“ We are facing a global crisis today, not because of how ecosystems function but rather because of how our ethical systems function. ”
Donald Worster on what the Humanities can do for the environmental crisis, as quoted in the introduction to The Ecocriticism Reader.
I’ve been thinking about this quote for days. On the one hand, I like it. It justifies my existence in the humanities. It gets to the heart of a certain blockage I’ve been noticing in political discourse — a tendency to interpret statements of fact, about the finitude of resources, perhaps, as political statements. Of course, they are political statements - you wouldn’t ask a question like, ‘what would happen if everyone on the globe lived like an American?’ if you didn’t have a political agenda. But the desire to dismiss such empirical facts as Scary Socialist Sayings is a blockage in our debates and suggests that there’s an ethical system in play that makes the appraisal of the ecological system taboo.
Of course, I guess I’m also edging up on what I don’t like about the above quote — the bifurcation of ecology from ethics that it goes ahead and reifies even as it tries to make a bid of the relevance of humanities / ethics to ecology. It buys into the idea that ethical systems (culture) are apart from ecosystems (nature) and not something that stems from and is part of ecosystems. Isn’t it our ecosystems that made us competitive, self-interested bastards?
