The Environmental Movement—Five Causes of Confusion

Is there an environmental crisis? The accumulative impact of recent disasters and the publication of stirring books have created a general sense of crisis since 1969, but there remains considerable confusion about the problem and how to solve it.

Some experts say there is no problem. These “cornucopia economists” assure us there is still standing room available on earth, even though the global population will double by the end of this century to about seven billion people. Some over-specialized scientists who have eyes only for their own highly developed disciplines don’t entirely deny the crisis but cling to the assertion that we have a lot to learn about our environment. They ask, for example, how we can fight air pollution when we are still ignorant of the nature of 70 per cent of the pollutants in the atmosphere. And of course there are businessmen with vested interests as resource-users who assume environmental deterioration is only a technical issue anyway, one that other techniques can solve.

On the other hand, politicians generally affirm that there is a crisis, as evidenced by new legislation enacted in many countries, by the United Nations environmental conference held in Stockholm in June, by the several UNESCO conferences already held, and by the support of celebrations like Conservation Year and Earth Day. Environmentalists have been alarmed for some time. Now moralists of many persuasions are beginning to think of the crisis as one not just of the physical environment but also of society.

Beyond these technical controversies, however, there are five basic causes of confusion that Christians should be warned against. After all, Jesus himself admonished his disciples, “Take care that no one misleads you” (Matt. 24:4).

1. Beware of panaceas and fads. It seems inherent in man to look for simple answers to complex problems. He seems to symbolize his needs in this manner and to confuse the symbols with the actual remedies. Is this true of the present environmental issue? Is it a gimmick of our day, born yesterday and gone tomorrow? Is it just a symptom of change, a simplistic symbol of man’s unease concerning his whole destiny?

Some suspect the ecology issue because it has appeared so suddenly. Before 1969 the general public was scarcely aware of it. True, George Perkins Marsh had given dire warnings in his book Man and the Land, published in 1874. But Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring didn’t appear until 1962. Between these two events only professional groups such as conservationists and geographers were really awake to the issue. A few years ago ecologists were considered to be primarily bird-watchers! Now the ecologist is on the topmost pedestal of our society as philosopher, theologian, planner, and general statesman of the welfare of mankind. If it has arisen so suddenly, might the issue not be as suddenly bypassed in the public mind by other, newly relevant issues? This is the danger: if something else replaces the environment as the object of public concern, will a genuine crisis then confront an apathetic public?

While it has its faddish aspects, ecology is more than a fad. We should view our times as a “crisis of crises,” as John Platt has suggested. The deeper we go into it, the more poignantly we realize the vast series of problems we are up against. It is not one major issue that now faces us but a whole galaxy of shattering problems, all of them coming to a point of crisis that threatens the entire human enterprise within the next fifteen to thirty years. Very few sober-minded scientists believe it is possible for the human race to survive far into the third millennium.

2. Beware of false emphases. In 1930, as Irving Babbit looked back to the previous century, he noted the irony of American history: “No age ever grew so ecstatic over natural beauty as the nineteenth century; at the same time no age ever did so much to deface nature” (Rousseau and Romanticism, p. 301). The age of Audubon, Thoreau, and Muir was also the age of the dust-bowls, deforestation, and urban sprawl. The new wilderness dwellers were concerned not about the oppressive social realities of Boston, New York, or Chicago but about escape to nature. This cult of the simple, rustic life as an escape from the metropolitan realities is still with us:

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world and am free

[Wendrell Berry, “The Peace of Wild Things,” The New York Times, March 3, 1968].

Some environmental enthusiasts today may be seeking in nature solace from both the social issues of our day and the individual pressures of contemporary life.

Militant blacks in American ghettos tend to consider ecology a false and diversionary issue, irrelevant to the needs of the masses. Does the environmental issue distract attention from the points of social vulnerability where real and radical changes ought to be made? Should not our primary concern be people rather than things—even the environmental thing?

We must also be sure that pollution is not turned into big business. Man in his duplicity is quite capable of making one branch of a corporation an environmental offender while another branch of the same company turns out anti-pollution products. James Ridgeway’s The Politics of Pollution (1970) shows that some leaders of capitalist enterprise are on the bandwagon too. Often the worst sinners are the greatest preachers, as current advertising of some companies reveals. This method of neutralizing an issue has been called “desublimation.” When the chief polluters lead an anti-pollution crusade, they control protest by desublimating it, by bringing it out into the open, and even appearing to identify with it. It is the old adage: “If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em.” We need to avoid the trap of duplicity by dealing with environmental deterioration at its source instead of making a new and separate industry out of depollution.

3. Beware of false judgments. Since 1966 Lynn White, Richard Means, Ian McHarg, and others have argued that it is the biblical view of man’s attitude to nature that has made man the manipulator and destroyer of the environment. Such a charge cannot be dismissed lightly; it has been taken up by Nobel prize-winning biologists such as René Dubos and Joshua Lederberg, as well as by some theologians.

It is of course true that the implicit belief-structure in the rationality and harmony of the universe, which made science possible, is a derivation of Christian theology. It is also true that Christian societies have been destructive of the environment, though it could certainly be argued that they have not been the only destroyers. But we challenge White and his followers on their biblical exegesis, or rather their lack of it.

Does the Bible, notably in the Genesis passages cited by White, provide a warrant for man’s exploitive and arrogant attitude toward nature? On the contrary, man is viewed as a steward over nature. To “subdue” it (Gen. 1:28) also means to be responsible for it. The Bible clearly distinguishes the utilization of nature from the wanton destruction of nature, as Deuteronomy 20:19, 20 makes clear:

When you besiege a city for a long time, making war against it in order to take it, you shall not destroy its trees by wielding an axe against them; for you may eat of them, but you shall not cut them down. Are the trees in the field men that they should be besieged by you? Only the trees which you know are not trees for food may you destroy and cut down that you may build siege-works against the city that makes war with you, until it falls.

Moreover, the urban experiences of man outside the garden (Gen. 4–11) provide a graphic reminder of the ambiguity of man’s increasing power. These episodes show that each stage of civilization’s growth (represented in Genesis 5:17 f.; 9:18; 11:32) is reflected in an increased capacity for violence, injustice, exploitation, themselves all products of that civilization. Today’s environmental threat simply reflects the increased powers of ambiguities within our civilization. The immense increase of retaliatory power available in modern thermonuclear, chemical, and biological technology demands a correspondingly increased moral and spiritual commitment to principles of global concern, both ecological and social. White and his followers are too simplistic in their identification of the source of the trouble.

4. Beware of false analogies. If the Bible does not support the exploitation of nature, neither does it engender the worship of nature. Yet analogies have been used to make it do so. In the seventeenth century, the analogy of the clock and the clockmaker to explain the universe and the Creator led to a mechanistic view of the universe that still hangs on. In the nineteenth century, “evolution” became the analogue of biological theory that was applied to all the social behavior of man. Now it looks as if “ecology” will become a new analogue, applicable to late twentieth-century secularism.

An indication of what to expect has been given by Richard A. Underwood in “Ecological and Psychedelic Approaches to Theology” (Soundings, 1969). Ecology, he says, seeks the restoration of nature. It is therefore the contemporary scientific expression of cosmic redemption, the possibility of a realized eschatology. As a transcendental science it focuses attention upon the totality of life, calling for a reinterpretation of the man-nature relation. But ecology itself cannot bring about this reinterpretation, and Underwood concludes: “If ecology cannot succeed without a reorientation which is at base religious, and if religion of the culture itself is anti-ecological, then what is the way out?”

The answer Underwood suggests is psychedelic experience, a new kind of revealed religion, as ecology is a new kind of natural theology. Both thrust man into the interconnectedness of things, felt bodily and engendering new visions of reality. Both unite understanding and action, so that while ecology seeks an understanding of nature, which in turn involves a metanoia by scientific man to new efforts to save nature, the psychedelic experience seeks a restoration of the self in the midst of a nature corrupted by rationality.

This kind of analogical reasoning is of course nonsense, but dangerous nonsense that many swallow even though it suffers from A. N. Whitehead’s “fallacy of misplaced concreteness” and G. E. Moore’s “naturalistic fallacy” that values can be derived from facts. These leaps from one dimension to another are the cause of much contemporary heresy. Associated then with the gulf between the material and the personal, the natural and the supernatural, is dualism. Dualism, in turn, is the root cause of man’s alienation from his physical environment, as well as from his fellow men. It is this that engenders man’s manipulation of nature as well as the social engineering of his fellow.

5. Beware of false solutions.

Ecology Action East, which publishes a radical journal, has argued that do-good ecological liberals cannot do more than delay the final catastrophe because they fail to make the connection between violence on the environment and the society that perpetrates that violence. They attack only the effects, not the causes, and technology becomes a convenient scapegoat while the deep-seated social conditions that make machines and technical processes harmful are bypassed. So far this is powerful stuff, but then such radicalism whimpers out with feeble suggestions for spontaneous self-development of the young, freedom to eroticize experience in all its forms, the promotion of joyous artfulness in life and work. But if all restraints are released from society to engender anarchy, how then will the earth fare?

Nor will a reinforcement of conventional religion help us, even if it is dished up in a new guise called “ecological theology.” Reshaping religion with ecological perspectives may be of religious interest. Reshaping religion with psychedelic experimentation may produce new mystical experiences. But biblical faith stands opposed to such “religion”; such efforts of man to reach God by human efforts are idolatry. The biblical God is the Creator of nature and man. The heavens declare the glory of God, but the heavens are not God. Man will not find God in ecology, for God speaks directly to man.

However, the ecological issue is indeed challenging Christians to a radical life-style that may bring us closer to the Christianity of the early Church and instill more realism in Christian living.

In the first place, the ecological crisis challenges our attitudes to both the physical environment and our fellow men. It requires us to consider more deeply what and who man is, since matters of environmental quality depend ultimately upon our appraisals of man himself. Perhaps the environmental issue can provide new and meaningful symbols of man’s needs. Perhaps too it can unify his aspirations and give them content.

In the second place, the environmental issue challenges us to go beyond knowledge, to do something, and that quickly. This sense of both realism and urgency should also permeate our Christian calling, for we are being summoned to new and deep senses of responsibility. Man is not just the thinker or the maker; he is the responsible agent. He is able to harness his thought and his technology to make the fitting response to what is happening. As John Black points out in his book, The Dominion of Man: The Search For Ecological Responsibility (1970), “If western civilization has failed, it has failed because it has been unable to find a concept which would engender a feeling of responsibility, for the use to which we put our control over nature.”

In critical periods of Israel’s history this emphasis on man as responsive was heightened by the challenge: “What does the Lord require of thee?” For us Christ is the paradigm of responsibility, the cure for the mass-mindedness of our day. He gives us the motive for right attitudes toward our environment and toward the needs of the underprivileged.

In the third place, the ecological crisis reminds us forcibly of the interdependence of life, the “web” of life. Because the earth’s environment is no respecter of nationalism, provincialism, racism, or individualism, there may be in eco-politics common ground for international understanding and cooperation. At the same time the ecological sense of interdependence may also help curb the gigantic sense of individualism bred by our affluence, inside as well as outside the Church.

In the fourth place, ecology provides an awareness of limits by making it clear that the resources of the earth are limited, and subject to delicate balances. There can be no sense of responsibility, no response to the interrelatedness of life, if we continue to push the GNP. That contemporary disease of pleonexema, the itch for “more,” so stimulated by the advertising and industrial powers of our society, must be contained. We must impose ceilings on our wants and luxuries. Likewise we must curtail our procreative freedom to bring more babies into an overpopulated world. To impose limits on human activity will, however, create enormous new problems for government, legislation, and authority.

In the fifth and final place, the Christian must lead in a new life-style that encompasses all these needs. Where does he begin? Perhaps in the regular practice of tithing his income. Learning to give first a tenth and then even more of it will tell the world more about his responsible stewardship on behalf of the earth and his fellow men than any academic discussion. This reduction in income can begin to count environmentally when he runs his car as long as the body and engine hold together and runs his house within a simple economy. This is one way Christians can start to control the environmental crisis now upon us.

James M. Houston is principal of Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia, and special lecturer at the University of British Columbia. He has the M.A. from Edinburgh University and the D.Phil. from Oxford.

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