Ecocentrism

Historical development

The founding text is Leopold’s essay “The Land Ethic”, published in A Sand County Almanac (1949), although the word itself came later. Holmes Rolston III built a systematic account of value in nature in Environmental Ethics (1988). He argued that species and ecosystems carry objective value, which people discover and do not create. J. Baird Callicott grounded the land ethic in Hume and Darwin, tracing moral feeling for the biotic community to an extension of social instincts.

Robyn Eckersley’s Environmentalism and Political Theory (1992) defined ecocentrism as the position that sets green political thought apart from reform environmentalism. It has since been the usual name for the non-anthropocentric end of environmental politics.

Principal claims

• Species, ecosystems and ecological processes have value that cannot be reduced to their benefit for people or to the welfare of individual animals.
• Humans are members of the biotic community and have obligations to it. They are not merely its users.
• The integrity, diversity and continued working of ecosystems are the main tests of any environmental action.
• Some individual organisms may be sacrificed when the health of the whole requires it, including by culling or predation.

Policy implications

Ecocentrism supports protecting habitat on a large scale and preserving species whether or not they are useful. It supports restoring ecological processes, predation and disturbance among them, and limiting how much land and biological production people take for themselves. It accepts active management toward ecological integrity, and hunting that mimics natural death rates. That acceptance separates it from animal ethics focused on individuals.

Internal disagreements

Ecocentrists disagree about whether value in nature is objective, as Rolston holds, or rests on sentiment, as Callicott holds. They differ over which wholes matter: ecosystems, species or evolutionary processes. Restorationists say ecocentrism permits or requires intervention, and wilderness purists say it does not. They weigh individual animal welfare against ecosystem health differently. They also disagree about politics, since ecocentrists include anarchists, liberals, conservatives and supporters of strong states.

Criticisms and controversies

Tom Regan called the land ethic “environmental fascism” because it puts individuals below the whole. Critics ask whether an ecosystem is the kind of thing that can be helped or harmed at all, now that ecologists have largely given up the idea of stable communities that regulate themselves. Others say that “integrity” and “stability” are human tastes in landscape presented as ecological facts. Social critics warn that ecocentrism can easily set nature against the poor.

Ecocentrists answer that ecosystems still have health and function even when they change, and that only an ethic concerned with wholes is equal to extinction and the collapse of ecosystems.

Relationships to other traditions

Ecocentrism is the ethical core of deep ecology, the land ethic, ecological holism, wilderness preservation and much of rewilding. It is the opposite of anthropocentrism and shallow ecology. It differs from biocentrism and compassionate conservation over the standing of individuals. Ecocentrists can be found across the political spectrum.