A n Opinion by Kevin Hart
Despite the efforts of organizations such as the Sierra Club and the National Environmental Defense Council, many people would argue that the environmental movement has not yet swung into full motion. A highly affordable and available alternative source of energy to replace crude oil has not yet presented itself. Hunting is allowed, and, in many cases, encouraged on public lands throughout the country. Many people refuse to efficiently recycle their paper, resulting in a rampant logging industry. Most importantly, the priorities set forth by the Environmental Protection Agency do not meet the needs of the Earth. Industries of all types continue to dump pollutants into our planet’s air and water supplies, while continuing to increase the temperature of the Earth. If the environmental movement was truly strong, these scenarios would not exist.
In the 1970s, the American government began to take some important steps to improve the quality of our natural environment. Despite all these apparent attempts to get the environmental movement rolling, why is it that such a small amount of progress has actually been made? I believe that many of the environmental regulations in place today are too anthropocentric in their goals. They aim to improve the health and wellbeing of humans by improving environmental quality, but too rarely aim to preserve natural ecosystems for their own sake. This anthropocentric point of view was presented to us, in part, by philosophers such as the 17th-century philosopher René Descartes.
Descartes advocated that nature, including all animals that reside in the natural world except humans, is just a machine. He believed that the Earth moves because of its mechanical workings, and that a rabbit hops because it is a machine programmed to hop. Humans, on the other hand, contain reason and souls, and are therefore above nature. Descartes believed that animals cannot communicate with humans, and used this belief as the base of his argument that animals lack souls and reason. He believed that if animals could speak at all, then humans could understand them. As far as Descartes could see, humans cannot understand animals; therefore, they must not be able to speak. As a result, he argued that animals must not contain any reason at all because very little reason is needed in order to speak.
Today, we are able to identify this argument as a flawed one. Through scientific studies and observations we have discovered that animals are, indeed, capable of communication. In order to draw this conclusion, we studied dolphin pods and the gorilla Koko, who has a vocabulary of over 1,000 words in sign language. These studies refute Descartes’ argument, yet we continue to create policies based on anthropocentric values. I believe that we cannot fully swing into an environmental movement until we throw away our anthropocentric roots. We must make political decisions based on what we know today, not what a 17th-century philosopher wanted us to believe.
