Picture Post #52 - The Township

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

Posted by Thomas Scarborough

Hastily boarded-up window 
at New Rest, in South Africa's Eastern Cape

It is hard to know where to begin, describing the township here.

Many houses, the doors or windows have been taken. Including the neighbour's, twice. Severely damaged through crime, he put in reinforced concrete frames. It did no good. They made off with his ceiling, plumbing, and much of the plaster, too. Every second house, broken glass is replaced with broken boards, carpet tiles, plastic.

A resident came round yesterday. Someone tried to batter down his door, he said, when he was in bed. The door was ruined, but they didn't get in. He armed himself. Then a sergeant came round. If they found someone dead on his floor, he said, he would go straight to jail. My host sleeps with a loaded rifle next to his bed.

A few nights ago, criminals mounted a vast raid on a group of townships, including this one. I had two locks on my car damaged. A friend had a window smashed, too. The same day, in front of me, a man flew off a pickup truck which swerved recklessly to avoid potholes, and those are filled with water from broken pipes. He hit the tar at speed, and lay motionless in a storm gutter. I was the only one to help him, and was astonished that he could (slowly) get up, although he was bloodied all over.

Plastic waste tumbles down the hillsides, and recently carved ravines scar the earth. People are gaunt, their teeth are out, their clothes are ragged. Even the neighbour came begging for bread.

A Philosophy of the Environment

Posted by Thomas Scarborough

In spite of its crucial importance today, in practice we have little operational guidance for defining policies, strategies, and outcome targets with respect to the natural environment. Above all, there are no agreed philosophical grounds for its preservation. Reactions to its destruction are fragmentary.

In times past, it was possible for every individual, or every family group, to be self-sustaining through all the cycles of nature. Today, we have advanced beyond all possibility of such a lifestyle, although pockets of our planet retain such ways of life. Today, the whole of nature needs to sustain the whole of humankind. This requires more than a parochial approach to the environment. It requires a global environmental ethics, and global environmental principles.

There is a pressing need today for a rational basis for a healthy, balanced relationship with the natural environment – for 'a broadly-based philosophy', in the words of the Scottish theologian and philosopher John MacQuarrie. While one cannot underestimate the effectiveness of reactive measures to protect or to heal the environment – on all levels, individual, organisational, and governmental – the philosophical underpinnings are sorely missed. Any substantial philosophy today should be able to present definitive criteria for dealing with the environment.

Various 'base principles' have been suggested:

• that nature enjoys a sacred status,
• that every life form has a special goal,
• that the natural environment is vital to our human flourishing,
• that it is essential for our economic progress.

Yet beyond all such considerations, it may be the very complexity of nature which promises a solution.

There is something which sets the environment apart, which requires a different treatment to all other ethical issues. There is no system (insofar as we may speak of a system at all) which is more complex than our natural environment. The environment presents us with an infinity of relations. We would need a mind (or a computer) larger than nature itself to understand it. We may say therefore that it is 'beyond the condition of things'. It is beyond reducing, controlling, or bringing into the condition of things. It is unconditional.

The natural environment is the ultimate zone, in which a vast tissue of influences cannot be reduced. It is so much more than a sphere which merely should be 'protected'. It is sacred. It is tabu. A reductionistic approach to nature does not apply.

Not only this. For want of a concept as to how nature ought to be – since we cannot possibly possess such knowledge – we cannot say that it should be this way or that. 'Is' and 'ought' vanish here. It is in a sacred space even beyond the realm of ethics. With respect to nature, we cannot give and we cannot take, we can only receive. In fact nature stands as a vast and all-encompassing symbol to teach us the limitations of human reason.

On the basis of a belief in a sacred environment there is a principled way forward. The environment – both animate and inanimate – is not merely an object of wonder and awe, nor is it sentimentally sacred. Its sacredness is of biblical proportions: a sacredness which means that it stands under 'the ban'. Whatever the value of nature may be – whatever its stores, whatever its appeal – it must not be touched. The only way forward is to treat it on the basis that it is both off-limits and hands-off, and this is unconditional. It is non-negotiable.

Our own simple, built environment is of course ensconced in the natural environment. Of necessity, we disturb the environment, because we are a part of it. How then should it be possible for nature to be off-limits today, in our (post) modern world?

The notion of such separation is not merely a wistful one. There are large areas today which we do keep off-limits: contaminated areas, for instance, military zones, and diamond areas. These are as good as sacrosanct – and yet the environment seems by comparison to be treated with ambivalence. In fact in times past, the natural environment was indeed thought to be sacred – in some cases more valuable than the life of one who desecrated it.

Just a hundred years ago, nature did not need any assistance from humanity. That is, in our very recent past, we knew a world in which nature was allowed to be nature, and did not need human cosseting or monitoring. The deliberate, nation-wide, even global protection of the natural environment through human custodians is a comparatively recent development.

In short, a separation between the natural and the built environments should be – and has to be – a realistic goal. This goal will be achieved when the equilibrium of the environment is maintained in every part without human intervention – or rather, its dynamic equilibrium is maintained over all its various cycles. Since, however, nature is beyond the condition of things, this must be a self-sustaining dynamic equilibrium, without the influence of human custodians.

'Our immediate environment is not nature as formerly, but organisation. But this immunity from nature produces a new crop of dangers, which is the very organisation.' —Dietrich Bonhoeffer.