It was the
kind of unintended confession that can mark an author and his ideas
forever. In his 1968 classic, The Population Bomb, Stanford biologist
Paul Ehrlich wrote,
I came to understand [the
population explosion] emotionally one stinking hot night in Delhi a couple of
years ago. My wife and daughter and I
were returning to our hotel in an ancient taxi.
The seats were hopping with fleas.
The only functional gear was third.
As we crawled through the city, we entered a slum area. The temperature was well over 100, and the
air was a haze of dust and smoke. The
streets seemed alive with people. People
eating, people washing, people sleeping.
People visiting, arguing, and screaming.
People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people, people, people. As we moved slowly through the mob, hand horn
squawking, the dust, noise, heat, and cooking fires gave the scene a hellish
aspect. Would we ever get to our
hotel? All three of us were, frankly,
frightened. It seemed that anything
could happen … since that night, I’ve known the feel of overpopulation.
It takes some patience to sort out the problems with this
passage. Ehrlich seems to have misunderstood
his uneasy sensation, which was the “feel” of poverty more than of
overpopulation. The defecating,
urinating, and screaming come of taking your domestic and intimate life outside
beside you have no hotel room in which to enact it. The “hellish aspect” comes mainly from
primitive technology: the open fires of the poor do in fact happen to fit some
Christian images of eternal damnation, though they would hardly have felt that
way to Ehrlich’s “mob,” probably made up in good part of Hindus. “Mob,” for that matter, is quite the
pejorative for what the details suggest is just a neighborhood’s daily life:
the word suggests a crowd on the edge of violence, out of its mind with some
passion.
And here is
the most damning thing about the passage.
The “feel” Ehrlich evokes has almost nothing to do with living in
crowded slums. There is no hint of
interest in what it might be like to watch a half-defunct cab, with some
anxious-looking foreigners inside, crawl within inches of one’s cooking fire on
a hot Delhi night. The only feel he
describes is his own discomfort. If we
take the passage at face value, it says this: the feel of overpopulation is a wealthy white man’s unease at being
pressed upon by poor, brown people.
This kind
of thing, along with coercive sterilization policies in India and other poor
countries, got the population question disinvited from respectable
environmental conversations. It is worth
lingering over. It crystallizes
suspicions that have attached to environmental sentiment for decades. Chief among them are that environmentalists
are misanthropic – they do not like
most people very much; that they are pessimistic
about human prospects – show them a slum, and they see the future of humanity;
and they are blindly privileged – disinclined
to think about how they came to be cabbing it back to the hotel while the “mob”
squats and argues over cooking fires.
Add to this another quality not instanced in Ehrlich’s Delhi vignette,
but threaded throughout environmental literature: nostalgia for a lost, always better past, whether of pastoral
harmony, pristine wilderness, or rugged adventure. To complete the charges, introduce that most
delicate accusation, that there is something racist in the blended nostalgia and fear of privileged white
people, for whom the nature to be preserved is the legacy of one’s own
ancestors, and the crowding, consuming, philistine threat comes from the wrong
kind of person. Let us lump these
together, for the sake of economy, as the
misanthropic worry about environmentalism.
This
chapter aims to take these charges seriously and understand what they can show
us about environmental imagination. None
of the charges is unfounded. The more
one learns about the history and personalities that formed the American environmental
imagination, the more discomfiting associations arise to confirm the
accusation. Most environmentally minded
people today are unaware of all this, and most historians of environmental
ideas, if they are aware, pass over these questions in haste or in
silence. Rather than turn away from this
uncomfortable history, this chapter addresses it directly.
Let’s begin
with a passage that has some unsettling parallels with Ehrlich’s. It concerns “the result of unlimited
immigration” into the United States just before the country’s entry into World
War One:
The man of the old stock
(Anglo-Saxon) is being crowded out of many country districts by these
foreigners [“the Slovak, the Italian, the Syrian and the Jew”] just as he is
to-day being literally driven off the streets of New York City by the swarms of
Polish Jews. These immigrants adopt the
language of the native American, they wear his clothes, they steal his name and
they are beginning to take his women….[1]
This is Madison Grant, American aristocrat, Yale graduate,
and dandyish son of New York City, in The
Passing of the Great Race. This
torrid work of pseudo-scientific fantasy won the uneasy distinction of
favorably impressing both Theodore Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler.[2] Grant was a prominent eugenicist, and here he
was arguing that Americans should shut down European immigration to stem the
low-quality tide of short, stocky, round-headed Alpines (“always and everywhere
a race of peasants”)[3]
and dark, slight Mediterraneans (who thrived in “the cramped factory and
crowded city” because of their racial aptitude to “work a spindle, set type,
sell ribbons or push a clerk’s pen”)[4]
– let alone the Negro, with his lack of both “self-control” and “capacity for
cooperation,” and his “low vital capacity” than any of the Europeans.[5] Grant argued that a policy of open
immigration was a “suicidal ethics” that would effectively wipe out the group
that had created the country – the Nordics, in his term, a people of courage,
initiative, and leadership, whose noble spirit and unsuspicious nature made
them vulnerable to being overwhelmed by a people better adapted to an
environment of factories and ghettoes.[6]
Why spend
even a minute on this wretched and obsolete work? For one thing, Grant came to his analysis of
an overcrowded world by the same path as later and more respectable theorists
of overpopulation. Humanitarian
sentiment and scientific advance had combined to reduce infant mortality,
meaning that the children of the poor were surviving to crowd cities and pour
across oceans – producing, for instance, the “tumultuous and frantic invasion”
of Polish Jews who had overtaken Grant’s Manhattan.[7] This undermined biological checks on
population. While “the laws of nature
require the obliteration of the unfit,” in present conditions social policy
would have to step take up the slack, not just restricting immigration, but
imposing sterilization on the least desirable segment of humanity.[8] Eugenicists and modern population-control
advocates make an argument with the same basic structure: our habit of valuing
every life, combined with new technological capacity to save lives, puts us on
a collision-course with environmental limits and requires us to give up some of
our liberal, democratic, humanitarian commitments. As ecologist Garrett Hardin put it in his
iconic 1968 article, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” “freedom to breed is
intolerable”[9]
because it results in crushing overpopulation: only political coercion could
save us from one another.
Of course
the explosion in human population is a reality, not a fantasy, and so are the
ecological pressures it produces. But
what is real is no less an occasion for fantasy, and it is telling when
someone, confronted with the problem, experiences it as the personally
threatening press and crowding of alien people, eroding an idealized and
nostalgic legacy. To be clear, I do not
mean to tar Paul Ehrlich or the late Garrett Hardin with this nasty brush. Understanding their resonances with Madison
Grant, though, helps to show what in Ehrlich raises the hackles, and will also
help to sort out which parts of the misanthropic worry to take seriously.
Madison
Grant’s greater interest here, though, is not that he is a eugenicist who
sounds like Paul Ehrlich, the conservationist.
It is that Grant was himself a conservationist, an influential figure
who has been mostly scrubbed from the history of the movement, in whom
conservation and elitist, nostalgic, anti-democratic racism were closely
intertwined. His New York Times obituary captured the unity of his governing
sentiments: “The preservation of the redwoods, of the bison, of the Alaskan
caribou, of the bald eagle … of the spirit of the early American
colonist... and of the purity of the
‘Nordic’ type of humanity in the country, were all his personal concerns, all
products of the same urge in him to save precious things.”[10]
As the Times noted, Grant’s most visible
achievement was organizing the Save-the-Redwoods League, an organization of
wealthy and influential men (John D. Rockefeller donated one million dollars in
1924) that created many of the coastal preserves where California’s redwood
trees now survive. Grant’s biographer,
Jonathan Spiro, judges, “There can be little doubt that Grant identified the
redwood trees with the Nordic race” – noble survivors of a heroic age, now
being laid low by commerce and home-building for the democratic swarm.[11] This is speculation, but it does express
themes that always united Grant’s projects: elegy, a sense of threat, and a
heroic call to save a vanishing world.
The tone was established as early as his 1894 article on “The Vanishing
Moose,” in The Century, a
clearinghouse of progressive thought and letters. Grant began,
So much has been has been written …
of the great achievements and rapid development of the United States that
sometimes we lose sight of the fact that we are still in a period of
transition. The old order of things has
largely passed away, but we are yet within sight of the primeval state of a
savage and beautiful wilderness, and can obtain some idea of what this country
once was by the untouched or only partly mutilated corners that remain. The end, however, is near…. Of the great
forests … scarcely anything is left.
That little will be destroyed by fire and ax within two decades, and
with the trees will vanish the last of the game.[12]
The themes are all there: “development” has also been a kind
of mutilation, and only fragments can now remind us of past greatness. Those fragments are what should command our
attention and affection.
In moods
like this, Grant made himself a force for conservation over more than four
decades. In 1893 he joined the Boone and
Crockett Club, an elite society of outdoorsmen that Theodore Roosevelt had
founded in the winter of 1887-88.
Restricted to 100 members at any time, the Club’s requirements included
having killed a member of three of the large species of North American game
animals (bear, bison, caribou, cougar, deer, elk, moose, mountain sheep, musk
ox, pronghorn antelope, white goat, and wolf).
Grant soon became one of the Club’s most active members, throwing its
weight behind state bans on commercial hunting of game animals, helping to
engineer the network of preserves that saved the American bison from
extinction, and pressing to establish Glacier National Park in 1910. He was also instrumental in establishing the
Bronx Zoo, whose naturalist and conservationist overseers largely overlapped
with those of the Roosevelt-centered Natural History Museum and the members of
the Boone and Crockett Club. He
reckoned, like John Muir and Aldo Leopold, that “nature itself has some
rights,” and that the US could respect those rights by leaving some areas of
the continent in “their pristine condition of wilderness.”[13]
The milieu
in which Grant moved was the crucible for the conservation policies of Theodore
Roosevelt, who was the Club’s president as well as its founder. Its membership was, quite without
exaggeration, an Olympus of conservation thought. It included the former Interior Secretary
Carl Schurz, who had first sought to restrict timbering on federal land,
outraging Western populists; Gifford Pinchot, Roosevelt’s chief forester and
the leading spokesperson for the conservation idea; Albert Bierstadt, the
celebrated painter of sublime Western landscapes, including Lake Tahoe and
Mount Rainier; Theodore Strong van Dyke, the popular outdoors writer; Clarence
King, former director of the US Geological Survey, Sierra explorer, and
theorist of art who was heavily influenced by John Ruskin; Owen Wister, the
literary tribune of the frontier nostalgia that shaped Roosevelt’s early
experience and public persona; and, a little later, Aldo Leopold. It also included Grant’s very close friend
and collaborator, Henry Fairfield Osborn, the director of the Natural History
Museum, who contributed the introductions to Grant’s two major works of
explicit racism, The Passing of the Great
Race and The Conquest of a Continent,
both times (nearly twenty years apart) praising the author for providing a
thoroughly racial account of the causes and meaning of human history.
Osborn was
not the only member of this influential circle to celebrate Grant’s
racism. Roosevelt greeted The Passing of the Great Race with a
letter, now lost, but excerpted in the publisher’s promotional material:
This book is a capital book; in
purpose, in vision, in grasp of the facts our people most need to
realize…. It shows a habit of singular
serious thought on the subjects of most commanding importance. It shows a fine fearlessness in assailing the
popular and mischievous sentimentalities and attractive and corroding
falsehoods which few men dare assail. It
is the work of an American scholar and gentleman; and all Americans should be
sincerely grateful to you for writing it.[14]
Another friend and fellow conservationist who evidently did
not share the egalitarian “sentimentalities” that Roosevelt scorned was Gifford
Pinchot, who was a delegate to the first and second international eugenics
congresses in 1912 and 1921 and a member of the Advisory Council of the
American Eugenics Society from 1925 to 1935.[15]
Maybe none of this should be
surprising. Certainly to be indignant
would be anachronistic. It is one of the
major arguments of this book that conservation sentiment arose as part of
Progressive nationalism and a managerial view of both nature and social
life. It would be rather astonishing if
it did not share their darker aspects – resistance to immigrants, ambivalence
about mass democracy, and an impulse to preserve the status and privileges of
an older elite by reasserting their central place in the American nation. Moreover, what today might be called
biopolitics was always a part of the managerial program: public health, labor
markets, and the vitality of the country’s mothers and soldiers were central
concerns for the same reformers who produced the conservation movement, and the
affinities were much more than incidental.
National efficiency was about the quality and deployment of the human
stock in many ways; to its advocates, eugenics was one more of these.
In a more
Romantic vein, Madison Grant’s redwoods, trophy mammals, and Nordic heroes, and
his fear for the loss of all three, form quite a standard constellation. He, Roosevelt, and their fellow Boone and
Crockett Club member made a milieu obsessed with the decline of heroism. Club member Owen Wister’s frontier novels,
most famously The Virginian, spoke to
the same sentiment. So did Roosevelt’s
lifelong search for adventure and physical trial – on Dakota ranches, African
safaris, and military excursions such as his Rough Riders’ bit part in the
Spanish-American War. Familiar
institutions such as the Boy Scouts have their origins here, in Ernest Thompson
Seton’s efforts to preserve frontier experiences to put some rawhide in
American boys’ character, and Daniel Carter Beard’s aim to do the same with
stereotyped American Indian woodcraft.
(Both movements merged into the khaki-clad, paramilitary-toned British
import, founded by the Roosevelt- like imperial enthusiast, Lord Robert Baden-Powell.) Although nothing in these impulses guarantees
racism, the cocktail of sentimentalism, nostalgia, and a sense of demographic
threat to one’s own status all have strong affinities that way. Claptrap and bombast about Anglo-Saxon
virtues from the misty forests of Northern Europe ran far back in American
rhetoric: Emerson had indulged in it without misgivings. The pseudo-science that Grant popularized
could only have attracted those whose minds were already bent this way.
Indeed,
maybe the remarkable thing is that Grant was not more typical of those who
wanted to save “the old America.” John
Muir’s basically apolitical temper surely made it easy for him to consort with
railroad barons as well as Progressive professors; but it may have helped preserved
his seeming indifference to racist and nationalist jingoism. His sometime friendship and alliance with
Roosevelt and Pinchot highlights his immunity to the fevers that stirred them
and seem inseparable from their conservationism. It is striking, too, that women played an
unquestioned role in the Sierra Club from the beginning – quite a different
thing from the all-male Boone and Crockett Club, where a certain amount of
dignified slaughter was the first membership requirement, and the future of
nature was never far the future of manhood.
Unquestionably
the most important historical marker here is World War Two. As the world began to confront and absorb the
wages of racial ideology and eugenics in Nazi Germany, a set of attitudes that
had recently seemed plausible extensions of progressive nationalism now smacked
of ultimate evil. It is true that the
Western confrontation with the Holocaust was neither immediate nor complete,
and that the rise of human-rights universalism was not, as is often imagined, a
quick and direct response to Nazi genocide.[16] That said, though, had Grant lived longer
than 1937, he would have had to confront the letter Hitler had written him,
calling The Passing of the Great Race
“my bible.”[17] Similarly, Henry Fairfield Osborn, who died
in 1935, would have had some explaining to do a decade later about his
announcement, on returning from an enthusiastic 1934 visit to Germany, that
“the metempsychosis of Germany is one of the most extraordinary phenomena of
modern times.”[18] (In using the term of the transmigration of
souls, Osborn presumably meant to praise the Germans’ rebirth into a new
incarnation under Hitler’s nationalism.)
It is somewhat intuitive to draw a hard line sometime during the Nazi
era, a kind of moral statute of limitations that, at least, grants that
Roosevelt, Pinchot, and the rest had no real grounds to understand that they
were tarrying with world-historical evil.
If this is too sweeping, if there is no grounds to excuse them outright
when others knew better, it is at least symmetrically true that anachronistic
moralizing, which fallaciously turns everything Hitler might have approved of
into a tendency to mass murder, is an enemy of clear historical and moral
judgment.
There is, however, an eerie
continuity between the shadowed alliances of conservation and Romantic
preservation and the influences of their successor after World War Two, the new
ecological sensibility. It was not
Rachel Carson who first warned Americans of the threat that industrial society
presented to planetary health and, ultimately, human life. Nor was Aldo Leopold, the old Boone and
Crockett Club member, alone in setting out the ecological perspective. In 1948, twelve years before the chapters of
Carson’s Silent Spring began
appearing the New Yorker and a year
ahead of the posthumous publication of Leopold’s Sand County Almanac, Henry Fairfield Osborn, Jr., published Our Plundered Planet, a manifesto for a
new conservation. Writing simply as
“Fairfield Osborn,” the son opened with an image of ecological harmony
disturbed and nature and humanity threatened.
The world was an “earth-symphony,” in which “each part if dependent upon
another” and “all are related to the movement of the whole.” Subtract any one of the integral parts of the
planey’s chemistry and “the earth will die – will become as dead as the
moon.” Some parts of the earth were
already dying from human interference, some were dead, and, “If we cause more
to die, nature will compensate for this in her own way, inexorably, as already
she has begun to do.”[19] These were the themes that, twenty years
later, would be suddenly ubiquitous in the national conversation: nature as an
interdependent system, human power as an epochal disruptor of its harmonies,
and the dangers of ecological collapse and mass extinction, even (Osborn seemed
to hint) of humanity itself. Writing in
the wake of World War Two, Osborn called “man … destroying his own life sources
… that other, silent world-wide ‘war.’”[20]
Osborn’s
prescription, too, would have been unsurprising two decades later. He regretted that “[man] has failed so far
to recognize that he is a child of the earth and that, this being so, he must
for his own survival work with nature in understanding rather than in
conflict.”[21] Like Leopold, he urged his readers to
appreciate the small place and brief span of human civilization: the universe
was vast, time was deep, and if we hoped to survive in our fragment, we would
have to understand that “human life on this earth … is but an element in the great
scheme of nature,” and would have to conform to its standards.[22] He also shared with Leopold a great emphasis
on the primacy of soil to life and the need to preserve it.[23] Osborn also gave in capsule form the argument
about the anger pesticide, specifically DDT, in an ecological web that Carson
would later make the touchstone of the ecological imagination. He explained that DDT could move through the
food web, from its insect targets to birds, fishes, and reptiles, finally
jeopardizing “the life scheme of the earth.”[24] If insects had to be controlled, he argued,
it should be by means resembling nature’s own measures, such as preserving
natural predators: above all, we should bear their presumed importance within
“the relatedness of all living things.”[25]
None of this is to deny the
literary achievements that earned Leopold and Carson their canonical
status. They conjured and carried their
readers through, a way of seeing the natural world and the human place in it that
Fairfield merely asserted in patrician tones.
Osborn, though, did make the same arguments, with the same stakes. That he was poised to do so highlights, among
other things, how much in the ecological perspective was continuous with
Progressive conservation. After all, the
conservationists around the senior Osborn had seen natural systems as complex
and intertwined – one of their touchstones was the way that clearing forests
could produce soil erosion, exhausting land fertility and clogging rivers and
irrigation systems. As early as George
Perkins Marsh’s Man and Nature, US
conservationists had also understood that felling forests denied habitat to the
bird species that, in turn, controlled pests – a point Osborn echoed in the
passages that anticipated Rachel Carson.
The conservationists had also insisted that natural resources were
finite, and that hubris – mainly the laissez-faire spirit of the frontier –
risked exhausting natural wealth and needed enlightened regulation to bring it
to heel. Indeed, what Fairfield Osborn
had that the conservationists had lacked – and which he shared with Leopold,
Carson, and the generation that followed them – was the Romantic idea that
nature mattered in itself and contained lessons essential to the human
spirit. Understanding the natural world,
for Osborn, gave us more than tips for prudent management: nature was a tutor
in enlightened consciousness. Gifford
Pinchot would have disagreed sharply, and George Perkins Marsh would have been
nonplussed at best. But John Muir and
Madison Grant, for all that separated them, would have said the same
thing. Osborn and the other bearers of
ecological ideas combined the conservationists’ description of nature with the
Romantics’ way of valuing it. Of course,
in doing so, they intensified some parts of earlier ideas, changed others, and
set some aside. Nonetheless, the
ecological perspective was continuous with the older views, and also a
synthesis of the two.
In Osborn’s hands, the ecological
perspective also carried forward the demographic anxieties of his father’s
generation. Our Plundered Planet is very much a book about ecology. It is also, quite emphatically, a book about
population. The first line of its
preface is about the harmony of the “good earth,”[26]
and the first line of the main text is an image of the 175,000 newborns then,
according to Osborn, coming into the world each day.[27] As he presented it in his conclusion, the
book’s basic argument described a pincer action between two forces: “The tide
of the earth’s population is rising, the reservoir of the earth’s living
resources is falling.”[28] This situation, Osborn insisted, gave the lie
to such humanitarian hopes as the Franklin Roosevelt slogan, “Freedom from
Want”: he declared this “an illusory hope” unless we could limit our pressure
on the planet by achieving “comprehension of the enduring processes of nature.”[29] Those surely included the historical balance
of population within ecological limits, now exploded by technology.
If one takes Osborn’s continuity
with his father and Madison Grant as a cue to read Our Plundered Planet suspiciously, a very different book
emerges. Osborn describes World War Two
in politically neutral terms, not as a clash of principles, but as a tragic
product of resource pressure, whose “spawn are armed conflicts such as World
Wars I and II.”[30] His description of the second of these as
“the most cruel and deadly world-wide war … marked by horrors and atrocities
from whose memory we are still attempting to recover” laid no specific blame. Although it was not an ecologist’s job to
moralize about the late war, he did not hesitate to moralize elsewhere, and it
is at least suggestive that he ended the book by calling one of Roosevelt’s
wartime Four Freedoms a delusion. His
father’s community of eugenicists, after all, had praised the Nazis for seizing
the demographic problem directly.[31] While Osborn’s neutral description of World
War Two might be just that, within the larger shape of his thought, it might
also conceal the by-then-unspeakable thought that the losing side had, at
least, understood part of the problem, while the victors remained caught in
humanitarian optimism. This rather
pessimistic interpretation would fit with Osborn’s striking remark, in the
course of arguing further that ecological pressures drive war, that “it is
difficult to adjust one’s mind to the possibility that … the problem of the
pressure of increasing population – perhaps the greatest problem facing
humanity today – cannot be solved in a way that is consistent with the
principles of humanity.”[32] What other principles might be more
compatible with “the enduring processes of nature,” Osborn did not say.
This is not a brief against
Fairfield Osborn, or against twentieth-century environmentalism. It is not an argument that he, or it, is best
understood as the bearer of some crypto-racist doctrine driven underground
after World War Two. All of that would
fall much too close to conspiracy theory.
In any case, the biographies of ideas are not their essences, and
neither Osborn nor Madison Grant carried some ideological bacillus that could
have contaminated the environmentalists of 1968 and afterward. Moreover, Osborn disowned some of the uglier
things his father had celebrated, writing, “The antipathies of nations and
races, the cults of ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ races, cannot be founded on
biology.”[33] Although the discussion that leads up to this
ringing conclusion is choppy and opaque and gratuitously concedes that
different human populations may have evolved in parallel rather than from a
common ancestor, Osborn plainly meant to rest no part of his argument on the
torrid racial fantasies that had united his father, Madison Grant, and, at
least sometimes, the first President Roosevelt.
What does emerge here is that a
deep pessimism about humanity, inherited in part from earlier theories of
racial decline, was present at the start of modern environmentalism. It was a misanthropic sentiment, not just in
its deep skepticism toward humanitarianism, but also in a certain grim
eagerness to condemn human optimism in the name of the natural limits humanity
had supposedly violated. Reflecting on
Fairfield Osborn may remind any former student of philosophy of a passage in
the Genealogy of Morals where
Friedrich Nietzsche purports to find hatred at the root of Christianity’s
doctrine of love – suppressed and redirected, but hatred nonetheless. Why, he asks, does St. Paul write with such
care, attention, and energy of the punishments of Hell, if he is not secretly
rapturous at seeing the proud, lustful, and wholly alive pagans wrung on the rack of his God? Is a similar spirit lurking in Osborn’s
oblique, portentous passages about how nature answers those who disregard
her? Is it present in his willingness to
set aside “the principles of humanity” as sentimental error?
Maybe so. In any event, it is clear that the older,
eugenicist strain of disgust at disorderly, overbreeding humanity did not
disappear after World War Two. Fairfield
Osborn’s uncle, Frederick H. Osborn, remarked tellingly in his nephew’s 1962
edited collection on the global population crisis, that the “geneticist, if he
is wise, will not introduce the genetic argument” because people “don’t like to
admit” the importance of genetic differences.[34] Instead, he should hope that “population
pressures may bring about genetic reform by intensifying the problems of
civilization and forcing us to seek new solutions.”[35] Here, with self-contradicting explicitness,
is the old eugenics, gone underground in the movement to control population
growth.
Ecology and Anti-Humanism
The point
of this story is to put forward the least pleasant facts in the American rise
of environmental ideas, and to show the nastiest company that those ideas have
kept. This is to lay the ground to
consider the charges that, at the beginning of this chapter, I collected
together as the misanthropic worry. To do that as fully as possible, consider the
strongest version of this principled case against environmentalism, which the
French critic Luc Ferry expressed in a polemic titled The New Ecological Order.
Ferry, not one to neglect an exposed jugular, reminded readers that the
Nazis passed what he claims was the first comprehensive
environmental-protection legislation in the mid-1930s, along with laws
promoting animal welfare and regulating hunting. These laws had the attention of Hitler and
his top ministers.[36] This precedent, unsurprisingly, seldom plays
much part in the standard histories of environmental lawmaking. Yet, Ferry claims, we should give ut close
attention. It shows environmentalism’s
moral problems, which go beyond the obvious point that loving nature does not
prevent one from despising some or all
of humanity. (As Ferry grants, the
history of the Nazi regime also demonstrates that building freeways is
compatible with genocide, which tells us very little about the moral status of
highway construction.) According to
Ferry, the Nazi environmental legislation expresses a deeper philosophical
logic.
That logic
has several parts. One is the nostalgic
identification of “nature” with the mythic origins of a people, here the
Germans. Nazi theorists, Ferry points
out, reworked natura in German to urlandschaft, both “earth” and “original
land.”[37] Valuing “original land” meant prizing the
natural, or primitive, condition of the world, idealizing undisturbed
nature. This is already something of a
nostalgic fantasy, since human habitation has thoroughly reworked the
world. Much more troublingly, “original
earth” was aligned with the people who had their origins there: in Nazi racial
ideology, the Germans. The value of
people was thus connected with their rootedness, their nearness to these
origins. Nature had erected a
hierarchical divide between those who belonged to the place where they dwelled
and those did not – the uprooted, who, for the Nazis, were always and
especially the Jews. Enlightenment
thought at its best had insisted that rationality and freedom were universal
qualities, giving people everywhere more in common than separated them. That is to say, it defined humanity by its
distinctness from nature and origins, and valued it for that separation. The Nazi idea that an intact urlandschaft sustained the German people
spiritually as well as materially denied this Enlightenment conception of
humanity – and, not coincidentally Ferry argued, denied the freedom, equality,
and universal human dignity that had flowed from it.
Closely
related was the Nazis’ vitalism, their celebration of health and life – in the
body, the race, and the land of national origin. Ferry argued that Hitler’s minions shared
this ideal with the “deep ecologists” who came later in the century, and even
with their American contemporaries, such as Aldo Leopold, who would have
expanded the scope of ethics to “the land community.” What these positions share, according to the
criticism, is that they find the basis of value in the life that humans share
with the rest of nature. Although
superficially attractive, this approach to value has several problems. It abandons the Enlightenment project of
thinking critically about value as a special problem for free and rational
creatures, and treats it instead as if it were natural fact. This is an abdication of the burden of
freedom and rationality: to think through the questions of what to value and
how to live, not act as if they were presented to us as nakedly as the
weather. This approach also invites
sorting people into “healthy” and “degenerate” groupings, as the Nazis did,
turning the universal standard of human dignity into a relative one that many
people, even peoples, might be thought to fail.
It also invites subordinating human interests and those of non-human
nature: if a people has exhausted its cropland, maybe it should be allowed to
starve, rather than receive succor to help it burden the planet another
day. Finally, vitalism gives us no
reason to second-guess our “instinct,” however tribal, selfish, or
bloody-minded it turns out to be; what are those sentiments, after all, but
expressions of life and health?
Should we
be concerned, then, when we remember that Thoreau urged, “all good things are
wild and free” and “the most alive is the wildest,” and praised “this vast,
savage, howling Mother of ours, Nature lying all around”?[38] That he praised “tawny grammar,” words rooted
in experience of the natural world, over coldly rational denotation?[39] That he described the westward movement of
the American “star of empire” as the national ingestion and absorption of the
ancient, raw vitality of the American landscape, harbored in its forests and
swamps, which would sustain Americans and fuel their creation of a new body of
myth, as great as what had sprung from the Nile, the Ganges, and the Rhine
before those once-wild places were exhausted?[40] It is not only in racist outliers such as
Madison Grant that American environmentalism is tied to a vitalist nationalism
that celebrates instinct over cold reason and fantasizes about a people’s
identity becoming inseparable from the fertile and dark depths of its
land. Where does the misanthropic worry
stand, with its charges of racism, nostalgia, misanthropic pessimism, and
obtuse privilege?
Let us
begin with racism. First, an
observation: Madison Grant’s toxic, pseudo-scientific fixation on racial purity
made him an outlier in the conservation movement of his time, while Teddy
Roosevelt’s sympathy for Grant and embrace of jingo imperialism were rather
more standard, especially in Boone and Crockett circles. That is to say, as far as conservation was a
quintessential Progressive program, it grew connected with the racial attitudes
of Progressives across their full spectrum.
It is much harder, though, to argue that a deep logic connected
conservation and racism. The managerial
strain of conservation bound up scientific resource use with utilitarian
nationalism, and its distasteful attitudes were of a piece with its nationalist
affinities, notably the imperialism of Roosevelt and allies like Albert
Beveridge. Conservation was woven into
this idea, most dramatically in Beveridge’s global manifest destiny. The heart of the connection was the
conviction that there was only one right way for a people’s history to unfold,
toward American-style prosperity and institutions, and that rational mastery
over nature was both necessary for this path (because it produced wealth and
power) and one of its fruits (because successful institutions would perforce
manage nature rationally). The
conservationists’ view of nature and the utilitarian nationalists’ view of
human destiny converged on a single shape for history (not surprisingly, as
they were often the same people) and lent support to policies that were
advertised as bending history that way.
All of this confirms how thoroughly ideas of nature were drawn into the
programs of the time, but these connections leave conservation in the same
place as the rest of the Progressive agenda.
That agenda was, in sum, an excessively self-confident movement toward
social rationality in a time marked by acute racial anxiety and widespread
bigotry. Conservation bore these marks,
but its really defining quality was supreme confidence that nature could be
rationally managed for social advantage, its sense that the world’s complexity
was just great enough to respond to expert administration, and not, as
ecologically minded environmentalists later insisted, to confound it. The conservationist view of nature made it
easier to be some kind of universalist, even one who believed, like Beveridge,
in bringing other peoples into universal destiny by force, and these attitudes
are rife with dark sides. A
conservationist view, though, was not in itself a friend to racism.
The white supremacism and racist
theories-of-everything that Madison Grant embraced had, for him as for the
Nazis who admired him, less affinity with conservation than with the Romantic
way of celebrating nature – the vitalism, the myth of deep origins in sacred
land, the near-totemic adulation of charismatic peaks, forests, and
species. It was never really plausible,
though, to connect this Romantic totemism with the genesis of North America’s
northern Europeans, as the Nazis did Germans and their landscape. The continent was plainly not the origin of
the people whose descendants dominated it by the end of the nineteenth century:
to claim it imaginatively, a people could be inspired by it or try to live up
to it, but white Americans could not claim to come from it – nor, for the same
reason, claim that preserving it meant preserving their “racial” heritage.
Much of American environmental imagination took shape from the effort to
work the continent into the idea of a new nation, but that was a different,
even opposite, thing from claiming origins there.
European bids to claim the
continent imaginatively tended to erase or simplify the Native American
presence here: think of Thoreau’s “wild,” his image, in “Walking,” of a
continent full of untapped vitality. All
of the past before New England is, at best, pre-history in this picture,
preparatory to the self-realization of the American nation. John Muir erased Native American history in a
more pedestrian way when he assured his readers that Indians had been broken to
docility on US public lands, so Romantic tourists could wander there without
danger. In this, though, Romantic
conservation scarcely did more harm than any other nineteenth-century take on
the national project, a theme that almost always began by ignoring, maligning,
or distorting the aboriginal presence.
[Interesting nonetheless that they didn’t overcome this, as Thoreau and
Emerson overcame certain warlike and racist attitudes of the time.]
What is
remarkable about the Romantic strain of environmental imagination is how
consistently its claims were universal – quite opposite in spirit to Grant’s
racism, which relentlessly drove distinctions among peoples. For John Muir and his Transcendentalist
predecessors, the human qualities that wild nature vivified were higher
potentials that everyone shared. The
meaning of the American landscape lay in universal human and natural forces
that Americans could hope to absorb and live by, not in qualities it had
specially imparted to anyone’s ancestors.
In this respect, Romantic conservation had something in common with the
idealistic, natural-law strain of American constitutionalism. The thought that united them was that certain
principles should be American because they were true, not that they took their
force from being American. This idea
fits a nation of conquerors and immigrants: the important thing was that the
indwelling potential of the American land should be open to those who could
claim it.
Nonetheless,
those who stepped forward to claim it were a quite particular patch of the
American people. Interpreting American
nature, especially in a Romantic register, was the special preoccupation of
educated white Protestants, especially traditional elites with roots in New
England and the Upper Midwest. The early
Sierra Club was a collection of academics, artists, scientists, and seekers
after outdoor adventure and aesthetic delight.
They saw appreciation of nature as a mark of refined sensibility that
set them apart from the hurly-burly of money-seeking and utilitarian ideas of
what gave life value. They constantly
assured one another that their time in the high country confirmed them in these
values. The view of nature that they
helped to make popular supported the special status of a traditional elite that
had lost its grip on the country’s economy and political institutions and felt
the need for other bases of distinction and deference. Historian Richard Hofstadter emphasized
decades ago that the entire Progressive era was shaped by the status struggles
of declining American elites; this was acutely true of the Romantic view of
nature. Thoreau was a cultural dissenter
within New England when he enlisted nature in support of aesthetic values over
his neighbors’ conformity and search after wealth. Six-odd decades later, the themes he set out
helped those New Englanders’ descendants, both familial and cultural, to assert
their specialness against new tides of economic strivers.
This
history speaks to two parts of the misanthropic worry: privilege and
nostalgia. Much of the continent was
interpreted, and then shaped and managed, as an austere but spectacular
pleasuring-ground that marked the refinement of those who could enjoy it. It was a public-lands equivalent of the
aristocratic English gardens of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which
deliberately shaped parts of the landscape to show off the educated eye of
their owners. We may call it privileged
because what it holds up as the universal spirit of nature is really the
favored bauble of a declining elite, nostalgic because it looks to nature for
unearned reassurance that this elite’s attitudes are especially valuable and at
home in the world. These observations form
the starting point for a body of criticisms of environmental politics. These range from the demographic fact of
environmentalism’s predominantly white and prosperous constituency to the claim
that much of environmental sentiment is just the search for an enchanted home,
a fairy-tale castle in the woods, of white men and women dissatisfied with what
the workaday world has provided them.[41]
There is an
important fallacy in these criticisms.
The fact that an idea arose in a certain group, even to assert that
group’s privilege, does not limit its potential validity for others. If we were inclined to disqualify ideas that
began in this way, we would have to start with ideas like democracy and
citizenship, which began as the special powers and rights of an overclass in
the slave societies of the ancient Mediterranean and came into their modern
forms through the gradual extension of white, male landowners’ privileges to
every member of the political community.
The test of the Romantic idea of nature is not its origins but its uses.
The
criticism, however, can be recast as one about the use of the idea, and here it
comes to its nub: misanthropy. The
environmental imagination is deeply involved in a set of reactions against
strands of the modern world: from Thoreau’s shopkeepers to Muir’s lowlands,
Roosevelt’s unhealthful cities to the tourists the Wilderness Society struggled
to keep out of its shrines, the involvement with nature has been a way to stand
apart from the ordinary human situation, with all its compromises, indignities,
and petty satisfactions. By aligning
one’s self with nature, one can disown ordinary humanity, or at least put
oneself outside some of its limitations.
There is, then, a disgust at humanity that runs through environmental
imagination.
There is also pessimism about human
powers. In the twentieth century, Rachel
Carson’s Silent Spring was only the
most visible of the many strands that connected environmental sentiment with
mistrust of technological mastery, what Aldo Leopold rejected as “biotic
arrogance.” Consider by contrast John
Stuart Mill’s argument, that our duty toward nature is to make it fit human
security and freedom as far as possible – that is, to transform it in line with
a better human future. This exhortation
distills centuries of humanitarian hopes.
The stronger the pessimism about technology, the more an
environmentalist writes off this hope as a mistake.
This pessimism easily becomes a
moral complaint that humanity is disrupting the natural order, presumptuously putting
its own needs ahead of the rest of the living world. Then the complaint is not just that we are
unlikely to succeed in controlling nature – the basic pessimistic claim – but
that success would itself be a kind of moral failure. As we saw earlier in this chapter, disgust
with humanity and pessimism about its prospects ran together in the strand of
early environmentalism that fixated on population growth after World War Two.
Environmental historian William
Cronon has gathered these criticisms, especially disgust at humanity, into a
charge that environmentalism as a whole suffers from “the trouble with
wilderness.” The trouble is that that
American environmentalists imagine nature as standing in contrast with the
lowlands of society, technology, and politics, in a way that enables its
devotees to divide their loyalties. When
in the lowlands of everyday life, they are not entirely of it, because they
hold apart the most essential portion of themselves. In wild nature, they cultivate a (supposedly)
higher part of the self, and they assume that this, the best in us, cannot
thrive where we spend most of our time and energy. The best and highest, what we live for, is
elsewhere for most of our lives. In this
divided attitude, we find excuses to neglect and disrespect the places where we
actually live and the people we live among.
At the same time, we fail to take the “higher” values of nature as
seriously as we might when we reserve it for rare occasions and faraway places,
rather than work to bring it into everyday life.
To assess this, it helps to step
outside the assumption that misanthropy and pessimism are simply bad, and ask
whether, in some version, they can also be helpful. The objection to these attitudes is tied up
with the democratic premises of our time.
Our public ideas encourage accepting – at least nominally – the equal
value of everyone’s perspective and denying that anyone should have any
business telling others how to live.
Although we may not do very well at actually showing respect to each
individual, we happily knock others off their high horses. In the United States, we accept enormous
economic inequality, but only if it comes with cultural equality. This country will happily elect a billionaire
mayor but revolt if he presumes to stop residents of his city from drinking
giant sodas. Our tax rebellions are more
likely to aim at public institutions that can be colored as elitist, such as
public broadcasting or state universities, than at low tax rates for the
wealthy. Elitism and misanthropy run
smack against these democratic premises: what makes backcountry skis better
than a snowmobile, a wilderness better than a scenic highway, solitude better
than a mall or nightclub? And who has
any business saying so? Nothing and nobody are today’s democratic answers.
Our time is also committed to
boundless economic growth. The survival
of any Western government, and probably the very legitimacy of states such as
China, depend on it. In our politics, it
is effectively impossible to ask whether our economic optimism is misplaced,
not a real, long-term estimate of our prospects, but only be a convenient
medium-term illusion.
Environmental ideas sometimes break
us out of these simplifying premises.
Take the anti-judgmental premise of equality. Because environmental lawmaking directs
acreage and resources to serve specific visions of nature’s value and our place
in it, it unavoidably engages questions about what is valuable, and about how
to live. Being committed to one version
of nature’s value and willing to argue and fight for it can seem elitist. The unavoidable contrast between many
environmental ideas and our highways and strip-malls can seem
misanthropic. But that is what it means
to argue for a view of nature’s value that lacks the support of a present
majority or an economic cost-benefit report.
This kind of argument might be good
for democracy, because our anti-judgmental, live-and-let-live attitude is
superficial for environmental problems.
Our neutrality can only be spurious: economic analysis works only
because someone selects the values that provide its prices, and those values
are exactly what the argument is over.
Any environmental regime – like any economic order, like any legal order
at all – tilts power, resources, and everyday experience toward one version of
how to live together, and those who see things differently have no choice but
to argue democratically over those commitments.
In this way, arguments about nature’s value ask a democratic people to
grow up into its own responsibilities.
In a mature democracy it must be
possible to address a majority by criticizing, even denouncing it. Citizens must understand that they are
choosing among values, in the face of disagreement, and that they have no choice
but to do this, if they are to choose at all.
A democratic people should be able to believe that over time it is
improving, not just getting richer, but understanding more of how it means to
live and coming close to that ideal. For
this to make sense, its members must be able to step outside the familiar
present and call on a better version of the country. They will call on familiar strands of
dissent, of course – religious prophecy, constitutional ideals, practices of
civil disobedience – to make it clear that they are addressing the present from
a possible, imagined future. A rich
democratic culture gives its members the means to speak to one another in this
way. Calling on nature is one of the
ways we do this in our American politics.
It discomforts our simpler democratic premises – neutrality and
non-judgment – to strengthen more complex and essential democratic powers: to
criticize, exhort, and change ourselves.
That is high-minded; but that is also precisely the point.
This is where taking responsibility
for nature and taking responsibility for democracy come together, and why this
book begins with Thomas Hobbes, who believed we could find no divine
reassurance to underwrite either our politics or our relation to the natural
world. The lesson I took from Hobbes was
that we must accept that we make our own political order – and, in our
technological age even more than his, our own nature. The lesson I took from Montaigne, which
Americans such as Emerson, Thoreau, and Muir have developed, is that making
nature does not mean treating it as just an enemy or a resource mine. We can, and do, develop relations with
nature, draw meaning from it, as we do with one another – though with even more
bafflement, and perhaps just as much mystery and wonder, as with other people. In a phrase, the democratic responsibility is
what Hobbes defined it as being: to take on ourselves the responsibility of
making a world, a responsibility that, for much of human experience, has fallen
instead on the imagined legislation of gods.
This is true for both the political and the natural world. Always bound together in imagination, these
two are today ever more inseparable in fact.
Pessimism, criticism, the social
wariness that misanthropy cultivates, all draw attention to the basic questions:
What are we doing? What shall we do
next? They remind us that no providence is overseeing our burning through the
planet’s storehouses of energy and fertility – for they were not created as
storehouses at all. They remind us that
our cultural and political drift is not all we can, or might wish, to be, even
when a majority of us rests there for the moment, whether comfortably or
anxiously. They call us back to
questions we cannot help answering, if only implicitly or passively, and which
we would therefore do well not to avoid asking, even if the questions are
discomfiting and confusing. Again,
calling on nature is one of the ways we do this, and have all along.
For these reasons, it is
superficial to say that appeals to nature are irrational and half-superstitious,
as John Stuart Mill insisted. They are,
instead, part of our repertoire for asking uncomfortable and necessary
questions of one another. Calling on
nature serves the most rational human power, criticism in service of clear
choice, and it uses the tools and spurs of misanthropy and pessimism to do
so. It does not, however, step out of
the democratic project. Better
understood, it presses deeper into that project, where nature also needs to
become part of the democratic question.
The ways that Americans argue about nature are not a betrayal of
Enlightenment; they are expressions of Enlightenment problems and projects, as
they have developed in our democratic culture.
Our investments in nature are no more fictional or made-up than our investments
in liberty, equality, or authenticity.
No one has seen or touched those principles, any more than any
laboratory instrument or computer model could ever confirm or falsify the
meaning of nature; but in all these cases, we are talking about something real,
a part of our shared lives, which we can argue over, learn from, and honor,
even though it is also something we have created. We have created it by talking about, living
by it, and becoming the kinds of people who do such things, which is how
language, reason, and imagination contribute to making a world.
This returns us to Thoreau’s “in
wildness of is the preservation of the world,” and what he might have meant by
it. I raise this not because we must
respect what Thoreau believed – of course that is up to us – nor even because,
150 years later, it is possible to be sure what he meant – as if most of us
were sure of what we ourselves meant yesterday!
I raise it because the thing about wildness is very different from the
trouble with wilderness, and it is much more helpful in sorting out the
problems I am discussing here.
It helps to consider that Thoreau
was using world here in the same way
as in his call to reform “the world” before reforming “the globe,” which we
examined in Chapter [ ]. By world, he meant, not the physical
planet, the “natural world,” but rather the joint product of the planet and the
minds that met it from moment to moment. The world was a matter of experience.
The foremost human contribution to the world, meant in this sense, was to
cultivate the qualities of mind that helped one to meet it openly and
generously. The ideal was to move
fluidly through the present moment, on the perpetual threshold between past and
future. It was to gather into one’s
attention those things one found in the moment, so that thought and plants,
sensations and qualities of light, rose from within and outside to meet one
another. Mind and things, inside and
out, met to form the moment as past joined future. We are never anywhere else, Thoreau insisted,
but we too easily forget altogether where we are.
Wildness is not a quality of the
globe, not a matter of the density of forest or species: it is a quality of the
world, the moment where we always are.
It is, in fact, the quality of
the world, the essential preserver. It
is the condition in which we are open to surprise, insight, sudden elevation or
humility, a sense of wholeness or diffusion – in which we remain in motion
through a living and mobile world, sauntering, as Thoreau put it, toward an
ever-receding Holy Land that cannot be more than another instance of the
present moment.
Where do the basic questions of
this chapter stand? The misanthropic
worry is sometimes well-founded.
Environmental ideas can be, and frequently have been, braided together
with bigotry, narrowness, obtuse privilege and nostalgia, and indifference to
careful argument. Both history and
reflection suggest that environmental ideas even have some affinity with these
attitudes. Environmental thought bears
the marks of the Romantic revolt against narrow forms of reason, and shares its
tendency to celebrate irrationality as insight and freedom. Nature, unspeaking and sometimes beautiful,
invites the narcissistic projections of nostalgia. Environmentalism often begins in response to
harm that humans have done, and in “taking nature’s side” it can slide into
dislike of humanity, and for this reason it attracts and amplifies misanthropy.
When environmental thought has not
been parochial or immature, however, its relation to these issues has been
constructive. It has pressed at the
seams of the same modern commitments it has been accused of betraying –
democracy, humanitarianism, technological mastery, reason – in ways that may yet
prove essential. The problems it poses
are reminders that democracy is not just the stripping away of old hierarchies;
it means making the world together, collectively and politically, including
taking responsibility for our mutually shaping interaction with nature. The environmentalist ambition to align
oneself with nature is a reminder that reason, public debate and private
deliberation, mean more than clearing away the moss and ivy of superstition to
let in the light, more than the technological control of nature. Reasoning about how to live benefits from the
power to draw ourselves away from the present to imagine the future, to escape
– temporarily – from familiar human entanglements into a sense of our place in
the larger living world. Trying to build
a peaceful and humane world means finding a way to live peaceably with nature,
and not just mining it for our convenience.
This is true both because harmony with our setting is a cultural
achievement for a good life and, more materially, because disrupting natural
cycles ensures that our lives will be disrupted in return. Environmentalism, taken in its best light, is
a reminder that our dominant versions of democracy, reason, and progress are
still superficial, especially because they rely on ignoring or recklessly
exploiting nature, and that, for these values to be sustainable, we must give
them a sustainable relation to the larger living world.
[1] 2d
ed, 1918, 91
[2]
[Spiro sources]
[3]
MG, Passing 227
[4]
Id. at 209.
[5]
Conquest of a Continent, 285 (1933).
[6]
Id. at 91.
[7]
Conquest at 224; on dynamics of population, Passing at 48-50.
[8]
Passing at 48-54.
[9]
443 of McKibben reader
[10]
NYT, June 2, 1937.
[11]
Spiro, 272.
[12]
Century, Jan. 1894 (345, 345).
[13]
Letter to Secretary of the Interior [ ]
West, Jan. 16, 1929 (quoted in Spiro, 71).
[14]
Quoted at Spiro, 158.
[15]
See Garland E. Allen, “’Culling the Herd’: Eugenics and the Conservation
Movement in the United States, 1900-1940, n. 2.
Published online in connection with the Journal of the History of
Biology, DOI 10.1007/s10739-011-9317-1 (March 13, 2012).
[16] See Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human
Rights in History.
[17]
Spiro at 357.
[18]
Spiro at 371.
[19]
Fairfield Osborn, Our Plundered Planet vi (1948).
[20]
Id. at ix.
[21]
Id. at 4-5.
[22]
Id. at 10 (the general argument appears at 5-10).
[23]
Id. at 67-86.
[24]
Id. at 61.
[25]
Id. at 60.
[26]
Id. at iv.
[27]
Id. at 3.
[28]
Id. at 201.
[29]
Id.
[30]
Id. at ix.
[31]
[Material from Spiro.]
[32]
Id. at 40-41.
[33]
Id. at 26.
[34]
Frederick H. Osborn, “Overpopulation and Genetic Selection,” 51, 60 in Our Crowded Planet.
[35]
Id. at 67.
[36]
Luc Ferry, The New Ecological Order 91-107 (trans. Carol Volk,1995) (1992).
[37]
Id. at 98.
[38]
Id.
[39]
Id.
[40]
Id.
[41]
Timothy Morton’s very unfriendly characterization.
