Environmental Thought. Robin Attfield

1 Pre-modern Attitudes and Influences

      This chapter concerns attitudes to nature in the period before 1500 CE. With the exception of one allusion to ancient China and one to ancient India, it is concerned with Western cultures, broadly enough interpreted to include the rise of Islam and its spread into much of the Middle East, and beyond that to the lands once conquered by Alexander, such as Iran and Afghanistan. Yet it primarily focuses on the Greeks and the Romans, on the Old and New Testaments, on early Christianity and on Europe in the Middle Ages. For these were the periods and the cultures from which many more recent attitudes have derived, as becomes clear in Chapter 2, which depicts the early modern period of Europe.

      While the predominant ancient stance was that humanity can and should be in control of nature, it was from the Greeks, in particular, that we have received, on the one hand, belief in human stewardship of the natural world (a belief to which Christianity later contributed: see Chapter 2), and, on the other, belief in the world as a living being, an ancient theme echoed many centuries later in James Lovelock’s theory of Gaia (see Chapter 8). Greeks such as Empedocles and Romans such as Lucretius were among early adherents of speculative versions of the theory of evolution by natural selection, more recently supported with empirical evidence and a different conceptual scheme by Charles Darwin (see Chapter 3); this theory has in turn fostered a new ecological awareness (see Chapter 4 and onwards).

Thus, while some readers may prefer to turn to the chapters about Darwin and environmental thought in the subsequent period, it may be rewarding to review first the beliefs and theories of the ancient and medieval worlds. These are the focus of the current chapter.

Greeks and Romans

      This section concerns the ancient worlds of the Greeks and the Romans – the period from 700 BCE to the Emperor Constantine in the early fourth century CE. (The Homeric poems, which may have attained their current form around 700 BCE, bear many traces of earlier thought and practice, but are not considered here.) The thousand years under consideration nourished beliefs, attitudes and practices of immense diversity, and embodied a large variety of attitudes to nature, the land and the natural environment. No claim is made to anything like comprehensive coverage here. Instead, I have selected certain prominent, significant and contrasting claims and statements, whether in prose or verse, in song, drama or philosophy. (As we shall see, some of these were overlapping categories, with much drama and much philosophy expressed in poetic form.) Some have been selected because of their later influence, whether ultimately misleading, like Empedocles’ belief in four basic elements, or far-sighted, like his belief in a kind of natural selection (albeit without any recognizable belief in adaptation). Predominantly, however, ancient writers must be allowed to speak for themselves, and ancient practices, however questionable, to receive attention, if only because they supply the context of related thinking and protests, both contemporary and subsequent.

       Hesiod and Virgil

      All ancient civilizations were agrarian, observes J. Donald Hughes (1994: 131), and dependent on agriculture and the soil. (Some, however, could remember a nomadic past.) So it is not surprising that the fifth-century BCE tragedian Sophocles wrote of Earth as the greatest of the gods, from whom the other gods were descended (Antigone, 338–41; Hughes 1994: 130). There are many other passages of the fifth-century tragedians celebrating the Earth as universal Mother, despite recognition of Zeus as the supreme deity.

Nor is it surprising that one of the earliest surviving poems in the Greek language is the poetic guide to farmers (of several centuries earlier than Sophocles) on how to scratch a living from the soil of Boeotia (central Greece), Hesiod’s Works and Days (around 700 BCE). Hesiod encourages farmers to plough diligently and thus garner enough of a harvest to survive the winter without needing to beg from neighbours. His world is one of small-scale farming and peasant proprietors, albeit also one where much of the hard work is done by slaves.

      Hesiod thus became the father of didactic verse, poetry intended to teach a message. This was accomplished in hexameters, the same rhythm as that of the Homeric poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, with their heroic themes. But there is nothing heroic about Works and Days; Hesiod is aware of living in an Age of Iron, in which the Earth has greatly degenerated from the golden age when ‘the fruitful field bare fruit abundantly and without stint’ (Works and Days, 117–18, 176–7; Hughes 1994: 130). Such belief in decline, both in nature and in human nature, was widespread in the ancient world, although, as we shall see, there were some significant exceptions.

      Nearly seven hundred years later, the Roman poet Virgil (70–19 BCE) wrote another didactic poem to foster farming, again in hexameters, but this time in Latin, the Georgics. Virgil lived in an age of farms both large and small, and of large armies. He was an influential supporter of (and propagandist for) the first Emperor, Augustus, who ruled the Roman world,