Environmentalism

David Peterson Del Mar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317861041
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

Why are our environmental problems still growing despite a huge increase in global conservation efforts? Peterson del Mar untangles this paradox by showing how prosperity is essential to environmentalism. Industrialization drove people to look for meaning in nature even as they consumed its products more relentlessly. Hence England led the way in both manufacturing and preserving its countryside, and the United States created a matchless set of national parks as it became the world's pre-eminent economic and military power.

Environmental movements have produced some impressive results, including cleaner air and the preservation of selected species and places. But agendas that challenged western prosperity and comfort seldom made much progress, and many radical environmentalists have been unabashed utopianists. Environmentalism considers a wide range of conservation and preservation movements and less organized forms of nature loving (from seaside vacations to ecotourism) to argue that these activities have commonly distracted us from the hard work of creating a sustainable and sensible relationship with the environment.

Part 1

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ANALYSIS AND ASSESSMENT

1

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Introduction

The project seemed reasonable enough. Americans' consumption of energy continued to climb at the dawn of the twenty-first century, and wind offered a relatively ‘green’ or clean source of electricity Locating some 170 energy-producing turbines on windy Nantucket Sound, off the New England coast, would serve area homes and businesses without the pollution attached to oil, natural gas, or coal.

But residents and their sympathizers raised $3 million to oppose the plan, and they did so in the name of nature preservation. ‘Our national treasures should be off limits to industrialisation,’ explained Walter Cronkite, the retired news anchor (Burkett, 2003: 48). The wind generators would not belch smoke, create acid rain, or require extensive mining. But they would mar the horizon, would constitute a pimple on the smooth cheek of sand, sky, and ocean.

Of course Cronkite's ocean-front home consumed a great deal of nature in its construction and maintenance, and the power which ran it had to come from somewhere. But opponents of the project evidently thought that people living inland, where views and property values were more modest, ought to bear the burden of producing energy for those whose capacious living rooms enjoyed better vistas. Indeed, another opponent of the project pointed out that the turbines would be part of a working industry, would not resemble the ‘quaint, scenic windmills … scattered across the Cape’ (Phadke, 2010: 13). Nostalgia-inducing remnants of earlier manufacturers were welcome; modern industry was not (see Plate 8).

The battle over wind-generated power off Cape Cod illustrates this book's salient themes. Environmentalism dwells on the paradoxical relationship between prosperity and nature loving. Professions of concern and affection for the environment have been most powerful among the eras, nations, and people that have most successfully subjected and consumed it. This relationship has been, in some respects, logical. Worries over nature's wellbeing should indeed rise as its health is compromised, and environmentalists have succeeded in regulating the exploitation of natural resources, preserving many parks and other areas, rescuing from extinction many animals and plants, and reducing some pollutants.

Parks Parks in areas considered wild became common in the United States, Canada, and Australia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and soon spread to Europe.

But nature loving has more often embodied than challenged the western march of material progress and comfort. People who buy the expensive homes on the shores of Cape Cod may consider themselves refugees from industrial capitalism. Yet only the very wealthy can afford the view, a prized window onto a ‘natural’ world that is every bit as much of a consumer good as the luxury cars in the driveway.

We revere nature not so much because it provides us with food, shelter, and tools, but because it offers meaning. Western peoples have become progressively ignorant of and disinterested in how soil, water, animals, trees, and other plants sustain our bodies, more and more adamant that these things feed our souls, that they transport us to a pure place beyond our superficial, everyday lives.

Most environmental histories do not focus on these sort of broad cultural themes. The field has historically divided itself between scholars who study how humans have shaped the environment – a sort of blending of natural and human history, if you will – and historians who focus on particular environmental movements, such as the development of forestry or nature reserves.

Conservation This broad term became common in the nineteenth century as western nations sought to use natural resources such as timber and water more wisely and rationally.

One problem with this set of approaches is that it skirts one of the central ironies in the field: Why have we seen a steady increase in conservation and preservation, the setting aside of areas deemed especially scenic even as human exploitation of the environment has continued apace? This book focuses on the recent history of western people's understandings of and sentiments about nature. It is a cultural history of nature loving.

Preservation This broad term emerged late in the nineteenth century as growing numbers of people in the western world advocated setting aside and protecting lands considered particularly scenic.

This book will spend considerable ink on the development of ideas and practices having to do with the conservation and preservation of particular parts of the environment, including some, like forestry, that have been highly technical in nature. But we shall study these political and economic movements in the context of much broader cultural forces, a growing embrace of places, species, and experiences deemed precious and beneficent: nature loving. Unlike programmes of rational conservation, nature loving has been much more concerned with transcending this world, our environment, than with coming to terms with it. Hence upon being confronted with the choice of lowering the rate of pollution and climate change or preserving a good view, many Cape Cod residents opted for the latter.

Forestry This term refers to the scientific and systematic management of forests that emerged in Germany in the eighteenth century and spread across the western world. It was at first concerned primarily with the rational use of timber and later with maintaining forests to prevent flooding and erosion and, more recently, as part of sustaining healthy ecosystems.

Environmentalism explores the recurring tension between science and emotion, conservation and preservation. The former has taken up the business of establishing a sensible, sustainable way of interacting with nature, which is understood as providing humans with life's necessities, from building materials to clean air. Preservation has been more likely to focus on nature's intangible gifts – the spiritual or national regeneration said to spring from certain places or species.

Class or economic divisions have informed these clashes. Poor people's reliance on plants and animals has often been direct – as has their experience of environmental problems like toxic waste. Well-to-do westerners have been more apt to perceive nature in abstract or symbolic terms and to disguise their reliance on it, like the prosperous Victorians who replaced vegetable with flower gardens, chickens and pigs with pets and cast-iron deer. Ideas about and movements concerned with nature loving have provided venues for people to malign the character of and attack the material interests of people different from themselves.

This book's emphasis on the complexities, divisions, and paradoxes of environmentalism should not be understood as an indictment of environmental movements, a brief for unfettered capitalism. But in exploring the history of nature loving I have become convinced that many of our environmental problems are rooted not simply in the western world's commitment to prosperity and growth but also in environmentalism's tradition of incoherence and irrelevance, its tendency to complement rather than to confront the attitudes and practices behind our growing environmental problems.

I am optimistic and vain enough to hope that Environmentalism can play a role in helping a worthy set of impulses and movements become more self-reflective and therefore more relevant and effective.

2

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Domesticating the wild

Men on trains were not supposed to behave this way. The gentleman was sticking his head out of the window, exposing himself to the storm. Finally he withdrew, then sat back, with eyes closed, as if trying to memorize the unpleasant sensations he had just subjected himself to.

Landscape painter J.M.W. Turner's odd behaviour seemed to make a mockery of the hard-won comforts of mid-nineteenth-century England. For millennia travellers had slowly toiled along at the mercy of the elements. To travel several hundred miles overland was the work of weeks or months, through all manner of weather. The railroad had finally changed all of that, had annihilated time and space, cheated sun, wind, cold, and rain. So why was this Englishman sticking his head into the storm?

Europeans had a long legacy of distrusting and trying to dominate the environment. Indigenous peoples across the world emphasized their dependence on a powerful, animate world that had the power to bestow or withhold sustenance. East Asians, notwithstanding their technological achievements, perceived nature as a potent force that humans ought to contemplate and learn from. But Christians viewed untamed nature as a threat to their survival, livelihoods, and salvation.

The economic and scientific transformations of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries made western people less fearful of nature, more confident in their ability to unlock its bounties. Indeed, thoughtful scientists and bureaucrats began to realize that woods and soils were being exploited too successfully, that without programmes of conservation, nations' future prosperity and security would be compromised.

But the emergence of sensible programmes of conservation do not explain the spread of sensibilities such as Turner's, the growing affinity for a nature that appealed precisely because it still lay beyond human control. By the mid-nineteenth century the most prosperous western peoples had turned to nature for instruction and meaning even as they transformed it into a machine that predictably produced wheat, timber, and other crops.

BACKGROUND

Christianity dominated medieval Europeans' views of nature. The Judeo-Christian God transcended the earth rather than residing in or emanating from it. Worldly existence was a fleeting prelude to eternal, hopefully heavenly, life.

Like the Greeks and Romans before them, medieval Christians asserted that nature made itself available and useful to humans. Even Francis of Assisi, a thirteenth-century figure often invoked by modern nature lovers, placed humanity squarely at the head of creation. St Bonaventure noted approvingly that St Francis had ‘subdued ferocious beasts, tamed the wild, trained the tame and bent to his obedience the brute beasts that had rebelled against fallen mankind’ (Coates, 1998: 54). When medieval people expressed appreciation for nature, they had in mind orderly and productive fields, land that they had cleared or drained, and animals that they had domesticated, not the uninhabited places where wild beasts, monsters, and perhaps Satan himself lurked [Doc. 1, p. 100].

Nature's toils and fruits alike could distract good Christians from pursuing a heavenly reward outside this world. Its terrors – drought, wolves, trolls, and worse – could kill, and its pleasures could divert people's attention from God.

Then capitalism emasculated nature. Scientists such as Galileo Galilei, Francis Bacon, René Descartes, and Isaac Newton described nature as passive, a collection of inert materials and mechanistic processes that humans could and should manipulate to further their own ends. Leon Battista Alberti, a fifteenth-century writer, celebrated ‘the Rocks cut, Mountains bored through, Vallies filled up, Lakes confined, Marshes discharged into the Sea, Ships built, Rivers turned, their Mouths cleared, Bridges Laid over them, Harbours formed’ (Glacken, 1967: 464–5). Humanity had found the golden key to unlock prosperity's stubborn door. Transportation, commerce, agriculture, and industry accelerated. Yields of wheat and other staples swelled with such inventions and innovations as the seed drill, more efficient ploughs and other implements, and intensified crop rotations – all the fruits of a more experimental, scientific, market-oriented approach to farming. Pastures, heaths, fens, and marshes were drained and put to work, forests cut to create space for more fields.

Western peoples approached nature with less trepidation, more confidence. Scientists such as Galileo and Descartes reduced what had been a mysterious and daunting world to mathematics. The experimental method, not passive piety, made the world apprehensible. This optimism accelerated with the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, a movement, as its name implies, suffused with a spirit of confidence in the ability of human beings to fathom and manipulate their world. Progress in abstract and practical science validated this growing faith in human reason and intellect. Christians had previously understood dominion over the earth as an unmerited gift from God. Now that dominion, made much more complete, was their own hardwon achievement. God had become a remote entity that set the universe in motion and then stood aside as people seized their futures. Practical men of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries created machines for spinning and weaving cotton, harnessing steam, harvesting crops, and casting metals, all of which multiplied the rate at which food, minerals, and wood were extracted from the earth and bent to human will.

Enlightenment This multifaceted intellectual and cultural movement swept across much of Europe in the eighteenth century. Proponents of the Enlightenment shared optimism over human capacity to master and manipulate the non-human environment.

THE BIRTH OF CONSERVATION

But growing numbers of Europeans realized that their new machines and techniques could endanger the very prosperity they had fostered. Agriculture had less to do with subsistence, with feeding local populations, more to do with generating money by producing crops for distant markets. But these shifts put more pressure on the land. Thoughtful farmers compensated by rotating crops more carefully, using legumes such as peas and clover to restore nitrogen to depleted soils, for example.

Others worried about the consequences of shrinking forests. Sixteenth-century landslides and floods provoked a ban on logging in parts of Florence. Germans began noticing wood shortages around 1600, and in the late eighteenth century they began regulating logging in an attempt to provide a reliable annual supply of firewood and building material. The first forestry school appeared in 1763 and was accompanied by many articles and books on the subject. ‘From the State Forest not more and not less may be taken annually than is possible on the basis of good management by permanent sustained yield,’ remarked a 1795 text (Rubner, 1984: 171). The Danes created Forest Acts in 1763 and 1805, with the latter set of regulations requiring both preservation and replanting. Russia's reform-minded Peter the Great touted forest preservation as a means to both slow erosion and ensure a reliable supply of oak trees for masts in the early eighteenth century. The French expressed similar concerns as early as the twelfth century. Their Forest Ordinance of 1669, though routinely ignored, covered human activities from grazing and charcoal production to logging, even how many seed-bearing trees were to be left standing.

Forestry became not an exercise in cutting down trees as quickly as possible, but a process of establishing rational, even mathematical, equations to ensure that trees were utilized with maximum, long-term efficiency.

This emphasis on conservation, on using natural resources in a sustainable manner, flew in the face of western tradition and local demands, but it fitted well the requirements of the new science and the modern economy. Trees could best be understood as timber, as material to be converted into fuel, fences, houses, and railroad ties. Like the earth itself, they were expansive yet finite and ought therefore to be used judiciously. Empirical study and mathematical equations should determine the rate at which they should be cut and the uses to which they should be put. Forestry was a scientific study in which specially trained humans used reason to address concrete, practical problems.

Natural history in some ways resembled forestry. The rational exploitation of the earth's flora and fauna, after all, required an exhaustive cataloguing of those commodities. Botanists and other collectors commonly accompanied explorers such as Captain James Cook because the sponsors of such expeditions wanted to know the commercial and agricultural potential of lands that they hoped to colonize.

But by the eighteenth century a growing array of enthusiastic amateurs who gathered plants and insects in the fields and hills around their homes had joined the self-conscious professionals. These collectors eventually formed natural history societies, such as the British Association for the Advancement of Science. British publishers produced books on natural history that sold very, very well in the nineteenth century, and British newspapers included natural history sections. ‘By the middle of the century, there was hardly a middle-class drawing-room in the country that did not contain an aquarium, a fern-case, a butterfly cabinet, a seaweed album, a shell collection, or some other evidence of a taste for natural history’ (Barber, 1980: 13). Natural history collecting and societies spread to Canada and other English colonies.

These collectors were fired by several impulses, not all of them instrumental. The amateurs, to be sure, believed that they were advancing ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Introduction to the series
• Table of Content
• Acknowledgements
• Publisher's acknowledgements
• Chronology
• Who's who
• Glossary
• Part One Analysis and Assessment
• Part Two Documents
• Guide to Further Reading
• References
• Index