A Voice Crying in the Wilderness

The National Post recently features a series of articles arguing that environmentalism has become something like a religion.

I agree; as it happens, I had written somethnig to this effect a few years ago. I've dug a draft out of my files:



Everybody wants to protect the environment; it is inconceivable to oppose such a thing. It is a “motherhood” issue—Mother Nature, that is. So the Social Affairs Commission of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a pastoral letter last October calling on Christian communities to “reflect on the meaning of water in our lives, the need to preserve it and safeguard its purity, and …to redefine how it is shared.” Catholics are to “tithe time, treasure and talent to environmental causes”; even to “insist on government action to ban bulk exports of water… and guarantee that water utilities remain public, rather than private entities.” (1)

But wait a minute. Is this Christianity? Or is the world too much with us? Aren’t these quite material concerns? Why are we asked to share--but not Canada’s water resources with foreigners?

Care for the environment is implicit from the moment God charged Adam to tend his garden. The Holy Father observes, “If you look at the world with a pure heart, you too will see the face of God” (2). That’s what science is about: reading God's “signs and characters in the Book of Nature,” as some of its early advocates put it (3). But note: barring a tree or two, Adam’s job was not to leave nature alone, but to tend and complete it. Christianity begins in a garden; it ends in the celestial city, New Jerusalem.

Is the modern ecology movement on this path? In getting Christianity on board with current thinking, are we missing legitimate objections? Environmentalism seems, in the end, a distinctly different cosmology, in some ways hostile to Christian values.

Husbanding resources is good Christianity; but the modern ecology movement wants more. It wants wilderness.


The Wilding of Canada

Canada currently plans fifteen new national parks. The “Lake Superior National Marine Conservation Area” is typical. It is not for humans--not accessible to them. It is to “preserve the area in its natural state” (4). A park is urged for the southeast corner of BC--because it has no road in (5). Fully 94% of current Parks Canada lands are tagged “wilderness,” with human activities “kept to a minimum.” Most of the rest is “special preservation” and “natural environment”: combined total: 99.42%. Humans may freely visit about 0.58% of our national parkland. The rest is for … ?

When John A. Macdonald's government founded our park system, with Banff Hot Springs in 1885, the point was the new railroad leading up to it. It was “worth a million,” W.C. Van Horne declared--for tourism. He built a stately hotel for the influx; Sir John predicted “the greatest and most successful health resort on the continent.”

The world's first national park, Yellowstone, was established just 13 years earlier. Its superintendent, Nathaniel Langford, planned “to render it accessible to the people of all lands“ (6).

They were for humankind. Ecologists now invert this: the CCCB speaks of a “preferential option for the earth.”

An important milestone was the 1964 passage by the US Congress of the Wilderness Act. This established a mandate to protect “wilderness,” defined as “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.... Retaining its primeval character and influence... which is protected and managed so as to preserve its natural conditions.”

An Eden imagined before the fall. An Eden without an Adam, nor an Eve. Just lots of serpents. Canada's Wildlife Act (1973), our rough parallel, is explicitly for the benefit of flora and fauna.

But even granted that this is right, benefit in what sense? Realistically, the life of an animal in the wild is nasty, pestilent, brutish, and short. Better for individual animals if we hand land over to settled farms, to Adam’s stewardship. Better for animals collectively, too: a managed farm should support more creatures than a wilderness can.

So the point is apparently not to promote the welfare of flora and fauna generally, either, but specific, “endangered,” species—necessarily against the interests of other species? A kind of leafy affirmative action, if you will.

But if the goal is “biodiversity,” even this is best done by a zoo or wildlife park: stocked with variety, managed, enjoyed by Adam’s lads. In “wildernesses,” the number of species is instead artificially limited. The Lake Superior park bans not just man, but all “exotic species.” Parks Canada has contemplated exterminating all non-native species in the Banff wilderness (7). This sounds like like eco-ethnic cleansing.

Okay; then is the goal protection of animal “habitats” or “ecosystems”? Consider: animal habitats are not destroyed; they are altered, becoming suitable for other species. Why is one habitat better than another, if not to provide for more species, or provide better for one?

Perhaps there is a benefit for science? You’ve heard this one, I expect: preserve these wild spaces, and science might find some valuable new medicine or industrial product.

But medicines are more likely to be found by seeking medicines. Nor are they likely to be happened upon, by humans, where humans are banned.

If you think about it, humans have been part of nature for millenia. A “natural” area without them is profoundly artificial, profoundly unnatural. What is the value in it? Does it outweigh other human needs? And need we repeat the experiment endlessly? There is now more land under “preservation” in Canada and world-wide than under the plough. Why not preserve some land too in the absence of mosquitoes, cabbage worms, or crabgrass? For either is equally “natural.”

Some ecologists, of course, claim, we are preserving the land for future generations.

But no, that was the old idea. That was Macdonald’s idea. That was the Banff plan. If human use “damages” land, that will be just as true in seven or seventy-seven generations as it is now. Future generations can go fish. Or rather, can't.

The CCCB letter argues we are preserving resources for the poor. Yet it is the poor who lose most by conservation, as with a ban on water exports to water-poor areas. Those with connections, leisure and income to hire float planes, get in. The poor in their Sunday station wagons are kept out. The old landed gentry similarly protected trout ponds and deer parks from poaching by the unwashed: it seems of a piece.

The World Wildlife Fund, ecology’s flagship, was co-founded by Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, and long headed by the Duke of Edinburgh. There is a direct line of descent here.


But if none of the practical arguments for wilderness quite make sense, what is it all about?


Nature Worship

John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club, called wildernesses “divine,” and considered visiting the High Sierras “worship” (8). Aldo Leopold, founder of the first “wilderness area” in the US, now the Gila National Forest (1924), meant to “tear down the Christian ethic that man had dominion over all living things and replace it with the 'land ethic'” (9). (This involved, literally, extending civil rights to soils) (10).

So there is something at least quasi-religious here. For example, Greenpeace’s original flagship, “Rainbow Warrior,” their Web site explains, is named from a Cree Indian legend. “It described a time when humanity's greed has made the Earth sick. At that time, a tribe of people known as the Warriors of the Rainbow would rise up to defend her” (11).

Moving; and there is some Christian precedent for the view that nature is fallen through the actions of man. But this is a moral and a poetic appeal; it is nonsense scientifically to speak of the Earth as “sick” or “well.” We’re really speaking here of cosmic good and evil. Of a religious cosmology.

David Suzuki’s The Sacred Balance (1998) seems its complete expression. Note that title. We are speaking of the sacred.

Kim Cuddington has traced this idea of a mystical balance in nature in the ecology movement to as early as 1887. She calls it a “powerful force in ecology,” which “lies at the centre of many environmentalist positions” (12).

It is not science. “Nature”--from the etymology, “that which is born,” in other words, that which changes—knows balance or equilibrium no better than crisis. Nature progresses from big bang through chemical chain reactions and exploding suns, to multiple births, deaths, mutations and extinctions. “Natural balance” is a pious romantic metaphor (13).

Wallace, co-discoverer of the theory of evolution, observed:

Some species exclude all others in particular tracts. Where is the balance? When the locust devastates vast regions and causes the death of animals and man, what is the meaning of saying the balance is preserved? (14)

This myth of “cosmic balance” seems a kind of fancied earthly eternity. Too much of ecology seems, accordingly, a literalistic attempt merely to stop change. A bulleted list of Greenpeace’s current goals promises to “Stop... Protect... Save ... Stop... Say no... Stop... Eliminate....” There is, surely, a certain innate conservatism here; a fear of change as such.

Suzuki and others even explicitly venerate a new god: Gaia, “the whole living entity of earth, which controls the proportions of oxygen, carbon dioxide, salt in the oceans and surface temperatures,” and “may rid the earth of species if they disturb this balance” (15).

Scary stuff. Mother Nature seems, to these ecologists, no longer a folk metaphor, like Santa Claus, but a real and an angry goddess, hating change and demanding sacrifice.

It is to this being, in the end, that our lands and first fruits are being offered up: wilderness as shrine, as holy of holies.

This smells of the culture of death: to deep ecologists, there are too many humans.

We Christians believe in the conservation (and perfection) of nature. But I would rather plant a garden in the howling wilderness, than worship the howling wilderness.


Notes:


(1) “Christian Ecological Imperative,” a pastoral letter from the Social Affairs Commission, Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, October 4, 2003.

(2) Pope John Paul II, World Youth Day, Denver, August 14, 1993, Part II, no. 5-6.

(3) Florentinus de Valentia, Rosa Florens contra F. G. Menapius, 1617, 1618, paraphrased in Frances B. Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, London: Routledge, 1972, p. 97.

(4) “Ontario Agrees to Protect Lake Superior,” National Post, Sept. 3, 2003.

(5) “A Call to Green More Land,” Report, February 3, 2003.

(6) David A. Clary, The Place Where Hell Bubbled Up. Washington:Office of Publications, US Department of the Interior, 1972, p. 44.

(7) Sylvia LeRoy and Barry Cooper, Off-Limits: How Radical Environmentalists are Shutting Down Canada's National Parks, Fraser Institute: Vancouver, 2000.

(8) Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, New Haven: Yale U. Press, 1967, p. 126.

(9) Deborah E. Hare, “The People and Philosophy Behind Our National Parks: A Biographical Curriculum Unit,” Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute, http://www.yale.edu/ynhti/curriculum/units/1990/3/90.03.03.x.html, September 5, 2003.

(10) Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, New York, NY: Oxford U. Press, 1966. Cf. Michael Soulé and Reed Noss, "Rewilding and Biodiversity: Complementary Goals for Continental Conservation," Wild Earth 8, no. 3 (Fall 1998), p. 20.

(11) http://www.greenpeace.org/international_en/aboutus/, September 13, 2003.

(12) Kim Cuddington, “The 'Balance of Nature' Metaphor in Population Ecology: Theory or Paradigm?” Biology and Philosophy 16: 463-479, p. 3, p. 4.

(13) Cuddington, op cit.

(14) quoted in F. N. Egerton, “Changing Concepts of Balance of Nature,” Quarterly Review of Biology 48: 322-350, 1973.

(15) Suzuki, op cit.