The Hastings Center Memorializes Strachan Donnelley

On October 9, 2009 The Hastings Center dedicated the Great Lawn outside its facility in Garrison, NY overlooking the Hudson River to the memory of Strachan Donnelley (1942-2008). The Hastings Center is an internationally recognized research and educational institute that studies ethical issues in medicine and the life sciences. I worked with Strachan there from 1986 to 2003, and then reunited with him in 2006 as a staff member of the new organization he had founded, the Center for Humans and Nature. Strachan served as the second president of The Hastings Center, which was founded in 1969 by Daniel Callahan and Willard Gaylin.

Strachan's wife and several members of his family were present at the ceremony, as were many of his former colleagues and friends and current Hastings Center staff members. Remarks in honor of Strachan's contribution to The Hastings Center were given by board chair Harold Edgar and president Thomas Murray. David Gordon spoke about the history of the Garrison property, which for many decades prior to the arrival of The Hastings Center had been the site of Malcolm Gordon School. I was asked to make a presentation on the philosophical substance and importance of Strachan Donnelley's work. The text of my presentation is given below.

The Philosophical Legacy of Strachan Donnelley

Strachan Donnelley had a philosophical and a moral vision concerning the human responsibility for the natural world. He developed and expressed it in his nearly two decades of work and scholarship at The Hastings Center, in his founding and leadership of the Center for Humans and Nature, in his lecturing and teaching, in his community service, and in his philanthropy. The key to his vision was the relationship between evolutionary biology, ecology, and ethics; out of a synthesis of those bodies of knowledge would emerge a new sensibility, a new worldview, a recovered and reborn philosophy of nature.

In nearly all of his work, Donnelley wrote with the intention of expressing the experience that had shaped his life as a naturalist, conservationist, and outdoorsman, and then connecting that experience with the learning and reflection that had shaped his life as a philosopher. He aspired to unite those two modes of knowing, those two poles of his own identity, not so much for personal reasons, but in an attempt to heal the wound in our contemporary ways of thinking, feeling, and living; a wound brought about by our mechanistic conception of nature and by our abstract, artificial, denatured conception of the human condition. His abiding purpose was to explore ways of thinking “humans” and “nature” together—to restore a kind of philosophical and ethical practice that can overcome the separation of human being and the rest of natural being that has been created by dominant currents in modern philosophy and modern science.

The basic tenet of his philosophical and ethical naturalism is that human beings are a part of nature—not separate from nature. That is, humans do not stand above the natural world at the top of a hierarchical structure watching non-human life from on high. Strachan Donnelley considered it a presumption and a deep philosophical mistake for human beings, who share a biological footing and an evolutionary history with the rest of life, to deny their membership—their “plain citizenship,” as Aldo Leopold called it—in the natural world. Instead, Donnelley held that the natural world consists of humans and all other species, each one part of a vital whole and that humans have an ethical obligation to conserve, respect, promote, and nurture that complex living whole in all its richness and diversity and out of respect for its sheer evolutionary accomplishment. In short, we must recover a strong understanding of the fact that nature is real and that nature is alive. And we humans, as natural and as a part of nature ourselves, must recover a strong sense of moral responsibility toward the integrity and preservation of nature alive.

Donnelley had a deep and abiding respect for systematic philosophy and metaphysics, something to which Americans are allergic, as his mentor Hans Jonas once warned him, and as he became keenly aware over the years. He was speculative, but he was not a system-builder. He was an explorer in the terrain of ideas and an essayist in mode of presentation. Donnelley was always a philosopher, but he never really pursued a conventional or disciplinary philosophical career. He found his niche among wild and marginalist intellectuals and among those outside academia who have devoted their lives to an engaged kind of activity or contemplation.

Soon after his doctorate was completed and he had some teaching under his belt, in 1986 he began a new chapter at The Hastings Center, an interdisciplinary research and educational institute, where he created an environmental ethics and philosophy program and where he served as president from 1996-1999. During that period of his work, he became increasingly interested in those aspects of the life sciences that the field of “bioethics” tended to overlook, such as biodiversity, evolution, animal communities and behavior, and the like.

During the same period, in the 1990s Donnelley began to study Darwin in earnest and to see the significance of the ways in which a Darwinian understanding of evolution, with its “tangled bank” of life, formed interconnections and intimations with so many philosophers, past and present, who had made their mark on him earlier, but who now seemed to come together in new ways—Heraclitus, Spinoza, Nietzsche, the great Russian novelists, especially Tolstoy and Pasternak, the pluralist political philosopher, Isaiah Berlin, Alfred North Whitehead and Hans Jonas. The intellectual excitement of those years was given further impetus and direction by the work of Ernst Mayr. Mayr was one of the principal contributors to the New Synthesis of Darwinism which brought genetics together with evolutionary theory, and in his later work, he was a powerful historian and philosopher of the biological sciences.

In 2003 Donnelley left The Hastings Center and set up a new organization, the Center for Humans and Nature, which was in part an outgrowth of the environmental bioethics program he had established at The Hastings Center. As he became even more deeply involved in the work of cutting edge conservation groups and ecological and evolutionary thinkers, he became increasingly convinced that radical new practices are indeed urgent and essential, but also that new sustainable ways of living won’t come without a fundamental reorientation of our culture at the level of conceptual thought and moral feeling.

Organic life baffles our modern minds. The very meaning of life is in doubt. The problem of life is the philosophical problem of modern philosophy and science—so claimed Alfred North Whitehead more than 75 years ago. Despite the advances in the biological sciences, genetics and biochemistry, but also evolutionary biology and ecology, this situation has changed little. In fact, arguably things have gotten worse. Now life is also the practical problem of modern life, culture, society, politics, and the 21st century global economy.

Donnelley argued that we have unthinkingly plunged head first into complex environmental, conservation, community and cultural crises, already here or looming, that threaten ecosystems, species populations, fertile soils, fresh water resources, and climate, indeed, the future diversity of life itself. The causes of these natural and cultural crises are many and interact with one another: burgeoning human populations, overuse of natural resources, and economic and other activities that degrade and pollute the earth’s nature and the resiliency of its long term evolutionary, ecological, and human cultural processes.

We must explore, articulate, and promote long term moral and civic responsibility for human communities and the natural ecosystems and landscapes within which they are embedded. Following the insights of evolutionary biology, ecology, and everyday life, we must recognize the bewilderingly complex and inescapable interactions—historical, dynamic, systemic—of humans and nature. This fundamental earthly reality sets the terms of the intellectual, moral, and civic work that lies ahead, the work of that Strachan Donnelley himself pursued, and that he has bequeathed to us.