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Rival Philosophies of the Earth
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20301 |
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Section : |
SPECIAL SECTION
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1992 |
4,510 Words |
| Author
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Lincoln Allison
Lincoln Allison is senior lecturer of politics at the
University of Warwich in England. He is author of A Journey
Quite Different: Collected Walks, Manchester University Press
(1988). |
The central question can be put simply: How should we treat the earth, the umwelt, the environment, meaning the system of existence that surrounds us as a species? We talk of it, inconsistently, as if we were both part of it and distinct from it. Is it there for our best use, to be judged by criteria of efficiency? Or should we revere it, treat it as if it had legitimate rights or ends of its own?
The philosophical dilemma is an ancient one. Most prehistoric cultures revered the earth, treating it, in whole or in part, as a totem. But Genesis offers what many commentators have regarded as a distinct approach in its account of the origins of man and the earth:
And God said, Let us make man in our image after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. (1:26)
By comparison with the beliefs of its time, Genesis distinguishes man from nature and gives him unlimited rights over it.
For most of human history, reverence versus exploitation has been a submerged and secondary debate, dominated by the disputes about the nature of God's revelation and (more recently) by the justice or otherwise of socialism and capitalism. But it has always been present, both as a philosophical issue and as an element of practical dilemmas, being at issue between Christians and pagans, but also within Christianity, being an important element of the difference between Franciscans and more orthodox Catholics in the medieval period and between creationists and more orthodox theologians in our own times.
The revival of reverential philosophies of nature began with the relationship between industrialism and romanticism. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Constable, and Rousseau saw, in their different and definitively modern ways, that nature could not be taken for granted, that its charm and purity were under threat from human numbers and activities. Romanticism as an artistic movement often verged on a religious pantheism, which saw the divine as ubiquitous and inseparable from the idea of nature. After the midpoint of the nineteenth century this perception moved from the artistic and religious realms to the scientific: Darwinian biology crystallized ideas about the survival and interdependence of species that gave rise to the concept of ecology. The word Oekologie (literally meaning "house-study" from the Greek
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