Is There an Ecological Ethic?

The Ecological Conscience is the arresting title of a representative environmental anthology. The puzzlement lies neither in the noun nor in the by now familiar modifier, but in their operation on each other. We are comfortable with a Christian or humanist ethic, but the moral noun does not regularly take a scientific adjective: a biological conscience, a geological conscience. In a celebrated survey, The Subversive Science* where ecology reaches into our ultimate commitments, Paul Sears entitles an essay "The Steady State: Physical Law and Moral Choice." To see how odd, ethically and scientifically, is the conjunction, replace homeostasis with gravity or entropy. The sense of anomaly will dissipate, though moral urgency may remain, if an environmental ethic proves to be only an ethic—utilitarian, hedonist, or whatever—about the environment, brought to it, informed concerning it, but not in principle ecologically formed or reformed. This would be like medical ethics, which is applied to but not derived from medical science,. But we are sometimes promised more, a derivation in which the newest bioscience shapes (not to say, subverts) the ethic, a resurgent naturalistic ethics. "We must learn that nature includes an intrinsic value system," writes Ian McHarg. A Daedalus collection is introduced with the same conviction: Environmental science "is the building of the structure of concepts and natural laws that will enable man to understand his place in nature. Such understanding must be one basis of the moral values that guide each human generation in exercising its stewardship over the earth. For this purpose ecology—the science of interactions among living things and their environments—is central." We shall presently inquire into the claim that an