Hi Ted, hi everyone,

Ted, I really appreciated reading your thoughtful response on the topic of
"preservationism."  Sorry if I offended you (or anyone else) with my use of
the word, "opined," to describe your statement, "To me, terms such as
'unethical preservationism' is part of the general body of
anti-environmental hate literature."  I'll be more careful with my use of
the word "opine" in the future.  :-)

>Dear Jim, Steve Bissell and others:
>Sorry for not replying to the above posts sooner.  I only joined this
>group in the
>second week of July and was surprised at the volume of traffic. Then I went on
>vacation. So, when I returned near the end of the month, you can visualize the
>stuff (just from this listserve alone) in my Inbox!  And, in the meantime,
>my large
>vegetable and flower gardens needed critical attention. And, hey, it's the
>middle
>of summer!! But I could not refrain from zeroing in on that offensive term
>"unethical preservation," which, frankly, I thought to be an impossible and
>dangerous notion for this day and age --  more on this below. But one item
>at a
>time....

No apologies needed at all.  I hope you have been able to get your
vegetable and flower gardens in order--if your garden is anything like
ours, it's probably just a big, weedy mess, what with all the rain we've
had this summer.  Have you had any problems with woodchucks?  Hmmm. . . .
It occurs to me that as a gardener you probably would *really* like the
Michael Pollan book I mentioned earlier, *Second Nature: A Gardener's
Education*.  Why don't I include a few excerpts here from Pollan's
Introduction in order to whet your interest. . . .

Pollan writes:

	"I began gardening for the same reasons people usually do: for the
satisfaction of pulling bunches of carrots from one's own ground; the
desire to make a patch of land more hospitable or productive; the urge to
recover a place remembered from childhood, and the basic need to keep the
forest from swallowing up one's house. . . .

	"It wasn't very long before I discovered I was ill-prepared for the
work I'd taken on.  The local New England landscape--a patchwork of
abandoned farms swiftly  being overtaken by second-growth forest--proved
far less amenable to my plans for it than the tame suburban plots of my
childhood had.  Here were large and rapacious animals, hegemonies of weeds,
a few billion examples of every insect in the field guide, killing frosts
in June and September, and boulders of inconceivable weight and number.
But there were obstacles of a very different kind that proved just as
vexing: the unexamined attitudes toward nature that I'd brought with me to
the garden.

	"Like most Americans out-of-doors, I was a child of Thoreau.  But
the ways of seeing nature I'd inherited from him, and the whole tradition
of nature writing he inspired, seemed not to fit my experiences.  In
confronting the local woodchucks, or deciding whether I was obliged to mow
my lawn, or how liberal I could afford to be with respect to weeds, I was
deep in nature, surely, but my feelings about it, although strong, were
something other than romantic, or worshipful.  When one summer I came
across Emerson's argument that 'weeds' (just then strangling my annuals)
were nothing more than a defect of my perception, I felt a certain
cognitive dissonance.  Everybody wrote about how to *be* in nature, what
sorts of perceptions to have, but nobody about how to *act* there.  Yet the
gardener, unlike the naturalist, has to, indeed *wants* to, act.

	"Now it is true that there are countless volumes of practical
advice available to the perplexed gardener, but I felt the need for some
philosophical guidance as well.  Before I firebomb a woodchuck burrow, I
like to have a bit of theory under my belt.  Yet for the most part,
Americans who write about nature don't write about the garden--about
man-made landscapes and the processes of their making.  This is an odd
omission, for although gardening may not at first seem to hold the drama or
grandeur of, say, climbing mountains, it is gardening that gives us our
most direct and intimate experience of nature--of its satisfactions,
fragility, and power.

	"Yet traditionally, when we have wanted to think about our
relationship to nature, we have gone to the wilderness, to places untouched
by man.  Thoreau, in fact, was the last important American writer on nature
to have anything to say about gardening.  He planted a bean field at Walden
and devoted a chapter to his experiences in it.  But the bean field (which
I talk about in my chapter on weeds) got Thoreau into all sorts of trouble.
His romance of wild nature left him feeling guilty about discriminating
against weeds (he rails against the need for such 'invidious distinctions')
and he couldn't see why he was any more entitled to the harvest of his
garden than the resident woodchucks and birds.  Badly tangled up in
contradictions between his and nature's perogatives, Thoreau had to forsake
his bean field, eventually declaring that he would prefer the most dismal
swamp to any garden.  With that declaration, the garden was essentially
banished from American writing on nature.

	"I think this is unfortunate, and not just because I happen to
stand in need of sound advice in the garden.  Americans have a deeply
ingrained habit of seeing nature and culture as irreconcilably opposed; we
automatically assume that whenever one gains, the other must lose.  Forced
to choose, we usually opt for nature (at least in our books).  This choice,
which I believe is a false one, is what led Thoreau and his descendents out
of the garden.  To be sure, there is much to be learned in the wilderness;
our unsurpassed tradition of nature writing is sufficient proof of that.
But my experience in the garden leads me to believe that there are many
important things about our relationship to nature that *cannot* be learned
in the wild.  For one thing, we need, and now more than ever, to learn how
to use nature without damaging it.  That probably can't be done as long as
we continue to think of nature and culture simply as antagonists.  So how
do we begin to find some middle ground between the two?  To provide for our
needs and desires without diminishing nature?  The premise of this book is
that the place to look for some of the answers to these questions may not
be in the woods, but in the garden" (Pollan, pp. 2-5).

Well, I guess that's enough for now on Pollan.  It would be fun to come
back and discuss some more of his ideas here on the list.  The full cite
for Pollan is:
Pollan, Michael. *Second Nature: A Gardener's Education*. New York: Dell
Publishing, 1991.

[snip]

Hmmm.  Well, okay, one last thing.  I guess I just can't resist drawing
attention to one other item that Ted has managed to slip into his otherwise
very thoughtful response about "unethical preservationism."  <s>

In this case, Ted averred:
> But, again, I want to reiterate that unlike religions and
>quasi-religions, preservationism has an ecological/scientific basis --
>ecocentrists
>see the imperative need to preserve/restore the Earth's normal systems.

Well, whew!  I am sure glad to hear that preservationism has an
"ecological/scientific" basis.  <grin>  And here all along I thought that
preservation was just a woolly fuzzy value judgment that no one in their
right mind would try to back up and/or otherwise support with "objective"
reasons.  I am glad finally to learn that ecoeccentrics have Science on
their side.  Now that *is* a relief.  :-)

Kidding aside, Ted, what exactly does that mean, i.e. that "preservationism
has an ecological/scientific basis"?  And why is having a scientific
"basis" for preservation--and/or for environmental ethics more
generally--important?

I suppose that I should alert you ahead of time that among other things I
am somewhat skeptical of the seeming opposition of religion and science
that you appear to be proposing: "unlike religions and quasi-religions,
preservationism has an ecological/scientific basis."  If I may be so bold
as to opine (!) simply that this claim of yours strikes me as a somewhat
naive statement, both about religion but also about the nature of science .
. . .

For some discussion about WHY this view is naive you might see e.g. Mary
Midgley's fine book, *Science as Salvation : A Modern Myth and Its Meaning*
(Routledge, 1992).  Her earlier book on evolutionary biology might also be
of interest (Midgley, Mary. *Evolution as a Religion: Strange Hopes and
Stranger Fears*. New York: Methuen, 1985).

Also, another author who has discussed the philosophical problems inherent
in trying to ground enviroethics specifically in *ecological* science is
Kristin Shrader-Frechette, e.g. in:

Shrader-Frechette, Kristin. "Ecological Theories and Ethical Imperatives:
Can Ecology Provide a Scientific Justification for the Ethics of
Environmental Protection?" In Scientists and Their Responsibility, edited
by William R. Shea and Beat Sitter, 73-104. Canton, MA: Watson Publishing
International, 1989.

and in:
Shrader-Frechette, K. S., and Earl D. McCoy. "How the Tail Wags the Dog:
How Value Judgments Determine Ecological Science." Environmental Values 3
(1994): 107-20.

Many of Shrader-Frechette's other writings (e.g. *Method in Ecology*)
address these issues as well.  fyi and fwiw.  This idea that preservation
has a "scientific basis" might make for yet another interesting <g> topic
for our discussion on the list . . . .

best,

Jim T.



>
>Note:  My apologies for the length of this post. Enviroethics is a great
>listserve.
>From now on I hope to keep my posts brief -- as requested by David
>Pearson, list
>owner.
>
>Cheers to all,
>Ted
>--
>Ted Mosquin, B.Sc. (Hons.), Ph.D.
>Box 279, Lanark, Ontario K0G 1K0, Canada
>http://www.ecospherics.net (literature on ecocentric/ecospheric ethics)
>Tel: (613)267-4899;   Fax: (613)264-8469