On Environmental Philosophy

Power to the Peeples is an exclusive Earth911 series written by Bob Peeples, our resident chemical engineer and Program Manager of Earth911’s sister site Beaches911. Bob combines his extensive knowledge of the environment and how things work with an off-the-cuff sense of humor.

There are a lot of parallels in structured reasoning and environmental science that can be drawn from the teachings of the Athenians. They also learned some important lessons themselves, and some of them learned the ultimate lesson.

Whenever you bring up philosophy, there seems to be some sort of obligation to discuss the Athenians. Specifically; Socrates, Aristocles (“Plato”) and Aristotle, and usually in that order. That’s because Socrates taught Plato, who taught Aristotle, who taught Alexander the Great, who went on to teach some pretty good lessons to the Persian Empire.

Plato was a mathematician and philosopher. He developed the Scientific Method of reasoning. Actually, he wasn’t the primary author, but the first to write it down. Socrates was quite a chatterbox, but never wrote a word of it down. That’s why the Scientific Method is referred to as the Socratic Method everywhere except your high school chemistry class.

Plato also noted that knowledge was a subset of the intersection between beliefs and truth. OK, that concept is shown much better with a Venn diagram:

This illustrates the very essence of where my suggested paradigm deviates from conventional grassroots environmentalism. So what does a study of Greek philosophy have to do with Earth 911? It’s because environmental philosophy should involve reason, and reason should supersede ovine devotion, but doesn’t always do so. Learning without thinking is a complete waste of time.

Let me explain the relevance of the diagram with more universal knowledge, like the Salem witch trials:

• The pink area is for those who had faith that witches existed and could be detected by their invincibility and inability to be drowned (for argument, let’s assume that wasn’t true).
• The blue circle represents the fact that these poor souls weren’t really witches.
• The purple area would represent the overlapping position where those faithful in the existence of witches also believed that this particular person was not a witch.
• The green area represents the knowledge that, if you hold a mortal being underwater long enough, s/he will drown.

This sort of system is why we don’t move forward in ecological science nearly as quickly as we should. Everybody at the witch trial went home thinking that they were in the green circle and had no reason to correct their reasoning. I don’t know whether I should term this environmental pragmatism or pragmatic environmentalism, but the basic philosophy is the same either way; I am just looking to achieve a reasoned balance.

Pragmatism, as it applies to technology, really launched about a century ago through the writings of Charles S. Pierce. Basically, he stated that although it is important to investigate any theory that may come to mind without undue hesitation (taking into account the economics of said research, of course), you cannot blindly accept the results of any research as natural law, as to do so hinders further discovery.

I don’t agree at all with environmentalism as some sort of religious faith on its own merit. The essential responsibility of leaders (political, religious, or otherwise) is to guide their followers toward a solution that protects further survival. I admire those that do. Pontification over personal beliefs and insisting on blind faith falls short of this objective. When we cease to analyze, and instead rely only on celebrated leaders to make our scientific decisions, then we cease to advance science as a society.

What we like to call the “grassroots environmental movement” is a more recent philosophy, and not necessarily based in the Socratic method. Science is about examination and study, and laying all positions out for honest scrutiny.

Another concern has always been with the broad, pendular swings in public opinion and policy that we seem to experience. We shoot right past the middle and suddenly find ourselves at the polar opposite in popular public opinion.

When we force our policies toward mitigative responses rather than adaptive solutions, we also drive ourselves toward an out-of-control oscillation in policy. I would much prefer to see more of the middle instead of these periodic quantum shifts between diametrically opposed paradigms. We won’t recover easily from the next “the environment will be just fine” period.