Appendix B
Albert Schweitzer once wrote, “The great fault of all ethics hitherto has been that they believed themselves to have to deal only with the relation of man to man.” Modern ethical discussion does not seem to have removed itself very far from this fallacy. Joseph Fletcher’s Situation Ethics: The New Morality, for instance, deals piecemeal with man’s relations to his fellows without even suggesting that man’s relation to nature—to the physical and biological world— raises questions of moral behavior. Perhaps this oversight is due to the general psychological and subjective tone of much current social criticism. Or, even more likely, it represents the “revolt against formalism,” the eschewing of the abstract and sweeping interpretations of man and nature once the passion of American social scientists.
It is true that the Thoreau-like comments of Joseph Wood Krutch or the aggressive naturalistic interpretations of the Austrian scientist, Konrad Lorenz, find a grudging response among some social scientists. But contemporary social scientists have so completely separated conditions of culture from nature that it will take some intellectual effort to overcome this dichotomy. Moreover, although the relations of man and nature may be envisioned in various ways—all the way from control to passive obedience—the notion that man’s relation to nature is a moral one finds very few articulate champions, even among contemporary religious writers. Harvey Cox’s book, The Secular City, for example, is set in an urban world in rather extreme isolation from the surrounding problems of resources, food, disease, etc. The city is taken for granted and the moral dimensions of Cox’s analysis are limited to man’s relations to man within this urban world, and not with the animals, the plants, the trees, the air—that is, the natural habitat.
Eric Hoffer, one of the few contemporary social critics who have met head-on the issue of man’s relationship to nature, has warned in these pages of the danger of romanticizing nature. [“A Strategy for the War with Nature,” SR, February 5, 1966.] Longshoreman, dishwasher, student of human tragedy, and exposer of the corruptions and perversions of power, Mr. Hoffer says that the great accomplishment of man is to transcend nature, to separate one’s self from the demands of instinct. Thus, according to Hoffer, a fundamental characteristic of man is to be found in his capacity to free himself from the restrictions of the physical and biological.
In a way, Hoffer is correct. Surely the effects on man of flood, famine, fire, and earthquake have been great and hardly indicate a beneficence in nature which is ready and willing to rush headlong to the succor of man. But Hoffer’s attack is basically political. It is an attack on “romantic individualism”—a special interpretation of man’s relation to nature. Hoffer knows full well that romantic individualism leads easily to a kind of egoism and antirationalism which can pervert and destroy democratic institutions.
One is reminded of Hitler’s call to neglect reason and to “think with one’s blood.” Values— tradition, home soil, nationalism, and race—have often been legitimized on the basis of a vague nature mysticism. Such a nature mysticism is the very essence of romantic individualism (though, of course, there may be other types of nature romanticism which do not advocate egotist striving). Perhaps the problem lies in the focus on the “individual” as delineated by Hoffer. He assumes that the response to nature couched in the terms of a naive faith in nature’s bountiful, miracleworking properties is an individual response. And, of course, it always is, to a degree, but, by failure to consider the collective or social side of man’s relation to nature, the true moral dimensions of the problem are obscured.
It may be that man is at war with nature, but men are not (or, at least, cannot be). The reason is that certain individual attitudes and actions, when taken collectively, have consequences for nature, and these consequences may be most clearly understood under the stark realities of social survival itself. Take the problems of radioactive wastes, Strontium 90 contamination, etc. Man does not just do battle with the natural world; he may, in the act of cooperating with it, also shape and change it. Men join in a chain of decisions which facilitate the emergence of a new symbiotic relationship to nature—that is, we create civilization and culture. This crucial assumption strikes at the very roots of romantic individualism. One man, totally alone, acting before nature and using nature to satisfy needs of warmth, comfort, and creativity, is very difficult to imagine. Even Robinson Crusoe had his man Friday!
Hoffer seems to neglect the possibility that man’s cooperation in the subjection of nature need not be conceptualized simply on the basis of brute force. Physical work, mechanical and otherwise—from the labor of the Chinese masses to the works of a sophisticated high-tower steeplejack—depends on the intrusion of human ideas into the natural world. Aided by machines, cranes, bulldozers, factories, transportation systems, computers, and laboratories, man does force nature’s hand. This does not, however, force us to acceptance of metaphysical materialism, the naive belief that matter and physical force are the only realities. The power of ideas, of values, provides the presuppositions which in the first place create a particular web of human interaction between nature and man. The power of the contemplative idea, the chain of speculative reason, the mathematician’s art, and the philosopher’s dreams must also be considered. If this point of view is accepted, then the question of man’s relation to nature is a much more crucial moral issue than Eric Hoffer seems to suggest.
What, then, is the moral crisis? It is, I think, a pragmatic problem—that is, it involves the actual social consequences of myriad and unconnected acts. The crisis comes from the combined results of a mistreatment of our environment. It involves the negligence of a small businessman on the Kalamazoo River, the irresponsibility of a large corporation on Lake Erie, the impatient use of insecticides by a farmer in California, the stripping of land by Kentucky mine operators. Unfortunately, there is a long history of unnecessary and tragic destruction of animal and natural resources on the face of this continent.
One might begin the indictment with the classical case of the passenger pigeon which once flew across America in tremendous numbers, and then end with the destruction of the seal industry. The trouble is, however, we do not seem to learn very much from these sad happenings, for (to the anguish of men who have thrilled to the images created by Herman Melville and the great white whale) such marine scientists as Scott McVay believe that commercial fishing is endangering the whale, the last abundant species in the world. For those more inclined toward a cash nexus, there goes a profitable industry. For those of us who have a respect for nature—in particular, for our mammalian kinsmen—the death of these great creatures will leave a void in God’s creation and in the imagination of men for generations to come.
Another case in point is the attempt to dam and flood mile after mile of the Grand Canyon in order to produce more electricity—a commodity we seem to have in great abundance. The Grand Canyon, of course, is not a commodity; it is truly, in popular parlance, a “happening.” Uncontrolled by man, created by nature, it cannot be duplicated. Any assault on its natural state is an equal attack on man’s capacity to wonder, to contemplate his environment and nature’s work. In short, such activities seem to belittle and diminish man himself. Thus the activities of those who suggest such destruction assume a restricted view of man and his capacity for joy in nature. In this sense, such activities are immoral. We could lengthen the list, but it should be clear that destruction of nature by man’s gratuitous “busyness” and technological arrogance is the result of a thoughtless and mindless human activity.
A second basic issue is the growing biological pollution of the environment. Discussions of the pollution in just one river, the mighty Hudson, in financial terms stagger the imagination. The economic costs just to keep the river in its present undesirable state are immense—and to make any progress back toward a less polluted river will cost billions of dollars. The same is true of other great bodies of water.
And consider the state of the air we breathe. Air pollution has demonstrable ill effects on man, as many reports confirm. But in addition, for the economically minded, A. J. Haagen-Smit, a leading expert on air pollution, notes that a largely ignored breakdown in standards of efficiency and technology also is involved:
From all the emissions of an automobile, the total loss of fuel energy is about 15 percent; in the U.S. that represents a loss of about $3 billion annually. It is remarkable that the automobile industry, which has a reputation for efficiency, allows such fuel waste.
Perhaps an issue becomes most moral when it is personal, existential—appeals to our own experience. Scientists vary in estimates of the time when the Great Lakes will be largely polluted, but the day of reckoning may be much too near. When I was a boy in Toledo, Ohio, summer after summer many of my neighbors and playmates went to cottages along the shores of Lake Erie. Today, visiting these cottages is anything but a happy event, and some owners are attempting desperately to sell their properties to any bidder. An analysis by Charles F. Powers and Andrew Robertson on “The Aging Great Lakes” [Scientific American, November 1966] is not at all comforting for those of us who love the miles of sandy beach of Lake Michigan or the rugged, cold, wind-whipped shores of Lake Superior. Although Lake Michigan will not immediately turn into a polluted wasteland like Lake Erie, with dark spots of water without aeration where only worms can live, pollution is growing in the southern end of Lake Michigan. And these problems, as Powers and Robertson point out, are beginning to touch even relatively unspoiled Lake Superior.
Why is man’s relation to nature a moral crisis? It is a moral crisis because it is a historical one involving man’s history and culture, expressed at its roots by our religious and ethical views of nature—which have been relatively unquestioned in this context. The historian of medieval culture, Lynn White, Jr., brilliantly traced the origin and consequences of this expression in an insightful article in Science last March: “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis.” He argues that the Christian notion of a transcendent God, removed from nature and breaking into nature only through revelation, removed spirit from nature and allows, in the ideological sense, for an easy exploitation of nature.
On the American scene, the Calvinistic and the deistic concepts of God were peculiarly alike at this point. Both envisioned God as absolutely transcendent, apart from the world, isolated from nature and organic life. As to the contemporary implications of this dichotomy between spirit and nature, Professor White says:
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 two millennia Christian missionaries have been chopping down sacred groves, which are idolatrous because they assume spirit in nature.
Perhaps, as Lynn White suggests, the persistence of this as a moral problem is illustrated in the protest of the contemporary generation of beats and hippies. Although the kind of “cool cat” aloofness expressed by this generation grates on the nerves of many of us, and more than a few “squares” find difficulty in “digging” the new hair styles (not to mention Twiggy), there may be a “sound instinct” involved in the fact that some of these so-called beats have turned to Zen Buddhism. It may represent an overdue perception of the fact that we need to appreciate more fully the religious and moral dimensions of the relation between nature and the human spirit.
Why do almost all of our wisest and most exciting social critics meticulously avoid the moral implications of this issue? Perhaps, in the name of political realism, it is too easy to fear the charge that one anthropomorphizes or spiritualizes nature. On the other hand, the refusal to connect the human spirit to nature may reflect the traditional thought pattern of Western society wherein nature is conceived to be a separate substance—a material—mechanical, and, in a metaphysical sense, irrelevant to man.
It seems to me much more fruitful to think of nature as part of a system of human organization—as a variable, a changing condition—which interacts with man and culture. If nature is so perceived, then a love, a sense of awe, and a feeling of empathy with nature need not degenerate into a subjective, emotional bid for romantic individualism. On the contrary, such a view should help destroy egoistic, status politics, for it helps unmask the fact that other men’s activities are not just private, inconsequential, and limited in themselves; their arts, mediated through changes in nature, affect my life, my children, and the generations to come. In this sense, justification of a technological arrogance toward nature on the basis of dividends and profits is not just bad economics—it is basically an immoral act. And our contemporary moral crisis, then, goes much deeper than questions of political power and law, of urban riots and slums. It may, at least in part, reflect American society’s almost utter disregard for the value of nature.