GeoJournal 26.2
103
103-111
© 1992 (Feb) by Kluwer Academic Publishers
Part One: Nature, Home and Horizon in Cross-Cultural Perspective
Reflections on the History of Western Attitudes
to Nature
Clarence J. Glacken (1909-1989)
ABSTRACT: This paper explores some of the fundamental ideas which have shaped
Western attitudes toward the natural world. Four vital sets of ideas about nature and
humanity, still current today, are examined: the relationship of the human race to other
forms of life; the study of the interrelationships in the natural world; the transformation of
nature by human agency; and subjective, emotional and aesthetic reactions to nature. Most
of these ideas, though transformed throughout human history, have their roots in the
classical world. Both classical and biblical conceptions were hospitable to an anthropocentric
view of the role of human beings with regard to nature. The broader conception of the
human race as a custodian of other forms of life has been a powerful ingredient in modern
movements for conservation. Since about the middle of the 18th century, there has been
increasing concern with the interrelationships in nature, and here two developments can be
noted: the persistent idea of man as a geographic agent and the realization that human
transformations of nature have provoked unforeseen and often unintended changes.
Introduction
We are all aware, as a matter of daily observation and
experience, of the results, if not all the causes, of the now
incalculable power of h u m a n beings to transform the
natural world. I am concerned not with listing them and
their possible scale, but with the ideas lying behind them,
ideas that have b e e n powerful in shaping Western
attitudes toward the natural world.
The relationship between ideas and what has actually
happened, whether they find concrete expression and
realization in historical movements or reflect them, is a
difficult one even to speculate upon. O n e thing is certain:
despite circumstances that differ from one age to another,
despite variants introduced by thinkers from different
cultural backgrounds, ideas endure. They may not endure
in the form in which they were originally expressed, and
it is therefore difficult, if not impossible, to say that a
current problem or a situation is owing to an event or a
philosophy that originated long ago. Ideas that endure
are not static; the history of ideas reveals over and over
again their dynamic character.
There are four vital and powerful ideas or sets of
ideas about nature and h u m a n i t y curre.nt today that have
a long history. I do not claim that these are the only vital
and powerful ones concerned with the natural world, but
their importance is indisputable. ! wish to discuss each in
turn, not with any pretensions to comprehensiveness, but
with the intent 'of showing their historic depth and their
contemporary roles.
(1)
The relationship of the h u m a n race to other forms
of life, particularly to the higher animals.
(2)
The study of interrelationships in the natural
world, almost universally k n o w n today as ecology.
(3)
The transformation of nature by h u m a n agency,
interpretations that have b e e n made of it, and the
ideas it has engendered.
(4)
Subjective, emotional, and aesthetic reactions to
nature. W e can trace these back to the ancient
world, but I am concerned here with only one
phase of this history, the efflorescence of such
ideas in Western civilization from about the middle
of the 18th to the middle of the 19th centuries.
Many of the bitter controversies of today have grown out
of conflicts arising out of the acceptance or rejection of,
or indifference to, these ideas or combinations of them,
showing once more, if it needs any showing, the
f u n d a m e n t a l importance of ideas and their history in the
shaping of a civilization.
104
The Relationship of the H u m a n Race to other Forms of
Life
In the classical world and until the early part of the
19th century, ideas of humanity's place in nature were
closely allied with concepts of a hierarchy, a great chain
of being whose history has been so cogently recounted by
A r t h u r Lovejoy. We can say this in a different way, that
the history of Western thought has given much attention
to trying to understand the nature of nature, that is,
organic and inanimate nature on earth. One way of doing
this is to devise a taxonomy, ranging from the inanimate
to the animate world, then to arrange the living forms
from the simplest and crudest to the most highly
developed, conscious, and sensitive. This arrangement
was often also called the ladder of nature. The teleology
of nature, ideas of design, the great chain of being, and,
in modern times, theories of evolution have all been
attempts to organize and understand the nature of nature
and the place of the human being in it.
Only after one has read extensively and over long
historiCal periods, does one become aware of the central
importance of a great philosophic and religious question:
in what way do human beings differ from other forms of
life, particularly from the higher animals, referred to in
the English speaking world in the 19th century as the
"brute creation".
The idea that this gulf is a great one is not universal.
In Buddhist thought, the differences are there, but the
gulf is not so great. We need only recall the ahimsa
concept, associated with Jainism, of non-violence, the
awe and the sacredness of all life, and respect for the
realization of its own being. There is a difference in
outlook between a civilization or a culture that sees this
gulf as great and unbridgeable, and one that tends to see
a blending, a fusion of life forms. In some countries,
including the United States, the m o v e m e n t to give rights
to other forms of life, even to inanimate nature, can be
viewed as a protest against belief in this gulf, the
arrogance it allegedly fosters, and the anthropocentric
view of the world it first engenders, then encourages.
H o w did these conceptions start in Western thought?
Is it a natural question which inevitably arises in the
human mind? W h o can say? To answer affirmatively
might suggest a belief in the ancient doctrine of innate
ideas. I need not be concerned with this issue; I can avoid
it by merely saying the gulf exists and has existed for a
long time.
So far as we know, human beings have had an
association with animals since primordial times. They
have tamed, domesticated, hunted, and worshipped
them. In the ancient world, it was noticed that a shepherd
boy or a frail adult could control the behavior of an
elephant, an ox, or a horse. The obedience, devotion,
and labors of dogs are legendary. Animals have
intelligence, and a large store of fact and lore has
accumulated on the subject. H u m a n beings are also
intelligent, but do they have something more? If they do
GeoJournal 26.2/1992
not, how could they exercise so much control over other
forms of life?
Thoughts concerning the relationship of human beings
to the higher animals did not originate in the theology of
Judaism and Christianity. A n impressive development
took place in the classical world. The reason the question
of the difference between these two higher forms of life
was fundamental was that it was closely connected with
concepts of the purpose, design, and meaning not only of
nature on earth, but also of the entire cosmos.
Speculation on their purpose and meaning seem universal
in civiIizations, as well as among prehistoric and so-called
primitive peoples, if we remind ourselves of the immense
literature on creation myths.
Granting there is purpose and meaning in the world,
and this belief is also ancient in Western civilization, the
next query is: W h o is in a position to think about them,
to speculate and ponder over them, to make self-assured
assertions about them? Only human beings have these
abilities. So far as we know the higher animals do not,
but dolphin research may disprove it. They have
produced no literature on the subject, no footnotes, no
glosses.
For this reason the nature and quality of human life
have, early in Western civilization, been closely related to
a teleological view of nature, to the idea of design, one
drawn up by a god or gods, and planning a harmonious
whole, with all life forms adapted to the environmental
conditions for which they have been created.
One of the earliest and most explicit arguments for a
close relationship between human beings and design in
nature is in Xenophon's Memorabilia of Socrates.
Socrates is speaking with the dwarf, Aristodemus, and
after a lengthy interchange, Aristodemus assures Socrates
that if he believed the gods paid any heed to man, he
would not neglect them. Socrates in reply gives evidence
that they are not unheeding. Man is the only creature
with upright carriage, giving him wider range to see
things ahead and above, exposing him to less injury. Men
have hands, the creatures only have feet; all creatures
have tongues, only man has power of speech and the
ability to communicate with it. All other creatures have
a prescribed period for sexual indulgence; the time limit
for man is set only by old age. The deity was not content
merely to care for the body. H e also implanted in man a
soul.
Later, Euthydemus tells Socrates he is beginning to
doubt the gods are occupied in any other work than the
service of man, the one difficulty being that the lower
animals also enjoy these blessings. Socrates replies this is
so, but it is also evident that these animals receive life
and food so that they can serve man, giving as further
evidence the taming and domestication of useful animals
in order to participate in many human activities including
warfare. Euthydemus agrees. The animals are far
stronger physically, but they are so subject to man that he
can put them to any use he desires. Socrates argues that
the reasons for this relationship are the unique powers
GeoJournal 26.2/1992
and endowments of the human race. The gods have
endowed human beings with senses adapted for all kinds
of perceptions. They have implanted in them the faculty
of reasoning, they can commit things to memory. Unlike
the animals, they build up a body of knowledge based on
perceptions acted upon by reason and stored by memory.
The power of speech enables them to teach themselves
and others, to share knowledge, and to govern
themselves.
Since we live in an industrial age, one in which
meticulous artisanry handed down from generation to
generation is no longer characteristic but exceptional,
perhaps we are unable to appreciate the deep impression
made on people of the past by the suppleness, skill, and
creativity of the human hand in the arts, in everyday
chores, in the use of weapons, and in sports and games.
Although it might be true that the human eye is less
quick and sharp than the eyes of some animals, the
triumph over them is this, that the hand and the eye are
not separate but close partners. Thus there is a mighty
triad, the hand, the eye, and the mind. This combination,
it was argued both in ancient and modern times, could
not be rivalled by the instinctive behavior of animals,
quick and skilled though they may be.
The classical writers and the early fathers of the
Christian church frequently emphasized the erect carriage
of human beings. This could easily be explained
teleologically, as a product of design, enabling them to
see in all directions in a way far superior to the
corresponding animal skills. Human beings had the
unique ability to look above them to holy places,
knowing them to be heaven or the home of the gods or
of a god. For a capstone, there was Aristotle's assertion
in a famous passage of his Ethics that contemplation is the
distinctive and unique human characteristic.
These ancient speculations came to a climax in the
second book of Cicero's On the Nature of the Gods, in
which the case for and against the exalted position of the
human race is presented by the Stoic and the Epicurean
spokesmen. The Stoic argues that the creation could not
have been made for the sake of plants without sensation,
for dumb irrational animals that lacked the power to
understand, appreciate, or enjoy it; only the human being
possesses these gifts. The Epicurean, an opponent of
design and the idea of an artisan deity, dismisses the
argument by peremptorily asking how the world could
have been created for human beings when there are so
many fools and so few who are wise? Was it reasonable
to believe nature would be created for fools?
More widely known than these classical texts is the
place of man in nature in Judeo-Christian theology, the
basic source being Genesis 1, 28, in which God
commands the human race, in addition to increasing and
multiplying like other forms of life, to have dominion
over every living thing. The most exalted poetic
expression of this conception is Psalm 8. The psalmist
asks God, "What is man that thou art mindful of him",
then adds, "Yet thou hast made him little less than God",
105
and "Thou hast given him dominion over the works of
thy hands"; but the theme of the psalm is not the gifts of
the human being who has acquired them on his or her
own. The human being is a creation of God and becomes
God's vicar on earth.
Such ideas were common in the Middle Ages, the
Renaissance, and the 18th century. In the 19th, Samuel
Taylor Coleridge, following a suggestion from Kant,
distinguished between "Reason" and "Understanding";
these words do not have the meaning they have in
ordinary English today. Coleridge equated "reason" with
a higher form of perception, approximating a divinely
implanted intuition, while understanding was of a lower
order, knowledge coming from conventional workaday
science and observations of the senses. To Coleridge,
"reason" is unique to the human race, while
"understanding" is common among animals. The
intelligence of horses
and dogs is universally
acknowledged.
Thomas Henry Huxley in a famous essay, Evidence as
to Man's Place in Nature (1863), summarizing and
defending the Darwinian theory, stressed that evolution
had brought about a qualitative difference between
human beings and the higher primates, remarking upon
the great gulf in intellectual power between the lowest
man and the highest apes.
The best recent example of this effort to portray the
essential differences between human and other forms of
life is the philosophy of Teilhard de Chardin, particularly
his Phenomenon of Man. It is based on two fundamental
concepts: the human being as the unique form of
consciousness in the world, one that will continue to
evolve; and the creation by human beings of the
noosphere, the sphere of mind. I will discuss this latter
point later.
Anthropogenesis is the crown of cosmogenesis. In
wishing to settle the question of the superiority of man
over the animal, it is necessary "to brush resolutely
aside" secondary and equivocal manifestations of inner
activity in human behavior, "making straight for the
central phenomenon, reflection". This seems identical
with Aristotle's "contemplation".
When I was writing this, I was reminded of two of the
most famous lines in English poetry, ones I learned by
heart in grammar school. They are from Gray's Elegy
Written in a Country Churchyard: "Full many a flower is
born to blush unseen, / And waste its sweetness on the
desert air". Both the flower and the human being present
to love its sweetness - it was wasted.
Although the classical and biblical conceptions had
different origins and different motives, the results were
not
dissimilar.
Both
were
hospitable
to
an
anthropocentric view of the role of the human race, but
it could range from a crude to an exalted form: a narrow
view, especially of plants and animals as being nothing
but human resources, a conception summed up in the
phrase, "Lord and Master of the Creation"; and a
broader and more humane one, still recognizing human
106
superiority but believing the creation was for all life, that
the place of man at its apex was also the seat of
custodianship.
The crude form has survived in a purely utilitarian
conception of nature, perhaps the most powerful of all
current conceptions because it is a dominant philosophy
of many governments, of the developer's mentality, and
of many national and international corporations and
conglomerates.
I am not suggesting that present day attitudes are
direct descendants of classical views or that modern
enthusiasts have ancient ideas in mind. I am only
suggesting the persistence, in different variants and
forms, of what is basically a similar attitude. The
difference between the present and ancient times is that
in the present the huge apparatus of technology is
directed to short term profits, benefits, and rewards, and
is at the service of the utilitarian philosophy.
The broader conception has been more charitable to
other forms of life: it could include not only the
conception of the human race as a custodian of other
forms of animate and inanimate nature, but also ideas of
responsibility to posterity as well, even though posterity
is still a human one. These ideas have been powerful
ingredients in modern movements for conservation in
general, saving plants and animals from extinction, and
the preservation of the aesthetic values and beauties of
the natural world.
From time to time, both views have been challenged,
particularly the crude version. Today the challenge takes
the form of saying that other forms of life and inorganic
masses like rivers, landforms, and rocks also have rights,
but the argument is still based on an anthropocentric view
in the sense that human beings become lawmakers
against themselves, public attorneys taking care of the
interests of the natural world.
Critics of the
anthropocentric view have also found in it a justification
for cruel treatment of working animals and in the blood
sports like bull- and cock-fighting, animal breeding for
human gratifications like horse racing, and the highly
specialized breeding of dogs for shows and the hunt.
The Study of Interrelationships in the Natural World
Natural theology was an outgrowth of fundamental
importance from the design argument to which classical
and biblical thought contributed. The term often is used
synonymously with physico-theology and natural religion.
It was assumed that God or the gods were kind and
reasonable, did not act capriciously or senselessly; the
result was a conception of the world as a harmonious
whole, consistent in its structure with intelligent design,
each part adapted to its own function, each life form
created as it is now at the beginning (fixity of species was
taken for granted), and so created that it could live in the
habitats designed for it. From these presuppositions,
particularly in the period of the high development of
GeoJournal 26.2/1992
natural theology in the late 17th and early 18th centuries,
modern, secular, scientific concepts of ecostystems (today
called ecology) emerged.
One of the most enduring and influential ideas to
come out of natural theology is that nature is a teacher.
The comparison is expressed from the early church
fathers virtually to the present and appears frequently
among natural theologians, poets, novelists, and other
prose writers of the pre-Romantic and Romantic periods.
Nature is a book. If we are theists, especially Christians,
our religion quickly teaches us how to read this book and
its letters, to increase our knowledge and contribute
further proofs of the wisdom of God's creativity. Book
learning, education in schools and universities was often
unfavorably compared with nature's teachings, ignoring
the fact that they taught different lessons. One could
never learn calculus by absorbing lessons taught by
beautiful trees swaying in the wind beside a romantic
waterfall, and one could not experience the emotional
and aesthetic satisfactions of a mirror lake when studying
French irregular verbs.
In its development, natural theology was closely
identified with the physico-theological proof of the
existence of God. The order and beauty of the creation
are evidences of God's existence. They could not possibly
be the result of chance, caprice, lack of design. In
Christian thought, the basic text is in Paul's letter to the
Romans, "Ever since the creation of the world his
invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has
been clearly perceived in the things that have been made"
(Romans, 1, 20). God is a transcendent deity. When we
look at nature, we are not looking at God, there is no
suggestion of pantheism, and nature is not holy. God is
not present in it; nature is there, a creation of God,
evidence and proof of his creative activity.
Natural theology also has been deeply involved with
the history of revealed religion. It could be looked upon
as subordinate to but supportive of God's written word in
the Bible, it could be offered as something superior to
revelation because God's written word, as recorded, has
suffered errors and misunderstandings in translation and
transmission. No such errors are in the Book of Nature.
Natural theology was not confined to Christianity; its
only theological requirement is theism. It was embraced
by many Christian thinkers as another proof, in addition
to revelation, of God's existence. Deists who rejected
Christ but not a deity frequently promoted it. Natural
theology is one of the best illustrations in Western
thought of agreement, not conflict, with science, and for
a simple reason: every discovery, whether of a hitherto
unknown beautiful flower or of a new land, could be
viewed ecstatically as additional proof of God's existence.
Once we are aware of the scope and vigor of natural
theology, we can recognize its wide acceptance and
influence from the 17th to the 20th centuries. One of its
early classics is John Ray's Wisdom of God Manifested in
the Works of the Creation, another is Gilbert White's
Natural History of SeIborne. It was basic to Linnaeus'
GeoJournal 26.2/1992
philosophy of nature. William Paley's Natural Theology,
a conspicuous nadir, was probably the most influential of
all in the English speaking world. It inspired the young
Darwin, who wrote: "I do not think I hardly ever
admired a book more than Paley's 'Natural Theology'. I
could almost formally have said it by heart." One of the
classics of my native state, which is also a national classic,
John Muir's The Mountains of California (1894), is
suffused with traditional natural theology.
From the times of Ray, natural theology has had a
closer and closer relationship to natural history. The
traditional natural history of those times is different from
the popular natural history of today, at least as we find
it in American bookstores, because the latter is largely
concerned with animals and their habitats. Traditional
natural history is broader and deeper, and could include
natural theology; ethnography; statistical antecedents of
modern demography; natural resources; plants and
animals and their habitats. By its nature, it was
ecological. A popular equivalent term in that day of what
is now called ecology was "the economy of nature".
The 18th century was a high point in modern natural
history, its eminence obscured by the stress of general
and intellectual historians on the philosophes and political
and social thought. The most illustrious of the natural
historians was Buffon, reminders of whom are still there
for any curious wanderer through the Jardin des Plantes
in Paris. His Histoire naturelle, g~ndrale, et particuli~re is
absorbing today, as we read the first and second views of
nature, descriptions and comments on wild and
domesticated animals, the masterpiece on the dog, and,
most of all, his Des Opoques de la nature. Buffon was not
alone; there were Linnaeus, Rousseau (his writings on
such subjects forgotten in the emphasis on his social,
political, and confessional writings), Bernardin de SaintPierre, now remembered for his novel Paul et Virginie,
which is still fine reading on the natural vegetation of the
tropical world. In England there was Sir Joseph Banks
and in the United States William Bartram whose account
of his travels in North and South Carolina and Florida is
one of the classics of New World natural history. In many
of these writings - Linnaeus, Bernardin, and Bartram are
examples - significant doses of natural theology still
remained.
Unfortunately the history of natural history has been
studied far less extensively that the history of science and
technology. The result has been a neglect of fields which
have been vitally concerned with interrelationships in
nature. Today "ecosystem" is the single most important
concept, for the present and future welfare of all life may
well determine the future of the planet.
The conspicuous successes of Western science have
been in isolating a problem, then finding the answer. It
has not been so distinguished in the explorations of
interrelationships. Science could envisage and then create
a nuclear reactor, but scientists are still apparently as
much in the dark as the rest of us in knowing how to
control the diffusion of nuclear wastes, radiation, and
107
many other only dimly foreseen consequences of their
discoveries and inventions.
Since about the middle of the 18th century, the
literature concerned with the interrelationships in nature
has been increasing in the West until reaching its present
worldwide proportions, but I have reservations regarding
its possible future successes. The history of the study of
these interrelationships is largely that of natural theology,
natural history, the earth sciences, evolutionary theories,
and modern ecological theory. I have already discussed
natural theology and natural history and will now turn
briefly to the others.
When speaking of earth sciences, I am thinking
primarily of Alexander von Humboldt, honored in his
day as one of the great explorers and scientists of the
modern world, then disdained, after his death going
through a period of eclipse, almost forgotten, but now
revived especially after the celebrations in 1959 of the
centenary of his death. When one reads von Humboldt
today, one is impressed with his preoccupation with the
unity of nature amidst its diversities. He was interested in
plant geography, not so much in the distribution of
individual species as in plant associations. He was deeply
involved in the relationship between the subjective
attitudes to nature expressed in travels, novels,
exhibitions of exotic plants, and landscape painting, and
the objective study of phenomena by scientific methods,
experimentation,
instrumentation,
reason,
and
observation. One of his favorite emphases was that these
polar ways of looking at nature were not antagonistic but
reinforced one another.
Most histories of the idea of evolution emphasize
phylogeny almost exclusively. If, however, we look at the
history of natural theology, natural history, and earth
sciences as preludes, the evolutionary theories of
Lamarck, Darwin, and Wallace are also firmly grounded
in interrelationships, what Darwin called, in the third
chapter of The Origin of Species, "a web of complex
relations". J. Arthur Thomson, in his lectures on the
Darwin Centenary in 1909, said that "no naturalist,
before or since, has come near Darwin in his realisation
of the web of life, in his clear vision and picture of the
vast system of linkages that penetrates throughout the
animate world". There is a changing pattern in the web
through time, Thomson added; it becomes complex, "and
this is evolution".
The study of interrelationships in evolutionary theory
was not confined to Darwin. Lamarck, still suffering from
neglect of his genius, was deeply concerned with this
issue in his writings, particularly his essay on Nature
which he wrote in the Nouveau dictionnaire d'histoire
naturelle in 1818. Wallace, like Darwin, saw the basic
importance of geographic distributions, another phase of
interrelationships, in evolutionary theory, and Wallace's
interest in them is conspicuous in his scientific works and
in his autobiography.
Earlier studies of these interrelationships were based
primarily on natural theology, natural history, or both.
108
Since Darwin their study has been based, directly or
indirectly, on a theory of evolution. What are "natural
selection" and the "struggle for existence" but ways of
describing or summarizing interrelationships? Many
ecological studies of the late 19th and early 20th centuries
illustrate the new post-Darwinian trends. Darwin himself
wrote a classic study of earthworms. The Austrian
botanist, Kerner von Marilaun, wrote of the plant life of
the Danubian lands; the German zoologist, M6bius,
studied oyster beds as a biocoenose (a community of
living things); and the American limnologist, Forbes, the
lake as a microcosm.
Continuing this account to the present is unnecessary.
The fact that ecological ideas and methods are the
fundamental concepts in nature-preservation movements,
environmental protection organizations, public and
private, societies for the prevention of plant and animal
extinctions, industrial and other kinds of pollution is too
well known to be labored over and expanded upon here.
The Transformation of Nature by Human Agency
Two developments are striking in the history of these
concepts of interrelationships: (1) their close association
with the idea of man as a geographic agent, and (2) the
realization that human transformations of nature have
provoked unforeseen, often remote and unintended
changes.
I was convinced of the truth of the first point when I
found it was impossible to write the history of the idea of
man as a geographic agent without constantly being
confronted with conceptions of interrelationships in
nature. One reason is that, historically, there has been a
strong tendency to study them as far removed as possible
from human interferences. It was assumed there was a
harmony, a natural climax, an equilibrium in nature and
the best way of studying it therefore was in isolation
because human interferences disturbed them. The
concept of a primordial, pristine, untouched nature was
often inspired by the wilderness before the onslaughts of
modern technology. It continues in the idea of nature
preserves which are set aside solely for scientific research
and are not open to visitors or tourists, but only to
scientists studying processes that could be isolated, in
part at least, when the human interferences were reduced
if not completely eliminated.
Within the last few decades, confidence in the recent
existence of such a primordial world has declined. I am
not speaking of the world before the coming of homo
sapiens. It used to be widely believed that primitive and
prehistoric peoples were so much a part of nature that
they were indistinguishable from it. This belief was
especially prominent at a period when the changes made
by such peoples were contrasted with the quick,
dramatic, often disastrous transformations brought about
by peoples of E u r o p e a n origin or descent. Scientific
travellers in the late 18th century often commented on
GeoJournal 26.2/1992
still relatively untouched regions on the eastern seaboard
of the United States. They thought them unchanged since
the creation until they felt the axe of the European
woodsman. Indigenous peoples, so it was thought, were
so much a part of nature that they made few if any
permanent changes in it. Modern studies of the role of
fire in prehistoric and primitive societies have
undermined this earlier belief, and Danish archeologists
using Neolithic flint axe blades from the National
Museum in Copenhagen and models of the haft showed
that a forest could be cleared by these tools.
If we assume a pristine nature, what is the role of
human beings either as individuals or organized into
cultures or societies? They are considered intruders. They
are disturbing influences penetrating a pre-existing
natural harmony and equilibrium. The literature of the
past century or so is full of references to the natural
balance or harmony of nature if uninterfered with, which
mean in almost every case nature that is in equilibrium
because it is remote from human intrusions. This was the
basic premise of the work of George P. Marsh (1964), the
first to my knowledge in any language dealing with the
scope and historical depth of environmental change by
human agency. In the opening sentence of the preface to
Man and Nature, Marsh said his object was "to point out
the dangers of imprudence and the necessity of caution in
all operations, which, on a large scale, interfere with the
spontaneous [that is, natural] arrangements of the organic
or the inorganic world ... " On entering the natural
world, the human being, unavoidably disturbing
harmonies and natural equilibriums, should be a cautious
and wary intruder, not a brash and reckless one.
In the modern history of natural history, all of which
in
one
form
or
another
is concerned
with
interrelationships, sooner or later we come upon
warnings or denunciations of human interferences in the
natural order. It was said that cutting down trees changed
the climate, induced soil erosion. Destruction of the
habitats of plants and animals indirectly brought about
their extinction, overabundant harvests of oysters made it
possible for other species to fill their niches. The
domestication of plants and animals was seen as a
massive intrusion into the natural world; the breeding of
plants and animals for specific purposes, whether for
food, medicine, or sport, could effectively and
cumulatively change the earth's biomass.
The most revealing and surprising discovery could
only have been made by observers with an eye to wider
relationships. We are so familiar with it today that it
seems not a discovery but self-evident. We are not
surprised to read that a trace element from the pollutants
of a industrial society has been found in the stomach of
a bird in the Arctic. Neither are we surprised when told
our water has been poisoned by industrial waste a long
way off, or that we can no longer eat the offshore marine
life because it has accumulated too many chemicals.
A n example of this discovery from a pre-industrial age
concerned 18th century American colonists so annoyed at
GeoJoumal 26.2/1992
the crows because they gobbled up the corn that they
killed them off, then repented when the worms,
caterpillars, and beetles multiplied. So they stopped their
war on the crows because they were efficient devourers of
the tiny parasites. Marsh's example is even more pointed
about the possible relation between ecological processes
and cultural matters, activities for one purpose which
have remote, unforeseen, unintended consequences.
When beaver hats were fashionable in Paris, their
popularity was leading to the extinction of the beavers.
Then a Parisian manufacturer invented the silk hat, the
beaver was out of danger, resumed its activities in
forming bogs and multiplied; thus, in Marsh's words, "the
convenience or the caprice of Parisian fashion has
unconsciously exercised an influence which may sensibly
affect the physical geography of a distant continent."
In an earlier part of this essay, I discussed the
historical importance of distinctions between human and
other living beings, particularly the higher animals. In the
19th century this question came up in a different setting,
and is associated with the eminent geologist Charles Lyell
and also Marsh. In the first edition of his Principles of
Geology (1830-33), Lyell, the outstanding defender and
proponent of uniformitarianism in geology, considered
the agencies which transform the earth's geological
structure, among them human agency. Human beings can
level the land as a result of settlement and cultivation;
they can affect the lives of plants and animals by
destroying or modifying their habitats, but he thought, on
the whole, that human beings, compared with the great
natural forces like vulcanism or floods (he did not
consider that, despite their destructiveness, they are local
in character, not regional or worldwide in their effect)
were weak geological agents, and denied that there was
a qualitative difference between human and "brute"
action.
Without naming Lyell, Marsh disputed the weakness
of man as a geographic or geological agent. The two men
later corresponded; Lyell realized he was wrong. In the
tenth edition of the Principles of Geology (1867), he
acknowledged that human and brute action in modifying
the surface of the earth were qualitatively different. The
distinctness "of the human form from all other species,
considered merely as an efficient cause in the physical
world is real"; the relation of human beings to
contemporary species of plants and animals is "widely
different" from the supposed relations of irrational
animals to one another. The human race through the
progressive accumulation of knowledge from generation
to generation also changes its own character. Human
interventions are a "peculiar and unprecedented agency",
appearing long after other parts of the animate and
inanimate world were already in existence, which affords
ground for concluding that the experience, during
thousands of ages, of all events which may happen on
earth "would not enable a philosopher to speculate with
confidence concerning future contingencies."
109
If a gulf separates human beings from the brute
creation, and human modifications of the earth
historically have been not merely an intensification of
changes also made by plants and animals, but are of a
unique character in the history of the earth, and if we
agree with observers who knew what they were talking
about that, in the latter part of the 19th century, this
unique human power was increasing by leaps and bounds,
then what? It led back to a trail already blazed by
Buffon. In Des #poques de Ia nature (1778), he divided
earth history into seven epochs; in the seventh and final
one the power of man aided nature ("Lorsque la
puissance de l'homme a second# celle de la nature").
Marsh said the eminent Italian geologist Stoppani
went further than he ventured to do, treating human
actions "as a new physical element altogether sui
generis". The existence of man constituted a geological
period, an "anthropozoic era". In 1904, two prominent
and highly respected American geologists, Chamberlain
and Salisbury, commenting on Lyell's earlier thought,
stated that "the mental era has just begun"; its effects are
increasing with phenomenal rapidity "when measured by
the slow pace of most geological change".
In our own times Teilhard de Chardin belongs to this
tradition. As a paleontologist well grounded in the
geology of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Teilhard
seemed inspired by the famous work of Eduard Suess
(whom he mentions), Das Anditz der Erde (The Face of
the Earth) in which Suess discussed the various zones of
the earth, the central baryosphere, the lithosphere, the
hydrosphere, and the atmosphere. Later, Teilhard said,
science added another to Suess's four layers, the
biosphere, and now he will add one more, the noosphere,
a thinking layer outside and above the biosphere.
Hominization brings forth a new age; the earth gets a
new skin, and it finds its soul. Man emerged "from a
general groping of the world. He was born a direct lineal
descendant from the total effort of life, so that the species
has an axial value and a pre-eminent dignity". He
paraphrased approvingly Julian Huxley's assertion that
"in modern scientific man, evolution was at last becoming
conscious of itself". Teilhard dismissed the view of a
simpler age that man is the centre of the universe because
he is "something much more wonderful - the arrow
pointing the way to the final unification of the world in
terms of life. Man alone constitutes the last-born, the
freshest, the most complicated, the most subtle of all the
successive layers of life".
Teilhard was optimistic but he was no Dr. Pangloss.
The Jesuit paleontologist knew war's realities at first
hand, but despite this knowledge, he was optimistic
because he envisaged an extremely long time for the final
realization, the final perfection, an indefinite period,
perhaps millenia away. The effect of taking such a long
view can be to place less emphasis on contemporary wars
and catastrophes which make religious and philosophical
optimism seem weak-minded and foolish, as being
another episode in a long history that has passed and is
110
to come. Teilhard died on Easter Sunday, 1955. Since
that time prospects have become infinitely more ominous.
In the short term view, especially the period beginning in
August 1914 and continuing to the present, the
indications are that our noosphere has become a sphere
of irrationality, mindlessness, and madness.
The effect of these developments has been to set off
the human race even more dramatically and decisively
from the rest of the animate and inanimate world than in
the past, and in a way that differs from earlier
conceptions like alienation that emphasize how modern
life, especially in large cities, has divorced the human
being from nature, a familiar theme throughout the preRomantic and Romantic periods.
These realizations of the massive human power over
the earth's environment, the concept of an anthropozoic
era, were current long before the discovery of atomic
fission, computers, nuclear bombs and reactors, and a
host of other technological developments that distinguish
the period of World War If to the present as unique in
the history of technology and the history of the world.
Subjective, Emotional, and Aesthetic Reactions to Nature
The great age of subjective, emotional, and aesthetic
reactions to nature was from about the middle of the 18th
to the middle of the 19th centuries, what is called the preRomantic and Romantic periods, f do not like these
terms as applied to the history of attitudes to nature.
They are unsatisfactory in marking off chronological
periods or styles in taste because these attitudes have
been widely spread over the history of Western
civilization from the ancient world to the present. This
period was distinctive in being an efflorescence. It was
remarkable, and I think no other one in the history of
Western civilization can equal it in the exploration of
these conceptions.
An outstanding characteristic of its literature is the
strong emphasis on natural theology, on nature as a
teacher. There was intense interest in environments of
wilderness and solitude, and humanized environments
long settled and with strong historical associations.
Masterpieces were written about Athens, the Roman
Campagna,
and
Chamonix.
Another
prominent
characteristic is the interest in the unique and the
individual in books of travel, poetry, novels, or landscape
painting; it was not the universal, but the specific: in
scenery, people, and landscapes. Their authors gloried in
the differences.
It was an age in which sensitive poets, travellers,
ordinary people alike unashamedly watched, became
lyrical, and described as best they could waterfalls,
cataracts, mirror lakes, lonely crags and precipices,
Alpine scenery, winding roads, panoramic views, solitary
plains, strolls along the seashore with spires in the
distance.
Some fine travel books were written, like
GeoJournal 26.2/1992
Goethe's Italian Journey and Chateaubriand's journey
from Paris to Jerusalem; there were the Waverley novels,
Bernardin's Paul et Virginie which von Humboldt took
with him on his South American explorations, and
Rousseau's Julie, ou La Nouvelle Hdloise, an extremely
influential novel, in part about the human relationship to
nature, especially mountains.
It was easy later to ridicule people communing with
nature, but many beautiful lines attest to its power and
inspiration. It was easy to parody a person standing amid
the ruins of Palmyra, Rome, Athens, musing on the
passing away of everything human, while nature was
eternal, but there were many authentic and moving
testimonies, illustrating the old saying, sic transit gloria
mundi. Some explored the idea that our attitudes and
feelings for nature change throughout the phases of our
lives. Almost all of them had something to say about
urban and rural life and landscapes. There was a certain
wistful, sad, and poignant evocation of sound in the
Eolian harp, a stringed instrument with a sound box
inserted into a window frame, allowing the winds to
produce unpredictable sounds and mysterious melodies to
enchant the imagination. The most touching tribute to i t
is Coleridge's poem, The Aeolian Harp (1795).
In letters, travels, poetry, and novels there was much
interest in human geography, not merely in customs and
traditions, but in the relationship of people to their
environments. These were closely associated with love of
one's birthplace, patriotism and nationalism that went
beyond reverence for the past, national epics, and the
like; they emphasized instead the roots of a people in its
soil. They were also frequently allied with vague ideas of
environmental influences mostly of climate, and it was
common to ascribe moods, national character (another
strong preoccupation), customs and other cultural
characteristics to climate. They paid much attention to
the elements, particularly to water in all its forms: the
sea; streams, whether they were mighty rivers like the
Rhine or Rhone, or tiny rivulets in a beautiful vale;
clouds (one could write a book on clouds as they were
seen in this period). Such experiences lent themselves to
disquisitions on melancholy, solitude, and reverie.
It was a walking age. Observations could be made
from carts, carriages, coaches, or horseback, but many
came from indefatigable walkers and climbers, innocent
of automobiles, airplanes, even of bicycles. I know of no
other period in which these subjective, emotional, and
aesthetic reactions to the natural world were so closely
allied to landscape painting. In the United States, the
best example is Asher Durand's Kindred Spirits (1894) in
which the American landscape painter Thomas Cole and
the poet William Cullent Bryant are on a promontory
overlooking an indescribably beautiful
mountain
landscape, framed by overhanging boughs of a tree, with
waterfalls, and large rocks at the bottom of the stream.
Almost every element in what was considered a
Romantic landscape could be identified in this painting.
"Kindred Spirits" meant the kinship between poet and
GeoJournal 26.2/1992
artist. It was a period in which they were considered the
most sensitive interpreters of nature's wonders.
The E u r o p e a n examples are much more famous: the
paintings of Constable, Turner, Caspar David Friedrich,
the continuing reverence for Claude Lorrain, Salvator
Rosa and Nicolas Poussin. It is little wonder that
Alexander von Humboldt included landscape painting as
one of the great historic inspirers of a subjective feeling
for nature. The retrieval of the past was carried on with
fervor, particularly folk songs, folklore, and music, many
about home, humble scenes, and daily chores.
The 19th century was an age of great environmental
transformations and the destruction of much natural
beauty. Many of these people were concerned about it;
the roots of modern movements to preserve buildings and
nature, and to create national parks and preserves were
inspired by ideas of writers and poets of this period.
Later, many of these topics were sensitively discussed by
John Ruskin.
111
Conclusion
Are ecological concepts, aesthetic, emotional, and
subjective values, the means by which we can
understand, protect, and cherish the natural world,
becoming more and more ineffective in guiding and
controlling the transformations that continue at an
amazing pace? Is the human race, through its massive
influences, creating too many divergent and conflicting
changes with little heed and preciously little knowledge of
present and future consequences, choking off the means
by which its changes can be understood? We are back
again to the unforeseen indirect consequences of acts
done for different, more direct, more immediate
purposes. Are these changes now so incredibly complex
and varied, so diffuse, now blending, now conflicting with
one another, that progressively we will have less and less
real, detailed, and accurate knowledge of what is
happening to the environment as an ecological, not an
economic system? Is the ruthless destruction of natural
beauty depriving life of one of its great heritages? The
chances now seem excellent these disasters might occur.
If anything can fend them off, it will be a sensitivity to
ideas and their history. Only they can rescue us from
mindless development and progress.
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