“The Distinctiveness of Humanity:” A Response to Neil Evernden’s Argument of Human Inter-Relatedness to Nature

In “Beyond Ecology: Self, Place, and the Pathetic Fallacy,” Neil Evernden questions the wisdom of science on insisting upon the subject/object binary necessary for the observation and measurement of the objective, external world, arguing that concomitant with the aforementioned binary is a devaluing of the role of the arts and humanities in deciding what is most important in environmentalism. At the very heart of the issue, as far as Evernden sees it, is humanity’s insistence on seeing themselves meaningfully distinct from the environment at large. Following such a belief, is that nature ends up being valued above all for its utility to human life, that is, for its “resources,” a term that Evernden apparently finds loathsome, (“slurp of chunks of the world’). Attempting to destabilize this sense of human distinctiveness, Evernden takes great pains in stressing Ecology’s most positive contribution to date in the environmentalism debate: how inter-related is everything in the environment, meaning, that, as humans,“we can’t do as we wish without pay a price [for it]” (92). Throughout the article and with great attention to detail, Evernden attempts to show how difficult, if not impossible it sometimes appears to be, to consider a human being anything but a biological amalgamation of sorts. The implication, of course, is that the human sense of an individual self among the flesh is merely an illusion, and given humanity’s history of polluting the environment, a dangerous illusion at that. 

While I enjoy and appreciate Evernden’s biological analysis of, for instance, the stomach’s collection of living organisms, or the lichen’s being composed in reality of two distinct organisms, lost in the scientific minutiae of everything about the natural world he describes are just the sort of human concerns that he claims are most important. Part of the problem with his argument is how needlessly complicated he makes a human being out to be. Scientist and engineer Ray Kurzweil makes the profound point in the following of how important it is in science to approach a problem with the appropriate level of complexity, as clarity about a potential solution often will depend on a certain conceptual distance, as it were, from the details of what is being observed: 

It is important that we build models of the brain at the right level. This is, of course, true for all our scientific models. Although chemistry is theoretically based on physics and 

could be derived entirely from physics, this would be unwieldy and infeasible practice. 

So chemistry uses its own rules and models. We should likewise, in theory, be able to 

deduce the laws of thermodynamics from physics, but this is a far-from-strait forward

process. Once we have a sufficient number of particles to call something a gas rather than a bunch of particles, solving equations for each particle interaction becomes impractical, 

whereas the laws of thermodynamics work extremely well. The interactions of a single molecule within the gas are hopelessly complex and unpredictable, but the gas itself, 

comprising trillions of molecules, has many predictable properties. (Kurzweil ch. 4)

After reaching a certain microscopic level of examination, human beings are, too, hopelessly complex and unpredictable, full of various lifeforms, each having their own peculiar traits and manners of existence. Yet, when determining human values, little of any of this knowledge helps one get any closer to determining what matters most to us as human beings. How, for instance, would one's studying or being made aware of the various examples of bacteria in the human stomach ever lead a person to the knowledge of the Sistine Chapel? Or Neil Armstrong’s landing on the moon? Or the beauty of Shakespeare’s verse? In other words, peer too closely at a human being and what is missed is how all that is gathered together in that blink of an eye ultimately composes a complete and distinct person, someone with dreams, hopes, fears, desires, and loves. No amount of studying biology or the larger environment can ever teach a person what it means to be human. And my argument in no way should be interpreted as an attack on science. I love science. We need science. In a word, the kind of bare facts that Evernden’s argument depends on are just that: meaningless in themselves, and empty of human subjectivity, and therefore, incapable of explaining or bringing us any closer to a definitive understanding of what makes homo sapiens more than just biological entities but more importantly, distinct persons of, for lack of a better word, spiritual value.