THINKING ABOUT THE ENVIRONMENT:  READINGS ON POLITICS, PROPERTY, AND THE PHYSICAL WORLD

Chapter 16:  The Green Critique

 

Matthew Cahn

 

The emergence of Green criticism does not begin with the environmental writers.  Rather, as the earlier chapters illustrate, there is a slow evolution of thought on nature and the physical world.  Yet, there is a turning point in the mid-19th century when a uniquely naturalist critique of the relationship between human civilization and the physical world emerged.  The green critique reflects a nostalgia for a time that may never have existed, but like Locke's state of nature, provides a conceptual tool for assessing our current position.  If early writers pondered uninhibitedly the human role in the physical world, it was a result of the unbridled optimism of an, as yet, undiscovered universe.  As nature was subdued for human consumption the issues of property and ownership became natural dilemmas.  And, as industrial development unfolded, the contemporary environmental problematic emerged: identifying the ideal equilibrium between controlling nature and preserving nature.  The environmental problematic only becomes more complex as knowledge of our physical world increases.

 

The Evolution of the Environmental Ethic

As early as 1851 Thoreau called for a reinterpretation of the significance of nature.  As a transcendentalist, Thoreau saw the physical world -- nature -- as a reflection of spiritual truth and moral law (Nash 1990).  In this sense nature, specifically wilderness, provides an antidote to the sterility, conformity, and predictability of "civilized" life:  "... I derive more of my subsistence from the swamps which surround my native town than from the cultivated gardens in the village..." (Thoreau 1851).  Thoreau's writings express the shortsightedness and ultimate vacuity of  treasuring only the material potential of the natural environment.  In this way Thoreau provides the intellectual foundation for the emerging preservationist movement.  Emerson similarly saw the rejuvenating value of nature: "At the gates of the forest, the surprised man of the world is forced to leave his city estimates of great and small, wise an foolish... Here is sanctity which shames our religions, and reality which discredits our heros" (Emerson 1985).

The systematic concern for environmental protection has evolved through the efforts of an intellectual tradition which traces its roots back a century and a half.  As early as the 1860s, the need for sustaining forest resources was broadly discussed.  Basic forest preservation was introduced through limited forest reserves in 1891, and selective cutting programs in 1897 (Caulfield  1989).  The appearance of preservationism as distinct from traditional conservationism emerged during the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt.  Conservationists have traditionally sought the development and regulation of natural resources, to ensure long-term resource extraction.   On the other hand, the emerging preservationist movement sought to protect specific resources by banning development and resource extraction altogether.  It was the preservationist movement that succeeded in setting aside Yosemite Valley as a State Park in 1860 (designated as a national park in 1890), as well as the creation of Yellowstone National Park in 1872. (Cahn 1995)

The preservationist movement began in the west.  Led by the San Francisco based Sierra Club (established in 1892 by John Muir), preservationists met stiff resistance from ranching and mining interests who favored conservationists, but managed to win the creation of the National Park Service in 1916.  This was significant because it allowed for the transfer of public land from the Forest Service, a strictly conservationist agency, to the Park Service, an agency whose mandate was to preserve public lands.  By the 1940s and 1950s public sentiment was strong enough to allow Congress to pass the federal water protection acts over the vetoes of presidents Truman and Eisenhower.  And, by 1961, the Senate Select Committee on National Water Resources sought federal plain regulation as an alternative to flood control dams (Caulfield  1989). 

The contemporary environmental movement coincided with the "new politics" of the Kennedy administration, bringing together preservationists and those concerned with the degrading urban environment.  In his "Special Message to the Congress on Natural Resources," Kennedy articulated a concern with depleting resources.  The "Message" outlined the need for federal legislation protecting  air, water, forests, topsoil, wildlife, seashores, and public lands for recreational use.  Kennedy's Secretary of the Interior, Stewart Udall, became the administration's environmental torchbearer.  He sought an increase in federal parklands, ordered the Fish and Wildlife Service to draft an endangered species act, and by 1964 turned the dull annual reports of the Interior Department into unusually colorful publications with a wide readership.  Udall himself traveled the country giving speeches on behalf of his preservationist policies.

President remained sensitive to the growing environmental constituency.  In September 1964 the Land and Water Conservation Fund Act and the Wilderness Act were signed into law.  The Water Quality Act establishing the Federal Water Pollution Control Administration was signed in 1965.  The first Clean Air Act was adopted in 1965, and the Air Quality Act in 1967.  The Endangered Species Act was signed in 1966 (and a revised Act in 1969).  And, finally, in October 1968, Johnson signed the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act and the National Trails System Act, and establishment the North Cascades National Park and Redwood National Park  (Caulfield  1989).

Nixon's election to office slowed the early environmental momentum.  His appointment to Secretary of Interior was Walter Hickel, a former governor of Alaska who was more concerned with development than with environmental protection.  In order to satisfy the Senate Interior Committee, Nixon ultimately appointed Russell Train, president of the Conservation Foundation, as under-secretary of the interior.  Though Nixon was by no means an environmentalist, he was not prepared to fight a Congress aware of the growing environmental concern among the public.  Hesitantly, the Nixon administration carried on the policies of his predecessors.  (Cahn 1995)

The growing strength of the grassroots environmental movement in the late 1960s came as a  result of increasing urban pollution and numerous environmental mishaps, including the massive Santa Barbara Oil spill in 1969.  With the waning urgency of the anti-Vietnam War movement, much of the energy of the counter-culture was retained by the growing environmental movement.  Popular concern culminated on Earth Day (1970), observed on university campuses throughout the country.  Earth Day was a celebration of the nurturance and beauty of the natural environment, and a day of education focusing on the difficult issues of environmental degradation.  This growing salience was illustrated in the popularity of a number of books that held broad appeal, including Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962), Paul Erlich's The Population Bomb (1968), Charles Reich's The Greening of America (1970), and Barry Commoner's The Closing Circle -- Man, Nature, and Technology (1971).  Clearly, the environmental issue had become a permanent feature on the national agenda.

 The Modern Environmental Critique

Silent Spring (1962)  launched the contemporary environmental siren.  Rachel Carson, a noted naturalist writer, published several articles on the dangers of widespread insecticide use in the New Yorker.  Following publication of Silent Spring, a palpable public concern emerged: "The most alarming of man's assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials... chemicals are the sinister and little-recognized partners of radiation in changing the very nature of the world -- the very nature of its life."  Carson exposed the dangers of DDT, Strontium 90, and a host of commonly used chemical pesticides and fertilizers.  Her warnings had particular salience as urban air pollution reached unprecedented levels and the nation's most polluted waterways seemed to actually catch fire with increasing frequency.  The public had a vague anxiety about environmental degradation that Carson gave language to.  Pollution, ecology, and environmentalism merged into the 1960s vernacular, and concern for environmental degradation merged into our political culture.

As environmentalism became increasingly salient, writers and scholars searched for causes and solutions.   In The Population Bomb (1968) Ehrlich resurrects the Malthusian analysis that over population leads to disaster.  Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) wrote that population would inevitably increase faster than the food supply leading to certain starvation unless birth control was widely used.  Erhlich extends the Malthusian dilemma beyond mere famine to the environment generally:  "In the United States... we hear constantly of the headaches caused by overpopulation: not just garbage in our environment, but overcrowded highways, burgeoning slums, deteriorating school systems, rising crime rates, riots...."  And, like many population theorists, Ehrlich extends greater responsibility for the problem to countries with high population rates. 

Barry Commoner put the environmental message into a broader context, connecting environmental degradation and technology:

We have long known that ours is a technological society, a society in which the        

knowledge generated by science is a chief source of wealth and power.  But what
            the environmental crisis tells us is that the future of our society now depends on
            new, profoundly fundamental judgements of how this knowledge, and the power
            that it endows, is to be used.  (Commoner 1970)

But, it was The Closing Circle (1971) that brought greater public attention.  Mystified by the sudden rediscovery of environmental degradation, Commoner reminds the public that, in fact, we are all responsible.  Quoting Pogo, Commoner puts it squarely: "We have met the enemy and he is us."

As with all movements, the emerging environmental movement did not speak with one voice.  The deepest rift was seen between liberal environmentalists and their radical counterparts.¹   Arne Naess distinguished between these elements as shallow ecology and deep ecology.  Shallow ecology fights against pollution but maintains a central focus on maintaining the health and affluence of those in developed nations.  Deep ecology is an organic philosophy based on changing the entire relationship between human civilization and the natural world.  Thus, in addition to fighting pollution and resource depletion, deep ecology asserts a "biospherical egalitarianism," based on the mutual respect of all species of plants and animals -- the principle of ecological diversity.   Further, deep ecology takes an anti-class posture, favoring instead economies that are small, local, and autonomous.  Thus, while shallow ecology strives to improve our current lifestyle, deep ecology strives to change social interaction at its roots.  In short, where shallow ecology remains anthropocentric, deep ecology is ecocentric.

Garrett Hardin sees causality in rational self-interest.  Since each person is self-interested, he or she will act in a manner that maximizes self-benefit.  This, more often than not, Hardin argues, is at the expense of the common good.  Using the classic discourse on the commons, Hardin illustrates the inevitability of ecological destruction in an unregulated environment.  The commons are those resources which all members of a society hold in common. Hardin supposes a large grassland commons, in which many people graze sheep.  Self-interested shepherds recognize that they will enjoy individual benefits (more sheep to sell) by grazing greater numbers of sheep while the costs of grazing additional sheep (e.g., overgrazing)  will be shared among all users of the commons.  Eventually, of course, the commons will be destroyed through overgrazing.  But, this long range consequence is inadequate to deny the short term gains: "Ruin is the destination to which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons.  Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all" (Hardin 1977).  The tragedy of the commons extends in the contemporary discourse to air, water, national forests, and all public lands.  Lacking external controls, rational, self-interested users will deplete such resources in a quest for personal gain.

Ynestsra King offers a more complex analysis, arguing that ecology is a feminist issue.  Feminism, at its core, negates patriarchal domination of society and of nature: "Either we take the anthropocentric position that nature exists solely to serve the needs of the male bourgeois who has crawled out of the slime to be lord and master of everything, or we take the naturalist position that nature has a purpose of its own apart from serving 'man' " (King 1981).  This is not to say that "men" are responsible for all environmental destruction, but that patriarchy -- the systematic domination of society by a hierarchically structured network of men -- is incompatible with environmental sustenance.

In The Concept of Social Ecology (1982) Murray Bookchin identifies a holistic ecology.  Environmental degradation is a result, Bookchin reminds us, not only of misused technology, but of social dysfunction as well:

... social ecology provides more than a critique of the split between humanity and

nature; it also poses the need to heal them.  Indeed, it poses the need to radically

transform them...  In conceiving them holistically, that is to say, in terms of their mutual

interdependence, social ecology seeks to unravel the forms and patterns of

interrelationships that give intelligibility to a community, be it natural or social.

In this sense, social ecology seeks to heal the alienation within society, so as to make a more ecosensitive civilization possible.

Ultimately, however, the critical question remains: Why should we care about environmental degradation and biodiversity?  Biologist E.O. Wilson comes right to the point:

What difference does it make if some species are extinguished, if even half of all the

species on earth disappear?  Let me count the ways.  New sources of information will be

lost.  Vast potential biological wealth will be destroyed.  Still undeveloped medicines,

crops, pharmaceuticals, timber, fibers, pulp, soil-restoring vegetation, petroleum substitutes,

and other products and amenities will never come to light (Wilson 1993:347).

Life in this physical world is interdependent on all other species.  Environmental quality and biodiversity, therefore, is not just a moral question or ethical dilemma but a requisite for sustaining life.  

The cost of environmental degradation is heavy.  And, as Robert Bullard points out in Confronting Environmental Racism (1993), it is not shared equally.  Technology and modern industrial processes create goods and services, as well as toxins and degradation.  The traditional environmental debate focuses on finding a balance between the costs and the benefits.  But, what if the costs and the benefits are not shared equitably?  Does this shift the context of the environmental discourse?  Bullard argues that it does: "Whether by conscious design or institutional neglect, communities of color in urban ghettos, in rural 'poverty pockets,' or on economically impoverished Native-American reservations face some of the worst environmental devastation in the nation" (Bullard 1993).  The disproportionate burden on minority communities is not only ethically unsustainable, but environmentally unsustainable.  Bullard concludes that it is "unlikely that this nation will ever achieve lasting solutions to its environmental problems unless it also addresses the system of racial injustice that helps sustain the existence of powerless communities forced to bear disproportionate environmental costs."

The modern environmental critique expands the classical discourse on nature and the physical world -- shifting from an equilibrium based discourse to an ethical discourse.  The earlier writers, reflected in the excerpts in Part I and Part II, are primarily concerned with the relationship between human civilization and the physical world, and ultimately between property rights and optimum resource allocation.  In this sense, the early discourse remained within the anthropocentric paradigm.  The environmental writers bring the discussion beyond the merely

human-centered, to consider a host of material and ethical issues.

 

About this Section

The following chapters provide excerpts from these authors in an effort to provide the reader with tools for assessing the environmental problematic.  Previous sections explored the role of nature and the physical world (Part One), and the evolving role of law and property (Part Two).  This section explores the environmental literature -- the green critique (Part Three).  The final section explores strategies for resolving environmental degradation (Part Four: Accommodating the Future). 

 

Notes

 

1. The terms liberal and radical should not be misunderstood.  Liberal, in this context refers to the liberal capitalist tradition, as discussed at length in chapter 15.  Radical, on the other hand, refers to those who see a problem at its roots. 

 

 

References

 

Bullard, Robert. 1993. Confronting Environmental Racism.  Boston: South End Press.

 

Cahn, Matthew Alan. 1995.  Environmental Deceptions.  Albany: SUNY Press.

 

Carson, Rachel.  1962. Silent Spring. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

 

Caulfield, Henry.  1989.  "The Conservation and Environmental Movements:  An Historical

Analysis."  In Environmental Politics and Policy: Theories and Evidence, ed. James

Lester. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

 

Commoner, Barry.  1970. "Beyond the Teach-In," Saturday Review, LIII, 50-64.

 

---- 1971. The Closing Circle -- Man, Nature, and Technology.

New York:  Knopf.

 

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. 1985. Nature. Boston: Beacon Press.

 

Erlich, Paul.  1968. The Population Bomb.  New York: Ballantine.

 

Hardin, Garrett. 1977.  "The Tragedy of the Commons," in Garrett Hardin and John Baden (eds.)

Managing the Commons. W.H. Freeman and Co.

 

King, Ynestra. 1981. "Feminism and the Revolt of Nature," Heresies, no. 13.

 

Naess, Arne. 1973.  "The Shallow and the Deep: The Long-Range Ecology Movement,"

Inquiry, 16: 95-100.

 

Nash, Roderick Frazier. 1990.  American Environmentalism: Readings in Conservation History.

NY: McGraw-Hill Publishing Co.

 

Reich, Charles.  1970.  The Greening of America.

 

Thoreau, Henry David.  1851.  "Walking," in Excursions, The Writings of Henry David Thoreau,

IX, Riverside Edition, 11 vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1893.

 

Vig, Norman and Michael Kraft. 1990.   "Environmental Policy from the Seventies

to the Nineties:  Continuity and Change."  In Vig, Norman and Michael Kraft.

1990. Environmental Policy in the 1990s.  Washington DC:  CQ Press.

 

Wilson, Edward O. 1993.  The Diversity of Life.  NY: W.W. Norton and Company.