Embodied Ethics: The Balance of Nature as Lived Experience in the Delaware Bay

Since the nineteen-seventies, wildlife biologists and environmental activists have converged on the Delaware Bay, in the northeastern U.S., to study a migratory shorebird called the 'red knot'.  Ecologically linked with the spawning cycle of the horseshoe crab, the population of this bird has declined precipitously in recent decades with the advent of a horseshoe crab fishery on the east coast.  Attempts to halt this decline have hinged on shorebird population surveys and horseshoe crab harvest quotas carried out and imposed since the nineteen-nineties.  The political controversy over these quotas has taken the form of abstract rhetoric common to environmental controversies in the latter half of the twentieth-century: the cost/benefit analysis of jobs vs. conservation.

Beneath such rhetoric is a world of lived experience in the Bay.  Horseshoe crab fishers, state wildlife biologists, visiting birders, and bayfront property owners all describe their connections to this ecosystem in terms of bodies and balance.  Through corporeal experience and emotion-language, denizens and visitors to the Bay have used their relationships to the birds, crabs, waters, and beaches to instantiate and justify social norms and notions of responsibility to nature.   These embodied forms of environmental ethics stand in sharp contrast to the 'economic rationality' of much policy-making, which has alienated the various stakeholders in debates over crab quotas and shorebird conservation.  Drawing attention to this disparity, this paper argues for environmental decision-making based on less abstract ethical bases, grounded in the bodies and experiences of those on whose behalf such decisions are ostensibly made.