As an English major, I’m not going to lie, my environmental philosophy has been greatly influenced by John Steinbeck. Yes, his works of fiction contain a great many themes on the stewardship and responsibility humans owe to the environment—but his most influential work and thought concerning the environment, I found, comes from a little known piece of non-fiction he wrote: The Log From the Sea of Cortez. Its of little concern, for this post, what all he details in this book and for the sake of brevity I’m only going to paraphrase the part that has most influenced my own thinking on the environment: his theory of “Is Thinking.” In short, “is thinking” is a philosophy on living in a world of limits and competition and struggle—a very Darwinian world—and is built upon a mode of non-teleological thinking. Teleology, just to make terms clear, is a way of thinking that claims goal-oriented progress, or purpose, is a reasonable cause for existence; for example: “air is for breathing” is a statement informed by telic thought. The problem with this mode of thought, which Steinbeck reacts against in the formation of his “is thinking,” is that the natural world does not necessarily operate in this fashion—air could still exist without having to be breathed, the lack of breathing does not negate the existence of air—what this exposes, then, is a detachment from the real and natural world, and this is where Steinbeck comes in. “Is thinking” is committed to understanding the actuality of the world around us, it abandons purpose and reason as legitimate reasons for the existence of the natural, and focuses, instead, on the actuality of their existence—in other words, he abandons the search for purpose of existence as it is inferior to a complete understanding of the world around as it is.
What this method of thinking exposes is the trap of anthropocentrism. Humans tend to view the world around them in terms of purpose, in terms of “what can this used for?” or “how does this help me?” both questions implying that everything in the world around us has a purpose, and that this purpose is solely designed to advantage the human species. Not only is this wrong, but it is destructive and unsustainable. And it is mostly in reaction against this that I have constructed my environmental philosophy.
My environmental philosophy is, by necessity, utilitarian. Humans cannot exist without acquiring and using resources from the environment—we are not self-sufficient beings capable of creating, within ourselves, our sustenance. But this utilitarian approach is not anthropocentric. To consider the natural world as subject to the needs and desires of humans, shows a complete reliance on telic thought and is the archetypical model of environmental philosophy Steinbeck rages against. The environment is able to, and must, be used by humans to survive, but in no way should it be considered to be for the human element. If we consider all of nature our domain and use it as such, we lose focus of the natural limits of existence and we use up all of the world’s resources at an unsustainable pace—but what happens when we reach the limit of these resources? The end, that’s what.
Humans are not above the rules of the rest of the world’s species, and the world has its carrying capacity. This, however, brings up so many moral and ethical questions that I could spend probably the next month writing and not cover them all, and for the sake of time (I’ve already probably written too much) just one quick moral consideration as a sample case study to highlight how I apply this philosphy: is it right then to limit the reproduction of people? In short, no. But what this freedom demands is an intense stewardship of the natural world and the environment—if we want to claim these freedoms and this position of authority over the natural world, we have a responsibility to it; for if we fail in this responsibility, we destroy the world and all of the species dependant upon it, including us…and that’s how it is.
