The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (78 page)

The word evokes some combination of (1) the sacred East to which Christians and Moslems both pray; (2) the Orient (which is simply the Latin for ‘east’) as traditional antithesis to the modern secular West; (3) the Orthodox or Eastern Church with its historic mission to preserve the orderly values of the Eastern Roman Empire, as much against a decadent West as against Islam; (4) the settled and tamed East coast of North America; and (5) the Eastern bloc of communist states, centred upon the USSR, which the United States and its allies opposed during the
Cold War
.
CJ 

 
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In the sense used by political statisticians, ecological association is the association between two characteristics both measured at the aggregate level rather than the individual level, and has nothing to do with
ecology
. For instance, it may be shown that regions with high mining employment also display a high vote for the left-wing party. The ecological fallacy is to infer from this that miners vote for the left-wing party. From the given facts, nothing is known about the individuals in the region and there may (although in this case there is unlikely to) be some quite different reason for the association than the obvious one.

 
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From the Greek roots meaning ‘house study’. The German writer Haeckel defined ecology as ‘the science of relations between organisms and their environment’, a general definition which has remained acceptable. He first published the word
Oekologie
in his
Generalle Morphologie
in 1866. At that time industrialization was changing the face of England and Germany, and railway-led development was racing across North America, causing such dramatic ecological phenomena as the extinction of the passenger pigeon and the near-extinction of the American bison. Intellectual life was dominated by the publication of Charles Darwin's
Origin of Species
in 1859 and the ideas of the evolutionary development of all creatures, including man, which it contained.
The concept of ecology has always had three separate dimensions.

(1) Overtly, it refers to an intellectual pursuit, the study of the system of interactions involving living things.
(2) But it is also used to refer to the system itself: the reality of causal relationships between species.
(3) Finally, ‘ecology’ has always been used by some people, though not generally by professional ecologists, to mean a substantive morality and a political programme inspired by the perception of the existence of an ecological system. Typically, the morality criticizes current human practice for its destruction of ecological systems and seeks to (re)create harmony between man and nature. Whether these objectives are possible (or even coherent) and what their relations are with the perceptions of scientific ecology form the central questions of political ecology.

The history of political ecology is a long one which appears to many people to be quite short. The political (as opposed to the scientific) use of the term only became established after the period of intense environmental awareness in the Western world in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This period also diverted the attention of moral philosophers, in particular, the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess , to the implications of the idea of ecology. Naess distinguished ‘Deep Ecology’ which was not ‘anthropocentric’ and which recognized principles of ‘biospherical egalitarianism’, ‘diversity and symbiosis’, and decentralization, from ‘Shallow Ecology’, the merely anthropocentric environmentalism which sought to conserve the earth's resources (whether beauty or fossil fuels) for man's use. The suggestion was that man must shift to the outlook of ‘Deep Ecology’ even to attain the more modest aims of shallow ecology. On Naess's own account the distinction and the key principles of ‘Deep Ecology’ were far from clear, but this essay, among others, struck an important chord in the concerns of the time and stimulated the growth of ‘green philosophy’, which has existed and developed at popular, polemical, and academic levels since.
Although this tradition has itself proved highly diverse, a common strand is a dissociation from both liberal capitalism and Marxism-Leninism, sometimes collectively treated as ‘industrialism’. Certainly, ‘green’ philosophy can claim to be in sharp contradistinction to all the shades of assumptions which dominated Western policy thinking before 1970. Typically, these were liberal and utilitarian. In a word, they were economic. Ecology and economics, from their Greek roots, both indicate the management of the home or habitat, but they now indicate almost diametrically opposed approaches to such management.
Political ecology and ‘green’ philosophy may be relatively new terms, but they draw upon ancient ideas. Most primitive cultures have an important ‘green’ dimension, a kind of proto-ecological philosophy in that they seek to revere aspects of nature and maintain a harmony with their environment. The exception marked by many writers is Jewish culture, the statement in Genesis 1: 26 of man's ‘dominion’ over the earth, is said to have conceived man as uniquely separate from nature with unlimited rights over other creatures. Thus the pagan respect for ecology is contrasted by many green writers with the ‘Judaeo-Christian’ abandonment of an ideal of ecological stability in favour of an anthropocentric theology of man and God separate from, superior to, dominant over, the rest of creation—despite the counter-examples of St Benedict and (especially) St Francis.
All political ecology requires a doctrine of the eco-fall: that is, it must argue that mankind is capable of living in harmony with nature and once did so, but has, at some specific stage in history, ceased to do so. One common version of the fall is the replacement of paganism by Christianity, in Europe and later when Europeans began to colonize. A tradition of German thought identified disharmony with nature with Jewish influence. The point was made vehemently, for instance, in Ludwig Feuerbach's
The Essence of Christianity
. When combined with the development of racial theory this fed into the
anti-Semitism
of Richard Wagner , H. S. Chamberlain , and the Nazi Party. The Nazi
Reichsnaturschutzgesetz
body of law for the conservation of nature (1935) was a prototype of its kind. Rudolf Hess , the deputy leader of the Party, and Walther Darre , minister of agriculture, both believed in ‘bio-dynamic’ (or organic) farming, but this aspect of Nazi thought tended to lose influence once war started in 1939. Some English writers, such as the novelist Henry Williamson , were strongly attracted to the naturist aspects of Nazi thought. More typically, J. R. R. Tolkien saw Nazism as a ‘perversion’ of the German law of nature. One important strain of thought saw the Anglo-Saxons as having a particular affinity of nature; thus the arrival of Norman feudalism constituted an eco-fall. John Massingham , C. S. Lewis , and Sir Arthur Bryant were writers who felt a peculiar affinity with Saxon England; in Massingham's version the naturist Saxons replaced the exploitative, proto-capitalist Romans, were themselves supplanted by the Normans, but rose stealthily to impose Saxon values on medieval England, though those values were undermined by the capitalist bureaucracy of the Tudors. Perhaps the most reactionary version of the eco-fall was that promulgated by Edward Goldsmith as editor of
The Ecologist
in the 1970s. In this version, human beings yearn to live in harmony with nature, but have only done so as hunter-gatherers: all agricultural and industrial society is ecologically unstable.
This indicates the core problem of ecological political theory. Scientific studies of ecology do not offer a model of ecological stability nor an idea of a harmonious role for
homo sapiens
within the ecological system. Rather, they develop the Darwinian model of an unstable, evolving system in which man, though not only man, crucially modifies the conditions of life for most other species, affecting their chances of survival, some for the worse, but perhaps even more for the better. Man cannot live in harmony with nature, if that means that his ecological role must be inert; nor can he fail to, in the sense that it is part of the role of all species within an ecological system to modify that system as an environment for other species. On two-thirds of the land surface of the earth (nearly all outside of the polar and desert regions) human activity has transformed the whole direction of ecological systems. Man could not let nature be in, say, the English countryside; it is our creation and cannot survive without us. There can be no substantive ethical doctrine which is ecological
per se
: an ethic of man's role in nature must import its values from elsewhere. Haeckel, for instance, introduces a religious element into his system, announcing that ‘Every science, as such, is both natural and mental. That is the firm principle of Monism which, as its religious side, we may also denominate pantheism. Man is not above, but in, nature.’ But this is formal religion without substance. The pantheistic God not only does not, but cannot, tell us whether to dam rivers or plant forests.
One of the most imaginative and influential of recent ecological theorists stresses the paradox of ecology. James Lovelock's
GAIA: A New Look at Life on Earth
suggests that life-on-earth (not the earth and not human life) is a self-sustaining system of systems that man can do very little to damage or benefit, even though we can affect our own chances of survival. Pollution is, to Lovelock, ‘the most natural thing in the world’ and nuclear power not essentially different from any other resource. What he does suggest is that man would serve his own interests better if guided by his senses of beauty and wonder at the natural world. This is a suggestion of a similar tone to that of Naess, who says his ethical proposals are merely ‘suggested, inspired and fortified’ by the nature of ecology.
Individual and collective choices cannot be ecologically right or ecologically wrong
per se
. However, there are powerful arguments for the looser suggestions that we should consider not only the detailed ecological consequences of our decisions, but also the nature of ecology, in considering the ‘environmental’ aspects of policy.
LA