The Tree Contemplates Me

In Red Sky at Morning, author James Gustav Speth laments that “…the only way to save the marvelous world we inherited is to convince people that it is worth more economically alive than dead”. Sources like the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment exist in order to convince policy makers of the value of protecting natural resources and other species. The MEA only briefly touches on the intrinsic value that the natural world has, that the other inhabitants share the same ethical right to live that we assign humans. The argument that humans inherently owe the natural world ethical treatment finds difficulty taking hold in the masses possibly due to the argument’s fundamental nature. In confronting nature, a human essentially confronts the ultimate Other. Western society’s historic oppression of the Other shows that improvements will not be made until ethical rights are extended to protect it.

The philosophical notion of the Other is the product of separating one’s self from its surroundings, differentiating between the subject and the object. On a larger scale, the Other may be used to describe minority groups, gender-identities, and paradigms that do not align with the status quo. In the case of the natural world and western society, Mother Nature is a mysterious and dangerous Other that can and must be conquered and commoditized. Like a slave at auction, she is stripped of her intrinsic value and instead marked with a price tag. The ideals of unbridled economic expansion and development clash against the natural cycles that delicately and dutifully regulate our environment. It is speculated that continuing trends will irreversibly destroy much of the Earth’s ecosystems in the foreseeable future.

In the case of race and gender related rights, the Other is no longer (or is less) oppressed when the majority realizes the Other is also a subject. Obviously, this is much harder to do in the case of nature, as it definitively non-human. However, in Martin Buber’s “I Contemplate the Tree”, the author recognizes and confronts his alienation from nature.

He first describes viewing the tree as object, ignorant of its intricacies and uniqueness. He then goes on to describe being “…drawn into a relation, (where) the tree ceases to be an it”. Buber’s tree is no longer just an object to his subjectivity, but a subject all its own. It must “deal” with Buber as he deals with it, that is inevitably the tree is in some way perceiving his presence and objectifying him. The duality of each individual is both an object and subject at the same time demonstrates and interconnectedness and similarity between the individuals, perhaps even that they are one in the same. As Buber puts it: relation is reciprocity.

Historically, oppression of and rejecting the Other is achieved through dehumanization (slavery once again being a prime example). The very word “dehumanize” suggests an alienation from other species. Mistreating a human degrades them to that of what is essentially non-human. Environmentalism struggles to overcome this dilemma, but as Speth points out and the MEA proves, the natural world may only be salvageable by commoditizing it further.