The Policy Turn in Environmental Philosophy
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Environmental Philosophy, Spring, 2004, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 7-16.
One of the old chestnuts of philosophy is the debate over what counts as “first philosophy”—which area of philosophy is the proper place for thinking to begin. Across the last 2500 years philosophers have claimed that ethics, or epistemology, or metaphysics, or in Nietzsche’s case, aesthetics (“the world can be justified on aesthetics grounds alone”) marks the origin of thinking. This essay revisits this question of philosophic beginnings from the perspective of environmental philosophy, in order to suggest that environmental thinking should in many cases not begin with philosophy at all, but should instead grow out of needs and perspectives of public policy decision makers.
Environmental philosophy has always had close ties to empirical matters. This is why the field has often been described—incorrectly—as a subset of applied ethics. After all, no one speaks of applied aesthetics, even though there is a similarly close connection between aesthetic theories and particular art objects and movements. But more telling is that the empiricism of environmental philosophy has been oriented toward environmental science rather than policy.
Even if they seldom have formal training, it is common for environmental philosophers to be familiar with one or another area of environmental science. Whether it is the latest theories of ecology or the details of salmon restoration in the Northwest, scientific perspectivesregularly make an appearance in environmental philosophy articles and books. But an equal appreciation of the ways that environmental philosophy and public policy intersect is much less common.[1]
This is especially ironic for those environmental philosophers who come out of the tradition of European or continental philosophy. The critique of positivism is central to this tradition. It is nearly axiomatic that both intellectuals and the culture at large have been seduced by the siren call of science and its claim to be an all-encompassing theory of reality. Nonetheless, for many years now environmental philosophers who wish to burnish their bona fides have studied the intricacies of biodiversity or global climate change. Examination of how environmental philosophy can effectively contribute to the specific debates of policy makers in a real time basis is far more rare.
In calling for a policy turn in environmental philosophy I mean a shift from philosophers writing philosophy essays for other philosophers, to philosophers doing research and working on projects with other academic disciplines, public agencies, and policy makers. The standard approach to environmental issues today on the part of society is to turn to science, economics, or democratic populism as a means to resolve our environmental debates. The standard approach to environmental issues today on the part of philosophers is to focus on the theoretical underpinnings of environmental issues, with possibly a brief reference to a specific case or example. A policy turn in environmental philosophy involves a third way, where philosophers begin from society’s own growing sense of the inadequacy of our conventional ways of addressing environmental problems.
Consider the following example. In the face of growing concerns about our effect upon the climate, the federal government created the US Global Change Research Program in the late 1980s. This program was justified in terms of the role that science can play in addressing policy concerns surrounding climate change:
The US Global Change Research Program was conceived and developed to be policy-relevant and, hence, to support the needs of the United States and other nations by addressing significant uncertainties in knowledge concerning natural and human-induced changes in the Earth's environment. . . . The USGCRP is designed to produce a predictive understanding of the Earth system to support national and international policymaking activities across a broad spectrum of environmental issues.
Today, however, the USGCRP is a program in distress. Over the last 15 years of the program the US government has spent more than $25 billion on climate change research. Across this same span, the range of predictions for global mean temperature for the year 2100 has actually increased—from 1.4 to 5.4 degrees, to 1.4 to 5.8 degrees C.[2]
Make no mistake: climate scientists have learned a great deal about the nature of the climate system. But much of what they have learned—for instance, about the complexities of modeling vegetation, or the nature of the ocean-atmosphere interface, or the effects of cloud cover upon the Earth’s albedo—has only served to increase our uncertainty about future states of the climate. The upshot is that both public science agencies such as NASA and the NationalCenter for Atmospheric Research, and the US Congress, are starting to ask questions such as:
- Why has this massive investment in climate science for policy-making borne such little fruit?
- What is the relation between scientific facts and decision-making?
- What other ways might there be for making progress on the climate change debate?
Granted, global climate change would not even be a policy issue without science. Humans experience weather, not climate; we need science if we are to make sense of events beyond human perceptions, which are localized in space and time. But while science has been necessary to identify the possibility of a problem, it cannot certify what will happen—the climate system is too complex, and there are too many human inputs. More basically, however, rather than being a question of predictive science, the climate change debate is fundamentally a debate over meanings and values—about what kind of world we want to live in. The future, after all, is not something that simply happens to us; being human means that we exercise a significant degree of influence over what will happen through the choices we make. Rather than basing action primarily on predictions of the future, as if it is something outside of us and beyond our control, climate change challenges us to engage in an explicit debate about the kind of future we want to have.
Programs such as the US Global Change Research Program—now, the Climate Change Science Program—are founded upon a type of scientific fundamentalism, the belief that science is uniquely qualified to address societal questions, environmental or otherwise. It was thought that the objectivities of scientific prediction could lift us out of the subjectivities of partisan politics. It turns out, however, that the relationship between scientific fact and decision-making is far from linear. But neither is it the job of either science or policy-making to parse the relationship between facts and values, or science and decision-making. We are left, then, with a conceptual gap, which needs to be filled through the development of a “philosophy of environmental policy” or a “philosophy of science policy.”
Note that a policy turn in environmental philosophy expands the portfolio of philosophy in three ways. It does so first by complementing the standard type of research done by philosophers with the development of a second strand of philosophic labor. Instead of only doing research into philosophic questions concerning our relation to the environment, we would now also do research into how to integrate philosophic insights with the work of scientists, public science agencies, and policy makers. This second mode of philosophizing—what could be called topical philosophy—is decidedly on the margins of our discipline; but it should be viewed as just as central to the philosophic project as traditional philosophical work. There will always be a central place for the type of philosophical research that now dominates academic philosophy. But such a policy turn in environmental philosophy could open up a whole new front for philosophic research.
Second, a policy turn would expand the portfolio of philosophy because it involves much more than only questions of applied or environmental ethics. The relevance of environmental philosophy to policy concerns includes all the domains of philosophy. As I have argued in Geo-Logic and elsewhere, the policy-relevant aspects of environmental philosophy include aesthetics, political philosophy, epistemology, metaphysics, and theology. Moreover, it is time to abandon the metaphor of “applying” philosophy—the idea that when they want to get relevant, philosophers attach a pre-existing theory to a problem. The relation of theory to practice is much more dialectical than that. Rather than simply a matter of “application,” determining how to draw out and relate philosophic perspectives to specific environmental questions is a challenge of the highest intellectual order.
Third and finally, it is worth noting that the development of a topical environmental philosophy holds the promise of opening up a second career track for our undergraduate and graduate students. Public agencies such as the National Park Service, the National Forest Service, the National Science Foundation, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration—to name only a few—are faced by a variety of challenges that are broadly philosophical in nature. With few exceptions these agencies lack people systematically trained in addressing these challenges. This is where a topical environmental philosophy becomes complementary to traditional philosophic research: working with such agencies increases the possibilities both for employment and for having an effect upon the world, which in turn could lead to more majors and graduate students in philosophy and humanities departments.
Nonetheless, a policy turn in environmental philosophy faces both intellectual and institutional barriers to its implementation. For as long as such work is viewed as peripheral to philosophy—as not being the real work of philosophy—it is unlikely to get the attention that it deserves. It is therefore necessary to excavate the intellectual and institutional foundations of our structures of knowledge.
A tacit commitment lurks within the precincts of philosophy, an assumption that might be called the analytic fallacy. This term does not refer to the familiar distinction between analytic and continental philosophy; for all their differences, both types of philosophy are one in their embrace of disciplinarity, specialization, and expertise. The analytic fallacy is an assumption both intellectual and institutional in nature, and is shared not only across the field of philosophy, but also by all the disciplines of the academy. Indeed, it is not too much to say that the presumption of analyticity both gives birth to, and sustains, the disciplinary structure that orders the work of the modern university.
If we wish to locate the historical roots of the analytic fallacy, we might reference two points, one intellectual, the other institutional in nature. The intellectual origins of the analytic fallacy could be seen to lie in Descartes Discourse on the Method; the institutional sources in the development of the modern research university. In the Discourse Descartes describes what he views as the universal method of our thinking. Thinking proceeds by analysis: breaking things down into their constituent parts until we get to the indivisibly small pieces of reality that Newton called “simples” and the ancient Greeks a-temos, what which cannot be cut (thus “atom”). Once we have made a full accounting of these simples, we can reconstruct our object of analysis, putting the pieces back together in order to gain a complete understanding of the whole.
Despite its many successes—and granting in some sense the inevitability of analysis as a manner of thinking—today the questionable aspects of this statement of method have become quite apparent. First, Descartes’ method is anti-organicist, in that it assumes that the world consists of only mechanical wholes. Integrated wholes (for instance, ecosystems, or societies) are reduced to the sum of their parts. This is a philosophy of external relations where it costs nothing to examine a thing in isolation from its larger context. Second, it has become a commonplace to note that Descartes’ method assumes a foundationalist metaphysics, the belief that if we labor long and hard enough we will arrive at a ground that can serve as a point d’appui or firm support for everything that is to follow. But the belief in the existence of something like atoms or irreducibly small pieces of matter that can serve as a ground to reality has been overturned by modern physics. There is simply no evidence that if we go deep enough we will come to the bottom of things. The latest incarnation of fundamental particles, neutrinos, quarks, and strings, may once again turn out to be simply the reflection of the current technical limitations of our atom smashers. Rather than simples, going deeper into the nature of things seems to reveal that, as John Muir says, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe."[3]
The irony here is that while we have deconstructed the philosophic presumptions of analyticity, we have done so only philosophically. In terms of the epistemological commitments of our institutions of knowledge, Descartes’ methodology still reigns supreme.
This methodology finds its institutional expression in the modern research university. The modern American research university was the late 19th century invention of institutions such as Johns Hopkins, the University of Chicago, and the University of Michigan. Importing the model of the PhD from Germany, the key innovation of these schools was the redefinition of the role of the professorate in terms of research and the creation of new knowledge. Until then, American higher education had consisted of colleges whose central purpose had been the transmission of a cultural heritage reaching back to the Greeks. It is worth emphasizing the importance of this task: democracy was still a fragile institution, and an education in history, philosophy, and letters trained men in the skills necessary for preserving what was then a radical social and political experiment. Post Civil War period society was seized by a different dynamic: rather than preserving and applying the intellectual legacy of the ancient world, societal progress was increasingly linked to scientific discovery and cultural change. This transformation had a profound affect upon the goals of higher education, as the analytic method of science was applied to the new institutions of knowledge. Teaching, or the transmission of our cultural legacy, came to be seen as the lesser part of the professors’ role, as research leading to the creation of new (paradigmatically, scientific) knowledge came to the fore.
A number of consequences followed from this redefinition of the institutional structure of knowledge. They include an increased emphasis upon disciplinarity and an increasing specialization and professionalization across academic fields (including the formation of professional societies such as the American Philosophical Association in 1900). For our purposes, most telling was the expansion of the research paradigm to the various fields of the humanities (including philosophy)—as an intellectual structure, a work plan, and as a means for managing the tremendous growth in knowledge.
The conundrum facing us today is that if we no longer believe in simples, epistemic foundations, or a philosophy of external relations, why are our intellectual efforts so deeply wedded to the concepts of specialization and depth? Why do we still structure our undergraduate and graduate programs, and judge the work of our colleagues, in terms of their ability to go narrower and deeper in their examination of a given thinker or topic? By what logic to we hold onto the presumption of specialization, and tacitly, a philosophy of external relations, when specialization and external relations have been shorn of their epistemological raison d’etre?
One specializes in order to plumb the depths of a subject, to join the community of other thinkers on that subject, and to become qualified to speak on and to judge the comments of others. Knowledge is thus intimately tied to questions of legitimacy, the quid jure of who is entitled to speak on a subject. The problem with this claim, however, is not only that we never reach bottom—there is always another volume of Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe to read, and another counter-argument consider from the most recent issue of Philosophy Today. The problem is also that we are able to go deeper into a given subject only by ignoring the lateral connections between this subject and the rest of the universe of thought and action.
What is at issue here is a presumption of external relations—the dominance of the metaphorics of the laboratory in disciplines ostensibly quite far from the lab. The epistemology of the laboratory presumes that it is relatively unproblematic to separate a bench experiment from the world at large: creating conditions that can be replicated, by controlling the materials used and constraining the parameters of the experiment. Even fields quite far from, and in some cases quite disdainful of science, have applied this presumption of external relations to their own work. For instance, it is somehow obvious to literary scholars that it is more central to the work of their field to further probe the depths of the Prelude than to see how Wordsworth can illuminate the experience of employees of the National Park Service, and through them, the park-visiting public.
Philosophy too remains captured by a metaphorics of depth that vitiates our attempts to make our work, environmental or otherwise, relevant to ongoing social and political questions. We pay obeisance to the vertical dimension of thought, believing that progress into the deeper recesses of a given thinker or topic is more central to the work of the philosophy than understanding how a thinker’s work relates to other disciplines or the world at large. But it may fairly be asked: whence the imperative for continually going deeper? Why not complement the vertical axis of exploration by a horizontal movement, through a rigorous training in making lateral connections across the disciplines, with communities, and with the public and private sector? Indeed, in a world of hyper-specialization, why not define the task of at least one discipline (we could, perhaps, call it philosophy) as explicitly trans-disciplinary in nature? For if there are no longer simples to be found, or a ground of knowledge that we are seeking, by what logic to we insist that in order to “really” know a subject a student must reach a certain depth rather than breadth of knowledge?