Words&Dirt

“No amount of ideology can change the profound dependence of each human person not only on other human beings, but on air and water and other species as well––the invisible ‘others,’ the great ‘cloud of witnesses’ we depend on. But whereas ‘independence’ is a word enshrined in history, ‘interdependence’ is an uncelebrated academic neologism. Efforts to train children to cooperate and share are outweighed by the emphasis on independence, and quickly shift into training them to compete in environments where sharing is often defined as cheating. We have gone further than other cultures in defining kinds of ownership: whereas some societies have regarded land as common to all, we have invented the ownership of airspace above buildings, of genes and even species, of ideas, of tunes (not yet single notes), of affection, and even, in the shameful past, of human beings.

But the real issue is neither independence nor dependence, nor even interdependence. It is learning to define ourselves through relationships, as part of something larger, and recognizing that the goals of individuals must sometimes give way to, or at least harmonize with, larger entities. Human beings are components of larger systems, of ecosystems and ultimately the biosphere––components with the capacity to disrupt but also analyze the properties of these systems and learn that they too are valuable and deserve respect. Single lives are part of a winding evolutionary skein stretching through millennia and encompassing the entire surface of the planet.

Thus, it is a fallacy to ask why you or I as individuals should inconvenience ourselves or limit our consumption when others are not doing so and our impact is so relatively small. What is critical is that each is more accurately a part of the whole than a separate being.

If the concept of the individual is to give way to a recognition of relatedness, how must the concept of individual rights correspondingly change? Various efforts have been made to argue for animal rights. These arguments tend to focus on mammals and birds, species with which humans perhaps like to compare themselves and for which they feel empathy––whales, for example, or sea turtles. We don’t hear much in the West about insect rights, and although declining populations of bees are beginning to attract attention, the concern is largely instrumental. We don’t generally speak about the rights of plants. What is more serious, perhaps, is that we do not hear about the rights of oceans or marshes or jungles, which are treated as containers (habitats) for the species that capture the imagination. Yet arguably these too are living systems of which the vertebrates that inhabit them are parts. We may make an effort to protect the whales; but if the plankton in the oceans are destroyed by changes in acidity, the food chain will collapse, not only for the whales but for many other species as well. On this account, rights may belong more appropriately to systems than to individual species.”

––Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril, “Why Should I Inconvenience Myself?” by Mary Catherine Bateson, pg. 213-4