Environmentalism

David Peterson Del Mar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138160811
• eBook ISBN: 9781317868217
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

Environmental movements have produced some impressive results, including cleaner air and the preservation of selected species and places. But movements that challenged western prosperity and comfort seldom made much progress, and many radical environmentalists have been unabashed utopianists.

In this short guide, Peterson del Mar untangles this paradox by showing how prosperity is essential to environmentalism. Industrialisation made conservation sensible, but also drove people to look for meaning in nature even as they consumed its products more relentlessly. Hence Englandled the way in both manufacturing and preserving its countryside, and the United Statescreated a matchless set of national parks as it became the world's pre-eminent economic and military power. Environmentalismconsiders both the 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.

CHAPTER 1

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 seemed appealing 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 would predictably produce wheat, timber, and other crops.

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.

Like the Greeks and Romans before them, medieval Christians asserted that nature made itself available and useful to humans

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’.¹ 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 hard-won 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.

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.² 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 in the early eighteenth century touted forest preservation as a means to both slow erosion and ensure a reliable supply of oak trees for masts. 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.

Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century touted forest preservation as a means to both slow erosion and ensure a reliable supply of oak trees for masts

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.

Forestry

The scientific and systematic management of forests emerged in Germany in the eighteenth century. The new field was primarily concerned with the rational use of timber. Wood constituted a precious military and economic resource, and foresters were charged with calculating rates of logging that would leave sufficient wood available for subsequent governments and generations.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries foresters paid more attention to how forests prevented erosion and flooding and fostered healthy drinking water. They worked harder at preventing forest fires and replanting logged areas. Modern foresters often describe trees not just as crops to be cultivated and harvested, but as part of an ecosystem supporting a complex and interrelated set of organisms.

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 distant 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 …’.³ 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 scientific knowledge. They fitted their discoveries into an interminable Linnaean catalogue of nested classification in which plants, animals, and minerals were assigned places in an extensive but fixed hierarchy. Status accrued to those who assembled and organized the most specimens and facts. Unlike twentieth-century ecologists, they were not much interested in how their insects or plants fitted with the rest of the environment. This interest in the jots and tittles, the genus and species, of beetles and ferns embodied the Enlightenment confidence that nature could be, literally, pinned down, that it could be sorted and contained in a finite, if vast, system of kingdoms, classes, and genera. Nature was a static collection of species and data that could and would be fully defined, not a dynamic set of interactions. Discovering, describing, and cataloguing the world’s flora and fauna represented Europeans’ growing sense of mastery over the natural world.

Discovering, describing, and cataloguing the world’s flora and fauna represented Europeans’ growing sense of mastery over the natural world

Yet amateur naturalists also looked backward, to a time when nature constituted not a scientific laboratory, but God’s handiwork. They were apt to be pious Protestants, particularly Quakers, for whom plants, insects, and shells suggested the beautiful, intricate, and wondrous work of God’s creation, ‘through Nature up to Nature’s God,’ as British collectors liked to put it.⁴

European gardens illustrated the same ambivalence over man’s growing power. By the time of the Reformation, in the 1520s, Italians had the most elaborate and celebrated. Fine gardens spread north, with economic growth. Holland’s urban elite purchased country estates in the seventeenth century that they surrounded with elaborate arrangements of plants, especially foreign and flowering varieties. These gardens provided a foil to wild landscapes. They served not simply to please the eye, but to demonstrate how human artifice made nature orderly and pleasant.

Gardens also performed political functions. More than one historian has pointed out that the overwhelming Versailles gardens of Louis XIV, which consumed more water than the 600,000 denizens of Paris, were meant to suggest that a monarch who could so successfully control nature should also control his nation. The ability to make a thousand flowers bloom betokened a sort of supernatural command of the rest of creation. Likewise, the tree-lined avenues leading up to important people’s homes connoted power as well as taste.

Yet the unprecedented wealth of the eighteenth century was accompanied by gardens that were not only larger, but less orderly. Geometric and rigid landscapes – patent in their human artifice – gave way to less linear arrangements of plants, hills, water, and temples. These gardens required a great deal of intervention, not only in planting and cultivating various types of vegetation, but also in fashioning the very features that lent the gardens such a ‘natural’ appearance. An English landscape garden created in 1764 included a forty-acre lake. Indeed, the fences that separated the gardens around...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Timeline
• Who’s Who for Environmentalism
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Domesticating the wild
• Chapter 2 Industrial nature loving
• Chapter 3 The friendly wild of post-war affluence
• Chapter 4 Nature and counter-culture
• Chapter 5 Breakthrough
• Chapter 6 Radical departures
• Chapter 7 Thwarted
• Chapter 8 Extreme nature loving
• Conclusion
• References
• Index