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30 Green Political Thought
like mountains and rivers too? Environmental philosophy is not only
concerned with preserving and promoting natural value, therefore, but
also with deciding which possessors of natural value should be pre-
served and promoted. I shall try to give a flavour of all these debates in
what follows, but my principal intention is to focus on the kind of
environmental philosophy that I believe underpins the radical ideology
of ecologism being examined in this book. Environmental philosophy
seeks to judge between various reasons for restraint, and I shall suggest
that not all reasons that can be given are radically ecological reasons,
and that this leads to a distinction between what has come to be known
as  deep ecology on the one hand, and the public face of ecologism as a
political ideology on the other. I shall explore this below.
In green thinking, the general targets of attack are those forms of
thought that  split things up and study them in isolation, rather than
those that  leave them as they are and study their interdependence. The
best knowledge is held to be acquired not by the isolated examination
of the parts of a system but by examining the way in which the parts
interact. This act of synthesis, and the language of linkage and reci-
procity in which it is expressed, is often handily collected in the term
 holism . Greater recognition of mutual dependence and influence, it is
argued, will encourage a sensitivity in our dealings with the  natural
world that discrete atomism has conspicuously failed to do.
Political ecologists often derive evidence for a holistic description of
the universe from developments in physics during the twentieth century.
It is no accident that one of the intellectual champions of the green
movement, Fritjof Capra, is a teacher and researcher of theoretical
physics, and his books The Tao of Physics (1975) and The Turning Point
(1983) had a tremendous impact on its early intellectual development.
In this context, if twentieth-century physicists Niels Bohr and Werner
Heisenberg are popular figures in the green pantheon, then Francis
Bacon, René Descartes and Isaac Newton are their complementary
opposites. These three, according to the analysis of most green theor-
ists, produced a world-view at variance in virtually all respects with that
demanded by ecological survival in the twentieth century. Briefly,
Bacon developed methods and goals for science that involved (and
involve) the domination and control of nature; Descartes insisted that
even the organic world (plants, animals and so on) was merely an exten-
sion of the general mechanical nature of the universe; and Newton held
that the workings of this machine universe could be understood by
reducing it to a collection of  solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, movable
particles (Newton, quoted in Capra, 1983, p. 52).
In contrast, twentieth-century physics exploration of the subatomic
Philosophical foundations 31
world has led to a very different picture of the nature of the  physical
universe. The Newtonian atomic description has given way to a universe
in which (at the subatomic level at least) there are no solid objects, but
rather fields of probability in which  particles have a tendency to exist.
Nor are these  particles held to be definable in themselves: rather, their
nature is in their relationship with other parts of the system. As Niels
Bohr commented:  Isolated material particles are abstractions, their
properties being definable and observable only through their interaction
with other systems (quoted in Capra, 1983, p. 69). Further, Werner
Heisenberg s Uncertainty Principle (fundamental to the practice of
quantum physics) shows that the observer  far from being independent
of her or his experiment  is inextricably a part of it. Capra draws from
this the requisite ecological-theoretical conclusion:  We can never speak
about nature without, at the same time, speaking about ourselves
(Capra, 1983, p. 77). Greens say that given these underlying connections
in the physical world, it is a mistake to try to deal with problems in
isolation from one another. In the UK, the current New Labour
administration is fond of the idea of  joined-up government , and if this [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]