Environmental and Environmentalist Crises

Writing for Slate, Johann Hari argues that there are really two environmental movements in American history and that one group actually makes it harder for Americans to take their environmental predicament seriously. Although American Environmentalism owes much to the romantic tradition of transcendentalists like Henry David Thoreau and naturalists like John Muir, this tradition's emphasis on the "spiritual" causes of environmental crisis don't offer the concrete solutions required by problems with empirical causes and material consequences. The problem is that this romantic tendency views empiricism as a symptom of a greater spiritual crisis, which allows romantics to deny the applicability of solutions that rely on empirical evidence. To confirm this point, Hari points out that

Human beings didn't unleash warming gases into the atmosphere out of malice or stupidity or spiritual defect: They did it because they wanted their children to be less cold and less hungry and less prone to disease. The moral failing comes only very late in the story—when we chose to ignore the scientific evidence of where wanton fossil-fuel burning would take us. This failing must be put right by changing our fuel sources, not altering our souls.

Hari's remarks suggest that the romantic's appeal to a spiritual failing at the heart of environmental crises overstates the case. There is no deep or sinister flaw behind our current crisis. We have simply exceeded the empirical limits that make the world inhabitable.

When responding to questions of the environment, it's good to be aware of the traditions that shape our understanding of the world, whether they are spiritual or empirical, but it's also good to note that these traditions incline us toward particular interpretations. Take the question of whether cities are the solution to excessive resource consumption (for one account of how this might work, look at Craig Ruff's article from the online Dome magazine) or whether cities demand the industrial conditions that have ruined the environment. Romantics tend to view cities as "dehumanizing" thereby contributing to a spiritual decay that manifests itself in environmental destruction. Empiricists deny these indirect effects in favor of a rationalism based on the supremacy and sufficiency of objective evidence.

Siding with "the rationalists," Hari claims that circumspection about the limits of our rational powers only blinds us to the possibility of clearly seeing the environmental challenges confronting us. The future of environmentalism, as the future of life on Earth requires us to acknowledge the simple, empirical facts of our condition and to use this acknowledgment to develop strategies to change our future,

Rationalist environmentalists are close to finding a language that can rouse people to the great global game of Russian roulette we are playing without descending into cause-discrediting voodoo.

Since crises tend to be rapid affairs calling for swift action, we don't have time for the kind of romantic obscurity that passes for thought in most environmental writing today and throughout our history.

I don't mean to confirm Hari's conclusions, but merely to point out how well his review illustrates the tension between two very different understandings of nature, those of empiricism and romanticism. We should return to the Hari's account of the consequences of this division throughout the semester because the distinction seems so clear and the consequences so great. We may also find that these distinctions suggest a level of simplicity that distorts the interaction between empiricism and romanticism.

For instance, Michael Pollan suggests that taking "the plant's-eye view" seriously, thus muddying the waters of rational purpose, helps contribute to a solution for both spiritual and empirical environmental crises. His research draws upon rationalist, empirical research in order to carry out a project that inclines us toward romanticism's emphasis on discovering and respecting the limits of our own human-centered perspective. Hari's simplifications, if they are applied to environmental problems, might be bold enough to head off or at least diminish one kind of environmental crisis. On the other hand, if precipitous action caused by a lack of circumspection has contributed the greatest part to these crises, we might also recognize the virtue of complicating our accounts and thereby undercutting the certainty that led us to this mess in the first place.