Barbara Frey
Reflective Essay I The Ecological Life
2008
Through his lectures, author Jeremy Bendik-Keymer is concerned with opening our eyes to the basic tenets of human existence – that of humanity and how through true humanity, one can live a full, flourishing life, have a true value and appreciation for the Earth and all its assets living and non-living, and provide unequivocal justice to all life forms.
He begins by taking us through an examination of what it means to be a “citizen” of the Earth (with a capital E), as a true universal cosmopolitan. He defines this cosmopolitan as “who are citizens of the moral community of reason anywhere in the world.”6. By this definition, anyone with the moral reasoning of the world is cosmopolitan, not just world travelers. By extension, he spends time reminding us that “concerns of the Earth are systematically absent”8 from the lives of people in advanced, consumer-driven cultures. He further argues that we should be ecological citizens of the Earth because we “have a responsibility to non-human life, that destruction of life and self-destructive behavior limits our ability to have a fully good life.”14
Next, Bendik introduces the concepts of Moral Attention and Justice as they relate to ecological situations and the lives of the people affected by such injustices. With three examples, including the Freeport Mining operation in Irian Jaya; the Zortman-Landusky Mine in Montana; and Ms. Lopez-Ostra’s ordeal with the nearby waste treatment plant, he introduces us to some explicit injustices, brought upon the people of the affected areas. He makes us understand that their injustices are not only related to their health, economic well-being and inconvenience, but more importantly, and more unjustly, to their identifications with the land, their ideological and spiritual relation to the lands where they live. These cases are all the more important because they exemplify the lack of international laws of justice that could in some ways compensate the people and/or penalize the offending companies. In further conclusion of his argument, he states that “If we are not supporting ecological conditions for people, then we are not being just.” 34 Later, he discusses his four modes of attention: to relationships between humans and lands; to vast special scales; to long-term temporal scales and to environmental complexity and how these moral attentions enrich life. He reminds us that we in advanced cultures, particularly Americans “live in a bubble”38, exist oblivious to the fact that our comfortable lives have “causal connections” 41 to the environment that may not be seen in our lifetimes.
In The Idea of an Ecological Orientation lecture, Bendik discusses how an ecological orientation brings good things to the human life, that it is beneficial to human flourishing. He then gives reasons: self-preservation of the human species; in richer human relationships; in education to develop into maturity; in discerning reality – the world around us; in human history and culture; in a complex aesthetic sense57-59 and how each of these elements of an ecological orientation enables humans to live a moral identification with the Earth60.
In his fourth lecture, Bendik discusses anthropocentrism (human centeredness) and that the term does not mean inhumane, but in fact, is a sense of humility and not necessarily of self-centeredness. How then to settle the dichotomy of human-centeredness with a moral identification with nature. He does this by illustrating the analogical identification: “one going from us to nature and one going from nature to us.”68 With Analogical Extension, he asks us to “extend humanity to nature”80 and shows that with analogical implication that “nature is already part of us”80. He uses a very telling example of the gorilla being laughed at by the researchers, that their laughter does not directly disrespect the gorilla, but the injustice of the action is surely there.
In the final lecture, we learn about the Relationships between Humans and Lands, with a series of discussions from the often radical Deep Ecology movement who preach and practice misanthropic actions against humans, to examples of indigenous peoples’ ideological relationships to their native lands, to the 19th century Romantics who wrote of nature’s integration with lives and sacred places awakened a sense of justice in American readers.
Through his lectures the author is making us aware of the basic tenets of human existence: respect for life in all its forms (sentient and non-sentient), justice and moral responsibility for the Earth. He is teaching us as one teaches a child: with baby steps – the absolute basics of humanity. And he is right to do so because we in western cultures do tend to live in a bubble, oblivious to what is just beyond our immediate surroundings. We have removed nature from our daily lives in a metropolitan environment. As such, we have lost our sense of humanity in relationship with nature. Anthropcentrism is a mode of existence for most of us. But one must ask: does the average person consciously realize they live anthropocentrically or is it just ingrained in us? Afterall, the bible tells us that man has dominion over all the creatures of the earth. Humans can reason and make intellectual connections that other life forms cannot. By extension, these attributes place humans in a position of dominance. We do not consciously live anthropocentrically; it’s just the habitual way our culture has progressed. The importance of these lectures is to point out to a broad western audience the nature world that is not so obvious to us in our daily lives: to bring us back to a nature-centeredness consciousness.
As a culture, we are becoming more aware of the sustainability “movement.” I use the word movement because although the subject has been around for several decades, it is only recently in the vernacular of the average person. We are now beginning to see the effects of that our lifestyles and actions as individuals and collectively have wrought upon the living and non-living earth. For example, the recent Hollywood film “Blood Diamond” made a huge audience aware of something that we in a rich culture value, diamonds, and how its acquisition affects the lives and lands of people in a remote part of the world.
In all, Bendik’s lectures are solid, informative, and educational. However, he falls into a sort of blame game that others who adamantly support ecological programs also tend to fall into. He says: “People living in Christian Louisiana where Freeport is based should have known that that problem comes out of the Sermon on the Mount!”95 He loses credibility when trying to blame the people of the place where the company is headquartered. How are they to know what the company is up to across the world? Many don’t even know this company exists. This is the kind of presupposition and pronouncement that turns the average American off to important issues and alienates the very audience one is trying to educate and convert.