Ants and People are Equal

Are we human beings or “eco-beings?” Not sure exactly what the latter term means, but as used by Albert J. Bergesen, professor of sociology at the University of Arizona in the San Francisco Chronicle, it appears to mean that we are equal with—meaning no better than—rocks, spiders, fungi, trees, and plankton. This is a new strain of radical environmentalism that seems to go far beyond positing a human duty to protect the environment, as Earth Day originally promoted, to saying we are nothing more than one part of nature with, as others have written, no greater claim to existence or use of resources, than any other life form.

This is to mutate the concept of egalitarianism into an extreme quasi-earth religion mysticism. Bergesen writes: “The categorical location of consciousness as human, or animal, and perhaps even plant or rock, river or mountain, may be merely an accident of Gaian birth.” (Gaia is the theory that Earth is a living being. Many in the deep ecology movement who support this view humanity as vermin parasites on Gaia.)

Bergesen further states that “tying moral thought to humanism...seems increasingly untenable, for it is a mystification of our fundamental eco-existence as an equal among other living things...We must realize that, as part of nature, we are eco-beings first, and human beings second.” (My emphasis.)

What would that mean in practical terms? In this article, Bergesen doesn’t say. But if fungi and ants are equal to people, it could mean that we have to substantially sacrifice human welfare to ensure their equal treatment as part of respecting their supposedly intrinsic equal moral worth.

This idea, which is now being expressed in hard Darwinian terms by some and in neo-mystical terms by others, as here with Bergesen, seems to go even beyond the idea of humans and animals being moral equals. We now have some asserting, to paraphrase PETA’s Ingrid Newkirk: “A rat, is a pig, is a beetle, is the Potomac River, is a boy.”