Politics and eagle's
nests
In order to
appreciate the place of Ruskin in the modern environmental arena we
first have to consider environmentalism in relation to the model of
global industrialisation, to which he was responding when it was
surging ahead in mid- Victorian Britain. Environmentalism, like
industrialism, was not a completely new phenomenon to the
Victorians, but rather the culmination of tendencies going back to
the seventeenth century. Its roots extend deep into the beginnings
of the industrial revolution, from where it became entangled in
social criticism, public health Acts, and landscape
appreciation.
All that has
happened in recent years has been an explosive realisation that
natural resources, landscape heritage and the global commons of sea
and air, are being destroyed irreversibly on an ever increasing
geographical scale. This has occurred alongside a sharpening
of public awareness of environment, through the media and its
popularisation of new divisions of applied biological sciences,
such as ecotoxicology. The rapid decline in 'environment health is
now seen by nearly everyone as a major threat to the survival of
humanity.
The key to
understanding this vast interdisciplinary area of knowledge lies in
the synthesis between two eighteenth century primary divisions of
knowledge, political economy and natural economy. These
subjects were the birthplace of the many specialisms which produced
the compartmentation of scientific information which is now an
impediment to civic understanding of environmental
issues.
It is appropriate at
this point to give Ruskin's words which sets the tone for the
interaction between politics and wildlife.
"And of all essential things in a gentleman's
bodily and moral training, this is really the beginning - that he
should have close companionship with the horse, the dog, and the
eagle. Of all birthrights and bookrights - this is his
first. He needn't be a Christian, - there have been millions
of Pagan gentlemen; he needn't be kind - there have been millions
of cruel gentlemen; he needn't be honest - there have been millions
of crafty gentlemen. He needn't know how to read, or how to
write his own name. But he must have horse, dog, and eagle
for friends.
If then he has also Man for his friend, he is a
noble gentleman; and if God for his Friend, a king. And if, being
honest and kind, and having God and Man for his friends, he then
gets these three brutal friends, besides his angelic ones, he is
perfect in earth as for heaven. For to be his friends these
must be brought up with him and he with them. Falcon on fist,
hound at foot, and horse part of himself - Eques, Ritter, Cavalier,
Chevalier.
Yes; - horse and dog you understand the good of;
but what's the good of the falcon think you?
To be friends with the falcon must mean that you
love to see it soar; that is to say, you love fresh air and the
fields. Farther, when the Law of God is understood, you will like
better to see the eagle free than the jessed hawk. And to
preserve your eagles' nests, is to be a great nation. It
means keeping everything that is noble; mountains and fields, and
forests, and the glory and honour of them, and the birds that haunt
them. If the eagle takes more than his share you may shoot him, -
(but with the knight's arrow, not the blackguard's gun) - and not
till then"
Political Economy and Natural
Economy
Ruskin's writings
were frequently concerned with what he called "political economy".
Political economy was one of the two major interdisciplinary themes
that unified the gathering and presentation of knowledge about
European development for about 200 years. The other was
natural economy. Natural economy dealt with the organisation
of natural resources for human production. Political economy,
as a distinct body of knowledge, is complementary to natural
economy. In Ruskin's day, it dealt with questions about how
production is socially organised, the factors that determine the
pattern of jobs in different production systems, and the social and
economic relationships between workers. Ruskin would be
pleased to see that, increasingly, it now deals with the planning
constraints governing the utilisation of natural resources for
sustained production. These questions are usually analysed in
relation to different kinds of monetary policies, and economic
value-systems.
The distinction
between the "natural' and the "political" aspects of industrialism
were put in the following way by John Ruskin in the 1870s, "It is
one question, how to get plenty of a good thing, and another
whether plenty of it will be good for us." In the context of
modern world development, political economy is the launching pad
for laws and plans governing development and conservation, whilst
natural economy delineates the technological innovations for the
exploitation and management of natural resources by which laws and
plans can be realised.
Having said this,
Ruskin did not define natural economy as being separate from
political economy. But, some of his contemporary readers could
dimly perceive a distinction from his writings. For example,
Mr Dixon, a cork-cutter in Sunderland, to whom, in 1867, Ruskin
wrote a series of letters stressing how important is was that
working people should clearly define their aims in social reform,
tells Ruskin of a pamphlet he has read. This "gives an account of
how it is the poor Indians have died of Famine simply because they
have destroyed the very system of Political Economy, or one having
some approach to it, that you are now endeavouring to direct the
attention of thinkers to in our country". In fact, the
American march into the West had destroyed the delicate balance
between Indian society and the natural economy of its renewable
resources, an example of the interdependence of political and
natural economy. Again, Dixon writes, after
reading Sesame and Lilies "I cannot help directing your attention
to that portion where you mention or rather exclaim against the
Florentines pulling down their Ancient Walls to build a
Boulevard. That passage is one that would gladden the hearts
of all true Italians, especially men that love Italy and
Dante!" It can be argued that since then the British
have lost, proportionately more of their architectural heritage
than the whole of Europe.
The need to manage
nature to retain a wide range of incompatible benefits was not new
in Ruskin's day. It first emerged in 17th century Europe at a
time when information about, rocks, soils, and the particular
assemblies of plants and animals associated with them, were under
scrutiny as resources for increasing human health and prosperity.
From the 16th to the early 18th centuries the term economy was used
in a context where we would now use 'management', 'control', or
'regulation'. It defined the ordering of various systems such
as the household, animal and crop husbandry, the human body's
physiological systems, the political administration of all the
resources of a community or state for production.
To a biologist,
economy also means the interactions and interdependence of plants
and animals. The latter area was defined by Linnaeus in the
1740s as 'nature's economy' and it is to Linnaeus and his pupils
that we must turn for the approaches to a scientific understanding
of the linkages of living things in food chains and habitats, which
were taken up later in the 18th century, particularly by Gilbert
White and John Bruckner.
Managing nature
Although he never
articulated it distinctly, it is probably true to say that Linnaeus
saw our role in nature as managers of its resources to maintain the
orderly and interdependent interplay between living things and
their surroundings. He certainly saw the need to avoid
unnecessary destruction and ensure a continuous supply of
environmental resources' for human development. He was aware
that the maintenance of natural resources requires knowledge of
natural structures, processes, and systems.
From the diaries he
kept on his scientific expeditions in search of new resources to
fuel the Swedish economy, it is clear that Linnaeus could also see
that the richness of an environment was not just the monetary
returns that could be obtained from the use of natural
resources. He also put a great value on the aesthetic riches
of an unspoiled landscape. The problem then, as now, is
to define the analytical techniques and social mechanisms by which
we may regulate relationships between exploitation and
stabilisation to maintain standards of 'environmental richness'
when different kinds of riches have to be related to a common
monetary currency.
Natural economy
gained it's knowledge through analytical topography; the study of
the whole landscape and its multipurpose uses. However, as
knowledge about the developing European environment accumulated, it
was increasingly delivered into expanding academic educational
compartments such as geology, and zoology. In Ruskin's time,
natural economy had lost its prime relationship to the human
economy and was split into a range of specialist academic
subjects. Also, nature's economy became much more narrowly
defined as a subject dealing with unspoiled nature, and eventually
reemerged at the end of the 19th century as the academic,
non-applied subject of ecology.
Humanity has now
entered an era where we must return to the broad base of 'natural
economy' which, in its original definition was both font and focus
of knowledge emanating from a wide range of environmental subjects
embracing anthropology to zoology.
Modern natural
economy defines the ways in which we now treat most of the planet
as a resource. As a theme, based on a well-defined set of
principles governing the relationship of people to nature, it
stands in relation to environmental management as physics does to
engineering. Also, it can also be an attitude, and a cause,
to sustain human development in that it sets out to systematise
knowledge that is necessary to balance human numbers with nature,
in dignity and harmony.
National and local
perceptions of development have to be related to a world view where
human well-being is seen to be limited by the Earth's natural
economic order, and planners have to deal with many competing
global demands on natural resources. This depends on the "landscape
capital" of rocks, soils, water, air and the interdependent
communities of animals, plants and microbes. This balance between
the uses of physical and biological capital produces the ecological
segregation of landscape expressed nationally as the country's
biogeographic zones, and locally as a particular pattern of land
use and settlement.
The most dominant of
these demands is urbanisation. Ruskin in his description of
the expanding city of Geneva in the 1860s cynically describes the
fruits of progress, which will strike a cord with any modern
traveler faced with endless miniaturised versions of New York and
Los Angeles. In Ruskin's day the models were London and the
industrial cities of northern Britain.
"The town itself shows the most gratifying signs
of progress in all the modern arts and sciences of life. It
is nearly as black as Newcastle- has a railroad station larger than
the London terminus of the Chatham and Dover-fouls the stream of
the Limmat as soon as it issues from the lake, so that you might
even venture to compare the formerly simple and innocent Swiss
river (I remember it thirty years ago-current of pale green
crystal) with the highly educated English streams of Ware or Tyne,
and finally, has as many French prints of dissolute tendency in its
principle shop windows as if they had the privilege of opening on
the Parisian Boulevards".
A holistic knowledge
system, based on Ruskin's overview is now necessary to deal with
the maintenance of the dynamic equilibrium and global accountancy
of natural resources. We have now become the dominant species
on the planet, and the dominant force for change. By
comparison, the earth before mankind changed infinitely
slowly. Now, governments and local communities
increasingly have to plan within the natural economics of
competitive resource utilisation in order to first to gain, and
then to maintain prosperity by setting a dynamic balance of land
use. On the credit side is prosperity; in the debit column of
the global account is the decline of wildlife communities,
unclean rivers, unstable climates, and the loss of human well-being
through the creation of industrialised agricultural
systems.
Consumerism
In the model of
industrialisation derived from Ruskin's writings natural
economy defines the system involved in our 'social use' of
nature through industrialisation. Expressed as a general
model for world development, it represents people drawing living,
and non- living, resources from the material environment according
to the process of consumerism, which is driven by peoples
wants. These wants are generated within our social
environment by education in its broadest context, and are
transmitted globally through sophisticated information networks of
the media.
People's wants,
expressed as 'commodified' foods, goods, services and armaments,
are produced as cheaply as possible by industrialisation, which is
activated by a combination of science and monetary capital.
Up to a point, human development increases the richness of the
landscape, but above a certain population density, and, beyond a
certain scale of industrial development, the environment is 'used
up' and its riches decrease.
Industrialism no
longer means factory production lines;. Agriculture and
tourism are now classed as industries; the one using machines to
minimise investment in people to maximise crop output; the other
supporting the production of ever larger aircraft and hotels to get
economies of scale in transporting people to their holiday
destinations, and feeding them with mass-produced
food.
Ruskin had his
clashes with the embryonic tourist industry.
"In 1862, I had formed the intention of living
some years in the neighbourhood of Geneva, and had established
myself experimentally on the eastern slope of the Mont Saleve; but
I was forced to abandon my purpose at last, because I could not
endure the rabid howling, on Sunday evenings, of the holiday-makers
who came out from Geneva to get drunk in the mountain
villages".
The products
of industrialism, whether it be the latest motor car, long-haul
package holiday , or commodified food produced by ranch-type
industrial husbandry, change society by increasing peoples horizons
for more products. Industrialism therefore uses up the
environment ever more rapidly. The resultant self-augmenting
cycle is an example of positive feedback, which is the most
difficult kind of system to control.
Ruskin was right to
tell us that control of industrialisation has to exerted through
our perceptions of the environment, which are set by moral values
(religion), and culture (political philosophy and associated
legislation). Regulatory inputs at one extreme come from the
application of collective interest and responsibility (socialism
with a small 's'). This is the 'brake" which encourages a balanced
or positive use of the environment. At the other extreme are
the corporate and individual interests of capitalism). This
is the "accelerator" which encourages destructive, or negative use
of the environment.
If we are to
stabilise the natural economy, the year to year stability and
riches of regional and local environments first have to be
evaluated. These measured states have then to be compared
with desired norms of stability, richness and availability
(climate, soil fertility, wildlife diversity, state of industrial
resources, and art in the context of our landscape heritage).
Any departures from desirable standards of stability, richness and
availability have to be corrected by a change in our attitude
towards development. This correction involves the application
of collective interest and responsibility through the social
environment so that less is taken from the material environment,
and fewer harmful substances are put into it.
Ruskin was concerned
with delineating some of the social mechanisms to controlling the
use of the environment. For example, in the 1860s he
wrote:
The income of great
landowners should be paid to them by the State and,
"So far from their
land being to them a source of income, it should be, on the whole
costly to them, great part of it being kept in conditions of
natural grace, which return no rent but their loveliness; and the
rest made, at whatever cost, exemplary in perfection of such
agriculture as develops the happiest peasant life;
agriculture which, as I will show you hereafter, must reject the
aid of all mechanism except that of instruments guided solely by
the human hand, or by animal, or directly natural forces; and
which, therefore, cannot compete for profitableness with
agriculture carried on by aid of machinery".
It is a small step
across a century of ever-increasing industrialisation of British
agriculture, and the destruction of its Georgian patchwork of small
fields and woodlands, to see this sentiment expressed in recent
legislation to subsidise low-input agricultural systems for
maintaining uneconomic agricultural landscapes in so-called
'environmentally sensitive areas'.
In a modern context,
education, is required to generate an ecological conscience;
legislation, taxation, and commodity pricing, to discourage
negative usage of the environment; and the subsidisation of
unprofitable use of the environment, to encourage positive
management for wildlife and landscape aesthetics. The latter
are global riches that cannot be equated directly with monetary
economics
The missing element
in Ruskin's work is a firm scientific viewpoint.
Unfortunately, apart from a tourists knowledge of geology, he
lacked any scientific understanding, which would allow him to
incorporate natural science into the comprehensive knowledge system
he was striving to create. We are occasionally made aware of
this difficulty and at the same time see, as in the following
passage, where a synthesis between art and science might have
led.
He tells us that in
1867, he visited a friend who had been conducting experiments
into the pigments of leaves, each of which he defined by its
fingerprint of dark energy absorption bands, or bars, in a
spectroscope.
"My friend showed me the rainbow of the rose and
the rainbow of the violet and the rainbow of the hyacinth and the
rainbow of forest leaves being born and the rainbow of forest
leaves dying. And at last he showed me the rainbow of blood.
It was but the three- hundredth part of a grain, dissolved in
water; and it cast its measured bars, for ever recognisable now to
human sight, on the chord of the seven colours. And no drop
of that red rain can now be shed so small as that the stain of it
cannot be known and the voice of it heard out of the ground.
Then , he characteristically took off at a tangent to define the
fulfillment of human liberty in the peaceful inheritance of the
treasure of a fruitful earth and not "the ravage of it down the
valleys of the Shenandoah".
