“Place is now the new wilderness” INTERVIEW WITH ANDREW LIGHT
Andrew Light is associate professor of philosophy and environmental policy, and director of the Center for Global Ethics, at George Mason University. Light is an internationally recognized environmental ethicist, specializing in the ethical dimensions of environmental policy, restoration ecology, and, more recently, climate change. He also comments frequently on the ethical and social impacts of new and emerging technologies, such as food biotechnology, nanotechnology, and synthetic biology. On these topics he has authored, co-authored, and edited 17 books including: Environmental Values (2008), Philosophy and Design (2008), Controlling Technology (2005), Environmental Ethics (2003), Moral and Political Reasoning in Environmental Practice (2003), Technology and the Good Life? (2000), and Environmental Pragmatism (1996). Light is also co-editor of the journal Ethics, Place, and Environment and serves on the editorial boards of Environmental Ethics, Environmental Values, Ecological Restoration, Philosophical Practice, and Theoria. A frequent advisor to various agencies on the ethical dimensions of environmental and technology policy, including the U.S. Forest Service, the National Parks Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the National Science Foundation, he is currently working on questions of fairness and equity in national and international regimes for climate regulation and the social impacts of new energy technologies. Light is also a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, working with the Energy and Environmental Policy program.
When founding in 1997 the Society of Geography and Philosophy, you insisted in the fact that this was not a new form of applied philosophy. What was the purpose of the Society? The idea for the society came to me shortly after I finished graduate school and I started getting interested in ethical issues concerning urban environments. I quickly learned that my own discipline, environmental ethics, had produced almost nothing on the topic in its first 15 years, but that geographers had been discussing such issues for many decades. Together with Jonathan Smith, a geographer I had become friends with and who had opened my eyes to the literature in this field, we co-founded the society to create a forum where philosophers, geographers, and others interested in questions concerning "non-natural" environments could come together and learn from each other. This eventually led to creation of the journal Philosophy & Geography, which is now in its tenth volume under the name Ethics, Place, and Environment: A Journal of Philosophy & Geography, published three times a year by Routledge. The journal has become the primary work of the society, and, to my mind, achieves the purpose of creating the society.
The notion of "place" has become along the 20th century a more and more crucial issue in American culture and stakes. How closely is this related to the ideas of first environmental philosophy. It's certainly related but not identical. The way that I would put the point is that in American environmentalism, place is now the new wilderness. What I mean by that is that in earlier waves of environmentalism, such as the period between the world wars when Leopold was ascending in influence, the spaces which motivated people to embrace the identity of "environmentalist" were primary wilderness areas and national parks. We also find this predominant concern in the first generation of environmental ethicists, such as Callicott, but more in the work of Holmes Rolston, and still amply represented in some other environmental organizations in the US. But, for various reason, some historical and others conceptual, what counts as the appropriate focus of the attentions of environmentalists has greatly broadened in the US to include cities, agricultural areas, and other "hybrid" spaces. There has also been a quite credible assault on the very idea of and existence of wilderness led by environmental historians, especially William Cronon. Once we take the wilderness out of American environmentalism what are we left with? For various reasons, which one can find historically in the work of figures like Frederick Olmstead and later William H. Whyte, the community has congealed around the notion of "place," conceived as a normative ideal, as the best term to represent what we are trying to preserve, restore, and create.
You belong to the "second generation" of environmental ethicist. After the pioneering phase, centered on very theoretical issues, it seems that your generation is more linked with the real world of action and decision-making. Is it one of the reasons why the concept of place is important to you? I think that's right. When you start looking at the most pressing environmental problems faced today a focus on wilderness is just far too limiting. "Place" is a essentially a stand in for "environments that can and do matter to people" (which of course needs to be analytically explained and understood). And insofar as many in the second generation of environmental ethics are less convinced that any meaningful distinction can be made between human and natural environments, we are drawn to work on the environmental problems that are most impacting human and non-human communities. "Place" tends to capture that nexus better than most other terms.
Urban ecology is a complex and stratified field of study. How would you define it? How would you sum up its story in a few lines? I know that's probably a deflationary view as many of my colleagues in geography and sociology are heavily invested in a cannon of conceptual works which demarcate this field from others. So, insofar as I dispute that there really is a field, I wouldn't try to define it in a more robust way. Interest in what we would now call the environmental and ecological relationships in cities though goes back to the creation of the first cities. In the West there are ample examples among the Greeks for thinking through the problem of how the structure of a city impacts social relationships. After the rise of the formal science of ecology we eventually add to the social ecology of cities an understanding of the ecological systems which impact cities and are impacted by cities.
What have been the main achievements of urban ecology? This is probably an answer that few would give but I would say that the main achievement has been a contribution to the realization that environmental problems cannot be solved without a thoroughgoing embrace of urban environments. Environmentalism has historically been infused with an anti-urban bias and a profoundly undemocratic form of ruralism. We still see this today in the extreme fringes of the environmental movement with the city standing for everything that is wrong with the human relationship with the non-human world. This is a dangerous mistake to make. We can't hope to solve most of our environmental problems without making cities more liveable and sustainable. The worst future for the planet is one where everyone sprawls out of their cities, as we did in the US, creating the most unsustainable and disastrous forms of land use and energy consumption the world has ever seen. Urban ecology has helped to revive an appreciation of cities and city life and documented the important, and sometimes beneficial, impact that cities can have on larger ecological processes.
What are the main issues and horizons of urban ecology now?
Have you worked on any particular city? Which one, and what have you studied? I directed the graduate program in environmental studies at New York University for six years and worked primarily there on urban gardening and urban park restoration. Much of my work on restoration ecology has focused on Chicago which as the largest urban forest restorations in the US.
How has the Society accompanied and/or been inspired by urban ecology? The Society in part emerged out of my peculiar interests in urban environmental ethics. Insofar as the literature in urban ecology informed that it influenced the society. In Ethics, Place, and Environment we've made a concentrated effort to publish work on urban environments and make it the leading forum for philosophers to publish their work on this subject.
What are you working on now? After taking several years to finish a co-authored book, Environmental Values (Routledge 2008), I'm back to work on a long overdue book on ethical and historical issues in restoration ecology. As I'm now trying to incorporate new work which is emerging on how climate change is complicating, even exasperating, attempts to do restorations, this will take a bit more time to finish. More exciting, to me, I'm now a Senior Fellow at a think tank in Washington, D.C., the Center for American Progress, which is giving me the opportunity to do more policy oriented work which is better positioned to actually influence the new Obama Administration. In part this is a natural evolution for me as an environmental ethicist more interested in real world problems than theoretical debates. For this group, I'm working primarily on questions of fairness and equity in national and international regimes for climate regulation, especially the future of the UN Framework on Climate Change (the Kyoto process), and the social impacts of new energy technologies. Wildproject, 2009
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