What does the goal of “saving the planet” or “protecting the environment” mean? The environmentalists ultimately mean that the planet needs to be saved from humans. Protect the environment from what or from whom? Protect the environment for what? Protect the environment for whom? The planet needs to be protected from you. Doubtless many will argue that the environmentalists just want to “save the planet” for humans, but—with anti-impact still the ideal—this still entails comprehensive central planning to the extent that human existence must severely retrench if it cannot be eliminated.
Environmentalists—at least the true believers that hold the anti-impact goal consistently—want you dead; they will settle, in the short term, for you to feel guilty for existing, producing and consuming, and willing to comply with any degree of central planning and freedom curtailment to “save the planet” from you.
After the failures of socialism—economically, historically, and ethically—the Left-liberal intellectuals, not wanting to abandon socialism, employed several new strategies. It has been suggested that these several manifestations can be subsumed under one general category—postmodernism. After a review of postmodern philosophy and philosophical influences, Stephen Hicks explains his central argument in Explaining Postmodernism: “Postmodernism is the academic far Left’s epistemological strategy for responding to the crisis caused by the failures of socialism in theory and in practice.” In other words, once socialism was discredited theoretically, economically (in several ways), historically, and ethically, those who were still ideologically committed to socialism despite its failures had to try to achieve socialism and central planning by appealing to other goals. One such strategy was the pursuit of egalitarianism (i.e. “equality”) between every disparate group, even between humans and the environment. Thus, the modern environmentalist movement—influenced by prior streams of thought—was born.
Describing further his analysis as to how the public failures of socialism plus postmodernism and modern environmentalism coalesced, Hicks writes,
The second variation was seen in the Left turn that rising concern with environmental issues took. As the Marxist movement splintered and mutated into new forms, Left intellectuals and activists began to look for new ways to attack capitalism. Environmental issues, alongside women’s and minorities’ issues, came to be seen as a new weapon in the arsenal against capitalism.
Traditional environmental philosophy had not been in principle in conflict with capitalism. It had held that a clean, sustainable, and beautiful environment was good because living in such an environment made human life healthier, wealthier, and more enjoyable. Human beings, acting to their advantage, change their environments to make them more productive, cleaner, and more attractive….
The new impetus in environmental thinking, however, brought Marxist concepts of exploitation and alienation to bear upon environmental issues. As the stronger party, humans necessarily exploit harmfully the weaker parties—the other species and the non-organic environment itself. Consequently, as capitalist society develops, the result of the exploitation is a biological form of alienation: humans alienate themselves from the environment by despoiling it and making it unviable, and non-human species are alienated by being driven to extinction.
On this analysis, the conflict between economic production and environmental health, then, is not merely in the short-run; it is fundamental and inescapable. The production of wealth itself is in mortal conflict with environmental health. And capitalism, since it is so good at producing wealth, must therefore be the environment’s number one enemy. Wealth, therefore, was no longer good. Living simply, avoiding producing and consuming as much as possible, was the new ideal.
The impetus of this new strategy, captured perfectly in Rudolf Bahro’s Red to Green, integrated with the new emphasis on equality over need. In Marxism, humankind’s technological mastery of nature was a presupposition of socialism. Marxism was a humanism in the sense of putting human values at the core of its value framework and assuming that the environment is there for human beings to use and enjoy for their own ends. But, egalitarian critics began to argue more forcefully, just as males’ putting their interest highest led them to subjugate women, and just as whites’ putting their interests highest led them to subjugate all other races, humans’ putting their interests highest had led to the subjugation of other species and the environment as a whole.
The proposed solution then was the radical moral equality of all species. We must recognize that not only productivity and wealth are evil, but also that all species from bacteria to wood lice to aardvarks to humans are equal in moral value. “Deep ecology,” as radical egalitarianism applied to environmental philosophy came to be called, thus rejected the humanistic elements of Marxism, and substituted Heidegger’s anti-humanist value framework.
(It ought to be noted that, prior to this, the moral grammar of modern environmentalism was prepared through Romanticism [late-18th to mid-19th century], especially Rousseau, with its “revolt against reason, as well as against the condition under which nature has compelled him to live,” its “grudge against reality,” its dislike of industrialization and bourgeois society, its emphasis on nature as morally superior to civilization, its suspicion of human mastery over nature, its emphasis on authenticity over progress, emotion, intuition, and moral sentiment over reason, and pastoral idealization of pre-industrial life).
The Anti-Impact Framework
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