Expansive Concern: Environmentalism and The Good Life

In this post I want to articulate how it is that human beings, uniquely among animals, cares for and should care for creation as a whole and without direct regard for our own well being. To do this, I want to argue that we posses what I call "expansive concern." Thus, in this post, I hope to articulate my concept of expansive concern and argue that we possess it.

Expansive concern is concern which is able to regard any subject, as well as elements of the natural world, as possessing value in itself. Notice that this is similar to what I have already claimed for humans as selves, that we are able to recognize other selves as selves, and thus are able to recognize that others have their own value by recognizing that arguments we make for our own value applies to others as correlates of worlds just as well as to ourselves. Thus, in this post, I need to show how our concern expands beyond other selves.

To do this, I need to return to the concept of culture. Just as selves emerge from living bodies, so culture emerges from a natural world. The natural world is something of an abstraction, just as our living bodies are. We never encounter either one by itself, apart from their respective subjective phenomena. That is, we never encounter living human bodies except as selves or latent selves. We never encounter nature except as it has come to be entangled with culture.

Culture is a very broad term here. It includes phenomena which one might not think of as cultural, such as our natural appreciation for exercise. Culture covers the whole terrain of how we as societies value the world around us. The imagery which we have drawn from and laid over nature is a key part of culture. The ways in which weather evokes emotions and associations in us is a cultural phenomenon, whether or not it varies from culture to culture.

As I write this, it is snowing outside. Winter has a variety of connotations, whether of hardship and desolation, of curling up by a fire with a good book, or of an adventure in a transfigured world. Snow, by itself, has further connotations of purity or, in a blizzard, of isolation and stranding. These are cultural connotations. However, these are also based in how winter is and what snow is like. Winter is cold, it freezes the ground, it keeps one inside. Snow is opaque and among the whitest things in nature. We do not merely impose ideas and values on nature, but engage nature in such a way that it has values for us.

All of this is to make the point that culture stands on material and natural conditions. To alter the environment is to alter that upon which culture stands. To fail to care about what happens to nature is like failing to care about what happens to one's body. It is a mistake which relies on a kind of Gnostic or Platonic aversion to the body in favor of an immaterial soul. The value of sociality thus grounds a concern for the environment because to act sustainably with respect to culture requires one to act sustainably with respect to the environment.