What drives our ecological crisis? Is it our failure to understand the impacts we are having? Is it greed, the pursuit of narrow self-interest, disregard for future generations and the value of the nonhuman world?

It’s all of these things, but more deeply it’s our culture. Our worldview conflicts with the ecological reality of all life on Earth, and our place in it. Our scientific understanding of the world has caught up with what indigenous cultures and nonhumans have always known. Indeed, in some ways, we have exceeded the ken of all who came before, opening vast technological possibilities. But our culture, our worldview, our values — these remain doggedly embedded in the anachronistic outlook that has brought upon the ecological crisis. We still don’t operate from an ecological outlook. We know “in theory” that we are animals, utterly dependent upon our involvement in staggeringly interconnected, pan-species networks we call ecosystems. But in practice, we see ourselves as special; as above the systems of recycling and reciprocity that underpin the indefinite vitality of nature’s materially finite order; indeed, as nature’s rightful master. We own the world.

If you’re like me, this is more than just an intellectual observation. Our culture feels wrong. Alien. You might say you’re experiencing culture dysphoria. And justifiably so, for as one wag once quipped, “the cost of sanity in this society is a certain level of alienation.”

That is the point of view I will be writing from in this series of short essays, collected under the title Culture Dysphoria. The critique of culture as the cause of the ecological crisis is not new. Many writers have argued along these lines before — though they seem to be waning with time — and most of my entries in this series will comprise of reflections upon those writings. I will be starting with Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy, since that happens to be what I’ve just finished reading. But first, to emphasise where I’m coming from, I’d like to highlight the centrality of cultural critique in the works of two especially important writers.

Aldo Leopold in the Sierra Madre, 1936–7. Credit: US Forest Service

The first is Aldo Leopold. A name that will need no introduction to most, Leopold’s essays in A Sand County Almanac are cited as inspiration by environmental and conservation groups across the spectrum from radical to conservative. Leopold’s thoughts are contradictory at times — perhaps a point to return to in a future post — but seemingly overlooked by many is the radical character of his message. For Leopold saw the task of conservationists as “the reorganization of society rather than the passage of some fish and game laws.”

Under Aldo Leopold’s land ethic, our worldview itself would be remade:

In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members and also respect for the community as such.

Implicit in this view is a factual understanding of our existence as just one species of animal, living in an ecological community of kindred beings. Explicit is the point that such an understanding ought to engender humility and an ethic of egalitarian participation, rather than domination. Furthermore, Leopold clearly asserts the value not just of ecological wholes — ecosystems, ecological communities, species, populations and so forth — but also of the individual members of ecological communities.

My second champion of ecological culture, Val Plumwood, is less well known, but her message is at least as worthy of wide dissemination and deep assimilation. I hope to explore Plumwood’s works in detail in Culture Dysphoria. Val Plumwood’s critique is aimed at cultural hegemonies structured around the oppression of the many by a few master subjects, especially the oppression of nature by Western human culture. Inherent to these hierarchies of oppression are sets of interrelated ‘dualisms’: value-laden, hyper-exaggerated false dichotomies, for example between humans and ‘nature’, persons and property, and use and respect. Both the cause of our ongoing ecological crisis and its solution are to be found in the disconnect between our worldview and reality:

Val Plumwood. Image: International Society for Environmental Ethics

Despite what we have learnt from Darwin, our culture has been a dismal failure at coming to terms with our inclusion in the animal and natural order, and this is a major factor behind the environmental crisis. It is no trivial matter for a culture which locates human identity outside and in opposition to the earth, in a disembodied universe even beyond materiality itself, to receive the news Darwin brought, of our descent from other animals through evolution. The Darwinian knowledge has been accepted in some places, after a long struggle, but it has been absorbed at a very superficial, mainly intellectual level. It has not penetrated into other parts of our consciousness and is still at odds with the deep culture. Most of the dominant culture still resists this knowledge and some is explicitly rejectionist. Even at an intellectual level, there are all sorts of dodges for evading its egalitarian import … We remain special, as the real owners of the world, the pinnacle of evolution, the ultimate species for whom it was all designed and to whom it all leads.

In the incendiary conclusion to her masterwork, Environmental Culture, Plumwood makes it plain that our culture must be changed at a deep level, if we have any hope of diverting the current course of ecological destruction:

The historic task of cultural change is to resolve throughout the dominant culture the distortions of rationalist human/nature dualisms that deny our ecological embodiment and membership of the global ecological community. We must counter those maladaptive forms of reason that radically distance us from the non-human sphere and disguise or disappear our ecological embeddedness and vulnerability, in order to develop a communicative, place-sensitive culture which can situate humans ecologically and nonhumans ethically.

That’s the task I have in mind. In Culture Dysphoria I’ll be exploring how we could make it happen.