Political respect for nature

The meaning of respect: Always also as ends

Respect carries multiple meanings in common parlance, including the special esteem we feel for those we admire, and the deference sometimes required toward people who have authority over us, such as parents, teachers or employers. In the political context of democratic citizenship, however, respect is a more impersonal phenomenon. It does have an affective valence, but it does not depend on the feelings we happen to have for specific others, and it does not derive from the particularities of our personal relationships with them or from special attributes unique to them. To exercise political respect for persons is simply to acknowledge the normative force of their independent standing, their being-for-themselves, meaning the irreducibility of their existence as exceeding their use-value to us. Above all, political respect for persons involves a habit of self-restraint. It means constraining our inclination to subject others to the unbounded force of our own desires and perspectives. The practice of political respect also involves responsiveness to the well-being of others, as we shall see, and it often results in the enlargement and enrichment of the self as well. It makes life with others freer and more rewarding over the long term, but it begins in a kind of self-restraint.

Kant’s principle of respect for persons is one way to conceptualize this restraint. The principle holds that human beings are to be regarded always also as ends in themselves and never merely as the means to the ends of others. ⁴ In healthy liberal democracies, this principle forms an essential part of the structural framework of society and is internalized as part of the shared political ethos of citizens. Kant grounded respect for persons in rational autonomy, of course. In his view, the capacity to formulate ends for themselves makes rational beings ends in themselves. ⁵ As such, they are entitled to be protected from the unlimited, instrumentalizing power of others. Indeed, given their more-than-instrumental status, the exercise of unlimited, instrumentalizing power over them is always illegitimate, a violation of political right. Thus, while Kant formulated the principle of respect for persons as part of his moral theory, it also has a political life. Specifically, it calls for republican political forms, including rights and political representation, which are intended to ensure that persons are treated as ends in themselves. ⁶

I do not mean to endorse the Kantian conception of the person or Kant’s notion of human agency as rational autonomy. The Kantian view misconceives human agency by ascribing autonomy to what is a fundamentally non-sovereign phenomenon, and it fails to acknowledge the agentic capacities of many non-human animals. ⁷ Moreover, in making rational autonomy the basis of moral and political standing, this approach excludes many persons and all of non-human nature. Indeed, it is one source of our domination of nature, as it has been understood to set human beings apart from and above non-human beings and things and to justify a merely instrumentalizing orientation to them. Yet despite these deficits, Kant’s concept of respect is a powerful way to express the important idea that the being of others exceeds their use-value to us. It also connects this moral orientation to a political framework that establishes institutional protections against unconstrained, instrumentalizing power. I mean to detach these aspects of Kantian respect from the other parts of Kant’s philosophy and to reconstruct them as a resource for a new kind of eco-politics. From a post-Kantian, ecological perspective, what entitles others – whether people or non-human parts of nature – to be respected as ends in themselves is not rational autonomy but the degree to which their existence unfolds according to logics that exceed the purposes of others. The non-human beings and things that populate Earth’s ecosystems are not for us in the sense of having been brought into existence for the sake of satisfying human desires. Nor is their well-being defined or necessarily advanced by serving us. Nature just is; it unfolds for itself. Like people, Earth’s non-human parts are ends in themselves in the sense that they are not in any fundamental sense for anything else, including us.

Some ecologists make this point by invoking the idea of ‘autopoeisis’, meaning self-production or self-renewal. Autopoesis is thought to be a feature of all life systems, including ‘populations, gene pools, ecosystems, and individual living organisms’. ⁸ The activity of autopoetic entities, on this view, manifests an ‘internal telos’ oriented toward the unfolding of their own potentials, although the unfolding life activity of non-human beings often transpires without conscious intentionality. ⁹ The internal telos of a thing is distinct from the notion of an external telos, the idea that the nature of a thing is realized by serving something else, and it need not entail an Aristotelian teleology writ large, conceived as a single, hierarchical order. ¹⁰ Nor does the idea of internal telos posit a fixed, unchanging essence for each thing. On the contrary, the ecological view assumes that living things evolve and hence that their well-being can change. Yet because ‘the primary product of the operations of living systems…is themselves, not some goal or task external to themselves’, as one commentator puts it, autopoetic entities are reasonably considered to be ‘ends in themselves’ and hence ‘deserving of moral consideration in their own right’. ¹¹

The language of autopoesis is admittedly somewhat misleading, as Donna Haraway points out, in that no living organisms are entirely self-producing or self-renewing, including human organisms. ¹² Scientific ecology demonstrates instead the deep interdependence of organisms and ecosystems. Haraway thus speaks of ‘sympoesis’ rather than autopoesis as a way to characterize the vitality or life force of all beings. In a similar way, Jane Bennett’s vital materialism helps us see that what we conventionally think of as discretely bounded individual organisms are always assemblages comprised of things and forces that exceed the individual. For example, the most recent research on the human microbiome puts the ratio of non-human to human cells in the human body at roughly 1-1. ¹³ We could not be who we are as individuals without the many others both within and around us who participate in the assemblages that constitute us.

In view of the distributed or sympoetic quality of all things (human and non-human), one might worry that even a quasi-Kantian ideal of respect is too individualized to be applicable. Bennett rejects it on just these grounds, saying that ‘to face up to the compound nature of the human self is to find it difficult even to make sense of the notion of a single end-in-itself’. ¹⁴ Yet while the assemblage view complicates what it means to be an individual and makes the boundary around the individual porous, it does not dissolve the individual entirely. On the contrary, interdependence presupposes individuation insofar as particular organisms look to distinctive others for the things they require but cannot provide for themselves. Likewise, the distinctiveness of the individual parts of any assemblage is what makes it an assemblage rather than a singular, undifferentiated mass. Plants, animals and people are simultaneously individuated and embedded in assemblages. I am composed of many things that are not reducible to me, including the bacteria in my microbiome, the physical forces that keep my parts together and the social relations that help shape my consciousness and enable (or undercut) my agency. Yet my dog (like my people) can easily distinguish me from other human assemblages and from various non-human individuals. This kind of individuation is all we need to make sense of the notion of an end in itself, meaning something that should count with us in a way that is not reducible to its use-value for us. Still, these considerations suggest that respect for nature should increase our attunement and responsiveness not only to the individuated instances of sympoesis that we recognize as individuals but also to the ecosystems, species and other assemblages in which they are always embedded. ¹⁵

Along these lines, Paul Taylor defends what he calls ‘a biocentric outlook on nature’ according to which each organism ‘is seen to be a teleological (goal oriented) center of life, pursuing its own good in its own, unique way’ – albeit often in the absence of consciousness. ¹⁶ To count as an end in itself, on Taylor’s view, an organism need only be a living, ‘unified system of organized activity, the constant tendency of which is to preserve its existence by protecting and promoting its well-being’. ¹⁷ Anything that has a good of its own is covered. ¹⁸ Non-biotic things are excluded because, as he sees it, they ‘have no good of their own and so cannot be treated rightly or wrongly’. ¹⁹ The latter grouping includes many parts of what we think of as nature, such as rocks, soil, water and air. On Taylor’s account, they are to be ‘sharply separated from the animals and plants that depend’ on them.

Taylor acknowledges that insofar as animals and plants do depend on such things for their well-being, ‘it may still be the case that moral agents should treat [these things] in a certain way’ in order to fulfil their moral duty. ²⁰ Yet the sharp separation he insists on is misplaced. Many things that are widely seen as inanimate such as rivers, mountains and dirt are actually composed of complex communities of living creatures interacting with non-biotic matter. In practice, the line between biotic and non-biotic parts of nature is more porous than Taylor assumes, and respecting nature will regularly mean extending moral considerability to the simultaneously biotic/non-biotic assemblages that typically compose organisms and ecosystems. We will also need to expand Taylor’s analysis beyond the moral domain so that respect for nature covers political standing and not merely moral considerability. Yet Taylor’s key insight (like Kant’s) is an important one. Respect for nature orients us as human beings in a more than merely instrumental way to a very wide range of non-human beings and things. It means regarding Earth’s non-human parts as entitled to moral and political consideration independently of ‘any instrumental…value’ they may have for us, treating their well-being always also ‘as an end in itself’ and never merely as the means to human ends. ²¹

It is important to see that respecting others always also as ends and never merely as means is not the same thing as respecting them only as ends. The use of other beings and things is a necessary condition of all existence, including human existence. Relationships that combine respect for the other with personal benefit are common among human beings and are unobjectionable in principle. If I employ you on genuinely fair terms and uphold these terms, I am treating you as an end in yourself even though I am also making use of you as a labourer. When we confide in our friends and lean on our family members – or simply enjoy their company – we are benefiting from them. Indeed, it is partly because we expect to benefit in this way that we seek out their company, which means that we are making use of them, although hopefully not in a merely instrumental way. A merely instrumental use would mean satisfying our own purposes without any consideration of their well-being, as in a master’s use of his slave. Slavery is use without respect. Friendship and love involve respectful use, even if they regularly involve unconditional giving as well. In a similar way, respect for nature is in principle compatible with the human use of it. To be sure, the human use of nature, even respectful use, will regularly impose heavy costs on non-human beings and things. We cannot live without eating, or without clothing and sheltering ourselves, all of which involves using nature, and these forms of use ineluctably involve the destruction of plants and non-human animals. Still, we can exercise respect for nature while also making use of it to meet our needs provided that we accept principled constraints on our power of use and that we attend as best we can to nature’s well-being alongside our own. There is no possibility of perfect harmony here, but perfect harmony is not the goal of respect for nature.

Respect so conceived is a way of relating to non-human beings and things that is more than merely instrumental but that does not fetishize nature as untouchable. ²² Not only does human life depend on the use of non-human beings and things but in our age of anthropogenic climate change, there is no longer any nature on this Earth that has not already been touched by us. ²³ Even the most remote parts of the world, which may otherwise retain a pristine wildness, are subject to human influence today, given the ubiquitous effects of our greenhouse gas emissions. A good deal of the non-human world reflects much deeper human influence as well, from the crops and domesticated animals whose gene pools have been shaped by our selective breeding practices to the directly cultivated nature in our urban parks and suburban gardens. The notion that nature should remain untouched, that respect for nature means simply disengaging from it, is antithetical to the human condition and it may also be detrimental to non-human beings and things. As William Cronon has observed, many of our ‘most serious environmental problems start right here, at home, and if we are to solve these problems, we need an environmental ethic that will tell us as much about using nature as about not using it’. ²⁴ This is not to say that wilderness conservation has no place in political respect for nature. ²⁵ The point is that the principle of respect does not imply a strictly hands-off stance toward the non-human world or thorough disengagement from it.

Still, if nature, like other persons, is not fundamentally for us then the exercise of unconstrained, merely instrumentalizing human power over non-human beings and things will be as illegitimate as the exercise of unconstrained, instrumentalizing power over people. To be sure, the specific harms effected by unconstrained power will differ in the case of persons as compared with many other parts of nature. Yet the illegitimacy of power will be the same in the two cases. Nothing has endowed human beings with a legitimate title to dominate nature. Even the Old Testament’s book of Genesis, which is still sometimes invoked to depict the human domination of nature as being underwritten by the authority of God, falls short in this regard. Genesis holds that on the sixth day God made human beings and then granted them ‘dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth’. ²⁶ Yet it envisions human power as subject to the watchful eye of God and answerable to His command. Indeed, many Jews and Christians have interpreted ‘dominion’ in terms of responsible stewardship, even respect, rather than domination, and there is a rich strand of contemporary ecology animated by Biblical faith. ²⁷ In any case, although the Bible continues to be a moral authority for many people today, liberal democratic societies do not accept the Bible as a source of political authority. In liberal democracies, claims of divine right cannot authorize the exercise of public power, including the power that human beings collectively exercise in our relations with nature. In the absence of a legitimate title to dominate non-human beings and things, such use can only constitute a usurpation. Yet this kind of use is the norm today. Nothing runs deeper in us (or most of us living in ‘advanced’ societies) than the assumption that nature is for us. Consequently, political respect for nature requires a deep, even existential, shift in how we understand both nature and ourselves.

The experience of respect: Rupture, epiphany and response

Jacques Derrida’s extended meditation on the experience of being addressed by his cat forcefully captures the depth of this shift and the ‘abyssal rupture’ it may entail. ²⁸ One day while getting dressed Derrida notices his cat sitting in the corner of the room gazing at him. He realizes that the cat is watching him, and he sees her register the fact that he sees her watching. He becomes aware that he is being addressed by her, that he and the cat are inter-acting. Suddenly, he realizes that he is naked, and he finds himself flooded with shame. Why? Surely his nudity means nothing to the cat. As the meditation unfolds, we come to understand that this exchange has exploded the objectifying conceptual frame through which Derrida has always looked at non-human animals. The cat appears to him now not merely as an anonymous instance of the genus ‘cat’ but as a distinctly individuated being, a particular embodied consciousness, an ‘unsubstitutable singularity’. ²⁹ He realizes that she is capable not only of movement but of purposeful action and not only action but also the iterated address and response that constitutes interaction with another. Moreover, her gaze makes him conscious of himself in a new way, aware of ‘the abyssal limit of the human’. ³⁰ Like most of us, his orientation to animals has been a largely instrumentalizing one, a way of looking at non-human others that projects the human self – its needs, desires and purposes – onto them, subsuming the other under this projection of self, and interpellating her/him/it as a mere thing available for use. But ‘the animal that sees me see it seeing me’ is clearly not reducible to me, and it is not a mere thing. ³¹ The radical alterity of the cat as being in this sense ‘wholly other’ stops Derrida in his tracks. ³² This ‘abyssal rupture’ makes him conscious of his limits, his boundedness, because he suddenly feels the force of the feline other as an independent being who exists in herself and for herself rather than simply for him. ³³

The rupture shatters the illusion of the authority that Derrida has always assumed in his relations with animals. This is the source of his shame. It is an emperor-has-no-clothes moment in which he suddenly sees that there is no justification for the ‘subjection of the animal’ to human domination. ³⁴ The very term ‘animal’, with its connotation of inferiority, of brutishness, of thingness available for human use, is nothing more than ‘an appellation that men have instituted, a name they given themselves the right and the authority to give to the living other’. ³⁵ This authority has no objective ground; it is a naked assertion of power, devoid of legitimacy, a usurpation. Derrida’s shame, which is the shattering of his humanist sense of entitlement, is an ethically transformative epiphany. As he puts it, ‘the animal looks at us, and we are naked before it. Thinking perhaps begins there’. ³⁶ This epiphany stimulates ethical consciousness and opens the door to a form of respect for animal others that was not previously possible.

It is true that Derrida himself does not exactly walk through the door that his epiphany opened. As Haraway points out, although Derrida ‘came to the edge of respect’ in his exchange with the cat, he neither tells nor shows us what the practice of respect for non-human animals might involve. ³⁷ The cat’s gaze calls for a response that Derrida fails to provide. Haraway gives him credit for recognizing the ‘absolute alterity’ ³⁸ of the animal other in the sense of acknowledging her more than merely instrumental standing and for resisting the ‘facile and imperialist move of claiming to see from the point of view of the other’, which may inadvertently subsume the other under the mantle of the self. ³⁹ Yet she insists, rightly, that ‘shame is not an adequate response’ to the denuding of human authority brought about by the cat’s gaze. Haraway herself speaks of respect for animal others as a form of responsiveness through work and play ⁴⁰ that is a practice of ‘becoming-with’ them, ⁴¹ a ‘co-constitutive naturalcultural dancing’ among ‘those who look back reciprocally’ at one another. ⁴² To respect is ‘to hold in regard’, as Haraway puts it, to ‘notice, pay attention to’, ⁴³ to be curious about the other’s feelings, actions and thoughts – and responsive to them. ⁴⁴ She gives some examples of scientists who study animals in ways that manifest this respect, and her own work is replete with anecdotes that help to illustrate her vision. ⁴⁵ Still, while respect involves ‘looking back at the other reciprocally’ in the sense of registering and returning a gaze that contains an address, Haraway acknowledges that there is an irreducible asymmetry between people and animals in view of their different ways of being and diverse capacities. ⁴⁶ One implication is that it may be incumbent on people to respond to animals in ways that animals themselves cannot precisely reciprocate or reproduce with one another.

The alterity of the other and the asymmetry of response call to mind Emanuel Levinas, whose phenomenology of ‘facing the other’ inspired Derrida’s meditation on being addressed by his cat. As Derrida notes, Levinas himself paid little attention to the animal gaze. His account of respect as attunement and response to the call of an other is limited to human beings, but the account can be generative for thinking beyond the human. ⁴⁷ For Levinas, ethical subjectivity is constituted in moments of epiphany like the one Derrida describes, in which the subject suddenly finds himself called into question by the face of an other who addresses him. Levinas emphasizes both the alterity and the vulnerability of the other, which he associates with the ‘defenseless eyes’ and the destitution and hunger ⁴⁸ of ‘the poor, the stranger, the widow, the orphan’. ⁴⁹ The face of the other as a site of independent being and irreducible needs is a wake-up call to the previously unreflective subject. The other ‘disturbs the being at home with oneself’ of the subject, the ‘I’. ⁵⁰ Levinas describes this being at home with oneself as a form of ‘egoism’, ⁵¹ a ‘spontaneous freedom’ ⁵² through which the subject projects itself onto the external world without limit, ‘negating or possessing the non-me’. ⁵³ This ‘imperialism’ of the self is a ‘naïve’, unself-conscious exercise of power. ⁵⁴ Levinas calls it freedom, but it locks the subject into a self-referential ‘totality’ ⁵⁵ that is actually a kind of stultified containment, even captivity, one that contrasts with the ‘infinity’ opening to the subject when he welcomes an other who exceeds him and who ‘brings me more than I contain’. ⁵⁶

The face of the other impresses his being upon our consciousness and ‘puts the spontaneous freedom within us into question’, ⁵⁷ generating ‘a critical attitude’ ⁵⁸ that challenges ‘the naïve right of my powers, my glorious spontaneity as a living being’ to use, posses and subsume all that is not me as if it were there for me. ⁵⁹ It makes me aware of myself as a bounded, limited thing, and aware of the other as having an existence that exceeds me. This awareness evacuates of authority my unreflective assumption that the world is there solely for me, that I am entitled to make use of others simply for my own purposes. It generates ethical subjectivity in me because ‘morality begins when freedom, instead of being justified by itself, feels itself to be arbitrary and violent’. ⁶⁰ This ‘shame that freedom feels for itself’ ⁶¹ is the shame that Derrida felt before his cat, whose gaze stripped him of his naïve imperialism of the self (and species), started him thinking and made him acknowledge the emptiness of the presumed right by which people dominate animals.

Two aspects of this Levinasian response to the other are worth highlighting because they take us beyond the Kantian paradigm in a way that can help fill out the notion of respect for nature. The first is the primordial quality of the response as grounded in the alterity of the other; the second is its asymmetry. The response is primordial in the sense that it rests on nothing more than the force of the other’s irreducible alterity. We are called to respond not because we identify with the other, not because we see ourselves in his eyes and not because we recognize some essentially shared experience or common quality between us. ⁶² Levinas insists on the ethically generative quality of the response in this regard, saying that ‘the welcoming of the other, is the ultimate fact’, ⁶³ meaning that it is not dependent on any facts about the other, such as ‘attributes’ that would ‘reduce him to what is common to him and other beings’, including me. ⁶⁴ Nor does the response depend on an independent set of principles or standards of right; no system of ideas underlies the epiphany, according to Levinas. The address of the other simply presents him to us as ‘a nudity’, meaning a being whose existence is irreducible. As Levinas puts it, in addressing me ‘the face has turned to me – and this is its very nudity. It is by itself, and not by reference to a system’. ⁶⁵

It is true that Levinas emphasizes the neediness of the other, referring regularly to vulnerable groups of people, to their ‘defenseless eyes’ ⁶⁶ and to their ‘destitution and hunger’. ⁶⁷ Yet he insists that the epiphany is not dependent on anything in particular about the other aside from his alterity. By addressing me, the simple ‘presentation of being in the face’ of the other, whatever its affective comportment may be, ‘introduces into me what was not in me’ and ‘puts into question the brutal spontaneity’ of my ‘egoism’ as an ‘immanent destiny’. ⁶⁸ In this respect, Levinas’s recurring references to the widow, the orphan and the poor are somewhat misleading. The other need not be suffering in ways I can identify with to elicit in me the epiphany of self-awareness and to generate an ethical response. Still, coming face to face with the suffering of others can be an arresting experience. This is true as much for animal suffering as for human suffering. The lengths to which American society goes to hide from human view the animal suffering that transpires in factory farms, slaughterhouses and animal laboratories is an indicator of just how potent the face of the suffering other can be. It is also an example of how disavowal can obstruct ethical epiphanies that we would rather avoid and block responses that we do not wish to make. Earth others present themselves to us in ways that do not always involve suffering, however. Derrida’s cat, after all, addressed him impassively and in no apparent distress. She disrupted his naïve imperialism of the self simply by making her distinctive being present to him. For those who are attuned to the ‘faces’ of non-human others, a stand of trees or a mountain in repose against the evening sky may also generate an epiphany, making us feel the irreducible alterity of their being and of our ‘emprise’ over them as nothing more than what Levinas calls a ‘usurpation’. ⁶⁹ The primordial quality of the response means that we need not assimilate nature’s various parts to ourselves to feel the force of their presence; we need not make likeness a condition of respect.

To respect nature in a post-Levinasian way is therefore to acknowledge the existence of non-human beings and things as having significance that cannot be captured by their significance for us but it does not require us to specify the content of this remainder. It eschews a merely instrumental orientation to nature without insisting that nature has intrinsic value by virtue of some particular set of attributes or shared characteristics. ⁷⁰ Consequently, we can have different interpretations of nature’s ethical remainder and the basis of its more than merely instrumental standing. Some of us may characterize the remainder in religious terms, as in the idea that creation embodies divine meaning and purpose. Others may see it in aesthetic terms, focusing on the grandeur or sublimity they find in nature. Still others may remain agnostic about the remainder, simply accepting that Earth’s being exceeds its being-for-us without needing to say why. Like respect for persons, respect for nature can be affirmed from a variety of different perspectives, much in the way of a Rawlsian overlapping consensus. ⁷¹ Although there are plenty of comprehensive doctrines in the world today that run counter to respect for nature, many others are compatible with it. The diverse breeds of environmentalists on the contemporary scene, from ecofeminists to conservative Christians to neo-Marxists to green capitalists to Indigenous spiritualists and beyond, are evidence of this diversity. The unspecified quality of the ethical remainder in the other is therefore an advantage rather than a deficit. It can help stabilize the principle of respect in the context of pluralistic societies, where substantial disagreement about ultimate values exists. It also gives the principle travelling power across societies, which is crucial given the global nature of many environmental problems and the need for cooperation among otherwise diverse peoples.

The asymmetry of the response is also important. ‘What I permit myself to demand of myself’ by way of response to the other, Levinas says, ‘is not comparable with what I have the right to demand of the other’. ⁷² There is no assumption that the other will – or even could – repay me in kind. To respond to the other is ‘to give’ as one can, with no strings attached. ⁷³ One gives simply because one is called and one is able. In extending a Levinasian ethos of respect beyond the human, this asymmetry matters in two ways. First, at the individual level, the epiphany attunes my ethical sensibility to the being of the other, but it focuses my practical, action-guiding faculties solely on myself. It tells me nothing about what the other should do, and it gives me no grounds for expectations in this regard. Rather than generating a relation of reciprocity between us in which I could reasonably expect the other to return my respect in kind, it creates a relation of responsiveness that has the character, as Levinas puts it, of a gift. Even as a gift, however, responsiveness is very much an intersubjective, relational experience. A gift is an intervention into an ongoing relationship, after all, intended to generate some kind of reaction on the part of the recipient. This reaction need not take the form of a gift in kind, or even a direct acknowledgment. A gift can elicit a reaction simply through the effects it has on the unfolding relationship between giver and receiver. In the environmental context, this means that although my expression of respect for my cat or the forest behind my house will not be exactly reproduced by them, it will nevertheless shape the continuing context of interactions between us over time, the quality of the relationships through which we affect one another. In this regard, while the asymmetry of respect-as-responsiveness distinguishes it from reciprocity, it remains a deeply relational practice.

Asymmetry matters at the species level as well. The epiphany answers a distinctly human question: What should we do, and how should we live? The ‘we’ is a human one, and our answers to the question are by and for human beings alone. What other beings and things should do, or how Earth systems themselves should behave, is no part of the post-Levinasian ethos of respect. It would be wrong to hold non-human beings and things to the same standards of behaviour that we expect from people. Martha Nussbaum, for example, suggests that non-human animals not only are entitled to be treated justly by human beings but should be made to act justly themselves through ‘the gradual formation of an interdependent world in which all species will enjoy cooperative and mutually supportive relations with one another’. She acknowledges that ‘nature is not that way and never has been’, but she insists that this fact ‘calls, in a very general way, for the gradual supplanting of the natural by the just’. ⁷⁴ Yet part of respecting nature is allowing non-human beings and things to be who and what they are, not trying to make them like us. In this sense, the asymmetry of the post-Levinasian approach makes it a human-centred view but not exactly an anthropocentric one. The approach is not anthropocentric because it does not see the value of all things as being reducible to human use-value. Nor does it assimilate all things to a human standard, insisting on likeness or commonality with the human as a condition of moral and political standing. And it asks us to be open to learning about – and learning from – other beings and things so as to make new forms of relationship with them, and new ways of being human, possible over time. In all these ways, it asks us to reach beyond the confines of our habitual self- and species-referentiality. A post-Levinasian respect for nature is therefore non-anthropocentric even as it is also human-centred.

One might wonder whether all non-human others have a ‘face’ in the sense of being able to address us in ways that inspire epiphany and response, given that the communicative capacities required to make an address are not shared by all things. ⁷⁵ A cat who can form conscious purposes and communicate her intentions to us (‘Let me out the door’, ‘Feed me’, ‘Let’s play’, etc.) addresses us in ways that a forest or a river cannot do. The cat also can experience suffering that is not open to things that lack sentience. Still, forests and rivers are assemblages of countless non-human beings and things that affect and are affected by us. Their existence erupts into our consciousness in all kinds of ways, as when a breeze carries the scent of pine or the sound of birdsong from a nearby forest, or when the river behind us overspills its banks, flooding our homes and fields. These eruptions differ from a conscious, purposive address. Yet they do present the being of others to us in ways that convey information about their status and that can be transformative for us if we are receptive to them. Indeed, they can function much like the address of a human or animal other, enlarging our own subjectivity by ‘introduc[ing] into me what was not in me’ and ‘put[ting] into question the brutal spontaneity’ of my ‘egoism’ as an ‘immanent destiny’. ⁷⁶ The face of a river or a forest can stimulate the epiphany that makes us mindful of others in their irreducible alterity, meaning their other-than-us, the fact that their existence cannot be fully captured by what they can do for us. In addition to animals, then, non-human things can be catalysts for the emergence of ethical sensibility, for self-consciousness about our limits and shame about our usurpations and hence for respect for nature as self-restraint and responsiveness.

If non-human beings and things can be catalysts for ethical epiphany, however, in practice they regularly fail to generate the response that Levinas depicts. Of course, the same is often true for the people who address us. Levinas formulated his account of the face, the epiphany and the response in the aftermath of the Holocaust. As a European Jew who lived through World War II, he knew that the address of the other frequently fails to elicit a response, and he saw how destructive disavowal can be. Yet if he was alive to the limits of the face as a catalyst for ethical response, he offers few political resources for attenuating these limits. We very much need political resources today. Our current condition is one of overwhelming disavowal of non-human others. ⁷⁷ We are so steeped in a mentality of human exceptionalism, species superiority and the instrumentalization of nature that we have made ourselves blind and deaf to the addresses of non-human beings and things. Perhaps this collective disavowal helps explain the truncated trajectory of Derrida’s interaction with his cat. Seized by his cat’s gaze, he had enough awareness to recognize the address as calling for a response but he remained too trapped within ‘his textual canon of Western philosophy and literature’, as Harraway puts it, to actually respond. ⁷⁸ To bring respect for nature into being, we need to insist on it as a political imperative and to actively cultivate it through our political institutions and public practices. This means constituting robust political protections for nature alongside our protections for people, and it means promoting responsiveness to non-human others as part of the political ethos and public culture of democratic citizenship.

Practicing political respect

Political respect for nature puts us into political community with non-human beings and things, but in extending the boundaries of political community in this way, it also transforms the meaning of political community. In the centuries since the Age of Revolution when democratic political forms began to overturn the hierarchical orders of the old regime in Europe and the Americas, political equality conceived as the same set of rights and duties for all members of the polity has come to be seen as the only legitimate meaning of political community. The identification of political community with political equality was an important step in the historical break from the old regime with its many forms of domination, and equality among persons remains crucial today as a central element of political community. At the same time, it constitutes a roadblock to the forms of political imagination that are now needed to effectively address our environmental problems, and it is an obstacle to creating political communities that are more emancipatory for both people and the Earth. We do need to insist on political equality for people, albeit in the nuanced, difference-respecting forms that many feminists, disability theorists and colonized indigenous peoples have called for. Yet we need to combine political equality for people with forms of political inclusion for non-human nature that allow differentiation in the rights and responsibilities of membership. It makes no sense to ask cows and rainforests to obey the law, or cast a ballot on election day, or pay taxes, or deliberate with others while respecting their rights, but this fact should not preclude us from extending political consideration to cows and rainforests. Respect for nature requires us to constrain our action with reference to the well-being of non-human others and to formally incorporate responsiveness to their well-being into our political decision-making. It means that there are principled limits to what we may do to cows and rainforests and that their well-being must be part of the discussion when we make collective decisions about, for example, animal agriculture or resource extraction. In this way, it reflects the basic liberal and democratic idea that the power of individuals and groups should never be unlimited but is legitimately constrained by the well-being of others.

Familiar mechanisms such as rights and political representation, which formally establish respect for persons, can help us institutionalize respect for nature too. Various approaches to rights and representation for non-human nature have been pursued in recent years, including offices of animal and environmental welfare, proxy representation for endangered species or habitats in local decision-making bodies and constitutional protections and legal standing for animals and the environment. ⁷⁹ Such mechanisms are crucial resources for securing respect as the structural conditions of non-domination. ⁸⁰ In addition to the structural role they play, rights and representation also can help foster a political ethos of respect. For example, to be a holder of rights is to be publicly recognized as having worth and dignity that is independent of one’s use-value or benefit to others. ⁸¹ This recognition has both a ‘legal-operational’ side and a ‘cultural-psychological’ one, as Christopher Stone puts it. ⁸² It simultaneously structures the objective context of our relationships with others and shapes our subjective experience of how we see and value them. As Stone points out, in contemporary democratic societies, it is difficult for us to conceive of something that lacks rights as anything other than a thing available for our use. ⁸³ Granting rights can therefore be a powerful engine of cultural reform as well as legal change insofar as it reconstructs the perceptions and public practices that instrumentalize particular others. Historically, as Stone shows, ‘each successive extension of rights to some new entity has been, theretofore, a bit unthinkable’, but in each case, the extension of rights eventually transformed how other people saw the rights-holders. ⁸⁴ Over time, what became unthinkable was that those groups had ever been denied rights, that it had once seemed reasonable that they should be treated as the mere instruments of other people’s wills.

Stone argues forcefully on these grounds for the extension of certain rights to non-human beings and things. Nature should not have all the rights – or the same rights – that people have, as he acknowledges, but he makes a good case for thinking that appropriate sets of rights for some non-human beings and things are a necessary step not only in establishing non-domination in a structural sense but in cultivating respect for nature as a shared political ethos. ⁸⁵ Like rights, political representation also nourishes the more-than-merely instrumental status of those it covers. It signals the public expectation that their well-being is to count with others, that it may reasonably constrain political decision-making and state action as well as the behaviour of individual citizens. Thus, rights and representation can help support political respect for nature not only by establishing basic protections for nature in the laws that constitute the political community but also by enshrining them at the core of citizenship and embedding them in the reigning political ethos and public culture. ⁸⁶ Rights and representation are not by themselves enough – even in the case of people – to guarantee an emancipatory politics of non-domination. Indeed, both can be misused and both can generate unintended consequences. We will therefore need to pursue these mechanisms in a critical way that is sensitive to how they can fail to achieve their desired ends and is ready to respond accordingly. ⁸⁷

The practice of political respect for nature poses substantial challenges. For one thing, the category of nature is large and diverse, including non-human life forms together with the material entities and ecosystems that sustain them. Given this diversity, conflicts are endemic. In practicing respect for nature, we may find that mitigating our impact on certain non-human beings and things causes unavoidable harm to others. In seeking to limit our harmful effects, then, the practice of respect will sometimes require us to mediate between the needs of different organisms, and sometimes it will require mediating between the well-being of non-human individuals and that of species and ecosystems. For example, human development has led to the near extinction of caribou in Canada and the northern United States. Anthropogenic factors have also contributed to a rise in the wolf population in that area, and the wolves are rapidly eradicating the last of the caribou. To mitigate this human disruption to the ecosystem, government-paid hunters have begun to cull individual wolves. ⁸⁸ They are right to do so, but respect requires that they minimize the suffering of the individual animals they kill and that they watch for and respond to unintended harms that may accrue to local packs.

Then too, some species and ecosystems are more central to the flourishing of life on Earth than others, and we may have reason to prioritize their well-being over that of more marginal things when unavoidable conflicts arise in the context of efforts to remediate our effects. For instance, Aldo Leopold’s description of land as ‘a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants, and animals’ reminds us just how much life depends on ‘the microscopic flora and fauna of the soil’. ⁸⁹ These tiny beings determine the land’s fertility, the ‘ability of soil to receive, store, and release energy’ into the food chains that sustain other species and broader ecosystems. ⁹⁰ In practicing respect for nature, we may sometimes need to give priority, in working to mitigate our own effects, to parts of the Earth on which many other beings and things depend. In navigating conflicts like these, we will need to use our best judgment, drawing on the most reliable information available and ameliorating our harm as far as possible. Still, such conflicts will rarely be resolved without remainder, given the complexity of ecosystems and the diversity of interests within nature.

Respect for nature will also put pressure on human interests. How are we to navigate this kind of conflict? Does respect require us to protect the well-being of bacteria and viruses that are deadly to us? Does it demand that we forsake our own security, our comfort, our prosperity? Respect is a principle for regulating human life in relation to others, meaning that human life is a condition of its possibility. Consequently, respect cannot require action that would systematically undermine the survival of our species or make it impossible to meet basic human needs. Just as the principle of respect for persons allows for acts of self-defence, respect for nature is compatible with efforts to protect ourselves from pests and predators – and compatible more generally with the conditions of our own well-being. Indeed, respect for nature must be practiced in ways that are consistent with respect for persons, including respect for human rights. Yet if the two forms of respect can put pressure on one another, they are also mutually reinforcing in certain ways. Among other things, persons with human rights are better positioned to be able to practice political respect for nature. Their rights empower them politically, economically and socially to insist on environmental protections and to demand that their societies foster sustainability. Likewise, where animal and Earth rights are strong, practices such as toxic dumping and resource depletion are more difficult for large corporations and governments to get away with. Even when nature is the direct object of their protection, they also indirectly protect people.

Still, conflicts between human interests and the well-being of nature will regularly arise. Respect for nature requires us to make difficult distinctions between important human needs and superfluous human desires. Feeding, clothing and housing ourselves are basic needs and justifiable enterprises, compatible in principle with respect for nature, but unlimited consumerism, profit-driven extractivism and cruelty are not. Moreover, while a secure and comfortable life is a perfectly legitimate aim for human beings to have, the unlimited growth of the human population is an illegitimate imposition on other life forms. A human population that exceeds the carrying capacity of the Earth puts the satisfaction of even basic human needs systematically at odds with the well-being of non-human beings and things and necessarily causes avoidable harm to them, effectively instrumentalizing them for human purposes. ⁹¹ The distinction between legitimate human aims and superfluous desires is not something that can be specified once and for all in the abstract. It is properly subject to contestation, and we will need to look beyond the principle of respect for nature to resolve disputes when they arise. An eco-politics that incorporates respect for nature will put this contestation at the centre of public debate and decision-making; it will be a constitutive feature of the political community.

Even when we have good reason to consider something a substantial threat or to regard a particular use of nature as legitimate, we should be careful in how we manage the threat and attentive in how we carry out the use. Things that are threats to us may be important food sources for other animals, or otherwise contribute to the health of ecosystems. And the effort to eradicate a pest can pose risks to other living things, as when the indiscriminate use of pesticides contributes to the collapse of bee colonies. Our ecological knowledge is in its infancy; we should always assume that there is more to the picture than we can presently see, and act accordingly. ⁹² Likewise, we could meet our needs and satisfy many of our desires through forms of use that are far less destructive of Earth systems than is our current practice. Respect for nature does not preclude the defence of basic human interests or the protection of human rights, then. It does allow for human beings to defend ourselves and to provide for our own well-being, even when this requires the sacrifice of non-human beings and things. What it rules out is the unreflective destruction of nature in reaction to the inconveniences that life in a biotic community inevitably imposes on all its members or for the purpose of satisfying endless consumerist desires and the boundless pursuit of profit. Respect asks us instead to bring a more discriminating sensibility to the pursuit of our own well-being and to pair it with responsiveness to the well-being of others.

It bears repeating that the use of non-human beings and things is a necessary condition of human existence, as of all existence. This use regularly, ineluctably involves destruction and violence. Even the most sustainable way of life embodying the greatest respect for nature would require the continuing sacrifice of many Earth others. Facing up to this inevitability is sobering. It can easily generate guilt and even paralysis. Guilt and paralysis need to be resisted, however, both because we cannot avoid impacting the Earth and because they are deeply disabling in the context of environmental politics. Yet we ought not disavow the sacrifices we impose on nature either. Knowing that we cannot avoid harming non-human others too easily allows us to disavow our harm, or rationalize unlimited harm, including harm driven not by the basic terms of human well-being but by proliferating, superfluous human desires. We need to actively counter our tendency to disavow the sacrifices that human existence inevitably imposes on nature but without being paralyzed by the scope of our impact; navigating this fraught terrain is part of practicing political respect for nature.

One way to resist disavowal without generating paralysis is through public rituals of mourning and memorialization. Such rituals simultaneously mark a loss or sacrifice and embody a collective commitment, as Josiah Ober puts it, to ‘go on together as a polity in the face of [that] loss’. ⁹³ Recent work in political theory has demonstrated the long-standing and very central place of public mourning in democracy from Pericles’s funeral oration in ancient Athens to the AIDS quilt, the 9/11 memorial and street theatre in Black Lives Matter protests. ⁹⁴ The right kinds of speeches, memorials and rituals can simultaneously be a salve for grief and an acknowledgment of accountability that spurs critical reflection and sometimes collective transformation. The AIDS quilt, which began traveling the United States for display in public spaces in 1987, is a good example. Conceived as a public expression of sadness for the many people who had died of the disease, it was also intended to make American citizens more aware of stigma and bias against gay people – and to generate political and cultural change. As one activist put it, the quilt was ‘a weapon to deploy against the government; to shame them with stark visual evidence of their utter failure to respond to the suffering and death that spread and increased with every passing day’. The quilt was therefore ‘both a memorial – and a call to action’. ⁹⁵ It was meant to express grief but also to transform the country’s political ethos and public culture.

The public mourning most often discussed in democratic theory today is of course limited to the mourning of human losses, meaning sacrifices imposed on human beings and on the polity conceived as an exclusively human community. Because so many of us fail to recognize the sacrifices we impose on nature as ethically and politically significant losses, part of the work of public mourning in this context must be to establish for nature the condition that Judith Butler calls ‘grievability’. ⁹⁶ Mourning speeches, monuments and rituals do more than simply call attention to losses for which the polity already feels grief; they can also call forth grief by marking certain losses as publicly significant and worthy of regret. The AIDS quilt identified people with AIDS for the first time as publicly grievable and entitled to collective response. Moreover, even as the quilt was a reminder of the losses suffered by those with AIDS and an effort to hold the country accountable for its bias against gay people, the quilt also called for a public commitment to go forward together on more inclusive terms.

A more recent public memorial – this one for a tree – suggests how we might begin to make use of public mourning to both express and catalyse a political ethos of respect for nature. On 27 April 2018, roughly 30 members of the Brown University community, including faculty, students, university chaplains and groundskeepers, gathered under the massive canopy of the 110-year old Angell Street beech tree to hold its funeral. The tree was slated to be cut down over the summer to make room for a new performing arts centre. A faculty member from the History Department, whose office looked into the branches of the tree, decided that its life and death needed to be publicly memorialized. The service she organized included readings from the Bible and the Koran as well as some poems, a Chinese proverb and excerpts from the writings of Thoreau, John Muir and the German forester Peter Wohlleben. Along with sadness about its imminent demise, people expressed gratitude for the tree’s long life, for its cooling shade in summer, for the habitat it provided to birds and other things and for its sheer beauty. The service also included reflections on the university’s decision to destroy the tree, noting other exceptional trees taken down over the years to make way for new buildings and criticizing the university’s repeated failure to plan its development in ways that would accommodate such trees or at least protect spaces where replacement trees planted today could grow to maturity over time. One could sense a bit of self-consciousness in the crowd – a funeral for a tree! But there was also a palpable desire to forge a new kind of relationship between people and the Earth, one premised on respect rather than disavowal. Like the AIDS quilt, the memorial service for the Angell Street beech captured the powerful way that public mourning can mark a particular loss or sacrifice as grievable, generate reflection on collective accountability for the loss and catalyse a forward-looking public commitment to create more respectful political practices going forward.

So along with rights and representation, ritualized practices of public mourning and appreciation can help us practice political respect for nature. When we cannot avoid damaging nature to meet our legitimate needs, respect requires us to recognize rather than disavow the damage and to publicly acknowledge both the loss itself and our role in it, however unavoidable this role may have been. It also elicits collective reflection on the conditions that made the loss unavoidable and invites us to reimagine – and where possible to reconstruct – those conditions. Public mourning is another way of ‘facing’ others in Levinas’s sense because it means insisting on their considerability even when we find ourselves having to harm them. It also offers an alternative to paralysis, a means for going forward in good faith even as we acknowledge the costs to non-human others that our life on Earth inevitably exacts.

Public mourning can be misused, of course. If it is invoked simply to appease a guilty conscience without generating critical reflection, it will not serve political respect for nature. Moreover, it should be balanced with public rituals that attune us to nature’s vitality and not only its destruction. Earth Day is too generic to do much work in this regard at present, but it could be enhanced by the addition of more concrete holidays and festivals that makes us conscious of particular parts of nature and their ways of life. Perhaps alongside the local Octoberfest, we might have festivals marking the annual migrations of birds or (in coastal communities) the hatching of sea turtles. We have public holidays and rituals to remind us about the founding of the country, about our veterans, past presidents and most important political activists, even about our mothers and fathers. They stimulate awareness of our debts to others and the sacrifices they have made and are occasions for expressing collective appreciation. Public rituals that attune us to non-human beings and things, acknowledge our dependence on them and express appreciation for both their sacrifices and their vitality could be a valuable way to practice and to nourish respect for nature.

In practicing respect, we must be mindful of the different subject positions we inhabit and the attenuations of agency they may imply. True, the large literature documenting the environmentalism of the poor demonstrates that people who are impoverished and politically marginalized can be effective practitioners of respect for nature and powerful agents of environmental change. ⁹⁷ Indeed, wealthy societies have much to learn from the environmentalism of the poor and from the varieties of human/more-than-human relations found outside the ‘developed’ world. Still, where people find themselves trapped in poverty with the only available jobs requiring them to engage in harmful resource extraction, for instance, or when the only food and clothing they can afford to buy are produced through practices that torture animals and poison the Earth, they will need help in addressing the broader political, economic and social conditions that constrain their agency. This consideration has implications for the accountability of individual agents within particular societies, given their distinctive dynamics of inequality, but it also applies at the global level. Wealthy societies bear a special responsibility for supporting environmental action. This means not only practicing political respect for nature themselves but also promoting changes that can empower those in other countries to practice political respect as well – for example, by helping to pay for green technologies that would enable poor countries to pursue development in genuinely sustainable ways.

Conclusions

So political respect for nature means establishing principled constraints on human power in relation to non-human beings and things, and it means making this power responsive to nature’s well-being as well as our own. There will be plenty of conflicts and competing interests here, some of them irreducible. Respect for nature is not a solution to these conflicts but an ethical and political approach to navigating them. It asks us to treat human needs and interests as parts of a larger whole that has value, rather than as trump cards, as the only things with value. To interrupt the destructive dynamics of our environmental domination, we need to establish respect for nature in the political institutions that govern our collective life and to affirm it as a public ethos that is authoritative for us, even imperative for us, as democratic citizens. Respect for nature needs real politics, meaning the backing of legal rights and institutional representation as well as the collective action embodied in public rituals of mourning and appreciation. These changes are tremendously demanding, and the challenges can be overwhelming. Still, we should remember that large-scale transformations have happened before. Christianity once was new, after all. Capitalism too once did not exist. Human rights, representative democracy and the idea of the intrinsic dignity of the person all had to be invented. This is not a triumphalist narrative; not all these developments have been simply positive, not by a long shot. The point is the scale of the changes they have generated. The transformation that we need today is every bit as deep and wide as those transformations were, but it is also just as possible. Political respect for nature will not solve all our environmental problems, but it is an important part – and it is an attainable part – of building a better future for all of us who make the Earth our home.