I recently signed the “Statement of Commitment to Ecocentrism” sponsored by The Ecological Citizen , an open-access, peer-reviewed online journal that, according to its mission statement, is “striving to address the central issue of our time: how to halt and reverse our current ecocidal course and create an ecological civilization.”
This statement resonates with me on a number of levels, including its support for the “intrinsic (inherent) value in all of nature and the ecosphere.” While the statement briefly maps out ethical, evolutionary, spiritual, political, and ecological rationales for ecocentrism, I also see important implications for social justice.
Ecocentrism does a better job than the discourse of sustainability of taking into account the profound interrelatedness of all life on Earth. Many of our models of sustainability and almost all ways that we try to implement sustainability reflect the values of human supremacy (aka, anthropocentrism), and will ultimately be self defeating, as Aldo Leopold pointed out in his famous “Land Ethic” essay, which was published in the Sand County Almanac in 1949. Human supremacy as a way of being has been destroying the foundations of our existence for centuries.
Moreover, the ideology and practice of human domination over the natural world in both the past and present is implicated in various systems of hierarchy and domination. I am thinking, for example, of how the African slave trade, which was one of the most brutal of these systems, empowered Europeans to transform and exploit the lifeworlds of the Americas to grow commodity crops such as sugar, tobacco, and cotton, at unaccountable human and ecological costs. But I am also thinking about how global capitalism today distributes both the benefits and harms of industrial production in terribly unequal ways. Thus, some of the most “productive” places within the context of the global economy also have the most polluted air and water. And, some of the poorest communities on the planet will suffer the most because of climate disruption, even as they contributed the least to CO2 emissions.
In other words, although ecocentrism might at first glance seem to replace anthropocentrism with misanthropy, that’s far from true. Overcoming human supremacy is a critical requirement for transforming the various systems of human oppression that continue to hold sway. Thus, as the statement concludes: “a transformation towards an ecocentric worldview is a necessary path for the flourishing of life on Earth, including that of our own species.”
Update: July 17, 2023
Although I have signed this statement, I want to point out that it neglects to acknowledge the roles of Indigenous peoples around the world in promoting values closely related to ecocentrism. (I do not mean to oversimplify the diverse Indigenous cultures of the world, but most would find resonance with the idea of the “intrinsic (inherent) value in all of nature and the ecosphere.”) The First Nations peoples of Turtle Island and have been especially vocal in this regard. One significant example that comes to mind is “A Basic Call to Consciousness: The Hau De No Sau Nee Address to the Western World,” which was written primarily by John Mohawk (Sotsisowah), a historian, writer, and activist of the Seneca Nation, and was presented in Geneva, Switzerland in 1977, as part of the International Non-Governmental Organization Conference on Discrimination Against Indigenous Populations in the Americas. More recently, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass has reached thousands and thousands of readers. Also, in the past decade, Indigenous water protectors using the Lakota words Mní Wičóni, “water is life,” have stood up against the petroleum industry. Adrián Villaseñor Galarza has also written of the “ancestral deep ecology” of the Indigenous peoples of Central and South America. The establishment of systems of human supremacy over the past several centuries–systems that are now global in scale–has gone hand in hand with colonization and genocide of Indigenous peoples and the destruction of their lifeways. Proponents of ecocentrism today have an obligation to learn from and ally with Indigenous peoples, many of whom are front-line defenders of the ecosphere.
