Some green writers, particularly those who support the viewpoint known as deep ecology, accuse socialist environmentalists of anthropocentrism, of giving absolute priority to human needs and ignoring or downplaying the needs of non-human nature. To that, they counterpose what is variously called biocentrism or ecocentrism – the view that all living things have the same or similar intrinsic value.
Many who call themselves biocentrists argue that their viewpoint is superior to, and incompatible with, socialism and Marxism. The late David Orton, for example, refused to sign the Belem Ecosocialist Declaration in 2008, because it was “people-centered, not Earth-centered.”
There’s a tendency among ecologically-conscious socialists to reply to such criticisms by simply denying that we are anthropocentric. That’s an understandable response: after all, who wants to be labeled as anti-nature?
In the following remarkable passage, the noted radical ecologist Murray Bookchin offers a very different response, one that in my opinion deserves careful consideration from all green lefts and left greens, whether or not they agree with his anarchist philosophy.
The following is from Murray Bookchin’s essay “Where I Stand Now,” in Defending the Earth (South End Press, 2001), a book in which he debated these and related issues with EarthFirst! founder and deep ecology exponent Dave Foreman. The book is now out of print, but it can be downloaded from The Anarchist Library. To aid readability on screen, I have added paragraph breaks, but otherwise the text is unchanged.
[The rest is Bookchin]
To those who dismiss me as “anthropocentric,” I must ask: Why must I be forced to choose between “biocentrism” and “anthropocentrism?” I never believed that the Earth was “made” for human exploitation. In fact, as a dyed-in-the-wool secularist, I never believed it was “made” at all. I also don’t believe that humans should “dominate” nature — the ultimate impossibility of this is a key idea in social ecology.
Given my longstanding fascination with the wonders of natural evolution and, yes, wilderness, what need do I have for a “biocentrism” that deflects me from the social roots of the ecological crisis? I believe that non-human and human nature are as inextricably bound to each other as the ventricles of the heart are bound to the auricles and that both human and non-human nature deserve moral consideration.
An “anthropocentrism” that is based on the religious principle that the Earth was “made” to be dominated by “Humanity” is as remote from my thinking as a “biocentrism” that turns human society into just another community of animals.
We need a much better perspective, I think. Whether there will be any wild areas or wildlife left in a century or so depends decisively upon the kind of society we will have — not on whether we lecture the human species over its failings, call it a “cancer” or worse on the planet, or extol the virtues of the Pleistocene or Neolithic. It will depend not only on our attitude toward non-human life but on the extent to which countless social oppressions are permitted to exist that compel peasants to cut down forests in order to survive, and that destroy their traditional lifeways in the bargain.
Even more fundamentally — and we had better get down to fundamentals if we wish to be “radical” in the real meaning of the word — whether there will be wild areas or wildlife left in a century or so depends upon whether we continue to preserve the “grow-or-die” economy (be it free-market corporate capitalism or bureaucratic state capitalism) in which an enterprise or a country that doesn’t grow economically is devoured by its rivals in the domestic market or in the international arena.
Indeed, until humanity can actualize its evolutionary potentialities as highly creative and ecologically-oriented beings, the antagonisms engendered by social oppression in all its forms will literally tear down the planet — both for human and for non-human life-forms alike.
To blame technology per se for this terrible distortion of second nature; to deal with human population growth as if it were not influenced profoundly by cultural factors; to reduce the basic social factors that have produced the present ecological crisis to largely, often purely biological ones — all this is to deflect attention away from the fact that our ecological dislocations have their primary source in social dislocations. The very notion of “dominating nature” has its roots in the domination of human by human — in hierarchies that brought the young into subjugation to gerontocracies, that brought women into subjugation to patriarchies, ordinary people into subjugation to military chiefdoms, working people into subjugation to capitalist or bureaucratic systems of exploitation, and so forth.
Granted, we need profound cultural changes and a new sensibility..... But does anyone seriously think these cultural changes can be achieved in a society that pits people against one another as buyers and sellers, as exploited and exploiters, as subjugated and subjugators at all levels of life?
To deflect our attention from these crucial social questions with a “biocentrism” that basically ignores them at best or that blames a vague “Humanity” for problems generated by a rotten social system at worst is to lead the ecology movement onto an ideological sidetrack. We have no need for “biocentrism,” “anthropocentrism,” or for that matter any “centrism,” nor for any ideology that diverts popular attention from the social sources of the ecological crisis..........
We should never lose sight of the fact that the project of human liberation has now become an ecological project, just as, conversely, the project of defending the Earth has also become a social project.