INTRODUCTION
                    Environmental Philosophy
                    Anthropocentrism, Intrinsic Value,  
                         and Worldview Clash
           ENVIRONMENTAL PHILOSOPHY HAS CHALLENGED THE DOMINANT WESTERN CULTURE’S CONCEPTION OF 
           human nature through critiques of anthropocentrism (human chauvinism). 
           It has annoyed the mainstream with critiques of instrumental rationality and 
           its plea on behalf of the intrinsic value of nature. It has irritated nonenviron-
           mentalists and even some environmentalists with its criticism of mechanism 
           or the reductionist scientific worldview and has argued in favor of some form 
           of ecological worldview. The critique of anthropocentrism, the intrinsic value of 
           nature, and the ecological worldview are central topics for environmental phi-
           losophers, appearing across a wide range of environmentalist writing, from 
           environmental ethics and policy to political ecology, ecocriticism, and meta-
           physics. As I understand them, these topics have characterized environmental 
           philosophy since its inception in the 1970s.
             In the widespread environmental imaginary of a few decades ago, perhaps 
           the central term of engagement for environmental philosophers and ethicists 
           was the concept of anthropocentrism. Anthropocentrism—whose core mean-
           ing is human-centric evaluation—was also considered by many to be one of 
           the central causes of the environmental crisis. Identifying its historical and 
           conceptual sources and pulling them out by the roots formed a large part of 
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             © 2020 State University of New York Press, Albany
             the environmentalist response.1 By the early 1990s, the Australian environ-
             mental philosopher Warwick Fox could write that “virtually every paper and 
             book that ecophilosophers have written either implicitly or explicitly develops 
             some kind of answer to [the] question ‘what’s wrong with being anthropocen-
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             tric?’ ”  It effectively encapsulates a number of issues that have attracted critical 
             attention: the Modern western dualistic opposition between humans and non-
             human nature; the notion of human chauvinism or human-centric evaluation; 
             and the concept of nature as mere resource passively awaiting instrumentalist 
             exploitation. Current debates around the concept of the Anthropocene sug-
             gest that renewed attention to this topic is warranted.
               In addition to the critique of anthropocentrism, a “new ethics” was called 
             for by many environmental philosophers. Are traditional ethical categories 
             and theories so fundamentally anthropocentric that a completely new ethics is 
             required? Adopting a nonanthropocentric perspective would mean accepting 
             the propositions that nonhumans have moral worth, and that they must be 
             taken seriously in human decisions about environmental issues. In a nonan-
             thropocentric ethics, this also means that in cases of conflict their interests 
             may often carry greater weight than those of humans. Environmental ethics 
             might have to be “new” if traditional theories cannot accommodate these 
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             points.  After briefly entertaining the possibility of using the existing concepts 
             of “rights” or “standing” for nonhumans in the 1970s, environmental ethics 
             came more and more to be identified with arguments for the intrinsic value of 
             nature. A trickle of references to the intrinsic value of nature in the 1970s grad-
             ually became a steady stream in the late 1980s, and the high-water mark was 
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             reached in the debate in the 1990s.  Finding the appropriate epistemological, 
             ontological, and normative arguments to secure the concept became a major 
             preoccupation. J. Baird Callicott explicitly declared that the distinctive fea-
             ture of environmental ethics would be its claim that nature possesses intrinsic 
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             value.  He claimed that “the most important philosophical task for environ-
             mental ethics is the development of a non-anthropocentric value theory,” and 
             he defined the difference between anthropocentric and nonanthropocentric 
             ethics in terms of intrinsic value.
               An anthropocentric value theory (or axiology), by common consensus, 
               confers intrinsic value on human beings and regards all other things, in-
               cluding other forms of life, as being only instrumentally valuable, i.e., 
               valuable only to the extent that they are means or instruments which may 
             2   Introduction
                © 2020 State University of New York Press, Albany
                              serve human beings. A non-anthropocentric value theory (or axiology), on 
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                              the other hand, would confer intrinsic value on some non-human beings.
                          Reflecting on the concept itself, some writers noted that this very specific quest 
                          for the establishment of the intrinsic value of nonhuman nature was motivat-
                          ed by the need to identify some transcultural anchor of environmental value 
                          against the backdrop of value relativism. It is only if some value “independent 
                          of and overrid[ing] individual human judgment and . . . relative and evolv-
                          ing cultural ideals” could be found that environmental value would be safe 
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                          from provincial nature-exploitative interests.  Although it was and remains 
                          a fundamental part of the discourse of environmental ethics, I will provide 
                          some reasons to doubt the efficacy of this approach to value theory in part 
                          two of the book.
                              Finally, by the 1980s it became conventional among environmental phi-
                          losophers to contrast an “ecological worldview” with “the Modern scientific 
                          worldview”—where the latter is taken to be an expression of Cartesian dual-
                          ism, atomism, mechanism, and reductionist materialism—and to indict it as 
                          one of the central causes of the ecological crisis. The theoretical and techno-
                          logical transformations characterizing the Scientific Revolution, along with its 
                          supporting Judeo-Christian tradition, were seen as chief contributors to the 
                          highly anthropocentric, exploitative relationship of humankind to nature in 
                          western culture. From Arne Naess’s contrast between thing- and field-ontology 
                          (1972), to Carolyn Merchant’s case against Modern science and her plea for a 
                                                                                                          
                          return to a holistic, organismic conception of nature (1980),to Charles Birch 
                          and John Cobb Jr.’s mechanistic and ecological models of the living (1981), to J. 
                          Baird Callicott’s “metaphysical implications of ecology” (1986), and, ultimate-
                          ly, to the elaboration of these alternative conceptions by other writers during 
                          the 1990s, including Warwick Fox (1990, 1995), Bryan Norton (1991), Murray 
                          Bookchin (1996), and Arran Gare (1996), this contrast became a defining fea-
                                                                        
                          ture of environmental philosophy.Since “worldview” talk is also central to the 
                          post-Kantian tradition, the Continentalists among environmentalists seam-
                          lessly extended the general antipathy to the sciences in the dominant strains of 
                          Continental philosophy into environmentalism, and works like Neil Evernden’s 
                          (1985) and David Abram’s (1995) also traded on a series of oppositions cen-
                          tral to the grand contrast between mechanist and ecological worldviews. Even 
                          today, there are calls for “worldview remediation” and proposals to explicit-
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                          ly use the worldview concept as a tool in sustainable development debates.  
                                                                                                          Introduction       3
                              © 2020 State University of New York Press, Albany
             Although the figures and approaches listed are often conceived as antagonistic 
             to one another (e.g., deep ecology is often not compatible with pragmatism, nor 
             is ecophenomenology compatible with social ecology), they share the preoccu-
             pation with distinguishing a minority environmentalist “ecological worldview” 
             from a hegemonic “mechanistic worldview.” I will call this the “worldview clash” 
             model for thinking about science-environmentalism relations.
               This book is organized around these three major topics. Used in the sense 
             of “central issues” or “places” (topoi) of contention and thought, topics are 
             “clear enough and serious enough to engage a mind to whom they are new, 
             and also abrasive enough to strike sparks off those who have been thinking 
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             about these things for years.”  This book directly engages with the fundamental 
             assumptions, categories, concepts, and value priorities that characterize large 
             parts of environmentalist thinking, and considers the conditions under which 
             environmentalists and others generally think about the nature of humankind 
             (philosophical anthropology), how they think about the value of nonhuman 
             nature (metaethics and value theory), and how they understand more-than-
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             human nature generally (ontology and epistemology).  The three parts of the 
             book deal with these three broad topics. I have organized the book in terms 
             of them not because I think they embody timeless philosophical questions, 
             but because initially I found it helpful to organize the wide array of literature 
             that falls under the heading of environmental philosophy in this way, and 
             hopefully it will be for others. For introducing environmental philosophy to 
             those unfamiliar with it, they also serve a heuristic function, like a ladder to 
             be pulled up and carefully dismantled once one reaches the desired height.
               I consider environmental philosophy to be an informed examination of the 
             concepts, categories, assumptions, and priorities in historically and cultural-
             ly diverse human interaction with the human and nonhuman natural world, 
             along with the implications of their mostly tacit operation. Philosophers have 
             long recognized that much human activity is caused and conditioned in large 
             part—but never exclusively—by linguistic and conceptual categories, value pri-
             orities, and unspoken assumptions that remain mostly invisible to those who 
             think and act with them. Philosophers are particularly good at thinking about 
             such conditions, and if they have shown that these conditions motivate anti-en-
             vironmental activity in significant ways, finding the flaws in these frameworks 
             and correcting them ought to play a role in generating the kind of social 
             change environmentalists desire. This definition of environmental philoso-
             phy already implies that the scope of such philosophical work is far broader 
             than most people usually think. Contrary to popular belief, philosophy is not 
             4   Introduction
                © 2020 State University of New York Press, Albany