This short essay is a response to Steven F. Hayward’s paper entitled “The Fate of the Earth in the Balance: The Metaphysics of Climate Change”.

That Hayward is reading Heidegger into Al Gore is something worth considering. Heidegger evokes, in the political mindset, fascism, Nazism, reactionary politics and political naivety. When Heidegger is brought into view with regard Gore we are witnessing something akin to the re-appearance of the environmentalist bogeyman. More on this later, but let us get into the question of Hayward’s reading of Heidegger. Why is it problematic? It becomes problematic when we encounter in the starting lines a term such as ‘environmental correctness’. The phrase is nothing if not resonant. It links popular environmentalism with political correctness.

What calls Hayward to Al Gore is not what Gore has presented, but what he has omitted. The absence of nuclear power as a solution to environmental crisis is to Hayward indicative of a kind of environmental atavism. Atavism is a strong word to employ since it is, when applied to society, reminiscent of reactionary. Hayward is attempting to tie modern environmentalism with regression to a pre-industrial state, but this is entirely misleading. There is no battle between nature and culture for Gore. Instead we find an attempt to re-configure older technology rather than an attempt to abandon technology and return to an atavistic state. That nuclear power is not included cannot possible indicate ‘environmental atavism’. Worse still the disagreement with nuclear power is associated with a categorical suspicion. This is the first of Hayward’s attempts to associate his position with morality or ethics, elevating his position to one rooted in social reality as opposed to the ‘metaphysical’ musings of Gore. Hayward thinks the disdain for nuclear power is rooted in an underlying categorical mistrust of technology itself. Yet this is reliant upon the idea that mistrust of nuclear power implies distrust of all technology which is obviously not the case. This is the politics of suspicion and not at all justified.

The suspicion extends to environmentalism being named pessimistic which of course implies Hayward’s belief in progress is optimistic. It is not entertained that the absence of a nuclear solution is rooted in real concerns about its safety, storage of nuclear waste or a myriad of other possibilities. The broader pessimism is not a hatred for civilization but a concern for civilization. To be concerned about our place in nature and our alienation from it is to be concerned holistically and attempts to avoid disburdening us of our role within the broader ecosystem. Further Gore clearly assumes that we are capable of achieving this or else he would not be engaged in his project. That is an enviable optimism lacking in most industrial societies.

We are not here concerned with these issues as such, but with Hayward’s assertion that the real source for Gore’s work is in fact Martin Heidegger. Heidegger is no stranger to green thinking although he is divisive. His popularity stems from his critique of technology. For Heidegger technology challenges-forth and demands of nature that it give itself up as the place of resources— ‘standing-reserve’ [das Bestand]. Both approaches emphasise that the further we slip into the technological frame the more nature recedes into the background, eventually being subsumed to the demands of ever-expanding and progressive mankind. This has been interpreted in a variety of ways, and deep ecology has often admitted the influence of Heidegger upon its thinking (despite the problem of eco-fascism arising from Heidegger’s NS involvement). The point is that almost any thinker involved with environmentalism will have come across Heidegger at some point and those that haven’t will have been influenced indirectly by Heidegger either through deep ecology or others. There is no ‘real’ source or secrecy at work here. Heidegger is a very real and well-known source for green thinking. It is, then, no surprise if Gore should find himself on a similar path. Hayward feels Heidegger’s absence is due to his NS associations. Yet Heidegger is taught in almost every Philosophy department, is perhaps the most influential philosopher of the twentieth-century, and to state it directly, is not considered someone you need to hide as a source. Heidegger is absent because his ideas figure only vaguely as a distant influence in Gore’s work.

Hayward’s treatment of Heidegger’s critique of technology is sparse, but presumably this is because it is, fundamentally, complicated and reliant on Heidegger’s very specific concern with ontology (the study of being). For Heidegger technology is an ontological problem in that the technological disclosure is itself determinative of the ontological possibilities of an entire epoch. The conclusion of both remains the same: If entities manifest themselves through the prism of ratio-technological thinking then they manifest themselves through our reductive thinking as resources, reserve, production and ultimately consumption. It has nothing to do with phenomena as Hayward suggests since phenomena is a metaphysical term and Heidegger has long ceased to employ such terms. Here Hayward’s analysis is misleading: instead of phenomena he should state beings or things, he should also be aware that the technological age does not mean our way of being is defective but that being has simply receded. Nor does Heidegger ever employ the term pure Being. Instead it is ‘being’ and this refers to an ontological state of which we are in, not as he confusingly states perceive or contemplate. Hayward states this is obscure, but he seems to manage to obscure it even more.

The comparison between Gore and Heidegger is almost ridiculous. Here are the quotes he offers for comparison:

Heidegger,

puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy which can be extracted and stored as such. . . . The earth now reveals itself as a coal-mining district, the soil as a mineral deposit. The field that the peasant formerly cultivated and set in order appears different from how it did when to set in order still meant to take of and maintain. . . . But meanwhile even the cultivation of the field has come under the grip of another kind of setting-in-order, which sets upon [italics in original] nature. It sets upon it in the sense of challenging it. Agriculture is now the mechanized food industry. Air is now set upon to yield nitrogen, the earth to yield ore, ore to yield uranium, for example; uranium is set upon to yield atomic energy, which can be released either for destruction or for peaceful use.

Gore’s parallel:

[O]ur civilization is holding ever more tightly to its habit of consuming larger and larger quantities every year of coal, oil, fresh air and water, trees, topsoil, and the thousand other substances we rip from the crust of the earth. . . . We seem increasingly eager to lose ourselves in the forms of culture, society, technology, the media, and the rituals of production and consumption, but the price we pay is a loss of our spiritual lives.

There is the use of the coal example, but other than that there is little in here that one could not find in any sociological or political critique of modern industrial society. If critiquing consumerism is indicative of influence every single sociologist is plagiarizing off the other. The next quoted text is even more confusing:

Our seemingly compulsive need to control the natural world . . . has driven us to the edge of disaster, for we have become so successful at controlling nature than we have lost our connection to it.

Here Gore states that we are the drivers of this situation whereas the Heidegger quote explicitly states that technology puts this demand forward. By omitting this fact Hayward misleads the reader and this is easily accomplished due to the intricacies of Heidegger’s work. The parallel here is once again the common criticism of progress and destruction of nature - nothing one cannot find in, say, Wordsworth. Is Wordsworth then another ‘real’ source for Gore? How far can one go with comparative reading? Quite far if we let absence and omission lurk in the background. And so it is that Hayward finds himself committing the same act of omission that leads him to make the connection in the first place.