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The Natural Alien
In this eloquent and sympathetic book, Evernden evaluates the international environmental movement and the underlying assumptions that could doom it to failure. Beginning with a simple definition of environmentalists as "those who confess a concern for the non-human," he reviews what is inherent in industrial societies to make them so resistant to the concerns of environmentalists. His analysis draws on citing such diverse sources as Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, and TIME , and examines how we tend to think about the world and how we might think about it. The book does not offer solutions to environmental questions, but it does offer the hope that there can be new ways of thinking and flexibility in human/environmental relations. Although humans seem alienated from our the natural world, we can develop a new understanding of `self in the world.' The second edition has a new preface and an epilogue in which Evernden analyses the latest environmental sustainable development.
172 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1985
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September 27, 2016
I first read this book in college, in an amazing class, by far the best class I've ever taken in any context, mind-expanding and life-changing like college, I hear, is supposed to be. That class was on John Cage and Silence, taught by the amazing Thalia Field, and the fact that this book, which has nothing to do with music, or silence, or John Cage, was part of the syllabus is a good example of what made the class so amazing. Professor Field took Cage as a starting point, a wonderfully fertile starting point, and from there branched in every concievable direction; we read and learned and talked about music, and Zen, sure, but also Duchamp, Gertrude Stein, Buckminster Fuller, anarchism, mycology, globalization, just an amazing range of topics. And environmentalism, the curious environmentalism of this book, was one of them.
It's curious because, despite the bizarre blurb from the Globe and Mail on the front cover (did they even read it?) it is most certainly not a "call to arms"; as Evernden says towards the end, "I have aspired only to ask 'what if?' - not to prescribe some splendid alternative which would solve all our percieved problems. In fact, even to deal in terms of problems and solutions would defeat my purpose." In Evernden's view, what we are doing to the planet (what we call the environmental crisis, or whatever) is not something that can be fixed by simply changing our behavior but rather by a change in our entire way of seeing the world, a radical, fundamental shift in philosophy. Basically, that we must dissolve the subject-object distinction, stop distinguishing between figure and ground, discard the Cartesian divide. That the word "environment" itself is part of the problem, as it separates the subject self from the rest of the world: "If the environmentalist is only concerned about a thing - environment - then that concern is easily resolved, either by safeguarding and repairing that thing, or by showing that it is of no consequence. But environmentalism, in the deepest sense, is not about environment. It is not about things but relationships." To achieve this reset of ontology (if I'm using that word right? I'm not a philosopher myself) he mostly looks to the phenomenologists, such as Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. There is some difficult stuff about Dasein and so on.
I'm not sure how well I follow it. One thing that was interesting about this re-read, almost 20 years later, is that the book seems much less startling and forceful than it did at the time. Not because the ideas aren't radical and fascinating. But because they are explained in rather academic language and in a relatively gentle persuasive tone. I remember being struck, amazed, by concepts like Jakob Von Uexkull's vision of creatures surrounded by the 'soap-bubble' of their own Umwelt; or Paul Colinvaux's suggestion that a species might be nature's way of avoiding competition, the animal growing to fill the ecological niche, so that the niche feels more important to defining the species than the creature does. But rereading I was mostly surprised that I even noticed these things, which are not presented as amazing astounding new ideas, but simply noted along the way. When it came to reading for school, I was something of a skimmer, and I can only imagine that Professor Field called my attention to these things.
But it's definitely fascinating, Evernden's undermining of the perception of any creature as discrete and bounded. (I have recently been listening to a talk by biologist Scott Gilbert, called "We Are All Lichens Now", where he explains that most everything living is symbiotic, including humans with our necessary gut bacteria, which also attacks the concept of individuality, which reminded me of this book and prompted this re-read.) As he notes, territorial creatures like the stickleback have a sense of self which extends far beyond their skin; on the other hand anosognosiac patients' self does not include their entire body, feeling their arm or leg as something alien to themselves. And everything needs a context: "A solitary gorilla in a zoo is not really a gorilla; it is a gorilla-shaped imitation of a social being which can only develop fully in a society of kindred beings. And that society in turn is only itself when it is in its environmental context, and so on. To preserve only a package of genes is to accept a very restricted definition of animality and to fall into the trap of mistaking the skin-encapsulated object for the process of relationships that constitute the creature in question." Wonderful.
What has all this got to do with Cage? Well, something about his ideal of non-interfering yet interpenetrating sounds, and ideally, beings. Cage too was an environmentalist of an unusual sort, trying, like the pheonomenologists (um, I think) to discard the assumptions of the past and experience reality directly, with a complete dispassionate sympathy and respect for everything. He listened to any sound the world made, from flowing water to radio static, with the attention and enjoyment that everyone brings to music, and so made music of every sound; something like the radical respect Martin Buber recommends as the "I-Thou" relationship, and which Evernden thinks we must learn to bring to the world. I think this is why Thalia had us read this book. But honestly I don't totally remember, and wish I could take the class all over again, and perhaps better understand it the second time around, without being distracted by the fact that it was changiing my life.
It's curious because, despite the bizarre blurb from the Globe and Mail on the front cover (did they even read it?) it is most certainly not a "call to arms"; as Evernden says towards the end, "I have aspired only to ask 'what if?' - not to prescribe some splendid alternative which would solve all our percieved problems. In fact, even to deal in terms of problems and solutions would defeat my purpose." In Evernden's view, what we are doing to the planet (what we call the environmental crisis, or whatever) is not something that can be fixed by simply changing our behavior but rather by a change in our entire way of seeing the world, a radical, fundamental shift in philosophy. Basically, that we must dissolve the subject-object distinction, stop distinguishing between figure and ground, discard the Cartesian divide. That the word "environment" itself is part of the problem, as it separates the subject self from the rest of the world: "If the environmentalist is only concerned about a thing - environment - then that concern is easily resolved, either by safeguarding and repairing that thing, or by showing that it is of no consequence. But environmentalism, in the deepest sense, is not about environment. It is not about things but relationships." To achieve this reset of ontology (if I'm using that word right? I'm not a philosopher myself) he mostly looks to the phenomenologists, such as Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. There is some difficult stuff about Dasein and so on.
I'm not sure how well I follow it. One thing that was interesting about this re-read, almost 20 years later, is that the book seems much less startling and forceful than it did at the time. Not because the ideas aren't radical and fascinating. But because they are explained in rather academic language and in a relatively gentle persuasive tone. I remember being struck, amazed, by concepts like Jakob Von Uexkull's vision of creatures surrounded by the 'soap-bubble' of their own Umwelt; or Paul Colinvaux's suggestion that a species might be nature's way of avoiding competition, the animal growing to fill the ecological niche, so that the niche feels more important to defining the species than the creature does. But rereading I was mostly surprised that I even noticed these things, which are not presented as amazing astounding new ideas, but simply noted along the way. When it came to reading for school, I was something of a skimmer, and I can only imagine that Professor Field called my attention to these things.
But it's definitely fascinating, Evernden's undermining of the perception of any creature as discrete and bounded. (I have recently been listening to a talk by biologist Scott Gilbert, called "We Are All Lichens Now", where he explains that most everything living is symbiotic, including humans with our necessary gut bacteria, which also attacks the concept of individuality, which reminded me of this book and prompted this re-read.) As he notes, territorial creatures like the stickleback have a sense of self which extends far beyond their skin; on the other hand anosognosiac patients' self does not include their entire body, feeling their arm or leg as something alien to themselves. And everything needs a context: "A solitary gorilla in a zoo is not really a gorilla; it is a gorilla-shaped imitation of a social being which can only develop fully in a society of kindred beings. And that society in turn is only itself when it is in its environmental context, and so on. To preserve only a package of genes is to accept a very restricted definition of animality and to fall into the trap of mistaking the skin-encapsulated object for the process of relationships that constitute the creature in question." Wonderful.
What has all this got to do with Cage? Well, something about his ideal of non-interfering yet interpenetrating sounds, and ideally, beings. Cage too was an environmentalist of an unusual sort, trying, like the pheonomenologists (um, I think) to discard the assumptions of the past and experience reality directly, with a complete dispassionate sympathy and respect for everything. He listened to any sound the world made, from flowing water to radio static, with the attention and enjoyment that everyone brings to music, and so made music of every sound; something like the radical respect Martin Buber recommends as the "I-Thou" relationship, and which Evernden thinks we must learn to bring to the world. I think this is why Thalia had us read this book. But honestly I don't totally remember, and wish I could take the class all over again, and perhaps better understand it the second time around, without being distracted by the fact that it was changiing my life.
November 29, 2015
This is probably the first book I've read in the environmental ethics/philosophy genre. Overall, it's not a particularly enjoyable read and if you're anything like me you certainly won't go flying through it, but it has both modified my world view and given me a greater understanding of the one I already had. Truly it deserves more recognition than it has, and I am glad to have been lent it.
Want to read
December 10, 2014Recommended by Derrick Jensen
November 18, 2009
Reread 11/13/2009
Environmentalism is far bigger than the pigeonhole into which it has been forced by modern industrial society's demands for appropriate discourse. I mean to say that it is just as important to change the way we think as it is to change the way we act. The whole idea of an "environment" is an expression of anthropocentrism, for example. This anthropocentrism--this silencing of the world, to paraphrase Evernden--is the very cause of the environmental crisis. So the primary impulse which leads to environmental concern is more revolutionary (my word, not his) than it would appear to an observer of the modern manifestations of the environmental movement. But this is also a reminder of these primary concerns to environmentalists who have given in to the demand that they make a case that makes sense in the "logic" of an industrial economy. Environmentalism (or whatever we choose to call it) is more revolutionary than this for 3 reasons: it is concerned with meaning and value that's not monetary value, it springs from subjectivity not objective, and it is expressed in terms of primary experience not science.
Evernden begins by criticizing environmentalists' adoption of economic metrics as a basis for protecting places. But the problem here is that there are, no doubt, places which the environmentalist would defend but which lack any economic value. (This includes aesthetic value, which he says has been commodified.) But when this kind of economic co-optation has occurred, the fundamental point is subverted (and the economic system is likely more effective now, facing less resistance to its functioning).
Evernden puts this sort of economic environmentalism (there is a major academic journal called Environmental Economics) in perspective when he reports the monetary value of the the materials that make up the human body as $12.98. While this kind of reductionism is intuitively wrong to most people, it is precisely how the world looks through the lens of the industrial economy (i.e. science). Environmental concern is not compatible with this system, and it is what it ought to stand up against. Such a position would not be unprecedented, and Evernden presents the Romantic movement as just such a precursor to modern environmentalism.
"The dissonance which stirred the Romantics to action was engendered by the scientific assumptions which were taking hold in the eighteenth century." (p.30) The version of reality, outlined famously be Descartes, that sees the world exclusively in terms of thinking human subjects-disembodied minds--and objects to be thought about, bought, sold, or destroyed--matter--is repellent to anyone who experiences inherent value in the physical world. This repulsion is also the basis of environmentalism, and more than one philosophical movement in the 20th century.
The author uses Martin Buber's distinction between the subjective and the objective experience, which Buber calls I-You and I-It respectively, to illustrate the environmental consequences of choosing one or the other. The difference is I-You is open to relationship (where "you" is animal, tree, or mountain) and I-It is incapable of relationship, of recognizing "you" at all. The results of choosing the latter obviously lead to environmental crisis, as our civilization has pretty thoroughly demonstrated.
I-You, on the other hand, is the way the non-human world works much of the time. Evernden argues, citing some philosophical biologists, that except for when the lion seeks a meal and the chase has been initiated, predator and prey regard each other as mutual subjects. I would argue that human cultures for a million years have demonstrated the same ability. Ours is exceptional in this regard.
Territorriality, which animals exhibit, is difficult to account for in terms of a world devoid of subjects. Territory always reveals that there is a subject at the center constituting his/her world as such. It just makes sense that there is always someone to whom the territory belongs.
Heidegger was interested in specifically human experience, but Evernden finds his phenomenology useful as a contrast to the empirical imperialism facing the environmental movement. According to him, our primary experience of the world is what Evernden calls a "field of care." One can think of this like the territory with a subject at the center (which could be a particular case of such a field). This is not merely the sum total of things we care about, however. Evernden explains better than I can why that is so: "Phenomenology requires a return to...a world that precedes knowledge and yet is basic to it, as countryside is to geography and blossoms to botany." (p.57) There is no presumption of a Cartesian observer. The object of thought is always "enclosed" within consciousness. It is only at this level of raw experience that "significance is discerned." (p.59) Phenomenology represents a rejection of the same assumptions which Romanticism rejected, and Evernden illustrates its potential as a solid basis for environmental concern.
The title of the book refers to the author's speculation toward the end of the book that Homo sapiens represents an example of evolved neotony or paedomorphiosis--the retention of juvenile traits into adulthood. He isn't just referring to the resemblance of infant primates to humans but to the possibility that culture's central place in human life is a consequence of "incomplete" development toward some final form that we never reach in the way more "instinctive" species do. This dependence on culture has one important effect on the way we interact with ecosystems we inhabit: technology is our interface with the world, and any new technology effectively turns us into a new species, and consequently an exotic or alien to the ecosystem. Our niche is function of our technology and is just as subject to change, leaving us without a predetermined niche, and potentially very disoriented, depending on the culture.
By providing systems of values and ways of seeing the world that complete us in a sense, culture fills in a gap that our premature nature left in our psyches, and some cultures do this--complete our maturation process--better than others. If a culture's adequacy can be measured in these terms, we in the industrial world are members of surely one of the least adequate cultures to exist in our species' history. Instead of acting as a psychic home for homeless beings that helps us to better handle our predicament, we are being plunged by our culture headlong into one technological innovation after another, and the results are among others environmental and psychological problems on a massive scale. In other words, the problems we face are not just political but cultural. They are on a revolutionary scale.
Environmentalism is far bigger than the pigeonhole into which it has been forced by modern industrial society's demands for appropriate discourse. I mean to say that it is just as important to change the way we think as it is to change the way we act. The whole idea of an "environment" is an expression of anthropocentrism, for example. This anthropocentrism--this silencing of the world, to paraphrase Evernden--is the very cause of the environmental crisis. So the primary impulse which leads to environmental concern is more revolutionary (my word, not his) than it would appear to an observer of the modern manifestations of the environmental movement. But this is also a reminder of these primary concerns to environmentalists who have given in to the demand that they make a case that makes sense in the "logic" of an industrial economy. Environmentalism (or whatever we choose to call it) is more revolutionary than this for 3 reasons: it is concerned with meaning and value that's not monetary value, it springs from subjectivity not objective, and it is expressed in terms of primary experience not science.
Evernden begins by criticizing environmentalists' adoption of economic metrics as a basis for protecting places. But the problem here is that there are, no doubt, places which the environmentalist would defend but which lack any economic value. (This includes aesthetic value, which he says has been commodified.) But when this kind of economic co-optation has occurred, the fundamental point is subverted (and the economic system is likely more effective now, facing less resistance to its functioning).
Evernden puts this sort of economic environmentalism (there is a major academic journal called Environmental Economics) in perspective when he reports the monetary value of the the materials that make up the human body as $12.98. While this kind of reductionism is intuitively wrong to most people, it is precisely how the world looks through the lens of the industrial economy (i.e. science). Environmental concern is not compatible with this system, and it is what it ought to stand up against. Such a position would not be unprecedented, and Evernden presents the Romantic movement as just such a precursor to modern environmentalism.
"The dissonance which stirred the Romantics to action was engendered by the scientific assumptions which were taking hold in the eighteenth century." (p.30) The version of reality, outlined famously be Descartes, that sees the world exclusively in terms of thinking human subjects-disembodied minds--and objects to be thought about, bought, sold, or destroyed--matter--is repellent to anyone who experiences inherent value in the physical world. This repulsion is also the basis of environmentalism, and more than one philosophical movement in the 20th century.
The author uses Martin Buber's distinction between the subjective and the objective experience, which Buber calls I-You and I-It respectively, to illustrate the environmental consequences of choosing one or the other. The difference is I-You is open to relationship (where "you" is animal, tree, or mountain) and I-It is incapable of relationship, of recognizing "you" at all. The results of choosing the latter obviously lead to environmental crisis, as our civilization has pretty thoroughly demonstrated.
I-You, on the other hand, is the way the non-human world works much of the time. Evernden argues, citing some philosophical biologists, that except for when the lion seeks a meal and the chase has been initiated, predator and prey regard each other as mutual subjects. I would argue that human cultures for a million years have demonstrated the same ability. Ours is exceptional in this regard.
Territorriality, which animals exhibit, is difficult to account for in terms of a world devoid of subjects. Territory always reveals that there is a subject at the center constituting his/her world as such. It just makes sense that there is always someone to whom the territory belongs.
Heidegger was interested in specifically human experience, but Evernden finds his phenomenology useful as a contrast to the empirical imperialism facing the environmental movement. According to him, our primary experience of the world is what Evernden calls a "field of care." One can think of this like the territory with a subject at the center (which could be a particular case of such a field). This is not merely the sum total of things we care about, however. Evernden explains better than I can why that is so: "Phenomenology requires a return to...a world that precedes knowledge and yet is basic to it, as countryside is to geography and blossoms to botany." (p.57) There is no presumption of a Cartesian observer. The object of thought is always "enclosed" within consciousness. It is only at this level of raw experience that "significance is discerned." (p.59) Phenomenology represents a rejection of the same assumptions which Romanticism rejected, and Evernden illustrates its potential as a solid basis for environmental concern.
The title of the book refers to the author's speculation toward the end of the book that Homo sapiens represents an example of evolved neotony or paedomorphiosis--the retention of juvenile traits into adulthood. He isn't just referring to the resemblance of infant primates to humans but to the possibility that culture's central place in human life is a consequence of "incomplete" development toward some final form that we never reach in the way more "instinctive" species do. This dependence on culture has one important effect on the way we interact with ecosystems we inhabit: technology is our interface with the world, and any new technology effectively turns us into a new species, and consequently an exotic or alien to the ecosystem. Our niche is function of our technology and is just as subject to change, leaving us without a predetermined niche, and potentially very disoriented, depending on the culture.
By providing systems of values and ways of seeing the world that complete us in a sense, culture fills in a gap that our premature nature left in our psyches, and some cultures do this--complete our maturation process--better than others. If a culture's adequacy can be measured in these terms, we in the industrial world are members of surely one of the least adequate cultures to exist in our species' history. Instead of acting as a psychic home for homeless beings that helps us to better handle our predicament, we are being plunged by our culture headlong into one technological innovation after another, and the results are among others environmental and psychological problems on a massive scale. In other words, the problems we face are not just political but cultural. They are on a revolutionary scale.
February 17, 2009
Aren't environmentalist causes taken more seriously and victories being won? So it appears, but the reality of the destruction of the earth is devestating and it is only our perceptios of how "green" is the new god that have changed. Sound familar in this age of greenwashing and "sustainable" business? The situation was no different twenty four years ago when The Natural Alien was published in 1985. Evernden isn't critiquing the failures of the environmentalist--he wants to get rid of that word, in fact--, nor is he listing the atrocities committed against nature by our rapacious culture. Instead, he argues that the world view of the environmentalist is compromised from the start and that it shares too much in common with the view of the developer, the exploiter. Evernden argues that it is Cartesian thinking (some might say civilization's worldview) that must be dismantled.
So, you are now faced with a philosophy book rather than the environmental treatsie you thought you were going to get. How many times have you though that it isn't enough to change laws, change systems, change leaders, change tactics...no, we have to change minds, the way humans view the world. This is what Evernden attempts.
The argument begins with a discussion of science, the Romantics, phenomenology, Heidigger, Huessrl, and much more. The main thesis of the book is that we are able to "cut the earth's vocal cords" becuase of reification: turning subjects into objects. You can have a relationship with another being--a subject--but not with an object. There is, of course, much more here and it is well worth reading.
The book is entirely in the academic style, strangely. For Evernden's argument relies, in part, on the following:
1) We, as subjects (living beings), should trust our own experience over the science of experts.
2) Beings can have relationships and relationships are reciprocal.
Now, books, by their very nature, are not reciprocal, but Evernden limits himself even more with the academic style. He isn't a being to us--there are very few "i" statments, no personal information, life experiences--but the omniscient author keeping his audience (not people, objucts, object, the audience) at arm's length with the detached, reasoned, unemotional straight jacket that this academic style. One can forgive him this, of course, because if he rlied on direct personal experience instead of other books and thinkers, his work wouldn't be taken seriously by other academics. This goes for relating to the reader as well. Just as he describes the environmentalist as being trapped by mechanistic thinking, so, too, is he trapped by academic standards and this limits, a little, the effectiveness of his argument.
So, you are now faced with a philosophy book rather than the environmental treatsie you thought you were going to get. How many times have you though that it isn't enough to change laws, change systems, change leaders, change tactics...no, we have to change minds, the way humans view the world. This is what Evernden attempts.
The argument begins with a discussion of science, the Romantics, phenomenology, Heidigger, Huessrl, and much more. The main thesis of the book is that we are able to "cut the earth's vocal cords" becuase of reification: turning subjects into objects. You can have a relationship with another being--a subject--but not with an object. There is, of course, much more here and it is well worth reading.
The book is entirely in the academic style, strangely. For Evernden's argument relies, in part, on the following:
1) We, as subjects (living beings), should trust our own experience over the science of experts.
2) Beings can have relationships and relationships are reciprocal.
Now, books, by their very nature, are not reciprocal, but Evernden limits himself even more with the academic style. He isn't a being to us--there are very few "i" statments, no personal information, life experiences--but the omniscient author keeping his audience (not people, objucts, object, the audience) at arm's length with the detached, reasoned, unemotional straight jacket that this academic style. One can forgive him this, of course, because if he rlied on direct personal experience instead of other books and thinkers, his work wouldn't be taken seriously by other academics. This goes for relating to the reader as well. Just as he describes the environmentalist as being trapped by mechanistic thinking, so, too, is he trapped by academic standards and this limits, a little, the effectiveness of his argument.
November 3, 2020
An enjoyable corrective to materialism, scientific method, and individualism. Evernden brings in the likes of Heidigger and Merleau-Ponty to remind us that relationships and context are the missing ingredients in the western/European approach to the world and knowledge. The Cartesian outlook, for all its strengths, has the weakness of presuming an absolute connection to truth and accuracy. Any worldview that takes such an absolutist stance will necessarily distort reality. We are living with the consequences of the particular distortions created by René Descartes and his legacy.
A useful summary/intro to the ideas of Martin Heidigger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, E.F. Schumacher, Martin Buber, Adolph Portmann, Jakob von Uexkull and others.
A useful summary/intro to the ideas of Martin Heidigger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, E.F. Schumacher, Martin Buber, Adolph Portmann, Jakob von Uexkull and others.
March 10, 2009
Crucial reconstruction of the pathos of environmentalism. Asks the questions that really need to be posed.
November 14, 2024
This book essentially operates by speculating on a variety of literary, philosophical, scientific and historical facts which all in some way bear resemblance to humanity and the environment. It is in no way merited power in its argumentation by its structure or strength of claim; it is if anything a dream of the human connection to nature.
I resent that this book filled me with such inarticulate passion for the injustice done by man against nature.
I resent that this book filled me with such inarticulate passion for the injustice done by man against nature.
May 23, 2022
A masterpiece
August 24, 2022
An enjoyable read that discusses what "environmentalism" is and where it comes from. Argues for a relational, experiential worldview - one that is tied to, not detached from, earth.
October 24, 2011
So far I've found this to be unreadable. Does it get any better after the first chapter?
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews