When Descartes Is Not Enough

Anyone who has followed environmental writing with even a passing interest has probably noticed how many practitioners of the genre usually get around to beating up on that triumvirate of the Enlightenment, Rene Descartes, John Locke and Francis Bacon. The writer David Orr even told me once, half joking, that he blocks out a little section in each essay to run down Descartes one more time.

What’s our beef with these pillars of Western thought? It comes down to a basic assumption in the science of the 17th century—one we have never been able to shake—that a profound separation exists between the talking animals and the rest of the world. Locke wrote that “the intrinsic natural worth of anything consists in its fitness to supply the necessities or serve the conveniences of human life.” That about sums it up, and that is why individual states have Departments of Natural Resources. We continue too often to think if nature only as a resource—something we can use. We don’t think of it as something we can use up, still less as something we might learn from.

In Kentucky, where I live, the most egregious form of Cartesian thinking is mountaintop removal strip mining. Blowing the top off a mountain for its coal is at once a remarkable expression of contempt for the natural world as well as a profound separation—ethically and psychologically — from it. The 20th century theologian Martin Buber called this I/It thinking, whereby the subject treats the other as simply an object, something to be manipulated. The corrective to such thinking, said Buber, is an I/Thou way of thinking in which the object is actually another subject, worthy of the same ethical treatment.

That sounds abstract, so let me ground it in the work of the great Japanese poet, Mastuo Basho. Around the same time Descartes, Locke and Bacon were setting out their philosophies, Basho wrote:

Go to the pine if you want to learn about the pine, or to the bamboo if you want to learn about the bamboo. And in doing so, you must leave your subjective preoccupation with yourself. Otherwise, you impose yourself on the object and do not learn.

It is this imposition of human logic on the natural world that Basho objected to. Then, as advice to poets, he added:

However well-phrased your poetry may be, if your feeling is not natural—if the object and yourself are separate—then your poetry is not true poetry but merely your subjective counterfeit.

The I/Thou understanding is expressed here in almost a mystical, religious sense. It is also religious in the larger sense that it supplies an ethics as well. As a post-Auschwitz Jewish thinker, Buber knew better than anyone the evil that can result when other human beings are thought of as objects rather than selves.

But I/Thou thinking is also utilitarian. Compare the I/It logic of a strip mine to the I/Thou logic of a forested mountain. A strip mine causes deforestation, flooding, erosion, species loss, water pollution, and ultimately adds more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. A forested mountain, by contrast, prevents flooding and erosion, provides habitat for species, purifies streams and rivers, and sequesters carbon from the atmosphere. That is to say, a forest does everything that a strip mine cannot. It’s logic is far more ancient than the theorems of Descartes or the industrial logic of the strip mine.

To treat the natural world as merely a resource is not only immoral, it is ignorant. A far more intelligent, and ultimately self-serving, approach would be to learn from nature, to practice what Janine Benyus calls biomimicry. Such an idea is as old as the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus, who said, “The mind of man exists in a logical universe but is not itself logical.” To bridge this divide, we the talking animals must return to the logic of the mountain, the intelligence of the forest.