towards
a knowledge system of moral naturalism
Concord is a town in
N.E Massachusetts, and it was there that Henry David Thoreau
(1817- 1862), emerged as one of an Anglo-American group of nineteenth-century
Romantics who were the first great environmental subversives of modem times. The
Romantic approach to nature was fundamentally ecological in that is was concerned
with relation, interdependence, and holism. Thoreau
wrote about the lands around
his home in Concord, and the ways they had been altered by two centuries of
European colonisation. In these meditations on history and place he was one of the
first Americans to articulate a philosophy about the value of environmental heritage
and the need for its conservation.
His musings were concerned
with identifying landmarks as the remains of former
interactions of human social systems with ecosystems. People add notional
attachments to these landmarks based on ideas generated by coming into contact
with them. These random collisions between place and imagination illustrate the
inevitable creative stimulus of combining wildlife and people. This important
intellectual outcome illustrates the progression of civilisation carried forward by myth
and legend attached to landmarks such as marshes, ruins, and churchyards. These
thoughts in place are expressed as writings and art works. They are creative
elements of personal knowledge systems about the values of cultural heritage and
the need to inject these values into systems of conservation management. Most of
us, when we think about it, realize that after our own direct experience of wildness,
art and literature, myth and lore have contributed most to our love of wild places,
animals, plants, even, perhaps, to our love of human wildness. For here is the
language of imagination that we so desperately need in order to articulate the true
meaning of conservation and have the medium so necessary to communicate a
shared vision.
Thoreau's thoughts
about the juxtaposition of wildness and economic development
highlight the importance of notional values created by the people who have day-to-
day contact with places they wish to conserve. What is unsettling is that these
people, who have led a life of intimate contact with nature at its wildest– a halibut
fisherman plying the currents of the Gulf of Alaska, an Inuit whale hunter, a rancher
tending a small cow-calf operation, a logger with a chainsaw–are perceived as the
enemies of preservation.
The friends of preservation,
on the other hand, are often city folk who depend on
vacations in wilderness areas and national parks for their (necessarily) limited
experience of wildness. The difference in degree of experience of wildness, the
dichotomy of friends/enemies of preservation, and the notorious inability of these two
groups to communicate shared values indicates the depth of our muddle about
wilderness and wildness. It suggests again and again the increasingly desperate
nature of our struggle. At the heart of the dilemma is the fact that urban human
beings are no longer residents of wild nature, hence we no longer consider ourselves
part of a biological order.
The two cultures can
only be bridged through an education in moral naturalism; an
education that incorporates conservation and economic development as the two
pillars of applied knowledge for a sustainable future.
