[D66] Roundtable on The Ecocentrists

[R.O.]

https://s-usih.org/2020/08/whither-the-center-roundtable-on-the-ecocentrists-pt-4/

Daniel Wayne Rinn 
<https://s-usih.org/2020/08/whither-the-center-roundtable-on-the-ecocentrists-pt-4/>

August 14, 2020

https://s-usih.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/cover-1-520x800.jpg


  “Whither the Center?”: Roundtable on *The Ecocentrists* Pt 4


        Editor's Note

Daniel Wayne Rinn’s essay is the fourth installment of a roundtable on 
/The Ecocentrists/ by Keith Makoto Woodhouse (Columbia UP), the 2019 
winner of the Society for US Intellectual History’s award for best book 
of intellectual history. An introduction to the roundtable can be found 
here 
<https://s-usih.org/2020/08/the-ecocentrists-by-keith-makoto-woodhouse-roundtable-introduction/>. 
Roy Scranton’s essay can be found here 
<https://s-usih.org/2020/08/is-ecohumanism-possible-roundtable-on-the-ecocentrists-pt-1/>. 
Natasha Zaretsky’s essay can be found here 
<https://s-usih.org/2020/08/against-holism-roundtable-on-the-ecocentrists-pt-2/>. 
Paul Murphy’s essay can be found here 
<https://s-usih.org/2020/08/ecocentrism-humanism-and-the-wilderness-roundtable-on-the-ecocentrists-pt-3/>. 
A response from Woodhouse will be posted tomorrow.

Daniel Wayne Rinn is a historian of ideas and the environment. He 
completed his PhD at the University of Rochester in May 2020.

— Anthony Chaney

We are in the midst of a pandemic. Covid19 is killing people, destroying 
jobs, and exacerbating a long list of social problems. Yet “nature” 
seems to be enjoying something of a respite. As we engage in social 
distancing practices, seismic activity has declined, whales have become 
less depressed, and carbon emissions have dropped. I have no doubt that 
we will make up for these small environmental victories once our economy 
fully reopens; still, I can’t help but think “the whales are happy.” And 
I mean it. No sarcasm intended.

/Does this make me an ecocentrist?
/


/As Keith Woodhouse illustrates quite clearly in his book, the 
ecocentrists tended to identify as the more radical wing of the postwar 
environmental movement. Theirs was a philosophy anchored in deep ecology 
and predicated on the belief that the tenets of liberal democracy and 
reform environmentalism were flawed. Faith in human reason, 
individualism, and democratic institutions proved misguided when 
confronted with the severe environmental destruction wrought by the 
industrialized world. Thus, American environmentalism suffered a 
“radical break” as organizations such as Greenpeace and Earth First! 
turned away from litigation, lobbying, and policymaking—the modes of 
conventional reform central to the professionalized, mainstream 
movement—in favor of direct action. /

Enter figures such as Dave Foreman and Edward Abbey, both of whom 
advocated civil disobedience, monkeywrenching, industrial sabotage, and 
sometimes violence in the fight to protect nature. They represented a 
departure from the anthropocentrism that defined both the environmental 
mainstream and postwar society more generally.


/[...]
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