K. Deluca: ‘Thinking With Heidegger: Rethinking Environmental Theory and Practice’

Kevin Michael Deluca’s article on “Rethinking Environmental Theory and Practice” is self-evidently an excellent resource for anyone interested in environmentalism or at all concerned with ecological perception. In this essay, Deluca puts Heidegger’s writings on technology in the context of environmental political strategy in order to ask what it would mean to make Being-in-the-World our fundamental way of relating with the world via environmentalism. Deluca characterizes this shift in thinking as a “Copernican” catalyst, a way of critiquing environmentalism in the most fundamental way.

Deluca begins by establishing the state of present-day environmentalism as a “tired” institution within our culture, equating it with other “marginal special interest groups” and ultimately reducing it to just another form of consumerism. This felt to me like a fairly large claim to make straightaway, however he proceeds to persuasively argue the anthropocentric foundation of environmentalism: “Humans act to save the object earth and, fundamentally, this action is motivated by the subject’s self-interest” (72). A common justification for saving rainforests, to cite Deluca’s example, is to preserve the medicinal cures found within that ecosystem. Earth First! uses the metaphor of humanity as a cancer on the planet, separate and distinct from nature in and of itself, yet this distinction ensures that the various dichotomies of “subject-object,” “human-animal,” “culture-nature,” and “civilization-wilderness” remain a permanent part of the environmental paradigm. Most environmental organizations, Deluca says, are trapped in the Cartesian ontology that alienates humanity from the natural world (71). He uses Heidegger’s emphasis on technology and the way in which it mediates human-nature relations to question these foundations.

In citing Heidegger’s criticism of Cartesian ontology, Deluca illustrates the measurable and mathematical realm perceived and promoted by the environmental movement. The dangerous result of a Cartesian approach, in Heidegger’s words, is that “the kind of Being which belongs to sensuous perception is obliterated, and so is any possibility that the entities encountered in such perception should be grasped in their Being” (Heidegger 1962, 130). Heidegger concludes by stating that our relation with the world is never a matter of “to” but “in,” that humanity is not a subject separate from the world but remains always within the world (74). This is a very different trajectory from the mechanistic addiction to technology that largely determines the way people live in and look at the world. Deluca defines machination as “unconditional controllability, the domination of all beings, the world, and earth through calculation, acceleration, technicity, and giganticism” (75). This mechanistic logic values plants and animals only by their usefulness to humans: “What is a plant and an animal to us anymore, when we take away use, embellishment, and entertainment” (Heidegger 1999, 194). And nature, too, is seen only as a “standing reserve…a calculable coherence of forces” (Heidegger 1993, 322, 326).

Through use of the media and communication industry and self-promotion through political lobbying and money-raising, environmentalism “implicates and imbricates” itself in the “technosphere” (78). Environmentalism’s reliance on images and pictures in order to “enframe the world” exemplifies Deluca’s critique of the human-nature distinction. This tactic of persuasion not only depends on technology (which is used as a means of control or domination rather than, from a Heideggarian perspective, “a way of revealing”), but it further instills the mechanistic logic that traps humans here and puts nature over there. Throughout the history of environmentalism, pictures have played a huge role in preserving the notion of wilderness as something pristine and unspoiled by human habitation, prompting millions of Americans to visit national parks and picturesque points such as Yosemite or the Grand Canyon, locations that evoke the untouched wild. The very attitude of eco-tourism is embodied by the slogan, “Leave nothing but footprints, take nothing but pictures.” This image-driven strategy promotes “a wilderness vision that prevents even the possibility of human-wilderness engagement… The subject that has reduced the world to object is, in turn, reduced to tourist, to sightseer” (84).

I found Deluca’s emphasis on image-based environmentalism in this essay particularly effective. Human alienation from the natural world is a topic of great importance to me (and John very deftly assigned me an author quite fitting to my interests), thus Deluca’s work resonated with me in an extremely satisfying way. For anyone interested in the human-subject/world-object dichotomy, William Cronon’s article “The Trouble With Wilderness” comes to a very similar conclusion with regard to our relation with the world. Also, a book called “The Spell of the Sensuous” by David Abram is an intriguing read for anyone interested in ecophenomenology and the influence of language upon world-perception.

Deluca, Kevin Michael. “Thinking with Heidegger: Rethinking Environmental Theory and Practice.” pp 67-87. “Ethics and the Environment.” Indiana University Press. 2005.