The Human Environment

As someone whose academic interests lie primarily in the humanities and social sciences, I would hardly identify as someone who “does science.” However, I am also someone interested in the environment, specifically the ways our ideas about our environment fit in with the ideas we have about pretty much everything else, including our ethics, our economics, and more fundamental notions about the way our world works. So when I do philosophy – a discipline which, at its core, is concerned with clear thinking – I take it to be of the utmost importance to have clear thoughts about the subject matter I am dealing with. Now where might someone obtain clear, correct ideas about the environment or any other natural phenomena? One of the most reliable sources has proven to be people who actually “do science.”

Some of the most important work in conservation efforts is done by those who might identify as natural historians. Natural history, as defined by Thomas L. Fleischner, Professor of Environmental Studies at Prescott College, consists of “the study of life at the level of the individual – of what plants and animals do, how they react to each other and environment, how they are organized into larger groupings like populations and communities.” Fleischner argues that the human practice of natural history provides the genealogical underpinnings for much of today’s natural science. While its present form can be traced most directly back to the work of Aristotle, Fleischner proposes that natural history may have been practiced for as long as our pre-historic ancestors painted on caves and learned to track the patterns of the animals they hunted. In short, natural history represents the human attempt to put into narrative an empirical record of the natural world. In an ecological context, if we do not know what’s actually occurring in ecosystems, we can’t make judgments about where our conservation efforts should be focused.

I think this represents one iteration of a key insight we might infer about the importance of a commitment to a scientific perspective: that the kinds of normative judgments we can reasonably make about matters face constraints imposed by what we can know about the world. We can make arguments for climate action based on romantic notions of “wild nature” found in literary sources, but a stronger argument might be supported by appeal to, say, trends in organismal populations observed in data provided by long-term studies, or climatological data. The idea that normativity might be rooted in what we can observe about the natural world is nothing new; the underpinnings of Aristotle’s work in ethics and political philosophy can be found in his works on animals, physics, and metaphysics – works that concerned the nature of things, or “first philosophy.” And it would be awfully hard for someone to consider herself a good philosopher of mind without an understanding of what neuroscience can tell us about our physiology.

At the same time, I would hardly admit that science has a monopoly over our possible modes of thinking. I clearly believe that there’s value in doing philosophy, and I enjoy a good book as much as any other pretentious humanities major. I am also cautious about situations where our science gets too far ahead of our ethics (see: climate issues, the nuclear age, etc.), but I am consistently hopeful that we can move past such issues because we have methods of understanding our way out of predicaments by means of explanation. It is a fact of the matter that many of our best explanations are scientific and materialistic — many, but not all. And as Columbia University philosopher Philip Kitcher points out in an article written in response to some of the positions held by Thomas Nagel (who my fellow columnist Harry Zieve-Cohen ’15 quotes in his column “A Defense of Books”) one of the main challenges to science and philosophy consists in trying to provide naturalistic explanations for things like consciousness and our systems of valuing. We can hardly say that things like love and death are topics about which science has no jurisdiction because it is likely that one day they are things we will have explanations for.

Science and materialism have been considered as viable perspectives for as long as natural science has existed as an offshoot of natural philosophy. Just as it would be impossible to provide an accurate natural history of a region while ignoring the role humans play in shaping the landscape, we cannot do good science without remembering the lens through which it develops and is performed – the human lens. I doubt that anybody in our community or academia legitimately questions the value of humanities. We will discover the actual nature of “meaning and truth” inasmuch as science and the humanities are capable of collaborating in writing the human narrative.