Ecofeminism and nonhumans: continuity, difference, dualism, and domination.

Certain ecofeminists have developed sophisticated critiques of the structures in western patriarchal culture that contribute to ongoing domination and oppression, not only of women but of nondominant groups of humans, identified according to class, race, ethnicity, and other markers, and of nonhuman "nature" as well.(1) Val Plumwood focuses her analysis on rationalism and dualism, pointing to "a gendered reason/nature contrast" as a central form in western thought that is elaborated in such dualistic structures as culture/nature, mind/body, male/female, and subject/object (Plumwood 1993, 41-68).(2) To overcome this distorting thinking of "the master," which defines the dualistically conceived other as radically discontinuous with the self and recognizes that other only as colonized by the (master's) self, Plumwood advocates reconstructing identities so as to affirm continuity among all lifeforms while recognizing "a non-hierarchical concept of difference" distinguishing self and other (Plumwood 1993, 60).

Building on the work of Plumwood, I will urge that we further explore our continuity with and differences from the other-than-human(3) entities of nature,(4) utilizing much of the knowledge that has been accrued through western science while simultaneously remaining critical of the forms of reason/nature dualism that still prevail within that science. Evolutionary biology offers abundant evidence of human continuity with other lifeforms, while ecology and conservation biology recognize differences in the requirements and capacities of various nonhuman organisms that are distinct from those of human beings. Ecofeminism can be significantly expanded and refined by incorporating the insights of these disciplines, and I will therefore attempt to bring certain of their key points into the ongoing ecofeminist dialogue. Reciprocally, an ecofeminist critique identifying common dualistic structures underlying particular approaches to science, certain holistic positions in environmental philosophy, and some postmodernist and social constructionist views may prove a valuable corrective for such fields. Making use of a biologically enhanced ecofeminist perspective, I will then begin to explore the problematic space surrounding individual and group identities, suggesting that we conceive of nonhumans both as individuals and as members of groups that differ significantly from our own species-group, enmeshed in "political" relations with us that in some ways parallel relations among human groups. Finally, I will expand on the notion of a virtue ethic, as suggested by Plumwood, for human beings living within ecosystems, indicating ways in which a nondualistic understanding of ourselves as biological beings interacting with and partly constructing our world might be empowering in our efforts to overcome all forms of oppression - and put an end to ecological destruction.

CONTINUITY BETWEEN HUMANS AND NONHUMANS

If we look into the basic tenets of the contemporary biological sciences, we will find that both human-nonhuman continuity and difference are solidly endorsed and elaborated on, particularly in the fields of evolutionary biology and community ecology. Fundamental support for continuity prevailing among human and nonhuman lifeforms is provided by Charles Darwin's "theory of common descent," the view that all forms of life ultimately derive from a single or at most a few common ancestors. As discussed by Ernst Mayr, this theory provided an elegant explanation for the grouping of organisms by degrees of similarity that had been employed by systematists from Aristotle through Linnaeus, combining evidence from such disparate fields as paleontology, comparative anatomy, embryology, animal behavior, and biogeography. The theory was rapidly accepted by the majority of scientists of Darwin's day because it "tied the whole organic world together," finally making comprehensible the great diversity of planetary life (Mayr 1982, 435).(5) The discoveries of Mendelian and population genetics in the twentieth century provided further confirmation of Darwin's ideas, and the developments of molecular biology have added yet another level to our appreciation of the relatedness of all lifeforms. As Mayr notes, "all organisms possess a historically evolved genetic program, coded in the DNA of the nucleus (or RNA in some viruses)," a characteristic uniting all living things, from single-celled prokaryotes to plants, animals, and fungi, and distinguishing them, along with the similarities of their biochemical processes and their complex capacities for self-organization, maintenance, and reproduction, from the nonliving entities around them (Mayr 1988, 16).

Focusing more closely on our nearer relations, we find that paleontological evidence shows the mammals have been evolving together since the time the major land masses were still joined in the world continent Pangaea, more than 250 million years ago; their diversification and specialization increased as the land masses separated, isolating different populations (Eisenberg 1981, 7-12). The primate lineage began its differentiation in the Paleocene, with the Anthropoidea, the line giving rise to monkeys and apes, splitting off in the Eocene, 50 million years ago (Eisenberg 1981, 156). Recent studies based on a uniformly ticking "molecular clock" indicate that our human lineage parted company with the two chimpanzee lines as recently as six to eight million years ago; distinctively human DNA sequences make up about 1.6 percent of our total genetic material, while, according to physiologist and evolutionist Jared Diamond, "the remaining 98.4 percent of our DNA is just normal chimp DNA" (1992, 23-24). In regard to characteristics often taken as the marks of human uniqueness, our "rationality" and the capacity for moral thought and action, Darwin himself was well aware of the development in other animals of the "mental powers" and of the "social instincts" he considered to provide the basis for human morality, leading him to conclude that "the difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind" (Darwin 1989, 130). The presence of cognitive abilities in nonhumans is being amply confirmed by ongoing ethological studies,(6) and primatologist Frans de Waal is investigating in detail the possible origins of morality in the interactions of nonhuman primates and other social mammals (de Waal 1996).

The placement of the human being ever more firmly within the continuum of life since the publication of On the Origin of Species has had important philosophical implications, according to Mayr: "it ended the reign of the anthropocentric world view and necessitated a reorientation of man's [sic] position toward nature"; and, "at least in principle, it provided a new basis for ethics, and in particular conservation ethics" (Mayr 1982, 438). Mayr may perhaps have been too hopeful in proclaiming the demise of anthropocentrism, however; with a few exceptions, ethicists seem to have done relatively little to integrate evolutionary insights into our moral philosophy, and western culture at large - indeed, much of western science - remains thoroughly anthropocentric in orientation.

WESTERN SCIENCE AND HUMAN/NATURE DUALISM

Why, one might ask, with so much evidence now at hand supporting the continuity of human with nonhuman life, might recognition of such continuity be resisted so strenuously, even in the sciences? A closer look at Plumwood's analysis of dualism in western culture may help answer this question. The dualistic relationship is distinguished from those of dichotomy, nonidentity, or difference by its systematic construction of mutually exclusive oppressor and oppressed identities (Plumwood 1993, 47). According to Plumwood, in its demarcation of a superior "master" class from that of a colonized, subordinated "other," dualism employs five characteristic features: (1) backgrounding or denial, whereby contributions of the other on which the master depends are denied or minimized; (2) radical exclusion or hyperseparation, whereby an absolute discontinuity, a difference not of degree but of kind, is postulated between the master and the other; (3) incorporation or relational definition, whereby the other is defined only in terms of the lack of some quality possessed by the master or, conversely, only in terms of qualities that can be incorporated into the master's needs and desires; (4) instrumentalism or objectification, whereby the other is recognized only as an object, resource or means for the master's ends rather than as a subject with ends of its own; and (5) homogenization or stereotyping, whereby all members of the oppressed class are seen as uniform and stereotypic, stripped of all individuality or within-class difference (Plumwood 1993, 48-55). These characteristics come into play in various ways in the elaboration of reason/nature dualism, identified as the paradigmatic "line of fracture" running throughout western culture, a splitting in which "virtually everything on the 'superior' side can be represented as forms of reason, and virtually everything on the underside can be represented as forms of nature" (Plumwood 1993, 44). The further development of human/nature dualism, a process brought to culmination by Descartes that set the stage for much of modem science, Plumwood characterizes as follows:

The first step in the evolution of human/nature dualism is the construction of the normative (the best or ideal) human identity as mind or reason, excluding or inferiorizing the whole rich range of other human and non-human characteristics or construing them as inessential. The construction of mind or reason in terms exclusive of and oppositional to nature is the second step. The construction of nature itself as mindless is the third step, one which both reinforces the opposition and constructs nature as ineluctably alien, disposing of an important area of continuity and overlap between humans and animals and nonhuman nature. (Plumwood 1993, 107)

Descartes's metaphysics achieved the hyperseparation of human mind from the "mechanism" of nature, not only in the form of nonhuman animals but in that of the human body as well. Bodily nature simultaneously became thoroughly backgrounded, all dependency of the "master" on it denied through Descartes's proclamation that mind or soul "can exist without it" (Meditations, VI). Defining material nature relationally in terms of its lack of consciousness and agency opened the door to construing all things other than the human mind as homogeneously passive, inert matter ready to be stamped into the instruments for meeting the master's ends. Furthermore, as Plumwood notes (paraphrasing Boyle), the move to a mechanistic account of the natural world effectively "removes the basis for an ethical response to that world" (Plumwood 1993, 118). Cartesian epistemology at the same time laid the groundwork for what many feminists and others have criticized in the version of scientific "objectivity" still prevalent today: hyperseparation of knower from known and subject from object, leaving the free-floating "understanding" ideally uncontaminated by bodily particulars of sensation or emotion (Plumwood 1993, 114-17). Descartes's scientific methodology, as is well known, made full use of these moves to cut nature off from us and strip it bare of agency; his position with respect to animal experimentation, for example, illustrates' very well where the pattern of thinking leads.

The reluctance of some scientists to integrate evidence of human/nonhuman continuity into their own approach to science can be further understood by considering the work of Evelyn Fox Keller. Although she does not explicitly use this analysis of dualism in exploring the relationship between science and gender, Keller does examine the potential linkages between autonomy (construed as a "radical independence from others"), masculinity, scientific objectivity that disjunctively separates subject from object (an interpretation she terms "objectivism"), and the concept of power as the domination of that which is other (Keller 1995, 97). Keller draws on Nancy Chodorow's psychoanalytic account (Chodorow 1978) of the differential gender development of male and female children, which identifies the need of young boys to (radically) separate their identities from those of their mothers - to define themselves as "not-mother" - in contrast to young girls, who seem more comfortable allowing their identities to be continuous, in a sense, with those of their mothers. In considering western culture's construction of the predominant methodologies and ideologies of science, which heretofore has been considered a "masculine" profession, Keller observes "the linkage between objectivity and domination that feminists have discerned is not intrinsic to the aims of science" (Keller 1995, 97). Instead, it may be a contingent effect of such developmental dynamics, and she states that her examination is meant to "emphasize the existence of alternative possibilities" (Keller 1995, 92).

Keller's biographical account of Nobel laureate Barbara McClintock's approach to science illustrates some of these alternatives. McClintock's willingness to entertain the possibility that genetic material might respond to extranuclear and even extracellular, organismic, and environmental factors, which led to her discovery of genetic transposition, was once considered (and still is by some) heretical for challenging the "central dogma" of unidirectional information flow from the DNA to the rest of the cell. Though McClintock denies that her work is marked by a "gendered" perspective, Keller notes that "what she is not is a man" (Keller 1995, 174), implying that, perhaps having escaped some of the psychosocial indoctrination received by her male peers, McClintock may be more open to alternative accounts. "Because she has no investment in the passivity of nature, the possibility of internally generated order" - order more complex than can be accounted for by the received model of control proceeding hierarchically outward from the "master" molecule - "does not, to her, threaten the foundations of science" (171). Keller's emphasis on the "form of attention" that McClintock directed at the nature under her scrutiny, "the need to 'listen to the material'" and, indeed, regard it with a kind of empathy (162-65), may also further extend our analysis of dualism as it operates within science. As a counter to the hyperseparated "objectivism" Keller finds in the masculinist approach to science, she urges the adoption of a dynamic objectivity, an epistemological stance "that grants to the world around us its independent integrity but does so in a way that remains cognizant of, indeed relies on, our connectivity with that world" (117). She utilizes the work of Ernest Schactel, identifying" 'allocentric,' or other-centered, perception" as critical to "seeing the world in its own right," in explicating her own notion of objectivity (118-19). Such perception is receptive to what is out there in nature; it is not blinded by its own needs or by preexisting conceptual structures.

Openness or receptivity to the natural other, or, rather, the lack of it, is a key marker for tracing mind/nature dualism as it manifests itself in much of modern science - as well as in some holist philosophies and in extreme social constructionism. In a nondominating, more gender-neutral science, as Keller suggests, the scientist would engage in hypothesis or model construction through a dialogic process, respectfully attending to the entity being apprehended and continually modifying her or his constructs in light of insights gained through the ongoing interaction? Too often in scientific practice, however, the model the scientist constructs assumes paramount importance over the actuality of the nature being investigated. Many subtle and not-so-subtle characteristics of the natural other are ignored or erased (Keller 1995, 120-21). Such an approach displays characteristics of objectification and incorporation, attending to the "subject matter" only insofar as it serves the investigator's ends and incorporates the investigator's own notions of how such an entity should behave. To the extent that the scientist's intellectual and cultural constructions occupy center stage, with nature "backgrounded" to a minor supporting role, this relation can be seen as manifesting the self/other, culture/nature, and perhaps even production/reproduction dualisms mentioned by Plumwood (1993, 43), as well as the fundamental mind/nature or reason/nature split. The dialogue has been reduced to a monologue; the scientist has colonized the natural such that it appears significant only insofar as it reflects the products of his (or her) own mind. Rather than seeing nature as characterized by "an a priori complexity that vastly exceeds the capacities of the human imagination" (Keller 1995, 162) and seeking to understand it to the limited extent that a human being can, the colonizer-scientist assumes that matter passively obeys "laws of nature" that are, or eventually will be, completely explanatory and entirely knowable - fully congruent, strangely enough, with the constructions of the "objective" human mind (see Keller 1995, 134, 142; see also Midgley's examination of reductionism, 1994, 40). So conceived, scientific investigation itself courts the danger of embodying the "essence of modem technology" that Heidegger terms "enframing." As this process gradually blocks the possibility of allowing nature to reveal itself, "the illusion comes to prevail that everything man encounters exists only insofar as it is his construct" (Heidegger 1977, 308).(8)

Though many scientists would protest vigorously against the above depiction of their endeavor (and many quite rightly), I suspect that the patterning of conceptual thought in western culture somewhat along these lines is largely responsible for the resistance of some scientists to the integration of what they "know" from science into their own worldview. The principle of evolutionary continuity directly undercuts the depiction of all nonhuman nature as hyperseparated from us as privileged human knowers and as lacking in subjectivity and agency, yet the Cartesian framework remains in place in our culture at large and must prove highly seductive to those in the sciences who enjoy the power and privilege that accompanies possession of the "master" consciousness. For ecofeminists, learning to discriminate between the hard-won truths to be gleaned from science that can enhance our understanding of nature and the dualistic constructs that sometimes accompany them may pose a challenge, but surely a worthwhile one.

DIFFERENCES BETWEEN HUMANS AND NONHUMANS

With some of these considerations in mind, let us now turn to a discussion of human-nonhuman differences. A number of ecofeminist philosophers have rightly pointed out that "humanity" should not be conceptualized as an undifferentiated mass, since to do so would be to overlook many important differences between human groups and their differential responsibilities for causing today's ongoing ecological destruction (see Plumwood 1993, 11-12; Cuomo 1994, 95). It is crucial to appreciate, likewise, that "nature" should not be conceptualized as undifferentiated and homogeneous in its otherness. Various kinds of nonhumans differ from us and from each other in important ways, and it is in the understanding of these differences that we may come to grasp how they might be differentially oppressed by our actions, as well as how certain alterations in our actions may improve the situation for specific kinds of nonhuman others.

If evolutionary biology is construed as demonstrative of the continuity that holds among lifeforms, community ecology may perhaps be viewed as illustrative of the differences that prevail among living things. Actually, the two can be considered complementary ways of seeing the same process; the evolutionary view apprehends the transformation, diversification, and replacement of lineages over time, while the ecological provides a "snapshot," a temporal cross-section, of current relationships among different kinds of organisms (see Ehrlich 1986, 260), relationships that are the result of previous evolutionary changes.(9) And an interlinkage can be recognized at the level of natural process as well as at that of our representations: natural selection, the "mechanism" whereby organisms more favorably endowed to survive the exigencies of their environment will make a greater contribution to the genetic makeup of the next generation, leads to changes in the organismic lines, and changes in the characteristics of the biota that, along with features of the physical environment, make up a significant part of a specific organism's surroundings can lead to the selection of particular changes in the genetic makeup of future generations of that specific type of organism. In other words, among interacting lifeforms, an ongoing process of "coevolution," broadly construed (see Futuyma and Slatkin 1983, 2), is taking place.(10)

To paint with a broad brush some of the differences among organisms made apparent through the study of ecology, we may make a fundamental distinction according to the source of energy utilized for nutrition. This divides the living components of an ecosystem into producers, predominantly the green plants that fix the sun's energy through photosynthesis; consumers, classically the macroscopic animals that eat the plants or other animals; and decomposers, chiefly microscopic bacteria and fungi that break down the bodies of deceased plants and animals. A closer look classifies organisms according to trophic level, their numerical relationships being determined, within certain limits, by the second law of thermodynamics. Much of the energy trapped by green plants, the basal level of most food chains or webs, is utilized by the plants themselves and is therefore unavailable to the herbivorous animals that feed on them. A further reduction in available energy occurs when that embodied in the herbivores is transformed into the bodies of carnivores feeding on them, and so on. A rough estimate is that only about 10 percent of the energy of one trophic level is available to the level "above" it (Ehrlich 1986, 260). For terrestrial ecosystems, the amount of biomass thus generally decreases with each step up in trophic level, predatory organisms being considerably less numerous and at the same time usually larger than their prey (in order to capture it). The classic pattern of trophic level structuring is therefore often conceptualized as a "pyramid of numbers," with abundant green plants making up the base of the pyramid; many, mostly small-bodied, herbivorous animals composing the second level; a lesser number of medium-sized carnivorous animals forming the third level; and an even smaller number of large-bodied predators at the apex (first described by Charles Elton; see Elton 1935, 69). Animals located high on food chains, with large, active bodies to support and relatively less energy available to them as resources per unit area, must therefore have vast territories to meet their nutritional needs - this being the reason why, in the words of contemporary ecologist Paul Colinvaux, that "large fierce animals are so astonishingly (or pleasingly) rare" (Colinvaux 1978, 27; for a fuller discussion of this point, see 18-31).

The trophic level occupied by an organism will be of major importance in determining how that organism fits within its ecosystem. To sharpen our focus on nonhuman differences even further, we must realize that an organism, as a product of its long evolutionary history, will exhibit a myriad of adaptations to a host of other factors pertinent to its environment, from preferred temperature ranges and landscape features to specific food sources and particular predators and competitors. Such adaptations are relevant to defining its niche, which can be thought of as the organism's "profession," its "place in the grand scheme of things" (Colinvaux 1978, 11).(11) Evolution and ecology connect again through the concept of the niche; organisms of common ancestry can differentiate, spreading into different niches, through adaptive radiation, while similar niches in different locations can come to be occupied by similarly adapted organisms of different lineage through evolutionary convergence (see Wilson 1992, 94-130). One conclusion to be drawn from the notion of a plant or animal having a niche is that there will be a limit to the numbers of organisms of a given species that can inhabit a particular ecosystem, or at most a range over which they may vary, whether its reproductive strategy is to produce many offspring or few (Wilson 1992, 12). Another consideration that follows from the notion concerns the rigidity of the requirements a species filling a particular niche may have. Some are quite flexible in terms of the range of conditions they can tolerate, while others are far less so. The northern spotted owl, for example, appears to require very large, unbroken stands of old growth, Douglas-fir forest and seems unable to breed in or successfully colonize second growth forests (Norse 1990, 77-78).

The differences among organisms in their vulnerabilities to human disturbance on grounds such as these are of direct concern to those working within the "crisis discipline" of conservation biology (see Soule 1985).(12) Very large-bodied animals or those living at high trophic levels, such as the grizzly bear and the Florida panther, need vast territories to survive into the future. When we humans convert large portions of their habitat to agricultural fields, housing developments, and shopping malls, or fragment them by roads and clearcuts, we are hitting those species where they are most vulnerable.(13) Already existing at low densities on the land by virtue of their place within the "ecological pyramid," their populations become genetically impoverished as we further diminish their numbers and make it more difficult for mates to connect with one another. Populations of organisms that have very specialized requirements, moreover, such as spotted owls, Hawaiian honeycreepers, orchids dependent upon specific insects for pollination, and the like, may be severely impacted when we alter significant components of their habitat in ways that might seem relatively minor to us. Other kinds of nonhumans that are unusually vulnerable to disruptive human activities include migratory species that require a range of season-specific habitat types, colonially nesting species, organisms with highly restricted ranges, those dependent on food and other resources that may fluctuate greatly in availability, and species that have evolved in relatively disturbance-free environments (see Humphrey 1982, 9-18; Reid and Miller 1989, 46-47). Directing our receptive attention toward these various kinds of nonhumans and appreciating the significant ways in which they differ from us may help us moderate our impact upon them.

HOLISTIC ENVIRONMENTAL PHILOSOPHIES AND HUMAN/NATURE DUALISM

Ecological sophistication is frequently accompanied by the adoption of a "holistic" environmental philosophy, or so the latter's proponents often assert. The holistic heading spans a wide range of views, however, and I would like to focus my objections on only a certain portion of this spectrum. Those who experience nature firsthand and attempt to grasp its complexity will necessarily develop an appreciation for "the whole"; likewise, those who observe and interact frequently with wild nonhuman others in their concreteness have the opportunity to experience both the abundant similarities and the myriad differences that prevail between those others and human beings. Marked differences of goals, methodology, and ideology are likely to prevail, however, among such different groups as ethologists, conservation biologists, land or wildlife "managers," "consumptive" and "nonconsumptive" recreationists, bioregionalists, and environmental philosophers, and thus differences are likely to manifest in the ways they apprehend the natural world, even as all may profess to hold an environmentally holistic outlook. Contextual distinctions must be kept in mind, therefore, in addressing holistic views.

Michael Soule, in a classic article defining the young science of conservation biology (Soule 1985), distinguishes his discipline from the "management" schools in that the latter traditionally focus on enhancing populations of a few "resource" species instrumentally valuable to humans and generally under no threat to their continued existence even without human management. Conservation biology, on the other hand, often targets those organisms that are most at risk of extinction or are identified as playing a critical role within their ecosystems, with little regard to any direct instrumental value they may have (though their value to humans in maintaining ecosystem function or the overall level of "biodiversity" may play a greater or lesser motivational role for its practitioners). Explicitly recognizing the importance of the ethical in this predominantly action-oriented discipline, Soule refers to the ecophilosophy of Arne Naess in laying out what he holds to be the "normative postulates" of conservation biology: the judgments that diversity of organisms, ecological complexity, and evolution are good and that "biotic diversity has intrinsic value, irrespective of its instrumental or utilitarian value" (Soule 1985, 730-31, emphasis in original). Soule points out that "the ethical imperative to conserve species diversity is distinct" from ethical concerns pertaining to individual organisms, though, he acknowledges, this is not to say that the latter concerns are unimportant (731, emphasis added). As presented, this sort of general ecocentric orientation does not, in itself, necessarily fall prey to the major problems that seem to beset certain more specifically defined versions of holism (although Soules listing of "postulates" also fails to address their philosophical underpinnings at any length, it must be noted).(14) Some self-identified "holists," however, often those of a more instrumental or "consumptive" bent or, alternatively, those more abstractly "philosophical," are prone to construe their approach in terms that overlook or deny important insights into the nature of the organisms and their interactions that together make up "whole" ecosystems - many of which insights, again, themselves come from or are reinforced by the biological sciences.

One such problematic construal of "holism" minimizes the acknowledgment, as made by Soule, that considerations regarding groupings of organisms, such as populations or species, are distinct from considerations regarding organisms as individuals, either by using the catchphrase "only species count, not individuals," or by denying that nonhumans should even be seen as being individuals. The latter extreme is, in fact, quite inconsistent with a Darwinian view. As Ernst Mayr explains, one of the major contributions of Charles Darwin was to reject essentialistic or "typological" thinking, which can be traced to Plato's notion of "fixed, unchangeable 'ideas' underlying the observed variability" of the natural world, in favor of "population thinking," a kind of thinking that recognizes that "all organisms and organic phenomena are composed of unique features and can be described collectively only in statistical terms" (Mayr 1994, 158). Mayr contrasts the two views:

Most of the great philosophers of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries were influenced by the idealistic philosophy of Plato, and the thinking of this school dominated the thinking of the period. Since there is no gradation between types, gradual evolution is basically a logical impossibility for the typologist. Evolution, if it occurs at all, has to proceed in steps or jumps.

The assumptions of population thinking are diametrically opposed to those of the typologist. . . . Individuals . . . form populations of which we can determine only the arithmetic mean and the statistics of variation. Averages are merely statistical abstractions; only the individuals of which the populations are composed have reality. . . . For the typologist, the type (eidos) is real and the variation an illusion, while for the populationist the type (average) is an abstraction and only the variation is real. No two ways of looking at nature could be more different. (Mayr 1994, 158)

With respect to human "races," Mayr notes, the typologist or essentialist "stresses that every representative of a race has the typical characteristics of that race and differs from all representatives of all other races by the characteristics 'typical' for that given race"; "all racist theories are built on this foundation," he observes (Mayr 1994, 159). The populationist, on the other hand, will recognize different races in terms of "the average difference between two groups of individuals" with respect to particular characteristics, but no two individuals, and "consequently no two aggregates of individuals," will be expected to be the same.(15) And, Mayr emphasizes, "what is true for the human species - that no two individuals are alike - is equally true for all other species of [sexually reproducing] animals and plants" (Mayr 1994, 158). A critical step in the development of evolutionary biology as a discipline, the move to population thinking should also be seen as undercutting efforts to claim scientific support for "essentialism," whether applied to race, gender, species, or other classificatory categories. While this is an insight generated from within the framework of western science, its range of applicability may on occasion need to be pointed out to hunters, resource extractors, and even certain scientists as well as to others claiming a "holistic" bent with respect to environmental philosophy.

If the "holist" who attempts to deny nonhumans any individual standing at all is following a rationalist line that is ultimately off base biologically, the "holist" who insists that "only species count" when considering environmental concerns is likely to be - unless willing to apply the same reductionistic approach to the human species in ecological contexts - seriously guilty of adhering to a double standard, one that is yet a further manifestation of human/nature dualism. Even if it is not denied that nonhuman organisms (most of them, anyway) are distinct individuals, on this approach humanity is still hyperseparated from nonhuman organisms in being the only class of natural beings that count as individuals, while the members of all nonhuman groupings are still homogenized and objectified, their significance exhausted by being cogs in the wheels that run the "machinery of nature" needed for human survival. As long as the underlying dualistic framework persists, little has been achieved by the adoption of this sort of "holistic" outlook, since the conceptual construct of "the ecosystem" is simply standing in for the explicit hegemony of the human in an ongoing process of domination. As I will discuss at length later in this paper, I believe that the dualistically distorted view of the individual/member-of-a-group relation, a view that recognizes humans only as individuals and nonhumans only as members of populations or species, serves as a major impediment to conceiving of ecological relationships in such a way that we can begin to solve some of our most critical environmental problems. Holists who justify "culling" nonhuman animals that have become superabundant in their habitats, for example, without clearly acknowledging the role of human populations in creating that superabundance through such effects as elimination of predators or compression of nonhuman populations into unsuitably small land areas, and without taking responsibility for the need to reverse such dynamics by altering our human activities, will never get to the roots of our ecological crises and hence will have no chance of resolving them.(16)

Another sort of difficulty discoverable in other forms of "holism" has been identified by certain ecofeminists. Val Plumwood has engaged in a thorough critique of versions of "deep ecology" that attempt to compensate for western culture's hyperseparation from nature through accounts that "identify" the master self with nature in such a way that the distinctness of nature is lost (see Plumwood 1993, 176-82).(17) A concrete illustration of how the natural other is erased and replaced by the constructions of the master consciousness according to such a "self-outward" model, as carried out by some ecophilosophical holists, can be found in Marti Kheel's analysis of what she terms the "holy hunter" (Kheel 1995, 99-104). Holists who assert that hunting is a positive kind of spiritual experience that establishes or reinforces their identification with the natural world often construe the animal killed as making a "gift" of his or her life in a "mutual" exchange. As Kheel points out, "the notion that the animal chooses to end her or his life for the benefit of the hunter has no more validity than the idea that a woman who is raped 'asked for it' or 'willingly' gave herself to the rapist"; rather, the moral justification of the act is derived from the hunter's "own mental and emotional state" (Kheel 1995, 104). The attention of this sort of holist is similar to that of the "colonizing" scientist. It is not respectfully directed toward and receptive to the natural other; it does not take in the actuality of that other being, but instead deposits (violently) upon the uncognized other the imprint of the holist's own mind. Holists who refuse to relinquish their own essentialism and human/nature or mind/nature dualism, as expressed through such attitudes, have a considerable distance to travel before they can claim an adequate grasp of the nonhuman life that, together with human life, makes up the "whole" of nature.

ESSENTIALISM AND THE BIOLOGICAL

As discussed by Mayr, the essentialistic thinking that has privileged ideas over actuality since the time of Plato not only serves as the foundation for racism and other forms of oppression but also, under scrutiny, proves to be incompatible with contemporary biological thought. Feminists have rightly rejected the essentialization of male and female identities; it is true that "feminists have been 'burned' in the past by those wishing to characterize women by an appeal to their essence, which, since Aristotle on, has been perceived as 'naturally' inferior" (Fuss 1989, 39). My specific concern with this issue in feminism, however, is that rejecting the attribution of observable human gender differences to innate biological essences in some cases may lead to a blanket rejection of the biological perspective in general, rather than to an understanding of the many ways a biologically informed view can help us appreciate both the relationships among different species and certain aspects of our own human nature.

When "the body" has been theorized, for example, much has been said about its socially constructed "desired" size, appearance, and external adornments; but, with the possible exception of attention paid to reproductive anatomy, the physiological functioning that goes on under the skin has frequently been relegated to an intellectual "black box."(18) However, would a feminist theorist who maintains that "there is no such thing as biology" take comfort from that thought if she discovered a lump in her breast, or would she seek medical attention? To the extent that our physical beings are not attended to until a particular need for doing so arises, it would seem that our very human biology suffers from the "backgrounding" pointed out by Plumwood (1993, 48-49): we benefit from the functioning of our bodies, much as we enjoy the benefits of "free" ecosystem services, but at the same time we ignore them and deny our dependency on them, at least until something goes wrong. Emphasizing the external appearances that have been inscribed on our bodies by our minds, to the extent of overlooking the commonalities and the differences that are there by virtue of our membership within the community of living beings, is an orientation expressive of western rationalism, reinforcing our hyperseparation from nature rather than overcoming it.

Lynda Birke has recently taken a large body of feminist theorizing to task for uncritically accepting many of the dualistic assumptions of contemporary science - particularly those leading to the perceived "otherness" of nonhuman animals - even as it rejects other such assumptions (Birke 1995). As Birke points out, if feminists repudiate essentialism and the "biological determinism" that an essentialistic approach imposes on women, they should perhaps also question the view that nonhuman animals in general are "hard-wired," their behavior thoroughly determined by physiology and, ultimately, genetics. Otherwise, "feminist beliefs about our gender-specific behavior . . . rest on a belief in evolutionary discontinuity - that humans are fundamentally different from other species" (Birke 1995, 37). Recognition of evolutionary continuity, in contrast, a most powerful principle to which the vast majority of contemporary biologists subscribe (at least in the abstract), will enable feminist theory to integrate a great deal of empirical evidence in striving to understand the present situation of women nondualistically. As discussed by Barbara Smuts, for instance, "evolutionary theory does not imply genetic determinism" but rather emphasizes that all observable characteristics of an organism will be the "products of complex, gene-environment interaction" (Smuts 1995, 3; emphasis in original).(19) According to such an evolutionary model, humans are neither hyperseparated from the rest of nature nor construed as genetically determined automatons; rather, human beings are seen as "especially sensitive to both past experience and the present environment because natural selection favored the evolution of brains that specialize in flexible responsiveness to the extremely diverse and variable conditions in which humans live" (Smuts 1995, 4, my emphasis). Understanding ourselves in such a way, which is made possible by critically incorporating the insights of science, can help us avoid the pitfalls of both biological and cultural determinism, a necessity if we are to meet the challenges of our present planetary crises.

POSTMODERNISM, SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONISM, AND MIND/NATURE DUALISM

Postmodernism and social constructionism (along with some forms of ecofeminism) have recently been targeted by certain environmental philosophers and others as potentially counterproductive, if not directly threatening, to the aim of protecting the planet's ecological integrity; these movements embody, it is charged, the "anti-wild Nature orientation of anthropocentric humanism" (Sessions 1996-97; see also Sessions 1995). In the preface to their recent volume, Reinventing Nature? Responses to Postmodern Deconstruction, editors Michael Soule and Gary Lease note that "some in the deconstruction movement boldly assert that the natural world as described by scientists and conservationists, if it exists, is a human artifact produced by our economic activities, and as such is grist for further material reshaping." Soule and Lease find their rather diverse group of contributors united in the worry that "certain contemporary forms of intellectual and social relativism can be just as destructive to nature as bulldozers and chain saws" (Soule and Lease 1995, xv-xvi). On the other hand, a number of authors (see, e.g., Fraser and Nicholson 1990) have found feminism and postmodernism to be allies in certain ways, not the least of which is in breaking down the hegemony of the "master" consciousness, the western, white, male view that has for so long taken itself as the only view, universally valid for all humanity. If a critique of rationalism and dualism is considered central to the ecofeminist project, moreover, a challenge to "the modernist conception of a transcendent reason, a reason able to separate itself from the body and from historical time and place" (Nicholson 1990, 4) clearly would seem to be welcome. Can these different perspectives be reconciled in a philosophy that remains respectful of both human and nonhuman nature?

My answer to this would be a guarded "yes," provided that we subject the various positions to the same thorough scrutiny and careful selection process that we must apply to the different views found in science. One immediate concern arises out of such poststructuralist-postmodemist themes as the "erasure of the subject" and the simultaneous privileging of discourse or "text." To the extent that the sphere of language is defined as one occupied solely by human beings, the hyperseparation of humans from nature would seem only to be reinforced by a focus on discourse itself. Just as the critical theory of Jurgen Habermas, for example, quite unabashedly endorses a purely instrumental attitude toward the nonhuman world, recognizing only beings capable of engaging in communicative interchange (that is, humans) as properly deserving of our ethical attention,(20) the deconstruction of the "transcendental subject," leaving only "text," would seem to risk further narrowing the domain of our concern and, in effect, write off the natural world altogether as anything other than our own linguistic creation.

A number of feminists have questioned the postmodem elimination of the subject. Nancy Hartsock, for instance, asks "Why is it that just at the moment when so many of us who have been silenced begin to demand the right to name ourselves, to act as subjects rather than objects of history, that just then the concept of subjecthood becomes problematic?" (Hartsock 1990, 163). In parallel with Hartsock's judgment of this trend as "highly suspicious" with respect to the emerging self-definition of "marginalized [human] Others," Lynda Birke names as "ironic" the fact that the recent recognition of at least some animals as subjects (as in Tom Regan's formulation of certain animals as "subjects-of-a-life") comes "at a time when postmodernism celebrates the 'death of the subject'" (Birke 1994, 146). The creation of "text," narrowly defined, may be limited to members of the human species. But recognition of the principle of evolutionary continuity and, indeed, the immediate experience of interacting with particular members of the nonhuman world must lead to the conclusion that at least certain kinds of nonhumans - certainly the other mammals, other vertebrates, and probably many more members of the animal kingdom - are "subjects" in much the same way that we are (to the extent that we may still so name ourselves at all), enjoying lives of inner, subjective experience. Communication by means of the interchange of a complex system of signs, moreover, is widely dispersed throughout the living world, encompassing not only animals but also plants, fungi, and unicellular organisms.(21) Attempting to limit "discourse," thus broadly construed, to an activity that only a single species practices therefore seems quite uninformed biologically, just as restricting the sphere of what can be said to be "known" to the domain of human representation would seem to consign us to a kind of species-wide solipsism. Postmodernist approaches that take such an exclusionary stance ought rightly to be rejected by those hoping to reintegrate themselves into the natural world.

Rather than an erasure of "the subject," I would hope to see paths leading to an appreciation of the multiplicity of subjects that abound in the world, human and nonhuman alike. The contribution of N. Katherine Hayles to the Soule and Lease volume integrates nonexclusionary postmodernist, feminist, and constructivist insights with those of biology. Hayles acknowledges that everything we think we "know" about the natural world, through the methods of science and otherwise, is itself a human construction. She is also in fundamental agreement with the views of Keller (1995), Haraway (1991), and others in denying the existence of a single, disembodied, decontextualized "God's-Eye-View," generally taken to be congruent with the representations of privileged western men of science, that captures what the world is really like while effectively preventing those with different points of view from being taken seriously as subjects at all (Hayles 1995, 49, 59). Instead, Hayles urges feminists to reject this sort of "objectivism" and replace it with a recognition of positionality, the relevance of "language, history, culture, disciplinary tradition, gender, class, and race" and other contextual factors to the way whatever is "'out there'" becomes represented, and an acknowledgment of interactivity, that "we know the world because we are involved with it and because it impacts upon us," not because we are separated from it (1995, 56-59).

Appreciation of interactivity shatters the illusion of a transcendent rationality, forcing us to focus on the particulars of actual existence: "interaction is possible only because we are embodied, and the precise conditions of our embodiment" - which for humans include that portion of the electromagnetic spectrum which we utilize for sight, as well as our upright posture, grasping hands, binocular vision, and so forth, in conjunction with our individual and cultural contexts - "have everything to do with the nature of those interactions" and thus with how we construct our knowledge of the world (Hayles 1995, 56). Such an approach allows that "different subjects - a man, a dog, a rat - construct different worlds through their embodied interactions with it," each such construction reflecting only a tiny fraction of all possible construals. Moreover, whereas the hyperseparation of the disembodied subject with the one correct "objective" view implies that "one could act upon the world without oneself being acted upon" - an attitude that becomes concretized in such beliefs as that "rainforests can be cut without affecting those doing the cutting" or that a laboratory animal "is an object which can be manipulated to produce knowledge, rather than a subject who himself knows" (1995, 56-58) - recognizing interactivity returns us to the awareness that we are affected by our impact on the world, just as other subjects are affected by that impact. On Hayles's model, we humans are but one kind of subject interacting with the world, and hence "to sacrifice animals or exterminate species . . . directly reduces the sum total of knowledge about the world, for it removes from the chorus of experience some of the voices articulating its richness and variety" (1995, 58).

Postmodernism, in helping to dismantle the notion of a totalizing "God's-Eye-View," can contribute to a project such as Hayles envisions and to a wider recognition of the multiplicity of subjects within the sphere of "nature." As Donna Haraway points out, at our time in history we are experiencing "boundary breakdowns" at the interface of human and animal, of organism and machine, and of physical and nonphysical - breakdowns that should be seen as neither frightening nor irrational but rather, as illustrated by the movement for recognition of animal rights, as potentially leading toward "a clear-sighted recognition of connection across the discredited breach of nature and culture" (Haraway 1991, 152).(22) In contemporary science fiction, cyborgs are "creatures simultaneously animal and machine, who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted" (1991, 149). "Cyborg imagery," Haraway maintains, "can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves"; it embodies "a dream, not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia," allowing all that has been "other" to speak (1991, 181). As a postmodern project, decentering the "transcendental" subject - so privileged as to be able to ignore the fact of its own positioning (Hayles 1995, 59-60) as well as that of others' subjecthood - can give way to deconstructing the hegemony of the human species, to appreciating the realms of nonhuman subjectivity and "discourse" that suffuse nature,(23) and concurrently, if awareness of power relationships is preserved and extended, to subverting the domination humans presently exert over the rest of the natural world.

But what of the specific difficulty perceived as inherent in at least the more radical forms of social constructivism, the view that "everything we think we know, including 'nature,' is a construction emerging from historically specific discursive, social, and cultural conditions," a view that might lead to the question, "if nature is only a social and discursive construction, why fight hard to preserve it?" (Hayles 1995, 47). Does the thinking of those who focus on the socially constructed nature of much of the world around us, including our scientific theories and our conception of "nature" itself, really threaten the aims of those who are working to protect the natural world? Does such a focus necessarily entail the rejection of philosophic realism, belief in a world existing independently of our representations (see Searle 1995, 153), and therefore the embracing of the idea that we humans may "reinvent" nature in any image that suits our fancy?

The answer to the second question is clearly "no." Hayles's theory of "constrained constructivism," for example, departs from the radically constructivist, antirealist position in preserving the notion of a reality, a "natural world" that is "actually there," one that imposes constraints on the representations we can reasonably formulate of it (Hayles 1995, 52-54). Keller, Haraway, and other feminists acutely aware of the constructedness of much of the human sphere likewise hold on to the notion of a world of nature extending beyond that which humans construct or even encounter; they insist on the need for "reliable" and "shatable" knowledge of that world, insofar as humans can attain it (see Keller 1995, 11; Hataway 1991, 184-87). But there is a common misconception to be found in the philosophical literature to the effect that, in rejecting the notion of a single, correct, "objective" (as in decontextualized) view of reality, one is forced to abandon altogether the idea of an independent reality. Versions of this misconception have been traced by both Sally Haslanger (1996, 99-102) and John Searle (1995, 154-60) to confusion of the epistemic with the ontological. After investigating the manner in which certain aspects of human reality can be weakly or strongly socially constructed, often in ways that overtly or covertly perpetuate the existing power structure, Haslanger cautions that the existence of such possibilities does not mean that our judgments are only a matter of social relations: "It may well be that our point of view on the world is always socially conditioned; but there is no reason to conclude that the world we have a point of view on is likewise socially conditioned" (Haslanger 1996, 103). Similarly, Searle's analysis of this confusion, if without an explicit feminist perspective, is in keeping with the thinking of Haslanger, Hayles, Keller, and other feminists who wish to maintain a critically realist stance. As he points out, "the whole idea of a 'view' is already epistemic," not ontological (Searle 1995, 154). "Strictly speaking, there is an indefinitely large number of different points of view, different aspects, and different conceptual systems under which anything can be represented," Searle observes; "it is only from a point of view that we represent reality, but ontologically objective reality does not have a point of view" (1995, 176). Approaching the natural world with Keller's "dynamic objectivity," seeking to situate our various forms of knowledge in the different viewpoints from which they spring, as Haraway advises, grasping the importance of interactivity and positionality that Hayles emphasizes in our construction of knowledge in no way necessitate repudiation of the ontological independence of nature in its own right - indeed, these are all ways of coming to appreciate it more fully. Conversely, floating off into the idealism that is the final destination of a truly radical social constructivism is a way of erasing the "otherness" of nature altogether, becoming hopelessly lost in the seductive shimmer of one's own mental projections.

My answer to the first question posed is also "no," perhaps even a resounding "no." The focus of Searle, Haslanger, Hayles,(24) and others on the phenomenon of our social construction of significant portions of our human reality should be seen as significantly enabling to those who respect and desire to protect the natural world. Our current descriptions of nature, as formulated through science, are indeed constructions, representations that at present appear most in keeping with the ways that our interactions with the reality "out there" are constrained by it. Much of the rest of our constructed human world, however, is far less conditioned by a substantial "nature" that resists us when we press against it. Human social and cultural practices may be partly shaped by the physical and biological environment within which they have developed; they largely remain potentially quite plastic, however, perhaps inertially resistant to change but not nearly so constrained as the knowledge we construct about the world outside ourselves. Now that our attention has been drawn to their metaphysical peculiarity (see Searle 1995, 1-7), who could doubt that our human systems of economic exchange, our ideas concerning "private property" or the absence of it, or even our conceptions of what constitutes a desirable family size, manifestly differing from culture to culture, are anything other than social constructions? And, by implication, are they not thereby amenable to alteration, if their alteration is discovered to be crucial for the protection of planetary life?(25)

John Searle provides some conceptual tools for performing just such alterations in his examination of "the construction of social reality." He presents a detailed account of the creation of what he calls "institutional facts," facts that exist only within the institutional structures we create and maintain by our belief in them.(26) Many of our environmental problems, I would maintain, arise out of a lack of proper "fit" between the "reality" of a given situation - what there is independently of our constructed theories - and the "institutional facts" that have been superimposed upon it.(27) Utilizing analyses such as Searle's may help us uncover these discrepancies and carry out some reconstruction of our social reality so it will mesh better with that which underlies it. Perhaps most offensive to those who care about nonhuman others is the imposition of the "institutional facts" of the surveyor's grid upon the living landscape, in virtually total disregard for the very poor meshing of township, range, section, and parcel boundary with home range, habitat, and watershed. For those who put truly radical social constructionism into practice - resource extractors and land developers being prime examples - our human constructions of reality take on far greater ontological significance than that of the natural world. In upholding the priority of the "institutional facts" over the "brute facts" (to use Searle's terminology) in such situations, we again see a manifestation of mind/nature dualism: the construct - a product of the human mind - is hyperseparated from and violently colonizes the natural other, which remains unapprehended in its own reality. In bringing to light the process of the construction of social reality, and thereby enabling certain "institutional facts" to be reconstructed so as to fit more appropriately with all that which is not socially constructed, some social constructionists could be seen as playing a pivotal role in diminishing our current domination over and destruction of the nonhuman world.

DOMINATION OF THE NONHUMAN SUBJECT

If we acknowledge, with Hayles and others, that subjects abound in nature, we must disagree, for example, with William Leiss's pronouncement that "it is absurd to refer to 'man's [sic] conquest of nature' or 'man's domination of nature,'" that "the real object of domination is not nature, but men" (Leiss 1974, 121-22). Leiss maintains that "the necessary correlate of domination is the consciousness of subordination in those who must obey the will of another; thus properly speaking only other men can be the objects of domination" (122). In such a statement, of course - one not unusual for a philosopher of the rationalist tradition to make - the suppressed premise must be that nothing within the realm of nonhuman nature is capable of having "consciousness of subordination" - a view seemingly so self-evident as to require no argumentation by Leiss at the time of his writing.(28)

Contemporary animal rights/liberation theorists, however, in conjunction with some evolutionary biologists and cognitive ethologists, have succeeded in at least opening up a space for considering the possibility of such consciousnesses. Peter Singer, for example, offers the following description of the behavior of sows on the modern factory farm, confined while pregnant within metal stalls six feet long and two feet wide, barely larger than their bodies, and then transferred to even more restricted "farrowing pens" for birthing and nursing:

Sows thrashed their heads about as they twisted and turned in their struggle to free themselves. Often loud screams were emitted and occasionally individuals crashed bodily against the side boards of the tether stalls. (G. Cronin, as cited in Singer 1990, 127)

Can it really be credibly maintained that an intelligent mammal such as the sow has no "consciousness of subordination," of being forced to submit to "the will of another," in such a predicament? Or consider the following account of a young chimpanzee in West Africa, in a situation that seems not to be atypical of those in which great apes may often find themselves following their forcible removal from the wild by humans:

I walked into an isolated rural village and found, in the middle of the village, a young male chimpanzee hunched over, sitting on top of a rough wooden platform, chained by the neck with several bicycle chains doubled over and padlocked to the platform. The chains were so short and tight that the ape couldn't even sit upright. He was forced into a permanent hunch. All he could do was spin around on the chains, hopping with his feet, spin around and face the crowd of village children who were gathered to tease him, spin around with an unmistakable fury on his face. The chimp's name was Tolbert, I was told. (Peterson and Goodall 1993, 72)

Could it be said that a creature who shares more than 98 percent of our DNA is unaware in such a situation of being dominated by human beings? I think not, though Tolbert is, of course, unable to express his feelings in words, to "discourse" verbally with us in our language about our treatment of him. But the subjective reality of such nonhuman others, whatever form it might take within the world constructed by each different kind of being, is commonly erased from our awareness in its entirety, often even by those who strive for solidarity with human others who are victims of domination and oppression.

It is true that the major focus of the animal liberation movement has been on domestic animals or animals that have been brought into captivity, perhaps in part because the conditions under which such animals are maintained are often so extremely deviant from those for which they are adapted and in part because the animals are "at hand," completely under human control, if not always publicly visible. I would suggest, however, that the various dimensions along which wild nonhumans may be considered to be dominated or oppressed be explored in much greater detail than has been done heretofore. While I would not advocate attempting to identify any single, morally relevant characteristic for purposes of hierarchy building, the likely degree of mental development or "sentience" is certainly a dimension, an important one, of a nonhuman animal's life. It therefore is worthy of note that some of the wild nonhuman animals most vulnerable to human interference and habitat encroachment - the top-of-the-food-chain predators such as the great cats and the larger canids; very large, wide-ranging species such as elephants; and the forest-dependent nonhuman primates, for example - just happen to be among those with relatively more extensive brain development and, presumably, highly complex inner lives.(29) Though perhaps far harder to document than the sufferings of farm and laboratory animals, the hardships endured by such wild animals when, say, they become compressed into territories too small to support their normal migrations (which has resulted in mass starvation among elephants), or when roads, urbanization, invasion by off-road vehicles and other incursions so fragment their ranges that finding prey and mates becomes increasingly difficult (as has happened, in my state, to the Florida panther and the black bear, among other species), cannot be experientially insignificant. And suffering undoubtedly occurs in smaller and less "charismatic" animals as well, when clearcuts, for example, drive forest inhabitants (those that are not killed outright) out of their homelands and into foreign territory to battle for space and resources, often unsuccessfully.(30)

Examples of various degrees of dysphoria experienced by wild animals as a result of human activities abound, but they are seldom apparent to the inexperienced eye (and perhaps actively denied or repressed by the experienced one) and so frequently go unmarked and unnoticed. Other phenomena in addition to the suffering of sentient beings may be construed as resulting from human domination, moreover. Plants, too, interact, in their own ways, with what Hayles terms the "unmediated flux" (1995, 49); certainly there are ways in which the nonsentient can be said to be forced to "obey the will" of humans, even if no consciousness or suffering is involved, and some would maintain that human interference with the free expression of their "intrinsic natures," as well as those of animals, is objectionable.(31) Concerns about inflicting suffering or otherwise interfering with the intrinsic properties of a being are concerns about nonhumans as individuals, however, and many holists would judge such concerns to be at best overshadowed by issues affecting entire populations or species. On the contrary, I will claim that both sets of concerns are relevant and applicable to humans and nonhumans alike, in ways that bring the natural other into the sphere of the political as well as the ethical.

INDIVIDUALS VS MEMBERS OF A GROUP: DIFFERENT LEVELS OF ANALYSIS

The tension between one's identity as an individual and one's identity as a member of a group is a critical element in a host of contemporary human concerns. The problematics of racial and gender differences, conflicts between national, religious, and ethnic groups, and even the troubling issues surrounding such problems as gang violence are intimately connected with the individual/member-of-a-group relation, and much more attention clearly needs to be directed to this topic. Including nonhumans in the examination of this relation is needed for addressing environmental concerns and also may, I think, enrich the discussion in ways that can help illuminate human-to-human concerns as well by broadening our perspective on similarities and differences.

Toward this end, I would like to introduce a metaphor of there being multiple possible levels of focus for such discussion, much like the views to be seen through the different objectives of a microscope, each with its own scale of magnification, width or narrowness of field, and "grain" of subject matter under observation.(32) When individuals within a group, whether human or nonhuman, are under consideration, comparisons are made at a very fine grain, seen close-up within a narrow field of view as though through a "high-power" objective. At this level, the uniqueness of the individuals themselves, highlighted by their differences from one another, will probably occupy the center of our attention, while all the features they have in common may, understandably, recede into the background of our awareness. In contrast, if a discussion is primarily focused on different groups of human beings, the analysis will encompass a larger field and have a coarser grain. Identifiable differences that tend to prevail between human groups will come to our attention, and these differences will themselves be relevant to the issues at hand. At this level, recognition of differences should properly be accompanied by the acknowledgment that members of all groups also share much in common and that, within each group, much individual heterogeneity prevails. The ever-present danger at this level of discussion, of course, is that such acknowledgment may fail and homogenization or stereotyping take its place.

When different kinds of organisms are compared, moreover - most often, perhaps, as grouped according to species, but sometimes by ecological niche or by larger taxonomic category - the field of view is far broader and the grain is coarser still. Characteristics that fade into the background when the beings under scrutiny are all of one biological kind, such as their method of locomotion or the length and complexity of their digestive tracts, may suddenly emerge into prominence, depending on the context of the questions under consideration. Comparisons made at this very coarse-grained level, in the wide-ranging view taken in by the "low-power" objective, still need not be taken to negate the individuality of group members, nor to promote "essentialism" of human or nonhuman just because differences of organismic biology are in the foreground. Incorporation of this coarsest-grained level into our perspective may, however, serve to highlight the fundamental commonalities shared by all the different subgroupings that can be drawn within the human species-group, even as it illuminates the ways in which we humans differ from other forms of life.

Within a strictly human sphere, the commonness of our basic biology can usually be legitimately taken for granted (though it should not be thereby disregarded); the differences of most relevance between human individuals and between human groups are, in my estimate, far more likely to be due to differences of individual or social construction than of biology. When we expand our sphere of concern to take in the rest of the natural world, however, an appreciation of biological differences between species becomes crucial to an intelligent analysis. Human preferences may differ markedly, but fundamental human needs for certain kinds of food or particular environmental conditions can be said to be, over a certain range, basically the same on a coarse-grained comparison. If we invite some human friends over for dinner, for example, it can be assumed that they will be served easily digestible vegetable or animal matter and not, say, a pile of hay; if we were trying to meet the needs of ruminent animals, on the other hand, the hay might be just the thing to present to our nonhuman guests.

This is obvious, of course, but perhaps all too easily overlooked if we are accustomed to thinking solely within that human sphere, and the overlooking of such considerations leads to some of the difficulties that arise within certain approaches to environmental philosophy. Much contemporary animal rights and animal liberation theorizing, for example, lacking a nuanced conception of difference between the lives of humans and nonhumans, leads to conclusions regarding binary choices (in and of themselves inappropriate for the vast majority of ecologically relevant decisions) that are ultimately resolved by reference to a hierarchy of value, measured in a singular currency of utility or satisfaction assigned to different beings that is generally assumed to be qualitatively the same but variable in quantity, with the human animal, as usual, coming out at the top of the "value" heap.(33) An alternative approach, such as I am recommending, would have us look at an ecosystem with our "low-power objective" and appreciate how the coarse-grained outlines of different organisms' requirements can fit together with the complementarity of jigsaw-puzzle pieces. A thorough consideration of the ways in which ecologically sustainable numbers of each kind of being might live within their available niches, interacting appropriately according to their capacities with beings of their own and other kinds, may help us transform the binary "win/lose" situations into a "win/win" arrangement for all the different living components in our field of view (a possibility that I hope to explore further in subsequent writing).

THE POLITICS OF NONHUMAN OPPRESSION

By making connections between gender, "race," and colonial oppression in explicating her analysis of dualism and drawing attention to "nature as the missing piece" in the framework needed for formulating a critique of domination, Val Plumwood states that she hopes to demonstrate "how the treatment of nature can be thought of in political terms as well as ethical terms" (Plumwood 1993, 2). Iris Marion Young defines "politics" as taking in "all aspects of institutional organization, public action, social practices and habits, and cultural meanings insofar as they are potentially subject to collective evaluation and decisionmaking" (Young 1990, 34); a more general definition might simply point to power relationships among individuals and groups within a social context (a definition general enough to have permitted one of Frans de Waal's early works to be entitled Chimpanzee Politics - see de Waal 1982). We humans may be the only kind of being fully able to engage in collective, verbal decisionmaking about our own social and institutional organization, but that does not mean that we are not immersed in ongoing power relationships with groupings of other kinds of beings; as with other sorts of power imbalances, our lack of awareness in this regard may, rather, mean that we are usually so privileged in such relationships as to be able to disregard them entirely. Certainly our human ability to reach collective agreements does not mean the decisions we make will not be of direct relevance to a variety of nonhuman groupings that our organizational structures may impact, nor does it license us to leave consideration of all such groupings out of our decisionmaking.

Young has done some crucial work in developing a political analysis of the oppression of social groups within human society, and I would like to suggest that at least some of her points hold as well in relation to nonhuman groups, which should also be granted standing in the ongoing discourse regarding social and environmental justice.(34) Young presents an argument for recognizing and respecting group differences as an integral part of the undermining of oppression, an alternative vision to the homogenization and assimilation of members of different social groups that the individualistic liberal ideal entails. She characterizes a social group as "a collective of persons differentiated from at least one other group by cultural forms, practices, or way of life," and notes that human social groups are defined "not primarily by a set of shared attributes, but by a sense of identity" (Young 1990, 43-44). Nonhuman groups, in partial contrast, will lack most of the distinguishing features alluded to that are highly dependent upon linguistic constructions? Such groups are likely to be defined by us in terms of certain biological attributes, but their members (most clearly, to us, those of the more sentient species, but not only these), however, must also possess "a sense of identity" governing their own social interactions, including but not limited to mating and agonistic encounters. Many nonhuman primates and other social animals, for example, have a highly developed understanding of who is and is not a member of their own group (see, e.g., de Waal 1996). Young also notes the applicability of the characteristic of "thrownness," on Heidegger's understanding, to membership in a social group; "one finds oneself as a member of a group," rather than choosing to join it as one might choose to join an association - a feature that surely holds for members of nonhuman groups as well, since all of us find rather than choose our biological or species nature.

Oppression, on Young's analysis, "is a condition of groups" (Young 1990, 40), as is domination. Both are social conditions that together define injustice, construed by Young on a model that goes beyond "the distributive paradigm" of social justice with its emphasis on the distribution of material goods; oppression is "the institutional constraint on self-development, and domination, the institutional constraint on self-determination" (1990, 37). While those aspects of the concepts self-development and self-determination that depend on reflective self-awareness, linguistic ability, and verbal participation in some form of self-government will probably not be directly applicable to nonhumans, I would maintain that Young's own emphasis on "exercising one's capacities" and "participating in determining one's action" (1990, 37) could be said to have a nonhuman counterpart. Organisms that are allowed to develop within the range of environmental conditions for which they are adapted are able to exercise their inherited capacities and flourish in ways that those inhabiting ecosystems that have been impoverished cannot, just as nonhuman animals are able to determine their own actions (assuming, with the cognitive ethologists, that we may apply concepts of belief and desire to them) within habitats that support their evolved patterns of living, while those severely constrained in habitats heavily impacted by human encroachment cannot, or cannot do so fully. Moreover, Young emphasizes that in many cases oppression is not the result of coercion of a group by one or a few tyrannical rulers but is rather structural; "its causes are embedded in unquestioned norms, habits, and symbols, in the assumptions underlying institutional rules and the collective consequences of following those rules" (1990, 41). In this way, the oppression of human social groups often does not result from conscious intent on the part of the oppressors; rather, "the conscious actions of many individuals daily contribute to maintaining and reproducing oppression, but those people are usually simply doing their jobs or living their lives, and do not understand themselves as agents of oppression" (Young 1990, 41-42). To the extent that the nonhuman other is usually entirely erased as subject in our thoroughly anthropocentric western culture, our lack of conscious awareness of being engaged in acts of oppression against nonhumans - such as diminishing their abilities to exercise natural capacities or contributing to their elimination as populations through "clearing" a piece of land - is likely to be even more complete than that accompanying participation in the domination of human others.

Young identifies the "five faces of oppression" as applied to human groups: exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence (1990, 40). Certainly many nonhuman animals, both wild and domestic, are exploited, not only with regard to their labor but with respect to their reproduction and their bodies as well (see Adams 1990). Marginalization, moreover, a manifestation of mind/nature dualism historically producing exclusion from full citizenship if not from the means of making a living altogether of "all those whose reason was questionable or not fully developed," could be seen to apply not only to "poor people, women, the mad and the feebleminded, and children" (Young 1990, 54) but to any given group of nonhumans that happens to be "in the way of progress." Granted the state of technological prowess characteristic of western societies today, nonhumans as individuals and as populations are essentially "powerless" at the hands of humans, who hold life-or-death decisionmaking power over them on multiple levels.(36) Furthermore, if "to experience cultural imperialism means to experience how the dominant meanings of a society render the particular perspective of one's own group invisible at the same time as they stereotype one's group and mark it out as the Other" (Young 1990, 59), then the experience of poor Tolbert and many more members of his and other nonhuman groups should surely fit the bill. Finally, violence quite clearly applies to our relationships with many wild nonhumans. "Members of some groups live with the knowledge that they must fear random, unprovoked attacks on their persons" - I think, for example, of the elephant groups (they may no longer even merit the term "herds") that have become extremely elusive out of fear of poachers' guns, though virtually any systematically hunted or abused group may experience this phenomenon. "What makes violence a face of oppression," Young contends, "is less the particular acts themselves, though these are often utterly horrible, than the social context surrounding them, which makes them possible and even acceptable" (1990, 61). "Violence is systemic," furthermore, "because it is directed at members of a group simply because they are members of that group" (1990, 62). Groups of nonhumans could be considered to be the paradigmatic basis for making these statements, since violence is (or until recently has been) freely permitted against members of the heterogeneous "group" of all-that-is-not-human simply by virtue of such membership, and violence against members of certain human groups has often historically been justified by characterizing them in "subhuman" terms (see, e.g., Kuper 1981, 54).

Young's exploration of "the oppressive meaning of group difference" as "absolute otherness, mutual exclusion, categorical opposition," an "essentialist" meaning that "submits to the logic of identity" in measuring all other groups against the norm of the single, privileged group (Young 1990, 169), parallels Plumwood's analysis of the "dualistic construal of difference" as hyperseparation or radical exclusion. Young notices in this construal of difference "a fear of making permeable the categorical border between oneself and the others" (1990, 170), an end that some postmodernists, notably Haraway, explicitly embrace. The "politics of difference" Young is advocating "confronts this fear, and aims for an understanding of group difference as indeed ambiguous, relational, shifting, without clear borders," as no longer "otherness, exclusive opposition, but specificity, variation, heterogeneity" (Young 1990, 170-71). Like Plumwood, Young recognizes the notion of difference toward which we should move as one that "names relations of similarity and dissimilarity that can be reduced to neither coextensive identity nor nonoverlapping otherness" (1990, 170). Our examination of the evolutionary and ecological relationships that exist among living things, human and nonhuman, may be seen as further contributing to such a move.

There exist both analogies and disanalogies in the construal of nonhuman groups on the model of intraspecific human groups, a full examination of which lies beyond the scope of this discussion. As Val Plumwood points out, in a recent work exploring parallels between human liberation movements and environmental activism, "the awakening and revolt of the captive consciousness is a feature that has no obvious parallel in the human/nature case, except perhaps in special cases of subjective interchange with animals" (Plumwood 1996, 147). However, the use of a "liberation model of human-centeredness," challenging anthropocentrism as one might similarly challenge eurocentrism, ethnocentrism, or androcentrism, indicates the importance of drawing the attention of the "master" consciousness to its own peril in maintaining the oppressor relationship and emphasizes the galvanizing connection with activism such a group-liberation orientation may achieve within the environmental sphere (Plumwood 1996, 141-43). Moreover, adopting a perspective that allows us to view the coarse-grained relations between species-groups in a somewhat parallel fashion to the mid-grained relations between human social groups enables us to analyze, for instance, anthropogenic species extinction in a different light than do more standard approaches to environmental philosophy. Within the human sphere, we may condemn the killing of an individual human being as an act of murder; the killing of many individuals, however, in an effort to eliminate the entire group of humans, we classify not just as the summation of multiple individual murders but as genocide, and our condemnation resounds on a level beyond that on which we condemn murder. The Nazi regime, in its cold-blooded attempt to exterminate Jews and other marginalized groups, was guilty of genocide; the invasion of the North American continent and the killing or colonizing of its indigenous human inhabitants by Europeans, many of whom may have perceived themselves primarily as "settling" the land and innocently providing for their expanding families, can also be seen, in historical perspective, as genocidal. The history of such land "settlement," moreover, is frequently a history of decimation or total destruction of nonhuman populations as well as of human ones, often, in fact, occurring in parallel and interlinked with the decimation or extermination of indigenous humans. For example, the near-extinction of the "buffalo" or bison from North America - their numbers dropped from an estimated sixty million before colonization to around one thousand by 1900 (see Thornton 1987, 51-53) - was in part a deliberate effort by the colonizers to undercut the livelihood of a number of native North American peoples. Grizzly bear numbers have been reduced by 99 percent over the last 150 years within the continental United States (see Grumbine 1992, 67); similar tolls have been taken on the red wolf, the gray wolf, the cougar in eastern North America, and other predatory species. If we understand these nonhuman "others" as both subjects in their own right and as members of nonhuman groups - as members not just of "populations" or "species" but of "other nations," in the words of Henry Beston (1949, 25) - can we not see their oppression as a form of genocide waged, sometimes quite consciously (as when bounties were offered to encourage total extermination), against them?(37) Just what recognizing and taking responsibility for our species's role in driving many nonhuman populations and species into extinction will entail is yet to be determined, but I submit any analysis will be incomplete without attention to the political, as well as ethical, dimensions of the problem.

TOWARD A VIRTUE-based ENVIRONMENTAL ETHIC

Val Plumwood has proposed, in contrast to rationalist approaches to a human-nonhuman ethics and in preference to the suggestions of some deep ecologists that we dispense with ethical appeals altogether, that a new look at virtue ethics might be appropriate for the environmental realm (Plumwood 1993, 182-89). A virtue-based account, she maintains, would allow for greater attention to concepts such as friendship, respect, care, community, and responsibility, concepts that "seem to extend much less problematically to the non-human world than the impersonal concepts" such as rights and universalization (1993, 173). Such concepts are also "more resistant to analysis along the lines of reason/emotion dualism" and "more local," allowing for particularity without requiring assimilation or dualistic separation (1993, 183).(38) I agree, and I would like to explore further the potential of an ecophilosophical virtue ethic for indicating ways of realizing our continuity with and differences from other lifeforms in a greater degree of biological concreteness.

Aristotle's hierarchical ordering in the Politics, naming not only animals but women and slaves as "by nature" inferior and so rightly subject to rule by men, served as one of the first attempts to justify domination by an untenable appeal to biology and should be vigorously opposed. Some of his thinking in the Nicomachean Ethics, however, raises issues that might fruitfully be introduced into the ecophilosophical discussion. In his explication of virtue, for instance, Aristotle raises the question of what the "function of man" might be. By way of an answer, unfortunately, he takes an exclusionary approach, dismissing those traits that humans share with other lifeforms and identifying reason as the characteristic that supposedly sets us apart from all other beings (Aristotle 1941,942-43). From an ecological perspective, however, we might once again ask, "What is the function of the human being?" At the coarse-grained level, if we follow Aristotle's lead in comparing ourselves to other creatures but this time pursue a concept of difference that allows for distinction without radical exclusion, perhaps we can gain some valuable insights about ourselves, toward Plumwood's proposed end of seeking a "new conception of human identity" (Plumwood 1993, 185).

Recall some of the large-scale differences that were recognized to exist among various kinds of nonhumans - some are producers, some consumers, some decomposers; some exist at lower trophic levels, some at higher; some require very particular habitat conditions, like the spotted owl, others can adapt readily to a variety of surroundings and live happily with human disturbance, like the raccoon. Where might humans fit in alongside these other creatures? In terms of such ecologically relevant variables, what is the "function" of the human being within the ecosystem? Since we lack photosynthetic ability, we must identify ourselves as consumers of energy that nonhumans of the plant kingdom have trapped for us; as mammals, we share in the vertebrate body plan; as primates, and contrary to the socially constructed predilections now widespread in industrialized cultures, we should place ourselves no higher than the other omnivores on food chains.(39) Perhaps most significantly, however, we are not limited by rigid habitat requirements; our flexibility, in fact, might be said to be one of our most striking characteristics. Indeed, it is our very biological flexibility that allows for so much of the human sphere to be socially constructed.

Attaining a working notion of our interspecific "function" enables us to consider possible meanings of Aristotle's virtue as "a mean state" for living within ecosystems. An appreciation of "the golden mean" is something that unfortunately seems to have rather dramatically dropped out of western culture-witness the drive toward ever-increasing material consumption within industrial capitalism - and out of much of ethics as well - the "repugnant conclusion" of utilitarians, that achieving the largest possible number of people on the planet is perhaps the best way of maximizing total utility, despite the reduction in the quality of each individual (human) life this might produce (see Parfit 1984, 387-90), provides a striking case in point. Living more modestly within the ecosystem is, I think, something a contemporary Aristotelian might endorse today, both in regard to our material consumption and in regard to our numbers. Thinking of ourselves, in very coarse grain, as one particular kind of puzzle-piece that must fit within the complex pattern observable by our "lowest-power objective," the ecosphere, we might consider what sorts of niches are more and less appropriate for human beings to occupy, how many we should try to fill, and in how consumptive a manner we should fill them. In his day, Aristotle recognized that there might be a "proper number" of people to make up a city or a state, neither too many nor too few (see, e.g., Aristotle 1941, Nicomachean Ethics, 1091; Politics, 1156, 1158, 1283), and he even endorsed abortion as one necessary means for maintaining the appropriate population size (Politics, 1302). Since continued human encroachment on the living space of nonhumans must be considered a most damaging form of interspecific oppression, conceiving of and moving toward our "mean" for the niches we fill in different habitats should be both an ethical imperative and a political aim.(40)

Moreover, seeing ourselves as occupying the far end of the spectrum relative to other beings in regard to flexibility - our capacity to adapt ourselves to widely varying lifestyles when the need arises - we might come to appreciate that being blessed with such "good fortune" is accompanied by an obligation to make use of it such that others less adaptively privileged can continue to exist.(41) We humans are very flexible primates that have the capacity to construct, collectively, a great deal of the reality that constitutes our social milieu. Up to the present time, most of us in western cultures have been quite uncritically incorporating the structures of mind/nature dualism and its many reflecting dualisms into the institutions of our humanly constructed reality, sometimes with a stubbornness necessitating an active if unspoken denial of the dualism-shattering insights recently uncovered through western science. Instead of insisting on maintaining our presently existing institutions at the expense of the rest of the living world, hyperseparating ourselves from that world and projecting our own constructions onto it, we can try opening ourselves to that world, apprehending the needs and capacities of nonhuman others as well as those of marginalized human others and reconstructing our social reality so as to accommodate them. Humans and nonhumans alike are vulnerable in their own ways to domination and oppression by the "master" consciousness, but a critical ecofeminism can help awaken us, whatever our intraspecific group identifications, to the need for getting beyond dualism and striving to embrace more virtuous ways of living on the planet, ways of living within ecosystems that recognize and respect both our continuity with and differences from their other inhabitants.

NOTES

1. The work of both Karen Warren (1987, 1990) and Val Plumwood (1991, 1993) has been trailblazing in this regard.

2. To investigate and ultimately to undermine our many cultural dualisms, we must make distinctions and recognize dichotomies. As Plumwood notes, "it is hard to imagine how anyone could get along without making at least some of the distinctions in the list of dualisms" she presents (Plumwood 1993, 47). But, she explains, not every dichotomy results in a dualism. A dualism expresses internalized and institutionalized power relations; it is "a relation of separation and domination inscribed and naturalized in culture and characterized by radical exclusion, distancing and opposition between orders [or kinds] constructed as systematically higher or lower, as inferior and superior, as ruler and ruled, which treats the division as part of the natures of beings construed not merely as different but as belonging to radically different orders or kinds, and hence as not open to change" (1993, 47-48). Engaging in a critique of existing power relations (or indeed, using language at all) must necessarily involve the drawing of distinctions, but doing so does not entail the utilization of dualistic patterns of thought. Failure to mark the distinction between dualism and dichotomy, as Plumwood observes (1993, ch. 2, n. 1), may have "the disastrous result that any attempt to draw distinctions or to use negation comes under suspicion," a result that will derail any productive critique before it gets under way.

3. While clearly more satisfactory than earlier terms applied to indicate organisms not of the human species that incorporate notions of hierarchy, such as "subhuman" or "infrahuman," the term "nonhuman" remains potentially problematic as expressive of "relational definition," the defining of everything that is not human in terms of what it is lacking, humanness (see Plumwood 1993, 48-59). Variations in terminology will be attempted in this paper to encourage awareness of our current linguistic inadequacies, but the term "nonhuman" will also continue to be used for brevity and as the present standard of discourse. I thank one of my anonymous reviewers for drawing this problem to my attention.

4. As Plumwood notes, in our dualism-riddled culture, "nature must be seen as a political rather than a descriptive category, a sphere formed from the multiple exclusions of the protagonist-superhero of the western psyche, reason, whose adventures and encounters form the stuff of western intellectual history" (Plumwood 1993, 3). While I would like to work toward a nondualistic understanding of "nature" as indicative of a realm of substance and agency unto itself (and within which we humans are included as a part), I am not unaware of the cultural problematics of the terms "nature" and "natural" in common parlance, even as I employ them in this paper.

5. See chapter 10 of Mayr's 1982 work, 426-76, and Michael Ruse 1982, 114-39, for an examination of some of the supporting evidence leading to formulation of the theory of common descent and other Darwinian theories.

6. Some recent studies are cited in Noske 1989, 126-70. Also see Byrne and Whiten 1988, Cheney and Seyfarth 1990, Whiten 1991, Ristau 1991, and Griffin 1992.

7. Donna Haraway's (1991) emphasis on "situated knowledges" and N. Katherine Hayles's (1995) recognition of the importance of "interactivity" and "positionality" point out similar directions in which a reconceptualized science might profitably move.

8. It is no coincidence that Plumwood uses a longer version of this quotation to preface the seventh chapter, "Deep ecology and the denial of difference," of her 1993 book.

9. For an account that seeks to understand the changing relationships of lifeforms on the planet as a kind of history, not unlike our human history but occurring over a longer time scale, see Worster 1995.

10. In ecological investigations, a more narrowly defined notion of "coevolution" is frequently used; such coevolution "has occurred when, in each of two or more ecologically interacting species, there is adaptive response to genetic change in the other(s)" (Futuyma and Slatkin 1983, 2).

11. The concept of niche is not without controversy in ecology, but the term as used here to convey the general idea of an organism's place within the natural scheme of things adequately serves the purposes of this paper. For further discussion, see Schoener 1989, 79-113.

12. Conservation biology is termed a "crisis discipline" because it bears a relation to ecology "analogous to that of surgery to physiology and war to political science"; in such disciplines "one must act before knowing all the facts," and the mounting wave of species extinctions is similarly much too grave to permit the luxury of exhaustive fact-gathering (Soule 1985, 727).

13. While I recognize the difficulties associated with using the pronoun "we" to indicate the greatly differing kinds of responsibility human beings have for their impacts on nonhumans in different contexts, I prefer the use of "we," with connotations of a shared responsibility, over "they," with its potential for encouraging finger pointing and a denial of responsibility on the part of the speaker.

14. The same can be said, I believe, for the "platform" of the "deep ecology movement" as originally formulated by Arne Naess and George Sessions (Devall and Sessions 1985, 70). This is considered an advantage (at least by its founders) in that individuals holding a diverse assortment of philosophical viewpoints can all agree on and support the "platform."

15. Genetic variability overall is generally found to be about as great within the human "races" as between them.

16. See Marti Kheel (1995) for identification of this difficulty with the "holist" hunter and for references to further discussion on the issue.

17. Plumwood examines and criticizes "The Indistinguishability Account," "The Expanded Self," and "The Transcended or Transpersonal Self." Warwick Fox's ecophilosophical approach (1990) seems to present a particularly egregious example of such problems within "deep ecology."

18. See, e.g., Haraway 1991, 197 for the expression of a similar concern.

19. Most human societies, according to Smuts, show a greater degree of control by dominant males over female sexuality, societal resources, and other, less dominant males than do most nonhuman primate societies. She offers a developmental theory explaining the origins of human patriarchy and some suggestions for "essential counterstrategies" that women might develop to reduce such male dominance (Smuts 1995, 22-23).

20. In "A Reply to My Critics" (1982, 245), Habermas speaks, for example, of the possibility of feeling "compassion" and "solidarity" with respect to "wounded and debased [nonhuman] creatures," but his responses to questioning on this point do not seem to soften the boundaries of his epistemological categories. For discussions of Habermas and natural entities, see Alford (1985, 141-63), and Dryzek (1990, 203-4).

21. For a thorough examination of some of the environmental and interactional signs utilized by the mammals, for instance, see Eisenberg 1981, 367-97.

22. Lynda Birke raises the cautionary note that "boundary transgressions" between human and animal may result in, for instance, industries to "produce" nonhuman animals for the purpose of transplanting their organs into humans (Birke 1994, 147), a concern that Haraway appears to share in some degree (see Haraway 1991, 164-65).

23. For expressions of similar views regarding the possibility of engaging in "discourse" with nonhumans or the natural world, see John van Buren 1995, 267; John S. Dryzek 1990, 206; Charles Birch 1988, 73; Donna Haraway 1991, 195-96; and Jim Cheney 1989, 128 and 1994, 175.

24. See also Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman (1966) for a classic work on this topic.

25. I do not mean to imply that such alterations will be easily made but rather that attaining a full realization of the constructedness of our institutions constitutes the necessary first step on the way to altering them.

26. By collective agreement, we impose a new status on certain entities by virtue of their function or usefulness to us in certain contexts, a status above and beyond that which they may have solely as a result of their chemistry, physics, or biology. By repeated iteration of the rules whereby such status is conferred, we humans ultimately construct complex, nested hierarchies of "institutional facts" that make up much of what we take for granted as "reality." Searle distinguishes such "institutional facts" from "brute facts" (drawing the term from Anscombe 1958), the latter being distinguished from the former in requiring "no human institutions for their existence" (Searle 1995, 2). As he notes, "in order to state a brute fact we require the institution of language, but the fact stated needs to be distinguished from the statement of it" (1995, 2). Searle maintains that there is a "logical priority of brute facts over institutional facts" because the hierarchies of institutional facts eventually have to "bottom out in phenomena whose existence is not a matter of human agreement" (Searle 1995, 55).

27. One example of a lack of "fit" could be seen in an act of social construction that grants, to a particular chemical, the status of being "what is best for use" in a certain (ultimately economic) practice and proceeds to allow that chemical's wide dissemination when it just happens to have, among the many "brute facts" that pertain to it, the property of being carcinogenic - a property that, unfortunately, we cannot extinguish by mutual agreement.

28. Members of many oppressed human groups may, indeed, have only a dim or at best incomplete "consciousness of subordination" before focusing their awareness on their situation; see, e.g., Memmi (1965, 90-118) and Freire (1993). As feminists are well aware, many women suffer a similar lack of consciousness with respect to their position in patriarchal society.

29. See Eisenberg (1981, 275-83) for a discussion of behavior (if not inner experience!) and the "encephalization quotient," an expression of the relationship between brain size and body size, for certain groups of mammals.

30. One little-appreciated effect that would surely be judged and prosecuted as animal cruelty if brought to bear on a domestic animal involves the gopher tortoise of the southeastern United States. Burrowing animals, these tortoises are entombed in their burrows when their habitat is bulldozed for development, and they die slowly of starvation and dehydration, probably over the course of many months.

31. Michael W. Fox contends, for instance, that "a dwarf bonsai tree" has undergone perversion of its ethos, or intrinsic nature, "for nonessential human gratification" (M. Fox 1994, 59). See also Paul Taylor (1986, 60-68) for a discussion of the "objective" good any living being, including plants and other nonsentient organisms, may be said to have and which may be found worthy of respect; and Holmes Rolston (1988, 98-106) for an examination of the telos of a living organism, sentient or nonsentient.

32. This metaphor should not be taken to imply distancing or separation from the subject at hand, but rather to indicate the possibility of taking a fluid, shifting perspective with respect to our own and other groups, one that can move between broader and narrower fields of view.

33. For example, Peter Singer holds that "it would not necessarily be speciesist to rank the value of different lives in some hierarchical ordering" (Singer 1993, 107) and uses a utilitarian standard to measure such "value." Tom Regan judges that, since death forecloses fewer "opportunities for satisfaction" for a dog than for a human being, given a situation wherein a lifeboat with room for four is carrying four humans and a dog, the dog should summarily be thrown overboard (Regan 1983, 324).

34. For those who would immediately balk at such an idea, I offer Lynda Birke's closing thought in "Exploring the boundaries: Feminism, animals, and science":

For me, arguably the most central contradiction in feminist thinking about science and animals is how a critical discourse that celebrates difference and fracturing of simple dichotomies rests firmly and unquestioningly on such a dichotomy [that between humans and animals]. Whatever "animals" are, they are more than just whatever it is we wish to transcend. (1995, 50)

I would add that a similar statement could be made about feminist thinking on environmental justice and the political in relation to nonhuman animals.

35. Young appeals to Habermas and Lacan for theories of identity formation through language and social interaction (1990, 45).

36. It must be noted that Young construes some of the terms of her analysis much more narrowly than I am doing here, considering class, gender, and racially specific forms of exploitation, for instance, and using the word "powerlessness" in a more limited sense to denote an additional, particular form of oppression suffered by nonprofessionals but not by professional workers in capitalist society.

37. The prefix "gen," derived from the Greek genos, meaning birth, race, or kind, would seem to make the term genocide applicable to nonhuman as well as human groups or "kinds." An alternative way of referring to nonhuman organisms whose very group existence is threatened by human actions might be in terms of collective biocide (see Kheel 1995, 110), but I prefer to emphasize the commonality of processes pressing both human and nonhuman groupings toward extinction by use of the former term. A somewhat similar view of nonhuman extinctions was offered by Alastair Gunn in his observation that "the relevant human analogy is that of endangered cultures" (1980, 34).

38. Plumwood notes that "although virtue ethics are Aristotelian and Aristotle is usually counted as a rationalist, this is one of a number of areas in which his work is not typical of rationalist thought" (1993, 217).

39. Holists who truly look into the issue instead of imposing a predetermined set of ideas upon nature may be surprised by the answer they get to "Where am I in the food chain?" (see Kheel 1995, 103). Among our closest evolutionary relatives, the other great apes, only the chimpanzees consume significant amounts of animal material, and for them it makes up less than 5 percent of their diet, mostly in the form of insects and insect products. While chimpanzees do engage in some hunting of smaller mammals, its importance is believed to be primarily social rather than dietary. Since human digestive anatomy and physiology has had little time to evolve from that of our common ape ancestors, the recent discovery that "low fat, high fiber" diets are conducive to good health should come as no surprise to the evolutionarily informed. (Contemporary human societies that have long been living under extreme environmental conditions, such as in the arctic and subarctic regions where little vegetation is available for human consumption, have been forced to adapt to higher-fat diets; physiological comparisons of such populations with those of typical, recently industrialized societies may prove to be instructive.) For detailed accounts of chimpanzee diets, see Goodall (1986) and Harding and Teleki (1981); for an alternative to "man the hunter" accounts of human origins, see Tanner and Zihlman (1976).

40. See almost any recent work in conservation biology for agreement on the dire consequences of continued rapid human population growth (and particularly when accompanied by sizeable, and growing, per capita consumption, such as many industrialized countries, also continuing to grow in population, display) for nonhuman populations. Michael Soule et al., for instance, predict that, without captive propagation, "at least 2,000 species of large, terrestrial vertebrates," including virtually all nonhuman primates and large mammalian carnivores, and most large-bodied hoofed mammals, will disappear within the next century, a result attributed to the coming "demographic winter" that will accompany "the human usurpation of wildlands" (Soule et al. 1986, 102-4).

41. The notion that "good fortune obligates" has been identified by Herbert Spiegelberg as Albert Schweitzer's "other thought"; see Spiegelberg (1975, 227-34). William T. Blackstone (1980, 309-11) has utilized this principle in developing the position that more fortunate groups of people may have an obligation to help the "ecologically handicapped"; Blackstone seems not to have gone beyond the boundaries of the human species in its application, however, as I would urge us to do.

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RONNIE HAWKINS is currently assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, where she teaches courses ranging from philosophy of science and environmental ethics to existentialism and is working to develop a program in Environmental Studies. She holds doctoral degrees in both medicine and philosophy and has been studying conservation biology. (liveoak@pegasus.cc.ucf.edu).

Gale Document Number:A20869175