Peter Berg - interview

Whole Earth Review, Winter, 1988

Peter Berg guest co-edited our bioregional special issue (Winter 1981). Actor, director, and once a Digger (a hippie outfit that handed out free food), he is now a bioregional pamphleteer, publishing the urgent news of Place in the periodical Planet Drum. [By phone.]

Our most pressing question now is: what is the role of Homo Sapiens in the biosphere? Or, simply put, what should human beings as a species be doing?

It's obvious that Homo Sapiens has been the greatest force for change in the biosphere since the last Ice Age. And we've become that without knowing it, without really caring about it, and without understanding that there are very severe implications in that. The terms of how humans interact with the web of life in the future are being set now. We can see that in the ramifications of genetic engineering, for example, and in particular with the relevance of genetic engineering to agriculture. The direction of ecological protection and concern is also determined now. What it tends to boil down to is whether our species is in control of the biosphere, or is part of it. And that isn't to reiterate the cliches about anthropocentrism and biocentrism. We know that we're capable of exercising tremendous control, and maintaining an illusion, at least, of mastery over natural systems. The question is whether we should try, to bend external nature to our will, or whether we should begin controlling ourselves instead, viewing ourselves as being part of a larger life entity.

Thinking of ourselves as part of a larger life entity really wasn't possible during the industrial era. It was never proposed as a serious idea, or taken as a goal for human governance, or a guide for creating an ideal society. In fact, if you talked about being part of a larger life entity during the industrial era, it would be considered reactionary, or antiprogressive, or too much involved with the bunnies and birds and not enough involved with improving material well-being. By the way there are even some environmentalists today who believe that further control of the biosphere is the way to go. But there is a different sensibility underlying my question than the perspective of environmentalism. Environmentalism as a movement is over now. It's become a branch of the legal profession. A whole systems approach - the whole system of a rainforest, or the whole system of the Pacific Ocean, or the whole system of a bioregion - is what underlies ecological activites that are attracting the volunteers these days.

We have to begin thinking about getting out of the way of the biosphere. For example, when people try to alter the places where they live, growing English-style lawns in Arizona, for example - that's getting in the way of natural systems there. When people divert water from one water basin to another that's getting in the way. As part of the biosphere, we should be thinking about it, observing it, reflecting on it, but not directing it.

One of the things that would keep us out of the way would be a reiteration of taboos, Taboo is a great mechanism of social agreement. For example, nuclear power should be taboo because no one knows what to sensibly do with the waste from it. It's filthy, and it's filthy in the taboo sense of being defining. There should be a taboo against interfering with watercourses. I would even like to restore creeks in cities that are currently running in storm drains. There's one that rises about 500 feet from my house in San Francisco and goes through my basement, before it disappears down a storm drain. Well, I would like to remove half of the street that is interfering with that watercourse and put the creek back in, all the way to the Bay. Forty percent of the pollution in San Francisco Bay is the result of runoff from the streets. That means that just the way we live daily in the city is the cause for almost half of the pollution of the Bay Single-passenger automobile use should also be taboo. If we really want to reduce pollution, everyday lifestyles of people will have to change radically. Take the simple notion that the garbage goes out, for example. That was one of those industrial-era fantasies. The garbage goes in, to natural systems. Every aspect of consumption, of packaging and discarding of wastes, should be subjected to the test of taboo, that is: Does it defile natural systems.

We're at a place currently where we need a social philosophy that rethinks human society from a species point of view: A social philosophy that sees society as a necessary extension of our species, provides a way to reasonably preserve and reproduce, and contributes what is necessary for the survival of our species as a whole, rather than some overbearing fantasy of what human beings should be. Environmentalism is over, but the more ecological view of human beings as part of the biosphere is stymied for the time being because our present political language is so antique, This thinking in terms of being a species in the biosphere is as important an aspect of the social philosophy of the interdependent era, as the concept of freedom was for the industrial /democratic era. We are entering an interdependent era, The question is whether or not we want to attribute to ourselves the power and dominance of being in control of it, or whether we're going to begin controlling ourselves humbly fully aware of the sacredness of the web of life.