White, Lynn (Jr) (1967) The Historical
Roots of Our Ecological Crisis. Science 155(37)1203-1207.
A conversation with Aldous Huxley not infrequently put
one at the receiving end of an unforgettable monologue. About a year
before his lamented death he was discoursing on a favorite topic: Man's
unnatural treatment of nature and its sad results. To illustrate his
point he told how, during the previous summer, he had returned to a
little valley in England where he had spent many happy months as a
child. Once it had been composed of delightful grassy glades; now it was
becoming overgrown with unsightly brush because the rabbits that
formerly kept such growth under control had largely succumbed to a
disease, myxomatosis, that was deliberately introduced by the local
farmers to reduce the rabbits' destruction of crops. Being something of
a Philistine, I could be silent no longer, even in the interests of
great rhetoric. I interrupted to point out that the rabbit itself had
been brought as a domestic animal to England in 1176, presumably to
improve the protein diet of the peasantry.
All forms of life modify their contexts. The most
spectacular and benign instance is doubtless the coral polyp. By serving
its own ends, it has created a vast undersea world favorable to
thousands of other kinds of animals and plants. Ever since man became a
numerous species he has affected his environment notably. The hypothesis
that his fire-drive method of hunting created the world's great
grasslands and helped to exterminate the monster mammals of the
Pleistocene from much of the globe is plausible, if not proved. For 6
millennia at least, the banks of the lower Nile have been a human
artifact rather than the swampy African jungle which nature, apart from
man, would have made it. The Aswan Dam, flooding 5000 square miles, is
only the latest stage in a long process. In many regions terracing or
irrigation, overgrazing, the cutting of forests by Romans to build ships
to fight Carthaginians or by Crusaders to solve the logistics problems
of their expeditions, have profoundly changed some ecologies.
Observation that the French landscape falls into two basic types, the
open fields of the north and the bocage of the south and west, inspired
Marc Bloch to undertake his classic study of medieval agricultural
methods. Quite unintentionally, changes in human ways often affect
nonhuman nature. It has been noted, for example, that the advent of the
automobile eliminated huge flocks of sparrows that once fed on the horse
manure littering every street.
The history of ecologic change is still so rudimentary
that we know little about what really happened, or what the results
were. The extinction of the European aurochs as late as 1627 would seem
to have been a simple case of overenthusiastic hunting. On more
intricate matters it often is impossible to find solid information. For
a thousand years or more the Frisians and Hollanders have been pushing
back the North Sea, and the process is culminating in our own time in
the reclamation of the Zuider Zee. What, if any, species of animals,
birds, fish, shore life, or plants have died out in the process? In
their epic combat with Neptune have the Netherlanders overlooked
ecological values in such a way that the quality of human life in the
Netherlands has suffered? I cannot discover that the questions have ever
been asked, much less answered.
People, then, have often been a dynamic element in their
own environment, but in the present state of historical scholarship we
usually do not know exactly when, where, or with what effects
man-induced changes came. As we enter the last third of the 20th
century, however, concern for the problem of ecologic backlash is
mounting feverishly. Natural science, conceived as the effort to
understand the nature of things, had flourished in several eras and
among several peoples. Similarly there had been an age-old accumulation
of technological skills, sometimes growing rapidly, sometimes slowly.
But it was not until about four generations ago that Western Europe and
North America arranged a marriage between science and technology, a
union of the theoretical and the empirical approaches to our natural
environment. The emergence in widespread practice of the Baconian creed
that scientific knowledge means technological power over nature can
scarcely be dated before about 1850, save in the chemical industries,
where it is anticipated in the 18th century. Its acceptance as a normal
pattern of action may mark the greatest event in human history since the
invention of agriculture, and perhaps in nonhuman terrestrial history as
well.
Almost at once the new situation forced the
crystallization of the novel concept of ecology; indeed, the word
ecology first appeared in the English language in 1873. Today, less than
a century later, the impact of our race upon the environment has so
increased in force that it has changed in essence. When the first
cannons were fired, in the early 14th century, they affected ecology by
sending workers scrambling to the forests and mountains for more potash,
sulphur, iron ore, and charcoal, with some resulting erosion and
deforestation. Hydrogen bombs are of a different order: a war fought
with them might alter the genetics of all life on this planet. By 1285
London had a smog problem arising from the burning of soft coal, but our
present combustion of fossil fuels threatens to change the chemistry of
the globe's atmosphere as a whole, with consequences which we are only
beginning to guess. With the population explosion, the carcinoma of
planless urbanism, the now geological deposits of sewage and garbage,
surely no creature other than man has ever managed to foul its nest in
such short order.
There are many calls to action, but specific proposals,
however worthy as individual items, seem too partial, palliative,
negative: ban the bomb, tear down the billboards, give the Hindus
contraceptives and tell them to eat their sacred cows. The simplest
solution to any suspect change is, of course, to stop it, or better yet,
to revert to a romanticized past: make those ugly gasoline stations look
like Anne Hathaway's cottage or (in the Far West) like ghost-town
saloons. The "wilderness area" mentality invariably advocates
deep-freezing an ecology, whether San Gimignano or the High Sierra, as
it was before the first Kleenex was dropped. But neither atavism nor
prettification will cope with the ecologic crisis of our time.
What shall we do? No one yet knows. Unless we think
about fundamentals, our specific measures may produce new backlashes
more serious than those they are designed to remedy.
As a beginning we should try to clarify our thinking by
looking, in some historical depth, at the presuppositions that underlie
modern technology and science. Science was traditionally aristocratic,
speculative, intellectual in intent; technology was lower-class,
empirical, action-oriented. The quite sudden fusion of these two,
towards the middle of the 19th century, is surely related to the
slightly prior and contemporary democratic revolutions which, by
reducing social barriers, tended to assert a functional unity of brain
and hand. Our ecologic crisis is the product of an emerging, entirely
novel, democratic culture. The issue is whether a democratized world can
survive its own implications. Presumably we cannot unless we rethink our
axioms.
The Western Traditions of Technology and Science
One thing is so certain that it seems stupid to
verbalize it: both modern technology and modern science are
distinctively Occidental. Our technology has absorbed elements from all
over the world, notably from China; yet everywhere today, whether in
Japan or in Nigeria, successful technology is Western. Our science is
the heir to all the sciences of the past, especially perhaps to the work
of the great Islamic scientists of the Middle Ages, who so often outdid
the ancient Greeks in skill and perspicacity: al-Razi in medicine, for
example; or ibn-al-Haytham in optics; or Omar Khayyam in mathematics.
Indeed, not a few works of such geniuses seem to have vanished in the
original Arabic and to survive only in medieval Latin translations that
helped to lay the foundations for later Western developments. Today,
around the globe, all significant science is Western in style and
method, whatever the pigmentation or language of the scientists.
A second pair of facts is less well recognized because
they result from quite recent historical scholarship. The leadership of
the West, both in technology and in science, is far older than the
so-called Scientific Revolution of the 17th century or the so-called
Industrial Revolution of the 18th century. These terms are in fact
outmoded and obscure the true nature of what they try to
describe--significant stages in two long and separate developments. By
A.D. 1000 at the latest--and perhaps, feebly, as much as 200 years
earlier--the West began to apply water power to industrial processes
other than milling grain. This was followed in the late 12th century by
the harnessing of wind power. From simple beginnings, but with
remarkable consistency of style, the West rapidly expanded its skills in
the development of power machinery, labor-saving devices, and
automation. Those who doubt should contemplate that most monumental
achievement in the history of automation: the weight-driven mechanical
clock, which appeared in two forms in the early 14th century. Not in
craftsmanship but in basic technological capacity, the Latin West of the
later Middle Ages far outstripped its elaborate, sophisticated, and aesthetically
magnificent sister cultures, Byzantium and Islam. In 1444 a great Greek
ecclesiastic, Bessarion, who had gone to Italy, wrote a letter to a
prince in Greece. He is amazed by the superiority of Western ships,
arms, textiles, glass. But above all he is astonished by the spectacle
of waterwheels sawing timbers and pumping the bellows of blast furnaces.
Clearly, he had seen nothing of the sort in the Near East.
By the end of the 15th century the technological
superiority of Europe was such that its small, mutually hostile nations
could spill out over all the rest of the world, conquering, looting, and
colonizing. The symbol of this technological superiority is the fact
that Portugal, one of the weakest states of the Occident, was able to
become, and to remain for a century, mistress of the East Indies. And we
must remember that the technology of Vasco da Gama and Albuquerque was
built by pure empiricism, drawing remarkably little support or
inspiration from science.
In the present-day vernacular understanding, modern
science is supposed to have begun in 1543, when both Copernicus and
Vesalius published their great works. It is no derogation of their
accomplishments, however, to point out that such structures as the
Fabrica and the De revolutionibus do not appear overnight. The
distinctive Western tradition of science, in fact, began in the late
11th century with a massive movement of translation of Arabic and Greek
scientific works into Latin. A few notable books-- Theophrastus, for
example--escaped the West's avid new appetite for science, but within
less than 200 years effectively the entire corpus of Greek and Muslim
science was available in Latin, and was being eagerly read and
criticized in the new European universities. Out of criticism arose new
observation, speculation, and increasing distrust of ancient
authorities. By the late 13th century Europe had seized global
scientific leadership from the faltering hands of Islam. It would be as
absurd to deny the profound originality of Newton, Galileo, or
Copernicus as to deny that of the 14th century scholastic scientists
like Buridan or Oresme on whose work they built. Before the 11th
century, science scarcely existed in the Latin West, even in Roman
times. From the 11th century onward, the scientific sector of Occidental
culture has increased in a steady crescendo.
Since both our technological and our scientific
movements got their start, acquired their character, and achieved world
dominance in the Middle Ages, it would seem that we cannot understand
their nature or their present impact upon ecology without examining
fundamental medieval assumptions and developments.
Medieval View of Man and Nature
Until recently, agriculture has been the chief
occupation even in "advanced" societies; hence, any change in
methods of tillage has much importance. Early plows, drawn by two oxen,
did not normally turn the sod but merely scratched it. Thus, cross-
plowing was needed and fields tended to be squarish. In the fairly light
soils and semiarid climates of the Near East and Mediterranean, this
worked well. But such a plow was inappropriate to the wet climate and
often sticky soils of northern Europe. By the latter part of the 7th
century after Christ, however, following obscure beginnings, certain
northern peasants were using an entirely new kind of plow, equipped with
a vertical knife to cut the line of the furrow, a horizontal share to
slice under the sod, and a moldboard to turn it over. The friction of
this plow with the soil was so great that it normally required not two
but eight oxen. It attacked the land with such violence that
cross-plowing was not needed, and fields tended to be shaped in long
strips.
In the days of the scratch-plow, fields were distributed
generally in units capable of supporting a single family. Subsistence
farming was the presupposition. But no peasant owned eight oxen: to use
the new and more efficient plow, peasants pooled their oxen to form
large plow-teams, originally receiving (it would appear) plowed strips
in proportion to their contribution. Thus, distribution of land was
based no longer on the needs of a family but, rather, on the capacity of
a power machine to till the earth. Man's relation to the soil was
profoundly changed. Formerly man had been part of nature; now he was the
exploiter of nature. Nowhere else in the world did farmers develop any
analogous agricultural implement. Is it coincidence that modern
technology, with its ruthlessness toward nature, has so largely been
produced by descendants of these peasants of northern Europe?
This same exploitive attitude appears slightly before
A.D. 830 in Western illustrated calendars. In older calendars the months
were shown as passive personifications. The new Frankish calendars,
which set the style for the Middle Ages, are very different: they show
men coercing the world around them--plowing, harvesting, chopping trees,
butchering pigs. Man and nature are two things, and man is master.
These novelties seem to be in harmony with larger
intellectual patterns. What people do about their ecology depends on
what they think about themselves in relation to things around them.
Human ecology is deeply conditioned by beliefs about our nature and
destiny--that is, by religion. To Western eyes this is very evident in,
say, India or Ceylon. It is equally true of ourselves and of our
medieval ancestors.
The victory of Christianity over paganism was the
greatest psychic revolution in the history of our culture. It has become
fashionable today to say that, for better or worse, we live in the
"post-Christian age." Certainly the forms of our thinking and
language have largely ceased to be Christian, but to my eye the
substance often remains amazingly akin to that of the past. Our daily
habits of action, for example, are dominated by an implicit faith in
perpetual progress which was unknown either to Greco- Roman antiquity or
to the Orient. It is rooted in, and is indefensible apart from, Judeo-
Christian theology. The fact that Communists share it merely helps to
show what can be demonstrated on many other grounds: that Marxism, like
Islam, is a Judeo-Christian heresy. We continue today to live, as we
have lived for about 1700 years, very largely in a context of Christian
axioms.
What did Christianity tell people about their relations
with the environment? While many of the world's mythologies provide
stories of creation, Greco-Roman mythology was singularly incoherent in
this respect. Like Aristotle, the intellectuals of the ancient West
denied that the visible world had a beginning. Indeed, the idea of a
beginning was impossible in the framework of their cyclical notion of
time. In sharp contrast, Christianity inherited from Judaism not only a
concept of time as nonrepetitive and linear but also a striking story of
creation. By gradual stages a loving and all- powerful God had created
light and darkness, the heavenly bodies, the earth and all its plants,
animals, birds, and fishes. Finally, God had created Adam and, as an
afterthought, Eve to keep man from being lonely. Man named all the
animals, thus establishing his dominance over them. God planned all of
this explicitly for man's benefit and rule: no item in the physical
creation had any purpose save to serve man's purposes. And, although
man's body is made of clay, he is not simply part of nature: he is made
in God's image.
Especially in its Western form, Christianity is the most
anthropocentric religion the world has seen. As early as the 2nd century
both Tertullian and Saint Irenaeus of Lyons were insisting that when God
shaped Adam he was foreshadowing the image of the incarnate Christ, the
Second Adam. Man shares, in great measure, God's transcendence of
nature. Christianity, in absolute contrast to ancient paganism and
Asia's religions (except, perhaps, Zorastrianism), not only established
a dualism of man and nature but also insisted that it is God's will that
man exploit nature for his proper ends.
At the level of the common people this worked out in an
interesting way. In Antiquity every tree, every spring, every stream,
every hill had its own genius loci, its guardian spirit. These spirits
were accessible to men, but were very unlike men; centaurs, fauns, and
mermaids show their ambivalence. Before one cut a tree, mined a
mountain, or dammed a brook, it was important to placate the spirit in
charge of that particular situation, and to keep it placated. By
destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit
nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects.
It is often said that for animism the Church substituted
the cult of saints. True; but the cult of saints is functionally quite
different from animism. The saint is not in natural objects; he may have
special shrines, but his citizenship is in heaven. Moreover, a saint is
entirely a man; he can be approached in human terms. In addition to
saints, Christianity of course also had angels and demons inherited from
Judaism and perhaps, at one remove, from Zorastrianism. But these were
all as mobile as the saints themselves. The spirits in natural objects,
which formerly had protected nature from man, evaporated. Man's
effective monopoly on spirit in this world was confirmed, and the old
inhibitions to the exploitation of nature crumbled.
When one speaks in such sweeping terms, a note of
caution is in order. Christianity is a complex faith, and its
consequences differ in differing contexts. What I have said may well
apply to the medieval West, where in fact technology made spectacular
advances. But the Greek East, a highly civilized realm of equal
Christian devotion, seems to have produced no marked technological
innovation after the late 7th century, when Greek fire was invented. The
key to the contrast may perhaps be found in a difference in the tonality
of piety and thought which students of comparative theology find between
the Greek and the Latin Churches. The Greeks believed that sin was
intellectual blindness, and that salvation was found in illumination,
orthodoxy--that is, clear thinking. The Latins, on the other hand, felt
that sin was moral evil, and that salvation was to be found in right
conduct. Eastern theology has been intellectualist. Western theology has
been voluntarist. The Greek saint contemplates; the Western saint acts.
The implications of Christianity for the conquest of nature would emerge
more easily in the Western atmosphere.
The Christian dogma of creation, which is found in the
first clause of all the Creeds, has another meaning for our
comprehension of today's ecologic crisis. By revelation, God had given
man the Bible, the Book of Scripture. But since God had made nature,
nature also must reveal the divine mentality. The religious study of
nature for the better understanding of God was known as natural
theology. In the early Church, and always in the Greek East, nature was
conceived primarily as a symbolic system through which God speaks to
men: the ant is a sermon to sluggards; rising flames are the symbol of
the soul's aspiration. The view of nature was essentially artistic
rather than scientific. While Byzantium preserved and copied great
numbers of ancient Greek scientific texts, science as we conceive it
could scarcely flourish in such an ambience.
However, in the Latin West by the early 13th century
natural theology was following a very different bent. It was ceasing to
be the decoding of the physical symbols of God's communication with man
and was becoming the effort to understand God's mind by discovering how
his creation operates. The rainbow was no longer simply a symbol of hope
first sent to Noah after the Deluge: Robert Grosseteste, Friar Roger
Bacon, and Theodoric of Freiberg produced startlingly sophisticated work
on the optics of the rainbow, but they did it as a venture in religious
understanding. From the 13th century onward, up to and including
Leitnitz and Newton, every major scientist, in effect, explained his
motivations in religious terms. Indeed, if Galileo had not been so
expert an amateur theologian he would have got into far less trouble:
the professionals resented his intrusion. And Newton seems to have
regarded himself more as a theologian than as a scientist. It was not
until the late 18th century that the hypothesis of God became
unnecessary to many scientists.
It is often hard for the historian to judge, when men
explain why they are doing what they want to do, whether they are
offering real reasons or merely culturally acceptable reasons. The
consistency with which scientists during the long formative centuries of
Western science said that the task and the reward of the scientist was
"to think God's thoughts after him" leads one to believe that
this was their real motivation. If so, then modern Western science was
cast in a matrix of Christian theology. The dynamism of religious
devotion shaped by the Judeo-Christian dogma of creation, gave it
impetus.
An Alternative Christian View
We would seem to be headed toward conclusions
unpalatable to many Christians. Since both science and technology are
blessed words in our contemporary vocabulary, some may be happy at the
notions, first, that viewed historically, modern science is an
extrapolation of natural theology and, second, that modern technology is
at least partly to be explained as an Occidental, voluntarist
realization of the Christian dogma of man's transcendence of, and
rightful master over, nature. But, as we now recognize, somewhat over a
century ago science and technology--hitherto quite separate
activities--joined to give mankind powers which, to judge by many of the
ecologic effects, are out of control. If so, Christianity bears a huge
burden of guilt.
I personally doubt that disastrous ecologic backlash can
be avoided simply by applying to our problems more science and more
technology. Our science and technology have grown out of Christian
attitudes toward man's relation to nature which are almost universally
held not only by Christians and neo-Christians but also by those who
fondly regard themselves as post-Christians. Despite Copernicus, all the
cosmos rotates around our little globe. Despite Darwin, we are not, in
our hearts, part of the natural process. We are superior to nature,
contemptuous of it, willing to use it for our slightest whim. The newly
elected Governor of California, like myself a churchman but less
troubled than I, spoke for the Christian tradition when he said (as is
alleged), "when you've seen one redwood tree, you've seen them
all." To a Christian a tree can be no more than a physical fact.
The whole concept of the sacred grove is alien to Christianity and to
the ethos of the West. For nearly 2 millennia Christian missionaries
have been chopping down sacred groves, which are idolatrous because they
assume spirit in nature.
What we do about ecology depends on our ideas of the
man-nature relationship. More science and more technology are not going
to get us out of the present ecologic crisis until we find a new
religion, or rethink our old one. The beatniks, who are the basic
revolutionaries of our time, show a sound instinct in their affinity for
Zen Buddhism, which conceives of the man-nature relationship as very
nearly the mirror image of the Christian view. Zen, however, is as
deeply conditioned by Asian history as Christianity is by the experience
of the West, and I am dubious of its viability among us.
Possibly we should ponder the greatest radical in
Christian history since Christ: Saint Francis of Assisi. The prime
miracle of Saint Francis is the fact that he did not end at the stake,
as many of his left-wing followers did. He was so clearly heretical that
a General of the Franciscan Order, Saint Bonavlentura, a great and
perceptive Christian, tried to suppress the early accounts of
Franciscanism. The key to an understanding of Francis is his belief in
the virtue of humility--not merely for the individual but for man as a
species. Francis tried to depose man from his monarchy over creation and
set up a democracy of all God's creatures. With him the ant is no longer
simply a homily for the lazy, flames a sign of the thrust of the soul
toward union with God; now they are Brother Ant and Sister Fire,
praising the Creator in their own ways as Brother Man does in his.
Later commentators have said that Francis preached to
the birds as a rebuke to men who would not listen. The records do not
read so: he urged the little birds to praise God, and in spiritual
ecstasy they flapped their wings and chirped rejoicing. Legends of
saints, especially the Irish saints, had long told of their dealings
with animals but always, I believe, to show their human dominance over
creatures. With Francis it is different. The land around Gubbio in the
Apennines was ravaged by a fierce wolf. Saint Francis, says the legend,
talked to the wolf and persuaded him of the error of his ways. The wolf
repented, died in the odor of sanctity, and was buried in consecrated
ground.
What Sir Steven Ruciman calls "the Franciscan
doctrine of the animal soul" was quickly stamped out. Quite
possibly it was in part inspired, consciously or unconsciously, by the
belief in reincarnation held by the Cathar heretics who at that time
teemed in Italy and southern France, and who presumably had got it
originally from India. It is significant that at just the same moment,
about 1200, traces of metempsychosis are found also in western Judaism,
in the Provencal Cabbala. But Francis held neither to transmigration of
souls nor to pantheism. His view of nature and of man rested on a unique
sort of pan-psychism of all things animate and inanimate, designed for
the glorification of their transcendent Creator, who, in the ultimate
gesture of cosmic humility, assumed flesh, lay helpless in a manger, and
hung dying on a scaffold.
I am not suggesting that many contemporary Americans who
are concerned about our ecologic crisis will be either able or willing
to counsel with wolves or exhort birds. However, the present increasing
disruption of the global environment is the product of a dynamic
technology and science which were originating in the Western medieval
world against which Saint Francis was rebelling in so original a way.
Their growth cannot be understood historically apart from distinctive
attitudes toward nature which are deeply grounded in Christian dogma.
The fact that most people do not think of these attitudes as Christian
is irrelevant. No new set of basic values has been accepted in our
society to displace those of Christianity. Hence we shall continue to
have a worsening ecologic crisis until we reject the Christian axiom
that nature has no reason for existence save to serve man.
The greatest spiritual revolutionary in Western history,
Saint Francis, proposed what he thought was an alternative Christian
view of nature and man's relation to it; he tried to substitute the idea
of the equality of all creatures, including man, for the idea of man's
limitless rule of creation. He failed. Both our present science and our
present technology are so tinctured with orthodox Christian arrogance
toward nature that no solution for our ecologic crisis can be expected
from them alone. Since the roots of our trouble are so largely
religious, the remedy must also be essentially religious, whether we
call it that or not. We must rethink and refeel our nature and destiny.
The profoundly religious, but heretical, sense of the primitive
Franciscans for the spiritual autonomy of all parts of nature may point
a direction. I propose Francis as a patron saint for ecologists.
