”the prophecy inside him, like a grimace,

 was I WILL MEASURE IT ALL AND OWN IT ALL”

 – Ted Hughes

“Bios is intrinsically symbiosis” 

– Holmes Rolston III 

“In vain we force the living into this or that one of our molds. All the molds crack” 

– Henri Bergson

Anthropocentrism – the view that human beings are separate from and above the rest of Nature – has failed. This is not because it has been misapplied – because we have failed to effectively manage Nature in our interests – but because it does not correspond to reality. As the Promethean fever dream of perpetually expanding human dominion begins to break, the realisation is dawning, albeit too slowly, that human mastery over Nature has always been illusory. Experience now shows that the further we strive to build a post-natural world the more vengefully Nature, in Andreas Malm’s phrase, “comes roaring back” (1). In the space that has broken open, alternative understandings of our relationship and duty to the rest of the natural world have begun to proliferate. There has been a renewal of theories elaborating on our inextricable interconnection with the rest of Nature and advocating a fundamental change in our consciousness of our place in the world which any serious environmentalist attempt to respond to the climate and ecological crises will require. A fundamental contention of modern ecophilosophy, and the radical environmentalism it inspires, is that the solution to the collapse of the Earth’s life support systems cannot be merely technological, as the shallow ecology of supposed ‘green capitalism’ advocates. Such views serve only to extend an anthropocentric worldview grounded in human dominion over the world which this movement, with good reason, identifies as the fundamental cause of these developments rather than their cure. In particular, ecophilosophy has long advocated a reassessment of the way Nature itself has been excluded from our calculations of value, including those that have directed climate action so far. As John Broome has noted, the calculations by economists of the ‘social cost of carbon’ (the damage done by each tonne of carbon, used to determine how emissions should be priced) treat damage to non-human Nature as an ‘externality’ (2). These models are capable of valuing the non-human world only in-so-far as it is valuable to human beings. This discards a strong intuition, affirmed as perhaps a core principle of environmentalism, that something is inherently wrong with wilfully damaging the living world, irrespective of the effect of whether this damages human interests. Philosophical work must ground this intuition in an underlying metaphysics of value in Nature – philosophy can deeply root the idea that weight should be given to Nature’s own interests, from which it might flower across culture, politics and policy. 

The approaches taken by environmental philosophers thus far can be grouped into two broad schools. One is holism – dissolving the distinction between humanity and non-human Nature, leading us to further the interests of Nature as a whole which we are inseparably part of. This also encompasses efforts to use the theory of mind/body externalism to dissolve the barrier between the human mind and the external world in order to resituate value in Nature. Conversely, otherness derives respect for Nature from its autonomy from human beings, emphasising the enduring separation of the natural from the social. I will survey these approaches and sketch a new approach which seeks to move beyond that dichotomy. This approach, the ‘complexity theory’, is grounded in two innovations away from the ideas which underpin the anthropocentric worldview. The first is process metaphysics – the view that the world is ultimately made up of processes, rather than things. The second is a form of panpsychism – the view that consciousness, or the possession of ‘mind’, is to some extent fundamental to everything which exists, and varies only in degree. Alloying this account with some features of the otherness approach, I hope to present a direction toward a worldview which resituates humanity within a natural world permeated with other morally significant beings – in particular, ecosystems – whose interests we ought to respect. This view, I suggest, offers the metaphysical underpinnings for a modern environmentalist worldview, since it implies a set of moral obligations and boundaries which align with the urgent duties to conserve, restore and respect the rest of Nature that environmentalism advocates.

Anthropocentrism

The roots of anthropocentrism – seeing Nature as existing for humanity - can be traced to two Enlightenment ideas. These are the Cartesian account of minds as discretely internal and exclusively human, and the atomic, mechanistic ontology which perceives the world as fundamentally made up of separate objects that are entirely reducible to the arrangement of their parts. An environmentalist account of Nature will have to offer an alternative to these views, if Nature is to be afforded value beyond its instrumental utility for humanity. 

Two elements of Descartes’s account of mind corrode attempts to make sense of Nature’s value. First is the idea that minds, existing by virtue of an incorporeal soul, are exclusively possessed by human beings. The non-human world, being purely material, is passive – for Descartes, Nature is a lifeless “clock” (3). The world-picture which follows Cartesian dualism is, therefore, one in which humanity is the world’s mind, and Nature merely its body. This excludes Nature in-and-of-itself, in a manner modern economists perpetuate, from any calculations of value. This anthropocentric world-picture is exemplified in Locke’s account of property, which tells us that “Land that is left wholly to Nature” is “Waste” (4) and that an environment’s potential to enlarge the enduring value-store of money overwhelms any claim to preserve it in its natural state.

Arguably as damaging, but to this day more widely accepted, is the ‘internalism’ of thought – that minds are discretely contained within individual bodies. This implies, Mark Rowlands (5) argues, a dualism between thinking subject and unthinking object which renders non-anthropocentric value in Nature inconceivable. According to this view, what is outside humans possesses only subjective value – it can be valuable only by virtue of the valuing cognition of human beings projected outwards. 

The mechanistic account of the world holds that the world is made up of discrete objects and that any macroscopic entity is “ontologically reducible to its simple constituents” (6). The mechanical description has a normative element. Where pre-modern notions of Nature as alive and sensitive (continuing in many animistic traditions) constrained the permissibility of exploiting it, Nature’s reduction to passive mechanism permits seeing it as an inert, master-able resource to be shaped toward human ends. The mechanical account can therefore be understood as a “conceptual power structure” which shapes the dominant school of thinking about Nature from the Enlightenment onwards. In Heidegger’s sense, it ‘reveals’ Nature in a particular way: as a “standing reserve” of energy, resources and tools, to be tapped into (7). Humanity then reduces Nature to a “web of instrumental relations,” (9) – since humans are the only end to which things exist. Hence, there can only be an ethic of managing Nature – opposing overexploitation where it conflicts with our long-term interests, preserving ‘natural capital’ – rather than recognising Nature’s value in itself. 

Holism

Holism seeks to dismantle anthropocentrism by emphasising humanity’s indiscernibility from Nature. The ‘biotic community’ (10) of humanity with the rest of the living world is taken to imply moral community. When the division between human and non-human is abandoned, an environmentalist ethic should follow from enlightened self-interest – we value Nature from the same impetus that we value ourselves since we are inseparable from it. Hence, metaphysical indiscernibility is said to entail a variation of Aldo Leopold’s ‘Land Ethic’, which has become a core tenet of modern environmentalism: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise” (11). 

The argument for indiscernibility is buttressed by ecology, which perceives organisms as deeply co-evolved  – fundamentally shaped by each other. To illustrate: Zebra’s stripes are thought to be a deterrent response to tsetse flies – hence, “the point of view of the flies [is] entered into the body of the zebra” (12). No organism’s form can be abstracted from the environmental interactions which shape it – there is an ineliminable blurriness to the perceived boundaries between living beings. Ecology, following Arthur Tansley, therefore understands ecosystems, and Nature as a whole, in terms of “rotations of energy” (13). The energy-transferring interactions within ecosystems are taken to be internal relations within a wider, systematic whole. Since human beings are part of this indivisible web of life, our selfhood is properly identified with the whole of Nature – the line between self and Other disappears. If axiological egoism is assumed – that we all, fundamentally, value ourselves – then properly perceiving what we are (through ‘ecological consciousness’) entails moral concern for all of Nature, whose interests are identical with our own. 

 A significant criticism of holism concerns its vague ethical implications. Even if one accepts their indiscernibility from Nature, this may not imply environmentalism. I could consistently identify myself with Nature and see Nature as merely the extended life-support system which exists to sustain me. Stoic thinkers saw Nature similarly as a unified system of interdependent parts, while believing the whole existed for the rational parts, i.e. men (14). This holism collapses any distinction between human and non-human interests, without actually illuminating what those interests are – hence, it does not imply the land ethic’s imperative to preserve and enhance environmental richness. Oneness is not enough. 

Externalism 

This variation of Holism was grounded in the idea that we can account for the value of Nature by including the rest of Nature within ourselves, where we are properly understood as constituting the same being. In essence, this meant pulling the rest of the world into the mind – which, as we have seen, is ultimately insufficient to explain why and how we should value Nature’s own interests. One alternative, as Mark Rowlands argues, is to perform the opposite operation by pulling the mind into the world (15). On this account, we can acknowledge the value in Nature only by replacing the internalist account of mind with an externalist one (16). The ‘environmental model of mind’ proposes that cognition occurs not just through internal representations, but also through manipulating external, information-bearing structures (17). Consider the way we think by accessing environmental memory-cues (e.g. the organisation of a bookshelf) and visuographic representation (including written language). Cognition, this suggest, can take place outside the body. 

A natural environment contains the encoded information of ‘affordances’ – potential that it offers to particular complementary organisms (18) – e.g., the canopy affords a platform for locomotion to primates. The information that an environment has valuable affordances to that organism is objective – depending not on any particular disposition but rather the organism’s needs and an environment’s capacities to fulfil them (19). This does not even require the organism to exist, only to be possible – if humans did not exist, there would still be affordances in the environment that humans would value if they did. Hence, affordances are objective: they, and their potential value, exist within Nature, not in the one who values them. 

Thus, valuing Nature, according to the externalist account, actually means recognising the potential value which is always already embodied within it. The cognitive activity by which something is valued does not take place just in the mind of the valuer, but actively involves the valuable features of the environment themselves, and these features exist independently of the valuer. Value, therefore, on the externalist account, has an objective basis in the world. Our recognition of this value, crucially, is normatively evaluable – meaning that we can fail to recognise the value that features of Nature have (rather than our not perceiving it entailing that the value simply is not there) (20). As Emily Brady argues, we can learn to value parts of Nature which are not traditionally scenic – like swamps - by deepening our attention. A “sensuous appreciation anchored in scientific understanding which provides a background ecological story” (21) can reveal overlooked sources of value. The normative element to Rowlands’ account suggests such attention could be morally obliged. 

The externalist account of what we should value, however, is problematic. Human beings are inclined to value indicators of environmental affordances conducive to survival – we value features which appear to offer us utility. Rowlands suggests this does not mean we can only value Nature instrumentally, since these indicators include general features of an environment like richness, integrity, and stability, which are closely correlated with an environment offering us many affordances (22). It would be a ‘genetic fallacy’ – mistaking origin for content – to suppose that the instrumental origins of the way we value preclude valuing Nature for itself (23). Yet this still values only what humans are inclined to value. Nature may be intrinsically predisposed to be valued by humans, but what this leads us to value is still shaped by our species’ interests – which cannot represent Nature’s wider interests. 

Otherness

The ‘otherness’ tradition holds that Nature possesses an ineradicable ontological autonomy – affirming, rather than dissolving, the conceptual distinction between humanity and Nature. Where holism looks to Nature to guide our action, otherness understands Nature as a boundary to our activity (24). Contrary to holism and externalism, Nature is valuable precisely because of its independence from humanity, rather than its interconnection with us. While I will argue that otherness cannot be an environmentalist ethic’s sole basis, it offers some elements that can be valuably incorporated into a more complete environmentalist metaphysics.

Otherness holds that the ineradicable separation between humanity and Nature entails that there is “no moral community” (25) between them. The basis of value in Nature is not our identification with it, but the opposite: it is the metaphysical distinctness of Nature which lead us to respect its autonomy. Nature is autonomous in that it exists and organises itself independently of human causation. The ecological interconnection identified by holism does not preclude that Nature can be autonomous insofar as Nature pre-exists humanity and maintains its own integrity (26). Otherness theory contends, as Keekok Lee argues, that whatever is autonomous from humanity in its genesis and continuing existence exists for itself, not for us, and so is valuable in itself (27). Recognising Nature as having this kind of internal teleology implies that it counts, ethically, by the same token that we do. This usefully secures the value of non-living Nature, including beyond our own planet. Lee argues there is a strong intuition that it would be wrong for human beings to destroy or fundamentally alter even a lifeless planet, even if they lacked future descendants who would be deprived by this destruction. This concern could not be rooted in ecological interconnection between humanity and a distant exoplanet, since it is apparent that no such connection exists. Otherness theory, then, seems necessary to ground an environmentalist opposition to wanton interplanetary destruction. Against Hume’s dictum not to derive ‘ought’ from ‘is’, otherness theory, therefore, asserts the intrinsic value of natural artefacts and processes proceeding uninhibited whether or not they are alive or have living dependents. 

The otherness-based theory of Nature’s value also benefits from being relatively ‘objective’ (28). This claim draws from Thomas Nagel’s value theory, wherein objectivity is a matter of degree scaling with impersonality: “a view… is more objective than another if it relies less on the specifics of the individual’s makeup and position in the world, or on the character of the particular type of creature he is” (29). The value conferred by autonomy could be especially objective, therefore, because it does not rely on any of the specifics of the perspective of human beings: the claim ‘Nature exists for its own sake’ would be unaffected had humanity never existed. This theory avoids the weaknesses of more subjective accounts wherein the value of Nature depends upon the extent to which it is valued by people. For a subjective account, if the majority saw a worthless swamp where others saw precious habitat, then that environment would have to be said to have no value since its value would not be recognised by normal observers (30). The greater objectivity of otherness as a ground of value, by contrast, entails that if most people did not value Nature, there would be a meaningful basis to argue they are mistaken. 

Otherness accounts also offer a poignant critique of holism: that it fails to account for how humans cause the ecological crisis, and so cannot grasp how it could be resolved. To understand the interfaces between humanity and Nature where such damage occurs requires us, Malm suggests, to maintain a meaningful metaphysical distinction between them (31). Holism’s core thesis was a denial of any real distinction between human beings and the rest of Nature. Otherness, conversely, must be predicated on some real, significant distinction that which is human from that which is natural. A frequent claim in the past – from Descartes to Chomsky – has been that the use of language renders humanity categorically distinct from the rest of the natural continuum, but the empirical basis for this has weakened. We now observe the presence of social learning and symbolic understanding to exist, to different degrees, elsewhere in Nature, particularly among Great Apes and cetaceans (32). A stronger basis is found in the ‘metabolic rift theory’ derived from Marx – that humanity has severed itself from Nature by breaking from the metabolism “prescribed by the natural laws of life itself” (33) in an endless desire for growth fundamentally opposed to the stabilising cycles within Nature. As Kate Soper argues, this illuminates how human beings could be at once products of Nature and a threat to it, since there is a tension between “man as creature and creator” – between human nature and the ecologically ruinous consciousness prescribed by capitalism (34). 

The analytic distinction that such an account draws between human beings (in their modern state) and Nature, contrary to the indiscernibility supposed by holism, is not merely pedantic but rather offers a different way of understanding solutions to the ecological crisis. Recognising the interplay of distinct, though connected, human and natural forces allows us to make sense of the idea, as Naomi Klein has proposed, that a shift in “power relations”  away from humanity and back to Nature could be an environmentalist prerogative (35). This provides a novel basis for the necessity of returning to energy generation based on sun, wind, and water which, unlike fossil fuels, are never fully possessed by us, but rather retain a degree of natural autonomy.

Limiting the qualification of Nature’s otherness, does, then, present a basis for  environmentalism. However, it does so only partially. It may not accommodate, for instance, a major duty of contemporary environmentalism: active intervention in Nature, e.g., managing ecosystems and re-introducing species, where exclusive policies of protection can no longer reverse the desolation. Additionally, foreclosing the possibility of human integration within Nature, as the defence of Natural otherness seems to, is ahistorical and unacceptably alienating. Such a view contributes to the absurd injustice of indigenous peoples being evicted from land they lived inseparable from since time immemorial, in the name of an illusory, Western ideal of untouched ‘Wilderness’ (36). The most significant problem, however, is that while otherness does offer a basis for Nature being valuable in itself and some implications for what human being’s duties to Nature might be, irrespective of whether human beings value it, it does not provide a way of thinking about the relative strength of Nature’s interests, such that we might systematically weigh them up against the interests of human beings. To account for this, I believe, requires a more comprehensive rejection of the anthropocentric paradigm than the holistic, externalist or otherness-based theories have achieved, one which allows us to make sense of the claim that Nature values itself. 

Towards a Complexity Theory

To conceive of Nature valuing itself depends on two paradigm-shifts away from the anthropocentric model: a panpsychist theory of mind replacing Cartesianism, and a process metaphysics dismantling mechanical atomism. Such a shift expands the kinds of entities we perceive in Nature and their ability to confer value onto their interests – not just individual organisms, but entire ecosystems, come to be understood as cohesive entities which value themselves. 

Panpsychism contends that ‘mind’ is fundamental, rather than emergent, and varies in degree, not in kind. A full argument for panpsychism is beyond the present scope, but in brief: it seems arbitrary that minds (here defined as a basic level of awareness, including the ability to value, not the advanced self-awareness implied by ‘sentience’) should emerge only from some physical systems (human brains, as well as perhaps those of some mammals and cephalopods) and not others. Rather, mind is conceived as fundamental, in that anything which exists has a corresponding mind. Following Spinoza, this panpsychism contends that all beings to possess some mind, and it is the degree of mind which a being possesses which varies: “all [individuals], though in different degrees, are necessarily nevertheless animate” (37). For Spinoza, the physical complexity of a particular individual directly corresponds to the complexity and power of its mind: “its aptitude increases in proportion to the number of ways in which its body can be disposed” (38). Spinoza’s panpsychist doctrine emerges from his monism. If the world is composed of a single substance with both a mental and a physical attribute, then each individual (each thing which affects, and is affected, together as a whole) will have both a physical and mental aspect. If part of what it is to have a mind is to value oneself, all entities are then, to varying degrees, self-valuing ends-in-themselves, capable of instrumentally valuing things conducive to their survival and flourishing. The former assumption is credible, since, as Christine Korsgaard has argued, for a being to have a mind means it possesses a “centre of self” around which it is organised (39). Even absent rationality or sentience, something with a mind can value things since it “perceives the world in such a way that imbues it with practical significance determined by her own interests, as those are embodied in her instinctive responses”. This entails that entities without self-reflective sentience can be meaningfully said to confer value, and what they value is indicated by their instinctive actions. 

Crucially, this entails that something’s power to value corresponds to the degree of mind it possesses – a more complex entity confers greater moral weight upon its interests. Moral value, then, also comes in degrees. This may seem anathema to the anti-hierarchical approach to Nature adopted by much ecophilosophy, but I will demonstrate that it is necessary to provide a basis for the kinds of environmental action that our moment demands. This will become clear as we apply this panpsychist account of value to ecosystems. 

Process metaphysics allows us to understand the kind of entity an ‘ecosystem’ is, which cannot be captured within the Enlightenment paradigm of mechanical atomism. Within atomism, reality contains strictly separated objects, and every entity and phenomena can be reduced to its constituent parts. In processism, the world is fundamentally composed of processes, not things: “things simply are what they do” (40). Some support this with quantum mechanics, which has “dematerialised matter”: it appears that ordinary, macro-scale objects are in fact composed of quantum-physical processes, not substances (41). As applied to Nature, the science of “ecological interdependence” – the complex symbiosis displayed in living systems – has challenged the idea that organisms are discrete, independent things. The recent revelation that forest floors are threaded by coordinating networks of mycelium offers a profound example of this. Organisms may be “fundamentally relational entities” (42) – processes inseparable from the nexus of other processes constituting them. Dissolving the account of Nature as a hierarchy of separate organisms – seen more accurately as a web of interrelated processes – permits us to perceive a wider array of entities. 

An implication of processism is that systems cannot always be reduced to their parts, as atomism assumes. Processism endorses the idea of “macroprocesses that organize microprocesses into systematic wholes” (43) – a self-organising system can exercise downward causation on its parts, rather than the parts always determining the behaviour of the whole. Seeing ecosystems as entities of this kind, not reducible to their constituent biotic and abiotic components, allows us to recognise their distinctive interests. An ecosystem organises itself around a “centre of homeostasis” (44) rather than an organismic survival interest – their interest is in maintaining equilibrium. Like any other living being, it is a “process which hangs together” (45) in that it acts, as one system, to preserve its own viability. Nor can an ecosystem’s interests be reduced to an aggregation of its constituent organisms’ interests - the interests of the whole and the parts sometimes conflict. For their long-term integrity and stability, some ecosystems require periodic fires or freezes which are against the individual interests of the many organisms that these events kill. Ecosystems, as wholes, act to produce particular outcomes – the Amazon as a whole works to create its own favourable conditions by seeding rainclouds, for example. (46)

 In the complexity-based version of panpsychism I have borrowed from Spinoza, anything which composes an individual – which acts togethers as a whole – will have a corresponding mind: its own individual striving to persist, and so its own capacity to value itself. An ecosystem composes an individual entity on this account. As a system of interwoven processes, it displays a coherence and unity of purpose and direction – it acts together to produce a certain affect (47) – which cannot be reduced only to the activity of its parts, but rather can be explained only with reference to its activity as a whole. Because an ecosystem is a coherent individual, it has its own corresponding mind for precisely the same reason that any individual animal does – because part of what it is to be a coherent, individual thing is to have a mind: for all physical complexity, in this view, there is corresponding mental complexity. In this panpsychist account, to accept this in the case of the human body – that there is a mind parallel to our web of neurons – is to accept it in the case of ecosystems, and their cohesive web of life. 

Therefore, an ecosystem, judging by its instinctive actions as Korsgaard suggested, values itself – the activity which the entire being of an ecosystem coordinates is the perpetuation of its integrity as a system. We can, therefore, meaningfully say that an ecosystem has interests. An ecosystem’s power to value itself, and so the degree of moral weight that it confers upon its interests, corresponds to its complexity in this account of mind – complexity, in ecological terms, being the richness and variety of “networks of interactions” within it (48). Hence, a more complex ecosystem values itself more, conferring greater moral weight onto its interests, than a simpler ecosystem – the trees of a rainforest, richer in ecological interactions than those of a sterile plantation, make a stronger claim for their own preservation. This demonstrates the necessity of the hierarchical account of value in Nature for environmentalism: it provides us with a basis for placing particular value on rich ecosystems. Environmentalism must be able to discriminate between the moral value of these environments and the lesser value of barren plantations in order to have a basis to protect the former against replacement by the latter.

This resituates human beings within an egalitarian world of competing value claims and interests not inherently different from our own and provides a basis to adjudicate between these interests. This is not ‘biocentric egalitarianism’ in the sense of valuing all individual living beings equally. Such a view is, I believe, blind to precisely that which environmentalism strives to protect and restore. The value of a world of rich, diverse ecological interconnection is not captured merely by assigning all individual living things precisely equal value. Rather, it is egalitarian in the sense that complexity confers value to all living beings and systems equally, irrespective of what kinds of beings compose them – that is, regardless of whether they are human or non-human. In doing so, it grounds the intuition, common to many who are inclined to environmentalism, that ‘richness’ in Nature is valuable – since ecological richness, on this account, directly corresponds to the value an ecosystem confers upon itself. Human beings would be agents within wider ecosystems, with a negative duty not to infringe on the interests of other entities in Nature when they are stronger than our own, because they are more conducive to greater ecological complexity. Hence, this account provides a metaphysically grounded moral basis for acting, and building our world, according to the prescriptions of environmentalism. When coupled with a utilitarian imperative to maximise good, this lens would also entail a positive duty to enrich the overall complexity of Nature – providing a moral basis for active ‘wilding’ in addition to protecting existing ecosystems from harm. 

One concern is that this might not capture the harm of invasive species supplanting existing ecosystems – indeed, were the new ecosystem more complex, this might, perversely, be favoured (49). I believe this problem is limited because it is the case, empirically, that invasive species typically reduce ecological complexity. See invasive lionfish in the Caribbean outcompeting native predators, disrupting the balance which sustains the diversity of local reefs, and so reducing the overall complexity of the ecosystem.

Additionally, the value conferred by the complexity account – deriving from natural entities’ ability to value themselves – is not incompatible with the value accorded to the autonomy of Nature by the otherness account. Unlike traditional holistic accounts, the complexity account does not depend on a complete elimination of any metaphysical distinction between human beings and the rest of Nature – thus, it can accommodate the otherness theory’s claim that there is a meaningful barrier between humanity (as socialised by the metabolism of capitalism) and the rest of Nature, and that infringing on Nature’s autonomy can be a source of disvalue. If the two accounts are synthesised, then the otherness theory thus provides an imperative for allowing ecosystems to maintain their natural state which would outweigh the imperative to increase complexity in the hypothetical case where invasive species (or other artificial, human-caused changes to an ecosystem) increase, rather than decrease, its complexity. This synthesis also forestalls a potential criticism that the complexity theory fails to guard against the possibility of environmental damage beyond Earth, since the interest of increasing complexity might endorse activities, e.g., terraforming Mars, that environmentalists ought to be inclined to oppose. A synthesis of a complexity account and an otherness account therefore seems to offer a promising metaphysical basis for the environmentalist worldview and the actions – to urgently protect and restore the natural world – that is prescribes. Together, they makes sense of the idea that Nature can at once be interconnected and contain distinct sub-systems with opposing interests – accommodating the value of autonomous, ‘wild’ Nature without excluding humanity from the natural world they belong to. 

Conclusion 

The anthropocentric attitude to Nature is rooted in the Cartesian model of discrete, internal human minds, and mechanical atomism. Neither traditional holism nor the environmental model of mind offers a sufficient response. Rather than extending human self-interest or cognition out into Nature, an environmentalist metaphysics should show that Nature values itself. I have suggested a complexity-based theory of environmental value rooted in panpsychism and process metaphysics as a direction towards this. While otherness alone cannot offer an adequate alternative, some features which seem incompatible with purely holistic accounts, such as the maintenance of internal distinctions between the human and the natural and respect for Nature’s autonomy, are compatible with the complexity theory. Thus, this account moves beyond dichotomies of Nature as ‘One’ or ‘Other’, towards recognising an ecological fabric containing other beings with valuable interests which we ought to respect, whose existence and fate are inextricably entangled with our own. 

footnotes

1. Andreas Malm, The Progress of This Storm (New York: Verso, 2016), p. 77.

2. John Broome, “Philosophy, economics and harnessing self-interest.” (Lecture, Energy Ethics 2023, St Andrews, 8th June 2023).

3.  Descartes, Discourse on Method and The Meditations, p. 75.

4.  John Locke, Second Treatise of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 23. This is also explicitly part of Locke’s claim that indigenous people have no right to the land they inhabit – the expulsion and eradication of indigenous people being a frequent feature of early Enlightenment thinking about Nature.

5.  Mark Rowlands, The Environmental Crisis: Understanding the Value of Nature (London: Macmillan, 2000), p. 6-8.

6.  J. Baird Callicott, “The metaphysical implications of ecology” Environmental Ethics 8 (4), (1986), p. 303.

7.  Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, (New York: Harper Collins, 1983), p. 216.

8. Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Levitt, (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1977), p.14.

9.  W. S. K. Cameron, “Heidegger’s Concept of the Environment in Being and Time.” Environmental Philosophy, vol. 1, no. 1, (2004), pp. 34–46. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26167884. Accessed Aug. 9th 2023, p. 36.

10.  Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949), p. 204.

11.  Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, p. 225.

12.  Thibault De Meyer, “A Leibnizian Framework: Zebra Stripes and Monadology” in Field Philosophy and Other Experiments, (London: Routledge, 2021) p. 472.

13.  Arthur Tansley in Callicott, “The Metaphysical Implications of Ecology”, p. 307.

14.  Merchant, The Death of Nature, p. 23.

15.  Rowlands, The Environmental Crisis, p. viii.

16.  This is the overall thesis of Rowlands, The Environmental Crisis. 

17.  Rowlands, The Environmental Crisis, p. 128-9.

18. James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, New York: Psychology Press, 1986, p. 127.

19.  Rowlands, The Environmental Crisis, 145-146.

20.  Rowlands, The Environmental Crisis, 158.

21.  Brady, Emily, “Aesthetics in Practice: Valuing the Natural World.” Environmental Values 15, no. 3 (2006): 277–91. http://www.jstor.org/stable/30302153, p. 281.

22.  Rowlands, The Environmental Crisis, p. 155.

23.  Rowlands, The Environmental Crisis, p. 142.

24.  Bernard Williams, “Must a Concern for the Environment be Centred on Human Beings?”, Making Sense of Humanity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 238.

25.  Simon A. Hailwood, “The Value of Nature's Otherness” Environmental Values 9 (3), (2000), p. 354.

26.  Thomas Heyd, Recognizing the Autonomy of Nature, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), p. 5-6.

27.  Keekok Lee, “Awe and Humility: Intrinsic Value in Nature: Beyond an Earthbound Environmental Ethics” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 36 (1994), p. 99.

28.  This is a substantially altered adaption of the argument made in Hailwood, “The Value of Nature’s Otherness”.

29.  Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 4.

30.  Karen Green, “Two Distinctions in Environmental Goodness” Environmental Values 9 (3), (1996), p. 19.

31.  Malm, The Progress of this Storm

32.  Nancy R. Powell, “Have you ever wondered what it’s like to be a chimpanzee?” in Putting Philosophy to Work: Towards an Ecological Civilisation, eds. John B. Cobb, Andrew Schwartz, Anoka: Process Century Press, 2018, p. 48.

33.  Karl Marx, Capital Volume III, ed. Friedrich Engels, Marxists.org, (1999) URL: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Capital-Volume-III.pdf, accessed 24th Aug. 2023, p. 588.

34.  Kate Soper, What is Nature: Culture, Politics and the Non-Human, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 1995, p. 47.

35.  Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything, (London: Simon & Schuster, 2014), p. 340-341.

36.  Guha, R. cited in Barbara Muraca, “Relational Values: A Whiteheadian Alternative for Environmental Philosophy and Global Environmental Justice” Environmental Ethics, 8 (1), (2016), p. 33.

37. Spinoza, Benedict, Ethics Demonstrated in Geometrical Order (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 2001), E2p13s. Spinoza’s particular form of panpsychism is a result of his position that both body and mind are aspects of the one infinite substance

38. Spinoza, Ethics, E2p14.

39.  Christine M. Korsgaard, Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 50.

40.  Nicholas Rescher, Process Metaphysics: An Introduction to Process Philosophy, New York: State University of New York Press, 1996, p. 47.

41.  Johanna Seibt, "Process Philosophy", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2023 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2023/entries/process-philosophy/, p. 4.

42.  Nicholson, Daniel J., and John Dupré (eds), Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology (Oxford, 2018; online edn, Oxford Academic, 19 July 2018), https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198779636.001.0001, accessed 23 Aug. 2023.

43.  Rescher, Process Metaphysics, p. 37.

44.  Lawrence E. Johnson “Toward the Moral Considerability of Species and Ecosystems”, Environmental Ethics, Vol. 14, Iss. 2, (Summer 1992), p. 155.

45.  Johnson, “Toward the Moral Considerability”, p. 150.

46.  Ilima Loomis, “Trees in the Amazon make their own rain”, Science (2017), URL: https://www-science-org.ezproxy.st-andrews.ac.uk/content/article/trees-amazon-make-their-own-rain, accessed 16th Aug. 2023.

47.  Francesca di Poppa, “Spinoza and Process Ontology”, The Southern Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 48. Iss. 3, (September 2010), p. 287.

48. David G. Green, Nicholas I. Klomp, Glyn Rimmington, Suzanne Sadedin, Complexity in Landscape Ecology, Cham: Springer Cham, 2020, p. 4.

49.  This adapts a criticism of appeals to “the larger scheme of things” made by Lily-Marlene Russow, “Why do species matter?” in Environmental Ethics 3 (2) (1981), p. 140.

references

Albins, M.A. “Effects of invasive Pacific red lionfish Pterois volitans versus a native predator on Bahamian coral-reef fish communities” Biol Invasions 15, 29–43 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10530-012-0266-1

Brady, Emily, “Aesthetics in Practice: Valuing the Natural World.” Environmental Values 15, no. 3 (2006): 277–91. http://www.jstor.org/stable/30302153.

Broome, John, “Philosophy, economics and harnessing self-interest.” Lecture, Energy Ethics 2023, St Andrews, June 8th.

Callicott, J. Baird, “The metaphysical implications of ecology” Environmental Ethics 8 (4), (1986): pp. 301-316.

Cameron, W. S. K. “Heidegger’s Concept of the Environment in Being and Time.” Environmental Philosophy, vol. 1, no. 1, (2004), pp. 34–46. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26167884. Accessed 9 Aug. 2023.

De Meyer, Thibault, “A Leibnizian Framework: Zebra Stripes and Monadology” in Field Philosophy and Other Experiments, London: Routledge, 2021 

Descartes, René, Discourse on Method and The Meditations, trans. F. Sutcliffe, London: Penguin, 1968. 

di Poppa, Francesca, “Spinoza and Process Ontology”, The Southern Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 48. Iss. 3, (September 2010), pp. 272-294.

Gibson, James J. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, New York: Psychology Press, 1986.

Green, David G.; Klomp, Nicholas I.; Rimmington, Glyn; Sadedin, Suzanne, Complexity in Landscape Ecology, Cham: Springer Cham, 2020.

Green, Karen, “Two Distinctions in Environmental Goodness” Environmental Values 5 (1) (1996):31 - 46.

Hailwood, S. A., The Value of Nature's Otherness. Environmental Values 9 (3), (2000):353-372.

Heidegger, Martin, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Levitt, New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1977.

Heyd, Thomas, Recognizing the Autonomy of Nature, New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.

Johnson, Lawrence E. “Toward the Moral Considerability of Species and Ecosystems”, Environmental Ethics, Vol. 14, Iss. 2, (Summer 1992), pp. 145-157.

Korsgaard, Christine M., Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Lee, Keekok, “Awe and Humility: Intrinsic Value in Nature: Beyond an Earthbound Environmental Ethics” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 36 (1994):89-101.

Leopold, Aldo, A Sand County Almanac, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949

Locke, John, Second Treatise of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Loomis, Ilima, “Trees in the Amazon make their own rain”, Science (2017), URL: https://www-science-org.ezproxy.st-andrews.ac.uk/content/article/trees-amazon-make-their-own-rain, accessed 16th Aug. 2023. 

Malm, Andreas, The Progress of This Storm, New York: Verso, 2016.

Marx, Karl, Capital Volume III, ed. Friedrich Engels, Marxists.org, (1999) URL: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Capital-Volume-III.pdf, accessed 24th Aug. 2023.

Merchant, Carolyn, The Death of Nature, New York: Harper Collins, 1983.

Muraca, Barbara, “Relational Values: A Whiteheadian Alternative for Environmental Philosophy and Global Environmental Justice”, Environmental Ethics 8 (1), (2016), pp. 18-38.

Nagel, Thomas, The View from Nowhere, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Nicholson, Daniel J., and John Dupré (eds), Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018; online edn, Oxford Academic, 19 July 2018), https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198779636.001.0001, accessed 15 Aug. 2023.

Powell, Nancy R., “Have you ever wondered what it’s like to be a chimpanzee?” in Putting Philosophy to Work: Towards an Ecological Civilisation, eds. John B. Cobb, Andrew Schwartz, Anoka: Process Century Press, 2018.

Rescher, Nicholas, Process Metaphysics: An Introduction to Process Philosophy, New York: State University of New York Press, 1996.

Rolston III, Holmes, “Lake Solitude: The Individual in Wilderness”, Main Currents in Modern Thought, No. 31 (1975), pp. 121-126.

Rowlands, Mark, The Environmental Crisis: Understanding the Value of Nature, London: Macmillan, 2000.

Russow, Lily-Marlene, “Why do species matter?”, Environmental Ethics 3(2) (1981), pp. 101-112.

Seibt, Johanna, "Process Philosophy", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2023 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2023/entries/process-philosophy/>.

Soper, Kate, What is Nature: Culture, Politics and the Non-Human, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 1995.

Spinoza, Benedict, Ethics Demonstrated in Geometrical Order, Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 2001.

Williams, Bernard, “Must a Concern for the Environment be Centred on Human Beings?”, Making Sense of Humanity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 233–240.

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank the Laidlaw Foundation for the funding I received to conduct this research.