ACID MINE PHILOSOPHY

There is a standard way to address environmental controversies—through the artful combination of science and public policy. Science provides the facts needed for decision-making, and the law represents the will of the people: what Kai Lee has called “compass and gyroscope.” But to adequately address our environmental problems we need more than good science and democratic policy. We also need philosophy.

For many, the word “philosophy” summons up an image of Socrates in a toga, distracting people from their daily tasks by asking a series of pointless questions. But philosophy worthy of its name (“the love of wisdom”) begins on the ground, scrambling over scree, poking around in just such unsightly holes as abandoned mines in the San Juans. In its best dress, philosophy wears hiking boots and carries a walking stick, wandering nature trails that lead into the heart of our cultural wildernesses.

This talk will use the acid mine drainage controversy in the San Juan Mountains as a case study in the use of philosophy to help address environmental controversies. In the San Juans, questions concerning acid mine drainage center upon the upper Animas drainage. The San Juans contain large amounts of base metals locked up with sulfur as sulfide compounds. Exposing the metal-bearing rock to air and water mobilizes these metals, releasing them as well as sulfuric acid into the streams. The pH of the upper Animas is in many cases low enough to cause aquatic life to be deformed or die.

Philosophy can play at least two critical roles in environmental controversies like acid mine drainage. First, it can provide an account of the specifically philosophic aspects of our environmental problems, the ethical, aesthetic, epistemological, metaphysical, and theological dimensions which we must acknowledge before we can solve. These dimensions are more central to our concerns with the environment than we acknowledge: often the law and scientific data are stalking horses that disguise the fundamentally philosophic nature of our concerns.

Second, philosophy can provide a synopsis of how the various specialized disciplines relate within a given problem. Questions such as acid mine drainage refuse to follow strict disciplinary boundaries. Rather, they require a logic that is willing to track an argument across all the domains of knowledge.