On Alienation from the Built Environment

Author(s): Steven Vogel

Source: Ethical Theory and Moral Practice , February 2014, Vol. 17, No. 1, Special Issue:
Alienation (February 2014), pp. 87-96
Published by: Springer

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24478702

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Ethic Theory Moral Prac (2014) 17:87-96
DO I 10.1007/s 10677-013-9469-5

On Alienation from the Built Environment

Steven Vogel

Accepted: 15 July 2013 / Published online: 4 October 2013

< Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013

Abstract If "environment" means "that which environs us," it isn't clear why environmentalist
thinkers so often identify it with nature and not with the built environment that a quick glance
around would reveal is what we're actually environed by. It's a familiar claim that we're
"alienated from nature," but I argue that what we're really alienated from is the built environ
ment itself. Typically talk of alienation from nature involves the claim that we fail to acknowl
edge nature's otherness, but the built environment is just as other from us as the natural one.
And just as we are said to fail to recognize the role of nature as the origin of everything with
which we have to do in the world, so too we fail to recognize the role of socially organized
human labor in the objects that surround us. Overcoming alienation would require acknowl
edging the builtness and the sociality of the world we inhabit.

Keywords Environment • Built environment • Nature • Alienation • Social construction • Labo

Although I consider myself an environmental philosopher and attend conferences and write for
journals that have the word "environment" in the title, 1 find myself constantly confused by the
term and what it is supposed to mean. Literaliy/etymologically it means the world that environs
us, the world by which we find ourselves surrounded (the German word Umwelt says this even
more clearly). But the world that environs me as I'm writing this, and I'm guessing that environs
you as you're reading it, is a built one-a humanized and urban world that consists pretty much
entirely of technologically produced artifacts built by human beings for human purposes. And
it's odd to think of environmental philosophy as being concerned in the first instance with that
For most of what is talked about in those journals or those conferences, or for that matter in th
central texts in the field of environmental philosophy, isn't the built environment at all but rather
nature. J. Baird Callicott's first essay on the topic, for instance, asserted that "an environmental
ethic is supposed to govern human relations with nonhuman natural entities" (Callicott 1999)
Paul Taylor begins his book Respect for Nature by writing that "environmental ethics is
concerned with the moral relations that hold between humans and the natural world" (Taylor
1986). And plenty of other examples could be adduced. It's the intrinsic value or the rights or in
general the protection of natural entities-animals, plants, ecosystems, the biosphere-with
which most environmental philosophy is concerned. Built ones are hardly ever considered.
The protection of wilderness, the rights of mammals, the extinction of species are discussed in

S. Vogel (HI)
Department of Philosophy, Denison University, Granville, OH 43023, USA
e-mail: vogel@denison.edu

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88 S. Vogel

some detail; the protection of shopping malls, the rights of appliances, the threatened extinction
of the Saab rarely receive much investigation-and yet these latter are the sorts of things that
actually environ us.
Indeed, the built world appears in most environmental discussions not as the environment
but as a threat to the environment, which is to say, a threat to nature. The urbanized world
appears as harmful to the environment, which is taken to be something beyond or outside that
urbanized world: it pollutes it, it warms it, it destroys it, it "tames" it. But if the world that
actually surrounds us harms nature, and if nature is (confusingly) identified with the "environ
ment," it's no longer clear what the latter term actually means-nor what name we should give to
the world that actually environs us. Is it possible that we are environed by two different worlds?
And if so, what moral status do they have-and why? And what role do we play, or should we
play, within them? Or is there some deep confusion here, about who we are and where we
actually live? It is this set of questions that animates the discussion I would like to pursue.
Now the built environment often appears in environmental philosophy as a threat to
nature not simply in the direct sense that many technologies have toxic effects on the natural
world, but in a broader sense as well. The growth of the built environment, which is to say
the increasingly urbanized or technologized character of the world we inhabit, it is frequent
ly argued, is symptomatic of (and contributes to) an increasing human alienation from
nature. For earlier generations and cultures, it is often suggested, the distinction between
the world that actually surrounds us on the one hand and nature on the other would have
made no sense: the world by which those people were surrounded was the world of nature.
And the problem with our modern world is that it no longer is, and so we have lost our
connection to nature, have become alienated from it.
The line of argument here, I take it, is a very familiar one. By replacing the world of
nature with a technologized and artificial world built for the satisfaction of human beings,
this line suggests, we moderns have lost the feeling of being related to nature, and so have
alienated ourselves from it. There are at least two senses in which this is said to have
occurred. First, we are said to be alienated in that we have lost our understanding and
appreciation of nature's independence from us, of what might be called its otherness. The
natural world appears under conditions of modernity like a form of what Heidegger called
Bestand or "standing reserve," a perfectly malleable substratum of matter open to our
mastery. But such a view fails to recognize nature's essential wildness and stubborn
independence of us. Nature is something fundamentally beyond and indifferent to the
human, possessing an autonomy that despite our wishes we cannot finally overcome. Its
complexity at all levels-from the ecological to the organismic to the subatomic-are such that
it remains stubbornly opaque to our understanding, ungraspable in its total workings by our
subtlest attempts to observe and predict its effects. Thus our attempts to master and tame it
by replacing it with a human-made world are both doomed to failure but also evidence of
modernity's loss of the profound and humbling recognition that there is more to the world
than us and our needs. Nature is independent of the human; in surrounding ourselves with a
technological world we try to ignore or avoid that independence, replacing nature by a
comforting cocoon of humanized constructions in which we narcissistically see ourselves
reflected.1

1 Hailwood (2000) and Lee (1999) both discuss nature's "otherness" in this sense; Passmore (1975), as
Hailwell points out, seems to have something similar in mind when he speaks of nature's "strangeness." Cf.
also the various essays in Heyd (2005) on nature's "autonomy." And in the tradition of continental philosophy
the concept appears in the form of appeals by Derrida or Adorno to concepts such as "difference" or "non
identity." See Vogel (1999).

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On Alienation from the Built Environment 89

But secondly, we are also said to be alienated from nature in another sense: that we have
forgotten that we too are part of nature and that nature is in fact the source of everything we
are and do. By imagining that we could "replace" nature by an entirely technologized world,
could find when we look outside ourselves nothing but our own products (and thus nothing
but ourselves), we reveal our own misunderstanding of what nature really is. For we
ourselves are natural beings, with natural needs and limitations; the dream of technology
is the impossible fantasy of somehow being able to escape nature. We like to think of the
world we inhabit as somehow outside of nature, but it is not, and we do everything we can to
conceal this fact from ourselves. We like our meat cleaned and wrapped in plastic wrap, and
try as much as possible to ignore its origin in the lives and terrified deaths of sentient
animals; we think of our automobiles as running on fuel that will last forever and not as
requiring the burning of a biological resource with a limited supply; we treat the atmosphere
above us and the ground below us as infinitely deep sinks into which any refuse we produce
can be easily thrown without any ill effects. We try to "domesticate" nature by enclosing it in
national parks that allow us to observe and enjoy it from a safe distance, or to "modify" it by
changing its genetic structures, or to "control" it by building dikes and dams and irrigation
canals-and then we're astonished, regularly and humiliatingly, when earthquakes and
hurricanes and tsunamis and droughts overpower our puny efforts and the unintended
consequences of our technologies produce dire results we never imagined.
Thus nature is both independent of us and also the origin of everything that is (including
us), and our alienation from it (in the technologized world) consists in our failure to
acknowledge either of these characteristics. And furthermore the built environment that
surrounds us is an expression of that alienation: our gleaming antiseptic supermarkets, our
concrete landscapes, our dammed rivers and artificial coastlines-but also: our pesticide
infused diets, our toxic waste dumps, our frighteningly rising temperatures-all reveal the
extent to which nature is something whose reality and significance, whose independence
from us and whose necessity for us, we deny-but we do so at our (and the earth's) peril.
I repeat that this line of argument about our alienation from nature should be familiar.
What I want to do now is to undermine this thesis, not by arguing that we are not alienated
from nature but by pointing to a series of ways in which the same sorts of arguments might
be used to suggest instead that we are actually alienated from the built envimnment itself. We
are alienated from the environment, I will be arguing-but now by "environment" 1 will mean
the world we are in fact surrounded by, this technological one right here: it is the built world
which we fail to understand, and to which we fail to see our connection.2 For both elements
the previous arguments asserted to be characteristic of our relationship to nature, I want to
suggest-the failure to acknowledge its independence on the one hand and the failure to
recognize something important about origin on the other-actually characterize our relation
ship to the built environment, the one we actually inhabit, the one that actually environs us.
To begin with, the moment of strangeness and unpredictability, of sheer otherness,
associated with what I have called the independence of nature, is surely a moment one need
not go trekking in the wilderness to experience. 1 am not making a joke when I say that the
experience of confronting a piece of technology one has never before encountered, and
attempting to get it to work the experience, let's say, of first using a new piece of software,
or of getting behind the steering wheel of a rental car, or of assembling a children's toy on
Christmas morning-is precisely an experience of an object that is independent of the subject,

2 And the notion of "alienation" I employ here, it might be noted, has its roots directly in the work of Marx, for
whom the term refers first and foremost to the alienation of a laboring subject from something he or she has
built (Marx (1975)). See below.

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90 S. Vogel

autonomous with respect to him or her, fundamentally opaque and incomprehensible. That
opacity may lessen over time (but it never entirely disappears), and the incomprehensibility
may slowly come to be replaced by familiarity (but again, never completely)-but the crucial
point is that the experience of "otherness" is in no way necessarily connected to anything
like "naturalness" as opposed to "artificiality" or "builtness." And the experience of other
ness here is not limited to mundane examples: for the same experience is had by the operator
of the nuclear power plant faced by an imminent meltdown, by the disoriented airplane pilot
unable to make sense out of what the dials in front of him are saying, by the school bus
driver confused by signs as to which lane is the passing lane and which one is the exit. In all
these cases the experience is one of an object-or more precisely of a world of objects, of
something like an "environment"-that is in a deep sense independent of the subject
experiencing it, opaque to that subject's understanding, possessing meanings and functions
that subject does not and cannot know, and operating autonomously (sometimes tragically
so) of that subject's needs and wishes.
One might be inclined here at first to say that the moment of otherness in these examples
comes from a failure to grasp the intentions of another person (the author of the instruction
manual, the poster of the road signs), not from anything in the object itself. But this would be
wrong. The objects of technology are opaque in the way I am describing to their "authors"
too; the nuclear power plant operator could just as well be its designer. Technologies work in
ways that no individual has intended or is capable of fully understanding: thus biotechnol
ogists are never sure what the side effects of the drugs they synthesize will be, aeronautical
engineers are unable accurately to predict the effect on a space shuttle's heat shields of a
violent take-off, computer programmers could not tell us, back in December of 1999, what
the programs they had written would do once the first digit of the year changed from a 1 to a
2. The complexity of such systems-even the non-biological ones-rival that of "nature." And
that complexity isn't simply a matter of what has been engineered in but rather of the
materials employed themselves, and of the forces of entropy constantly at work in them:
when will the filament in a light bulb bum out? When will the metal fatigue in a set of struts
be sufficient to cause an airliner's outer skin to tear?
The "otherness" associated with nature, I am arguing, is surely to be found within the
world of technology too. Artifacts as much as natural items are independent of us, are
indifferent to us, are beyond our ability to control and to master. "Otherness" is not a
characteristic of nature, but rather simply a characteristic of the real world as such; the only
"world" not marked by such a moment of otherness would be the world of thought or
fantasy-the world in which we imagine our technologies as working perfectly and friction
lessly, a world that does not in fact exist. Indeed one might want to say that independence,
otherness, an existence beyond human intentions and human understanding, are simply
characteristics of reality itself. To exist in ivalitv, as opposed to being a matter of thought, is
to exist independently of us. Things as such are beyond us: not just the things of nature but
the things we build too. The things we build are not part of us, are not identical to us, do not
mirror us and are not images of us. They have human meanings and purposes, to be sure, but
so do "natural" objects, and in both cases there is more to them than those meanings and
purposes. Once we produce something it escapes us. To think of something or to imagine it
is to have a kind of absolute power over it: the imagined thing, of course, is exactly the way
we imagine it, does exactly what we intend it to do-there is nothing to it that the imaginer
did not place there, nothing about it that she does not know. But once it is built-not through
an act of imagination but through the active practices of a real embodied human engaging in
real acts of physical labor-it escapes that power. There is always something more to it than
the builder intended, always something about it that she does not grasp and cannot predict,

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On Alienation from the Built Environment 91

always an effect it produces that she has never considered. This is not a fact about the
limitation of human abilities (or for that matter about human hubris) but rather a fact about
the nature of reality: it has to do with what it means for something to be, and it doesn't matter
whether this thing is a thing of "nature" or a thing that a human (or a beaver, or a spider, or
any of the other builders in the world) has built.3
Indeed it is a fact about building itself. It is not just the products of our building that
escape our power and our understanding-the same thing is true of the very processes we use
to build them, of our practices themselves. To hammer a nail into wood requires the
operation of gravity, of the complex combination of the velocity and weight of the hammer,
the density of the materials of which it is made, its shape and its size, the lever action
between the grip and the head, and then of course the shape and size and weight of the nail as
well, plus the complexities of the dead organic matter that makes up the board, the splitting
of the cells along precisely this path, the unknown history of the tree, the rain and sun and
storm and passage of seasons that led it to grow these rings in this way-not to speak, of
course, of the unknown and almost unimaginable processes of blood and bone and muscle
and sinew in the worker herself as she brings the hammer down with this amount of force
and no other. These processes, although we count upon them, are still beyond us, indepen
dent of us, unknown and often unconsidered by us, finally unpredictable by us as well (and
sometimes although we count upon them they fail, as when the hammer falls not upon the
nail but upon the thumb, or when the splitting of the wood extends too far). Building too
and it should be clear that by this term I am really referring to everything that human beings,
embodied and material and subject to physical forces as we are, do-is "independent" of us, is
"other," although once one begins to think about this the insufficiency of such words to
capture the real and remarkable situation here begins to become clear.
And this independence, I want to add, is not merely a matter of the physical character of
things that are built, although that is certainly a key element of it. The social "meanings" or
properties of items of the built environment escape our ability to plan and to control as well.
The social significance of a building is not determined by the builder: buildings can become
objects of derision, of fetishistic worship, of terrorist attack in ways never dreamt of by their
designers, and their meanings can change over time in fundamental ways-think of Stone
henge (whose original meaning we're presumably ignorant of), think of the "Arbeit macht
frei" sign at the entrance to Auschwitz, think, for that matter, of any commercial building
whose original owners were forced to sell.
I've been studying, for example, the sad history of the City Center Mall in Columbus,
Ohio, near where I live (Vogel, 2013). It was built in 1989, was very successful for some
years, but then began to lose customers as other, larger and more interesting mails were built
in central Ohio, and finally went out of business, falling to the wrecking ball in 2009. Its
story is a story of "otherness," of an object in the world that escaped the intentions and the
understanding of those who built it. It possessed, first of all, physical characteristics no-one
intended: the cracks that showed up in beams supporting the parking garage, the whine of a
particular escalator whose cause nobody was ever able to determine or fix, the condensation
that formed on the inside windows of the skywalk on hot days that made it hard to see
outside. But secondly and more obviously its otherness was revealed by its most econom
ically salient characteristic, one that no developer or builder could possibly have intended it

3 Thus when Simon Hailwood (2000) suggests the importance of respect for "nature's otherness," defining the
latter as "nature as it is independently of significances attributed within local landscapes," he gives no account
of why we should not respect the "otherness" in this sense of built environments too-which also exist
independently of such significances (as becomes tragically clear, for instance, in earthquakes or tornadoes).

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92 S. Vogel

to possess: its failure. The fate of a commercial enterprise of that sort is from the beginning
unknown and unknowable, as any investor or investment analyst or risk manager will readily
admit. It depends upon what might be called an "ecology of commerce" at least as complex
as the those operative in biotic or "natural" communities: the incomprehensibly complex set
of relations among decisions and actions made by hundreds of thousands of customers,
competitors, regulators, law-makers, real-estate developers, actors in foreign lands, and so
on and so on. This is true whether the enterprise succeeds or fails, flourishes or is ultimately
(as in the case of City Center) is demolished. Here too, as in the case of "merely physical"
objects and processes, what happens to the things we build is beyond our control, and our
processes of building depend on that fact. The built environment, as physical or as social, is
independent of its builders.
But secondly there is in our relation to that built environment, at least as we experience that
relation today, something significantly analogous to our alienated failure to recognize the origin
of the objects that surround us in nature-to see our food as coming from animals, to acknowl
edge our dependence on nature's processes, to forget that everything we use depends on and
originates in the natural world. For the built environment does not only originate in "nature"-by
themselves, after all, natural objects like trees and stones do not turn into buildings. It originates
also, and crucially, in human labor. It is not merely the slaughtered animals that we fail to
consider as we enjoy our hamburger or our bacon (indeed, most people are aware that what they
are eating was once alive and sentient): we fail to think as well of those people who labor in the
abattoirs, not to speak of those who build those abattoirs, and those who made those buildings
possible by their own labor of planning and organizing and financing and so forth. But this point
is a more general one. The built environment is built: every item within it has only come to be
because human beings labored co-operatively in order to make it. The clothing we wear, the
houses we inhabit, the small technologies we use all the time without even noticing them (the
table on which my computer sits, the electricity that animates it, the eyeglasses through which I
peer at these words)—all of these are the product of work that human beings have done. And that
labor itself of course also took place in buildings that were built, using machines that were built,
by workers wearing clothes that were built-and so on. We should feel gratitude to them-and
community with them. Yet we are rarely aware of the human and social-the laborious-origin of
the objects that make up our environment. Anyone who has ever watched a building slowly
being erected on a construction site, and then perhaps has come to inhabit that very building, is
aware of the strange experience as the builtness of the building-the time and difficulty and
expenditure of human energy in the construction process so evident as one watches it-then
somehow retreats into a vague background memory while what might be called the
environmentality of it, its simple and apparently unbuilt thereness, its (dare I say it?) natural
ness as a place within which one finds oneself comfortable and engages in one's familiar
everyday tasks come into the foreground.
This last point is crucial to what I am arguing here. We are alienated from the built
environment, I want to suggest, precisely in the sense that we do not see it as built, but rather
instead come to view it as "natural," where this latter word is understood as meaning
ordinary, to be expected, unremarkable, etc. Actually it's not really phenomenologically
correct even to say that we view it as natural: rather we pay no attention to it at all. It is the
unnoticed locus within which the particular items that we do pay attention to arise; it is the
"environment" in the sense of the taken-for-granted context for our activities. In a sense, it is
simply the world. But we don't experience it as a world that has been built: the human
processes needed for it to come into existence-the massive expenditure of labor and effort
and time and intelligence and organization necessary, for example, so that the very room I
am in now as 1 write (or you are in as you read) could come into being-simply escape our

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On Alienation from the Built Environment 93

recognition. We take the environment, which for almost all of us almost all of the time is a
built environment, for granted as simply there, the unexamined and unquestioned basis of
our actions, without thinking of what had to happen, what work had to be done, in order to
make that simple thereness possible. We ignore its builtness, instead of explicitly acknowl
edging that builtness with astonishment and gratitude for the sheer quantity and difficulty of
the human actions that were required for it to come to be-actions, usually performed by
unknown others, that nonetheless serve as the necessary precondition for the possibility of
those actions we are performing, right now.
We are alienated from the world surrounding us-from our "environment"-in that we fail to
see that it is a world that is made by human action, and more particularly by social action: for the
labor that builds the world around us is collective labor. The chair 1 am sitting on was built in a
factory by the effort of many laborers working together; their labor required machinery, and that
machinery had itself to be built, again by many workers; the energy to run the machinery had to
be generated and the fuels necessary for that process had to be extracted, and these too required
work. And all these activities furthermore needed to be planned, organized, financed, etc., and
workers were needed for these tasks as well. We spend much of our time on chairs, in rooms,
never noticing that the number of people whose labor made it possible for us to do so-in each
room, on each chair-must run into the tens or even hundreds of thousands; we hardly ever give
those people a moment's thought. This seems to me a failure to pay attention to the origin of the
things in our environment that is as striking, and as serious, as our failure to notice their origin in
"nature." We do not recognize our everyday dependence on nature, it is often said; I am
suggesting that in the same way we do not recognize our everyday dependence on labor, and
more precisely on the labor of others,4
Extending the sense of the word only slightly, we could describe all the laboring activities
needed for something like a room to come into existence as practices of construction, and
then we might be led to say that we are alienated from the built environment in that we fail to
see it as socially constructed, except not in the usual sense of this misleading phrase. When
cultural theorists talk about "social construction" they too often mean something like a
mental process; the familiar (and often criticized) thesis that "nature is a social construction,"
for example, generally turns out to mean that the way in which nature is conceptualized
varies depending on the society in which the conceptualizing is taking place. Such a thesis is
easily disparaged by those who object to its supposedly anthropocentric and idealist
rejection of the real: although it's true, the critics point out, that our view of nature is surely
social, still nature itself-the thing, not the idea-is not, and such an objection clearly makes
sense. But the built environment, which is the world that actually surrounds us, is as I've just
argued really constructed, in practices of construction that really are social-and in this sense
the environment (if not nature) can truly and literally be said to be a social construction: it is
an environment that we, all of us, have built.
We are alienated from the built environment, I have been arguing, because we fail to see
its builtness and we fail to see its sociality. But there is another sense in which we are
alienated from it as well. For despite the apparent (and alienating) "naturalness" of the built
environment which follows from our failure to grasp it as socially constructed, there is at the
same time paradoxically a way in which we also fail to grasp it as "natural" as well. We see
it, one might say, as natural in the sense of ordinary and not to be remarked upon, but we do
not see it as part of nature, which is to say as part of the natural world. Instead, we are
dualists: we view the built environment, when we think about it at all, as somehow outside of

4 And again, here the connection between the view I am presenting and the accounts of "alienation" and the
"fetishism of commodities" one finds in Marx should be clear. See Marx (1975) and Marx (1977).

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94 S. Vogel

nature, as a uniquely human realm distinct from and even opposed to the natural one. Here is
a place where technological optimists and (many) technological skeptics turn out to agree:
they each view the world of technology as fundamentally different from the world of nature,
and as therefore either superior or inferior to it depending on their point of view. The one
emphasizes the safety and predictability of the world of technology over the dangers and
uncertainties of the world of nature; the other emphasizes the dangers, spiritual and other
wise, in technology's destruction of nature and its attempt to replace the real world by a
totally predictable and humanized artificial one. The one view wants to dominate and
perhaps to replace nature, and hopes that a sufficiently advanced technology can do so;
the other fears that this attempt will succeed, and worries about the loss of nature's
"otherness" it involves in the ways I have discussed earlier.
Both views thus treat technology as unnatural, with the only difference being that the
optimists value that characteristic while the pessimists think it demonstrates our alienation
from nature. Neither view recognizes the fact that on the contrary the built environment is
not at all outside of nature, but rather is itself natural through and through. We humans are
natural organisms, and the objects we produce through our actions are natural too, no less
real or part of the world of nature than the webs produced by spiders or the dams constructed
by beavers. The natural/artificial distinction reveals itself on examination merely to be a
version of the body/mind distinction, and no more philosophically viable than that one
either. Descartes was wrong; human beings do not consist of two ontologically distinct parts,
and neither does the world that humans inhabit. The "otherness" and unpredictability I
argued earlier were as characteristic of the built environment as they are of the world of
nature are to be found both places because the built environment is the world of nature. We
neither dominate nor could we ever replace it; rather we are in it, and so are our buildings,
without remainder. As 1 have argued above, we could not build without nature. And this is
not because nature somehow "undergirds" or "makes possible" or is "presupposed by" the
built environment-locutions which still treat the two realms as distinguishable although
perhaps also related to each other, and still betray the Cartesian error. Rather it is because the
distinction between nature and building, which is to say between the "natural" and the
"artificial," cannot be sustained.
To say this last, however, is not simply to repeat the truism that "humans are part of
nature" nor to assert that our alienation from nature consists in our failure to acknowledge
that truism. To say that the natural/artificial distinction cannot be sustained means not only
that the built environment is natural (that is, is subject to natural laws and natural forces) but
also, and perhaps more importantly, that the natural environment is built. We humans, like
all other living organisms in the world, are active organisms, and so the environment we
inhabit is one that we have always already transformed through our activity. Our every move
changes the world around us-when we walk, when we breathe, when we turn our heads. We
are not Cartesian subjects directing the actions of our bodies from inside the pineal gland,
and thereby in devoting ourselves to pure cogitation somehow disengaged from the physical
world. Rather we aiv our bodies, which is to say acting in the world and thereby changing it
is simply what we do. The laboring practices I discussed above are not things we occasion
ally engage in, when we deign to descend from the world of thought to the lower world of
the physical; engaging in those practices on the contrary is what it is to be human. This
means that the fact that the environment that surrounds us is a built one is not a new
development in the history of human beings, not an indication of our recent alienation from a
previous life in harmony with nature or of our anthropocentric and hubristic attempt to end
nature. Rather it is, if one can put it this way, our nature to transform nature; the natural
environment for human beings is a built one. And so the answer to the question I began with,

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On Alienation from the Built Environment 95

as to what is meant by the apparently ambiguous term "environment"-does it mean the

world of nature or rather the built world by which in fact we are environed?-turns out to be
that the term is not ambiguous at all: it means this world, the one world in whose midst we
find ourselves, a built world which could not be built if it were not natural, a natural world
which is naturally built.
Thus there is only one environment, not two. And it is in our failure to recognize this fact
that our alienation-which I want to call alienation from the environment, not from nature
consists. To think that the artificial world is somehow distinct from the natural one is to be
alienated, by failing to see that the artificial world could not come to be, and could not
continue to exist, without the operation of "natural" forces that are beyond our understanding
and control. But to think that the natural world is to be identified with the non-human one,
and that that world, "independent" of and "other" than us, is somehow the real or authentic
one that somehow underlies or makes possible the artificial human world, as if the latter
were somehow inauthentic or secondary, arbitrarily and dangerously imposed upon the first,
is to be alienated as well, by failing to see that nature includes us, and therefore includes our
actions and our products, and that our "natural" environment will always be, and has always
been, one that we have transformed through our socially organized practices.5
It is the latter kind of alienation, and not the former, it seems to me, that is the source of
our biggest problems-including our environmental problems-today, and I want to end on
that note. We do not see the world surrounding us as our world, meaning by that pronoun not
that it is something that we possess or dominate but rather that it is something for which we
are responsible: we do not see it as something that takes the form it does because of our
actions, our socially organized practices. No-one wants the world to get significantly
warmer; no-one wants rivers to be polluted with toxic waste; no-one wants an environment
of deadening shopping malls and suburban sprawl. And yet each of these things seems to
each of us like a fact of nature about which we are each powerless to do anything. They each
appear as the product of anonymous and uncontrollable forces-forces such as "the market,"
"globalization," "modernity," etc.-that seem to be out of our control. For each individual of
course, they are out of control, as no one of us can have any significant impact on any of
them: and yet these forces are in fact nothing other than the consequence of our own actions
taken as a whole. This is the phenomenon of alienation, as described in the work of the
young Marx: it arises when the actions of human beings appear in the form of an alien power
over and against them (Marx 1975).
1 have argued this point elsewhere, and won't repeat the argument here (Vogel, 2012), nor do
I have the space here to write in any detail about how I think such an alienation from the
environment might be overcome. I will say, though, that I think it could only be overcome if
there were a way for us explicitly to acknowledge that the environment we inhabit is the
consequence of the social practices in which we engage. That acknowledgment, further, would
itself have to be a practice, and not just a state of mind-the practice of a kind of democratic
decision-making in which we would actively and communally accept responsibility for the

5 One can of course analytically distinguish between that part of the world that humans have directly changed
and that part that so far they haven't (although nowadays there's precious little of the latter). But there's
nothing ontologically important about such a distinction. One could distinguish as well between that part of
the world that shrimp have changed, or beavers, or the HIN1 virus. But why would one want to? Why does
one want to in the human case, if not because one has already decided that humans are somehow outside of
nature? And in any of these cases why would one be inclined to treat the part of the world unchanged by
(shrimp or beavers or humans) as somehow prior to, or underlying, or more authentically natural than, the
part that they have changed? It is, no doubt, independent of them, but only because it has been defined as
such-and surely in no sense that produces any ethical obligation to "respect" that independence!

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96 S. Vogel

environment that our practices produce. Environmental problems are not problems about
"nature," if by that term we mean something distinct from the social world we inhabit, because
as I have argued the environment we inhabit is always already a socially constructed one.
Environmental problems, rather, are social problems, and require the sort of solution that social
problems demand-which is to say, a democratic solution. The trouble today is that although the
environmental consequences of our practices are collective ones-it's not the individual emis
sion of carbon dioxide by one automobile driver that causes global warming, it's the wholesale
emission of vast quantities of carbon dioxide by a developed world full of such drivers-we have
no way to make collective democratic decisions about such things, and so I'm left each morning
to decide whether I should drive my car to work or not knowing that neither action will have any
impact on global temperatures. The tragedy of the commons is the problem here, and the
tragedy of the commons is just another name for what I have been calling alienation (Hardin,
1968). To overcome that tragedy, that alienation, would require a collective decision, not a
series of individual ones. That, in turn, would require a new set of social and economic
arrangements, and a new understanding of what a non-alienated democracy would require.

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