The performance of being a man, from the moment we open our eyes, until we gasp our last breath, is damaging us, and those around us.




Phil Barker has written thousands of words about being a man in these strange and terrible times.

As a journalist, he has spent years investigating the modern epidemics of suicide, domestic violence, pornography and misogyny, but also the essential bonds of male friendship, fatherhood and men's relationships with women.

During this time, Phil found himself seeing what it is to 'be a man' in a completely new light.

in the 1960s, we became aware that Nature was being tyrannized and abused by an oppressive class—“man” or humankind.

So was it possible coherently and persuasively to include some non-human natural entities and/or Nature as a whole—which had historically been wholly and absolutely excluded—in the moral circle or the ethical base class?

That question had never been posed in the entire history of Western philosophy. So here was a genuine challenge for a creative philosopher—the possibility of an “environmental ethic.”

But now, a half-century later, environmental philosophy is flourishing and its importance has been grudgingly acknowledged by the mandarins of the discipline.

Heck, it has even established a beachhead on the intellectual Normandy coast of France.


…the only way to protect the environment or make sustainable use of natural resources is an essentially philosophical revolution, a shift in our ideas of Nature, of human nature, and the relationship between humans and Nature, naturally accompanied by a shift in our values from a narrow anthropocentrism to a wider circle of concern.



We humans are intimately connected—with every breath we take, every sip of liquid we drink, and every morsel of food we eat—to the surrounding bio-chemico-physical world.

We are as vortices in a flux of energy and materials, distinguishable only as ephemeral structures in that flux. We cannot—that is, we should not—conceive of ourselves as in any way independent of the natural environment.

Rather we are continuous with it. The protection of human health and wellbeing is indistinguishable from the protection of environmental health and wellbeing.


The ideal environmental scenario is a human society and economy coexisting in symbiotic harmony with Nature. How is that to be understood more concretely?

A human harmony with Nature is being more specifically and concretely expressed in such things as: industrial ecology, in which the waste of one industrial process (say, spent cooking oil for fried food) is the resource for another industrial process (say, the production bio diesel fuel); biomimicry, in which naturally evolved biological processes serve as the template for artificially created industrial processes; “green” architectural design in which each structure produces more energy—from sun, wind, and other sources—than it consumes. All this is achievable.

But note well, that the first step is philosophical, the re-conception of what Nature is (a congeries of dynamic biogeochemical ecosystems) and what human nature is (a congeries microcosmic biogeochemical ecosystems, including both individual organisms and various socio-economic wholes) embedded in the whole-Earth macrocosm.

I am not an environmental activist in the conventional sense. I do not instigate or even participate in street demonstrations; I am not the creator of an organization to litigate on behalf of the environment; I do not even advocate any particular environmental politics or ideology in the university classes I teach.

I do however consider just what I do, what I have dedicated my entire life to doing—environmental philosophy—to be a form of environmental activism, indeed the most radical and ultimately effective kind of environmental activism.

I am motivated by the conviction that our actions are conditioned by the “world” we believe ourselves to live in and that that world is composed (as Bruno Latour might say) by the ideas, the concepts which we bring to our sensory experience that give that world structure, coherence and meaning.

Ultimately the only effective way to change what we do in regard to the non-human environment is to change the way we think about it. And that is my business as a philosopher—critical worldview remediation.

A revolution of thought, of consciousness is the only path to a revolution of politics, economics, commerce and industry.

Source: http:///s77561857200716en_ng?client=newslite


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