Ecocentrism

Sometimes called dark green or deep ecological ethics, ecocentrism is the core of a number of environmental positions focused on protecting holistic natural entities such as species, ecosystems, and landscapes. Ecocentrism uses insights from the science of ecology to locate value within ecological entities, processes, and relationships and represents an alternative to an anthropocentric or human-centered ethic of the environment.

At the end of the classic environmental text A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold claims that actions are right insofar as they have a tendency to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of biotic communities. Leopold also talks about the value of respecting and protecting species, particular places, wild predation, evolutionary history, ecological [Page 114]energy circuits, wilderness areas, and land health. The land ethic he develops is ecocentric because it focuses on protecting biotic and ecological assemblages, processes, and relationships. This kind of holistic focus is the hallmark of ecocentrism.

The classic conception of ecocentrism is found within the philosophical field of environmental ethics. Environmental ethicists articulate moral norms to govern our actions with nature. There are at least three ways such norms can be justified. First, we can use existing moral norms or ethical theories that are focused on relationships between people. In the context of environmental ethics, such approaches are anthropocentric because our moral duties and obligations only apply directly to people. Second, we can extend existing moral norms or ethical theories that are focused on people to also include nonhuman animals and even plants by arguing that the source of value on which the existing norms or theories are based is also found in more than just humans. For example, if humans have moral value because they are sentient, then animals that are sentient might also have moral value. Moral extentionism that locates value directly in animals yields a zoocentric (centered on zoology) environmental ethic. Moral extentionism that locates value directly in plants as well as animals is biocentric (life-centered). The third way an environmental ethic can be justified is by locating value directly in novel features that classically are not attributed to individual humans. Ecocentrism is found here.

Ecocentrists believe that traditional moral norms and ethical theories that are focused on relationships between humans—including attempts to extend these norms and theories to cover animals and plants—are not sufficiently environmental and thus are inadequate to derive an environmental ethic. They take insights to heart from the science of ecology. Ecologists study the relationships between organisms and their environments, including collections or assemblages of organisms. From an ecological perspective, one cannot fully understand what an organism is without also examining the species of the organism, how the organism interacts within species populations, how the organism is related to ecosystem processes, what the organism eats, what eats the organism, and the like. Ecocentrists claim that we cannot fully understand the value of an individual organism without ascribing or discovering value in these kinds of relationships and at these different levels of organization.

One of the better-known ecocentric environmental philosophers is Holmes Rolston III. Rolston begins with biocentrism and claims that individual animals and plants have intrinsic value because they are teleological centers of life. Species also have intrinsic value because they have biological identities that are reasserted genetically over time, and species lines in part help determine what is and what is to be for species organisms. In terms of niches, species have adaptive fits within nature; this implies they are good right where they are, and humans have duties to let them be and continue to evolve. Ecosystems also have intrinsic value for Rolston. Individual organisms reproduce, species increase their kind, and ecosystems overall increase kinds. Ecosystems have ecological identities that are reasserted over time, and ecosystems in part help determine what is and what is to be for organisms and species. In this sense, ecosystems are prescriptive, selective systems that have systemic, intrinsic value. Rolston believes that if the products of nature are valued—namely, organisms, species, and ecosystems—the processes that produced the products also should be valued. For this reason, he believes that processes such as evolution (natural selection) and relationships such as predation have intrinsic value. All of this makes his environmental ethic ecocentric.

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