Biocentric farming? liberty hyde bailey and environmental ethics

Environmental Ethics

Volumn 30, Issue 4, 2008, Pages 341-359

  Minteer, Ben A ^a  

^a ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 58849125367     PISSN: 01634275     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/enviroethics200830439     Document Type: Review

References (80)

1. Bailey's legacy has been kept afloat in environmental studies by educational theorists such as Paul Morgan, Scott Peters, and David Orr-as well as neoagrarian heirs such as Wes Jackson. See, for example, Paul A Morgan and Scott J. Peters, "The Foundations of Planetary Agrarianism: Thomas Berry and Liberty Hyde Bailey," Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 19 (2006): 443-68;
2. David W. Orr, Earth in Mind: On Education, the Environment, and the Human Prospect, rev. ed. (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2004.);
3. and Wes Jackson, "Natural Systems Agriculture; A Truly Radical Alternative," in Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment 88 (2002): 111-17. The political theorist Kimberly Smith has also woven Bailey into the environmental and agrarian lineages in her fine study of Wendell Berry's agrarianism, Wendell Berry and the Agrarian Tradition: A Common Grace (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003).
4. See, e.g., Paul W. Taylor, Respect for Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986);
5. Holmes Rolston, III, Environmental Ethics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988) and Conserving Natural Values (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994);
6. J. Baird Callicott, In Defense of the Land Ethic (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989) and Beyond the Land Ethic (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999);
7. Laura Westra, An Environmental Proposal for Ethics: The Principle of Integrity (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1994); and Eric Katz, Nature as Subject: Human Obligation and Natural Community (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997).
8. Early arguments for an environmentally chastened anthropocentrism include John Passmore, Man's Responsibility for Nature: Ecological Problems and Western Traditions (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1974), and Bryan G. Norton, "Environmental Ethics and Weak Anthropocentrism," Environmental Ethics 6 (1984): 131-48.
9. The classic defense of moral pluralism in environmental ethics remains Christopher Stone, Earth and Other Ethics: The Case for Moral Pluralism (New York: Harper and Row, 1987). See also Gary E. Varner, "No Holism without Pluralism," Environmental Ethics 13 (1991): 175-79, and Peter S. Wenz, "Minimal, Moderate, and Extreme Moral Pluralism," Environmental Ethics 15 (1993): 61-74.
10. J. Baird Callicott has been one of the most forceful critics of pluralism in environmental value theory. See Callicott, "The Case against Moral Pluralism," Environmental Ethics 12 (1990): 99-124, and "Silencing Philosophers: Minteer and the Foundations of Anti-Foundationalism," Environmental Values 8 (1999): 499-516
11. J. Baird Callicott and Michael P. Nelson, eds., The Wilderness Debate Rages On: Continuting the Great New Wilderness Debate (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008).
12. See, e.g., Holmes Rolston, III, "The Wilderness Idea Reaffirmed," Environmental Professional 13 (1991): 370-77, and Laura Westra, "From Aldo Leopold to the Wildlands Project," Environmental Ethics 23 (2001): 261-74.
13. Notable alternatives in environmental ethics-i.e., arguments that take a greater interest in altered, built, and/or working landscapes-include Paul B. Thompson's classic monograph, The Spirit of the Soil: Agriculture and Environmental Ethics (New York: Routledge, 1995);
14. Andrew Light, "The Urban Blind Spot in Environmental Ethics," Environmental Politics 10 (2001): 7-35;
15. and Robert Kirkman, "Reasons to Dwell on (if Not Necessarily in) the Suburbs." Environmental Ethics 26 (2004): 77-96.
16. Lynn White, Jr., "The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis," Science 155 (1967): 1203-07.
17. Ibid., p. 1205.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.,
20. J. Baird Callicott, "Environmental Philosophy IS Environmental Activism: The Most Radical and Effective Kind," in Environmental Philosophy and Environmental Activism, ed. Don E. Marietta and Lester Embree (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1995), p. 31.
21. See especially Richard Routley, "Is There a Need for a New, an Environmental Ethic?" Proceedings, Fifteenth World Congress of Philosophy 1 (1973): 205-10;
22. Holmes Rolston, III, "Is There an Ecological Ethic?" Ethics 85 (1975): 93-109;
23. and Tom Regan, "The Nature and Possibility of an Environmental Ethic," Environmental Ethics 3 (1981): 19-34.
24. A case in point is some environmental ethicists' criticism of ecological restoration, which is characterized as "faking nature" and "the big lie" by those enamored of nature-culture dualisms and hostile toward the human modification of nature. See Robert Elliot, Faking Nature: The Ethics of Environmental Restoration (London: Routledge, 1997);
25. and the relevant essays in Eric Katz, Nature as Subject. Andrew Light has written a series of papers rebutting such views over the years; see, for example, Andrew Light, "Ecological Restoration and the Culture of Nature: A Pragmatic Perspective," in Paul H. Gobster and R. Bruce Hull, eds., Restoring Nature: Perspectives form the Social Sciences and Humanities (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2000), pp. 49-70.
26. Thanks largely to the conservation historian Char Miller's revisionist study, Gifford Pinchot and the Making of Modern Environmentalism (Washington, D.C.: Island Press/Shearwater, 2001).
27. E.g., J. Baird Callicott, "Whither Conservation Ethics?" Conservation Biology 4 (1990): 15-20.
28. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 224-25.
29. Bryan Norton has developed an alternative reading of Leopold's land ethic, one that hews to a pragmatist line. See Norton, "The Constancy of Leopold's Land Ethic," Conservation Biology 2 (1988): 93- 102;
30. and, more recently, the discussion of Leopold in Norton, Sustainability: A Philosophy of Adaptive Ecosystem Management (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). In my book, The Landscape of Reform: Civic Pragmatism and Environmental Thought in America (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), I offer another pragmatist-inspired view of Leopold, though unlike Norton, I argue that Leopold was motivated in part by intrinsic-value-of-nature commitments as well as more prudential concerns.
31. See also Eric Katz, "The Traditional Ethics of Natural Resources Management," in Richard L. Knight and Sarah F. Bates, eds., A New Century for Natural Resources Management (Washington, D.C.: Island Press), pp. 101-16.
32. Callicott, "Whither Conservation Ethics?" and "The Implication of the 'Shifting Paradigm' in Ecology for Paradigm Shifts in the Philosophy of Conservation," in Ben A. Minteer and Robert E. Manning, eds., Reconstructing Conservation: Finding Common Ground (Washington, D.C.: Island Press), p. 245.
33. Roderick F. Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 4th ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).
34. Ibid., p. ix.
35. Ibid, pp. 380-81.
36. Ibid., p. 389;
37. see also Roderick F. Nash, The Rights of Nature: A History of Environmental Ethics (Madison: University ofWisconsin Press, 1989).
38. Stephen Fox, The American Conservation Movement: John Muir and His Legacy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981).
39. Donald Worster, Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
40. John Dewey, Experience and Nature, in John Dewey: The Later Works, vol. 1, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1981), p. 186.
41. As I argue in The Landscape of Reform, Lewis Mumford, Benton MacKaye, and Aldo Leopold also avoided dualistic thinking about environmental values in their work by tying a moral regard for nature to broader social and civic goals.
42. Richard W. Judd, Common Lands, Common People: The Origins of Conservation in New England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); and Stephen Stoll, Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002).
43. E.g., David Stradling, Smokestacks and Progressives: Environmentalists, Engineers, and Air Quality in America, 1881-1951 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999);
44. Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001);
45. and Joel A. Tarr, ed., Devastation and Renewal: An Environmental History of Pittsburgh and Its Region (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005).
46. E.g., William Cronon. "The Trouble with Wilderness; Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature," in William Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York; W.W. Norton, 1996), pp. 69-90;
47. and Paul S. Sutter, Driven Wild: How the Fight Against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002).
48. See Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement, rev. ed. (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2005); and Minteer, The Landscape of Reform.
49. Liberty Hyde Bailey, The Country-Life Movement in the United Slates (1911; reprint ed., New York: Macmillan Co., 1915), p. 200.
50. Liberty Hyde Bailey, The Holy Earth (1915; reprint ed., New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1919), p. 11.
51. Bailey, Country-Life Movement, p. 184.
52. See, e.g., Steven Stoll, Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002).
53. Randal S. Beeman and James A. Pritchard, A Green and Permanent Land: Ecology and Agriculture in the Twentieth Century (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001).
54. Bailey, Country Life Movement, p. 207.
55. Ibid., p. 188.
56. Ibid.,
57. Ibid., p. 178.
58. Ibid., pp. 188-89.
59. Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959).
60. Callicott, "The Implication of the 'Shifting Paradigm' in Ecology." Bailey, Holy Earth, p. 6.
61. Ibid., p. 6.
62. Ibid., p. 16.
63. Ibid., p. 18.
64. While there is an important distinction to be made between these terms, I am treating them as equivalents here.
65. Liberty Hyde Bailey, The Outlook to Nature (1905; reprint ed., New York: Macmillan Co., 1911), p. 175.
66. Liberty Hyde Bailey, The Nature-Study Idea (New York: Doubleday, Page and Co., 1903), p. 100.
67. Bailey, Holy Earth, p. 8.
68. Bailey, Holy Earth, p. 30 (emphasis added).
69. Nash, Wilderness, pp. 194-95.
70. Aldo Leopold, Game Management (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), p. 21.
71. Ibid., p. 422.
72. Bailey, Holy Earth, p. 49.
73. Ibid., p. 11.
74. Aldo Leopold, "Land Pathology," in Susan L. Flader and J. Baird Callicott, eds., The River of the Mother of God and Other Essays by Aldo Leopold (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), pp. 212-217; p. 213.
75. Eric T. Freyfogle has written extensively on the significance of the land health concept in Leopold's work. See Freyfogle, Bounded People, Boundless Lands: Envisioning a New Land Ethic (Washington, D.C.: Island Press/Shearwater, 1998) and Why Conservation is Failing and How it Can Regain Ground (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).
76. Leopold scholar and conservation writer Curt Meine has made a point of emphasizing the integrative normative character of Leopold's mature conservation philosophy. See his important collection, Correction Lines: Essays on Land, Leopold, and Conservation (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2004).
77. See Minteer, The Landscape of Reform.
78. Ibid.
79. Bailey thus may provide an historical illustration of what Bryan Norton calls "the convergence hypothesis"; i.e., the idea that weak anthropocentric and nonanthropocentric views will end up supporting the same policies. The classic statement of the hypothesis appears in Norton, Toward Unity among Environmentalists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).
80. Indeed, Jackson cites Bailey's The Outlook to Nature and The Holy Earth as advancing ideas that have become key tenets in his own paradigm of "Natural Systems Agriculture," such as the view of nature as the norm for civilization and the notion that the farmer's task is to live in "right relation" with his natural conditions. See Jackson, "Natural Systems Agriculture."