This is turning out to be a very busy time. I have just started my Accounting, Society and Environment course which involves tweaking and even re-writing some lectures as I get to the students and their current knowledge. I also have a number of presentations to make to various students, professional groups and public gatherings. This involves a heavy workload but importantly helps me spread the deep ecology discourse. I have to front my presentation according to my audience but the aim is to encourage more people to care for the physical environment and the diverse creatures therein.
Today I am giving a talk at the Manchester Metropolitan University Research Conference and my main concern is the defence of my ecosophy, ie the philosophy underlying my commitment to deep ecology. I start by acknowledging my call on metaphysics and, as all metaphysics are subjective, admitting I cannot claim to know truth. At this stage I call on Pyrrhonian scepticism, Heidegger and even Nietzsche.
I continue in an existentialist vein by saying we are thrown into the world and have to make sense of it. To do so most of us use a metaphysic; and the joy of deep ecology is its pluralism, Naess’s total field view always seeks to bring ideas together. (Even Nietzsche had a metaphysic, the will to power). Having made this claim I then critique science for its claims to be objective and its subsequent rejection of metaphysical concepts. I also critique the empiricism underlying it for its lack of understanding and its apathy towards morality and values.
Empiricism fails on its own terms. It is grounded in perception yet talks of cause and effect, a concept that cannot be perceived. Science sidesteps this problem by allowing for theories provided they are built on objective, empirical evidence. But I argue this isn’t so, there is always a worldview and a discourse underlying the so-called objective view. Taking atoms as an example I note they were postulated by Ancient Greeks some 2,500 years ago as the fundamental building blocks of matter. They survived as a concept and in the Age of Science gained ascendancy because they were a useful way of describing the universe (though no-one had ever seen one).
So useful were atoms they became the dominant discourse and theories were built around them and schools taught them as Truth. A Truth that involved periodic tables and, in the chemistry laboratories at my school, pictures of football size nuclei with billiard ball size electrons in close proximity posted all around the walls. These solid looking building blocks looked the part, solid in themselves they were obviously capable of building solid objects.
Of course long before I was at school in the 1960s scientists had already determined that if atoms were to fit in with their other theories then they were far from solid. In fact they would have to be huge areas of space. In his book The Tao of Physics Capra, a quantum physicist, tells us that if you expanded an atom to the size of the dome of St Paul’s cathedral then the nucleus would be the size of a grain of salt and the electrons the equivalent of microscopic particles of dust. Essentially the universe is not made of particles it is made of energy but the particle discourse survives because it suits common-sense realism and is easily encompassed in language.
So science is revealed as discourse driven and metaphysically underpinned. And who is to say the scientific discourse is the correct one. I acknowledge it is useful but it cannot claim to be the only Truth. Thus I create room for other discourses and the deep ecology discourse in particular.
