Ecocriticism, Anthropocentrism and environmental ethics (Deep ecology and Shallow ecology)

 

The newest and most strongly emerging field of theoretical perspective is ecocriticism. Ecocritical studies emerged in the United States in the late 1970s and then spread to Europe. From its beginning, like postcolonial criticism, it was dominated by literary scholars. Most notably, the critic Lawrence Buell was influential in shaping the early definition of the field as one in which literature and the environment would be studied in relation to each other. In Buell’s work is an explicit commitment to environmental values. For this reason, the field is also sometimes called environmental studies, or green studies.

 

The word ‘ecocriticism’ itself was first used in 1978 by the critic William Rueckert in his essay ‘Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism’ and there now exists an established body of work focused on ecocriticism, including The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment (2010) and The Ecocriticism Reader (1996). Early ecocritical approaches focus on the role of the environment in literature, an interest that can be taken back as far as Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City (1973). It is concerned with how literature represents the environment and how this might contribute to understanding the environmental crises of the contemporary world. Recent ecocriticism has moved beyond the concern for the environment to questions about the human as a part of the ecosystem. In particular, ecocriticism ask questions about anthropocentrism (human centred thinking) – the way in which human thinking is centred on the human subject and how this shapes our perspective on the world and our treatment of it.   

Environmental Ethics

Environmental Ethics is an area of philosophy that attempts to establish that we have a moral obligation  to protect the environment. One of the most radical forms of environmental ethics is deep ecology  which was first advocated by Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess. The alternative to deep ecology is  often referred to as shallow ecology.

Deep ecology

The core theme of deep ecology is the claim that all living things have the same right to live and flourish. This means that the interests of other living beings have to be treated as seriously as the interests of humans. A rainforest, for example, can no longer be regarded as a valueless wood resource. Instead, it is a collection of living things, all of which have a right to live and flourish.
Nature is said to have intrinsic value. It is valuable even if humans can find no use for it. From a deep ecological perspective, climate change is wrong because it will affect the wellbeing of billions of living beings. Even if we could provide a way of protecting humans from climate change, it would still be a bad thing because many other living beings would suffer. Another aspect of deep ecology is the idea that we should expand our notion of who we are so that it includes the natural world. This is known sometimes as the expanded self. If we harm nature then we are really harming ourselves.

Deep ecology rejects anthropocentrism in favour of ecocentrism or biocentrism.

 

Shallow ecology

Shallow ecology rejects ecocentrism and biocentrism. Shallow ecologists claim that there is nothing necessarily wrong with the anthropocentric worldview. Nature is only valuable insofar as it serves  human interests. This is sometimes known as instrumental value. From this perspective, climate change is bad because it will affect human interests. It is humans that  will ultimately suffer if climate change is allowed to occur. Even if there was a way of protecting humans from the effects of climate change, shallow ecologists
would still think it was a bad thing. This is because the damage caused to other life forms would  adversely affect humans. Damage caused by climate change might, for example, mean that it is difficult to obtain natural resources. The extinction of species may mean that food supplies become harder to find. It might also be that humans would simply not like to live on a damaged planet.