Rethinking environmentalism
Thursday, December 3, 1998

By Dianne Dumanoski

These are dark times on the environmental front. What were just bad dreams in the summer of "No ecosystem on Earth's 1988 fill newspaper headlines in surface is free of pervasive the summer of 1998. As human influence," leading anticipated, the punch of global ecologists reported in the warming is hitting faster and journal Science last year. harder at high latitudes. Alaska is already melting. The average temperature there has jumped five degrees fahrenheit in the past 30 years. The New York Times, which has been loath to alarm its readers about the global warming over the past decade, reports soberly that Alaska's glaciers are retreating rapidly, the permafrost is thawing, and the broad stretches of white spruce forest are dead and dying. Between a third and a half of the white spruce have succumbed to climate-related damage.

Events are now unfolding pretty much as scientists predicted when global warming first captured public attention 10 years ago. That summer, while the Midwest baked in record drought and Yellowstone was going up in flames, I covered one scientific meeting after another on climate change, each more depressing than the preceding. So far, the scientific forecasts I chronicled for The Boston Globe have been off in only one respect. Timing. It is all happening faster than anyone expected.

Such disturbing news should bring on a new bout of despair. But I find myself feeling strangely expectant and even a bit hopeful. In my bones, I'm convinced a profound transformation is already beginning -- a shift comparable in scale to the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, which remade the mental and physical worlds and launched modern civilization. Our current way of life emerged from a cultural earthquake that brought down a world view and shattered the foundations of the existing order. Now the plates are shifting again deep beneath the surface. This is a hinge of history, a time that demands bold voices, vision, and leadership to nudge the flow of change in promising directions. Unfortunately, the American environmental community has yet to rise to the challenge of this unique historical moment.

For more than a decade now, I've been struggling to get a fix on this worsening environmental crisis -- an exploration that began in earnest in the mid-1980s as I was covering the scientific effort to discover the cause of the yawning hole in the Earth's ozone layer. When flights into the vortex over the South Pole pinned the blame on manmade chemicals called CFCs, the expedition report answered the scientific question but confronted the world with much more profound and disturbing ones. I stared into the ozone hole and listened to the rumblings of climate change in the distance. This marked a watershed in human history, I was sure. The weight of our civilization has become so great, it now ranks as a global force and a significant wild card in the human future along with the Ice Ages and other vicissitudes of a volatile and changeable planetary system. Crossing this fateful great divide, we now move into uncharted territory. A glimpse of this truth threw everything suddenly into question.

How, I wondered, had we arrived at this juncture? What does it say about us? Who are we anyway? Can we come to grips with our fundamentally changed situation? How do we make the dangerous passage that lies ahead?

After exploring these questions from many different angles, here's how I see our situation. A fundamental shift of some kind is unavoidable because the bedrock assumptions of our civilization are increasingly at odds with the world we now inhabit. The Antarctic ozone hole, which was discovered in 1985, marked the official arrival of this radically new reality which has been emerging since World War II. Humans now dominate the planet. As leading ecologists reported in the journal Science last year, "no ecosystem on Earth's surface is free of pervasive human influence." Over the past decade, world political leaders have mustered some response to immediate threats like ozone depletion and global warming. But at a deeper level, our now global human culture has only just begun to fathom the implications of this unprecedented situation. A planet spinning unsteadily under pervasive human influence presents a new kind of environmental challenge -- one unlike any humans have encountered. To make a future in this profoundly altered landscape, we will almost certainly have to do more than negotiate global treaties to remedy specific symptoms of planetary breakdown. In the longer term, it seems to me, we will have to reinvent ourselves and our global civilization in the light of our changed circumstance. Viewed from across this great divide we have crossed almost unnoticed, the deepest impulses and assumptions in the contemporary world seem not just quaint, but dangerously obsolete.

Confusion, conflict, crisis

Despite growing recognition of this environmental crisis over the past three decades, a profound confusion persists about the ultimate stakes. It is true that industry has mounted disinformation campaigns to sow confusion in the public debate. But environmental advocates and activists have unwittingly added to the muddle. In truth, what we call the environmental movement hasn't been a movement at all. It's been a hodge podge of efforts on many fronts that has lacked direction and any overall coherence. And for all its passion, valiant efforts, and not inconsequential victories, environmental activism over the past 30 years in the U.S. has been losing ground in the battle to stem this crisis.

Even worse, I fear that environmental campaigns that have captured
public imagination -- such as the worthy battles to save
wilderness, rainforests, and dolphins -- have helped foster the impression that this crisis is primarily about distant places and creatures rather than about the natural systems that support our communities and the larger human civilization. This focus on a "nature" remote from our daily lives has reinforced a dualism within our culture -- which imagines a nature separate from the places where we live our lives and makes it difficult to perceive our situation clearly. President Clinton's grand symbolic gesture on the environment during his 1996 reelection campaign -- his trip to Utah to announce a decision to protect the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument -- speaks volumes in this regard. If this is what his political advisors think will play with voters and the environmental community, it is a troubling sign indeed. The nature that we need to save is not a place and the highest stakes, in my opinion, are not endangered species or stunning pieces of red rock desert, though these are precious indeed. This double vision supports the comforting delusion that we can somehow save half the world while the degradation accelerates elsewhere and it obscures the reality that the human civilization we pass on to our children and grandchildren is also in profound jeopardy.

In recent years, the concept "sustainable development" has provided a new and valuable focus for environmental debate. One might take issue with the term and its implicit bias toward economy rather than ecology, but, for all its flaws, this vague goal does reflect a growing recognition that the environmental crisis is first and foremost a crisis for humans and our current civilization. I don't think this smacks of "anthropocentrism," but rather a sober realism.

Let me return now to the question of environmental activism. Why have environmental efforts over the past 35 years fallen short? How can this concern and energy be mustered so that it does meet the challenge of these times? What can this political, philosophical, and spiritual tradition offer as we reinvent civilization?

As I see it, the new wave of American environmental activism born in the late 1960s has been floundering about for the past three decades in part because it is mired in an unresolved philosophical crisis and a stalled transition. This crisis, which surfaced in the shadow of the bomb and the chemical revolution after World War II, arose because it became increasingly difficult to sustain the dualism -- which divides the world into sacred nature and profane lands of human habitation -- that has long been a part of the Romantic tradition and environmental thought. To understand this double vision, one needs to know a little bit about its origins. Most contemporary environmental battles reflect an ongoing feud within western civilization that has been raging for more than three centuries over the uses of nature and the human place in the larger scheme of things.

Between materialism and romanticism

The bedrock assumptions that dominate our present civilization come from the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightment, which replaced older visions of nature with materialism -- a nature desanctified into natural resources, dead stuff. The leading prophet for this camp in the feud is the 17th-century philosopher Francis Bacon who was utterly forthright about his imperial designs: "The world is made for man, not man for the world," he declared.

The Romantic tradition -- which inspired artists and poets and later gave rise to nature writing and the conservation movement -- arose as a protest against the materialism and rationalism of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. This minority tradition, which valued nature for its spiritual meaning and redemptive power, functioned by and large as a parallel or alternative vision to the dominant worldview represented by Bacon. It turned its eyes to sacred nature and its back to the Industrial Revolution that was transforming profane nature at a breathtaking rate. This camp did not engage in political combat in a bid to replace the Baconian assumptions that governed life in the larger world.

Until Rachel Carson, the activism that flowed from this tradition aimed to preserve sacred nature by saving pieces of the world. In the political realm at least, early conservationists implicitly accepted the schizophrenia that has plagued Western thought since the Enlightenment -- a fractured vision that partitioned various inseparable aspects of life and existence into discrete compartments. Hence, a world bifurcated into mind and body, reason and feeling, nature and not-nature, sacred and profane.

Carson, who had been a best-selling nature writer in the 1950s, moved reluctantly into the new role of social critic in the wake of a spiritual and philosophical crisis that confronted her with the questions that continue to haunt environmentalism four decades later. "I suppose my thinking began to be affected soon after atomic science was firmly established," she wrote to her friend Dorothy Freeman in 1958. "Some of the thoughts that came were so unattractive to me that I rejected them completely, for the old ideas die hard, especially when they are emotionally as well as intellectually dear to one. It was pleasant to believe, for example, that much of Nature was forever beyond the tampering reach of man. It was comforting to suppose that the stream of life would flow on through time in whatever course God had appointed for it, without interference by one of the drops of the stream -- man."

Faced with the bomb and the postwar tidal wave of synthetic chemicals, Carson couldn't sustain the nature writer's double vision. In both a literal and philosophical sense, the Baconian project, with its increasing power and now pervasive contamination, was bleeding over into sacred nature. "I may not like what I see," she confided to Dorothy, " but it does no good to ignore it, and it's worse than useless to go on repeating the old 'eternal verities' that are no more eternal than the hills of the poets." The world around her had changed irrevocably.

With the publication of Silent Spring in 1962, the cold war within the Western mind erupted into open battle over the direction of this civilization. Carson challenged not only the technology of modern life, synthetic pesticides, she questioned some of its central assumptions -- such as "the control of Nature" -- and scathingly criticized some of its priestly class, scientists. Carson's fighting posture and the barely restrained anger that seethes beneath the prose in Silent Spring signal her understanding that the stakes in this radically altered postwar reality were now all or nothing.

Silent Spring helped spawn a new wave of environmentalism, but, I believe, this effort has proceeded without truly grappling with the deeply troubling questions that had attended its birth questions Carson herself slid over or never fully answered before her untimely death.

Could there be nature on a human-dominated planet? Not the nature of the Romantic tradition or of Carson's nature writing, it seems. If this is the case, then the environmental tradition needs some major philosophical reconstruction. It needs to put hard work into laying a new foundation that will bear the weight of a changed world and carry it confidently forward to meet this altered reality. Though there has been much philosophical debate over such issues as "anthropocentrism" versus "biocentrism," I don't think it has moved us in the right direction, for the argument wallows in the dualism that has been obsolete for half a century now.

No road goes back to the future

Mainstream environmentalism has also shown great ambivalence about whether it is a radical critique engaged in challenging the assumptions at the heart of the current order. Although Carson concluded that the postwar world left no other choice, those who followed her have often been less bold and less certain. Looking broadly at the political battles over the past three decades, however, it appears that Carson was right in her assessment. Despite an increasing level of environmental activism in the U.S. and around the world, the environmental crisis has escalated from the dirty air and dirty water era in the 1960s to the global jeopardy of deteriorating planetary systems in the 1990s. During that time, this many-faceted activism has expended great passion and energy hurtling from one emergency after another -- banning a pesticide here, fighting an incinerator there, saving that ancient forest. Given the record, one has to question the wisdom of this crisis-oriented activism. Is there any value in running faster and faster to keep up with the accelerating treadmill of crisis? Perhaps the time has come to forget the brush fires and take on the pyromaniac.

I don't have a glib prescription to offer, but I am certain that those who care about the environment and the future need to confront these unresolved issues head on. Some of my own conclusions are already evident. If this modern global civilization survives the next few centuries, it will only do so through a profound transformation that will alter all of its current operating assumptions. While some within the environmental community have turned their attention to fundamental flaws in the system and the need to alter assumptions, far too much energy has gone into battling for mitigation of symptoms.

To meet the challenge of these times, the environmental community needs to reinvent itself and reorient its efforts. It needs to get beyond the double vision which is part of its philosophical tradition. It needs to wean itself from a persisting propensity for nostaligia and romanticism. It needs to turn its face resolutely toward the future and its energies toward expediting the shift to a new human order.

I have old and dear friends, who have spent their lives trying to stop the hemorrhaging of natural systems and the devastation of beautiful places. They take serious issue with my conclusions, arguing the these efforts have to continue. Otherwise, they contend, we will have nothing left by the time the new order emerges. I respect these efforts deeply but I question whether this strategy will save anything at all. To me, it has become increasingly clear that the only long-term hope for the places and things that have inspired the environmental imagination is a speedy move toward the new order. Species are disappearing even in protected areas like Yosemite National Park, where five of seven species of frogs and toads have vanished in the past century without explantion. These losses, which may be due to pesticide contamination traveling into the Sierra from California agricultural areas, bear witness to our failed experiment with double vision. In the face of rising sea levels, one of my friends is trying to buy and preserve an exquisite, low-lying coral atoll in the Pacific. I see this as an environmental parable for our times.

So let's assume that the environmental community heeds this counsel. What are the ingredients of an environmental effort equal to the times? Boldness and vision stand at the top of the list. If those concerned about the environment want to move global civilization in a new direction, they first need to get to work on developing a broad, compelling, and coherent vision that will provide a map for the human future. To rank as a serious contender, such a vision must reach beyond the traditional boundaries of environmental thought and describe how leading institutions in our global civilization -- such as science, technology, and the economy -- need to be redirected in light of our changed situation. This vision needs to unmask the deepest assumptions of the current order, many of them rather recent philosophical inventions as it turns out. This means taking on the guiding myths of modern life -- notions that are so much a part of the current worldview that many people take them to be truths rather than assumptions. It should be noted, however, that the environmental tradition springs from the same 18th-century soil as the rest of modern culture and it shares some of its problematic assumptions, including the fiction of individualism that emerged in this period.

Any serious challenge to our current civilization also needs to address the deepest philosophical questions. At this critical moment in the human journey, we must grapple with the question of human purpose in the light of our altered circumstance and of how we ought to live. We need to consider how we bring liberty and limits into reasonable balance. We need to confront the question that haunts modern life andems to ring with increasing hollowness: freedom for what? Surely these times demand a more imaginative answer than "the pursuit of happiness."

My own list of obsolete and increasingly dangerous concepts in need of revision includes: current notions of individualism, private property, and unmanaged markets and global free trade. International efforts to manage human impact on planetary systems are now on a collision course with the deregulatory imperatives of the increasingly powerful World Trade Organization and the supporting trade agreements. As currently written, the rules now being set in place in the ongoing process of globalization which assume free trade to be the highest human good and a trump for other competing goods such as environmental protection or cultural preservation -- pose a profound threat that will undo environmental gains and delay the necessary transition. The most dangerous aspect of the reigning economic assumptions is their theological nature, notably the belief in what amounts to economic Providence, which is implicit in the preposterous idea that the best human order will emerge without conscious intention or planning from this let-it-rip free for all. Those who embrace this idea must do so as a matter of fundamental faith, for evidence to the contrary has been mounting for half a century. This providentialism is probably as great a danger to our future as the rising levels of carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere. It is utter madness to believe that there is no need to consciously plan and create the human future. In the changed world we now inhabit, it is reckless to persist in treating trade as an end in itself, rather than a tool to accomplish our chosen ends.

As we struggle to create a new human order, I don't think we can reach backward for solutions. Environmental thought has suffered far too long from a chronic affliction "back to the future." In fashioning a new vision, we need to face the future squarely, imagine, and innovate in the tradition of thinkers and doers like scientist John Todd of Ocean Arks International (who proposes new technologies built on diverse organisms put together in creative combinations), rather than yearn for a simpler world of fewer people. Unprecedented challenges demand novel solutions. A vision of a new human order needs to begin with realistic premises -- such as the existence of an inescapably interconnected global civilization -- and point toward some plausible steps to propel us forward toward the kind of society and world we have decided we want to create.

Former Boston Globe environmental reporter Dianne Dumanoski is the coauthor of Our Stolen Future.

Reprinted with permission from Conservation Matters, a publication of the Conservation Legal Foundation.
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