Orr’s “Love It or Lose It: The
Coming Biophilia Revolution”
HMXP 102
Adapted from Dr. Fike’s slideshow
David W. Orr
• Orr is the chair of the Environmental Studies
Program at Oberlin College in Ohio.
• He gives dozens of lectures around the country
every year on environmental issues.
• His paternal grandfather was Rev. W.W. Orr of
Charlotte, NC.
Source: http://www.oberlin.edu/newsinfo/98sep/orr_profile.html
Biophobia
• How does Orr define biophobia?
• What characteristics of biophobia does
Orr list?
Characteristics of Biophobia
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
The world is not “alive and worthy of respect, if not
fear.”
Distance yourself from animals (“mere machines”).
Have no sympathy for nature: think of it only in
scientific and economic terms.
Join power, money, knowledge in order to make nature
useful.
Stress improvement and “perpetual economic growth.”
Cultivate dissatisfaction that can be alleviated only by
“mass consumption.”
World Views
• The next few slides help you explore WHY
we arrived at the six characteristics of
biophobia.
Re. #2: René Descartes
(1596-1650)
• Al Gore, Earth in the Balance: "The Cartesian approach to the
human story allows us to believe that we are separate from the
earth, entitled to view it as nothing more than an inanimate
collection of resources that we can exploit however we like; and this
fundamental misperception has led us to our current crisis.”
• “One of the deepest and most lasting legacies of Descartes’
philosophy is his thesis that mind and body are really distinct--a
thesis now called ‘mind-body dualism.’ He reaches this conclusion
by arguing that the nature of the mind (that is, a thinking, nonextended thing) is completely different from that of the body (that is,
an extended, non-thinking thing), and therefore it is possible for one
to exist without the other.”
• Source: http://www.iep.utm.edu/d/descmind.htm
Homology
Descartes Environment
Mind:body::humans:nature
POINT: There is disconnection on each
side of the homology. What Descartes
says about mind and body also applies to
humans and nature.
Re. #4: Francis Bacon
(1561-1626)
• “Francis Bacon provided the logic, and the evolution of
government-funded research did the rest.”
• “To take the place of the established tradition (a
miscellany of Scholasticism, humanism, and natural
magic), he proposed an entirely new system based
on empirical and inductive principles and the active
development of new arts and inventions, a system
whose ultimate goal would be the production of
practical knowledge for ‘the use and benefit of men’
and the relief of the human condition.”
• Source: http://www.iep.utm.edu/b/bacon.htm
Re. #1, 3, 5, and 6: Consumerism
• What do you make of the obvious connection to Swimme, “the
sophisticated cultivation of dissatisfaction”?
• Swimme: “But at a deeper level, what we need to confront is a
power of the advertiser to promulgate a worldview, a minicosmology, that is based upon dissatisfaction and craving” (112).
• Orr:
– “Sixth, biophobia required the sophisticated cultivation of
dissatisfaction, which could be converted into mass consumption.”
– “Beneath each of these endeavors lies a barely concealed contempt for
unaltered life and nature, as well as contempt for the people who are
expected to endure the mistakes, purchase the results, and live with the
consequences, whatever those may be. It is a contempt disguised by
terms of bamboozlement, like bottom line, progress, needs, costs and
benefits, economic growth, jobs, realism, research, and knowledge,
words that go undefined and unexplained.
– People “must come to see their bondage as freedom and their
discontents as commercially solvable problems.”
A Troubling Contrast
• What metaphors besides "board feet, tons,
barrels, yield," etc. do we use to talk about
nature? Can you come up with others?
• What does Orr say about “stewardship”?
• What metaphors are more in line with
stewardship?
Sample Nature Metaphors
• Here are some areas (nouns and adjectives) to
get you started.
–
–
–
–
–
–
Garden
Resource
Divine
Wilderness
Pristine
Female
• Source:
http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~amerstu/ce/summer9
7/ta/Metaphors.html
Question
• How can we be good stewards of nature
when we have the wrong metaphors to
describe our relationship to it?
• Perhaps by changing our metaphors:
– Argument as war vs. argument as dance (Lakoff and
Johnson, page 8)
– Our relationship to nature is USE vs. our relationship
to nature is ____________.
A Further Problem
• Not only metaphor is off. In addition, we
tell ourselves the wrong myths about
nature:
• What kind of myths do we have about
nature? Cf. Gore’s emphasis on “story.”
Paul Bunyan and Babe
Paul Bunyan
Paul Bunyan
• Source for the previous two slides:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Paul_Bunyan_and_Ba
be_statues_Bemidji_Minnesota_crop.JPG
Myths About Man and Nature
• http://youtube.com/watch?v=M3l2a_ESwP
c
• http://youtube.com/watch?v=zZp2JcmUU6
o
• http://youtube.com/watch?v=D_45epTAZL
g
• http://youtube.com/watch?v=DvVRMrUYv
Ys
• http://youtube.com/watch?v=o-Y0Az-4wUg
The Upshot
• “Biophobia sets into motion a vicious
cycle…”: This sentence describes the
notion of “feedback loop.” The idea is that
a biophobic orientation feeds itself.
• Fortunately, that would probably work for
biophilia as well.
The Other Orientation: Biophilia
• How does Orr define Biophilia?
• We will be reading Naess’s text soon. In it the
author speaks of “deep ecology.” see next slide
Deep Ecology
• Deep ecology is a recent branch of ecological philosophy
(ecosophy) that considers humankind as an integral part of its
environment. It places more value on other species, ecosystems
and processes in nature than is allowed by established
environmental and green movements, and therefore leads to a new
system of environmental ethics. The core principle of deep ecology
as originally developed is Naess's doctrine of biospheric
egalitarianism — the claim that all living things have the same
right to live and flourish — a principle which, after criticism, has
been substantially qualified (see Naess 1989). Deep ecology
describes itself as "deep" because it is concerned with
fundamental philosophical questions about the role of human
life as one part of the ecosphere, rather than with a narrow view of
ecology as a branch of biological science, and aims to avoid merely
utilitarian environmentalism.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_ecology
Topophilia: An Extension
of Biophilia
• loving the setting that is familiar to us.
• And there is hope in doing so because we
want to preserve what we love.
• What is the relationship between
topophilia and biophilia? Can there be
one without the other?
Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas
• Does the principle of repression apply to
environmentalism? If we continue to repress nature, will
it bite us on the backside?
• Here is Jesus, speaking in the Gospel of Thomas: “If
you bring forth what is within you, what you bring
forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is
within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy
you.” Is this true or false as regards the environment?
• Cf. technology in the Aliens movies. The monster is the
thing that is repressed.
Lewis Thomas, “Antaeus in
Manhattan”
• “But I think it was chiefly the plastic [that
was at fault in the death of the ant colony
on display in Manhattan], which seems to
me the most unearthly of all man’s
creations so far. I do not believe you can
suspend army ants away from the earth,
on plastic, for any length of time. They will
lose touch, run out of energy, and die for
lack of current” (The Lives of a Cell 26).
C.G. Jung, CW 10, 882/466-67
• “Yet the danger that faces us today is that the
whole of reality will be replaced by words. This
accounts for that terrible lack of instinct in
modern man, particularly the city-dweller. He
lacks all contact with the life and breath of
nature. He knows a rabbit or a cow only from
the illustrated paper, the dictionary, or the
movies, and thinks he knows what it is really
like—and is then amazed that cowsheds ‘smell,’
because the dictionary didn’t say so.”
END