Dr Robbie Nicol

Sitting amongst the lush, flowering machair, this rare European habitat, I find time and space to ponder.  The vast expanse of sandy beach below is empty of people who will no doubt appear a little later given the sunny forecast. For the moment I have the place to myself and the rising sun provides intermittent pulses of warmth and welcome relief from the chilly early morning air. A light south-westerly wind ruffles the papers beside me. One of these is David Farrier’s earlier blog on this site and I am fascinated by the question ‘what is the role of emotion in environmental ethics’? My own interest in this question is the extent to which experiences in the outdoors, and their dependence on direct encounters of land and waterscapes, can provide moral impulses for people to live more sustainable lives.  As an educator and academic my professional life at the University is spent developing educational responses (perhaps ‘interventions’ is a more appropriate word) to this intriguing issue.

The machair itself provides some guidance in responding to David’s question.  The understanding of substances, their properties and composition (chemistry) helps us understand how the shell-bearing sand created lime-rich fertile soil conditions. Botany helps with the identification of the variety of plant species currently surrounding me. History provides a record of how people came to farm this land, and from which, in the 18^th Century, some of them came to be ‘cleared’ to make way for more profitable sheep. These snippets of information provide valuable knowledge of this landscape.

Creating bodies of knowledge in this way has been a cornerstone of academia as we, the world’s human inhabitants, have striven to understand our surroundings.  However, thinking of knowledge in this way is part of a bigger problem.  The environmental philosopher Andrew Brennan has written about the divisions which compartmentalise subject based curricula and how this leads to divisions in the way people think and make sense of the world.  So, when I look at the machair surrounding me I do not really see chemistry here, biology there and history somewhere else. The danger of ‘reducing’ the land and seascape in this way is that we separate strands of knowledge that are in fact related.  It is perhaps more because of institutional convenience (i.e. the way we have organised our school and educational systems) rather than philosophical principles that things have turned out this way.  However, the fact that we have already done so means we run the risk of failing to understand the planet as an integrated whole.  (Note: In passing it is worth noting that the Global Environment and Society Academy, GESA, is itself an institutional response to provide a forum for interdisciplinary thinking and action.)

There is a further danger that scientists (social and natural) are intimately involved with their subjects but not intimately involved with what they describe.  This is one of the problems when we decontextualise studies and teach them remotely from the land and seascapes they refer to. There is a growing body of scholarly activity that suggests we can overcome these ‘second order expressions’ through direct, nature-based experiences.  It is based on the view that fundamentally there is no real separation of the affective and the cognitive because they are part of the same whole (most certainly at the level of the individual human organism).  It is within this understanding of epistemological diversity that the opportunity for moral impulses appear because sea and landscapes provide places in which we might develop and exercise what the environmental philosopher Simon James has termed ‘the virtue of attention’. I take this to mean that the moral significance of our relationship with land and seascapes is based, and ultimately depends on, the attention we pay to it.

Emotion is therefore centre-stage of any discussion regarding environmental ethics. I find it impossible not to be emotionally aware sitting amongst the machair. The sensorial stimuli of this amazing habitat, and the book on my lap that informs me in another way, infuses my being.  At this moment, at the cutting edge of experience, I want to learn more and feel more deeply.  The selfish reductionist in me does not want the moment to end and wishes to preserve it for what it means to me – forever.  The holist in me appreciates that this moment will not simply pass but morph into yet other moments creating links with the past, present and future.  I have been informed by thoughts and feelings of this incredible Harris landscape to the point that the machair has now become part of me. This consciousness now makes me want to speak of it and, should the need arise, act on its behalf (or should I say our behalf).

Dr Robbie Nicol is a senior lecturer in outdoor environmental education at the School of Education.  His article about moral impulses (Entering the Fray: The role of outdoor education in providing nature-based experiences that matter) has been published in the journal Educational Philosophy and Theory and is available electronically.  A further article (Fostering environmental action through outdoor education) has just been accepted by Educational Action Research. Robbie also co-authored Learning outside the classroom: Theory and guidelines for practice (2012).

Dr. David Farrier

Intervening in the debate around GM food this month, the environment minister Owen Patterson suggested that the public should listen more to their heads than their hearts when it comes to genetically modified crops entering the food chain. This is not the forum to rehearse the arguments around GM and neither am I, it must be said, especially well-placed as a literary scholar to offer meaningful comment.  Patterson’s comments do however point to where the humanities can engage fruitfully with ecological matters: what is the place of emotion in an environmental ethics?

How we feel about something has a determining effect on how we act. This commonplace observation has not, perhaps, been sufficiently acknowledged in debates around ecological threats, where it tends to be supposed that all that counts are ‘hard’ solutions. But the ‘softer’ interventions of the humanities do have a role to play, as a recent contrast illustrates.

On 10th May this year, climate scientists at the Manua Loa Observatory in Hawaii announced that atmospheric CO₂ levels had reached the largely symbolic but unprecedented milestone of 400 ppm (parts per million). The same month, George Monbiot’s manifesto for re-wilding the UK, Feral, was published with the sub-title, ‘Searching for Enchantment on the Frontiers of Re-Wilding’. On the one hand the contrast here is of course absurd, not least in terms of scale. But it also points to an instructive contrast regarding the relationship between how we feel and how we respond to environmental crisis.

The 400 ppm marker passed largely without comment. News media around the world were unmoved, and humankind has continued to plough on towards Pliocene-era CO₂ concentrations. Monbiot, on the other hand, is open about the affective basis for his project–as with the ‘new nature writing’ of Robert Macfarlane, Gavin Francis, and Roger Deakin, an alertness to wonder is presented as the foundation of a newly-vitalised relationship with the nonhuman world.

In both cases, an affective response (exhaustion or exhilaration) is crucial. The muted reaction to the 400ppm threshold seems to have been marked by nothing so much as fatigue. We might say it simply isn’t possible to sustain the level of emotional intensity required by frequent prophecies of global ecological calamity. But the urgency isn’t lessened because we don’t have the resources of feeling to appreciate it. Monbiot, on the other hand, calls for a greater intimacy with the particular and local; a greatly reduced scale that should, we might suppose, be within the compass of our capacity to feel engaged.

It would be easy to suppose that the problem here lies in our over-familiarity with a too-diffuse form of threat, the antidote to which is a good dose of ‘real’ nature; that is, to update CP Snow’s ‘two cultures’ for the anthropocene. Or to suggest that the answer to global problems lie in local solutions. Any one solution would be reductive, though; we also need to think further about the role feeling plays in creating a disciplining frame around concepts of the environment, which often tip into rather broad value judgements (‘good’ and ’bad’). Do we need the environment to make us feel good to engage with it? What is the relationship between grieving and hoping?

These are large questions, but they need to be asked alongside scientific enquiry if we are to properly imagine how to bridge the gap between the future our current actions promise for us, and the future we wish to have.

Dr David Farrier is Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature in the University of Edinburgh’s Department of English. He convenes the Edinburgh Environmental Humanities network, and has written books on nineteenth century travel writing (Unsettled Narratives) and asylum seeker & refugees in contemporary literature and visual culture (Postcolonial Asylum)