This is a book about nature and culture, about our place and plight on earth and the nagging challenges we face in living on it in ways that might endure. It deals with what American conservationist Aldo Leopold once termed the “oldest task in human history,” the task of living on land without degrading it.1 By land, Leopold meant not just soils and rocks but the entire interconnected, interdependent community of life, people included. It was an ancient task, Leopold said, an essential one, and we were struggling with it much as civilizations before ours had struggled and quite often failed. Our cleverness, technology, and fecundity: all had advanced well ahead of our collective ability to align our modes of living with nature’s life-giving ways.
All living creatures change the world around them simply by going about the daily business of staying alive. To change the physical world is thus inevitable and appropriate. Indeed, the community of life that we inhabit is largely the product of such changes, made by countless species going back several billion years. The challenge that Leopold saw was thus not to avoid change to nature or even to minimize it. Instead, it was to use nature in ways that kept it fertile and productive for people then living and for future human generations, if not for other species as well. Our challenge—our oldest task—was to use nature but not to abuse it.
Collectively we have had trouble with this oldest task, particularly as our numbers have risen, new technologies have emerged, and market-driven competition has overwhelmed customary restraints on land use and resource use. Laws have curtailed some of the worst practices in many countries; green technologies are gaining a bit; and green consumerism is on the rise. But overall, our trajectory has not materially changed course. We continue to alter nature in ways that seem to involve abuse rather than use and to do so on ever-larger scales—seem to, that is, but then who can really be sure given the increasingly contentious debates? How do we know when a change we’ve made to nature goes beyond legitimate use to become abusive?
I entered teaching over three decades ago, in a law school, where I’ve led courses on environmental, natural resources, and property law along with graduate readings groups on nature and culture, social justice, and conservation thought. This book arises out of this learning and instruction. It also draws together two core stands of my thinking and writing, going back as far or farther. One strand has been my effort to come to terms with our environmental problems in their full complexity, physically, socially, and morally. Land degradation is a product of human behavior and thus of the messy mix of factors and forces that motivate and shape how we act. My sense from early on was that this degradation arose proximately if not inexorably from business as usual in the modern age more than it did from individual mischief or malfeasance. We were all complicit to varying degrees, even the most well-meaning and conscientious among us. For me this recognition posed tough questions, especially about causes and responsibility. These questions gained complexity when they were examined together with our troubling, too-frequent tendencies to deny the scientific evidence of ecological ills and to resist even proven, cost-effective reforms. Plainly, the root causes of degradation run deep, among and within us.
My musings on our earthly predicament led me to wonder also whether we were being careful and thoughtful enough when we passed judgment on the physical evidence of ecological change. We were altering nature profoundly—that much was clear—and some changes seemed manifestly bad. But it didn’t appear so easy many times to decide which changes to nature were acceptable or good overall and which ones instead were misguided or immoral; it didn’t appear easy, that is, to distinguish between the legitimate use of nature and the abuse of it. A normative evaluation was needed to make that determination, and that evaluation, that line-drawing, required in turn some sort of measuring standard. We didn’t possess such a standard—not a sound one, at least—and the work of crafting one, I sensed, was far harder than we recognized. Many factors seemed relevant to such an overall assessment or evaluation, including factors relating to social justice, future generations, and other life forms, and to the vast gaps in our scientific knowledge.
The second strand has been my broader effort simply to make sense of the place and time in which I live—my effort, in Cicero’s familiar phrasing, to escape the tyranny of the present. As have many others, I have tried to step back from the modern age and to think critically about it, to identify and come to terms with the ideas, values, and sensibilities that structure how we understand the world and engage with it. This age-old task has never been a simple one. In our time it seems particularly challenging, in part due to the abundant writing flowing out of our specialized and fragmented universities and research centers, so helpful in some ways, so distracting and overwhelming in others.
What I soon recognized was that I couldn’t progress far on either of these intellectual projects without make sense of the other as well. However we might assess it, our environmental plight is a central reality of our times. It offers essential evidence of how we see the world, how we understand our place in it, and how we relate to one another, other living creatures, and future generations. Similarly, we cannot grasp why we have such trouble evaluating normatively our changes to nature, or why we bicker so about alleged ills and reform options, without broadening the inquiry greatly. In complex ways our ills have much to do with the culture of our era, with the secular, rational, and liberal values and assumptions that gained dominance in the Enlightenment era of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and that retain such power today. In the case of the United States they are particularly linked to the timing and peculiar political context when our nation was founded and when our collective self-identify coalesced. Adding to our challenge has been the darkening shadow of the capitalist market, now working at the global scale, the market that yields its material bounty by fostering base impulses, fragmentation, and moral and intellectual confusion—which is to say by making us, in basic ways, lesser creatures.
Out of this long-continuing inquiry has come this book. It draws upon diverse disciplines and bodies of writing, particularly history (intellectual, social, environmental), ecology and evolutionary biology, economics, social and political writing generally, and various core strands of philosophy. My home discipline, law, also plays a role—most openly in a critique of private property norms—but this is not a work on environmental or property law, present or proposed. Nonetheless, a legal perspective aids a project like this one because the legal arena is a setting in which all relevant factors on an issue are brought to bear, or ought to be. Good lawmaking is inherently wide-ranging and synthetic: It borrows facts, values, experiences, and intuitions from any and all sources. This book is synthetic in just this way: it is a patchwork effort, a labor that seeks to generate—by gathering, assembling, and assessing—emergent properties, just as natural communities do when their components come together to create traits and powers not possessed by the parts in isolation.
My central thesis is that our struggle to live sensibly within the land community is pre-eminently a cultural one, not chiefly a matter of scientific knowledge, technology, or even population, though these factors are all highly relevant. Our age faces a grave cultural crisis, a crisis not just in the sense of a loss of cultural coherence—a kind of descent into endless, misguided bickering with rising anxieties and anomie—but in the stronger sense that the central elements of our world view are simply no longer working for us, intellectually, morally, or practically, particularly when it comes to our oldest task. The foundational assumptions that frame our understandings and actions seem less and less able to bring order to the facts of the day and to provide the tools we need to make collective sense of our many challenges, indeed even to admit their very existence. Our ecological ills and our inability to think clearly about them—to think clearly about our rightful place in nature—are tied to traits embedded within and among us and to the complex ways we think about and value the world, particularly our self-images as morally worthy, rational individuals, different not in degree but in kind from all other life forms. No amount of new science and technology will help us, not enough at least. No amount of green consumerism will help much either; indeed, our emphasis on “going green,” I shall argue, arises out of and aggravates elements of modern culture that are themselves root causes of our planetary excesses.
This book is thus a critical inquiry into modern Western culture. It pays particular attention to the case of the United States both because I know it best and because it illustrates so vividly the cultural challenges that confront the modern age generally. The study digs into the essential components of the modern worldview, beginning with fundamental questions of reality, cognition, and morality that have long intrigued and challenged philosophers. This attention to fundamentals is essential, I believe, because our central cultural need is not, as it is sometimes said, a mere matter of learning to be nice to nature or to love “mother earth”—a shallow notion that is as confused and unfocused as it is well intended. Our needs for change go much deeper than that. Major elements of our worldview require revision.
This critical inquiry provides the foundation for a proposed recasting of our worldview, aimed at promoting better modes of living on earth and also at promoting—necessarily promoting, as I will argue—greater social justice and heightened concerns for future generations and other life forms. The inquiry pays extended attention to the challenge of distinguishing between the legitimate use and abuse of nature—a difficult challenge, one we’ve addressed poorly. It includes a hard look at science—what it is and is not—and at our cultural tendency to turn to science to answer questions that it simply cannot answer (even as, at the same time, we push aside scientific findings we don’t like). At the same time it digs deeply into the unsteady bases of moral thinking, revealing why our search for new moral standards for the ecological age are frustrated by an overreliance on empirically grounded objectivity and by confusion over the true, social origins of the liberal values that we do embrace. Necessarily, a new, more ecological perspective on the world is needed, along with new ecological ways of recognizing how we are embedded in nature. Further, we need to think much more broadly about environmental justice and about the roles and moral status of the planet’s other interconnected life forms.
Inevitably the recasting of culture undertaken in this book reflects my own value preferences as author. But the cultural framework I construct—my dissection and diagnosis of our plight—should have value also for readers of different temperament, readers perhaps less inclined than I to care intrinsically and aesthetically about other life forms or more prone to trust that future generations will be smart enough to handle whatever ecological forces we unleash.
I have written this book as I have because I know of no other book like it, no book that similarly endeavors to set the full intellectual stage. A particular hope is that it will help environmental scholars, students, and activists see how and whether their personal efforts make sense when viewed in context. Without the full picture it is hard or impossible to know. Is it sensible, for instance, to push forward the idea of ecosystem services as an intellectual frame? It is proper for biologists to treat species-preservation as a shared goal? Would a market-guided carbon-trading system, all things considered, help us come to terms with climate change? Are religion-based claims about the value of Creation inappropriate for public use? Indeed, is it simply a matter of personal opinion whether one landscape condition is better than another?
In its cultural malaise and confusion the modern age resembles the years during and after the American Civil War in the mid-nineteenth century. As historian Louis Menand explains, sensitive observers of that tumultuous time understood the Civil War not just as a colossal failure of democracy and goodwill but also as a failure of culture, a failure of prevailing beliefs, values, sentiments, and ideas. The war swept away the South’s slave civilization and took “almost the whole intellectual culture of the North along with it.”2 This breakdown was complexly linked to the great forces then at work—industrialization, urbanization, shifts of power to impersonal bureaucracies, and more. These forces together with their widespread economic and social consequences seemed to foster cultural chaos, to fracture the moral order and derail the nation’s progressive trajectory. Not until the end of the nineteenth century, Menand relates, did a new culture rise up to interpret and forge a counter to these massive forces, and it did so, in retrospect, only partially and temporarily.
The new, more confident culture of the Progressive Era ran aground not long after it emerged, when and as Western civilization descended into the disorienting horrors of World War I. Perhaps modern civilization was, after all, merely the thin veneer that doubters all along had claimed it was, a veneer that when stripped away by conflict or community fracture exposed the vast depths of inner darkness that Joseph Conrad and others had probed. For novelist Willa Cather the world broke in two around 1922; year one of the new era, Ezra Pound termed it. It was the time of Ulysses, The Waste Land, and Babbitt; a time, in the United States, of railroad strikes, mining massacres, and national corruption. One could, as H. L. Mencken did, ridicule the social and moral constraints of gentile and bourgeois culture, the culture that supplied the traction for reform efforts to fight corruption and decay. But where was the nation to find a new public morality that could effectively take its place and domesticate the economic and cultural forces of the day?
The cultural crisis we now experience is in many ways a continuation and strengthening of the crisis that Menand has charted and of the ensuing malaise fed on industrial-style war. To be sure, periods of peace and prosperity would come after the Great War and ensuing ones, creating times and auras of calm. But the acids of modernity had been dispersed widely. Particularly disorienting for the educated were the tales told by Darwin, Freud, and Einstein, who together cast doubt on human exceptionalism and on the objectivity and reliability of human reason and sense perceptions. Beyond that and also disorienting were the broadening demands for individual liberty and moral autonomy, the often amoral forces of industrial capitalism and bureaucratic efficiency, and the rising, dismaying evidence that the vast continent was not, after all, an unlimited warehouse of natural resources.
It will help at this beginning point to say more about these cultural ills, by way of introducing the inquiry to follow. As will be clear, our cultural deficiencies are intertwined, not just with one another but also with many of our cultural strengths. A quick look here at the overall picture might help clarify the pertinence of the individual parts of this wide-ranging overall inquiry, particularly the early ones.
Our cultural deficiencies fall rather roughly into four connected categories.
Moral value and interdependence. In the first category are the various ways that we commonly understand our roles and capacities in nature as the morally supreme form of planetary life and also perceive ourselves as autonomous beings. As human beings we do differ from other species of life, and they from one another. Yet we err gravely by assuming that we differ from them in kind rather than merely in degree, by assuming (implicitly today, more explicitly in the past) that we are in the long run really not much constrained by the planet’s physical capacities and functioning. We profess true belief in Charles Darwin’s evolutionary writings and likely chuckle at stubborn-minded contemporaries who can’t seem to face evolution’s bracing truths. But in an important sense those who reject a purely materialist interpretation of evolution are the more intellectually honest and coherent among us. They sense and profess that humans differ in kind from other life forms and they act consistent with this belief, as much interpretive and moral as it is factual. Evolution’s defenders, in contrast, while professing their kinship with the apes nonetheless seem plenty content to hold on to the generous benefits of our presumed creaturely uniqueness.
This first category of cultural elements has to do with the locus of moral value in the universe: does it extend beyond humans to other life forms, to species, and to communities? It also draws in the composition of reality (metaphysics) and the nature of individual humans and other life forms as living beings (ontology). Is the world made up not just of physical stuff—of atoms and their components and combinations bouncing about—but also of intangibles, such as ideas, moral values (goodness), and logical relationships, which exist not just in and among human minds but outside of them, embedded in the natural order? We routinely talk, for instance, as if human rights transcended mere social convention. But do such rights really exist apart from the historical forces and particular circumstances that gave rise to their proclamation; did they exist before we recognized them and will they continue existing if we forget them? If human rights do somehow exist independently of us, then what other normative or spiritual values might similarly await our belated recognition? As for the nature of existence, are we humans best understood as autonomous creatures or are we in significant ways—more important ways, even—defined and constituted by our many roles, connections, and interdependencies?
The world’s physical parts are highly intertwined, as we should certainly know. They are not merely collections of fragmented pieces and parts. When we overlook these countless interconnections it becomes too easy to ignore or downplay the essential dependence of all life on the planet’s basic functional processes. It becomes easy also to overlook how the planet’s millions of life forms have evolved in tandem with one another, gradually and inexorably, and how they can typically thrive only when these co-evolved interactions remain within natural bounds. To miss this fundamental truth is to miss the central role of cooperation in sustaining biotic communities. Even more it is to miss the many ways that communities of life give rise in their evolving interconnections to traits and capabilities that do not reside in the biotic and abiotic parts considered separately. In short, human-caused ecological degradation is plainly linked to what we see and don’t see when we look into nature, to our (over)confidence in our ability to gain knowledge about the world, and to the human-centered ways we attribute (create) moral value within it.
Reason, science, and the origins of morality. As for the second category, we are also weighted down today—even as we have been much benefited—by what might be termed our cult of objectivity, by our tendency to exalt facts and reason and to assume that, possessed of these two tools and little more (a few liberal and utilitarian principles), we can forge public policies that are workable if not better. Eighteenth-century thinkers exalted reason and demanded factual proof as part of a mission of destruction. They sought to sweep away superstition and ignorance and to challenge traditions that lingered on with no support other than long familiarity. A particular aim of the era was to push religious rites and practices out of the public sphere and into private life, and it did so even as the era’s leading intellects took for granted their embeddedness in a transcendent moral order mostly derived from Protestant Christianity.
In retrospect, the Enlightenment’s intellectual tools wielded too much power as they permeated the public realm. The era’s guiding insistence that all beliefs rest on facts and reason, used as a critical tool, proved forceful enough to chip away the sound along with the unsound, particularly when it came to public morality. As philosopher David Hume could see, no combination of reason and sense-derived factual information seemed able to supply a solid grounding for moral standards once the old order was fractured. With revealed religion called into question, morality needed to find a new, more sentiment-based foundation. This deficiency could remain concealed so long as the prevailing Christian moral order retained its power by inertia. But other pressures soon pushed against that customary moral order—particularly strident calls for individual liberty—and reason alone could not adequately defend it. Once disconnected from experience and inherited values, reason by itself couldn’t draw a reliable line between the moral and the immoral. Morality needed to secure a new, more defensible grounding, intellectual or otherwise, especially if it was to protect against the new forms of domination and exploitation.
Many troublesome ills have come from this cult of objectivity, even as an insistence on it has also yielded vast benefits.
• There is the too-easy sense within it that we can solve problems simply by gathering more facts and using reason-based science and technology, without questioning our values or becoming better people.
• There is the related tendency to turn to science and scientists to pass authoritative judgment on allegations of grave problems when this kind of assessment inherently requires the use of normative standards—standards of goodness and morality—which science as such does not possess and cannot generate.
• There is the inability to know what to do when the facts run out, as they so often do when it comes to nature and our dealings with it. How do we deal with our enduring ignorance? Religion long provided answers, and they are still at hand.
• And there is the tendency to assume that, with morals mostly matters of personal choice, the ideal state should merely keep the peace among people, leaving individuals free to pursue their separate visions of good living (a problem much exacerbated at larger scales by clashes of cultures that do not share overarching conceptions of the good or the right).
It is telling that the Enlightenment era did not challenge and corrode all public moral values. It left alone, and indeed exalted, what Thomas Jefferson famously called the “self-evident truths” of individual rights. This embrace of individual rights, soon to spread widely, was intellectually curious given that claims of rights were, in reality, no better grounded in facts and reason than any other moral precepts (senses of duty, good character, and virtue). Jefferson may have said as much when he termed them “self-evident” (by which he meant, according to historian Carl Becker, self-evident to some but not others). In truth Jefferson had no authorities to cite for his claims or any supporting proof based on evidence and logic. He spoke from intuition, common sense, and Christian tradition, from sources that eluded the physical senses.
Philosopher Jeremy Bentham soon pointed out the logical flaw at work. Rights-claims were mere nonsense, the empiricist Bentham blasted. Yet the popularity of rights and rights-rhetoric would only spread and gain momentum, Bentham (and conservatives such as Thomas Carlyle) notwithstanding. Proponents of the new rights and expanded liberty also had little trouble pushing aside John Stuart Mill when in the mid-nineteenth century he explained how individual rights were legitimate only when they derived from and helped promote the common good: Rights were the contingent products of social consensus, Mill stated, not timeless individual entitlements, and they needed to prove their social worth. Other writers disagreed (German idealists in particular), but by the age of Mill the argument meant little. Individual rights had acquired a secure cultural status.
The origins of rights and rights-talk are important to revisit in any effort to make sense, morally and intellectually, of our oldest task. Much of our moral thinking and talking is now based on individual rights. Further, they wrap around and help legitimate a worldview in which humans are supreme and in which they are best understood and treated as autonomous individuals, not as members of social and natural communities. When we fail to appreciate the social origins and contingency of individual rights we give them special moral status, and do so even as they fail to provide, standing alone, a sturdy moral frame for making sense of interdependencies and the common good.
The limits of liberty and equality. This second category of cultural elements connects, as noted, to the third category, having to do with our individualism and our particular enthusiasm for liberty and equality. Our long, slow recognition of human rights has brought many benefits, of that there is no doubt, with more work still awaiting. Before the era of human rights there was the Renaissance-era emphasis on man-as-the-measure, a humanistic awakening that similarly unleashed vast creativity. Yet, as in the case of our emphasis on objectivity—on sticking too much to facts and reason—our individualism can be and has been taken too far. Excessive individualism weakens senses of collective identity and collective fate, particularly individualism encased in broadly defined rights. It weakens the recognition that communities as such are legitimate sources of social values and expectations. It fuels calls for morally neutral states—a fictitious and misguided ideal—and for ever-looser limits on individual choice. Today’s libertarian thought is a form of fundamentalist dogma suited only for the selfish and short-sighted, with politically far-left versions only marginally better than those on the far right.
As explored in chapter 4, liberty deserves special emphasis among competing public values only when it is defined in its fullness, only when the concept covers not just negative individual liberty (the individual’s freedom from restraint) but also positive and collective forms of liberty, particularly the liberty of people in combination to take responsible charge of their shared fates. Even as to negative individual liberty, it has over time come to focus (as it did not in the past) on freedom from state-imposed limitations, even as so many constraints on individual life now stem from market-based private power (a reality recognized by Progressive Era reformers a century ago). As for equality, we struggle to think and talk clearly about it. We struggle to recognize that equality is not an independent moral principle but instead a fragment of one. As such it is a moral claim that can produce good only when embedded in a larger, sound moral vision, as it was in early centuries. (The same complaint can be leveled against the general idea of rights.) Formal equality means treating like cases alike—nothing more than this—and it cannot tell us when two cases are alike. It cannot on its own tell us when we should ignore differences among people and cases, thus viewing them as alike, and when instead differences are morally significant. Even when combined, individual liberty and equality as guiding beacons fall far short of the kind of moral order we need to come to terms with our ecological plight. In moral terms we resemble the arm-wrestler who spends years strengthening one limb while letting the others deteriorate.
When it comes to ecological decline our individualistic view of the world implicitly points a finger at people as individuals, tracing environmental ills to the free choices that they make. How else would the ills arise if individuals are, in fact, the prime components and movers of society? If that is true, if individual choices are at the bottom of all things good and bad, then the evident solution is to encourage people to make different personal choices, better ones. Today’s real situation, though, is quite substantially different. Few environmental problems are entirely or even largely caused by voluntary choices that individuals make in their private lives. Further, hardly any significant problems can be well addressed by encouraging different individual choices without more. The problems are systemic, rooted in institutions, structures, and patterns of communal interaction.
Competition and the market’s domain. Into a final category of troubling cultural components we can usefully place our implicit sense that progress arises largely if not entirely from competition and individual striving, particularly in the market. As historian Daniel Rodgers records, by the turn of this century “no word flew higher or assumed a greater aura of enchantment than ‘market,’” which came to stand in the popular mind “for a way of thinking about society with a myriad of self-generated actions for its engine and optimization as its natural and spontaneous outcome.”3 This faith in self-seeking competition seemed to rest solidly on the economic theory of Adam Smith and other classical and neoclassical economists and on the natural-selection theories of Darwin and his successors. In fact, Darwin had little confidence that competition and natural selection led to progress in any meaningful sense. Those who survived in nature were simply better at survival; little more could be said. Smith, too, never claimed that market processes inexorably brought economic gain—they merely could do so, and often did. Like most of his age, he presumed that even profit-seeking actors in the market would be constrained by Christian ethics.
Biologists now know that evolutionary fitness for humans and many other species has come about as much through cooperation and deference to communities as through individual competition. Selfish individuals may beat out altruistic ones in head-to-head competition but the “iron rule” of genetic evolution, says biologist E. O. Wilson, is that “groups of altruists beat groups of selfish individuals.”4 It is similarly relevant that individual competition can in fact yield evolutionary changes that harm a species (particularly, it seems, physical competition among aggressive males).
Looking ahead, we surely need a heightened recognition of the ways competition can prove wasteful—economically, socially, and ecologically—as well as beneficial. We need a sense, too, of the ways it is morally corrosive and prone to undercut the social norms and structures upon which it depends. As conservative Richard Weaver has proposed, competition and liberty need tempering with the age-old counterbalance of fraternity, “the ancient feeling of brotherhood [that] carries obligations of which equality knows nothing.”5
Rising above these four categories of cultural flaws—towering above them, some would say—is the implacable reality of nature’s limits. Our planet, to be sure, receives daily infusions of energy from the sun. And we can admit, too—indeed celebrate—human cleverness in manipulating the earth’s physical matter. But it is utter folly to charge ahead, bound by bound, without keeping an eye on the horizons, without pondering our plight and planet from the perspective of the stars. Our atrophied morality is in no way more evident than in our selfish conceits that cleverness and competition have, mirabile dictu, lifted the fetters and reserves of shared virtue.
If I am right in my claim that our ecological ills are rooted in problematic aspects of contemporary culture (perceptions, beliefs, and norms), not just in physical factors and population, then we have need of significant cultural reform:
Collectively we require a better-grounded vision of what it means to live well in nature to help us head in that direction. We do not now have such a normative vision, not in common currency, and for reasons already sketched. Such a vision would be grounded in morals and not merely facts and reason; it would embed us in natural systems in much the way other living creatures are embedded, challenging our boastful claims of independence; it would present us, in important ways, as parts of larger communal wholes, ecological as well as social, and not merely as autonomous individuals; and it would stress needs for us to cooperate for the common good, even as we retain and reward competition and creativity within morally prescribed bounds.
Somehow we need to gain the wisdom that we are not merely solo beings, adrift in a purely physical, morally empty world and competing for places to build homes and plant crops. Somehow we need to learn (relearn in part) that we cannot understand components of a landscape—or of an ecosystem or the world as a whole—without comprehending the whole as such, a line of organic reasoning readily traced from ancient times through Spinoza, Hegel, John Dewey, and others. Similarly we need to grasp how emergent properties so often arise when parts cooperate and evolve over time, giving rise not just to greater capacities but to capacities different in kind.
Above all, we need to find ways to talk collectively about moral values, ways that make it sensible and authoritative for communities as such to settle upon values that guide and constrict the lives and choices of individual community members. Values need to become something more and different than personal preferences. (Say it again.) Likely this means renewed talk about the good life, about good character, and about how both are linked to the honorable fulfillment of communal roles. At the moment (and as varied critics have said), we are woefully short of moral language that goes beyond negative liberty and individual equality to reach the higher grounds of cooperation and long-term community health. Good morals, good cultural controls, are not just out there waiting to be discovered, certainly not through reason and empirical data collection alone. Instead they are tools that we craft, as the value-creating beings that we are.
My call for cultural changes is not merely a call for reformers and activists to absorb these ideas and then use them as they develop environmental policy reforms and press for acceptance. It is more radical than that. Effective environmental reform needs to focus directly on cultural values and assumptions. It needs to find ways to foster reform at that foundational level. The failure to recognize this, and act upon it, explains better than any other factor why environmental reform efforts have run aground and why environmental activists are so often spurned. It just won’t work to appeal to people today where they now are, to speak to them in ways that make immediate sense given the deficiencies of modern culture. To the contrary, true reform needs to lure people into becoming something better than they now are, encouraging them to want and work for modes of living, understanding, and valuing consistent with a flourishing, enduring civilization.
Environmental reformers need to recognize that the challenge they pose to society is, and must be, more profound and demanding than the reform steps aimed at ending racism and promoting marriage equality. Hard as those social challenges have been, reform efforts have worked within, and have not needed to question, main elements of the modern worldview, morality included. Reformers could accept (and have) the idea that moral value resides only in humans and that we are best understood as autonomous individuals. They could accept, and have, short-term time horizons while doing little to shake our towers of human arrogance. For the most part, civil rights causes have wanted to help excluded people fit fairly and fully into the modern system, not to challenge the system as such, certainly not the capitalist market and dominant power structures. The environmental cause, in contrast, requires vastly more in the way of cultural and institutional change. It threatens power structures and business as usual far more than that, or certainly needs to. Indeed, to succeed it must pose a frontal challenge to the dominance of the very moral standards that civil rights causes have raised high in battle.
This inquiry, by its end, brings together the various components of a new, more land-respecting and enduring culture. In doing so, it identifies the key normative considerations useful in distinguishing between the legitimate use of nature and abuse, though without (for reasons explained) knitting them into anything like a ready-to-use test. More broadly it presents a call for a new direction for environmental reform, one that seeks first and foremost to promote a more land-respecting culture. The final chapter includes an overall strategy, identifying what needs to change in today’s culture and how reformers might best talk about that change.
A few words are needed to explain the book’s recurring use of American examples when discussing global cultural problems. The United States was founded upon, and during the heyday of, Enlightenment thought. By the end of the eighteenth century (far more than in 1776) the new nation’s identity was increasingly bound up in ideas of liberty, individual free competition, and the rising ideal of equality, principles that fueled distrust of government. Over the generations the nation came to exalt its mixed immigrant heritage and diversities of religious views, particularly among Protestant Christians. What held the nation together, given this mixed heritage, was not ethnic or religious bonds or any extended shared history. Instead the nation gained identify chiefly with political principles. It was a republic if not a democracy, a place of liberty and opportunity, a place where economic and social barriers were knocked down and individuals could rise as high as energy and abilities allowed. The nation’s dominant institutions, private property and the market above all, reflected these cultural values. Progress came by physical expansion and growth, by continued protection of individual rights, and by the free play of individual competition.
This heady mix of freedoms and opportunities has brought great gain to the United States, particularly in economic terms. It has also brought heightened respect for outcast and subordinate elements of the population. But these same cultural values, we need to see, also play foundational roles in ongoing ecological decline. They are cultural values that, in their place, yield distinct benefits but that, taken too far—as they have been—bear increasingly ill fruit. Today they underlie political impasses that are more severe than the nation has ever experienced apart from the days before the Civil War. They largely explain why the United States has become such an assertive nation internationally, not just dropping more bombs and dispatching more missiles over the past sixty-five years than all other nations combined but refusing to sign numerous international agreements (for instance, the Convention on Biological Diversity), ones that nearly every other nation has seen fit to sign.
My cultural criticisms, then, apply with particular force in and to the United States, which likely faces a greater need than any other nation to adjust and reassess its founding cultural elements. To be sure—and it needs emphasis—the United States has made progress in dealing with significant environmental ills. It proudly thumped its chest when the Soviet Union collapsed and the world saw how much ecological degradation had occurred behind the Iron Curtain. The fall of the Soviet Union, however, far from being an impetus for the United States to do even better on ecological issues, seemingly became instead a justification for quashing the very collective forces that accounted for the nation’s environmental progress. Libertarian and free-market enthusiasts were quick to assert that the better environmental record of the United States somehow had to do with its embrace of the free market: the United States was capitalist, the Soviet Union was communist, and capitalism took better care of the environment. Economic growth, higher under capitalism, somehow magically transformed into better environmental outcomes.
A more careful review shows that this narrative captures precious little truth. Rhetoric aside, the Soviet Union possessed a capitalist economy, every bit as devoted as Western nations to industrialization and to the reinvestment of profits into productive plant and equipment (the classic definition of capitalism) as Western, more market-based versions. The main difference was that Soviet-style capitalism was largely unchecked by popular insistence on environmental responsibility. That is, it lacked effective popular calls to control pollution and ecological degradation. One need only look at the often-dismal environmental records of US-based global corporations around the world to see how they would likely behave at home if binding environmental laws didn’t hold them to higher standards. The true story is complex and knotty, but there’s little doubt that the better environmental record of the United States had far more to do with citizen-led reform efforts and with the enactment (over vehement business resistance) of major environmental laws than it did with any mysterious market forces. To be sure, a wealthier nation can invest more in pollution control and other environmental measures. But the market itself does not motivate such investments; to the contrary, it encourages cost-cutting and profits.
Perhaps the biggest practical challenge we face, institutionally, on the path to environmental sanity is the work of embedding the capitalist market into a healthy, moral social order and into natural systems that remain fertile, productive, and biologically diverse. As we are learning—as we should certainly know by now—the market is a valuable servant but a terrible master. The good news is that public faith in the market is sagging, and for many sound reasons. Its star is tarnished, much as the star of science lost luster in World War I. Many feel it, even if subconsciously: the time has come for a new way of organizing ourselves, a new way of focusing and expressing our hopes.
To escape the tyranny of the present, to stand well back of modern culture and to view it critically, is to see major flaws in our worldview and to see too how these flaws largely account for various contemporary ills. Fortunately, it is also to see ample opportunities for beneficial change, change that can best begin, as perhaps progress has always begun, with a clear-sighted, critical look at the present.