It is immensely gratifying to see the little birds foraging from the feeders.
And then there is also this sense of "what a good person I am". This sense of "I am the kind of person who spends more money on bird food than on holidays, or clothes, or theatre trips."
Is giving ever free of this self-congratulatory spike?
I'm reading Erazim Kohák's The Green Halo, which is a broad overview of ecological ethics, arising from his lecture notes when he was teaching in Prague. He presents all the different schools of thought with generosity and clarity. It is a little dated in that I think that he was not familiar with Val Plumwood, for example, whose writing might have strengthened his analysis of ecofeminism.
One of the aspects that is new to me is the difference between deep ecology and depth ecology. Arne Naess first made the distinction between deep and shallow ecology - and I think he was intending to refer to ecology that values nature for itself and ecology that values nature for its benefit to humans. Kohák seems to feel that the likes of Aldo Leopold and John Muir, whose thinking led to what Kohák calls "flannel ecology" (he means those in flannel shirts who go out and get things done because they love the natural world and want it to thrive - this is, I think, where he sits, theoretically), were deep ecologists avant le letter, and that Naess's work created wasn't really "new". Deep ecology acknowledges that much of what we alienated humans do is bad for the rest of life. It acknowledges the destruction, pollution, extractivism, and so on. Depth ecology claims that what is wrong is not just what we do, but who we are, or rather, how we think. So the "depth" is like depth in depth psychology: its claim is that we need to work on ourselves, purify our minds, merge with the protoconsciousness of nature in order to first heal ourselves and then heal the earth.
He ends the analysis like this:
Is there a deep alienation from our nature behind the obvious alienation from nature? Or even deeper, is it alienation from the feminine side of our being? How deep into our subjectivity need we submerge to reach our own foundations. And if we do reach them, is human consciousness and effective mass- or a decisive direction? When we immerse ourselves in our putative unconscious, can we still call it ecological ethics- or have we crossed the boundary between care for nature and self-centred narcissism? At the end of the article we have cited, Karen J. Warren recounts with deep sympathy how a young Sioux learns to hunt:
Shoot your four-legged brother in the hind area, slowing it down but not killing it. Then, take the four-legged's head into your hands, and look into his eyes. The eyes are where all the suffering is. Look into your brother’s eyes and feel his pain.
Is that experiencing empathy- or tormenting an animal who was shot in the head could have saved much of the suffering? Are we here still interested in nature- or has our interest shifted in the first place to our feelings? Unquestionably, an ecological ethics without emotion and empathy would be an ethic devoid of all ability to reach out to the other and devoid of motivation to act, as the systems ecologists demonstrate. Depth ecology and ecofeminism speak of something crucial to our personal growth. Do we not, though, need also to recognise the otherness of the other, the others integrity and objectivity, lest we sink into a narcissism? The other is not just a projection of our feelings and should not be perceived as such the full stop the other deserves our respect for her his own integrity. Our relation to others is always a matter of balancing openness with respect for the otherness of the other. It is the difficult balancing of a love which knows kinship with respect which honours the integrity of otherness.
In this instance, did the scale tip to one side? You be the judge.
I this this is part of the anxiety I feel about the focus on self, meditation and purification.
There's more that disconcerts me. Like about how, for example, the deer starving and dying (rather than being fed by people like me) is a blessing for the trees and the plants, the invertebrates and small birds and mammals. Finally they get to recuperate. Deer dying, the deaths of complex, conscious, sentient beings, can be good. How much better if they had not reached the numbers that nearly killed the woodland and that led to starvation and suffering. So, am I recanting my ant-shooting deer policy? And if I don't is that just because I want my soul to be pure? Or is it that I don't think we humans know enough to know best how to intervene? But if we screwed it up, by killing wolves, releasing muntjacs from wildlife parks, and so on, don't we than have a duty to make reparation? But what good is reparation that is all about killing?
The thing is, this is hard. And purifying my soul is to disengage from responsibility.
Come to think of it, this is an anti-Valentine's Day post. Or is it Valentines' Day?
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