Orrs Love It or Lose It: The Coming Biophilia Revolution

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Orrs Love It or Lose It The Coming Biophilia
Revolution

• HMXP 102
• Adapted from Dr. Fikes slideshow

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David W. Orr

• Orr is the chair of the Environmental Studies
  Program at Oberlin College in Ohio.
• He gives dozens of lectures around the country
  every year on environmental issues.
• His paternal grandfather was Rev. W.W. Orr of
  Charlotte, NC.
• Source http//www.oberlin.edu/news-info/98sep/o
  rr_profile.html

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Biophobia

• How does Orr define biophobia?
•  What characteristics of biophobia does Orr list?

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Characteristics of Biophobia

• The world is not alive and worthy of respect, if
  not fear.
• Distance yourself from animals (mere machines).
• Have no sympathy for nature think of it only in
  scientific and economic terms.
• Join power, money, knowledge in order to make
  nature useful.
• Stress improvement and perpetual economic
  growth.
• Cultivate dissatisfaction that can be alleviated
  only by mass consumption.

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World Views

• The next few slides help you explore WHY we
  arrived at the six characteristics of biophobia.

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Re. 2 René Descartes (1596-1650)

• Al Gore, Earth in the Balance  "The Cartesian
  approach to the human story allows us to believe
  that we are separate from the earth, entitled to
  view it as nothing more than an inanimate
  collection of resources that we can exploit
  however we like and this fundamental
  misperception has led us to our current crisis. 
  
• One of the deepest and most lasting legacies of
  Descartes philosophy is his thesis that mind and
  body are really distinct--a thesis now called
  mind-body dualism. He reaches this conclusion
  by arguing that the nature of the mind (that is,
  a thinking, non-extended thing) is completely
  different from that of the body (that is, an
  extended, non-thinking thing), and therefore it
  is possible for one to exist without the other.
• Source http//www.iep.utm.edu/d/descmind.htm

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Homology

• Descartes Environment
• Mindbodyhumansnature
• POINT There is disconnection on each side of
  the homology. What Descartes says about mind and
  body also applies to humans and nature.

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Re. 4 Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

• Francis Bacon provided the logic, and the
  evolution of government-funded research did the
  rest.
• To take the place of the established tradition
  (a miscellany of Scholasticism, humanism, and
  natural magic), he proposed an entirely new
  system based on empirical and inductive
  principles and the active development of new arts
  and inventions, a system whose ultimate goal
  would be the production of practical knowledge
  for the use and benefit of men and the relief
  of the human condition.
• Source http//www.iep.utm.edu/b/bacon.htm

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Re. 1, 3, 5, and 6 Consumerism

• What do you make of the obvious connection to
  Swimme, the sophisticated cultivation of
  dissatisfaction?
• Swimme But at a deeper level, what we need to
  confront is a power of the advertiser to
  promulgate a worldview, a mini-cosmology, that is
  based upon dissatisfaction and craving (112).
• Orr
• Sixth, biophobia required the sophisticated
  cultivation of dissatisfaction, which could be
  converted into mass consumption.
• Beneath each of these endeavors lies a barely
  concealed contempt for unaltered life and nature,
  as well as contempt for the people who are
  expected to endure the mistakes, purchase the
  results, and live with the consequences, whatever
  those may be. It is a contempt disguised by
  terms of bamboozlement, like bottom line,
  progress, needs, costs and benefits, economic
  growth, jobs, realism, research, and knowledge,
  words that go undefined and unexplained.
• People must come to see their bondage as freedom
  and their discontents as commercially solvable
  problems.

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A Troubling Contrast

• What metaphors besides "board feet, tons,
  barrels, yield," etc. do we use to talk about
  nature?  Can you come up with others?
• What does Orr say about stewardship?
• What metaphors are more in line with stewardship?

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Sample Nature Metaphors

• Here are some areas (nouns and adjectives) to get
  you started.
• Garden
• Resource
• Divine
• Wilderness
• Pristine
• Female
• Source http//www.wsu.edu8080/amerstu/ce/summe
  r97/ta/Metaphors.html

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Question

• How can we be good stewards of nature when we
  have the wrong metaphors to describe our
  relationship to it?
• Perhaps by changing our metaphors
• Argument as war vs. argument as dance (Lakoff and
  Johnson, page 8)
• Our relationship to nature is USE vs. our
  relationship to nature is ____________.

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A Further Problem

• Not only metaphor is off. In addition, we tell
  ourselves the wrong myths about nature
• What kind of myths do we have about nature? Cf.
  Gores emphasis on story.

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Paul Bunyan and Babe
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Paul Bunyan
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Paul Bunyan

• Source for the previous two slides
• http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ImagePaul_Bunyan_an
  d_Babe_statues_Bemidji_Minnesota_crop.JPG

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Myths About Man and Nature

• http//youtube.com/watch?vM3l2a_ESwPc
• http//youtube.com/watch?vzZp2JcmUU6o
• http//youtube.com/watch?vD_45epTAZLg
• http//youtube.com/watch?vDvVRMrUYvYs
• http//youtube.com/watch?vo-Y0Az-4wUg

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The Upshot

• Biophobia sets into motion a vicious cycle 
  This sentence describes the notion of feedback
  loop.  The idea is that a biophobic orientation
  feeds itself.
• Fortunately, that would probably work for
  biophilia as well.

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The Other Orientation Biophilia

• How does Orr define Biophilia?
• We will be reading Naesss text soon. In it the
  author speaks of deep ecology. see next slide

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Deep Ecology

• Deep ecology is a recent branch of ecological
  philosophy (ecosophy) that considers humankind as
  an integral part of its environment. It places
  more value on other species, ecosystems and
  processes in nature than is allowed by
  established environmental and green movements,
  and therefore leads to a new system of
  environmental ethics. The core principle of deep
  ecology as originally developed is Naess's
  doctrine of biospheric egalitarianism the claim
  that all living things have the same right to
  live and flourish a principle which, after
  criticism, has been substantially qualified (see
  Naess 1989). Deep ecology describes itself as
  "deep" because it is concerned with fundamental
  philosophical questions about the role of human
  life as one part of the ecosphere, rather than
  with a narrow view of ecology as a branch of
  biological science, and aims to avoid merely
  utilitarian environmentalism.
• Source http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_ecolog
  y

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Topophilia An Extension of Biophilia

• loving the setting that is familiar to us.
• And there is hope in doing so because we want to
  preserve what we love.
• What is the relationship between topophilia and
  biophilia? Can there be one without the other?

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Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas

• Does the principle of repression apply to
  environmentalism?  If we continue to repress
  nature, will it bite us on the backside? 
• Here is Jesus, speaking in the Gospel of Thomas 
  If you bring forth what is within you, what you
  bring forth will save you.  If you do not bring
  forth what is within you, what you do not bring
  forth will destroy you.  Is this true or false
  as regards the environment? 
• Cf. technology in the Aliens movies. The monster
  is the thing that is repressed.

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Lewis Thomas, Antaeus in Manhattan

• But I think it was chiefly the plastic that was
  at fault in the death of the ant colony on
  display in Manhattan, which seems to me the most
  unearthly of all mans creations so far. I do
  not believe you can suspend army ants away from
  the earth, on plastic, for any length of time.
  They will lose touch, run out of energy, and die
  for lack of current (The Lives of a Cell 26).
  

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C.G. Jung, CW 10, 882/466-67

• Yet the danger that faces us today is that the
  whole of reality will be replaced by words. This
  accounts for that terrible lack of instinct in
  modern man, particularly the city-dweller. He
  lacks all contact with the life and breath of
  nature. He knows a rabbit or a cow only from the
  illustrated paper, the dictionary, or the movies,
  and thinks he knows what it is really likeand is
  then amazed that cowsheds smell, because the
  dictionary didnt say so.
• END