Environmentalism as Religion (Part Six)

Thomas (1983) writing of the development of environmental and related attitudes in the eighteenth century:

“The embarrassment about meat-eating thus provides a final example of the way in which, by the end of the eighteenth century, a growing number of people had come to find man’s ascendancy over nature increasingly abhorrent to their moral and aesthetic sensibilities. This was the human dilemma: how to reconcile the physical requirements of civilization with the new feelings and values which that same civilization had generated. It is too often assumed that sensibilities and morals are mere ideology: a convenient rationalization of the world as it is. But in the early modern period the truth was almost the reverse, for, by an inexorable logic, there had gradually emerged attitudes to the natural world which were essentially incompatible with the direction in which English society was moving.

“The growth of towns had led to a new longing for the countryside. The progress of cultivation had fostered a taste for weeds, mountains, and unsubdued nature. The new-found security from wild animals had generated an increasing concern to protect birds and preserve wild creatures in their natural state. Economic independence of animal power and urban isolation from animal farming had nourished emotional attitudes which were hard, if not impossible, to reconcile with the exploitation of animals by which most people lived. Henceforth an increasingly sentimental view of animals as pets and objects of contemplation would jostle uneasily alongside the harsh facts of a world in which the elimination of ‘pests’ and the breeding of animals for slaughter grew every day more efficient. Oliver Goldsmith wrote of his contemporaries that ‘they pity and they eat the objects of their compassion’. The same might be said of the children of today who, nourished by a meat diet and protected by a medicine developed by animal experiments, nevertheless take toy animals to bed and lavish their affection on lambs and ponies. For adults, nature parks and conservation areas serve a function not unlike that which toy animals have for children; they are fantasies which enshrine the values of which society as a whole cannot afford to live.

“By 1800 the confident anthropocentrism of Tudor England had given way to an altogether more confused state of mind. The world could no longer be regarded as having been made for man alone, and the rigid barriers between humanity and other forms of life had been much weakened. During the religious upheavals of the 1640s and 1650s contemporaries had been shocked to hear sectaries like the Ranter Jacob Bauthumley asserting that ‘God is in all creatures, man and beast, fish and fowl, and every green thing.’ But, in a secularized form, this kind of pantheism was to become very general in the eighteenth century, when it was widely urged that all parts of creation had a right to live; and that nature itself had an intrinsic spiritual value. Not everyone now believed that mankind was uniquely sacred. Some Romantics preferred the once-condemned mystical view that ‘each shrub is sacred, and each weed divine’, as William Blake put it, ‘Every thing that lives is Holy.’

“Of course, most people in practice, like G. M. Trevelyan himself retained their faith in the primacy of human interests, even if they lamented the effect of material progress on the natural world.

“(Whether trees, or animals, ought to be preserved ‘for their own sakes’ [wrote Trevelyan] is an interesting question on which different opinions might be held. But the argument for the preservation of natural scenery and the wild life of English fauna and flora may be based on motives that regard the welfare of human beings alone, and it is those arguments alone that I wish here to put forward. To preserve the bird life of the country is required in the spiritual interests of the human race, more particularly of the English section of it, who find such joy in seeing and hearing birds.)”

“As Trevelyan implied, it was not for the sake of the creatures themselves, but for the sake of men, that birds and animals would be protected in sanctuaries and wild-life parks. In 1969 the United Nations and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature defined ‘conservation’ as the rational use of the environment to achieve the highest quality of living for mankind.’

“But even in the early modern period there were some perhaps hypersensitive persons who were prepared to go further than this. For them it was increasingly difficult to accept the primacy of human needs when to do so involved inflicting pain on domestic animals or eliminating whole species of wild ones. In more recent times these difficulties have been widely perceived. Today there are writers of books who refer to the extermination of the wolf as a ‘pogrom’ or ‘holocaust’; and the law journals carry articles on whether trees have rights.

“The early modern period had thus generated feelings which would make it increasingly hard for men to come to terms with the uncompromising methods by which the dominance of their species had been secured. On the one hand they saw an incalculable increase in the comfort and physical well-being or welfare of human beings; on the other they perceived a ruthless exploitation of other forms of animate life. There was thus a growing conflict between the new sensibilities and the material foundations of human society. A mixture of compromise and concealment has so far prevented this conflict from having to be fully resolved. But the issue cannot be completely evaded and it can be relied upon to recur. It is one of the contradictions upon which modern civilization may be said to rest. About its ultimate consequences we can only speculate.” ((Thomas, K. (1983). Man and the natural world: Changing attitudes in England 1500- 1800. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 300-303)

Applying this to America is the seminal essay in which Arnold (1996) remarks on the use of the pastoral ideal:

“The pastoral ideal has been used to define the meaning of America ever since the age of discovery, and it has not yet lost its hold upon the native imagination.

“Since 1964, the rise of environmentalist ideology has pushed the pastoral ideal increasingly toward nature, striving to redefine the meaning of America in fully primitivist terms of the wild….

“…Public policy debate over the environment and the meaning of America has been clamorous these thirty years. Its terms were succinctly put by Edith Stein:

“The environmental movement challenges the dominant Western worldview and its three assumptions:

• Unlimited economic growth is possible and beneficial.
• Most serious problems can be solved by technology.
• Environmental and social problems can be mitigated by a market economy with some state intervention.

“Since the 1970s we've heard increasingly about the competing paradigm, wherein:

• Growth must be limited.
• Science and technology must be restrained.
• Nature has finite resources and a delicate balance that humans must observe.”

(Arnold, R. (1996). Overcoming Ideology, Essay from: A wolf in the garden: The land rights movement and the new environmental debate. Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield.)