Faith in Nature

Environmentalism as Religious Quest

Thomas Dunlap

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780295989815
• Topic: Tecnologia e ingegneria
• Subtopic: Selvicoltura

The human impulse to religion--the drive to explain the world, humans, and humans' place in the universe – can be seen to encompass environmentalism as an offshoot of the secular, material faith in human reason and power that dominates modern society. Faith in Nature traces the history of environmentalism--and its moral thrust--from its roots in the Enlightenment and Romanticism through the Progressive Era to the present. Drawing astonishing parallels between religion and environmentalism, the book examines the passion of the movement's adherents and enemies alike, its concern with the moral conduct of daily life, and its attempt to answer fundamental questions about the underlying order of the world and of humanity's place within it. Thomas Dunlap is among the leading environmental historians and historians of science in the United States. Originally trained as a chemist, he has a rigorous understanding of science and appreciates its vital importance to environmental thought. But he is also a devout Catholic who believes that the insights of religious revelation need not necessarily be at odds with the insights of scientific investigation. This book grew from his own religious journey and his attempts to understand human ethical obligations and spiritual debts to the natural world. CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2005

1 / Newton's Disciples

The environmental movement began with a concern for what was happening at the time—with DDT in our body fat and organo-chlorines in our drinking water and the awful environmental news of the late 1960s, the discovery that economic development and population growth threatened wilderness and even the world's ecosystems.¹ In the spring of 1970, when a quarter-million people rallied in Washington, D.C., for the first Earth Day and many more at teach-ins and protests across the country, they wanted to change the laws, not discuss humanity's deep ties to the world.

Politicians also focused on the present. They had passed laws to save parks and manage resources; now they passed laws mandating preservation of “the environment.” The National Environmental Policy Act spoke in general terms, but most legislation had specific targets. Laws set targets for the reduction of pollution in the air and the water, banned some chemicals and regulated others, established a program to save endangered species, and imposed specific duties on industries and people. Like the environmentalists, the politicians spoke of the moment. President Richard Nixon declared that the 1970s were the decade in which we had to act: “It is literally now or never.”² Many agreed.

A SENSE OF WONDER

Environmentalism, though, does not make sense without the deeper current of concern about the way humans are related to the world. Rachel Carson attracted public attention and gained headlines with warnings of the dangers of pesticide residues, but achieved lasting popularity not from muckraking, but morality. She preached—that is not too strong a word—that we had a duty to life on earth, the “obligation to endure.” We had to understand our place in the world, change our values and our hearts.³

Even at the time, people realized that Carson's case involved more than human health. Her admirers made her a modern nature saint, and her opponents looked more at her values than her science. Speakers for the National Agricultural Chemicals Association questioned her scientific credentials and evidence, but they charged with much more fervor that she opposed science, progress, and Western civilization, that if we took her ideas seriously we would soon be living in caves and eating nuts and berries. To be human, they said, we had to conquer nature, and modern society had written a glorious page in the annals of civilization by developing the wonderful chemicals that had saved so many people from disease and so much food from the ravenous hordes of our insect enemies. There was a lot of injured professional pride and economic interest in these accusations, but also outrage at what her opponents saw as Carson's denial of the power of human reason and her rejection of the triumph of the human spirit that produced modern civilization.

Carson's opponents were wrong in thinking the public would rally to the old cause—most people saw at least some merit in Carson's case—but right in seeing the contest as fundamental.⁴ The “conquest of nature” and living as “a plain citizen of the biotic community” involved different ways of accepting the universe. One view denied that humans were part of nature or at home in it; the world was only raw material to be used for what we wanted. The other declared that the world was our home, that we were creatures of nature as well as culture who were charged with the duties of good citizens not just toward human society but the larger community of nature. We needed nature to live a full and fully human life.

Before she wrote Silent Spring, Carson's reputation rested on her writings about wild nature, and her own love of the earth and its life lay at the foundation of her activism. Like many other nature writers and environmentalists, her fascination with nature began early, aided by her mother and life on sixty-five acres in Springdale, a small town east of Pittsburgh. Her academic interests, though, seemed entirely literary until her junior year in college, when a required biology course led her into science. She received an M.S. in biology in 1932 and spent the next twenty years as a government biologist, doing research and editing publications, while pursuing a second career as a nature writer. Her first book, Under the Sea Wind (1941), attracted little attention (probably because it appeared about the time the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor), but a second, The Sea Around Us (1952), made the best-seller lists. Carson became and remained a full-time writer until her death in 1965.

She argued for nature by implication in Under the Sea Wind and The Sea Around Us and directly in an article for Women's Home Companion in 1956, “Help Your Child to Wonder,” which was later printed as a book.⁵ “A child's world,” she said, “is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood.” She appealed to parents to give their children “a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.” “The lasting pleasures of contact with the natural world are not reserved for scientists but are available to anyone who will place himself under the influence of earth, sea and sky and their amazing life.” “Those who dwell, as scientists or laymen, among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life. Whatever the vexations or concerns of their personal lives, their thoughts can find paths that lead to inner contentment and to renewed excitement in living. Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is symbolic as well as actual beauty in the migration of the birds, the ebb and flow of the tides.… something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature—the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after the winter.”⁶

Here Carson touched on the heart of the environmental movement: the passion for nature that fills many people's lives and touches many more. What but an eagerness for this other world of nature would keep you rambling through wet woods on a cool spring day until not only your clothes but every piece of paper in your wallet was soaked? Why else take a child—past her bedtime—out under the eaves in a rainstorm to watch the lightning strike, or walk in the woods on a moonless midnight with no flashlight? What but the belief in a reality beyond human society but still part of this world sustains delight at the daily swoop of a barn swallow under the porch eaves or the quick glimpse of a mockingbird dropping two stories from house gutter to lawn?⁷ Behind the public face of environmentalism—its scientific studies, calls for protection, programs, and regulations—lay personal connections and beliefs. Fears about the impacts human numbers and technology had on wild nature fueled the movement, but so did the belief that we were losing more than resources or beauty: we were losing something essential to the human spirit. A sense of physical crisis drove the movement's reform program—people worried that things were going to collapse, and soon—but a concern with humans' relation to the universe, which reached the level of religion, lay beneath the campaign for new laws.

Neither environmentalists nor their opponents saw environmentalism in religious terms because they did not think of religion in terms of ultimate questions but denominations and creeds. Religions were institutions that told about a world beyond the senses. Americans viewed their own beliefs in human reason, the autonomous individual, human independence from nature, and the supremacy of material values not as beliefs about our place in the world, but as undeniable facts. In the usual scheme the world was one thing and humans another, and we should shape the world to our needs. If everyone worked for their own interests, the Earthly Paradise of consumer goods would follow, and eventually, in the more enthusiastic versions, humans would spread to the stars. These beliefs were not, perhaps, deeply spiritual, and did not address some fundamental questions, but the idea of humans controlling the universe and the flood of goods and gadgets made for an attractive faith. Environmentalism denied that humans were all, that reason enabled us to build an Earthly Paradise of gadgets, and that dollars measured all values. For these heresies the right-minded condemned it.

BELIEF IN REASON

The triumphs of science and technology had allowed the conqueror's view by making it unnecessary to invoke Divine Intervention. Science's infrastructure of societies, museums, and publications seemed to provide for the irresistible and inevitable advance of human knowledge. James Watt's steam engine and later triumphs of technology provided visible demonstrations of human power over nature. Firearms defeated wild beasts and non-European peoples; mechanical power drained mines and took us across the land at unheard-of speeds. By the late nineteenth century the cultural center of gravity had shifted from revelation to reason.

In the twentieth century educated people commonly dismissed “religion” as folk belief, superstition, or a stage of cultural progress society had, happily, passed beyond—at any rate, something no one with any pretensions to knowledge or sophistication took seriously. Science became the only acceptable source of understanding; objective, reproducible data, the only true knowledge; and supernatural religions, which people had seen as the support of civilization and the foundation of society, private opinion. Ultimate questions and ultimate meanings ceased to have any public value. Science stopped its explanations at the level of instrumental values and material causes, and people followed its lead, abandoning—at least openly—the search for ultimates. The “infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature” and people's joy in the diversity of its life became simply phenomena, perhaps a source of private satisfaction and pleasure, but without significance for society.

Just because the culture made organized religion an optional part of life did not mean people ceased to believe; they just ceased to call their beliefs religion. Secular beliefs lacked the characteristics we associate with religious organization, but they functioned as religious creeds, describing the world and humanity's place in it. Though some strenuously denied it, these were systems of belief, for it could no more be demonstrated that humans could understand the universe than that a white-bearded God in a robe created it in six twenty-four days, no more be proved that our senses showed us everything than that after death the righteous would sit around on clouds and strum harps. Allied with nationalism and patriotism, the American version of modern secular belief even acquired many of religion's trappings. “The American way of life” included a daily ritual for schoolchildren (the pledge of allegiance to the flag), yearly remembrance of those fallen in battle, and, until recently, something that seemed a form of Absolute Evil: Godless Communism.

During the Cold War guardians of orthodoxy hauled heretics before the House Un-American Activities Committee to be shamed by congressmen. Confession and repentance before these high priests, of course, restored them to grace.⁸ These public expressions of virtue did not address questions of ultimate purpose or such things as individual survival after death, but conventional faiths filled the gap by blessing the nation. Cardinal Spellman of New York, for example, assured American troops fighting in Vietnam that they were Christ's soldiers, and preachers emerged from the Oval Office to assure the public that the president was right with God—or, later, in the case of President Clinton, had at least wrestled with his demons. This was a faith that dared not speak its name, but it did not need to. As the common public point of view, it escaped scrutiny.

Environmentalism developed within the modern world, seeing secular beliefs as all there was, the material world as the only one, and human reason as our only tool for understanding, but it rejected other common views. Environmentalism believed nature had an intrinsic value and rights that humans should respect and that some values could not be reduced to dollars. It looked beyond knowledge, seeking meaning, and believed each of us needed to form conscious ties to the world. These concerns led some to see the movement as irrational or “mystical,” a weak-minded search for emotional satisfaction, or the refuge of those who had lost touch with reality. Those views had little foundation. Some environmentalists were mystical or weak-minded or out of touch with reality, as were some stockbrokers and free-enterprise Republican congressmen, but in its conscious attention to humans' place in the world, its insistence on nature and non-monetary values, environmentalism addressed questions fundamental to human life and looked steadily at real problems.

Its focus on choices and action was more “realistic” than belief in an inevitable progress that would solve our environmental problems and economic growth as a complete measure of public welfare. Besides, the anti-environmental opposition, despite its appeals to statistics and human reason, had as much ideological and philosophical baggage as any starry-eyed tree hugger and resorted to emotional and “irrational” arguments as commonly as New Age gurus. Anti-environmental arguments appeared hard-headed only because everyone accepted paeans to Progress and sermons on the Questing Spirit of Mankind as self-evident truths.

Looking at environmentalism as an approach to ultimate questions takes us back to questions of what we believe and why we believe it, for society's generally accepted view forms the ground on which environmentalism was built and the beliefs it holds to and departs from. This chapter touches upon the main points of modern secular beliefs. It begins with the rise of the Enlightenment view within seventeenth-century Europe and its triumph throughout Western society during the next two hundred years, then takes up Romanticism's role in making the conquest of nature a heroic venture and America's destiny. Americanism, the complex of commerce, patriotism, and piety that saw Reason, the Hand of God, and the Market leading humanity into a future of endless Progress, provided the context for environmentalism. Environmentalism rejected parts of the conventional wisdom but accepted much of its foundations. It believed, for instance, in science and had as much faith in reason and laws as any conventional businessman. Environmentalism, like environmentalists, faced the challenge of fusing these ingredients—science's objective stance, a Romantic attachment to experience in nature, and the conditions of modern industrial life—into a satisfying vision of human life and purpose that took account of environmental realities.

FAITH IN SCIENCE

To describe the Enlightenment as a “recovery of nerve,” as one historian did, understates the case.⁹ The seventeenth-century intellectuals (usually known by the French term, philosophes) who saw reason as humans' only—and sufficient—tool to understand the universe, established ideas about humans and their place in nature that still guide our hopes. The obvious triumphs of the mind in seventeenth-century Europe fueled their dreams. Copernicus's astronomy showed the sun, not the earth, at the center of the solar system, and Galileo's telescope revealed new wonders in the universe: craters on the moon, rings around Saturn, and moons orbiting Jupiter. Newton's physics allowed humans to calculate the fall of an apple and the movement of the moon and to see that the same forces controlled both. The philosophes made Newton the great lawgiver: “Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night/ God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.”¹⁰ Elevated to a philosophy, the methods and assumptions of physics destroyed a cosmology, reduced Creator to clockmaker, and changed Western views of the world. Instead of being God's mysterious handiwork, held in existence by his immediate and continuing intervention, the heavens and the earth appeared as a complex of bodies and forces governed by laws we could grasp.

Confidence in reason's power grew through the eighteenth century. In Europe Descartes's emphasis on rigor and reason and his view of geometry as the model of rational thought shaped the thought of a generation (and in France, the society) and in Britain Francis Bacon's program for a new science based on observation and experiment that would allow humans to understand and master nature formed the idea of science. The educated minority, at least, debated plans for a rational social order grounded in principles revealed by reason and believed people could codify and arrange all knowledge. Those dreams persist in the belief that science will solve our problems, in plans like E. O. Wilson's—developed in Consilience—to take up again the Enlightenment project of unifying all knowledge and even in our government, for it rests on Enlightenment principles. The Declaration of Independence, with its emphasis on “Nature and Nature's laws,” its belief that each people could and should arrange their government as seems best to them, and its appeal to the opinion of mankind, rested on faith in reason. So did the idea of a Constitution. The philosophes, in turn, saw the Amer...