Philip Shabecoff
As the ecologist Aldo Leopold pointed out, our civilization is racing far ahead of the slow pace of evolution. A Fierce Green Fire, 1993.
Philip Shabecoff was a reporter and correspondent for the New York Times for many years and more recently the executive producer of Greenwire, a daily environmental news service. He is a recipient of the James Madison Award of the American Library Association.
We have been acting out the classic cartoon image of a man sitting on the branch of a tree and sawing it off behind him. Ibid.
(Francis) Parkman did not applaud the triumphant march of civilization across the country. Like James Fenimore Cooper, he "despised commerce and businessmen, industrialism and all its works." Ibid.
George Catlin roamed across the then truly wild West in the 1830s, painting the Plains Indians and the wildlife he saw there. He was one of the first Americans to call for saving at least some portions of the wild land and its inhabitants. Ibid.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, romanticism held sway in the more settled areas of the United States. Rousseau had now won his argument with Hobbes on both sides of the Atlantic. Life in a state of nature was no longer perceived as mean, brutish, and short but, in some ways, more fulfilling and desirable than civilization. Ibid.
The most influential articulation of the importance of nature and the relationship of humans to the natural world came from the transcendentalists of New England, particularly from those two who are part of the bedrock of American literature and American thought&endash;Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Ibid.
Thoreau can be regarded as the spiritual founder of the modern crusade to preserve what is left of our wilderness. Ibid.
As the nineteenth century was drawing to a close, three talented, idiosyncratic, charismatic, and driven men were making their entrance on the national stage. Gifford Pinchot, John Muir, and Theodore Roosevelt were to write the first pages of modern environmental history in the United States. Ibid.
For most of this century, few people paid much attention to what was happening. We were fouling our own nest but, as former Environmental Protection Agency official Milton Russell noted,, "the stench was overpowered by the stronger perfume of money." Ibid.
FDR and his Interior Secretary, Harold L. Ickes, aggressively added lands to the public domain. They acquired hundreds of thousands of acres of private property in the East and amalgamated them with existing national forests or created new forests. Ibid.
The new environmentalism has made significant inroads into religious thought. Ibid.
The great French priest, theologian, and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin had long since criticized Christian doctrine for concluding that nature has been static since the creation and insisted that nature was a growing, self-creating force. Ibid.
Humans, Teilhard contended, did not save themselves by freeing themselves from nature, as Christianity taught, but by working with and becoming one with nature. Ibid.
In 1967 . . . Lynn White, Jr. published a short essay in Science called "The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis." Its message was blunt. Christianity or, more broadly, the Judeo-Christian tradition, "bears a huge burden of guilt" for the destruction of nature by the science and technology of Western civilization. Christianity, especially in its Western form, "is the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen." Ibid.
Christians are reluctant to adopt White's ideas of the need for a new theology to embrace nature because "people have spent two thousand years thinking of the earth as a way station. Ibid.
A basic premise of environmentalism . . . is that humans are interconnected with all of life and we throw away any of the pieces at peril to ourselves. Ibid.
The essential message of environmentalism is not catastrophe but hope. Ibid.