2.2 Charles Kingsley
2.2.1 Industrialism
As a boy Charles Kingsley became fascinated by freshwater biology whilst living on the edge of the East Anglian fenland. Later in life he was part of a social network of scientists and environmental reformers centred on the Bunbury family of Great Barton.
When he was 12 years old, he experienced violent social unrest first-hand in the Bristol riots of 1831, and until his death in 1875, was deeply involved with the social and environmental ferment of industrial development. One way or another, between the 30's and the 70's, he became associated with all major political and social reform movements of the age of steam. Kingsley's life coincided with the first historical period when primary evidence for future historians accumulated at an unprecedented rate. He moved within, and between, the circles of Royalty, the aristocracy, the church, business, and science. We can enter this world of technological change and social ferment through his novels, sermons and letters, and cross-reference to contemporary evidence about the lives of his friends and enemies. We can 'view' Kingsley from the writings of others, and study the events, and 'visit' the places and social movements which moulded his thoughts about families and the environment.
Charles Kingsley was a crusader for environmental health reform, with a deep knowledge of what we now call the ecological principles which create and maintain local biodiversity. In the following poem Kingsley attempts to equate the interdependence of living things in ecosystems with a Christian ethic of self-sacrifice. He imagined that the 'crowning glory of bio-geology', when fully worked out, might, after all, only be 'the lesson of Christmas-tide- of the infinite self-sacrifice of God for man'.
The oak, ennobled by the shipwright's axe-
The soil, which yields its marrow to the flower-
The flower, which feeds a thousand velvet worms
Born only to be prey to every bird-
All spend themselves on others: and shall man,
Whose two-fold being is the mystic knot
Which couples earth with heaven, doubly bound,
His being both worm and angel, to that service
By which both worms and angels hold their life,
Shall he, whose every breath is debt on debt,
Refuse, forsooth, to be what God has made him ?
Only someone who had actually felt the touch of earthworms could have written this.
Kingsley particularly promoted the use of religious imagery based on nature to carry notional messages to communicate his concept of God.
On his return from a holiday in the tropics to his Chester deanery, Kingsley married his recent experience of walking the forest floor with spiritual readings of stone pillars and vaults as follows.
"Now, it befell me that, fresh from the Tropic forests, and with their forms hanging always, as it were, in the background of my eye, I was impressed more and more vividly the longer I looked, with the likeness of those forest forms to the forms of our own Cathedral of Chester. The grand and graceful Chapter-house transformed itself into one of those green bowers, which, once seen, and never to be seen again, make one at once richer and poorer for the rest of life. The fans of groining sprang from the short columns, just as do the feathered boughs of the far more beautiful Maximiliana palm, and just of the same size and shape: and met overhead, as I have seen them meet, in aisles longer by far than our cathedral nave. The free upright shafts, which give such strength, and yet such lightness, to the mullions of each window, pierced upward through those curving lines, as do the stems of young trees through the fronds of palm; and, like them, carried the eye and the fancy up into the infinite, and took off a sense of oppression and captivity which the weight of the roof might have produced. In the nave, in the choir the same vision of the Tropic forest haunted me. The fluted columns not only resembled, but seemed copied from the fluted stems beneath which I had ridden in the primeval woods; their bases, their capitals, seemed copied from the bulgings at the collar of the root, and at the spring of the boughs, produced by a check of the redundant sap; and were garlanded often enough like the capitals of the columns, with delicate tracery of parasite leaves and flowers; the mouldings of the arches seemed copied from the parallel bundles of the curving bamboo shoots; and even the fatter roof of the nave and transepts had its antitype in that highest level of the forest aisles, where the trees, having climbed at last to the lightfood which they seek, care no longer to grow upward, but spread out in huge limbs, almost horizontal, reminding the eye of the four-centred arch which marks the period of Perpendicular Gothic".
"He is the God of nature, as well as the God of grace. For ever He looks down on all things which He has made: and behold, they are very good. And, therefore, we dare offer to Him, in our churches, the most perfect works of naturalistic art, and shape them into copies of whatever beauty He has shown us, in man or woman, in cave or mountain peak, in tree or flower, even in bird or butterfly.
But Himself ?-Who can see Him ? Except the humble and the contrite heart, to whom He reveals Himself as a Spirit to be worshipped in spirit and in truth, and not in bread, nor wood, nor stone, nor gold, nor quintessential diamond".
Apart from offering a personalised view of an important period, which witnessed the dawn of mass production and a greatly increased pace of world development, Kingsley's writings ring-true today because he was a social reformer who viewed society as a system driven by interacting processes which integrate community and production.  He was a polymath with a wide ranging grasp of the connections between scientific discovery, industrial development, social well-being, and environmental well-being.
2.2.1 Industrialism
graphic
(1) Knowledge about the interactions of people with the workings of nature is accumulated by thought, observation and experiment. This knowledge is organised in the form of physical laws which explain the way nature works; and spiritual/ethical laws which define the ways we should behave towards other people and the rest of nature.
(2) Spiritual and ethical laws are studied and applied to manage human production (the subject of political economy) : i.e. political economy defines the way people are governed in their everyday lives through political and economic understanding.
(3) Improvements in political and economic understanding are applied through social welfare and education to increase social well-being.
(4) Increased social well-being stabilises human production.
(5) Physical laws are applied to manage natural production (the subject of natural economy) i.e. natural economy defines the way people process physical and biological materials to meet their needs and wants through environmental understanding.
Together political and natural economy make up the subject of consumermatics, the body of knowledge which defines the forces of consumerism which since Kingsley's day have determined the pace of world development.
(6) Improvements in environmental understanding are applied through public health, nature study, and care for nature, to increase environmental well-being.
(7) Increased environmental well-being stabilises natural production.
Unfortunately his efforts, together with those of some of his contemporaries, notably John Ruskin, to encourage the growth of an embryonic generalist education system, which covered this holistic perspective, were swamped by the national priority for the training of specialists to control nature and exploit an Empire. Kingsley's contemporary, Henslow, a Cambridge professor began this process in his village school by getting pupils to dissect flowers and learn scientific terminology. They helped Darwin in his botanical experiments. The impact of these revolutionary ideas at the start of state support for education certainly turned the heads of the inspectorate towards single- subject teaching.
In contrast, Kingsley's starting point was the study of 'civilisation'.
"...give me the political economist, the sanitary reformer, the engineer; and take your saints and virgins, relics and miracles. The spinning-jenny and the railroad, Cunard's liners and the electric telegraph, are to me, if not to you, signs that we are, on some points at least, in harmony with the universe; ".
In this broader context Kingsley offers an educational model for modern times where we require a broad view of society and environment to absorb the educational implications of sustainable development.
The period of Kingsley's life was a triumph of invention and applied science which brought about great changes in the appearance of the British countryside. In the main, these changes were results of applied science, first to allow mass transport of people, and then to promote the spread of new ideas through mass communication. Kingsley described science as a 'good fairy' which could increase human well-being, providing it was harnessed to a political system which aspired to develop the latent potential in everyone.
It is convenient to define this period of rapid socio-environmental change as the 72 years spanning the opening of the first public railway line in 1825 to the first experiments in wireless in 1897. People born in the first decade of the 19th century would have experienced the benefits of mass production of goods and services in the 'age of steam', and from the launch of the penny post in 1840, would have been able to respond to overnight news about people and events throughout the world. They might have used the first public telephone exchange in 1878, and seen the first motor cars in the 1880s. A person born in 1825 might have lived into their seventh decade to celebrate Queen Victoria's Jubilee in 1897, the year in which the first plastic records entered people's homes. Kingsley saw the early benefits of applied science but died prematurely in 1875. He lived long enough however to become intensely aware of the human and environmental disbenefits of unchecked industrialism organised for maximum profit, and the social disfigurement it caused through substandard housing of urban workers .
Kingsley was one of the first to value nature study as a worthwhile hobby. He was an amateur sea-shore ecologist, and in the Water Babies he used the cleansing power of detritus feeders in rock pool food chains as a metaphor to preach the need for proper water management.
"Only where men are wasteful and dirty, and let sewers run into the sea, instead of putting the stuff upon the fields like thrifty reasonable souls; or throw herrings' heads, and dead dog-fish, or any other refuse, into the water; or in any way make a mess upon the clean shore, there the water-babies will not come, sometimes not for hundreds of years (for they cannot abide anything smelly or foul): but leave the sea anemones and the crabs to clear away everything, till the good tidy sea has covered up all the dirt in soft mud and clean sand, where the water- babies can plant live cockles and whelks and razor shells and sea- cucumbers and golden- combs, and make a pretty live garden again, after man's dirt is cleared away. And that, I suppose, is the reason why there are no waterbabies at any watering-place which I have ever seen".
The notion of conserving living resources, from rare species to valued landscapes, means managing their use so that vital stocks of plants, and animals are maintained for the benefit of succeeding generations. But progress in educating for sustainable development has been lamentably slow, largely because it has been seen as peripheral, and sometimes as a hindrance, to humankind's continuing quest for social and economic welfare.
From the building of the first coal-powered factories and mines a century before Kingsley, it was clear that unchecked industrial enterprise is incompatible with nature. Linnaeus, for example, on his Royal fact finding tour of Sweden's natural resources in the late 18th century, reported on the poisonous fumes from copper smelters which had destroyed vegetation down-wind of the factories. However, it was not until the middle of the next century that commentators began to agitate for something to be done about the environmental impact of a rapidly developing industrial society. John Ruskin, for example, railed against the ugly impact of tourism on Europe's mountain landscapes. This was exacerbated by the pollution from holiday resorts, which even then had begun to defile Alpine streams. Charles Kingsley summarised his two-pronged attack on the socio-environmental effects of industrialism in a sermon preached in 1870 when he spoke of 'human soot' as a by- product of competitive investment in mass-production.
"Capital is accumulated more rapidly by wasting a certain amount of human life, human health, human intellect, human morals, by producing and throwing away a regular percentage of human soot-of that thinking and acting dirt which lies about, and, alas ! breeds and perpetuates itself in foul alleys and low public-houses, and all and any of the dark places of the earth.
But as in the case of the manufacturers, the Nemesis comes swift and sure. As the foul vapours of the mine and manufactory destroy vegetation and injure health, so does the Nemesis fall on the world of man-so does that human soot, those human poison gases, infect the whole society which has allowed them to fester under its feet. Sad; but not hopeless. Dark; but not without a gleam of light on the horizon."
Kingsley was also prophetic in his vision of more enlightened times when society would demand that the countryside and human lives wasted by industrial development should be cleaned-up.
"I can yet conceive a time when, by improved chemical science, every foul vapour which now escapes from the chimney of a manufactory, polluting the air, destroying the vegetation, shall be seized, utilised, converted into some profitable substance, till the Black Country shall be black no longer, and the streams once more run crystal clear, the trees be once more luxuriant, and the desert which man has created in his haste and greed, shall, in literal fact, once more blossom as the rose.
And just so can I conceive a time when, by a higher civilisation, founded on political economy, more truly scientific, because more truly according to the will of God, our human refuse shall be utilised like our material refuse, when man as man, even down to the weakest and most ignorant, shall be found to be (as he really is) so valuable that it will be worth while to preserve his health, to the level of his capabilities, to save him alive, body, intellect, and character, at any cost; because men will see that a man is, after all, the most precious and useful thing in the earth, and that no cost spent on the development of human beings can possibly be thrown away".
The growing conflicts between economic development and quality of environment took more than a century to come to a head in the Rio Environment Summit. This assembly of world leaders in 1992 highlighted a global imperative to promote inter- disciplinary systems thinking, and encourage communities to express their concerns about quality of life in local environmental action plans. In the context of modern environmentalism, the world of Charles Kingsley is an exemplar for constructing appropriate holistic knowledge maps about the connections between the technical, biological and spiritual components of sustainable development. He was one of the first people to offer an overview of world development that took account of applied science, its detrimental social and environmental impacts, and the need to consider the spiritual dimensions of 'place' and 'change'. His novels are imaginative and popular interpretations of his ideas presented on various stages, some of which were contemporary, and others were set in more exotic places and distant times. His messages were the same: to urge government to action, and to calm social strife through the 'eternal goodness' of religion.
"And now, my dear little man, what should we learn from this parable?
We should learn thirty-seven or thirty-nine things, I am not exactly sure which: but one thing, at least, we may learn and that is this-when we see efts in the ponds, never to throw stones at them, or catch them with crooked pins, or put them into vivariums with sticklebacks, that the sticklebacks may prick them in their poor little stomachs, and make them jump out of the glass into somebody's workbox, and so come to a bad end. For these efts are nothing else but the water babies who are stupid and dirty, and will not learn their lessons and keep themselves clean; and, therefore (as comparative anatomists will tell you fifty years hence, though they are not learned enough to tell you now), their skulls grow flat, their jaws grow out, and their brains grow small, and their tails grow long, and they lose all their ribs (which I am sure you would not like to do), and their skins grow dirty and spotted, and they never get into the clear rivers, much less into the great wide sea, but hang about in dirty ponds, and live in the mud, and eat worms, as they deserve to do.
But that is no reason why you should ill-use them: but only why you should pity them, and be kind to them, and hope that some day they will wake up, and be ashamed of their nasty, dirty, lazy, stupid life, and try to amend, and become something better once more. For, perhaps, if they do so, then after 379,423 years, nine months, thirteen days, two hours, and twenty-one minutes (for aught that appears to the contrary), if they work very hard and wash very hard all that time, their brains may grow bigger, and their jaws grow smaller, and their ribs come back, and their tails wither off, and they will turn into water- babies again, and, perhaps, after that into land-babies; and after that, perhaps, into grown men.
You know they won't? Very well, I dare say you know best. But, you see, some folks have a great liking for those poor little efts. They never did anybody any harm, or could if they tried; and their only fault is, that they do no good-any more than some thousands of their betters. But what with ducks, and what with pike, and what with sticklebacks, and what with water- beetles, and what with naughty boys, they are 'sae sair haddened doun', as the Scotsmen say, that it is a wonder how they live; and some folks can't help hoping that they may have another chance, to make things fair and even, somewhere, somewhen, somehow."
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