In the search for
new beginnings and new ends for the mutual involvements of man and
nature the role of metaphor has become important, and in this field
of study the figures of St. Francis of Assisi and St. Benedict of
Nursia have come to represent two different types of creative
thinking in the West which try to move beyond the conventional
western world-view prevalent since the nineteenth
century.
In recent years the
icon of St. Francis has been held before both scholarly and lay
communities by the historian Lynn White. In his much discussed and
quoted paper of 1967, he proposed that there should be a revival of
the outlook and mores of St. Francis of Assisi, whom he
proposed as the patron saint of ecologists. White's original
argument has been attacked but the powerful image remains of a way
of life in which the natural is given an equal or perhaps superior
place alongside the human and the man-made, and in which simplicity
in the material sense is exalted as a sustainable and hence
superior life-style.
Against this
outlook, the medical scientist and humanist Rene Dubos put forward
the claims of St. Benedict of Nursia (480-550), best known for the
Benedictine Rule and for the numerous religious communities which
have put it into practice. Dubos has claimed for St. Benedict that
his followers have engaged not in a romantic and atavistic flight
to the 'natural', but have in a practical way brought about
creative transformations of nature: turning waste places into
productive agriculture, for instance. In this tradition he sees the
great landscape gardens of eighteenth-century England, and the
mixed farmland, woodland and small-scale settlement of Wisconsin or
Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. He claims that the Benedictine
tradition is one of stewardship, care and reverence for the
qualities of the land and that given such a positive and beneficial
type of change, nobody ought to want to expend energy on preserving
the wild for its own sake.
Just as White's
interpretations of the influence of religious history have been
challenged, so have Dubos's views: they are, it can be argued, too
much based on the attractive visual outcome of processes in which
social injustice was often manifest. Cistercian abbeys, for
example, accumulated great wealth and were not above dispossessing
peasants of their land and removing their settlements. Likewise,
the great landscape gardens of William Kent and 'Capability' Brown
may have occupied land which formerly supported yeoman farmers or
smallholders.
If we are to
incorporate these ideas but still to transcend the apparent
dichotomy they present then perhaps we have to eschew the notion of
a religious calendar in which there is only one saint. Thus at both
intellectual and practical levels what we need is an environmental
Book of Hours with both luminaries in their due seasons and in
their appropriate places. After all, transformation of the earth's
surface seems to be one of the inevitable concomitants of human
societies down the millennia and we should therefore be concerned
that such metamorphoses ought to be creative rather than
destructive. Yet there seems a persuasive case that no alterations
ought to be total. On practical grounds, we need the unchanged, the
wild, the natural because they are an evolving store of new
materials (especially where living organisms are involved), may
well be governors of biogeochemical cycles, and because the
behaviour of natural systems may afford us clues as to the 'best'
way of using ones like them for our own purposes. Beyond that, most
industrial cultures now place a considerable value upon the wild,
as 'being something other'. People may wish to visit such places
for recreation, or to watch TV programmes about them, or scarcely
consciously just to know that they are there. Such a deeply held
set of views cannot simply be dismissed as 'emotional' by advocates
of change.
This still leaves us
with the problem of distinguishing creative transformation from its
destructive opposite. Since no magic formula can be produced here,
we can only resort to hints and guesses. The most important is,
perhaps, to be open to innovations in terms not only of new
technology, but also of new ways of applying it and new social
structures. As in organic evolution, many of these will wither, but
others may flourish and form the nurseries of the long-term
viability which we seek. Being open must mean being ready to
receive ideas from sources other than the orthodox repositories of
scientific and technological information, T. Roszak argues that if
the Gaia hypothesis is a reality then the planet must be able in
some way to communicate with her inhabitants and tell them how to
behave. Such knowledge is as likely to come intuitively as
rationally and even those who would find Roszak and his followers
too mystical (or downright fanciful) might accept that we place too
much emphasis on the development of one brain hemisphere at the
expense of the other.
If we were to be
'greened' as individuals, with the more formal societal structures
following only as a consequence, it is then possible to glimpse,
albeit dimly, the kind of new self-organizing, co-evolutionary
relationship in which, Jantsch wrote, 'Learning . .. would be a
creative game played with reality . . . creative processes would be
permitted to unfold and form new structures.'
For each present
moment, we should continue to study the systems of the planet with
all the rigour and care that science dictates and learn both its
potentials and limits, and in a more meditative posture attend to
its emergent properties, to which we may perhaps attach the term
the way, or Tao. It is only from this duality that the
prudent practical measures endorsed by heads of nations at the Rio
Environment Summit in 1992 may be realised.