There is an interesting discussion that touches on philosophy in our political life by Wendy Wedge over at Crikey.com.au. The article is on the relationship between The Australian Greens, wilderness and forests.
Lets grant Wendy's main political point: that the Australian Greens practice wedge politics on envirornmental issues. Of course they do. Wendy is right that Bob Brown plays the old gowth forests of Tasmania as symbolic politics into the hearts and minds to the left of centre electorate in the inner city suburbs of Melbourne and Sydney.
The symbol is 'wilderness' and it is successsfully deployed against the ethos of utility of an instrumental economic reason. The symbol of wilderness used to be wild rivers, such as the Gordon River in Tasmania when the fight was about dams and hydro power.
One should not express suprise by this. After all, The Australian Greens are a parliamentary party that is seeking to increase its representation in the Senate. It aims to replace the Australian Democrats in holding the balance of power. And wedge politics works--Tampa showed that. Why not appropriate the successful tactics and strategies of the enemy?
Now to the philosophical point. Wendy Wedge says that the philosophical objection to the Greens is that:
"....philosophically they discount the value of the human and claim that the interests of nature are paramount. The argument goes that without nature there won’t be humans. Except that things are a bit more complicated than that as greens with a lower case “g” are discovering. Recently they have run into problems with indigenous Australians who have objected to environmentalist hijacking the word “wilderness”. You know – as in any area to be saved “is the last vestige of wilderness in (insert relevant geographic area)”.
Now as any fule knows...our indigenous inhabitants have been managing the landscape for some tens of thousands of years. Indeed, they are insisting that the greens stop using the word wilderness and that governments give indigenous nations rights of co-management of national parks....The trouble for the greens is that if they concede that “wilderness” has and needs to be “managed” some of their other claims start to look dodgy."
Several points can be made.
First, romanticism was the first expression of the ecological impulse, and romantic currents flow strongly within the symbolic politics of preserving what is left of "wilderness." Wilderness as uninhabitated in the sense used in Tasmania does not mean untouched by himan hand. The colonial history there is one of the white colonists destroyed indigenous Tasmania society, claiming the land fot r their own, and putting it to use as a resource to make a dollar. The politics of wilderness in Tasmania is concerned to preserve the old growth native forests in the Styx Valley from the "wise management" of the utilitarian foresters. It aims to preserve both the forests and the species living within this habitat.
Secondly, 'wilderness' of the 1970s environmental movement meant a widening of the sphere of ethics to include the natural world-- a land ethic if you like. that aimed to defend the existence rights of wilderness and in precedence of over human-use rights. It argued that right behaviour was not exclusively a question of human relationships, but also involved our relationship to nature and the moral staus of non-human entities. It's ecocentrism referred to the interconnectedness of all life.
Thirdly, I'm not sure that the philosophy being the Australian Greens is simply a romantic conception of nature. The green philosophy today also has something more to do with ecological science. Thus it accepts that human beings live within ecosytems not outside them, that ecosystems underpin our economic systems, and that the policy compass should be set towards ecological sustainability.
However, Wendy Wedge is not convinced by such well known considerations. Her concerns are political not philosophical She says the Australian Green's:
"...problem is their philosophic heritage. Greenery has taken, in grossly over-simplified terms, two forms over the past two millennia. Starting with the Romans and continuing through the Brits one lot wanted to make things green by regulating and controlling things through law. On the other hand there was another lot – mainly the German romantics, who had a sort of mystical view of nature and a transcendental view of how we might all recapture some pre-lapsarian rapture. This German romanticism is also claimed, from time to time, to be a precursor of Nazism and, thus, is the basis (if not understood as such) for the claims by inept Coalition backbenchers that greens are like Nazis. Sadly the substantive historical point is overlooked in the midst of Tory hysteria and hype and the tendency of some some greens to want it all in terms of both heritages."
This is the wedge politics of the culture wars, as it is designed to splinter the centre left attracted to the Greens but which loathes fascism.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at December 19, 2003 08:31 AM | TrackBack