And now, at last, the conclusion of my recent manuscript, “On Sleeping through the Night: Ecology, Economy and Ethics of a Vital Human Project.”
5. The Ethics of Sleep
Following a skunk track through the slush of an early thaw, Leopold (1949: 4) observed the carefully established tunnels and food stores of a meadow mouse exposed to the sky. To the mouse, he writes, the snow concealed his “economic system” from intrusion; as such, the snow meant “freedom from want and fear.” To the rough-legged hawk which stoops upon some hapless mouse surveying the damage to its domain, the melting of the snow likewise meant “freedom from want and fear.”
All living things strive for more or less the same things – “freedom from want and fear” – but we cannot all achieve what we strive for at the same time. The projects of the meadow mouse and the projects of the rough-legged hawk are at odds with one another, and a change in the weather was enough to tip the balance in favor of one over the other. For the chickadees going to roost in Leopold’s woods, a change in the weather itself thwarted the striving of part of the flock, even in the absence of a direct threat from any other animal.
This brings us at last to the ethical problem of sleeping through the night.
All else being equal, sleep is good. Sleep is so very good, in fact, that the project sleeping through the night is worth all the striving, worth the physiological and behavioral trade-offs, worth the commitment of material goods, worth the investment in and subordination to social institutions which limit freedom and channel human activities.
Sleep is good largely because it is good for the still more basic animal project of thriving as a living thing of a given species. In other words, sleep is a vital project in that it is not possible to thrive as an animal without it. Sleep is not the only project worth pursuing, though, and the arrangements one individual or community might put in place to sleep securely will inevitably intersect with others’ projects and their respective arrangements, and vice versa.
Practical ethical inquiry concerns what happens at those points of intersection. What are the goals of the intersecting projects? Why do those goals matter? Are the means appropriate to the ends? May conflicting projects be reconciled or mutually accommodated? If not, which project takes priority, and why?
Environmental ethics, in a broad sense of the term, simply places this mode of inquiry into the context of shared environments. An environment is best understood as the set of affordances relative to a living thing and its projects; a shared environment is thus to be understood as relative to the intersection of the projects of living things, a landscape in which their striving for “freedom from want and fear” – and the adaptations and arrangements which support those strivings – may align, compete or conflict.
Perhaps a more direct way to get at this point is to define an environmental problem as a possible conflict among the projects of various living things within a shared environment. Someone hosts a boisterous backyard party which continues late into the night, running directly counter to a near neighbor’s project of getting a good night’s sleep before an early-morning shift at work. This is a problem. A bit of excess noise and light may be relatively trivial, as environmental problems go, but the larger problems of landscape alteration, pollution, and even climate change follow the same logic, however much more weighty and complex they may be.
Consider the distribution of households across the landscape of the post-industrial world, which results in differential access to a safe sleeping environment: the institution of private property and the various social and technological arrangements of domestic landscapes have accomplished wonders in advancing important human projects. Many private spaces in the United States, at least, are among the most useful and most comfortable in human history. And yet, while many are able to take their rest in luxurious comfort, others huddle in doorways or in the shelter of highway overpasses, and many more must settle for arrangements somewhere in between.
Consider the means employed to ensure the cool, dry air so conducive to good sleep even in the sultry stillness of an August night in the American South. Refrigeration technology is a minor miracle for the support of human projects, many of them vital projects, but it entails a set of technological arrangements with implications for nearly every project of every living thing on Earth through climate change and – with older refrigerants – ozone depletion.
And yet, sleeping through the night remains a good thing, and no set of arrangements put in place to secure a good night’s sleep will be without its implications for the projects of others. An indispensable question for practical environmental ethics, then, is this: How much imperfection, how much inequality, is acceptable under the constraints of the world as it is? Garrett Hardin (1968: 1247) states the matter much more simply in his treatment of the tragedy of the commons, a special case of conflicting projects: “an alternative to the commons need not be perfectly just to be preferable.”
The ecological and economic problems of sleeping through the night also set a limit to any effort to solve the ethical problem because they are all problems with no ultimate solution: no matter how cleverly we may strive for security and comfort, we may still die before we wake.
We humans inhabit a wilderness, writes Wendell Berry (1987: 138-139): “This wilderness, the universe, is somewhat hospitable to us, but it is also absolutely dangerous to us (it is going to kill us, sooner or later), and we are absolutely dependent on it.” Berry hopes for a possible harmony between humans and the wilderness we inhabit, but underscores that such a harmony can only be worked out in ever-renewed practice.
If we are especially mindful and diligent – and especially lucky – many of us may for a moment experience the fulfilment of a prayer of the Mad Farmer, a recurring character in Berry’s (2013: 150) poetry:
Let me wake in the night
and hear it raining
and go back to sleep.
References
Berry W (1987) Home Economics: Fourteen Essays. San Francisco: North Point Press.
Berry W (2013) New Collected Poems. Brooklyn, NY: Counterpoint.
Hardin G (1968) The Tragedy of the Commons. Science 162(3859): 1243-1248.
Leopold A (1949) A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There. New York: Oxford University Press.
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