctions since these, after all, are simply the result of historical coincidence and human arbitrariness. Via scholasticism, Stoic natural law had a great impact on philosophers like Spinoza, Locke, Rousseau, Kant and Hegel. Its influence also extended to classical anarchism. The anarchists used natural law as a bastion against all those theories in which there was no place for human qualities like morality or sociability outside the state—for example, because such qualities were conceived as being the outcome of a contract between the subjects and a sovereign, be it in the person of a king or in the form of a parliament. In line with the tradition of natural law, the classical anarchists regarded such qualities as inherent to human nature. Since human nature was an integral part of a universal nature characterized by perfect harmony, there was no need for a sovereign to resolve conflicts. And since the sovereign was only nominally elevated above the conflicting parties while in actual fact, via conventional law, serving the temporal interests of a particular group, his presence was not only redundant but highly undesirable. Whereas the philosophers of the social contract regarded the state as a powerful weapon that enabled the community to keep the individual’s selfish urges in check, the anarchists were convinced that this institution exerted a corrupting influence on the ‘naturally’ altruistic individual. Science as the master of ethics In the distinctly scientistic climate of their age, the classical anarchists 111

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no longer appealed to divine revelation or mystical intuition in their study of human nature, nor availed themselves of metaphysical arguments of an a priori nature, but instead based themselves exclusively on the findings of the modern empirical sciences. While William Godwin adopted Bentham’s utilitarianism as his guideline, the continental anarchists resorted to the positivism of Saint-Simon and his most celebrated follower, Auguste Comte. Comte’s philosophy culminated in the view that it was possible to place ethics on a strictly scientific footing, thereby allowing science to evolve from the servant to the master of morality. Comte was convinced that social evolution was marked by a decrease in selfish and an increase in sympathetic affections and he considered it to be the prime task of positivism to actively foster this development. It goes without saying that positivism held a strong appeal for classical anarchism. The prospect of a scientific ethic nourished the anarchists’ optimistic belief in a future society without state or sovereign. If science could provide the proof that the moral order of society was essentially harmonious, the need for external constraint could be refuted and the conspiracy of the ecclesiastical and worldly authorities to keep the people in a state of ignorance and submission unmasked once and for all. The scientistic tendency was present in all the representatives of classical anarchism but reached its clearest and most sophisticated expression, according to Crowder, in the work of Kropotkin. In Modern Science and Anarchism (1903) Kropotkin testified in no uncertain terms to his faith in the possibilities of positivist scientific research: Anarchism is a conception of the Universe based on the mechanical interpretation of phenomena, which comprise the whole of Nature, including the life of human societies and their economic, political and moral problems. Its method is that of natural sciences, and every conclusion it comes to must be verified by this method if it pretends to be scientific. Its tendency is to work out a synthetic philosophy which will take in all the facts of Nature, including the life of societies. (in Crowder, 1991, p. 160) Like Michael Bakunin, Kropotkin was a great admirer of Comte. However, Kropotkin felt that Comte had not been sufficiently strict in applying his positivist principles to politics and ethics and had instead fallen back on metaphysical speculation. He ascribed Comte 112

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‘s failure to come up with a purely scientific explanation for the origin of moral sentiments to a lack of knowledge of biology. Kropotkin himself had found this knowledge in Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man, a book he made into a cornerstone of his anarchistic world-view. Kropotkin was certainly not alone in attempting to draw ideological conclusions from Darwin’s theory of evolution. Indeed, several versions of social Darwinism had already taken root in Victorian England (see Chapter 1). Led by Herbert Spencer, the majority of social Darwinists glorified the struggle for life as the pre-eminent vehicle of progress for which the state, too, should clear the way. This orthodox variant of social Darwinism was criticized by Kropotkin in a series of articles which appeared between 1890 and 1896 in the journal Nineteenth Century. His immediate motive for writing these articles was a treatise published in the same journal in 1888 by Geddes’ tutor Thomas Huxley, entitled ‘The Struggle for Existence in Human Society’. In actual fact the position taken by Huxley, who was known as one of the most capable advocates of Darwin’s evolution theory, was very different from what Kropotkin saw as orthodox social Darwinism. Unlike Spencer and his followers, Huxley did not use the evidence that Darwin had provided for rivalry and competition in nature as a basis for drawing direct conclusions as to moral norms and social regulation. Huxley plainly denied that nature could be accorded any sort of intrinsic moral status. He saw the animal world as a wholly amoral arena of struggle for selfpreservation where ethical judgements were totally irrelevant. ‘The strongest, the swiftest, and the cunningest live to fight another day. The spectator has no need to turn his thumb down, as no quarter is given’ (in Kropotkin, 1902, p. 4). Consequently, ‘primitive’ people were portrayed by Huxley as predators lacking any ethical awareness whatsoever, engaged in a merciless and unsparing battle of all against all. Huxley saw ethics and morality as typically human inventions or devices that could not be derived directly from nature but had indeed to be fought for and protected in the face of natural evolution. In his famous lecture ‘Evolution and Ethics’ Huxley summed up his position as follows: Social progress means a checking of the cosmic process at every step, and the substitution for it of another, which may be called the ethical process; the end of which is not the survival of those who may happen to be the fittest, in 113

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respect of the whole of the conditions which obtain, but of those who are ethically the best. (Quoted in Worster, 1992, p. 177) So although Huxley did not strictly speaking belong to the party of the social Darwinists he was treated as such by Kropotkin because of his emphasis on the fierceness of the struggle for existence in nature. Kropotkin reproached the social Darwinists for representing humankind’s natural condition as an amoral and asocial free-for-all. This representation was unacceptable to the anarchists because it carried the message that any society must resort to some form of authority for its self-preservation, an authority that can only be enforced by means of violence. In Kropotkin’s view, this was an ideological misrepresentation of the evolution of the species based on a misreading of Darwin’s masterpiece. In a series of articles later published in book form as Mutual Aid, a Factor of Evolution (1902), Kropotkin refuted Huxley’s standpoint, maintaining that nature does entail ethical implications, indeed that nature could even be considered as humanity’s first ethics teacher. As such, Kropotkin’s version of the evolution theory can be regarded as just another variety of social Darwinism, one which differs from the orthodox variety in that it shifts the emphasis from mutual warfare to mutual aid as the prime moving force in the evolution. In Kropotkin’s view the struggle for existence is not a struggle between individuals but one between the species as such and between species and their environment. He was convinced, partly on the basis of his experience as a field biologist in Siberia and Manchuria, that species faced with a hostile environment can only improve their chances of survival by periodic or permanent cooperation, in other words by curbing rather than stepping up their mutual competition. Their joining forces leads to a corresponding rise in social sentiments and these feelings of sympathy and solidarity in turn form the basis for ethical notions and higher forms of morality characterized by altruism and self-sacrifice. Between anachronism and scientism As already noted, Crowder points out the tremendous tension that exists between the two aspects of classical anarchism discussed above. The positive and perfectionist conception of freedom is based on a teleological world-view. Moral perfection is achieved by the actualization of a potential which the true or authentic self possesses 114

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by nature. As Kropotkin unequivocally stated, we can be sure that human beings will eventually take full control of their moral lives for the simple reason that they belong to the ‘genus homo’. The one condition is that they should acquire an understanding of the natural order of which they are part. Such an understanding cannot be obtained, said the classical anarchists, through divine revelation, mystical intuition or metaphysical speculation, but only through scientific research. Like Comte, they had deliberately renounced both theology and metaphysics and exposed them as anachronisms employed by the secular and religious rulers as a means of keeping the people ignorant and docile. Thus, the classical anarchists combined a ideological and a scientistic world-view. On this point, too, it was Kropotkin who struck the clearest tone. In his book on the origin and development of ethics published in 1924 he traced a straight line from the Stoic tradition to the modern school of natural science among whose most prominent representatives he counted Comte and Darwin. In fact it would be more accurate to speak of a sharp rift rather than a straight line since both Comte and Darwin, in their own way, had made a clean break with the type of teleological account of nature that underpinned the positivist and perfectionist conception of freedom. This then is the dilemma in which classical anarchism ultimately became entangled as a result of its attempt to establish nature as the sole objective guide to moral judgement and social behaviour. If the anarchists stick to the teleological account of nature that underpins their positive and perfectionist conception of freedom, they run up against their own positivist principles and lapse willy-nilly into anachronism. If, on the other hand, they stand by these positivist principles, they inevitably become guilty of the naturalistic fallacy. In the one case they project a moral order onto nature and embed ethics in theology and metaphysics, in the other they deduce moral precepts from empirical descriptions of nature and allow ethics to be dissolved entirely in science. Although the anarchists see themselves as modern, ‘scientific’ thinkers and would vigorously reject any connection between their general outlook and a theological worldview, there is evidence that their basic assumptions bring them closer to theism than they would care to admit… We are left with the Aristotelian and medieval world-view in a secularized and naturalized form. (Crowder, 1991, p. 183) 115

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Since Kropotkin, says Crowder, the anarchists have not ventured to confront the problems that such a world-view presents, let alone come up with any plausible solutions. Among the contemporary anarchists who have perpetuated rather than broken the deadlock dating back to the turn of the century, Crowder explicitly includes Murray Bookchin. ‘Bookchin’s underlying use of the idea of “nature” to condemn hierarchy and underwrite anarchism indicates a frank return to the ethical naturalism of his predecessors, with all the problems that entails’ (ibid., p. 194). Crowder’s criticism is not restricted to Bookchin, though; it can be taken to apply to ‘green’ political philosophy as a whole, the case being that eco-anarchism is currently the most powerful current by far in that field of thought (Dobson, 1990, pp. 83 and 182ff.). Although Crowder’s censure of Bookchin and eco-anarchism may seem fully justified at first, on closer inspection it turns out to be slightly over-simplified. Certainly, Bookchin makes a point on several occasions of placing his own work in the tradition of classical anarchism. His social ecology is an ‘ecology of freedom’, as the title of his principal work indicates. Like the classical anarchists he cherishes the ‘Hellenic ideal of freedom’, an ideal in which freedom is represented as ‘freedom to’, not ‘freedom from’. ‘Social ecology’, writes John Clark in his introduction to Bookchin’s work, ‘proposes the most positive conception of freedom. “Freedom” signifies not the mere “being left alone” of the liberal tradition, but rather selfdetermination in the richest sense’ (Clark, 1993, p. 347). Bookchin also concurs with the classical anarchists in regarding nature as the basis or source of an objective code of ethics. But he deviates sharply from his predecessors when it comes to the issue of how nature should be approached and studied, replacing their scientific positivism by a philosophical holism. Before taking a closer look at this shift I should like to point out that with regard to the conception of freedom and the associated personality ideal, Bookchin’s social ecology bears considerable resemblance with Arne Naess’ ‘deep’ ecology. A resemblance, it should be noted, that does nothing to diminish the profound differences between the two currents in radical ecology. Only after I have clarified these differences will I turn to the ideas they share. Neo-Stoicism in social and deep ecology Around 1987, Bookchin launched a series of fierce attacks on the advocates of deep ecology, even though only two years earlier he 116

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had been cited with great approval by Bill Devall and George Sessions in their well-known book Deep Ecology. What triggered these attacks was an interview by Bill Devall with Dave Foreman, in which this leading light of Earth First! issued a number of shocking statements. As the best solution for the problem of famine in Ethiopia, Foreman suggested the possibility of stopping international aid so as to give nature a chance to recover its equilibrium. He also advocated sealing off the US borders to people from Latin America, so as to prevent wholesale destruction of the wilderness and further poisoning of water and air. To cap it all, the house magazine of Earth First! published a statement by someone writing under the pseudonym of ‘Miss Ann Thropy’, to the effect that AIDS should be welcomed as a blessing, since this disease would help relieve the human population pressure on the earth. It is no wonder that these statements—immediately disowned by prominent deep ecologists, incidentally—should have prompted Bookchin to launch a frontal attack. He considered the misanthropy to which these statements testified to be not just an incidental derailment of a bunch of runaway activists but a symptom of ecocentrism, which does not distinguish between oppressors and their victims and which, moreover, lumps human beings together with all other forms of life, from mammals to germs. The deep ecologists fought off Bookchin’s attack by questioning his assertion that social structures are the main causes of the environmental crisis. Warwick Fox (1993), for instance, argued that the dissolution of these structures need not necessarily go hand in hand with the cessation of nature destruction. It is quite conceivable, Fox said, that a non-hierarchically organized society might collectively decide to adopt a wholly instrumental approach to nature. By focusing exclusively on social structures, Bookchin subordinated the concern for nature to the well-being of human beings and thereby revealed that he, too, had been infected by the anthropocentrist virus. Bookchin repudiated this accusation. The opposition between anthropocentrism and ecocentrism, he contended, is a bogus opposition that stems from a non-dialectical view of natural and social evolution. Inspired chiefly by Hegel, he set his ‘dialectical naturalism’ against the anthropocentrist notion of a duality between man and nature. Although primarily a social being, man cannot get away from his biological origins; it is out of this ‘first nature’ that he develops his own ‘second nature’. First and second nature cannot be set in opposition to each other as alien or even hostile powers as 117

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the anthropocentrists are wont to do, but nor can they be fully equated. It is of this type of monism, which completely dissolves the second nature in the first, that the ecocentrists are guilty. Even though he is born of nature and remains inextricably connected with it, man nonetheless occupies a unique position in nature, according to Bookchin. It is in man that nature becomes self-conscious, but this consciousness can only be fully realized if first and second nature, which stand in an antithetical relationship under current social conditions, can be brought to a synthesis in the next phase of evolution. This synthesis, which can only be achieved in an ecological society, is referred to by Bookchin as ‘free nature’. Not that Bookchin means in any way to imply that the nature of the future will be free from human intervention. He regards such intervention as not only inevitable but also highly desirable. In the phase of free nature, humanity can act as the ‘voice of nature’ and realize its latent potential in an active manner and on a planetary scale. Obviously, Bookchin’s concept of ‘human stewardship of the planet’ is grist to the mill of his deep ecology critics. Deep ecologists fear that in describing humanity as the ‘voice’ of nature which helps other beings realize their potential for self-consciousness, Bookchin elevates humans above other beings, thereby justifying human control of nature. According to deep ecologists, nonhuman species do not need our help to realize their potential; rather, they need only be allowed to pursue their own evolutionary destinies with minimal interference. (Zimmerman, 1994, p. 166) This bickering back and forth conceals the fact that deep and social ecology are in complete agreement on one fundamental issue. Like the classical anarchists, both maintain a personality ideal best described as ‘neo-Stoic’. Arne Naess deduces the demand for ecocentrist egalitarianism from the ‘ultimate norm of self-realization’, and most of the deep ecologists have taken their cue from him. In line with many religious beliefs and some philosophical systems, Naess sees the self that self-realization is all about as an all-embracing, cosmic Self, of which all individual things are but temporary manifestations. Self-realization requires that we should break through the bounds imposed on our egos by engaging in a process of everwidening identification with others. This process of selfdeepening and self-broadening should not be limited to our relatives 118

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or fellow-human beings but extend to animals, plants and even complete ecosystems. As the sense of belonging to nature occupies an ever-greater part of our self-consciousness, we will start to treat other life forms with more compassion and respect for their intrinsic value. If we hurt other creatures we ultimately hurt ourselves, or, conversely: our own self-realization is contingent on the selfrealization of all other beings to which we feel ourselves to be attached. The norm of self-realization is evidence of a revival of ‘Stoic sensibility’: ‘Deep ecologists are asking us to submit to the modern equivalent of the divine logos, to discern that logos at work in the ecosystem and identify with it’ (Cheney, 1989, p. 294). The selfrealization advocated by the deep ecologists revolves around a transformation of the egoistic self into an ecological Self. This is where the kinship between deep and social ecology becomes evident. Bookchin, too, never failed to point out the necessity of a profound spiritual transformation in the creation of an ecological society. Bookchin has often emphasized the fact that liberatory social transformation depends on renewal at the most personal level: that of the self…. The self is seen as an organic whole, yet as a whole in constant process of self-transformation and self-transcendence…. The replacement of the ‘hollowedout’ ego of consumer society with such a richly developed selfhood is one of the preeminent goals of social ecology. (Clark, 1993, p. 351) This kinship between deep and social ecology was also noted by Michael E.Zimmerman. ‘Deep ecology’s idea of self-realization, influenced by Spinoza, is in some ways similar to Bookchin’s view, influenced by Hegel, that the universe is gradually realizing its capacity for greater diversity and freedom’ (Zimmerman, 1994, p. 152). The ‘orthodox’ among the deep ecologists will play down this similarity by pointing out that Hegel was an outspoken anthropocentrist while the same cannot be said about Spinoza who, along with Whitehead and Heidegger, plays a prominent role in Naess’ ‘ecosophy’. However, the fact that Spinoza saw animals as lifeless machines undeserving of any moral consideration does rather cast doubt on his biocentrist credentials. Moreover, the deep ecologists read Spinoza through Hegel-tinted glasses: Deep ecology’s reading of Spinoza has inevitably been 119

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influenced by Hegel’s effort to link emancipatory political goals to an evolutionary view of history. Hegel’s Absolute Subject may be read as Spinoza’s Substance historically unfolding its potential for self-consciousness. Although deep ecologists criticize Hegel’s anthropocentrism, Naess claims that humanity has the potential to expand its awareness so as to contribute to the well-being of all life. (Ibid., p. 231) From positivism to holism This comparison between deep and social ecology confirms our impression that Bookchin shares with the classical anarchists a perfectionist conception of freedom as well as a corresponding neoStoic personality ideal. His approach to science deviates sharply from theirs, however. Classical anarchism was fully imbued with the faith in progress so characteristic of nineteenth-century evolutionary speculations. This optimism was closely linked to an unbridled faith in the possibilities of using the achievements of the so successful natural sciences for the benefit of social life. Modern eco-anarchism has done away with such Enlightenment-based faith in progress and abandoned all trust in the blessings of technology. It has coupled its demand for a return to natural conditions with a radical censure of modern natural science, which it has put in the dock as an accessory to the ecological crisis. Modern eco-anarchism is no longer scientistic, indeed it has become outspokenly antiscientist; it has written off the positivist conception of nature held by the classical anarchists and replaced it by a holistic conception. Bookchin is exemplary in this respect, too. The philosophers of the age of reason, according to Bookchin, cherished the hope of being able to liberate the human spirit from superstition, scholastic metaphysics and clerical dogmatism with the help of reason, science and technology. But these ‘tools’ for promoting freedom and well-being have since revealed their darker side. Since the middle of this century we have been increasingly confronted with what Bookchin, following Horkheimer and Adorno, defines as the ‘Dialectics of Enlightenment’, namely the paradox that reason, science and technology are increasingly under-mining, rather than supporting, the pursuit of a free society. At one time, reason was perceived as an immanent principle of reality and science was assigned the task of supplying a systematic interpretation of this ethically charged ‘logos’. Our age has adopted 120

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a radically different view. The ‘logos’ has been reduced to an icy logic, reason to pure Zweckrationalität or instrumental rationality. Science has fallen under the spell of scientism, an ideology that treats the world, including human and social relations, as an ethically neutral object of manipulation and control. Technics has been reduced to technology, a powerful weapon in the hands of bureaucratic elites. According to Bookchin the classical anarchists also contributed their bit to this transition. ‘Proudhon was no less committed to a “scientific socialism” than was Marx. Kropotkin was often as much of a technological determinist as Engels, although he redeemed this stance by his emphasis on ethics’ (Bookchin, 1982, p. 325). The fundamental difference, in Bookchin’s view, between the classic philosophy of nature and modern natural science lies in their divergent views on causality. After Aristotle, the emphasis in the philosophy of nature was more on final causes than on efficient causes. This was sometimes referred to using the term ‘teleology’ but it is a term that Bookchin prefers to avoid in view of its deterministic connotations and the conventional associations with a hierarchic world-view. The essence, as far as Aristotle is concerned, is not predetermination but ‘meaning’. Causality is oriented toward achieving wholeness, the fulfilment and completeness of all the potentialities for form latent in substance at different levels of its development. This sense of meaning is permeated by ethics: ‘For in all things, as we affirm, nature always strives after “the better”’. (Ibid., p. 284) In response to its Christianization by scholasticism, the originally pagan philosophy of nature has been dismissed since the Renaissance as out-and-out apologetic. Even though Bookchin finds this response fully understandable, he regrets the fact that many valuable things were carelessly thrown out along with the murky bath-water of Catholicism. Modern science has struck the notion of finality from its vocabulary, banished all values from the realm of nature and, since Descartes, erected a wall between human subjectivity and spontaneity on the one hand and passive matter obeying only mechanical laws on the other. The fact that the classic philosophy of nature conceived of nature primarily as an inexhaustible source of ethical inspiration is seen by Bookchin as its great strength; the fact that it clad this conception in religious vestments as its great weakness. This caused it to be 121

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poisoned from the very outset by an authoritarian spirit that had to be driven out before its ethical significance could come to full expression. Modern science has not succeeded in driving out this spirit; its attempt at exorcism has come down to enlisting Beelzebub to drive out the Devil. It has not only robbed nature of its ethical meaning and reduced it to the status of an unresisting object of technical control, it has become a new sort of religion in its own right, with ‘scientific objectivity’ and ‘value freedom’ as its principal idols. And the true tragedy of it all is the fact that science now execrates its adversaries with a zeal reminiscent of the Inquisition to which it once fell victim itself. This is something that must be stopped, and soon, says Bookchin. Science should stop acting like a Church. ‘It must tear down the ecclesiastical barriers that separate it from the free air of nature and from the garden which nourished its intellectual development’ (ibid., p. 289). Bookchin intends to breach these barriers with his dialectical naturalism. His philosophy of nature is based on the work of Aristotle and Hegel but departs from them in its attempt to rein-state the ethical significance of nature without falling back into the religious and metaphysical superstition that tarnished their speculations. Since such qualities as freedom, subjectivity and finality are inherent in nature there is no need to invoke either an Aristotelian god or a Hegelian spirit in order to explain these qualities. Dialectical naturalism is opposed not only to Hegel’s dialectical idealism but also to Engels’ dialectical materialism, which is denounced by Bookchin as another brand of scientism. Influenced by modern natural science, dialectical materialism mistakenly conceived of natural evolution as a purely mechanical process to which the qualities mentioned above are completely alien. Dialectical naturalism might best be characterized as a form of holism. The concept of ‘wholeness’, of unity-in-diversity, is held by Bookchin to be the vital link in the chain between Aristotle’s and Hegel’s reflections on the philosophy of nature, as well as the fundamental principle of his own ecology of freedom. In conceiving them holistically, that is to say, in terms of their mutual interdependence, social ecology seeks to unravel the forms and patterns of interrelationships that give intelligibility to a community, be it natural or social. Holism, here, is the result of a conscious effort to discern how the particulars of a community are arranged, how its 122

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‘geometry’ (as the Greeks might have put it) makes the ‘whole more than the sum of its parts’. (Ibid., p. 23) Holism holds out the promise of a way out of the dilemma that ensnared the classical anarchists in their attempt to elevate nature to the status of an objective moral guideline. Inspired by positivism and motivated by the desire to free the individual from the galling bonds imposed by Church and State, they denounced theology and metaphysics as hateful anachronisms and unreservedly embraced the materialist and mechanistic world-view of modern natural science. However, to lend credence to their belief that social order could be brought about without any coercion from above or without, they also had to retain the entire positive and perfectionist concept of freedom inherited from the tradition of natural law. This concept cannot be detached from a teleological conception of nature and is therefore irreconcilable with the scientistic principles that classical anarchism subscribed to. Modern eco-anarchism, as defined in exemplary fashion in the work of Bookchin, manages to escape from this dilemma via the loophole of holism, which does away with positivism and resurrects the teleological world-view. However, the price eco-anarchism must pay for this escape is high. In eco-anarchism, the tension between anachronism and scientism that is so characteristic of classical anarchism is resolved in favour of the former. Eco-anarchism is, in other words, anachronistic to the core. In order to substantiate this harsh judgement I shall devote the following chapters to a discussion of the philosophical and scientific foundations of holism.

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In the nineteenth century Darwin’s theory of evolution was seen by many, including the classic anarchists, as a successful attempt to extend the application of the mechanist programme of Descartes and Newton to living nature. There was widespread confidence in the possibility of explaining all phenomena of life exclusively in terms of physical and chemical laws. From the turn of the century onwards, however, the mechanist programme met with mounting resistance. In philosophy this resistance was led by Henri Bergson. In L’Evolution Créatrice published in 1907, he claimed that evolution rests not only on the mechanisms of selection and variation but is driven by a creative life force, the ‘élan vital’. Earlier on, biologist Hans Driesch had come to the conclusion, based on his research into the development of sea-urchin eggs, that certain phenomena in embryogenesis can only be understood if one accepts the operation of life forces, which he designated ‘entelechies’, a term borrowed from Aristotle. The works of Bergson and Driesch were largely responsible for the enormous popularity enjoyed by ‘vitalist’ theories in the early decades of the twentieth century. The main objection raised against the vitalists concerned the fact that their assertions could not be tested by means of experiment, for the simple reason that the forces they postulated could not be empirically observed. Accordingly, vitalism soon lost its attraction when new developments in population genetics, biochemistry and molecular biology raised the prospect of more scientifically fruitful solutions to the problems of the mechanist programme highlighted by the vitalists. However, these developments never reached the point where the mechanist programme was able to reclaim a monopoly position for itself, for in the late 1920s it met with a formidable 124

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opponent in the form of holism. The holistic programme aroused expectations that it might be possible to retain the anti-mechanist impulse of vitalism without recourse to some obscure life force. In addition, with its central premise that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts and the individual subordinate to the collective, holism pandered to the anti-liberalist sentiments that were rife in the 1930s. The pioneers of holism were the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead and the South African statesman Jan Christiaan Smuts, whose book Holism and Evolution (1926) attracted worldwide attention. During the interwar years, holism was warmly welcomed, not only in philosophy but also in ecology, and was particularly popular in the circles of the German Bios journal and the ‘Ecology Group’ at the University of Chicago. When the ideological climate underwent a drastic change in the run-up to World War II, the popularity of holism, too, came to a sudden end. But not for good, for thanks to the New Age movement and radical ecology, holism has been on the way back since the early 1970s. This remarkable renaissance does however beg the question of whether and to what extent contemporary holism is capable of resisting the totalitarian temptations it succumbed to so readily in the past. An answer to this question is sought at the end of this chapter in the work of Hannah Arendt and Claude Lefort. Whitehead’s organicism Alfred North Whitehead made his name as a logician with Principia Mathematica (1910), which he wrote together with his former student, Bertrand Russell. Thereafter, and particularly in the second half of the 1920s, he became more and more a philosopher of nature, a development observed with growing scepticism by Russell. In his Science and the Modern World of 1925, Whitehead set out to oppose the scientific cosmology devised in the seventeenth century by Galileo, Descartes and Newton. His primary objection to this cosmology concerned the radical divorce between mind and matter on which it was predicated and which meant that reality was conceived of as an aggregate of material particles possessing no intrinsic value and no purposiveness whatsoever. This ‘scientific materialism’ had been created by mathematicians for the use of mathematicians and was therefore of a highly abstract nature. As such, there was nothing wrong with it; things only began to go wrong when philosophy, impressed with the huge success of 125

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scientific materialism, accepted its abstractions as the most concrete rendering of reality. This ‘fallacy of misplaced concreteness’ was the ruin of modern philosophy, in Whitehead’s view. It has oscillated in a complex manner between three extremes. There are the dualists, who accept matter and mind as on equal basis, and the two varieties of monists, those who put mind inside matter, and those who put matter inside mind. (Whitehead, 1975, p. 73) According to Whitehead, materialist mechanism was based on a one-eyed rationality and was therefore handicapped by a superficial perception of nature. This perception was undermined from the inside by progress within the natural sciences themselves. The traditional notions of mass, motion, time and space had been comprehensively called into question by the theory of relativity and the quantum theory. It was these developments that strengthened Whitehead in his conviction that humanity stood on the threshold of an ‘age of reconstruction’ which would once again open people’s eyes to the vital interdependence of all things living. Heralds of this new age were, in Whitehead’s view, the poets of the Romantic revival—Coleridge, Wordsworth and Shelley—whose nature poetry was a protest against an ongoing impoverishment of reality. His own nature philosophy was intended to put an end to ‘the divorce of science from the affirmations of our aesthetic and ethical experiences’ (ibid., p. 188). To this end, Whitehead turned to biology and more particularly to the theory of evolution. More so even than the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, this theory necessitated a drastic revision of traditional thought patterns in which evolution was reduced to just another word for describing changes in the external relations between particles of matter. As such, it offered no room for anything like progressive development and could not do justice to the unmistakably creative character of natural evolution. On this point Whitehead professed agreement with Henri Bergson’s protest, although he considered Bergson’s solution an ‘unsatisfactory compromise’. Vitalism offered no real alternative for a mechanism grounded in materialism, it merely complemented it. The divorce between inanimate and living matter on which the solution of vitalism rested was just as untenable, in Whitehead’s view, as the divorce between material and mental entities underlying traditional thought patterns. 126

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As an alternative to materialist mechanism, Whitehead advanced his own doctrine of ‘organic mechanism’. The traditional doctrine was only applicable to very abstract entities, the products of logical understanding. Yet the concrete entities we encounter in reality are organisms. Organisms are characterized by the intimate relationship between the part and the whole. Subordinate organs are fully subservient to the organism which must maintain its stability within a continuously changing environment. The organism is a functional unit to which the well-known maxim ‘the whole is more than the sum of its parts’ pre-eminently applies. This intimate relationship between the part and the whole is present in literally every aspect of nature and is not restricted to the special case of bodies made up of protoplasm. Whitehead perceived electrons, atoms and molecules, entities that had always been counted among the ‘in’-organic substances, as organisms. Indeed, he went a step further and even described mental developments in terms of organic processes. In the case of an animal, the mental states enter into the plan of the total organism and thus modify the plans of the successive subordinate organisms until the ultimate smallest organisms, such as electrons, are reached. Thus an electron within a living body is different from an electron outside it, by reason of the plan of the body. The electron blindly runs either within or without the body; but it runs within the body in accordance with its character within the body; that is to say, in accordance with the general plan of the body, and this plan includes the mental state. (Ibid., p. 100) In the age of reconstruction, Whitehead believed, science would become a study of organisms that was neither purely physical nor purely biological. While biology focused on ‘higher’ organisms, the physics of the future would focus on the ‘lower’ organisms. Whitehead even gave his readers a foretaste of this development. In a curious passage he explained the massive stability of atoms by referring to insights derived from the theory of evolution. This stability, he claimed, is the result of a successful co-operation between electrons and hydrogen nuclei and the consequent absence of competition on the part of hostile bodies. With regard to the theory of evolution, Whitehead distinguished two camps. The materialist camp stressed the necessity for organisms to adapt to an environment generally portrayed as rigid and 127

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unchangeable. Here, all emphasis was on the struggle for survival and ethical or aesthetic values were left entirely out of consideration. They were politely bowed to, and then handed over to the clergy to be kept for Sundays. A creed of competitive business morality was evolved, in some respects curiously high; but entirely devoid of consideration for the value of human life. The workmen were conceived as mere hands, drawn from the pool of labour. To God’s question, men gave the answer of Cain—Am I my brother’s keeper?; and they incurred Cain’s guilt. (Ibid., p. 240) Evidence that society had fallen into decay as a result of this materialistic business morality was piling up: ‘the loss of religious faith, the malignant use of material power, the degradation attending a differential birth-rate favouring the lower types of humanity, the suppression of aesthetic creativeness’ (ibid., p. 242). In this precarious situation the other, organicist, camp offered a way out in that it highlighted the capacity of organisms to create their own environment. Since the individual organisms are not strong enough to do this on their own, they are thrown back on one another for help. Only by working closely together and creating tight-knit communities can they fully develop their creative potential and adapt their environment to their own needs and desires. This approach enabled Whitehead to reintroduce ethical considerations. For him such considerations even played a role at the sub-atomic level where, thanks to their mutual co-operation, electrons and hydrogen nuclei had succeeded in creating an environment that guaranteed them maximum stability. Whitehead maintained that nature was full of examples supporting the organicist gospel of conciliation and fraternization. The following example derives directly from ecology. The trees in a Brazilian forest depend upon the association of various species of organisms, each of which is mutually dependent on the other species. A single tree by itself is dependent upon all the adverse chances of shifting circumstances. The wind stunts it, the variations in temperature check its foliage, the rains denude its soil and its leaves are blown away and are lost for the purpose of fertilization. You may obtain individual specimens of fine trees either in exceptional circumstances, or where 128

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human cultivation has intervened. But in nature the normal way in which trees flourish is by their association in a forest. Each tree may lose something of its individual perfection of growth, but they mutually assist each other in preserving the conditions for survival. The soil is preserved and shaded; and the microbes necessary for its fertility are neither scorched, nor frozen, nor washed away. A forest is the triumph of the organization of mutually dependent species. (Ibid., p. 244) Whitehead presented this example as an illustration of the blind spot of traditional science, which had become so obsessed with the trees that it had lost sight of the forest. In consequence, it had systematically overlooked the social and moral importance of cooperation and community spirit. The same example is cited by Donald Worster to support his contention that Whitehead should be regarded as a major prophet of the ecological movement (Worster, 1992, p. 318). Worster counts Whitehead among the authors whose conception of nature places them on the Arcadian rather than the imperialist side (see Chapter 1). However, the following example of Whitehead’s gospel of strength through unity, which is (deliberately?) not mentioned by Worster, casts doubt on this classification. The North American Indians accepted their environment, with the result that a scanty population barely succeeded in maintaining themselves over the whole continent. The European races when they arrived in the same continent pursued an opposite policy. They at once co-operated in modifying their environment. The result is that a population more than twenty times that of the Indian population now occupies the same territory, and the continent is not yet full. (Whitehead, 1975, p. 244) On closer inspection, moreover, it appears that the former quotation about the Brazilian jungle also contains a treacherous little snake in the grass, namely in the passage where Whitehead refers to the loss of individual opportunities for growth, a loss we will just have to put up with in view of the advantages of co-operation. At this point the criticism of unbridled individualism threatens to turn into blind faith in collectivism, and the glorification of conflict and 129

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competition is in danger of being replaced by an equally destructive glorification of self-denial and subservience to the greater whole. That this ‘danger’ is far from imaginary is something that will be shown later on. It is also worth mentioning that as an extension of his nature philosophy, Whitehead developed his very own philosophy of religion. In order to give credibility to his assertion that the evolutionary process, though open, was not totally directionless, he introduced what Ernest Wolf-Gazo has called one of the most peculiar conceptions of God in the history of philosophy (Wolf-Gazo, 1989, p. 310). Whitehead’s God is a ‘bipolar’ god, a hybrid of Plato’s Demiurg and Newton’s Pantocrator. According to his ‘primordial’ nature, God is a guiding principle seeking to ‘seduce’ the creative process away from chaos into order, while according to his ‘consequent’ nature, he stores and keeps all that comes out of this process within himself forever. The ultimate goal of creation is the deification of nature. Whitehead’s philosophy fits perfectly into the tradition of social ecology. Bookchin refers to this philosophy frequently (cf. Bookchin, 1982, p. 281; 1990, pp. 84, 68 and 138), and Mumford was also greatly impressed by it, as is evident from the letter he wrote to Patrick Geddes in 1926 upon the appearance of Science and the Modern World. It’s a book of first importance. He has an ingenious solution of the problem of mechanism versus vitalism; by showing that the categories of mechanism are useless to further modern explanations in mathematico-physics, and suggesting that even the electron is modified by the properties of its environment—so that iron in a stone is one thing, and iron in the human body is quite another, although the laboratory analysis may reveal identity. It indicates the important modifications of the old physical concepts by biology; and is quite in the line of all your own thinking—unless I have misunderstood both Whitehead and yourself. (Mumford, 1979, p. 113) Smuts and holism In 1926, one year after Science and the Modern World was published, Holism and Evolution by Jan Christiaan Smuts saw the 130

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light. The two books had so many things in common that Smuts felt obliged to supply an explanation of his position with regard to Whitehead. He did so in the second edition that appeared already in 1927. In a lengthy note, Smuts conceded that his underlying ideas seemed to come very close to those of Whitehead. This was all the more remarkable and surprising, he hastened to add, since his ideas had been formed and for mulated completely independently from Whitehead’s. As evidence of this claim he referred to an unpublished study, ‘An inquiry into the whole’, supposedly dating back to 1910. After observing the necessary niceties vis-à-viss Whitehead, for whose ‘penetrating analysis’ he claimed to have great admiration, Smuts declared that his own analysis had at least one advantage over Whitehead’s. Whitehead had made the mistake of raising the inorganic to the same level as the organic, something he regarded as being just as faulty and misleading as the more customary error of reducing the organic to the level of the inorganic and treating organisms as purely physical objects. To call an atom an organism, as Professor Whitehead does, seems to me to open the door to serious confusions, to break down scientific distinctions which are really valuable, and to render the ordinary reader liable to the pitfalls of metaphors in matters calling for accurate description…. The atom has a different structure or pattern—different in kind— from that of the organism, and it is not really helpful to use the same descriptive, or worse, explanatory term for both. Nor could the soul or a personality, or the Supreme Good be rightly or usefully called an organism. (Smuts, 1927, p. 124) Whereas Whitehead put the concepts of ‘organicism’ and ‘holism’ on an equal footing, Smuts subordinated the former concept to the latter. In other words, he regarded ‘holism’ as a generic and ‘organicism’ as a specific term. Holism applied to both the inorganic and the organic and to both material and mental entities. Holism was the driving force of evolution, a principle that should not be restricted to the biological domain. Smuts’ approach to holism was not nominalist but explicitly realistic. ‘Wholes are not mere artificial constructions of thought; they actually exist; they point to something real in the universe, and Holism is a real operative factor, a vera causa’ (ibid., p. 88). 131

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Smuts represented evolution as a progressive succession of wholes stretching from the very first inorganic beginning to the highest level of spirituality. In this regard, his book displayed considerable similarity with a book published in 1923, Conway Lloyd Morgan’s Emergent Evolution. According to Lloyd Morgan, evolution advances in a saltatory manner and therefore exhibits a staggered character. Time and again, spontaneous combinations of existing elements produce something new which behaves as a whole that is more than the sum of its parts. At each stage of evolution, therefore, properties emerge that cannot be explained exclusively in terms of the laws governing the previous stages. The study of these lower levels, though necessary, is by no means sufficient for understanding the higher levels. In other words: each level required its own specific research methods. With its assumption that a consequence can differ radically from its antecedents, the theory of emergent evolution cast doubt on the whole scientific concept of causality and paved the way for a reintroduction of a teleological conception of nature. The marked similarity between Lloyd Morgan’s views and his own compelled Smuts to redefine his position once more. In another note in the second edition of his book, he once again assured the reader that his own ideas had been formed and matured long before he had had a chance to read Lloyd Morgan’s book. And once again he tried to give prominence to his own position by advancing ‘holism’ as the essential concept to which both ‘organism’ and ‘emergence’ are subordinated. To Lloyd Morgan emergence of the new in the evolution of the universe is the essential fact; to me there is something more fundamental—the character of wholeness, the tendency to wholes, ever more intensive and effective wholes, which is basic to the universe, and of which emergence or creativeness is but one feature, however important it is in other respects. Hence he lays all emphasis on the feature of emergence, while I stress wholes or Holism as the real factor, from which emergence and all the rest follow. (Ibid., p. 330) Like Lloyd Morgan, Smuts divided the evolutionary process into three broad stages: matter, life and mind. While new forms are emerging all the time, said Smuts, it is possible to point to two great moments—leaps—in the evolutionary process when something 132

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emerged that was radically different from its constituent elements: the leap from matter to life and that from life to mind. Each leap represented an intensification of the integration of the different elements or parts within the new wholes or units and this intensification has more in common with a geometric than an arithmetic progression. The universe displays a tendency to ever greater synthesis. As a result, the most recent products of evolution are of a far more holistic nature than its earliest products. In the course of evolution the emphasis has shifted from external determination to internal regulation, so that ‘necessity’ has gradually turned into ‘freedom’, a development that has reached its temporary apogee in the human personality, the essential vehicle of the mind. In Smuts’ view, ‘freedom’ must be interpreted as something other and more than the freedom of choice, namely the capacity for moral self-determination. As such, freedom is an attribute of reason rather than of will. Reason enables us to suppress our egoistic impulses and capricious whims and attune our actions to those of others, with the selfless pursuit of the ultimate Good as the final goal. In the ideal personality, therefore, ‘Libertas’ should coincide with ‘Imperium’. In his inner struggle for moral self-perfection the individual knows himself to be backed by the universe which, according to Smuts, is highly conducive to the pursuit of the highest good. As ‘the young science of ecology’ showed, this is, after all, an essentially friendly universe in which comradeship, social co-operation and mutual support hold sway and destruction and warfare are but exceptions. Its deepest tendencies are helpful to what is best in us, and our highest aspirations are but its inspiration. Thus behind our striving towards betterment are in the last resort the entire weight and momentum and the inmost nature and trend of the universe. (Ibid., p. 352) It becomes obvious from the above that Smuts adhered to a positive and perfectionist conception of freedom, a conception, as has been repeatedly pointed out, that is based on a teleological world view (see Chapter 6). Smuts saw purposiveness as the quintessential characteristic of holism. Purpose is thus probably the highest, most complex manifestation of the free, creative, holistic activity of Mind. Purpose is the door through which Mind finally escapes 133

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from the house of bondage and enters the free realm of its own sovereignty. The purposive ideological order is the domain of the free creative spirit, in which the ethical, spiritual, ideal nature of Mind has free scope for expansion and development. (Ibid., p. 267) Bookchin’s holism bears an astounding resemblance to that of Smuts, although the latter is never actually mentioned by name. Bookchin, too, combines an organicist philosophy of nature with the idea of emergence. According to Bookchin, both Aristotle and Hegel, the two main sources of inspiration for his ‘dialectical naturalism’, entertained an emergent interpretation of causality (Bookchin, 1990, p. 27). A remark by Worster is worth noting in this context: ‘Especially important to the idea of emergence, for example, was the nineteenthcentury Hegelian notion of nature struggling forward to final perfection, passing en route through a series of metamorphoses’ (Worster, 1977, p. 323). In Bookchin’s work the idea of emergence is expressed in the different stages of nature which he distinguishes: the first (biological) nature, the second (social) nature and their synthesis: free nature. It is on this very point, incidentally, that social and deep ecologists diverge sharply in their attitude to holism. Although Naess et al. refer to Whitehead’s organicist philosophy of nature, they reject Lloyd Morgan’s idea of emergence because it cannot but strike them as thoroughly anthropocentrist—especially in view of its Hegelian connotations. Among the classic philosophers they prefer Spinoza to Hegel. However, as already noted in the previous chapter, the difference here is rhetorical rather than real. I would like to conclude this section by pointing out a weak spot in the theory of emergent evolution. Although the evolutionary process was initially divided into only three phases, enthusiastic adherents of the theory soon began adding to this number, until the whole doctrine threatened to collapse under the sheer weight of categories. It seemed that everywhere one looked, new synergistic entities were flashing into being from even the most casual intercourse of atomic particles. The outcome of emergence could be a substance as basic as water—an emergent from two gases—or as complexly marvellous as the human brain. (Worster, 1992, p. 322) 134

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Mumford’s work provides a good example of this proliferation of synergistic entities. He, too, was a confirmed holist who repeatedly mentioned Whitehead and Lloyd Morgan in the same breath (see Mumford, 1970, p. 391). In fact, Lloyd Morgan was a friend and fellow student of Geddes’ and there are indications that to a large extent they developed the concept of emergence together (Meller, 1980, pp. 202–3). Mumford explicitly treats the city as an emergent entity. In the transition from village to city the separate occupational cultures become interconnected, giving rise to a whole new level of complexity. Or to put it in more organic terms, little communal village cells, undifferentiated and uncomplicated, every part performing equally every function, turned into complex structures organized on an axiate principle, with differentiated tissues and specialized organs, and with one part, the central nervous system, thinking for and directing the whole. (Mumford, 1961, p. 34) Holism and ecology Both Whitehead and Smuts sought to establish a viable alternative to the mechanist and materialist world view which they held responsible for all social ills, from environmental pollution to militarism. But as Peter Bowler rightly concludes at the end of his History of the Environmental Sciences: ‘We must be extremely careful of claims that alternative, holistic or organismic theories will necessarily reinforce more humane values and a greater respect for the environment’ (Bowler, 1992, p. 551). As he convincingly demonstrates, these alternative theories are no more immune to totalitarian excesses than the established theories they so adamantly oppose. To illustrate this thesis I will now briefly recapitulate the vicissitudes of the two most prominent centres of metaphysical holism: the circle around the German journal Bios and the ‘Ecology Group’ at the University of Chicago. In Germany under the National Socialists, holism became the dominant tendency in biology. The group around the zoologist and Marxist Julius Schaxel was sidelined by the regime and their publication Abhandlungen zur Theoretischen Biologie was shut down and replaced by Bios. Contributors to this new journal included Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Hans Driesch, Jakob von Uexküll and the 135

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ecologists Karl Friederichs and August Thienemann. The publisher of Bios was Adolf Meyer-Abich, who in 1938 published a German translation of Smuts’ Holism and Evolution. In an extensive Foreword to this translation Meyer-Abich pressed home his plea for a turn towards holism by invoking the prevailing sense of crisis. The liberal-democratic and socialist-marxist ideologies stemming from the ideas of the French revolution lie in ruins, together with their underlying mechanist-materialistpositivist philosophies which, like the political ideals of the French revolution, have their roots in Enlightenment. (Quoted in Küppers, 1978, p. 75) The methodological reductionism of the natural sciences was seen as one of the causes of the decline in community spirit and the attendant alienation and isolation. The mechanist and materialist scientific ideal had robbed nature of all intrinsic value and plunged society into a dark pit of chaos. This ideal had therefore to be replaced by a new world view, one in which nature was once again conceived of as an all-embracing unity. As a genuine cosmos, according to Meyer-Abich, nature was teleological in character. The goal to which the individual phenomena were (or should be) directed was the maintenance and development of the whole. This pursuit was grounded in a plan that Meyer-Abich ascribed to God. He explicitly referred to the total world organism as a permanent creation of God (see Meyer-Abich, 1989, p. 323). For the Bios holists, too, teleology and theology went hand in hand. The science upon which they chose to ground their new Weltanschauung was ecology. With the help of ecology, they believed, the progressive fragmentation of the sciences could be brought to a halt. Its significance as a binding and synthesizing force stretched beyond the natural sciences to include the social and human sciences. In the Bios circle, this view was advocated with particular fervour by Karl Friederichs. Sociology, for instance, also has its ‘ecology’, and the ecological point of view is accessible to any other science so long as the phenomenon under study is not wrenched loose from the greater whole. Thus arises the possibility of a reunification of the sciences into one single science. (quoted in Oechsle, 1988, p. 21) 136

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According to Friederichs, the ecological outlook could be applied to all areas of life: ‘protection of the national heritage, nature conservation, town planning, the people as a community, the economy as an organism, etcetera’ (ibid., p. 21). The political philosophy of holism was expressly directed against liberal individualism which, with its emphasis on self-interest, was blamed for all the symptoms of disintegration that threatened to undermine social life. Liberalism’s mistake is to regard the individual as the constitutive element of any form of social association; whereas even in the case of the group or the community, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The message is clear: the individual must set aside his self-interest and make himself wholly subservient to the group or community of which he forms a part. We have already come across this message in our discussion of Whitehead, where he cites the Brazilian forest—a ‘triumph of the organization of mutually dependent species’—as a model for human society, a triumph that can only be achieved if we are prepared to put up with the loss of individual opportunities for growth. Smuts is even less unequivocal on this issue. Throughout the entire range of organic nature one is impressed with the essential selflessness, the disregard of self, and the transcendence of self in the reproductive process, which harnesses the individual to the needs of the race, exhausts its reserves of strength, and often costs it its life. On that process is stamped, as on the very heart of Nature, the principle of sacrifice, of the subordination of the part to the whole, of the individual to the race or type. (Smuts, 1927, p. 83) This message bears an unmistakably reactionary stamp. The existence of conflicts of interest in society is denied and the total subjection of the individual to the state and fatherland justified. The remark made by Klaus Michael Meyer-Abich, son of the Bios publisher, to the effect that the political philosophy of holism was unacceptable to the National Socialists must therefore be taken with more than a few grains of salt (Meyer-Abich, 1989, p. 326). Whatever the case, the fall of the Nazi regime also spelled the end for metaphysical holism in Germany. On this point, a comparison with the adventures of philosophical holism in America becomes instructive. The first American ecologist 137

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to connect an organicist philosophy of nature with the theory of emergent evolution was Whitehead’s Harvard colleague, William Morton Wheeler. Wheeler—who was an acknowledged world authority in the field of social insects—sided with Whitehead in his fervent denunciation of liberal individualism with all its disastrous effects on social cohesion and stability. The lesson which according to Wheeler could be drawn from his studies of ant and termite colonies was that the chances of survival of a community are wholly dependent on the unselfish and unconditional subservience of its members to the greater whole, of their readiness to exercise selfdiscipline, self-denial and self-sacrifice. In the 1930s and 1940s, the gospel of metaphysical holism was spread with great enthusiasm by the ‘Ecology Group’ at the University of Chicago, headed by Warder Allee. Following in Wheeler’s footsteps, this research group went in search of a holistic ethic based on an ecological conception of nature. Like Wheeler, Allee and his circle were convinced that co-operation is more advantageous to the community than competition. Allee repeatedly illustrated this view by referring to studies of the effects of poisonous substances on social organisms such as a shoal of fish. If, say, a quantity of colloidal silver is introduced into their environment, the poison will be absorbed by the group as a whole, so that no individual fish receives a lethal dose (see Worster, 1977, p. 327). Observation of nature, the ‘Ecology Group’ claimed, yielded a wealth of proof that evolution is moving inexorably in the direction of ever-increasing integration. They saw this as a source of hope for the future of human society, and one or two even believed that mankind was on the verge of entering the stage of one unified world state. These hopes were rudely shattered by World War II. The Fascist threat painfully exposed the dark side of group conformism and blind discipline. In practice, the ideal of social integration, especially in combination with an appeal for self-sacrifice, turned out to have the potential for clearing the way for a totalitarian police state. The ‘Ecology Group’ consequently felt obliged to distance itself somewhat from this ideal and began to stress the importance of diversity and individuality. Wheeler’s ant heaps and termite colonies, which had previously been presented as community models worthy of imitation, quietly disappeared from the holist textbooks. Nor was competition any longer taboo. In view of the totalitarian excesses of an overly integrated society, the group retreated to the position that society could only prosper on the basis of a balance between competition and co-operation. But the 138

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retreat came too late to turn the post-war tide. After Allee’s retirement in 1950, nothing more was heard of the once so productive ‘Ecology Group’, either individually or collectively. In the United States, as elsewhere in the world, the meteoric career of metaphysical holism within ecology had collapsed. But this collapse only affected ecology as a scientific discipline in the strict sense; it was not felt in large areas of the environmental movement nor in important environmental philosophy circles, which in recent decades have helped metaphysical holism to regain immense and still growing popularity. One remarkable aspect of this revival is the fact that the ideological impulse has undergone hardly any change in the intervening period. As Luc Ferry demonstrated with a whole host of quotations in Le Nouvel Ordre Écologique, the deep ecology discourse in particular is steeped in a ‘thirties-style pathos’ characterized by a militant anti-modernism. In a variety of tones, the deep ecologists reiterate the accusations levelled at the Enlightenment by the holists of the interwar years. As ever, the main enemies are the ‘reductionist’ techno-sciences, ‘anthropocentrist’ humanism and ‘consumerist’ liberalism, while ‘formal’ democracy is also seldom spared. In their longing for a clean break with modernity, the deep ecologists keep swinging back and forth between Nostalgia and Utopia, between the romantic predilection for a (premodern) past and the revolutionary craving for a (post-modern) future. These extremist tendencies within deep ecology are ‘both connected to a solid tradition that had its peak some time in the late 1930s’, says Ferry, in a clear reference to Nazism and Stalinism (Ferry, 1995, p. xxi). Social ecologists are generally a good deal more cautious in their handling of the achievements of the Enlightenment than the deep ecologists. To be sure, Bookchin too levels fierce criticism at the Enlightenment, but he at least does so (following the example set by Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialektik der Aufklärung) in the name of the Enlightenment itself. However, it remains to be seen whether Bookchin really pays much more than lip service to the ideals of Enlightenment. Certainly, his attempt to reinvest nature with moral authority and make it the source of guidelines for the construction of the future ‘ecological society’ cannot possibly be reconciled with these ideals. The quest for a new—naturalist—world view, which to a large extent unites both social and deep ecologists, cannot but be repudiated as extremely regressive in the light of Enlightenment ideals. To bear out this judgement I will end this chapter with a brief discussion of the work of Claude Lefort, in which a clear echo 139

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can be heard of Hannah Arendt’s famous study The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). The totalitarian temptation In his essay ‘La question de la démocratie’ (1983), Lefort states that the desire for an all-inclusive world view should be seen as a reaction to the disintegration of the quasi-organic unity that characterized the society of the ancien régime. At the moment when the transcendental principles in the name of which the sovereign traditionally wielded his power finally lose their validity, the state and society become separated and politics, economy, justice, science and art fall apart. In addition, within each of these discourses there is a tremendous proliferation of rival paradigms. As a result of this decomposition of the societal body the future becomes highly unpredictable and unmanageable for want of a central position or point of view from which the truth about society can be established once and for all. Under democratic conditions, the seat of power formerly held by the sovereign does not disappear but rather becomes ‘Vacant’. Even though the people replace the king as the new sovereign, any reference to the will of the people or to the public interest remains purely virtual since there is no single person who can claim to have a natural or divine right to determine that public will or interest. The will of the people or the public interest cannot possibly be objectified; rather, they serve as an obligatory point of reference in a never-ending debate and as such defy any definitive determination. Power is in the hands of the people, to be sure, but it ‘belongs’ to no one; it retains its transcendent position in a sense, but this position is necessarily vacant. ‘Democracy thus proves to be the historic society par excellence, a society which in its form assimilates and preserves the indeterminate’ (Lefort, 1983, p. 43). It is typical of totalitarian movements, says Lefort, that they try to regain the seat of power by proclaiming themselves (via their leader) the incarnation of the will of the people. To the extent that they are successful in their attempt, a ‘logic of identifications’ becomes operative, which dissolves the divisions and splits that characterize a democracy and causes society to once more assume a quasiorganic appearance. But unlike despotism, totalitarianism can no longer justify its attempt to usurp the vacant seat of power by invoking religious or metaphysical entities. This inevitably leads to a situation in which the power is forced to relinquish its extraterritorial position 140

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and make a home for itself in the heart of society. This it does by raising some rationality or other that is immanent in social life—the rationality of nature or of history for instance—to the level of a political guideline. This causes the power to change into a purely social force characterized by radical complacency and massive intolerance of rival influences. It is here that the magnitude of Lefort’s debt to Arendt becomes evident. In the closing chapter of her book on the origins of totalitarianism, Arendt asserts that this form of government is only able to blossom after the traditional sources of positive law and legitimate authority have dried up. The Utopian models on which totalitarian regimes orient themselves lose their transcendent status and assume an entirely immanent character. Since these models are no longer situated outside or above but within the community, the people or the nation, politics appears as a form of self-creation or self-production, of autopoiesis, the direction of which is dictated by the immanent laws of nature or history as laid down by Darwin or Marx (the ‘Darwin of the science of history’). Totalitarian regimes see themselves as executors of these iron laws: by helping to eliminate inferior races or criminal classes, they give nature or history a helping hand, as it were, speeding up processes that would also run their course without their intervention (Arendt, 1951). These reflections by Arendt and Lefort lend credence to the assumption that the link between holism and totalitarianism does not rest exclusively on historical coincidence but may well be the consequence of an internal relationship. Like their predecessors in the interwar years, the radical ecologists aim to rehabilitate nature as the basis or source of an objective morality, under the motto that ‘Nature knows best’. Such a view instantly raises the question of who is authorized to speak in the name of nature. What could give anyone the right to set themselves up as the mouthpiece, the interpreter of nature? The radical ecologists have a ready answer to this question: it is ecology that can enable us to decipher the book of nature, thereby guaranteeing the objectivity of the desired ethics. By thus elevating ecology to the status of a political guideline, the radical ecologists pursue the ‘naturalistic fallacy’ and threaten to smother a social differend in scientific litigation, with all the totalitarian consequences this entails. The notion that one is basing one’s actions on an objective science of nature or of history has always ended in human catastrophe’ (Ferry, 1995, p. 86). It makes no fundamental difference here whether the science in question is based on mechanist and materialist or, conversely, 141

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organicist and holistic principles. Whether the seat of power is usurped in the name of social-Darwinist, historical-materialist or radical-ecological laws, the power is invariably robbed of its purely virtual and totally indeterminate nature. It follows that, regardless of the good intentions that undoubtedly often motivate it, the call for a new—ecological—world view is a plea best left denied, rejected in the name of a democracy that thrives on differences that can only be temporarily bridged by debate and deliberation. However, the radical ecologists not only display a tendency to smother a social differend in scientific litigation, they also tend to suppress the scientific litigation in question. In other words, they are guilty of double one-sidedness: not only do they turn a deaf ear to all arguments and considerations that are not based on ecology, in effect they also deny certain parties within ecology the right to be heard. This is the subject of Chapter 8.

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In ecology, metaphysical or philosophical holism was totally supplanted after World War II by a methodological or pragmatic holism. Whereas philosophical holism was based on a realistic perspective and strove to design an overall world-view, pragmatic holism opts for a nominalist approach in which the ‘whole’ merely serves as a scientific working hypothesis and a methodologically useful construct (Küppers et al., 1978, p. 76). It is this pragmatic type of holism that underlies systems ecology, which has enjoyed growing popularity since the 1960s. However, systems ecology— which can to some extent be regarded as the successor to pre-war ecology—has not had the field all to itself. Its main rival is evolutionary ecology, which can be traced back to the individualistic concept of association proposed by Henry Allan Gleason, a concept which did not stand a ghost of a chance in the pre-war climate. So, while academic ecology has deviated drastically from its prewar course, radical ecology has never left it: both deep and social ecologists continue to swear by philosophical holism. This has caused a rift between the two currents, the depth of which I want to gauge in this chapter. Radical ecology has revealed itself as a pseudoscience that is increasingly out of step with academic ecology, to which it nevertheless continues to appeal for a legitimization of its assertions and claims. Climax or civilization Possibly the best illustration of the transition from pre-war ecology to systems ecology is to be found in the vicissitudes of the ‘climax’ theory developed by Frederic Clements, a botanist from Nebraska whose renown came to be extended well beyond the borders of 143

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the United States. The climax theory, as the botanist John Phillips among others has pointed out, is reminiscent of Smuts’ philosophical holism. Influenced by Herbert Spencer, Clements regarded plant communities literally as super-organisms subject to a process of succession in the course of which plant species are successively replaced by others. Every vegetation goes through a development, the pattern of which is fixed ‘by nature’. A bare surface is gradually covered as a result of invasion and successful colonization by plant species which follow each other in a well-ordered succession. The earliest pioneers to settle on a patch of dry land, for instance, are algae, mosses and ferns. The humus they deposit creates a suitable environment for grasses and herbaceous plants which eventually oust the pioneers altogether. The victors add to the build-up of humus and in turn pave the way for the shrubs which, having done their bit, abandon the field for the trees. This process continues until a state of equilibrium—which Clements dubbed the ‘climax’— is reached. Clements chose this term not only to indicate that a high point had been reached in the development of a vegetation, but also because of its association with the word ‘climate’. Clements held that each type of climate corresponded to one particular climax formation, such as a forest, grass or desert landscape. The climax formation that Clements was most familiar with as a researcher was the prairie landscape of the Great Plains with its vast expanses of grassland, its herds of bison and pronghorns, its packs of wolves and coyotes, its eagles, owls and rattlesnakes. He witnessed at first hand the destruction of this finely spun web of plant and animal communities as a result of the colonization of the Great Plains during the second half of the nineteenth century. It is a bitter sort of irony, therefore, that this very colonization process should have provided Clements with the model for his dynamic ecology. In his view, the successive stages in the development of a vegetation displayed the same pattern as the successive stages of human colonization: first came the trapper, followed by the hunter and the pioneer, then the homesteader and finally the urbanite. The transition from a primitive to a civilized society, which elsewhere had taken eons, was accomplished here at a breathtaking speed. The irony of the equation lies in the fact that the two developments were in fact antithetical. Between the natural process of succession leading up to a stable and permanent climax and the process of human civilization there was an irreconcilable conflict. The one process could only advance at the expense of the other, something which became obvious for all to see and feel during the Dust Bowl that 144

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was to virtually halt agricultural activity on the Great Plains, the much-vaunted breadbasket of the world. On 14 April 1934 Texas was hit by a vast blizzard of sand which blotted out the sun and covered the land with drifts up to twenty feet high. Less than a month later, on 10 May, it was Chicago’s turn to be hit by a tornado which dumped an estimated twelve million tons of plains dirt on the city. Two days later the tornado reached the eastern seaboard, with dust finding its way into the White House and even falling on ships standing out at sea. And this was only the beginning of a long series of sand storms that sifted into each and every house along their way, blanketed the crops in the field and flattened all fences and hedges. In 1934, twenty-two such sand storms were counted, the number increasing in the following years from 40 in 1935 and 68 in 1936 to 72 in 1937 before at last they began to tail off. As such, sand storms were nothing new on the Great Plains. In fact, they occurred more or less regularly during prolonged periods of drought. The Dust Bowl, too, was preceded by an extremely dry period. But the sand storms of the 1930s were unprecedented in terms of frequency and ferocity. Something else had to be the matter besides drought alone. The explanation for this new phenomenon came from conservationists and professional ecologists whose expertise was, for the first time in American history, reflected in government policy. They were unanimous in pointing the finger at man for having destroyed the original vegetation of grama and buffalo grass with his ploughs, tractors and harvesters, thereby giving free play to the erosive influence of the wind. They felt that man should retreat from large areas of the Great Plains and allow nature to restore the balance. This view was inspired chiefly by Clements’ theory, in which climax and civilization were represented as essentially incompatible. Taken to its logical extreme, however, the theory leads to a paralysing dilemma, either to perish along with nature or reverse the course of human civilization and renounce many of its technical achievements. In view of this unpalatable message it is no wonder that Clements’ theory came under heavy fire in the course of the 1930s. Clements’ chief opponent was Arthur G.Tansley, a prominent botanist from Oxford. Tansley was convinced that any single climatic region could give rise to not one but several types of vegetation and proposed replacing Clements’ ‘monoclimax’ theory by a ‘polyclimax’ theory. But what bothered Tansley most was the fact that Clements portrayed man as an exclusively negative force in 145

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nature. Though Tansley acknowledged that man was increasingly upsetting existing ecosystems, he also believed that man was capable of forming new ones. In Britain, where Tansley conducted his field work, but also on the European continent and elsewhere, the original wilderness had long been replaced by ecosystems incapable of autonomous reproduction and requiring permanent human effort for their maintenance. Tansley refused to continue to designate such artificial ecosystems as ‘disturbance climax’ or ‘disclimax’ formations and instead termed them ‘anthropogenic’. These formations, he asserted, could be just as stable and balanced as Clements’ climax formations. Human intervention, in short, was not by definition destructive, which was just as well, since such intervention was absolutely inevitable. Save for a few exotic exceptions, the nature that surrounds us is socially constituted and in such a situation we simply cannot afford to be technophobic (cf. Böhme and Schramm, 1985). Clements himself broke the deadlock to which his theory had led by moderating his position. Recognizing that wheat and cotton farming would continue to be the central economic activity on the grasslands, his later work focused on the need for adjustment to the climate rather than on the preservation of a climax formation. Only if major periods of drought could be accurately forecast could precautionary measures be taken to prevent erosion and sand storms. Clements shifted his attention from botany to meteorology and devised a theory in which the onset of drought was correlated with the diminution of the sunspots, a theory that is still being debated, incidentally. Henceforth he considered it to be the ecologist’s task to provide the expertise that would enable people to deflect or retard the process of succession for their own benefit but in a more responsible manner. This change of course implied that Clements no longer held social progress to be irreconcilable with natural succession and, consequently, no longer clung to the ideal of a pristine nature engaged in permanent battle with human interference. The radical ecologists did not follow Clements in this but remained faithful to the old course. They have held on to the image of an ‘immaculate’ nature that must be protected against human intervention (read ‘rape’). The emblem par excellence of this ‘free’ nature, which is also emblazoned on the banners of many factions in the environmentalist movement and environmental philosophy, is the climax or primeval forest. It is this formation, which was accorded so much respect by Whitehead, that Bookchin has raised to the 146

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status of a model for the organization of society. ‘A climax forest is whole and complete as a result of the same unifying process—the same dialectic—that a particular social form is whole and complete’ (Bookchin, 1982, p. 32). ‘New Ecology’ In recent years, environmental philosophy’s appeal to ecology has become less and less credible. In contemporary ecology itself, Clements’ views have been brushed aside as being theoretically unproductive and empirically untenable. This holds true for systems ecology—where Clements’ climax theory, stripped of its mythical overtones and metaphysical connotations, has to some extent survived—and it holds true to an even greater extent for evolutionary ecology, the arch-rival of this heir to Clements’ theory. While completely ignoring evolutionary ecology, the radical ecologists in environmental philosophy have mixed feelings about systems ecology. Systems ecology does have some attraction for these environmental philosophers in view of its links with Clements’ theory. However, what they ultimately find objectionable is the explicitly mechanicist appearance that systems ecology assumed as soon as it renounced philosophical holism in favour of a pragmatic type of holism. Like the concept of an ‘anthropogenic climax’, the term ‘ecosystem’ comes from Tansley. He coined the term in 1935 in a discussion with the aforementioned Phillips, who had brought to light the correspondence between Clements’ climax theory and Smuts’ philosophical holism. Phillips’ views, wrote Tansley, ‘remind one irresistibly of the exposition of a creed—a closed system of religious or philosophical dogma. Clements appears as the major prophet and Phillips as the chief apostle, with the true apostolic fervour in abundant measure’ (in Bowler, 1992, p. 525). It was precisely because of its dogmatic character that holism became a massive obstacle to the progress of ecology as a scientific discipline. In Tansley’s view, their pronounced organicism prevented holistic ecologists from adequately conceptualizing the interaction between living creatures and their non-living environment. Inorganic environmental factors cannot, after all, be regarded as analogous to organisms. The concept of biotic communities as super-organisms was consequently too narrow to serve as a central category in ecology and should therefore be replaced by the concept of the ecosystem which encompassed both biotic and abiotic elements. 147

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Tansley derived the concept of systems from natural science, where it had begun to play an increasingly important role since the advent of thermodynamics. In keeping with this physicalist interpretation he took a nominalistic rather than a realistic view of ecosystems, which thus came to be seen not as concrete objects but as abstract constructs. In Tansley’s view, ecosystems were part of a hierarchically structured totality of systems ranging from the atom at the one extreme to the universe at the other. In the second half of the 1930s, Ludwig von Bertalanffy also attempted, wholly independently of Tansley, to introduce the natural science concept of the system into biology. Bertalanffy, who was the first to distinguish between philosophical and pragmatic holism, started out as a member of the Bios circle but in 1939 he founded his own publication, significantly entitled Abhandlungen zur exakten Biologie. In his ‘general systems theory’ of 1949, Bertalanffy successfully applied the thermodynamics of open systems, developed in 1929 by Defay, to organisms and their interaction with the environment. Together with Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics and Shannon and Weaver’s information theory, this general systems theory gave a powerful impulse to the emergence of ‘New Ecology’. Another, no less powerful impulse came from production biology, a branch of biology in which economic considerations traditionally predominated. Its central concern was how to optimize harvests in agriculture, forestry and fishing. In order to answer this question nature was viewed primarily as one great food chain consisting of producers (green plants), consumers (herbivores, carnivores and omnivores) and decomposers (bacteria and fungi). Production biology took a decisive turn with the identification of energy as the essential currency in the economy of nature. This discovery paved the way for the integration of production biology with the thermodynamics of open systems. This step was taken by fresh water ecologist Raymond Lindeman. In ‘The Trophic-Dynamic Aspect of Ecology’, an article published after his premature death in 1942, Lindeman explicitly adopted Tansley’s physicalist notion of the ecosystem as the fundamental unit of ecology. This enabled him to posit energy as the common denominator under which both biotic and abiotic components could be classified. There was considerable opposition to the publication of Lindeman’s article—‘a watershed in the history of ecology’ (McIntosh, 1991, p. 197)—and it was only made possible by the support of his teacher Evelyn Hutchinson, who was to make a major mark on ‘New Ecology’ after World War II (see Epilogue). 148

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The integration of systems theory with production biology went hand in hand with the introduction in ecology of mathematical models, causal analysis and experimental research methods. Ecology changed once and for all from a descriptive and comparative science in the tradition of classical natural history into an exact science modelled after modern natural science. It was a change that had a profound impact on the self-image of ecologists: whereas previously they had approached nature with a great deal of reverence, looking at it for both moral and social inspiration, they now began to investigate it primarily with a view to resource management. This shift naturally horrified old-style naturalists, eloquently represented by W.M.Wheeler, who accused the modern professionals of assuming a ‘gangster’ attitude towards nature, ‘so eager are they to assault, scalp or rape her’ (in Worster, 1992, p. 325). The fact that this shift from moral orientation to nature management is not always readily perceptible is undoubtedly due in part to the holistic rhetoric employed by some proponents of systems ecology. A case in point is Eugene Odum, whose classic Fundamentals of Ecology of 1953 has contributed more than any other work to the spread of this approach. Although Odum belongs to the same tradition as Clements, he followed Lindeman and Hutchinson in swapping his organic metaphors for economic ones. As a result, nature now appeared as ‘a corporate state, a chain of factories, an assembly line’ (ibid., p. 313). So despite its holistic rhetoric, ‘New Ecology’ has all the mechanicist undertones of classical physics. It, too, is inherently technological, producing forms of knowledge that could be instrumental in resource management. In classical physics nature was represented as a working machine after the prototype of the steam engine. Systems ecology works with only a slightly more sophisticated model, the bio-cybernetic machine that regulates itself via the transmission of energy, matter and information. This model allows for a more circumspect approach to nature management than the old one. Since systems ecology has evolved from a monocausal to a multicausal approach, and since it no longer assumes the independence of the many different variables but instead highlights their interdependence, it is better equipped than classical physics to predict and prevent unintended side-effects in the form of disturbances to the equilibrium (Van den Daele and Cramer, 1985). This pragmatic type of holism proceeds in a no less reductionist fashion than the classical natural sciences but its reductionism is of an entirely different order. Classical natural science involved a 149

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reduction to elements, such as atoms or molecules, that are similar in a material sense. Modern ecology, on the other hand, deals with components that are similar in a functional sense, because they perform the same function in an ecosystem, such as that of producers, consumers or decomposers. This type of reduction allows for a trade-off between organisms performing the same functions with a view to maximizing the biomass yield (Trepl, 1983, pp. 9 and 10). Social ecology as pastiche It is precisely because of its reductionist nature that systems ecology is denounced by Bookchin. If we interpret all of nature exclusively in thermodynamic terms, as a system of energy transmission, he writes, we succumb to a conception that is no less inadequate than Newton’s interpretation of the world as a mechanical clockwork. Inadequate, because both conceptions are one-eyed versions of the truth, not of truth in its ‘wholeness’ and ‘roundedness’. ‘Both reduce quality to quantity; both are “world views” in search of mathematical equations; both tend toward a shallow scientism that regards mere motion as development, changes as growth, and feedback as dialectic’ (Bookchin, 1980, p. 88). The Newton of thermodynamics in ecology, according to Bookchin, is Eugene Odum’s brother and collaborator Howard Odum. He treats life forms exclusively as reservoirs and conduits of energy, not as Variegated organisms that exist as ends in themselves and in vital developmental relationships with each other’ (ibid.). Bookchin berates the acolytes of systems ecology for failing to see through its holistic rhetoric and, together with Fritjof Capra, hailing it as the vehicle of a new spiritualism. Ironically, far too many well-intentioned people who are rightly dissatisfied with the linear thinking, the despiritizing formulas, and above all, the mechanical materialism of traditional science have unknowingly turned to its opposite face—a mechanical spiritualism that subtly betrays them with a different rhetoric to the very world view they have rejected. (Ibid.; cf. Bookchin, 1990, p. 68) Bookchin is right here in pointing out the ambivalent character of systems ecology, an ambivalence to which it owes much of its ideological appeal. Its holistic slant causes systems ecology to portray man as part of a greater whole to which he must adapt and submit 150

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or else face self-destruction. This account has given rise to a veritable renaissance of mysticism, even to downright occultism. At the same time, however, it holds out the promise of something like a ‘soft’ super-technology by which the whole can be managed more responsibly than by means of traditional technology. Insofar as this technology takes its cue from the functioning of ecosystems themselves, its interventions appear as ‘natural’, as if nature were managing and directing itself with the aid of technology. This cross between a humble holism and a presumptuous scientism can also be found among the Dutch nature developers, who get a warm glow from the idea that it might be possible to produce and plan ‘primeval’ nature (see the Epilogue). Gerhard Gamm sees this hybrid character as a direct consequence of what he calls the ‘aporia of cybernetics and systems theory’. This aporia lies in the fact that whereas man as organism is but an insignificant element of the system, man as theoretician and technician is able to direct this system from the outside and thus assume a quasi-divine position (Gamm, 1985, p. 53). Because of its hybrid nature, systems ecology exposes environmental activists and nature conservationists to temptations— temptations to which Bookchin has chosen not to succumb. In the face of its pragmatic holism, he clings unreservedly to philosophical holism, which lands him and his following among environmentalists and environmental philosophers in a paradoxical situation. As Worster rightly notes, they continue to argue their case with an appeal to the scientific authority of ecology. Like Whitehead, Wheeler, and Allee, they argue that science, rightly understood, points the way toward a naturalistic ethic of interdependence. But more often than not, the ecological text they know and cite is either of their own writing or a pastiche from older, superseded models. Few appreciate that the science they are eagerly pursuing took another fork back yonder up the road. (Worster, 1992, p. 332) Just how great a distance ecological science has put between itself and radical ecology becomes clear when one considers the second important post-war trend: the emergence of evolutionary ecology. Evolutionary ecology not only employs a wholly different image of nature than systems ecology, it also provides a basis for a wholly different nature policy. Unable to swallow either this image or this 151

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policy, the radical ecologists have elected to ignore the theory altogether, an ostrich tactic that threatens to stifle social debate on alternative future scenarios. The fable of the climax The systems ecology approach is sometimes also referred to as ‘neoClementsian’. What connects Odum to Clements is the shared view that nature will always tend to a stable equilibrium and that it is bound to reach this static situation and maintain it indefinitely, that is, so long as its natural course of development is not disturbed by human intervention. Odum and his followers conceive of nature as a machine operating at a stationary level and obeying only a limited number of natural laws. Like a machine, an ecosystem undisturbed by human activities has no history and undergoes no unpredictable or irreversible changes. This static vision of nature is relegated to the land of fables by an increasing number of ecologists. Their views are expressed with great eloquence in a book by Daniel Botkin published in 1990 under the significant title Discordant Harmonies. Wherever we look for stability, Botkin notes, we find change. Undisturbed nature is not stable, either at the level of populations or at that of ecosystems, whatever time interval or spatial scale we care to choose. The old representation of a static landscape lingering on forever like a single musical chord must be abandoned. The true idea of a harmony of nature…is by its very essence discordant, created from the simultaneous movements of many tones, the combination of many processes flowing at the same time along various scales, leading not to a simple melody but to a symphony at some times harsh and at some times pleasing. (Botkin, 1990, p. 25) One of the many fascinating examples Botkin uses to illustrate this view concerns a primeval or climax forest, the pre-eminent emblem for many nature developers and environmental philosophers. In the early 1950s Rutgers University bought a forest that was considered unique in view of its wholly virginal state. Hutcheson Memorial Forest, as the forest was baptized, was held to be a climax community of plants and animals living in perfect harmony with the surrounding environment, a harmony that would echo down the centuries, as 152

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long as the forest was left to itself and shielded from human intervention. But in the late 1960s something happened to defy these expectations: the species composition of the forest changed. The oak and hickory trees that had previously dominated the forest slowly but surely gave way to sugar maple. Research unearthed a number of facts which undermined the myth of the untouched primeval forest. Apart from indigenous species, the forest was found to accommodate a wealth of exotic species that had once been imported for their decorative value from Norway, China and Japan and whose seeds had been transported into the forest by the wind, birds and mammals. An analysis of year rings indicated, furthermore, that the forest had in the past, before human settlement, been hit by fires at an average rate of once every decade. It was this to which the forest owed its composition: oaks and hickories were more resistant to fire than maple trees. There were other indications that prior to the arrival of the white colonists the Indians had been in the habit of setting fire to the forest occasionally to get rid of the undergrowth that hampered them when hunting. Interestingly, some ecologists have also claimed that the stability of the Great Plains was due not to extensive drought but to the fires lit by Indians intent on expediting the buffalo hunt (see Worster, 1992, p. 245; Bowler, 1992, p. 508; Graber, 1995). As such, Hutcheson Memorial Forest turned out to be anything but a prime example of primeval forest; its composition was partly the result of human intervention and without further intervention it was destined to lose its ‘original’ form and composition. Stability versus persistence The idea that change is more ‘natural’ than stability is common currency among the evolutionary ecologists, including Botkin. Evolutionary ecology goes back to the individualistic community concept which Henry Allan Gleason opposed to the organicist views of his countryman Clements as early as 1917. According to Gleason, an association of plants or animals cannot possibly be likened to an organism. The development of associations cannot be explained or predicted by means of a few laws, but exhibits a non-deterministic and distinctly historic character. Every association is the outcome of a combination of migration patterns and environmental factors which works out differently in each instance and is therefore totally unique. Between the different associations there are only fluid transitions, not the welldefined boundaries that would justify a comparison with organisms. 153

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Among his colleagues, Gleason was seen, in his own words, as a ‘good man gone wrong’ and his arguments were ignored or even ‘pulverized’ (McIntosh, 1991, pp. 137 and 265). This state of affairs was to change dramatically around 1950, when the holistic community concept lost its dominant position almost overnight to the individualistic concept and vanished completely from the ecological debate. Since then, it has only survived in popular literature, where it has nevertheless acquired an influence with the emergence of the environmentalist movement that may well be greater than it was in the days when it was still the subject of serious scientific debate. (Trepl, 1987, p. 175) Taking their cue from Gleason, the evolutionary ecologists gave up the ‘top down’ approach, in which the parts are viewed from the whole, and replaced it with a ‘bottom up’ approach, starting from the individual populations and ending up at the associations which they jointly form. On the basis of this approach the evolutionary ecologists have found that the stability of ecosystems decreases as the number of populations increases. Hence, diversity and stability are found to be inversely related, a proposition that fully contradicts the systems ecologists’ views on the matter. The key concept employed by evolutionary ecologists is not stability but ‘persistence’, referring to the capacity of ecosystems to endure under changing circumstances by diverting into different states. Persistent ecosystems do not tend toward one stable state but pass through a series of different states, depending on the threats and challenges confronting them over the course of time. Whereas systems ecologists use insights taken from classic thermodynamics to underpin their account of nature, evolutionary ecologists appeal to irreversible thermodynamics, which finds its objects in situations that are ‘way out of balance’. Living systems behave like dissipative structures with a dynamic and essentially unstable nature. Their development cannot possibly be explained or predicted with the help of a limited number of physical laws but only in terms of their own specific history (Kwa, 1986). Ostrich politics The radical ecologists’ pertinent refusal to cast even the briefest 154

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glimpse at evolutionary ecology seems to be inspired by unadulterated fear. If one were to admit that change is not only inevitable but in many cases even desirable, would one not let all hell loose, would one not take the lid off a Pandora’s box, leaving only the hope of being able to prevent the environmental catastrophe behind? If natural ‘order’ is best understood as a temporary stabilization of processes that are primarily chaotic and dynamic, what sense does it make to speak of an ecological balance? For radical ecology, the potential implications of this shift in ecological theory are important. If in fact there is no such balance, and if natural processes are constantly in flux, why should anyone take seriously radical ecology’s warning that the practices of advanced technological societies are throwing nature ‘out of balance’? (Zimmerman, 1994, p. 12) This danger is real enough, but we cannot escape dangers by putting our heads in the sand. There is an element of opportunism in constantly invoking the cognitive authority of ecology in order to lend one’s own conceptions an aura of scientificity while handing the general public a text that is little more than a pastiche of threadbare speculations. Ecology then becomes little more than a whip to keep one’s own ranks closed and force one’s cause on others as if it were an undisputable and solemn truth that is all the more true for having received the blessing of the scientific community. If the controversy between systems ecology and evolutionary ecology makes one thing clear, it is that the constant appeal to ‘the’ ecology is misleading, to say the least. As an empirical and experimental science, ecology is constantly on the move. Its results are by definition controversial and tentative, so that ecology as such is fallibilist rather than fundamentalist in character. It is precisely because of its unmistakeably scientific approach that it has no option but to refrain from commenting on the true essence of nature. Ecology cannot make statements about nature an sich, let alone justify the use of such unlikely statements to draw conclusions about the organization of our social order or private lives. This does not imply that the findings of ecology can henceforth be brushed aside as irrelevant. On the contrary: if we are to discover what is theoretically and technically possible in the pursuit of a 155

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sustainable society, we simply cannot do without ecology. On the question of what is ethically or aesthetically desirable, however, ecology has no alternative but to remain silent. To answer such questions other language games, vocabularies or genres are required. In order to create the necessary space for such genres we would do well to distance ourselves from radical ecology as it has taken shape within the tradition outlined here, from Geddes and Kropotkin to Mumford and Bookchin. Not only are the social effects of radical ecology unpredictable at best, its philosophical and scientific claims have been declared null and void by the court of history.

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EPILOGUE: TOWARDS A DEMOCRATIC LANDSCAPE

A social dispute is in danger of being smothered in scientific litigation, not only in contemporary environmental philosophy—as we have seen until now—but also in current environmental policy. Since it is the ecologists who dominate the debate on nature and landscape values, nature policies give little if any consideration to ethicalnormative and aesthetic-expressive points of view. Moreover, the scientific litigation is itself repressed: nature policy-making is based one-sidedly on the view of nature that derives from systems ecology while scant justice is done to the view of nature held by evolutionary ecology. I shall illustrate this contention by presenting an interesting brand of nature conservancy that has sprung up in the Netherlands over the past decade: nature development. As the name suggests, the issue is no longer to protect and conserve existing nature, but to produce new nature. The fact that nature development should have arisen in the Netherlands is hardly surprising. The Netherlands is very densely populated, has an intensive agriculture and an expansive chemical sector and, as the delta of several of Europe’s largest rivers such as the Rhine, the Meuse and the Scheldt, it has become the ‘cesspit’ of Western Europe. In response to the progressive impoverishment of nature, the country has seen the emergence of a strong nature conservation movement. The two largest nature conservation organizations, the Vereniging tot Behoud van Natuurmonumenten (Nature Monuments Association, generally called simply Nature Monuments) and the Wereld Natuur Fonds (World Wide Fund for Nature, WWF), boast a membership of 870,000 and 708,000 respectively (out of a total population of some 15 million), while Greenpeace, with 610,000 members, also enjoys considerable support. This involvement by large parts of the population has certainly played an important part in the shift in 157

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official nature policies from a defensive to an offensive approach. The idea of large-scale production of new nature is exciting and promising. It also appears to bear out the view that nature has now, more than ever—and in the Netherlands more than elsewhere— entered ‘the age of its technical reproducibility’, as Gernot Böhme (1992) has said, with a nod to Walter Benjamin. Seen in this light, nature development is expected to do justice to the progressive interweaving of town and countryside, nature and culture, and mesh with attempts in postmodern philosophy (Derrida), social constructivism (Latour) and cyberfeminism (Haraway) to escape once and for all from the binary thought regime by undermining all manner of traditional dichotomies. But alas, things are not what they seem. The ideal behind the large-scale production of new nature is old nature. Everything revolves around the original, unspoilt nature, around ‘primeval nature’ in which there is no place for man or his technological artefacts. The motto of the nature developers is not integration but segregation. The aim is to shield nature from human interference, so that it can once again go its own way. Yet to achieve this in the Netherlands of today paradoxically requires large-scale human intervention. This attempt to drive the devil of technology out of nature with the help of the Beelzebub of human intervention reflects the profoundly ambivalent character of nature development. This ambivalence is already evident in the very expression ‘nature development’, where nature can be read as both genitivus subjectivis and genitivus objectivus. The phrase can refer both to a supreme, quasi-sacred subject—primeval nature— and to a profoundly manipulable object. On the other hand, it is precisely this ambivalence that gives nature development its strength and has allowed it to become the cause célèbre of a wide variety of social groups with diverging and often conflicting interests. In this Epilogue I aim to demonstrate that nature development can be seen and described as an (implicit) form of cultural politics which manages to engage certain social groups while at the same time threatening to sideline other groups to the point where their interests and needs can no longer be voiced in politics. As an introduction to this critique I will first outline the historical context in which the emergence of nature development must be seen. In doing so, I draw on Landscape and Memory (1995), in which Simon Schama advanced the proposition that there have always been two kinds of Arcadia, the pastoral and the primitive. Whereas the primitive Arcadia is inhabited by people who behave like wild animals, the pastoral Arcadia is a place from which all dangerous creatures (such 158

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as the snake and the lion) have been banned and the ideal animals (such as the cow and the bee) behave like conscientious and industrious citizens. Relations between the two representations have always been tense. According to Schama, this tension also makes itself felt within the nature conservation and environmental movements, an observation that also applies to Dutch nature policy, which for decades has swung back and forth between the pastoral and the primitive representation of an ideal landscape. Power to the primitive imagination The Dutch model par excellence of the pastoral representation is the landscape of around 1850, when society was poised on the threshold of large-scale modernization processes. Owing to the highly diversified but also highly stable forms of land use, this landscape offered a variegated panorama and a wide variety of plants and birds. It was this landscape that was embraced, most notably in circles around the Nature Monuments Association, as the model of a successful interplay between social patterns of utilization and natural development processes. In fact, it is a highly cultural-historical landscape in which the hand of man is all-pervasive. After 1850, this landscape underwent several fairly dramatic changes. The sharp rise in population led to urbanization and an increase in traffic and transport. Many canals were dug and, in a relatively short period of time, a dense network of train and tram lines and motorways was constructed. In line with the pastoral representation, the strategy of Nature Monuments has from the very outset been aimed at maintaining the status quo, the main criteria being the existing diversity of (rare) species and the cultural-historical value of the (pre-industrial) landscape. In order to maintain this landscape, human intervention is indispensable. The management of reserves by Nature Monuments therefore comes down to a continuation of traditional techniques such as hunting and fishing, reed and brushwood cultivation, tree planting and felling, mowing and turf cutting, the setting up of duck decoys and the operation of water mills. During the depression years in the 1930s, when vast areas of ‘wasteland’ were reclaimed in the context of unemployment relief works, conflicts arose between the nature conservationists and the farmers. This went hand in hand with the ascent of a primitive wing within the generally pastorally oriented nature conservation movement. The foremost spokesman of this wing was the biologist T.Weevers, 159

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who promoted the view that real nature cannot tolerate human intervention. Taken in a strict sense, this meant that there should be no human management of nature reserves and it presented private nature conservationists with a serious dilemma. By and large, the pursuit of ‘naturalness’, that is to say an undisturbed development of plant and animal communities, was irreconcilable with the demands of exploitation, the significance of cultural-historical landscape elements and the importance of the richness of varieties. This dilemma was resolved by biologist Victor Westhoff. He introduced the concept of ‘half-nature’ to characterize the Dutch landscape, every part of which, he believed, had been shaped by human intervention. If this landscape was to be maintained, he concluded, continued intervention was inevitable. If nature was simply left to run its course, then heaths and marshes, for instance, would degenerate irrevocably and lose their biological diversity. Westhoffs approach overtook that of the primitives around Weevers, allowing the pastoral tradition to regain its prominence in nature conservation in the first decades after World War II (Van der Windt, 1995). However, this did not put an end to the battle between the pastorals and the primitives; between 1975 and 1985 the consensus in the nature conservation movement crumbled once again. Two groups took up opposing positions. Organizations such as the Vereniging Milieudefensie (Environment Defence Association) and the Landelijke Vereniging tot Behoud van de Waddenzee (National Society for the Preservation of the Wadden Sea) reproached the nature conservation movement for assuming an elitist and apolitical stance and ignoring the position of farmers. These (pastoral) organizations favoured the integration of nature conservation and farming and advocated environmentally friendly agriculture. Groups such as Kritisch Bosbeheer (Critical Forest Management) and Kritisch Faunabeheer (Critical Fauna Management) were opposed to such integration and instead advocated a more rigid separation of nature and agriculture. They called on the nature conservationists to stop ministering to ‘degenerate’ nature in the shape of production forests, grasslands and heaths and to concentrate on ‘real’ ‘primeval’ nature. To help natural processes get back into swing, certain starting conditions would, of course, have to be created, but beyond that all human activity should cease. This (primitive) approach to nature conservation, called ‘nature development’, gained the support of the World Wide Fund for Nature, Nature Monuments’ biggest rival, and also had a strong impact on the Natuurbeleidsplan (Nature Policy Plan) adopted by the Dutch 160

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parliament in 1990. This plan centres on the realization of an Ecologische Hoofdstructuur (National Network of Important Ecosystems), a network of ecological core areas with a minimum area of 5 sq kilometres, several smaller areas and the links between them (in the form of stepping stones and corridors). The National Network of Important Ecosystems will eventually cover quite a large area—700 sq km—of the Dutch territory (total surface area 3,500 sq km), which already includes some 450 sq km of designated nature areas. The nature developers’ view of the future reorganization of the Dutch landscape can be clearly seen in their ‘casco’ (basic or ‘stripped’ structure) concept, in which a distinction is made between low and high dynamism functions. Low dynamism functions mainly concern ecological processes, which require a stable environment for sustainable development, whereas high dynamism functions relate primarily to economic processes which require a high degree of flexibility. In essence, the casco concept prescribes the spatial segregation of the two functions: the low dynamism functions are to be clustered together in a landscape framework (i.e. the National Network of Important Ecosystems) and the high dynamism functions in the ‘utility space’. To prevent the fast-turning wheel of the economy from one day crushing the slow-turning wheel of ecology, the Dutch landscape is to be converted into a ‘two-speed landscape’. In order to show how the nature developers have managed to mobilize fairly widespread social support for this view, I shall now turn my attention to the ambivalent character of the concept of nature development. The paradox of nature development The nature developers reject the landscape of 1850 as an objective reference point for nature policy, basing themselves instead on the ‘Ecological Reference’, which indicates what nature would be like in the Netherlands today if it had never been ravaged by human beings. Their particular point of reference is the situation as it is assumed to have existed in the last interglacial era, partly because from a climatological point of view this era is closest to our own times, but more especially because at that time man did not possess long-range weapons (such as the javelin or bow and arrow) and was therefore not yet able to eliminate his natural enemies. The reconstruction of this ‘primeval’ nature relies on geological, physicalgeographical and biological-archaeological research. In addition, research is being carried out into surviving ecological communities 161

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which are very similar in terms of species composition to the ecological communities in Europe during the last interglacial era. Such ecological communities are still to be found in the national parks of India and Sri Lanka and in a clutch of African nature reserves. Man has only a very modest role to play in this primeval nature, namely ‘as a hunter, gatherer or scavenger’, as the main background document to the Nature Policy Plan puts it, without the slightest trace of irony. ‘Even though, ecologically speaking, man is an omnivore, his choice of prey nevertheless puts him in the category of the large predators’ (Natuurontwikkeling, 1989, p. 40). Nature has been going rapidly downhill ever since humankind progressed beyond the primitive stage of hunter, gatherer and scavenger. Whereas the nature aspired to by traditional conservationists depends on the application of old agricultural crafts, the nature championed by nature developers is reconcilable with only the most primitive techniques. However—and this constitutes the main paradox of nature development—this alleged primeval nature has been absent from the Netherlands since 1871 when Beekberger Wood, the last remaining patch of primeval forest, was cut down in a matter of days, and can therefore only be reproduced by technological means. In other words, the romantic ideal of primeval nature rests on a hidden rational practice which might best be described as ‘ecotechnology’. From an ecological point of view the Netherlands is nothing short of a disaster area, according to nature developers. Land reclamation, cultivation, dyke-building and canalization have curbed or completely eliminated various natural processes, such as the flooding and drying up of river forelands. But living nature has also been completely disrupted, say the nature developers: on the one hand, certain species are no longer present in our landscape because of human intervention; on the other hand, our nature is infested with ‘exotics’, plants and animals which ‘by nature’ do not really belong here. The only genuinely autochthonous or indigenous organisms, they claim, are those that arrived in the delta region entirely of their own accord after the last Ice Age. Sheep, for instance, are not among them and neither are pheasants, grouse, house sparrows or housemartins. The presence of such interlopers is regarded as ‘fauna fraud’. Even our sparse woods turn out to consist mainly of exotics like the Canadian Douglas fir and the Japanese larch. This ‘genetic pollution’ by exogenous material is alleged to have had a highly detrimental effect on the vitality of the Dutch forests. 162

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So, not even the vestiges of primeval nature remain in the Netherlands. In order to bring it back, all sorts of dynamic processes will have to be reactivated. One example of this is ‘remeandering’, a process whereby bulldozers are used to reintroduce twists and bends to streams and rivers that were once neatly canalized. To give free reign to the dynamics of wind and water, dozens of summer dykes are breached, layers of clay are cut, parallel ditches are dug and high grounds are raised. Living nature requires a lot of work as well. Nature developers wish to remove exotic creatures and (re)introduce vanished species. Unfortunately, a number of species said to have settled here after the last Ice Age have since died out. This is true of the Irish deer and also of the mammoth, who would presumably have migrated to the lowlands in severe winters. However, good replacements can be found for some species that have become extinct. Thus the Heck ox can serve as a surrogate for the aurochs (†l627) and the konik can do the honours for the tarpan (†1887), the European wild horse. Because the Heck ox is unsuitable for areas where recreational activities are allowed, a human-friendly version is currently being bred: the ‘Ecolander’. Nature development is a purely technological enterprise, as is obvious in the rhetoric accompanying the (retro) breeding and (re)introduction programmes. (Re)introduced animals are being presented primarily as the instruments of a modern style of nature management that is supposedly cheaper and more efficient than traditional nature management. By redeploying large herbivores, grazers (such as cattle), pruners (deer and elk) and ‘intermediate feeders’ (red deer and European bisons) the forests can be prevented from overgrowing, allowing the landscape to develop into a mosaic of open and densely wooded patches with a rich vegetable and animal population. Provided, that is, the reintroduction of large predators such as wolves and lynxes is pursued with equal energy. If this is not done, the herbivores will not disperse sufficiently and the forests will not get a chance to regenerate properly. Just how strongly nature developers cherish an entirely instrumental view of these animals is revealed in the mechanistic metaphors they deploy. Frequent use is made of terms such as ‘tuning the grazing pressure’ exerted by herbivores, or the ‘number regulation’ of these cheap ‘mowing and pruning machines’ by their natural enemies and so forth. Another example of the engineering mentality of nature developers is the way they portray nature as the ‘main contractor’ of nature management. This frequently used phrase betrays just how much this spontaneous, self-regulating, self-ordering 163

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nature that is nominally the highest good, is in fact an out-and-out technological product. The new coalition But it is precisely to this ambivalent combination of a romantic image of nature with a rational planning practice that nature development owes its ideological appeal. Nature development nurtures the hope that action can be taken to stop the deterioration of nature, that it is even possible to make some big gains, while at the same time allaying the fear and loathing many conservationists feel towards technology which is, after all, blamed for the impoverishment of our natural environment. It is this ambiguous, two-way appeal that has enabled nature development to become a strong binding force for widely divergent social groups. The new approach, worked out by a group of young ecologists at the Ministry of Agriculture, Nature Management and Fisheries, was soon enthusiastically adopted by the planners and civil engineers of the Rijksplanologische Dienst (National Land Use Planning Agency) and Rijkswaterstaat (Directorate General for Public Works and Water Management). The latter department, in particular, had run out of work after the completion of the Delta Works and in 1994 it published the report Natuur aan het werk (Nature at Work) which proposed that the nature areas be considerably extended (beyond what had been foreseen in the Nature Policy Plan). Ironically, this proposal centred largely on the cutting of dykes and inundation of polders, some of which had previously been designed and constructed by that very same department. It goes without saying that the proposal was very well received by the dredging and brickmaking industries. The strength of the alliance between government and industry is evident in the energy they have put into the Grensmaasproject (Border Meuse Project), one of the most ambitious nature development projects of the moment. This project is being sold to the general public under the catchy slogan ‘Green for Gravel’, thereby inadvertently revealing the thoroughly technological character of nature development. The project involves a new technique of shallow rather than deep gravel quarrying, a method that has yet to be developed and tested. In addition to certain government sectors, the new approach has been eagerly welcomed by the World Wide Fund for Nature, which in 1996 launched a major campaign under the motto of ‘The Netherlands twice as beautiful’ aimed at doubling the area ‘under nature’ in the Netherlands from 5 per cent to 10 per cent. It is 164

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believed that the land required to achieve this aim can be withdrawn from agriculture, a solution that appeals greatly to a number of leading agriculturalists given the need for drastic reorganization in a sector that has long been in a state of severe crisis. While the aforementioned government agencies see nature development primarily in relation to practical activities such as planning, dredging, digging, heightening and deepening, the WWF aims to enable the Dutch to undergo ‘wilderness experiences’ in their own country. By emphasizing this aspect, the WWF has succeeded in winning the support not only of Dutch Rail but also of the largest touring association ANWB, the very association that happens to represent the interests of the car-borne day tripper. In addition, the WWF plays on public concerns, arguing that new nature creates a favourable business environment and, consequently, employment opportunities. Finally, the WWF has even managed to win over the Nature Monuments Association, previously fiercely opposed to the whole idea, with the argument that nature development is cheaper and more efficient than traditional methods of nature management (i.e. aimed at maintaining the agricultural landscape). The smothered differend But nature development is not only a binding factor in nature policy. It has also been a cause of discord and resistance because its adoption leads to certain groups being excluded from nature policy. The nature developers blame all the trouble and strife that surrounds nature conservation on the existence of different images of nature. ‘My definition of nature is not your definition. The one is just as good as the other. Where will it end? Everything is nature, so nature conservation is always OK. Soon even the farmers will be able to produce nature! Hail to postmodern nature.’ A cheap swindle, the advocates of prehistoric nature will say: ‘We don’t have five definitions of a clean environment, or ten definitions of iron, do we?’ (Vera, 1994). Nature developers present their Ecological Reference as the only objective standard. Such a standard does not put an end to all discussion, however. There is disagreement, for instance, about whether a species such as the European bison was indigenous to the Netherlands, but that is a discussion that can be fought out with scientific arguments—it is not a matter of taste, as in the case of cultural landscapes. (Vera, 1992, p. 22) 165

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It is the very fact that traditional nature conservation took the agrarian, man-made landscape of 1850 as its point of reference that makes it unacceptable to the nature developers. ‘By using the term “nature” as a synonym for situations created by various forms of agriculture, the concept has been given all kinds of subjective and contradictory meanings’ (ibid., p. 19). These quotations demonstrate that the nature developers’ strategy amounts to an attempt to smother the social differend concerning where we as a society want to go with nature, in scientific litigation. It is a strategy that threatens to put the lid on all language games or genres other than those based on ecology. Claiming to be the only ones who can recreate ‘real’ nature, the nature developers exclude other interested parties from nature policy-making. Prominent among those stricken by this fate are all individuals and parties who advocate or have an interest in functional integration rather than segregation. A group of painters and writers, for instance, have expressed the fear that implementation of existing plans to cut the dykes and allow the old polders to be flooded will spell the end for the river landscape as a cultural historical monument. But, more than the historical landscape, it is the modern agrarian cultural landscape that the nature developers really abhor. Their plans present a grave threat, for instance, to farmers who wish to combine their business with nature management. Such ‘farmers’ nature’ fills the nature developers with nothing but loathing. ‘Farmers’ nature is the same as razing the whole Amazon area to the ground and calling the result nature’, says nature developer Frans Vera (1994). And Ed Nijpels, the chairman of the Dutch WWF branch, says farmers’ nature is equal ‘by definition to sickly nature, in need of constant care’. Instead, the WWF opts for nature that can stand on its own feet. ‘A project like the Border Meuse, where the forelands of the Meuse are dug out, now that is nature’ (Volkskrant, 25.2.1995). Ecological and bio-dynamic agriculture, the production of foodstuffs without resorting to chemicals and in harmony with nature, is not to be encouraged therefore. Nature development benefits from intensive agriculture with a high yield per hectare. For only this will free sufficient acreage to be used for new nature. A number of nature conservation organizations, such as the Wadden Sea Society, Environment Defence and the Nature and Environment Foundation, are opposed to further intensification of agriculture and plead for equal treatment of nature and cultural landscapes. It goes without saying that as well as farmers’ nature, village and town nature are likewise in danger of falling victim to the nature 166

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development ideology. The extent to which this ideology has already begun to permeate policies regarding ‘public greenery’ is evident in the complaint uttered by Rob Leopold, one of the most prominent spokesmen of a new generation of Dutch garden artists. Nowadays, if you just say that it’s ecological green management, which comes down to letting things run wild a bit, putting up with a few more dandelions and nettles, you’re sitting pretty because it is not only nice and cheap but also natural. Ecologists often still nurture a prejudice against horticulture, hence also garden art, because it is species management and therefore culture. Plus, ecology is a science. A science is not supposed to have any aesthetic ambitions, for then it becomes recreational and recreation has nothing to do with nature. (quoted in Volkskrant, 25.2.96) The marginality of aesthetic considerations in current nature policy is also evident in the Landscape Report of 1992 which, together with the Nature Policy Plan of 1990, constitutes the basis for specific regional policies in the National Network of Important Ecosystems. This remark may seem at odds with the fact that landscape planning is repeatedly presented as resting on the so-called ‘Three E’s’: (A)esthetic, Ecological and Economic quality. On closer inspection, however, it turns out that these three E’s are not treated equally. This is because the Landscape Report gives pride of place to the ‘casco’ (or ‘stripped’) concept introduced by the nature developers. As we saw earlier, this concept is exclusively concerned with ecology and economics, while aesthetics play no role whatsoever. Or, in the euphemistic wording of the main background study for the Landscape Report: The aesthetic component is not specifically indicated by this concept’ (Sijmons, 1991, p. 30). According to the author, this component cannot be given any substance except, in practice, on the drawing board of the landscape architect whose job it is to link a specific programme to a certain landscape. He compares the relationship between a planning concept and an architectural concept with that between a story and the storyteller. ‘Without a story the storyteller is speechless and without the storyteller the story remains a dead letter’ (ibid., p. 54). In short: aesthetics has no story of its own and does not deserve to be heard at the highest level of planning. Its help is only called in at the moment when the ‘twospeed landscape’ is to be given concrete form. 167

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Ethical considerations tend to be as much ignored as aesthetic considerations in nature development projects. The nature developers, so runs the chief complaint of the Dutch Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, sacrifice the health and welfare of individual animals to their crusade to restore primeval nature. The herds of reintroduced cattle and horses have to undergo a process of ‘de-domestication’. Complementary feeding and veterinary care are withdrawn, exposing them directly to starvation and dehydration, to parasites and predators, all for the sake of regenerating natural selection processes. Under the pressure of these processes they have to learn once again to procreate on their own strength and according to a proper seasonal cycle, to organize themselves into harems and acquire all the skills needed for survival. That a serious ethical problem is at issue here becomes clear when one realizes that on average only some 10 per cent of all reintroduction programmes are successful. The stress and, hence, the mortality among animals subjected to de-domestication, are staggering (Beck, 1995, p. 155). The average holiday-maker and the ordinary nature lover, finally, are also left out in the cold by this policy. Their experience of nature is somewhat scornfully dismissed as irrelevant, as the following quotation demonstrates. In the Netherlands we call the South Limburg hills nature. They look pretty, they are fun to take your children out for a walk without being bothered by all kinds of wild animals, but they have little to do with full-blown nature. Most of our so-called nature areas are disused cultural landscapes. Although the landscape may look quite attractive here and there, Dutch nature is in fact dismantled nature. From an ecological point of view, the Netherlands is a disaster area. (Baerselman and Vera, 1990) But the professional opinions of the nature developers have little in common with the preferences of the general public, as has been confirmed by empirical research into people’s perception and appreciation of landscapes. Apart from the nature landscapes that are the be-all and end-all of the nature developers, people distinguish agricultural landscapes, village landscapes, urban landscapes and industrial landscapes. Another interesting finding is the fact that people tend to experience as natural anything that appears to have grown spontaneously and harmoniously. Thus, old farms, overgrown 168

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dykes and even old city centres create an impression of naturalness. As we have seen, there is a clear tendency in the practice of nature development to smother the social differend concerning what kind of nature and what kind of landscape we want, in scientific litigation. But there is clear evidence of injustice in the scientific litigation itself, too. The nature developers are guilty, in other words, of a double bias: not only do they turn a deaf ear to all arguments not based on ecology, they also make a highly selective use of ecological findings. The one entails the other: the fact that the nature developers are able to present their image of nature as the only objective and scientifically legitimate representation is the very reason why they are also capable of monopolizing the social debate on nature and landscape. Suppressed litigation Scientifically speaking, nature development can be traced back to cybernetics, which flourished in the United States in the early postWorld War II years, in a climate of technocratic optimism. The politicians, having proved unable to cope with the problems of a complex industrial society, were urged to make way for social engineers who would then manage society as a self-regulating machine. One of these technocrats, Evelyn Hutchinson, was to leave an indelible mark on post-war ecology (Taylor, 1988). In a pioneering paper published in 1946, ‘Circular Causal Systems in Ecology’, Hutchinson—‘the acknowledged fountain of much theoretical ecology’ (McIntosh, 1991, p. 287)—distinguished between two closely related approaches, the ‘biogeochemical’ and the ‘biodemographic’ approach. Seen from a biogeochemical perspective, the entire biosphere appears as a giant cyclical system of energy, matter and information which is able to maintain a dynamic equilibrium thanks to the presence of a series of feedback mechanisms. This perspective was elaborated in particular by Hutchinson’s student Howard Odum and his brother Eugene Odum (see Chapter 8). They repeatedly compared the biosphere, inclusive of mankind and society, to a complex clockwork. This comparison reappears in the main background study of the Dutch Nature Policy Plan. ‘In complete ecosystems all the wheels in the machinery are in place and everything runs on solar energy without any additional external input’ (Natuurontwikkeling, 1989, p. 39). The biodemographic approach deals with groups or communities of organisms, the so-called ‘populations’. In conformity with the 169

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cybernetic principle underlying both approaches, these populations are also perceived as systems attempting to maintain their stability under ever-changing conditions by means of feedback mechanisms. The biodemographic approach was further elaborated by another of Hutchinson’s students, Robert MacArthur. In the 1960s, in collaboration with Edward Wilson, he developed a theory on the biogeography of islands, the ‘island theory’. Using the size of the island and the distance to the mainland as its main parameters, the theory predicts the number of species on a given island. MacArthur and Wilson, too, assumed a dynamic equilibrium: although the taxonomic composition on the island is subject to continuous change, the number of species (which is determined by the rates of extinction and colonization) remains constant. Since its introduction in the early eighties, the island theory has enjoyed a lightning career in Dutch nature policy. Together with the ecosystems theory, it was used to underpin the National Network of Important Ecosystems, in the sense that nature areas are perceived as ‘islands in a sea of cultivated land’. The theory serves as a basis for the attempt to maximize the size of contiguous nature areas and the number of links between them. All attempts to test the island theory empirically have so far failed to come up with any conclusive evidence and the theory is still fiercely contested nowadays. This holds true with even greater force for the application of the theory to cultural landscapes, where the boundaries between the isolated nature areas and the surrounding environment are of course far less well defined than in the original situation. Three discussions currently in progress touch on the essential aspects of the island theory (Shrader-Frechette and McCoy, 1993). First there is the question of which is better: a large area or a multitude of smaller areas, a debate also referred to by the acronym SLOSS (Single-Large-Or-Several-Small). Second, there is the question of whether the spatial distribution of the nature areas makes any significant difference. This discussion is also referred to by an acronym: CONC, for Circular-Or-Not-Circular. And third, there is the question of whether the advantages of wildlife corridors outweigh the disadvantages (Mann and Plummer, 1995). Corridors are intended to increase the survival chances of populations by creating links that facilitate a two-way exchange of individuals. However, corridors also allow greater freedom of movement for undesirable organisms such as exotic species, predators, viruses and parasites. What is more, a free exchange of genetic material can pose a threat to genetic diversity. 170

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But there is another reason to be sceptical. There is something half-hearted about the way the nature developers exploit the legacy of Hutchinson. As already discussed in greater detail in Chapter 8, post-war systems ecology is often referred to as ‘neo-Clementsian’; while it proceeds on holistic premises too, this holism is of a methodological rather than a metaphysical nature. Naturally, therefore, systems ecology discards as unscientific the question of which specific species actually belong to a certain ecosystem. The same holds true for the related island theory which takes no interest in the identity of the species but only in their number. Yet it is this very question that is constantly exercising the nature developers’ minds. Did the European bison or the lynx live here in the past or did they not? If not, would these species have settled here if mankind had not prevented them from doing so? One detects an allergy to exotics and an obsession with the truly autochthonous and authentic. Primeval nature is the be-all and end-all. In order to regain this lost primeval nature, expensive research is conducted into ecosystems from far-off times, or in far-off regions where shreds of wilderness are thought to have survived. This restless quest for the untrodden and original shows how the nature developers are forever swinging back and forth between a metaphysical and a methodological holism, between a romantic image of nature (where there is room for only the most primitive forms of technology) and a rational planning practice (making use of the most advanced forms of ecotechnology). It was already noted above that nature development owes its ideological appeal largely to an ambivalent combination of a romantic image of nature and a rational planning practice; this ambivalence, it now turns out, can be traced straight back to its theoretical basis. However, nature development is not only theoretically ambivalent but also one-sided, since nature developers systematically turn a deaf ear to scientific alternatives. What the two approaches that determine current nature policy— systems ecology and the islands theory—have in common is the underlying image of nature as a self-regulating system. Both cherish the image of an orderly, balanced nature which in principle is fully knowable and manageable. Time and coincidence, irreversible and unpredictable events have no place in either of these theories. It is no accident that Sharon Kingsland concludes her book on the history of population ecology, Modelling Nature (1985), with a chapter devoted to the island theory entitled ‘The Eclipse of History’. The basic principle of nature development is ‘actualism’ which ‘implies that natural processes are timeless and will always reappear once 171

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the necessary conditions are in place. When this is the case, nature will resume working in its own way’ (Vera, 1992, p. 23). This static view of nature has been disproved by evolutionary ecology (see Chapter 8). According to evolutionary ecology, nature is less predictable, hence less manageable and controllable than the systems ecologists make out. Its view of nature is stochastic rather than deterministic. The importance of stochastic processes is also acknowledged by the nature developers, but only on the consideration that species that form part of stable ecosystems often fail to spread and are therefore liable to die out if they become trapped in an island situation owing to loss or fragmentation of territory. In order to keep these species ‘on the move’ they have to be exposed (once again) to natural processes ‘in the form of local catastrophes such as forest fires, storms, but also in the form of biotic dynamics such as grazing, sod cutting and predation’ (Natuurontwikkeling, 1989, p. 43). And wherever nature fails to do the job, the developers do not mind lending a hand, for instance by felling trees left standing by storms. The reasoning behind such practices is that while (stable) ecosystems remain the ideal and the touchstone, stochastic processes have to be ‘tolerated’ insomuch as the ‘completeness’ of these ecosystems is seriously damaged. A recent evaluation of the longest-running nature development project in the Netherlands, the Duurse Waarden, appears to bear out the evolutionary point of view. Five years after the start of this project, nature was found to behave far more capriciously in the wild than on the drawing board. One of the most explicit aims had been the preservation of the rare corn crake, but this very bird was the first to go. The attempt to reintroduce the sandmartin also foundered; the bird refused to make its abode in the steep wall specially constructed for it. Moreover, less grass and marshland and more woodland developed than had been expected. To top it all off, the Scottish highlanders and Iceland ponies proved useless because of their unpredictable grazing habits and are now being replaced by Galloways in the hope that these will function better. The fact that the natural mowing and pruning machines do not behave in accordance with policy ecologists’ expectations had already become apparent earlier in the Biesbosch marshland. The beavers set out here were supposed to set to work on the willows and so create room for rare species of trees. However, the beavers refused to do the job they were hired for—thinning out the thick willow brushwood—and instead feasted on the selfsame rare species they had been intended to clear the way for. 172

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Concluding remarks Evolutionary ecology not only employs a different image of nature than systems ecology, it also holds out the promise of a less rigid, more flexible nature policy. This is because evolutionary ecology takes more account of the increasing complexity of the interaction between nature and society than systems ecology. While systems ecology views functional disentanglement as an essential precondition for a healthy nature, evolutionary ecology sees nature as open to human design, with all the opportunities but also, of course, all the dangers this entails. Evolutionary ecology also compares favourably with systems ecology in that it is prepared to acknowledge that science is not in a position unilaterally to lay down the criteria for nature policy (such as the Ecological Reference of the nature developers). Because of its principled openness to other genres and vocabularies, evolutionary ecology is more in tune with a democratic culture than systems ecology, which is impelled by its holistic nature to issue compulsory directives as to how we should interact with nature. Finally, the very awareness that there are diverse visions of nature at work within ecology itself—and that references to ‘the’ ecology are therefore highly deceptive and misleading—can give a new impetus to the social debate about nature. The idea is not to gag the ecologists, but to give the final word back to society. It is not the ecological but the democratic landscape that should be the ideal of nature policy. This ideal appears to have gained a little more ground recently. The resistance put up by farmers and inhabitants of prospective nature development areas has sparked off debates here and there as to the whys and hows of nature development. The most important debate to date in the Netherlands was organized by the Rathenau Institute, whose mission it is to stimulate public debates on the social and ethical aspects of technological developments. The debate on nature development, which took four months and was organized in a fashion similar to that of the American citizens’ juries, was conducted by a 32-member panel. In the course of its work the panel, composed of laymen and experts, also visited four nature development areas and had in-depth discussions with inhabitants and users. The concluding debate was held on 1 July 1996, the very day on which the World Wide Fund for Nature and its allies staged the final manifestation of their promotion campaign, ‘The Netherlands twice as beautiful’. 173

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In its concluding statement, the panel stated that the debate on nature policy is unjustifiably dominated by biologists and ecologists and that nature development plans are too often implemented in a top-down manner by government. The panel demanded that in future greater weight be given to social priorities and local potential and argued the case for an open planning procedure which expressly permits discussion of different solutions and scenarios. The panel also came out strongly against an overly narrow view of nature in which all the emphasis is on ‘spontaneous nature’, advocating instead a broader perspective which leaves room for urban nature and (traditional as well as modern) farmers’ nature. If this message, which has also been heard in other recent debates, were finally to reach the policy makers, then nature development could become an exciting and adventurous project, a—democratic—experiment in the true sense of the word.

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181

INDEX OF NAMES

Abercrombie, L. 5, 75 Adorno, Th.W. 120, 139 Alcidamas 110 Allee, W. 138–9, 151 Andrea, J.V. 46 Arendt, H. 11, 12–14, 21, 39, 92, 107, 125, 140–1 Aristotle 25, 26, 96, 121–2, 124, 134 Austin, J. 19 Bacon, F. 15 Baerselman, F. 168 Bakunin, M. 84, 112 Barrès, M. 57 Beck, B. 168 Beck, U. 2 Benjamin, W. 158 Bentham, J. 9, 50, 112 Bergson, H. 49, 58, 124, 126 Bertalanffy, L.von 135, 148 Black, J. 29 Boardman, Ph. 63 Bodelschwingh, F.von 81 B?hme, G. 146, 158 Bookchin, M. 1, 5, 18, 52, 68, 91– 98, 100, 109, 116–23, 130, 134, 139, 146–7, 150–1, 156 Botkin, D.B. 152–3 Bowler, P.J. 135, 147, 153 Broussais, F.-J.-V. 33 Brundtland, G.H. 4 Buckingham, J. 46, 71, 73

Callicott, J.B. 7–9 Canguilhem, G. 32 Capra, F. 150 Carpenter, E. 73 Cheney, J. 5, 119 Clark, J. 116, 119 Claval, P. 35 Clements, F. 143–7, 149, 152–3 Coleridge 126 Comte, A. 53–4, 64, 112–13, 115 Conway, J. 56 Cramer, J. 149 Creese, W.L. 87 Crowder, G. 84, 109–10, 112, 114–16 Daele, W.van den 149 D’Eaubonne, F. 94 Darwin, Ch. 28, 32, 35–38, 53, 113–15, 124, 141 Defay 148 Derham, W. 26, 111 Derrida, J. 158 Descartes, R. 15, 121, 124–5 Devall, B. 11, 117 Dieteren, R. 79, 80 Digby, K. 28 Dilthey, W. 1, 17–19 Dobson, A. 3–5, 89, 116 Donzelot, J. 14, 16, 43–5, 47, 55 182

NAME INDEX

Driesch, H. 58, 124 Dubois, R. 4 Ehrlich, P. 3 Engels, F. 80–1, 121–2 Enzensberger, H.M. 15 Ferry, L. 2, 139, 141 Fishman, R. 72 Foreman, D. 117 Foucault, M. 6, 13–14, 16, 23, 25, 29–35, 38–43, 45, 47–52, 55, 69, 75, 77, 82, 85–8 Fox, W. 117 Freud, S. 49 Friederichs, K. 135–7 Friedman, M. 4 Galileo, G. 15, 125 Gamm, G. 151 Geddes, P. 5, 16, 49, 52–9, 61–4, 67–70, 72, 74–5, 79, 82–3, 93, 95, 113, 130, 135, 156 Girard, R. 1, 100–8, 109 Gleason, H.A. 143, 153–4 Godwin, W. 83–4, 87, 112 Goethe, W. 36 Goodman, P. 93 Goodpaster, K. 6 Gorz, A. 89 Graber, D.M. 153 Habermas, J. 12–14, 16–17, 19, 20, 107–8 Haeckel, E. 28 Hajer, M.A. 15 Hall, P. 58, 73–5 Haraway, D. 2, 158 Hardin, G. 3, 97, 100 Haussmann 56 Hays, S. 15 Hegel, G.W.F. 111, 117, 119, 120, 122, 134 Heidegger, M. 11, 12, 106, 119 Heilbronner, R. 5 Heller, C. 94–5

Hill, O. 53 Himmelfarb, G. 38–9 Hippodamus 110 Hitler, A. 64 Horkheimer, M. 120, 139 Howard, E. 5, 16, 47, 49, 56, 68, 70–5, 79, 82, 87 Humboldt, A.von 35–6 Hutchinson, E. 148–9, 169, 170–1 Huxley, Th.H. 53, 59, 113–14 Illich, I. 1, 5, 68, 91, 98–100, 102–3, 107–9 Jonas, F. 38 Kant, I. 9, 16–18, 20, 111 Katz, E. 10, 11 Keulartz, J. 12, 108 Kingsland, S.E. 171 Knox, P. 56 Kropotkin, P. 5, 16, 57, 59–61, 67, 70, 73, 82–84, 96, 112–16, 121, 156 Küppers, G. 28, 136, 143 Kwa, C.L. 154 Lamarck, J.B. 32, 53 Latour, B. 2, 158 Lavater, J.C. 36 Lavoisier, A. 30 Lefort, C. 92, 125, 139, 140–1 Leo XIII 57, 78 Leopold, A. 7, 9 Leopold, R. 167 Lesser, F.Chr. 26 Ley, R. 81 Light, A. 10, 11 Lindeman, R. 148–9 Linnaeus, C. 28, 30–1, 37 Lloyd Morgan, C. 132, 134–5 Locke, J. 111 Lovejoy, A.O. 26–7, 32 Lycophron 110 Lyell, Ch. 35–7 183

NAME INDEX

Lyotard, J.-F. 14, 16, 19, 20 MacArthur, R. 170 Malthus, Th. 35, 37 Mann, Ch.C. 170 Marshall, P. 83–4 Marx, K. 13, 121, 141 Marx, L. 68 Maupertuis, P.-L.-M. 32 Maurras, Ch. 57 McCoy, E.D. 170 McIntosh, R.P. 35, 148, 154, 169 Meller, H. 49, 70, 135 Meyer-Abich, A. 136 Meyer-Abich, K.M. 136–7 Miller, D. 84 Miller, D.L. 52, 64, 86, 88 Moleschott, J. 29 More, Th. 46 Morris, W. 57, 72–3 Morton, A. 54 Mumford, L. 5, 16, 52, 63–70, 75, 86–7, 93–5, 130, 135, 156 Mussolini, B. 57 Naess, A. 1, 5, 11, 116, 118–19, 134 Newton, I. 124–5, 130, 150 Nietzsche, F. 11 Nijpels, E. 166 O’Riordan, T. 3–5 Odum, E. 149, 150, 152, 169 Odum, H. 150, 169 Oechsle, M. 6, 13, 136 Ophuls, W. 3, 97, 100 Osborn, F. 75 Parker, B. 73, 75 Pas, W.van de 78–9 Pasteur, L. 62–3 Phaleas 110 Phillips, J. 143, 147 Plato 11, 26, 130 Play, F.Le 57–9, 61, 78

Plummer, M.L. 170 Poels, H. 78–80 Pope, A. 27–8 Priestly, J. 29 Proudhon, P.-J. 83–4, 121 Rabinow, P. 49, 51 Reclus, E. 16, 59, 83 Regan, T. 6–8 Richardson, B. 46 Rickert, H. 16–17 Ritter, A. 83–44 Ritter, C. 35 Rolston, H. 9 Roszak, T. 5, 93 Rousseau, J.-J. 111 Ruskin, J. 72 Russell, B. 125 Sagoff, M. 8 Saint-Simon 112 Salazar 57 Schama, S. 158–9 Schaxel, J. 135 Schramm, E. 26, 146 Schreijnders, R. 88 Searle, J. 19 Serre, M. 2 Sessions, G. 11, 117 Shannon, C.E. 148 Shelley 126 Shrader-Frechette, K.S. 170 Sijmons, D.F. 167 Singer, P. 6–9 Smuts, J.C. 125, 130–7, 144, 147 Speer, A. 81 Spencer, H. 38–9, 53–4, 113, 144 Spengler, O. 64–5, 93 Spinoza 111, 119, 120, 134 Stone, Chr. 9, 10 Stuyt, J. 79 Swaan, C.de 88 Tansley, A.G. 145–8 Taylor, P. 6 184

NAME INDEX

Taylor, P.J. 169 Thienemann, A. 135 Thomson, J.A. 55, 62 Thoreau, H.D. 93 Trepl, L. 38, 150, 154 Tummers, N. 81 Uexküll, J.von 135 Unwin, R. 71–5 Vera, F.W.M. 165–6, 168, 172 Verwilghen, R. 74 Vianen 76–7 Ward, B. 4 Warming, E. 38 Weaver 148 Weber, M. 17

Weavers, T. 159, 160 Westhof, V. 160 Wheeler, W.M. 138, 149, 151 Whitehead, A.N. 68, 119, 125–31, 134–5, 137–8, 146, 151 Whiteside, K.H. 11 Wiener, N. 148 Wilson, E. 170 Windelband, W. 16–17 Windt, H. van der 160 Wittgenstein, L. 19, 20 Wolf-Gazo, E. 130 118–20, 155 Wordsworth 126 Worster, D. 15, 27, 35, 114, 129, 134, 138, 149, 151, 153 Zimmerman, M.E. 5, 11, 93, 118– 20, 155

185

INDEX

Abhandlungen zur exakten Biologie 148 Abhandlungen zur theoretischen Biologie 135 abiotic factors, evolutionary process and 37, 147 absolute values 17 academic ecology 92, 143 ‘Academic Royale d’Architecture’ 50 acid rain 4 aesthetic (or reflexive) judgement 16 aesthetic-expressive art (art and erotics) rationality 20 African nature reserves 162 ‘age of reconstruction’ 126 agricultural revolution, naturalists and 28 agriculture 46, 60, 94, 160, 165–6 AIDS, Earth First! and 117 Amsterdam Housing Corporation 89 anabolism 59, 61, 63; catabolism and 54–6, 63 anarchism, chaos rather than order 110; education by community 84; hierarchy and 83; Kropotkin and ideal state 60; mechanical interpretation of phenomena 112; public opinion and 83–4; rules of law and 85; scientism and 114–16; small-scale communities 86;

social order and 83–4, 110; sovereign power and 82; the state and 85 animal ethics 6–7 ‘Animal Liberation: A Triangular Affair’ (1980) 7 ‘Animal Liberation and Environmental Ethics: Back Together Again’ (1988) 8 animal regime, catabolic processes 54 animal rights, deontological lines 6 animals 35, 37–8, 152 anthropocentrism 1, 6–7, 11–13, 62, 117 ‘anthropogenic climax’ 147 anti-statist propositions, global or regional policies 3 apocalypse 105, 107 ‘Apollonian’ culture of Greeks and Romans 64 ‘aporia of cybernetics and systems theory’ 151 Arcadia (pastoral and primitive) 158–9; ‘arcadian’ side of physico-theology 27–8, 129 archaeology of knowledge, ‘genealogy of power’ 23 architects 50–1 architecture 49–51, 68, 86–8 Archives de zoologie expérimentale et générale 53 association, migration patterns and 153 authoritarian community 4–5 186

INDEX

autopoieses, immanent laws of nature or history 141 ‘Beauty of Labour’ programme 81 beavers 172–3 Beekberger Wood 162 Berlin Wall 5 between anachronism and scientism 114–16 Biblical myths, victims and 103 Biesbosch marshland 172 biochemistry 124 ‘biodemographic’ approach to ecology 169–70 biodiversity, world-wide decline in 4 ‘biogeochemical’ approach, ecology and 169 biological communities, individual organisms and 38 biological life process, public space and 13 biology 49, 75; biopower and 52; birth of 23, 32–5; cognitive authority 91; ‘higher’ organisms and 127; holism and National Socialists 135; political arena 38–9; production 148; pseudoscience and 69; of reproduction 47; sexology and 48; study of autonomous life 34 biomass yield, trade-off with organisms 150 biopolitics 49, 52, 55–6 biopower 6, 13–14, 23, 40–3, 48–9, 69, 77, 82–3 bioregionalism 65, 85–6 Bios journal 125, 135–7, 148 biosphere, complex clockwork 169 biotechnic age 61 biotic community 7, 147 ‘bipolar’ god 130 birth control 55 The Birth of the Clinic (1963) 30, 32–4, 47 Books that Changed our Minds anthology (1939) 64 Border Meuse Project 164, 166 botany 38; Clements and 146;

ecology and 35; ‘the epistemological precedence’ of 30–2; ‘epistemological precedence’ over zoology 31, 40; immobility of plants 32; transition to zoology 34 Bounty voyage (1789) 29 bourgeoisie 42, 102 Brazilian forest example 128–30, 137 British Museum 73 ‘campaign for the moralization of poorer classes’ 43 capitalism, ecological limits of production and 97 carbon dioxide, ‘fixed air’ 29 ‘carboniferous capitalism’ 63, 65 ‘casco’ concept, Dutch landscape and 161, 167 The Case for Animal Rights (1983) 7 Catholic South 2 causality 121, 132 cell theory 53 chemical pollution 4 chemistry, biology and 54 child-care and hygienic norms, poor families and 44 chlorophyll 53 Christian-Democratic movement 78 ‘Circular Causal Systems in Ecology’ 169 Cities in Evolution (1915) 52, 56 Cities of Tomorrow (1988) 81 The City in History (1961) 63, 65–8 ‘civics’ 56 civil engineers, spatial organization 50 civilization 64, 143–5 classic antiquity 36 classical anarchism 5, 109, 111–12, 115–16, 118, 120, 123–4 classical Anarchism (1991) 109 classical nosology, natural history and 31 classification of chemical elements 30 classification of mammals 33

187

INDEX

classification of plants 31, 35 classificatory medical science 30 climate, vegetation and 36, 145–6 climax 146–7, 152–3 climax forest 147, 152 climax theory 143–44 cognitive-objectifying (science and technology) rationality 20 Cold War 5 collective killing, unity and solidarity and 104 comforts of economic sex 103, 107 communicative power, biopower and 13–14 CONC (Circular-Or-Not-Circular) debate 170 Le contrat naturel (1990) 2 ‘conservative surgery’ 56, 74 contemporary violence, social barriers and 103 continental anarchists, positivism and 112 continuity, all creatures form unbroken chain 26 cooperation and community spirit, social and moral importance of 129 corn crake 172 counter-culture 93 Critical Fauna Management 160 Critical Forest Management 160 crucifixion, primeval event of collective killing 104–5 The Culture of Cities (1938) 63 cybernetics 148, 169–70 Cyprus 56 damage (dommage), redressed or compensated 20 death, permeates life 34 decentring 20 deep ecology 15, 92, 116–18, 119– 20, 134, 139, 143 Deep Ecology (1985) 117 Denmark 2 ‘dephlogisticated air’ 29 depletion of ozone layer 4 The Depression (1930s) 159 desacralization 105, 107

The Descent of Man (1871) 113 destruction of gender, destruction of environment 100 dialectical idealism, Hegel 122 dialectical materialism, Engels 122 dialectical naturalism 91, 117, 122– 3 ‘Dialectics of Enlightenment’ 120 differend, injustice (‘tort’) 21, 165–9 differentiation 20, 94 Directorate General for Public Works and Water Management 164 disciplinary society 42, 50, 85 Discipline and Punish (1975) 42, 50 disciplines 41, 49 disciplining of the body, regulation of population and 14, 49, 52, 75 discontinuity 20 Discordant Harmonies (1990) 152 disease 30, 33, 34 dispositifs ‘aesthetics of existence’ 43 epistèmes 40 dissemination 20 diversity and individuality, Ecology Group and 138 doctors 43–4, 49 dominance 96–6 doppelgängers 102 ‘dubious’ sciences 52 Dust Bowl 144–5 Dutch model, landscape of (1850) 159 Dutch nature developers, primeval nature and 151 Dutch nature policy, island theory 170 Dutch Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals 168 Duurse Waarden project 172 dynamic ecology 144, 162–3 Earth First! 1, 117 Earth and Other Ethics (1987) 9 The Earth 35–6 Eastern Europe 2 ‘The Eclipse of History’ 171 ‘eco-communes’ 96 188

INDEX

‘eco-cratic’ 3 eco-facism 97 eco-feminism 1, 5, 68, 92, 94–5, 100 eco-libertarians, free market and 4 eco-socialists 4 ‘eco-technology’ 96–7, 171 ecocentrism 6–11, 117–18 Ecology of Freedom (1982) 93 ‘Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées’ (1747) 50 ecological gaze, archaeology of 23–4, 40 ecological movement, Whitehead and 129 ecological reason, critique of 91–2 ecological science, radical ecologists and 2 ecological society 96, 119; from organic 94–7 ecology 18, 23, 38, 49, 136; battlefield of competing paradigms 2; botany and 35; collapse as scientific discipline 139; empirical and experimental science 155; holism and 125; modelled after modern natural science 149; radical and 18; scientific authority of 151, 155, 167; shift to evolutionary development and 36–7; status of political guideline 141 Ecology Group (University of Chicago) 125, 135, 138–9 Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity (1977) 100 economic developments, docile and able-bodied workers 41 economic individualism, modernization of envy 102 economic progress, spread of mimetic desire 102 ‘economy of nature’ 28 ‘ecosophy’ 119 ecosystems 7, 27, 119; biotic and abiotic elements 147; man and 145–6; solar energy in complete 169; stability dependent on their

diversity 27; Tansley’s view 148; theory 170 ‘ecotechnology’, primeval nature and 162 The Ecology of Freedom (1982) 98 ecotopia 86 education, anarchists and 84 egalitarian relationships, authoritarian relationships and 95 electricity 49, 61 emancipation, poorer classes and 43 embryology 53 Emergent Evolution (1923) 132 empirical (or theoretical) judgement, faculty of cognition 16 energy, biotic and abiotic components 148 England 56 Enlightenment 139 An Enquiry into the Human Prospect (1974) 5 environmental sciences, medical sciences 51 environment 33–4 Environment Defence Association 160 ‘Environment’, ‘Function’ and ‘Organism’ (EFO) 57 environmental catastrophe 106, 155 environmental crisis 3, 5–6, 117 Environmental Defence and the Nature and Environment Foundation 166 environmental elements 33, 153 environmental ethics 6–7, 9 ‘environmental fascism’ 7–8 environmental movement 15, 52, 91–2, 99–100, 146, 154, 159 environmental philosophy 1–2, 11– 12, 15, 19, 21, 52, 146–7 Environmental Pragmatism (1996) 10 environmental problems, transnational of 4 environmental science 14–15, 23, 48, 51 Environmentalism (1976) 3

189

INDEX

eopolis 64 eotechnic period 63 epistèmes, dispositifs 40 ‘epistemological space’ 30 equality, scarcity and 93, 109 equilibrium concept, harmony of nature and 26–7 erotics 20 essences 30–1, 33–4, 109–10 ethical issues, charting and 10 ethical maps 9–10 ethical naturalism 116 ethical-normative (law and morality) rationality 20 ethics 7, 10, 20, 114–15, 121–2 Ethiopia 117 Europe 2, 57, 60, 68, 146, 157, 162, 171, L’Evolution créatrice (1907) 124 ‘Evolution and Ethics’ lecture 113; evolution theory 23, 34, 37, 53, 133; evolutionary ecology 143, 151, 153–5, 172, 174 evolutionay process 37, 132–3, 147 The Evolution of Sex (1889) 52, 54 Fabian Society 73 faculty of cognition 16, 18 faculty of desire (or will) 16, 18 Faktizität und Geltung (1992) (Between Facts and Norms) 17 ‘Famille’ (family) 57 family 42, 43–5, 55–7, 60 ‘farmers’ nature 166–7, 174 Facist threat, conformism and 138 ‘Faustian’ culture 64 feminism 2 Le Feminisme ou la mort (1974) 94 Fields, Factories and Workshops Tomorrow (1901) 61 financial support, poor families and 44 ‘finger city’ 74 food production, arithmetical progression 37 form (figura) 31 ‘forty years of housing for workers’ 79 France 2, 45

freedom 109–11, 116, 119, 133–4 Freizügigkeit (mobility) of young miners 76–7 Fundamentals of Ecology (1953) 149 Garden Cities 47, 51, 56, 69, 70, 71–4, 86–7 Garden Cities of Tomorrow (1902) 70, 79, 81 ‘Garden civilizations in preparing for a new epoch’ 75 gas, combustion and respiration 29 Gender (1982) 98 gender 98–100, 103 Generelle Morphologie der Organismen (1866) 28 geographic exploration, colonial expansion and 29 geography 23, 35–6 geological and climatic influences, struggle for life and 37 geology 23, 36 Germany 2, 135, 137 gerontocracy, hierarchy and 96 gradation, hierarchical structure of creatures 26 Great Plains prairie landscape 144– 5, 153 Greco-Roman civilization 64 ‘Green for Gravel’ 164 green Leviathan 3, 6 ‘green’ political forces, ‘anarchist solution’ 5 ‘green’ political parties 1–2 ‘green’ political philosophy 116 greenhouse effect 4 Greenpeace 1, 157 The Great Chain of Being (1936) 26–8, 32 guild 60 ‘half-nature’, Dutch landscape and 160 Heerlen 76 ‘Heimat’ 78, 81 helotism 38 high dynamism functions, economic processes 161

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The History of Sexuality (1976) 42– 3, 47 historia (ancient jurisprudence), ‘eye-witness account’ 25 history 15, 34 History of the Environmental Sciences (1992) 135 holism 9, 11, 13, 124; America and 137–8; anti-liberalist sentiments (1930s) 125; Bookchin and 109, 151; classical anarchists and 123; deep ecology 134, 143; dialectical naturalism and 122–3; ecology and 135–40; environmental ethics and 6–7; Geddes and 58, 135; individualism and 6, 154; metaphysical 92, 135, 137–8, 171; methodological 143, 171; National Socialism and 135, 137; obstacle to progress of ecology 147; organism and emergence subordinated 132; political philosophy of 137; from positivism to 120–3; pragmatic 143, 147, 149–50; purposiveness and 133; science and 142; Smuts and 130–5, 144; submission of individual to greater whole 13; totalitarianism and 124–5, 141; Whitehead 131, 135; world-view 68 Holism and Evolution (1926) 125, 131, 136 holistic community concept, individualistic concept 154 homo collectivicus, ousted by homo economicus 97 homo economicus, homo aequalis 99 house visits, poor families and 44–5 Houses of Parliament 73 Housing Act (1901) 79 housing inspections 44–5, 80 housing policy, Limburg (Dutch province) 75, 77 The Housing Question 80 Howard’s Dream (1991) 89 human beings 18, 94 human intervention 146, 159–60

human nature 6, 109–10 human sciences 47, 49 hunters 59, 66 Hutcheson Memorial Forest (climax forest) 152–3 Hygeia, City of Health (1876) 46 hygenists 45–6, 50 imperialist side of physico-theology 27–8, 129 India 56, 162 individual, liberalism’s mistake and 137; social organism 38 individualist animal ethics, contest with holistic eco-ethics 7 industrial revolution 28–9, 57, 59 industrial society, problem of environment 15 industrialization 55, 78 infant health 43 information theory 148 ‘An inquiry into the whole’ 131 Insecto-Theologia (1738) 26; ‘insufficiency’, reality and 18; intelligence, urbane and rustic 62–3; inter-specific struggle, intra-specific struggle 39 interaction, between environment and organism 58 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 4 internalization, social pressure and 84–5 International Town Planning Congress (Amsterdam 1924) 74 International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) 4 invisible functions, plants and animals 32 ‘island theory’ 170–2 Jesus, scapegoat mechanism and 104–6 Kehre (turn) 11–12, 14, 43, 51 laissez-faire, laissez-passer 39 land ethics, radical ecologists and 7–8

191

INDEX

landscape of (1850), traditional nature conservation 159, 166 Landscape and Memory (1995) 158 Landscape Report (1992) 167 language 16, 19, 107 ‘language games’ 19–20, 156, 166 language philosophy perspective 14, 19–21 Latin America, US borders and 117 Letchworth 70–1, 73–4, 87 liberal democracy 3 liberal individualism 137–8 libido, sexology and 49 ‘Lieu’ (place) 57 life 34, 48 life in community (Gemeinschaft), society (Gesellschaft) and 5 life forces, ‘entelechies’ 124 life sciences 47–8, 75 life-world and system, communicativley structured 14 ‘lifeboat ethics’ 3, 97, 100 Limburg 75–7, 80 litigation (litige), conflict between parties in same genre 20 living, non-living and 33 living systems 154 local policies, authoritarian and anti-authoritarian solutions 3 location in space (situs) 31 long-lived animals, limited number of offspring 26 low dynamism functions, ecological processes 161 lungs and gills, extent of similarity 33 mankind, biological origins 117–18; ecosystems and 145–66; empowered to exploit economy of nature 28; knows its place and respects fellow creatures 27; lesson from nature on how to construct society 59–60; middle position of 26–7; social being with biological origins 117; as technician assumes quasi-divine position 151; unique position in nature 118

map of ecosystems 10 map of species 10 materialist camp of evolution, organisms and 127–8, 135, 141 materialist mechanism, one-eyed rationality 126 materialistic business morality, decay of society and 128 materialist scientific ideal 136 mathematics 54, 67, 149 matricentric culture, ethic of complementarity 94–5 mechanism 124, 126, 130, 135–6, 141, 147, 149 medical science 14–15, 30, 34, 48– 9, 51 medically oriented pseudo-sciences 49, 85 medicine 14, 47 medieval city, communality and 60–1 megapolis 65 men 54–5, 95 meta-ethical notion, justice and 18– 19 metaphysics 11, 17, 113 meteorology, sunspots and 146 metropolis 65 metropolises, necropolises and 67 metropolitanism, bioregionalism and anarchists 85 Meuse river 157 migration movements 60, 153 mimeses, desire and 100–1 ‘mimetic crisis’, taboos, rites and myths 101–2 mimetic desire, scapegoat mechanism and 100–3, 106 miners, forced mobility and 57 miners’ colony, management tool 78–81 mining town, trouble and 61 Modelling Nature (1985) 171 modern eco-anarchism 120, 123 modern ecology, functional sense and 150 modem planning, demands on architects 50 modem science, robbed nature of ethical meaning 122

192

INDEX

Modern Science and Anarchism (1903) 112 modem societies 13, 98, 101–2 molecular biology 124 monism 9, 118 monoclimax theory, polyclimax theory 145 moral awareness, society and 84 moral costs and benefits, individual well-being and natural processes 10 moral (or practical) judgement, faculty of desire 16 moral pluralism, moral monism and 9 morality, essence of human nature and 110, 114–15 Mutual Aid, a Factor of Evolution (1902) 59, 114 mutualism 38 The Myth of the Machine, (1967/ 1971) 63, 68 nation-state, centralised authoritarianism 3, 46 national economy, monarch’s domestic economy 27 National Land Use Planning Agency 164 National Network of Important Ecosystems 161, 167, 170 Nationals Socialists (Germany) 135, 137 National Society for the Preservation of the Wadden Sea 160 natural historian, selection criteria 25 natural history 25–7, 30, 34–5, 36, 40 ‘natural occupations’ 58 natural region, cradle of the town 56–9 natural sciences 112, 136, 147–8 Naturalism, cognitive aspect 18 naturalists 28, 63 nature, cooperation more important than competition 59; genitivus subjectivis and genitivus objectivus 158; guide

to moral judgement 115; multifaceted 18; self-regulation system 171; social debate about 173; socially constructed 146; stable equilibrium 152; stochastic 172; teleological conception 132, 136; three or four ‘realms’ 33 Nature at Work report (1994) 164 nature developers, climax forest and 152; ‘Ecological Reference’ 161, 165, 173; general public and 168–9; legacy of Hutchinson and 171; primitive techniques 162; segregation and 158; social differend and scientific litigation 166 nature development 158; action to stop deterioration of nature 164; ‘actualism’ 172; cybernectics 169; debates on 173; ethical and aesthetic considerations 168; paradox of 161–3; plans and 174; scientific alternatives and 171; technical enterprise 163–4; top-down plans 174 ‘Nature knows best’ 141 Nature Monuments Association 157, 159–60, 165 Nature Policy Plan (1990) 160–2, 164, 167, 169 Natuur aan het werk (Nature at Work 1994) 164 Natuurontwikkeling (Nature Development 1989) 169 Nazi regime 137, 139 necropolis 65, 70 ‘neo-Clementsian’ 152, 171 neo-Stoicism 116–20 neolithic phase, anabolic character 59, 61, 65 neolithic village 65–6, 94 neotechnic age 61–3, 67, 70 ‘Neptunists’ 36 Netherlands 2, 50, 78, 157–8, 162, 165, 172 ‘The Netherlands twice as beautiful’ 164, 174 New Age movement 68, 125 new ecology 147–50

193

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new global order, anti-statist and 4 new nature, ‘age of its technical reproducibility’ 158 New from Nowhere (1891) 72 ‘niche’ 27 Nineteenth Century 113 non-anthropocentrism 6 non-violence 105, 107–8 normal, pathological 47, 49 norms 17, 44, 47–8, 50, 85, 119 Norway 2 nosological essences 30–1, 33 Le Nouvel ordre écologique (1992) 139 nuclear energy, risks of 4 nuclear holocaust, humanity and environmental destruction 105–6 number (numerus) 31 objective idealism, promotion of happiness 18 occupation groups 58–9, 63, 135 oceanography 53 Oeconomia naturae 28 Only One Earth (1972) 4 ‘Ons Limburg’ (Our Limburg) housing association federation 79–80 The Order of Things (1966) 30–2 ‘organic’ communities 94, 96–7 organicism, Whitehead and 125–30, 131, 134, 142 organicist philosophy of nature, emergence and 134 organisms 33, 67, 127, 150 On the Origin of Species (1859) 37 The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) 140 other Kehre, Hannah Arendt 11–13 Our Common Future (1987) 4 ‘outward beings’ 32 ovum cells, anabolic behaviour 54 pagan philosophy, Christianization by scholasticism 121 palaeolithic phase, catabolic character 58–9, 61, 63, 65 paleotechnics, neotechnics and 59–61

Palestine 56 panopticon 50–1, 69, 87 parasitism 38 pathological, normal 47 patriarchial family, chief agent of moral education 57 peasants, anabolic stamp on neolithic civilization 59 pedagogy 23, 47, 49 penology 23, 47 perfectionist, conception of freedom 110, 114–15, 120, 133 phenomenon of sexuality, population policy and 42 philosophers of the social contract, the state and 111 philosophia, search for principles and systems 25 philosophy of nature 25, 121–2 ‘photosynthesis’ 29 physico-theology 26, 27–30, 111 Physico-Theology (1713) 26 physics 54, 127, 149 ‘physiognomic’ character of vegetations 36 physiology 29–30 plants 31, 34–5, 144, 152 plentitude, maximum creatures world can hold 26 pluralism 10–12, 16, 19–20 ‘Plutonists’ 36 pneumatic revolution in chemistry, study of gases 29 polis 64, 96 ‘political biology of the population’ 41, 52 political ecology 1, 100 political leaders 66 La police des families (1977) 43 poor families, direct surveillance and 44 population, attitude of Earth First! to 117; balance with means of subsistence 3; geometrical progression of increase 37; more than sum of nation’s subjects 41–2; policy 42, 51, 91; problem with growth and expanding production 41, 76

194

INDEX

population genetics 124 positivism 92, 112, 115, 120–3 Positivist Church 53 post-Faustian future, Mumford and 65 ‘post-naturalist’ turn, environmental philosophy and 2 ‘postindustrial tribalism’ 5 power 40, 49, 107, 140, 159–61 power theory perspective 14–16 preoccupation with survival, social life and 14 primary space, taxonomy 32 primeval nature 147, 151, 158, 161– 2, 171 Principia Mathematica (1910) 125 prison guard 49 ‘professional paternalism’, English housing policy 56 proletariat, bourgeois family model and 42 Protestant North 2 ‘providentialism’ 26–7 pseudo-sciences 47–9, 69 psychiatrist 49, 51 psychiatry 23, 47 ‘psycho’ sciences 23–44, 47, 49, 69, 85 psychology 23, 47 psychoanalysis 23 ‘public greenery’ 167 public housing 52, 56 ‘pure’ speech acts 19 quaestio juris, quaestio facti 17 quantum theory 126 ‘La question de la démocratie’ (1983) 140 radical eco-feminism, sisterhood and 95 radical ecologists, evolutionary ecology and 11, 16, 151–2, 154– 5 radical ecology 1–2, 18, 92, 125, 142, 143, 151; anarchist solution 2–6; cognitive authority of ecology and 18, 155; ‘green’ politics 5; Heidegger and 11;

homo communitas 4; laws of biosphere and 6; local level of environmental politics 4; Mumford and 68; naturalistic slant 2; nature and 141, 146; ‘political biology of the population’ 16; power theory perspective 14; pseudo-science 143; pure light of truth in broken rays 18; religious or worldly authority 5; social effects unpredictable 156 radical environmental philosophy 13 radicalization, organic and inorganic 33–4 railways 49 Rathenau Institute debate 173–44 ‘re-meandering’ 163 real nature, human intervention and 159–60 reality claims 17–18 realm of human beings 33 realm of plants 33 realm of rocks and minerals 33 reason, egoistic impulses and 133 reductionism 149–50 regime of sex 98–9 region, three basic units of sociogeographic research 58 Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA) 75, 82 regional problems, shift to global problems 4 regional reconstruction programme 57 religion 5, 101–2, 108 Renaissance 29, 36, 121 resource depletion 4 respiration 29, 35 respiration and digestion 33 Rhine river 157 rich families, free child of physical constraints 43 Roman Catholic Church 57 Roman Catholic workers’ movement (Netherlands) 78 San Francisco Chronicle 93

195

INDEX

sand storms (1930s) 145 sandmartin 172 satellite towns 74 scales of justice 97–8 scapegoat mechanism, mimetic desire and 100–3, 104, 106 scarcity 3, 5, 37, 92–3, 97–100, 102, 109 Scheldt river 157 science 20, 54; ecological 2; master of ethics 111–14; of planning 57; positivist conception 109, 112, 120, 123; scientism and 121; study of organisms 127 Science and the Modern World (1925) 125, 130 ‘scientific materialism’, mathematicians and 125 secondary space, source of confusion 32 selection pressure, abiotic and biotic factors 37 self-consciousness 118–19 self-realization 118–19 sex 48, 98–100, 107 sexology 48, 75 sexuality 48, 52 Sheffield circle 73 Sierra Club 1 size (proportio) 31 SLOSS (Single-Large-Or-SeveralSmall) debate 170 slum improvement, small-scale approach 56 social control, medicalization and ecologization 15 social Darwinism 38–9, 113–14, 142 social differend, scientific litigation and 21 social ecology 1, 69, 116, 119–20, 122, 130, 134, 150–2 social evolution, intra-specific struggle for life 39 social geography 57, 59 social housing 45, 47, 49, 56 social order, classical anarchists and 110 social organisms, ecologically inspired pseudo-sciences 49

social pressure, internalization and 84 social progress 113–14, 146 ‘Social-Technical Association of Democratic Engineers and Architects’ 50 ‘socio’-sciences 24, 39, 48–9 sociobiology 24, 48 socioecology 24, 48–50 sociogeography 24, 48, 49, 57 sociology 2, 38, 53–4, 136 solar energy 169 Sophists, physis and thesis 110–11 sovereign power 40–3, 77, 82, 86, 140 space, power and 49 ‘Space, Knowledge and Power’ 49 sperm cells, catabolic behaviour 54 ‘spontaneous nature’ 174 Sri Lanka 162 stability, versus persistence 153–44 Stalinism 139 statist, anti-statist propositions 3 steady-state society 3, 100 Stoics 109, 111, 115, 119 structural variables, shift to functional relationships 33 struggle 20, 94 ‘Struggle for Existence in Human Society’ 113 struggle for life 26, 35–8, 94, 113 study of blood circulation 29 study of respiration 29 subjective idealism, inclination and obligation 18 super-organisms 38, 53, 64, 144, 147 supranational NGOs 4 surviving ecological communities, research and 161–2 sustainable society 5, 155 systems ecology, bio-cybernetic machine 149; classic thermodynamics and 154; denounced by Bookchin 150–1; holistic nature of 150, 173; nature policy-making and 157; ‘neo-Clementsian’ 152; pragmatic holism and 143, 147;

196

INDEX

production biology 148; temptations for nature conservationists 151 systems of priorities, one single standard 9 systems theory, integration of production biology 148 the system and life-world 13–14

truth about objective state of affairs in reality 19 truthfulness of subjective intentions 19–20 Tuindorp Oostzaan (Dutch garden village) 88 ‘tutelary complex’ 44 tyrannopolis 65

taxonomic method, visibility of structural characteristics 31 techne 51 Technics and Civilization (1934) 63 technological inventions, political liberty and 61 technology 94, 96, 121, 173 teleological world-view, freedom and 114–15, 122–3, 133–4 theory of communicative action 17 theory of emergent evolution, weakness of 134–5 theory of evolution 127–8 theory of relativity 126 thermodynamics 148, 150, 154 Third World 2 ‘Three Es’, landscape planning and 167 To-morrow: a Peaceful Path to Real Reform (1898) 70 totalitarianism 92, 124–5, 135, 140– 2 Town Planning Act (1909) 56 Town Planning in Practice (1909) 74 trade-off between organisms, biomass yield and 150 traditional conservationists, old agricultural crafts and 162, 166 traditional societies, social distinctions and 101–2 transnational global cooperation, Green sustainable society and 5 ‘Travail’ (work) 57 Treatise on Political Economy 84 tribal community, village community and 60 ‘The Trophic-Dynamic Aspect of Ecology’ (1942) 148

‘uniformitarianist’ theory of the Earth 36 United Nations 4 United States 68, 169 unity, multiplicity 20 ‘unity-in-diversity’ 97 Der Untergang des Abendlandes (Decline of the West) (1926) 64 urban civilization, upper reaches of river valley 63 urban nature 174 urban proletariat, Geddes and living conditions 53 urban renewal, rural revitalization and 56–7, 61 urban smog 4, 61 urban society, balance between various regional cultures 59 urbanization 49, 55, 78 utopian architectural concept, Bentham’s panopticon 50–1 ‘Valley’, natural region and 58 value spheres 17 vegetable regime, anabolic nature 54 ‘Versprachlichung des Sakralen’ (‘verbalization of the sacral’) 108 Victoria 46–7, 71 village community 60, 95–6 violence 101–8, 109, 114 visibility, stagnation of anatomy and physiology 31 visible structure, hidden functional relationships and 34 vitalism 48–9, 58, 124, 126, 130 Wadden Sea Society 166 water power 61

197

INDEX

Weltanschauungslehre (world view theory) 18, 136 Welwyn Garden City 87 Western process of modernization, cognitive-objectifying rationality 20 whole is greater than the sum of its parts 13, 125, 127, 137 wildlife corridors, advantages and disadvantages 170–1 women, Bookchin on 94–5; ‘ecofeminism’ and 68; as housing inspectors 44–5; neolithic village and 65–6, 94; new occupations of care and

nursing 44, 55–6; qualities and limitations 55; support for working class 44; technology and 68; war and 99 working men’s hostels, Limburg 80 working-class housing unit, outsiders excluded 45 World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) 4, 157, 160, 164–6, 174 zoology 31, 35, 37 ‘Zur Kritik der politische Ökologie’ (1973) 15 Zweckrationalität (instrumental rationality) 121

198