Can Nature be exploited? Does the Universe have rights?

This has been a very odd semester, to say the least. Having turned 30, I’ve somehow become antsy; I find myself, for instance, more and more subject to the urge to write fiction, i.e., to “finally get going again” with my childhood passion (and my organization, NewEurasia, may also be taking an arts-cultural turn in its coverage during 2012-13). In terms of the intellectual themes predominating my academic life, I’m starting to move away from strictly Islamological issues and into other terrains that have long interested me, particularly the democratic/liberal theory and environmentalism.

Studying liberalism, of course, intersects with my journalistic work, so it shall come as no surprise to my readers that I’m looking into the phenomenon of “managed democracy” in contemporary Russia and Kazakhstan, and that I shall probably be approaching the topic from the perspective of Claude Lefort. It also feeds into my interests as a member of the Baha’i Faith, namely, whether global democracy is possible, indeed, whether there can be a global understanding of what it means to be “human”.

As for environmentalism, believe it or not, this actually emerges from my background in Averroism, and no, I don’t mean by way of Spinoza; again, it is by way of my childhood resources.

Child psychologists have observed an intriguing phenomenon among children, namely, that they have the impression that things or objects have personalities and subjectivities, but that eventually we grow out of this and come to see the world around us as (largely) inert and plastic. Of course, interpreting psychological development this way is probably very culturally encoded, even if it is generally true that the capacity to instrumentalize one’s environment does seem to be a marker of maturation (so, it might be more accurate to say that psychological development in Modernity entails objectifying the world, whereas in previous eras it simply entailed making use of it…)

Yet, I somehow never lost this impression. When I look at a spoon, a violin, a tree, a rock, even the stars, I have the distinct impression that they are looking back. Although I’ve had this feeling all of my life, I only became really conscious of it since coming to Belgium, as I think something about the process of cultural dislocation somehow heightened my sensitivity to my own internal sensations (a phenomenon among expatriates that’s been noticed by psychologists), and so I’ve been sort of letting it guide my thinking a bit these last few years (if you go back and read some of my poems and posts, you can sniff it).

Consequently, my interest in Averroistic monopsychism inevitably extended beyond human beings in application to the physical world around me: is the environment somehow thinking? Does it have agency? Does it have subjectivity? As Cartesians, we are constantly tempted to think of subjectivity in terms of thought — after all, cogito ergo sum — but can we really say with certainty that even something as seemingly inert as a rock isn’t thinking, perhaps just one thought, articulated in the very alien language of the intercourse between its mineral composition, shape, density, mass and the forces of erosion placed upon it, a thought occurring over the course of an aeon?

My turn toward environmentalism has other sources, of course, from my interest in evolution and the purpose of the physical to my background as a Boy Scout to even the work I’m doing in Central Asia. I must also confess, there’s not a little bit of a compensatory need to regain the balance viz. all the time I spend in the digital world, i.e., in front of a machine, concerned with the petty Nietszcheanisms of my career and the human universe. Finally, I’ve always been moved and intrigued by come passages in the Qu’ran that imply a degree of subjectivity, free wil and social organization beyond the human but viz. our species:

“There is not an animal on earth, nor a bird that flies on its wings, but they are communities like you” (Qur’an 6:38).

“Do you not realise that everything in the heavens and earth prostrates/submits to God: the sun, the moon, the stars, the mountains, the trees, and the animals?” (Qur’an 22:18).

“We did indeed offer the Trust to the Heavens and the Earth and the Mountains; but they refused to undertake it, being afraid thereof: but Man undertook it — he was indeed unjust and foolish” (Qur’an 33:72).

So, you can begin to see how these interests are intersecting: if things can have subjectivity and perhaps agency, then can they also be exploited? Does the world around us have rights?

I want to explore this in one of my MPhil courses this year, entitled “Ethics and Public Policy” and conducted by three academics here in Belgium: Philippe Van Parijs, Antoon Vandevelde, and Nicholas Vrousalis. My paper question is this:

“Does the planet earth as defined in James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis possess any intrinsic rights, and if so, does human activity therefore constitute an exploitative violation of these rights?”

I’m choosing to focus on the controversial Lovelock because he seems to offer the most ready, as it were, point of attack/investigation. Just as Lovelock tests the limits of the Darwinian concept of evolution by applying it to such a massive scale, I wish to do the same to the Lockean concept of natural rights.

However, this is obviously a huge question I’m pursuing — and I have only 7000 words in which to do it. So, I’d like to know the thoughts of my readers. Click here to read what is essentially my abstract cum introduction to the paper and please tell me what you think.

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Update, 11/12/2011: I’m trying the following out as my paper abstract:

Does the planet earth as defined in James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis possess any intrinsic rights, and if so, does human activity therefore constitute an exploitative violation of these rights? My central interest here concerns whether Nicholas Vrousalis’ definition of exploitation as a form of domination for self-enrichment (“A obtains a benfit from B by taking advantage of B in virtue of B’s relational vulnerability vis-à-vis A”) makes any sense when extended beyond the human species, and if so, whether it can be utilized for the purpose of something as counter-intuitive as ecological justice. In other words, allowing that it is prima facie obvious that the planet earth can be exploited in a non-moral sense, I am curious as to whether it can be exploited in a moral sense, as well.

The reason why this is potentially interesting is that arguments in defense of maintaining/preserving the environment have mostly relied upon human-centric reasoning around notions of present- and future-term quality of life, flourishing, security, etc.. Can there be an argument that transcends the human, and if so, would a combination of Vrousalisian exploitation and the Gaia hypothesis provide one? The answer is: (tentatively) yes, although it would require establishing whether personhood is a necessary precondition of Vrousalis’ approach to exploition and whether “Gaia” can constitute a large-scale non-human “person” (in other words, whether Vrousalis’ logic, when applied in this manner, results in human rights being extended to our planet). These two issues shall thus serve as my main lines of investigation.

What do you think?

I should note that it is my understanding that my question is “unique” only in a very specific way: since Peter Singer, there has been much philosophical work concerning whether human rights should be extended to animals, but there has not been anything substantial on whether they should be extended to the entirety of our physical environment, i.e., the combined terrestrial geo-biosphere (to say nothing of the universe beyond).

That does not mean, however, that I am the first to ever argue for this; to the contrary, it is a position quite familiar to shamanistic religions, Jains, Franciscans, Sufis, and so forth. Consequently, I am attempting a “rational” (philosophical) way of not only re-describing their intuitions, but of rejuvenating them and making them relevant to contemporary debate.