The Green Wave, Part 4 - The Great Role Reversal

In our last post, we asked how it could have taken us so long to recognize that we needed to protect nature, centuries after environmental destruction should have been evident to any observant person.  The answer lies not in external nature, but in human nature — the nature of our mind.

Many of us can recall a moment when we realized we were bigger and stronger than our parents.  Not just physically, but psychologically too.  And we recognized their vulnerability, perhaps for the first time.

What a shock!  Our whole lives had conditioned us to regard our parents as bigger and stronger than we were, perhaps even invincible, and certainly invulnerable to anything we might do.  Then some event thrust the truth upon us:  the roles had been reversed.

Some younger readers may never experience this reversal, because in recent decades many parents lost control the moment their babies were born.  Their children ruled them.  If you were one of these children, please take my word for it that once upon a time, parents were in charge.

When this moment comes — when we realize we are bigger and stronger than our parents — we usually also realize that we've been bigger and stronger than them for quite some time.  The real reversal occurred long before we recognized it.  Why didn't we see it before?  We were held in a habit of the mind, caught by our conditioning.

Precisely the same thing happened with humanity's relationship to the environment.  That's why, as we saw in the last post, just 102 year ago  William James  could speak of enlisting our youth in a war against nature as a moral step forward.  For most of history, as we said, nature was not something to protect, but something to protect ourselves against.  Few of us worry about protecting our enemies. 

Over thousands of years, our antagonistic relationship with nature was deeply grooved into the culture, continually reinforcing our conditioning.  Do you see the magnitude of the role reversal required to go green?

Of course, nature was not just an enemy.  It was always also a source of resources — fish, game, land, stone, timber, coal, oil — as well as the ultimate repository of all our waste.  As such, it seemed infinite.  Boundless, bountiful, and self-replenishing without limit.  And far beyond our capacity to damage it.

When we did damage it — as we did again and again — it was often on a scale so vast it could not be seen, and a time scale so extended it could not be noticed.  If you were about to kill the last mammoth, how could you have known?

Despite considerable advances in science, technology and communications over the past 10,000 years, many people today are just as oblivious to the environmental consequences of their actions.  The human mind does not naturally attend to things on such a scale, although it can learn to do so.

There were a few far-sighted exceptions.  As early as 400 BC, Plato noted that the nearby hills had been denuded of trees by human activity.  But more than 2,000 years later, white pioneers in America saw cutting down all the forests as progress.  And in Moby Dick (1851), Herman Melville asserted that whaling could never exhaust the supply of whales.  Nature's boundless bounty went unquestioned.

This seems strange to us now, looking back.  But for so long, we had experienced our vulnerability in the face of nature.  The idea of the vulnerability of nature was a total reversal.  So in our minds, nature continued to loom large, even as we loomed ever larger.

In the 19th century, many people had difficulty believing that something as small as a germ could make a human being ill.  And they were right. A single germ couldn't. But bacteria by the billions are a different story.  And in the 20th century, most people came to realize that this story is true.

Similarly, in the 20th century, many people had difficulty believing that something as small as a human being could make Mother Earth ill.  And they were right. A single human couldn't. But humans by the billion are a different story.  And in the 21st century, more and more people are realizing that this story is true.

Given the magnitude of the role reversal required — against millennia of cultural conditioning — it's no mystery that the green wave did not arise earlier.  The question instead is why it arose at all — and why, in the last century, we've come so far so fast.  Why is the green wave washing over us now?  See our next post. 

Keith Borden, Consultant
Brilliant Green Marketing