Environmental Thought. Robin Attfield

Introduction

      Environmental thought concerns reflections on nature, and related attitudes and intuitions. The vulnerability of natural systems to human destructiveness came to full awareness only in the nineteenth century, with the publication of George Perkins Marsh’s Man and Nature (1965 [1864]), and in the wake of the publication (in 1859) of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, although some limited grasp of the impact of human interventions dates back to Theophrastus (371–287 BCE), one of Aristotle’s followers, in the ancient world (Glacken 1967: 129–30; see also Chapter 1), and to John Evelyn in the early modern period (Glacken 1967: 485–91; see also Chapter 2). Yet it took until the disclosures of Rachel Carson (1962) about emissions of DDT in Europe reaching the flesh of Antarctic penguins (see Chapter 6) for the urgency of redressing the impacts of human interventions to be taken seriously.

      There have been many different conceptions of nature across the centuries. For some, nature is everything that is not supernatural, and in this sense humanity is generally regarded as part of nature. For others, the natural is everything that is not (or largely not) the result of human artifice or intervention, and in this sense humanity is often regarded as distinct from nature, since most people are formed by human nurturing and education. The parenthetic ‘or largely not’ is important, for the regions of Earth unaffected by humanity are diminishingly slight, and in some views nonexistent. Yet whole tracts are largely unaffected, and it is these tracts and their living inhabitants that are most often meant when people speak of ‘nature’.

There is, of course, another sense of nature, where a thing’s nature is its character or composition, as in the expression ‘the nature of the beast’. This is why it even makes sense to talk about ‘the nature of nature’. But that is not the sense of nature intended in this book, except where the context indicates otherwise. However, some people have regarded nature as an autonomous force, with laws (and in some views even purposes) of its own, and this sense survives into the present, as when Barry Commoner (1972) presented as one of his laws of ecology the suggested law that ‘Nature knows best’ (see Chapter 7). Aspects of this conception will be used here to the extent that there are laws of nature to which human beings – as well as everything else in creation – are subject, but the suggestion that nature is an autonomous force should not in my view be credited, let alone the view that it has knowledge or a will of its own. The related Gaia theory of James Lovelock (1979), according to which the Earth is a self-regulating system or superorganism, will also be discussed and sifted (see Chapter 8).

      The recentness of the discovery that human action is affecting and sometimes undermining ecosystems worldwide may suggest that there is little to learn from pre-modern or early modern environmental thought. But here we should heed the warning of George Santayana (1863–1952): ‘Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’ More positively, John Passmore has brought to light some environmentally promising stances which he finds in ancient literature, for one of which humanity is nature’s steward, answerable (whether to God or to posterity) for its care, and another for which the role of humanity is to complete, adorn or perfect nature, regarded as an incomplete creation (1974: 28–40). While Passmore claimed that these were minority stances that disappeared from view until the modern period, there is evidence that there was a continuity among their adherents across the Christian centuries, and that these approaches were in due course adopted by Jews and Muslims as well. Passmore considered these stances important as being seeds within the Western tradition on which contemporary environmentalism could be built; if he was right to this extent, then these ancient stances have great contemporary importance.

This suggestion, however, gives rise to a debate concerning whether ideas and thought are capable of exercising influence on the course of history as opposed to economic and related social factors. Many Marxists and others have regarded economic forces as the motors of history, and ideas as mere epiphenomena or by-products, with little or no influence of their own. It is not necessary to be a determinist to hold this, for economic factors could predispose people both to beliefs and forms of behaviour which they could have resisted but have lacked the determination to reject. Others, however, have held opposed positions, maintaining either that ideas are what shape the future more than anything else, or, more moderately, that beliefs, ideas and cultural factors exercise some degree of influence alongside economic forces and social and technological trends.

      My own inclination coheres with this more moderate stance, evidence for which may be found in whichever passages in this book concerning thinking of the past ring bells with readers and stimulate environmental concern. (In particular, one cogent example, discussed in Chapter 1, is the influence of Plato’s Timaeus on centuries of subsequent thought, while an even clearer case may be found in the passage of Chapter 4 concerning the influence of the ideas of Henry David Thoreau and George Perkins Marsh on the inauguration of the Yellowstone National Park by President Ulysses Grant in 1872.) And if this more moderate stance is credible, then (for example) the ancient traditions of Passmore’s account remain worth considering, even if his account is open to qualification in detail. There again, other ancient and environmentally sensitive traditional schools of thought, such as Daoism, should not be forgotten, but taken into account when the prospects for contemporary environmentalism are being considered. If the West needs to build on its own ancient traditions, so does China, and so too does (for example) the world of Islam. Accordingly, some longstanding Daoist traditions will receive mention in Chapter 1, and, likewise, consideration will be given to some longstanding Islamic themes. Yet in the modern ‘global village’, historical attitudes of past centuries are the history of humanity as a whole, and none of these traditions can be regarded as irrelevant to any of us, however emancipated we may claim to be from the social constraints and narrow nationalisms of the past.

      This granted, the scope of this book is perforce broader than that of ecological science and its origins, important as this science has been to environmental