A
secular breviary for meditations on ecological meanings and values
An extension of the Schools in Communities
Agenda 21 Network
(scan-online.org)
The
joy of belonging
One of the key figures
in shaping a modern educational movement to end the lonely,
often desperate, isolation of Homo sapiens from the other species was the American
Joseph Wood Krutch (1893-1971). "We are all in this together," he concluded in
1949, not long after he finished writing a biography of Henry Thoreau. Once a rather
melancholic humanist, Krutch now became a kind of pantheist or ethical mystic,
caught up in the joy of belonging to "something greater than one's self."
Reading Thoreau again
and again was partly responsible for the radical change in
Krutch's outlook. The other chief stimulus was a self-education in ecological
principles. "Every day," he observed, "the science of ecology is making clearer the
factual aspect as it demonstrates those more and more remote interdependencies
which, no matter how remote they are, are crucial even for us." Krutch's tutoring in
science confirmed him in an organismic sensibility, partly pragmatic, but more
fundamentally ethical.
We must be a part not
only of the human community, but of the whole ecological
community. We must acknowledge some sort of oneness not only with our
neighbors, our countrymen and our civilization, but also some respect for the natural
as well as the man-made community. Ours is not only "one world" in the sense
usually implied by that term. It is also "one earth." It is abundantly clear that our
species requires behavioural adaptations for long term survival, based on the political
and economic interdependency of the various sections of the civilized world. It is not
a sentimental but a grimly literal fact, that unless we share planet Earth with
creatures other than ourselves, we shall not be able to live on it for long.
Science has led directly
to a moral awakening: a new sense of biological relatedness
and communalism. However, Krutch perceived that ecology, "without reverence or
love," could become naught but "a shrewder exploitation of what it would be better to
admire, to enjoy, and to share in." His own approach to the science helped turn him
from the pursuit of self toward a "sense of the community of living things." Spirituality
makes the connection. To the Hindu bhakti yogi, compassionate love is the highest
vehicle to union with creation. In pursuing creation in this way one becomes more
god-like, and from this inner source comes an outward manifestation of selfless love
for all creation.
The persistence of
this moral undercurrent in ecology as an increasingly quantified
discipline means, for one thing, that mid-twentieth-century ecology belongs to the lay
mind—to the amateur naturalist and the conservationist—as much as to the
scientific establishment. Like Thoreau in his time, it is important that collectively we
do not wholly surrender this science to academic experts.
Ecology has always
been unusual among the sciences in its accessibility to the
ordinary student of nature,-throughout its history it has been shaped by and
responsive to the everyday life of all sorts of people: farmers, gamekeepers,
foresters, bird watchers, travellers. More than this, it has consistently appealed to
many who are otherwise hostile to scientific explanations: As long as ecology has a
lay input, it can continue to teach the gospel of organic community, whether or not
this is subject to empirical validation.
In practice this means
endorsing conservation as one side of the coin of political
economy. The problem is that a culture that tends towards conservation
management of its natural resources could be a dying culture if others around it do
not adopt the same constraints on consumption.
Moral
naturalism
The hope that nature
will show humanity the way to sound moral values is part of
Krutch's faith, and certainly that of the 'Age of Ecology'. But this view has long been a
beacon for Anglo-American culture, at least since the eighteenth century. Indeed, few
ideas have been recycled as often as the belief that the factual "Is" of nature must
become the moral "Ought" of man.
Many have contended
that a pronounced pattern or observed direction in nature
provides man with all the guidance he needs for "should-ness." If nature is found to
be a world of interdependence, then human beings are obliged to consider that
characteristic a moral dictum. But if we have to first follow nature, which road do we
take? Whose map do we use? How can we keep to the road?
The perennial hope
has been that science will show the way. In the case of the
ecological ethic, its proponents picked out their values first and only afterward came
to science for its stamp of approval. What is really required is a deeper sense of
integration between man and nature, a more-than-economic relatedness—and to let
all the appended scientific arguments go. "Ought" might then be its own justification,
its own defense, its own persuasion, regardless of what "is."
With the decline of
religion and its moral tradition in our own time, science has
become the universal standard, and for many, it maintains an aura of absolute
sanctity. It is seen as an oracle of objective truth, located well above the shaky
ground of moral choice, and therefore a perfectly trustworthy source not only of
knowledge but of value. Others, noting how often scientists reflect their cultural
milieu, are more sceptical of science's claim to detachment; the quality of trust is
strained. But even the sceptics look to science for the validation of certain truths. If
science cannot, by itself, save society, neither can society be saved without it. The
moral values inherent in scientific models cannot be accepted without examination,
but the guidance such models provide is indispensable. To judge which of these
attitudes is the most valid requires presenting them within an educational framework
where "Is" and "Ought" are distinct and unique concepts, but which demonstrates
that any attempt to rigidly separate them is probably misguided.
The idea of truth or
fact outside the moral context has no meaning for the human
mind. Whether imperialist, arcadian, organismic, or something else, values have
always been woven into the fabric of science. So much so that when scientists most
firmly insist that they have screened out everything but demonstrable fact, the rest of
us should nevertheless anticipate moral consequences. In his thoughts about his
homeland of Concord Thoreau was beginning to assemble a guide to attaching
moral values to our various uses of the environment. These web pages are a
development of Thoreau's secular breviary to guide personal actions of atonement
that lighten the guilt of humankind for initiating metamorphoses that have been more
destructive than creative.
Imagination
and place
As early as 1806, John
Forster in his Essays in a Series of Letters to a Friend, trying
to define the essence of the romantic had written:
"Imagination may be indulged till it usurp an entire ascendency over the mind,
and then every
subject presented to that mind will excite imagination instead of understanding to work;
imagination will throw its colours where the intellectual faculty ought to draw its lines;
imagination will accumulate metaphors where reason ought to deduce arguments; images will
take the place of thoughts and scenes of disquisitions. The whole mind may become at length
something like a hemisphere of cloud scenery, filled with an ever-moving train of changing
melting forms, of every colour, mingled with rainbows, meteors and an occasional gleam of
pure sunlight, all vanishing away, the mental like this natural imagery, when its hour is up,
without leaving anything behind but the wish to recover the vision. And yet, . . . this series of
visions, may be mistaken for operations of thought, and each cloudy image be admitted in the
place of a proposition, or a reason; and it may even be mistaken for something sublimer than
thinking."
Forster's fears of
the predominance of imagination over judgement in the evaluation
of place were not a problem to later writers. Kingsley's Alton Locke the Chartist poet,
discovers the work of Tennyson and is overwhelmed by the pleasure of imaginative
recognition.
... he has learned to see that in all Nature, in the hedgerow and the sandbank, as
well as in the
alp- peak and the ocean-waste, is a world of true sublimity —
a minute infinite — an ever fertile
garden of poetic images, the roots of which are in the unfathomable and the eternal, as truly as
any ! ..... phenomenon which astonishes and awes the eye. The description of the desolate
pools and creeks where the dying Swan floated, the hint of the silvery marsh mosses by
Mariana's moat, came to me like revelations. I always knew there was something beautiful,
wonderful, sublime, in those flowery dykes of Battersea Fields; in the long gravelly sweeps of
that lone tidal shore; and here was a man who had put them in words for me. This is what I call
democratic art —the revelation of the poetry which lies in common things. And surely all the
age is tending in that direction; in Landseer and his dogs — in Copley Fielding and his downs,
with a host of noble artists — and in all authors who have really seized the nation's mind from
Crabbe and Burns and Wordsworth to Hood and Dickens, the great tide sets ever outward,
towards that which is common to many, not that which is exclusive to the few . . ."
