“Beneath each of these endeavors lies a barely concealed contempt for unaltered life and nature, as well as contempt for the people who are expected to endure the mistakes, purchase the results, and live with the consequences, whatever those may be. It is a contempt disguised by terms of bamboozlement, like bottom line, progress, needs, costs and benefits, economic growth, jobs, realism, research, and knowledge, words that go undefined and unexamined. Few people, I suspect, believe “in their bones” that the net results from all of this will be positive, but most feel powerless to stop what seems to be so inevitable and unable to speak what is so hard to say in the language of self-interest.
The manifestation of biophobia, explicit in the urge to control nature, has led to a world in which it is becoming easier to be biophobic. Undefiled nature is being replaced by a defiled nature of landfills, junkyards, strip mines, clear-cuts, blighted cities, six-lane freeways, suburban sprawl, polluted rivers, and superfund sites, all of which deserve our phobias. Ozone depletion, meaning more eye cataracts and skin cancer, does give more reason to stay indoors. The spread of toxic substances and radioactivity does mean more disease. The disruption of natural cycles and the introduction of exotic species has destroyed much of the natural diversity that formerly graced our landscapes. Introduced blights and pests have or are destroying American chestnuts, elms, maples, dogwoods, hemlocks, and ashes. Global warming will degrade the flora and fauna of familiar places.
Biophobia sets into motion a vicious cycle that tends to cause people to act in such a way as to undermine the integrity, beauty, and harmony of nature, creating
the very conditions that make the dislike of nature yet more probable. Even so, is it OK that Woody Allen, or anyone else, does not like nature? Is biophobia merely one among a number of equally legitimate ways to relate to nature? I do not think so.
First, for every “biophobe” others have to do that much more of the work of preserving, caring for, and loving the nature that supports biophobes and biophiliacs alike. Economists call this the “free-rider problem.” It arises in every group, committee, or alliance when it is possible for some to receive all of the advantages of membership while doing none of the work necessary to create those advantages. Environmental free riders benefit from others’ willingness to fight for the clean air that they breathe, the clean water that they drink, the preservation of biological diversity that sustains them, and the conservation of the soil that feeds them. But they lift not a finger.
Biophobia is not OK because it does not distribute fairly the work of keeping the earth or any local place.
Biophobia is not OK for the same reason that misanthropy and sociopathy are not OK. We recognize these as the result of deformed childhoods that create unloving and often violent adults. Biophobia in all of its forms similarly shrinks the range of experiences and joys in life in the same way that the inability to achieve close and loving relationships limits a human life. Put it this way: People can grow up with the outward appearance of normality in an environment largely stripped of plants and animals, in the same way that passable looking monkeys can be raised in laboratory cages and cattle fattened in feeding bins. Asked if they were happy, these people would probably say yes. Yet something vitally important would be missing, not merely the knowledge and pleasure that can be imagined and might have been, but a wide array of experiences that the human brain is peculiarly equipped to receive. Can the same be said of whole societies that distance themselves from animals, trees, landscapes, mountains, and rivers? Is mass biophobia a kind of collective madness? In time I think we will come to know that it is.”