Christianity's Role in Our Ecological Crisis - Lynn White's Essay Revisited

I was driving around a last week performing an errand, and I had NPR on the car radio as background noise because I wasn't in the mood for music (NPR is  mostly background noise to me these days, particularly the news and analysis).  I had the opportunity to hear a snippet  of a public affairs program which was profiling Dr. Paul Lindroth at the University of Wisconsin, professor  of entomology, an Evangelical and a promoter of the Christian environmental stewardship movement.  Environmental stewardship by Christians is underpinned by the idea that man's dominion over the earth as  articulated in the Bible actually means stewardship.  One of the roots of this idea was an essay  published in 1967 by Lynn White, professor of history at Princeton and UCLA.  

That essay, "The  Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis", identified Christian ethos along with the Industrial Revolution  as critical shapers in human attitudes towards nature - as a resource to be exploited.  The stewardship  movement in a sense is effort to counteract the message in Dr. White's essay of Christianity as a despoiler  of nature.  

Even 40 years later, Dr. White's essay has legs, taking into consideration the tree we've gotten ourselves up  in from an ecological and resource perspective. He observed that the proposals to address the ecological  crisis "seem too partial, pallative, negative. . ." which aptly describes measures such as "50 Simple Things  You Can Do to Save the Earth" and TerraPass, themselves worthwhile as educational efforts but let's not  mistake them for real solutions to biodiversity losses, resource depletion, climate change or harmful  chemical exposures.  He expressed doubt that the ecological backlash can be avoided by simply applying more  science and technology to the problems, noting that "[u]nless we think about fundamentals, our specific  measures may produce new backlashes more serious than those they are designed to remedy".  These fundamentals  consist of the Western tradition of science and technology, which, as anyone who's watched "Connections"  knows, started in the 11th Century, coupled with the Medieval view of nature as something to be dominated and  exploited, which grew out of the victory of Christianity over pagan traditions and then later was nurtured by  advances in agriculture.  

However, the present increasing disruption of the global environment is the product of a dynamic  technology and science which were originating in the Western medieval world against which Saint Francis was  rebelling in so original a way. Their growth cannot be understood historically apart from distinctive  attitudes toward nature which are deeply grounded in Christian dogma. The fact that most people do not think  of these attitudes as Christian is irrelevant. No new set of basic values has been accepted in our society to  displace those of Christianity. Hence we shall continue to have a worsening ecologic crisis until we reject  the Christian axiom that nature has no reason for existence save to serve man.

It's hard to imagine most Americans, who pronounce themselves to be Christians, overcoming this blind spot.   They're going to see it as a rejection of their faith.  And, a lot of Americans who share this blind spot  need to get on board with the mammoth undertaking of reversing or at least mitigating ecological problems if  we're going to make it through the next few generations.  Scaring them with melting ice caps, oil shockwave  and chaos is only going to accomplish so much in pushing them in the right direction (also keep in mind the  "Left Behind" crew, a sizable group, which awaits the chaos with the same sense of anticipation of a seven  year old awaiting Christmas day). In a way, it appears that Dr. White recognized this problem - we not going  to turn back into paganists or Zen Buddhists to avert the onrushing ecological crisis.  His suggestion was to  propose St. Francis of Assisi, who rebelled against the notion of human dominion over nature, patron saint of  ecologists. Is there still some life in this idea?

A momentary aside: if you're one of us who are fighting to preserve the Enlightenment and to reclaim our  democratic institutions from the forces of neoconservatism, the implications of this observation of Dr.  White's might be troubling.  

Science was traditionally aristocratic, speculative, intellectual in intent; technology was lower-class,  empirical, action-oriented. The quite sudden fusion of these two, towards the middle of the 19th century, is  surely related to the slightly prior and contemporary democratic revolutions which, by reducing social  barriers, tended to assert a functional unity of brain and hand. Our ecologic crisis is the product of an  emerging, entirely novel, democratic culture. The issue is whether a democratized world can survive its own  implications. Presumably we cannot unless we rethink our axioms.

From an ecological perspective, are we fighting for the wrong side?  We'd like to think we've grown beyond  Dr. White's pronouncement that "[o]ur implicit faith in perpetual progress" is rooted in Judeo-Christian  theology.  But has that really happened yet?