Selection #6 The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis

In this reading Lynn White, Jr. the author, argues that Christianity is to blame for the dispositions that have resulted in environmental degradation. The world's religions have given people a view of nature as having no reason but to serve humankind. This attitude, along with the power from modern science and technology , has unraveled an ecological crisis that is continuing to retrograde. Man's unnatural treatment of nature is considerably wrong and has had bad results.

This dialogue begins with Aldous Huxley speaking of a place in England, a serene grass convered everglade, where he had spent many happy years as a child. When he returned in his later days, the area was overgrown with brush because the rabbits inhabiting the area were killed off by a disease called, Myxomatosis, that was introduced by local farmers to reduce the destruction of crops. White, being a somewhat barbaric then added that these rabbits were brought to England in 1176 most likely to enhance the protein diets of the peasants. Humans introduce alien species to an area to solve a specific problem, then when these species begin to be inconvenient or costly they are simply killed off. This enhances the fact that changes in human ways of life causes changes in nonhuman nature. Theses changes happen everywhere and in greater severity. In many regions terracing or irrigation, overeagerly hunting, overgrazing or the cutting of forests by Romans to build ships to fight wars or for expeditions, cause profound changes to our Ecology. The history of ecologic change is still so incipient that we still do not know what has happened or what the results will be.

Natural science, an effort to understand the nature of things, has evolved in several generations and among several people. Similarly, technology has been growing at times quickly and other times slowly. When Western Europe and North America merged science and technology, the theoretical and experimental approaches evolved into our natural environments. Scientific knowledge nowadays means technological power over nature.

When the first cannons were fired, in the early 14th century, they affected ecology by sending people mining for potash, iron ore, and charcoal resulting in deforestation and erosion. Nowadays a war faught with hydrogen bombs would alter the genetics of life. In 1285, London had smog problems from burning coal, presently burning of fossil fuels threatens to change the chemistry of our atmosphere, this significance we are only beginning to understand. Today's growing sewage and garbage deposits are sure to create unmanageable problems.

Our ecological crisis is emerging from our democratic culture and can only be solved if we rethink our principles, our laws.

Our science today is the heir to all the sciences of the past, presumably from Islamic scientists skills and acuteness, such as al Razi in medicine, or other Islamics in optics and mathematics. Today, around the world in whichever language, science is Western in style and method. Since our science and technology was mastered in the Middle Ages, we must study the assumptions and developments of the Midievals to understand their present day impact on our ecology.

Until recently, agriculture has been the chief in occupation. Plowing has gone through much evolution beginning with the use of oxens to machinery nowadays which were enhanced to yield from family size to larger yields. "Formerly man had been part of nature; now he was the exploiter of nature." In the Middle Ages, men are plowing, harvesting, chopping trees and butchering pigs. Man and nature are two things, and man is master nowadays. The religous study of nature was profoundly artistic rather not scientific. From the 13th century on scientists explained their motives in religious terms, until the 18th century religion became unnecessary to many scientists. Human ecology is deeply conditioned by beliefs about our nature and destiny-that is, by religion. Christians, especially in the Western World, have an anthropocentric view. Christianity bears a huge burden of guilt because most Christians believe we are superior to nature, they are willing to use it to extrapolate it for our slightest needs.

Most technology and more science will not get us out of this ecological crisis unless we find a new religion or rethink our old one. Most people do not think this as a Christian view is irrelevant since no new set of basic values has been accepted in our society since those of Christianity. We cannot save this ecological crisis until we reject the idea that nature has no need other than to serve man, since this view is religious, the remedy must essentially be religious.