Heraclitus the Tree Hugger

I had the idea for this blog a few months back, but haven't gotten around to writing it until now. In my environmental science class, we learned about the three major ethical views you find among environmental scientist. There's the anthropocentric who is human centered, the biocentric who values living things, and the ecocentric who values whole ecological systems. The easiest way to explain the different views is to explain what each person would do in a given situation, so I'll use the example we got in class.

Imagine you're on a safari and you run across an elephant with its foot stuck in a whole. You know the elephant can't get out by itself and will die either from starvation or attack without any help. At the same time, it would be dangerous for you to help the elephant as you could get seriously hurt in the process. You remember that you have a rifle in your car so you could shoot the elephant and put it out of its misery. What would you do?

The Anthropocentric would say it's best to shoot the elephant because it would be too risky to help it, but they wouldn't want to be left with the guilt of knowing the elephant was later attacked by predators or starved to death. The biocentric would choose to help the elephant despite the risk because certain living things (namely all animals) have value and should be protected. The biocentric still values human life, but they don't necessarily place humans above other living things. The ecocentric would likely leave the elephant, preferring to allow nature to run its course. In their view, everything happens for a reason. If the elephant lives good for it; if the predators find it good for them; if the elephant dies and decomposes good for the soil. Either way, it's not the human’s job to get in the way.

So where does Heraclitus come in? I am convinced that Heraclitus is an ecocentric. Its claims like, "Opposition brings concord. Out of discord comes the fairest harmony" that make me believe he would take the c’est la vie approach of an ecocentric to nature. The claim "out of discord comes the fairest harmony" only makes sense through the eyes of an ecocentric. It's about the checks and balances in place in the natural world. For instance, we all love deer (if you don't, watch Bambi and you'll change), but we don't want them running all over the place causing problems. That's why when Discovery channel shows us a video of a tiger hunting a deer and having it for dinner no one freaks out and calls PETA. We understand that the discord between the deer and the tiger is necessary to maintain harmony. After all, if we went around protecting the deer all the time, they would run amuck and the tigers would die. Heraclitus understood this. That's why he wrote his philosophy around the importance of opposites and opposition.

All this time he we thought he was just throwing around random paradoxes for us to think about. It turns out he was coming out of the closet as a tree hugger.