"HE IS RICHEST WHO IS CONTENT WITH THE LEAST, FOR CONTENT IS THE WEALTH OF NATURE." - Socrates

ENVIRONMENTALISM

“The universe is wider than our views of it.”
-- Thoreau, From “Walden,” 1854

The human mind shapes the world according to its subjective anthropomorphic prejudices rather than seeing nature as a thing-in-itself. The universe, or natural world, is seen through a prism that constructs the world according to an order and equality that bestows fixed human sensibilities to a fluxive, and randomly chaotic universe. Our perceptions refer to man and not the universe. We generate systems of understanding not objectively, but according to our passion for finding explanations that support those theories we prefer. We find what we look for, and what we look for is dictated by what we want to find. Our beliefs are shaped by a desire for agreement with our abstractions of nature, rather than what nature is. That we see the world in our own image is a convenient way to not see the world at all.

Francis Bacon saw this seeing the world in our own image as a constraint on human knowledge. These constraints led Bacon to formulate his doctrine of the four Idols. One of which is the “idol of the Tribe.” Curtis White describes Bacon’s idol as, “a truth based on insufficient evidence but maintained by a constant affirmation within a tribe of believers”(Harpers, 8/07). Once these systems of belief are in place they are difficult to displace. This difficulty arises from the all too human habit of holding an unquestioning belief in the idea that traditional paradigms automatically make sense. It is as if because they once made sense they will always make sense.

One such belief is that our possibilities as the highest animal are “limitless.” It has long been held that we will always have more, that the environment is self-renewable, and that the perpetuation of “limitlessness” as a viable concept can be sustained by a faith in science and technology. But this long held belief based on “insufficient evidence” is now beginning to rapidly crumble. Concerning this myth of human limitlessness, Wendell Berry writes, “There is now a growing perception, and not just among a few experts, that we are entering a time of inescapable limits. We are not likely to be granted another world to plunder in compensation for our pillage of this one” (Harpers, 5/08).

What Curtis White and Wendell Berry both call for, and what I agree with them on, which may surprise some of my readers, given my strong anti-religious views, is an appeal to a rhetoric of religion and spirituality as a way of thinking about the environment. White and Berry cite American Transcendentalism (Emerson and Thoreau), Christopher Marlowe’s “Faustus,” the Bible’s “Exodus,” Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” and Shakespeare’s “King Lear, as alternative ways of seeing our relationship to nature.

But within the secular post-enlightenment zeitgeist that surrounds us inheres a deep suspicion of spiritual discourse. As a result, as White puts it, “we are forced to resort to what is in fact a lower common denominator—the language of Science and bureaucracy. These languages have legitimacy in our culture, a legitimacy they possess largely because of the thoroughness with which they discredited Christian religious discourse in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries” (Harpers, 8/07).

In White’s view, environmentalism must shed its unquestioning belief that the language of science can save us. In a similar fashion, Berry believes that, “To deal with the problems, which after all are inescapable, of living with limited intelligence in a limited world, I suggest that we may have to remove some of the emphasis we have lately placed on science and technology and have a new look at the arts. For an art does not propose to enlarge itself by limitless extension but rather to enrich itself within bounds that are accepted prior to the work.” (Harpers, 5/08) White, like Berry, calls for an expansion of environmental discourse to include a spiritual rhetoric that demands “a recognition of the mystery, the miracle, and the dignity of things, from frogs to forests, simply because they are” (Harpers, 8/07).