The Green Wave, Part 3 - The Conquest of Nature

As we saw in our last post, for most of history, nature was not something to protect, but something to protect ourselves against.  Especially to those who lived literally behind the walls of civilization, nature was an enemy.  It was to be feared and fought.  And so we fought it.

Gradually, we won.  We cleared the land, and killed or chased away our predators.  We conquered the seas.  Today there is nowhere on earth that humans cannot go, usually with as much comfort and safety (except sometimes from our own species) as we care to have — and so as not to run out of challenges, we've set our sights on Mars.

As nature was subdued, we gradually became less afraid of it — to the point where today people take idiotic risks like climbing mountains without due precautions, because they take their safety for granted even beyond the zone of human control.  We've forgotten the nature our ancestors knew.  For most of us, most of the time, today's nature is as tame as a teddy bear.

And as we became less afraid of nature, sensitive souls began to appreciate her beauty.  (Yes, her beauty.  It was always her.)  This was the West's "romantic" movement.  In 1798, William Wordsworth wrote his poem Tintern Abby, in which he describes himself as "a worshipper of Nature."   Eight years later, he wrote his famous lines calling attention to what we had lost by trading nature for the world civilization and commerce:

The  world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours....

These lines, which have become a mantra of the green movement, were written just 202 years ago — barely 2% of the period since the dawn of agriculture — and could not have been written much earlier.  It's no accident that the romantic movement arose when it did — it's hard to appreciate the beauty of a feared enemy.  Only when industry and science had rendered nature relatively tame was it safe to appreciate what we were missing by our separation from her.

But even as our appreciation of nature slowly grew, our war against her was far from over.  One of the most progressive and enlightened men of the late 19th century was William James, a Professor of Psychology at Harvard.  His The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) is still cited by both scholars and enthusiasts of today's consciousness movement.  Early in the 20th century, he turned his attention to a perplexing question:  modern  warfare was increasingly destructive, yet men were drawn to it, and war often brought out the noblest in men.  As a psychologist, he thought war could not be eliminated unless we could find a suitable substitute.

So James searched for a substitute for war, and finally thought he'd found one.  In 1906 — a full century after Wordsworth's words, and just 102 years ago — he published The Moral Equivalent of War.  In it he described a great leap forward we could now take in our moral development.  Instead of continuing the carnage of war against our fellow human beings, we could turn our weapons upon a new enemy.  This new war would have all the advantages of war with none of the drawbacks, all the adventure with none of the destructiveness.  It would only bring benefit, not harm.

What was this enemy so evil that vanquishing it could only be good?  Nature!

If now — and this is my idea — there were, instead of military conscription, a conscription of the whole youthful population to form for a certain number of years a part of the army enlisted against Nature, the injustice [between rich and poor] would tend to be evened out.... 

To coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dishwashing, clotheswashing, and windowwashing, to road-building and tunnel-making, to foundries and stoke-holes, and to the frames of skyscrapers, would our gilded [i.e., rich & spoiled] youths be drafted off, according to their choice, to get the childishness knocked out of them, and to come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas.

They would have paid their blood-tax, done their own part in the immemorial human warfare against nature; they would tread the earth more proudly, the women would value them more highly, they would be better fathers and teachers of the following generation.  [my italics/underlining.]

As you can see, what James had in mind would have been remarkably like today's AmeriCorps.  It was an excellent idea, and far ahead of its time.  But the fact that an advanced thinker conceived it as a war against nature a mere century ago reveals how far we've come since then.

It also raises a puzzle.  Looking back — for example, by reading Clive Ponting's A New Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations — we can clearly see that environmental devastation began much earlier.  It should have been clearly evident to someone as aware and progressive as James.  How, then, could he have still seen nature something to attack rather than protect?  We answer this in our next post.

Keith Borden, Consultant
Brilliant Green Marketing