Pragmatism

Environmental pragmatism represents one school of environmental philosophy, a larger discipline concerned with the relationships among humans, other animals, and their [Page 338]environments. Environmental pragmatists also are active in environmental ethics, a subfield within environmental philosophy that considers moral principles and rights relative to nonhumans and to the environment in general. During the early 20th century, the views of influential conservationists and regional planners—Liberty Hyde Bailey, Aldo Leopold, Louis Mumford, and Benton Mackaye—were influenced by the classical American pragmatism of William James, Charles Pierce, George Herbert Mead, and John Dewey. By the mid-20th century, the appeal of pragmatism waned in philosophical circles, only to be revived by “neopragmatists”—philosophers such as Richard Rorty, Jurgen Habermas, Richard Bernstein, and Hilary Putnam. Recently, a number of contemporary environmental philosophers and legal scholars—environmental pragmatists, or “ecopragmatists”—have appropriated elements of both classical and revived American pragmatism. Environmental pragmatists seek practical strategies for conducting open-ended inquiry into particular environmental problems, recognizing the plurality of public interests inherent in environmental disputes, and therefore, attempting to resolve, if not transcend, the inflamed rhetoric and “either/or” choices that often deadlock environmental debates.

The classical American pragmatism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries rejected the fatalistic evolutionary determinism of Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner, particularly their claim that intractable economic, social, and racial laws determine human relations and potential. Pragmatists redefined evolution's social implications by asserting that humans, though inextricably embedded in their environments like other organisms, can actively learn from their experience, systematically inquiring into their circumstances and using the resulting knowledge to better adapt to their environments and ameliorate social problems. Furthermore, classical pragmatist epistemology and ethics are radically empirical, positing that knowledge and value result from these human interactions with and within their environment, and therefore, the truth and efficacy of ideas and values depend on their practical results—their usefulness—including the emotional satisfactions that they give individuals. Because people learn from experience and derive values by testing their actions and ideas against their resultant consequences, classical pragmatists contend that truth and values are plural, indeterminate, variable, and fallible because what is consequentially good or true for an individual at one time may not be good or true for other individuals at other times. Pragmatists, therefore, are critical of all metaphysical and ethical absolutes and immutable, universally applicable principles.

In late-19th-century America, a society that mythologized the self-made man, William James' pragmatism explained how, against daunting odds, individuals might creatively bootstrap themselves up from humbler origins. In early-20th-century America, a more corporate society seeking alternatives to possessive individualism, John Dewey's communitarian pragmatism showed how societies might reform themselves by using experimental methods to solve social, and even environmental, problems. It was little wonder, therefore, that in the first half of the last century, conservationists and regional planners were attracted to pragmatism's emphasis on the environment, experimental science, collaborative action, and social and environmental reform. Accordingly, Liberty Hyde Bailey's rural environmental education, Aldo Leopold's land ethic, Louis Mumford's participatory regional planning, and Benton Mackaye's integration of wilderness preservation with rural community development initiated what Ben Minteer calls a “third way tradition” in American conservation thought—a pragmatic and civic environmentalism that stands midway between the ecocentric, “nature-first” orientation of John Muir's preservationist philosophy and the “human-first” emphasis of Gifford Pinchot's utilitarian conservationism. A small but influential [Page 339]group, these civic environmentalists were just as concerned about the corrosive effects of industrialization and urbanization on the health of American democracy as they were about their effects on the health of the land. Always mindful of citizens' needs, desires, and civic capacities, they advanced their urban, regional, and wilderness planning as tools for creating a robust civic life and healthy landscapes, balancing the needs of human, animal, and plant communities and expanding citizens' capacity to collectively discuss, debate, and decide issues affecting these communities.

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