ENVIRONMENTAL
PHILOSOPHY
Wilderness
versus
The Garden
• The land is the Garden
of Eden before them,
and behind them a
desolate wilderness.
Joel 2:3
1
•
The authors of the Bible gave
wilderness a central position in
their accounts both as a descriptive
aid and as a symbolic concept. The
term occurs 245 times in the Old
Testament, Revised Standard
Version, and thirty-five in the New.
In addition there are several
hundred uses of terms such as
"desert" and "waste" with the same
essential significance as
"wilderness" and, in some cases,
the identical Hebrew or Greek
root.1
John W. Ellison, Nelson's Complete Concordance of the Revised Standard
Version Bible (New York, 1957) cited in Nash, Wilderness and the American
Mind
Jean Antoine
Condorcet
(1743 – 1794)
• predicted that
innovation, resulting
increased wealth, and
choice would provide food
in the future and lead to
fewer children per family
• believed that society was
perfectable
Thomas Malthus on
Population
An Essay on the Principle of Population, 1798
Malthus, responding to
Condorcet, predicted
population would outrun food
supply, leading to a decrease in
food per person.
Assumptions:
• Populations grow exponentially.
• Food supply grows
arithmetically.
• Food shortages, famine, war, and
chaos inevitable.
Food
2
4
8
16
Population
2
4
16
256
Romantic Wilderness
Transcendentalists:
• Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Henry David Thoreau (18171862)
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
(1807-1882)
Love of the wilderness is born in the
great American cities as industrial
revolution breeds revulsion to urban
life. Artists, poets, and philosophers
came to see the wilderness and
particularly the untamed American
wilderness as salvation for the
human soul.
by Albert Bierstadt
Henry David Thoreau
• Walden, 1845. “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
• On April 23, 1851 Henry David Thoreau, slight and stooped, ascended
the lecture platform before the Concord Lyceum. "I wish," he began, "to
speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness." Thoreau
promised his statement would be extreme in an effort to answer the
numerous champions of civilization. ''Let me live where I will," he
declared, "on this side is the city, on that the wilderness, and ever I am
leaving the city more and more, and withdrawing into the wilderness."
Near the end of the address, he concentrated his message in eight words:
"in Wildness is the preservation of the World.” 1
1 quoted
in Nash, Roderick. Wilderness and the American Mind
Albert Bierstadt, 1866. A Storm in the Rocky Mountains - Mount Rosalie
Albert Bierstadt, 1865. Looking Up at the Yosemite Valley
Preservationist Philosophy
• March 1, 1872 - Ulysses S.
Grant sets aside Yellowstone as
a national park, the world’s
first.
• Nature is best when
untouched by human
hands.
• Some areas should be
completely preserved
in their natural state.
• National parks are a
fundamental element
of this philosophy. It
is also an American
invention.
“None of Nature's
landscapes are ugly so
long as they are wild.”
“ In God's wildness lies
the hope of the world the great fresh
unblighted,
unredeemed
wilderness. The
galling harness of
civilization drops off,
and wounds heal ere
we are aware.”
John Muir
John Muir (1838-1914)
• Born in Dunbar, Scotland
• Moved to Wisconsin farm as a child.
• Award-winning inventor of clocks and
machines as student at U. of Wisconsin.
• Eye-injury in 1867 changes his goals
(regained sight a month later).
• After walking 1000 miles to the Gulf of
Mexico, he travels to California, via
Panama, in 1868.
“I only went out for a walk and
finally concluded to stay out till
sundown, for going out, I
found, was really going in.”
• Walks to the Sierras, across the Central
Valley, in 1868. Stays there wandering for
years.
• 1892 founds the Sierra Club
• 1901 publishes Our National Parks and gets
the attention of Theodore Roosevelt.
• 1913 Hetch-hetchy battle is lost. He falls and
dies in the next year.
Conservationist
Philosophy
Roosevelt believed that
wild lands were
necessary for the
healthy
development of
young men and for
the economic future
of the country.
• Resources are not unlimited. We
must conserve them so that there
will always be a supply.
• Use is acceptable, if reasonable and
prudent.
• Sometimes referred to as the “wiseuse” philosophy.
•
Theodore Roosevelt (18581919): "...The conservation
of natural resources is the
fundamental problem.
Unless we solve that
problem it will avail us
little to solve all others."
Address to the Deep Waterway
Convention, Memphis, Tennessee,
October 4, 1907.
•
(1901-1908) He set aside as
National Parks, National
Forests, game and bird
preserves, and other federal
reservations, a total of
approximately 230,000,000
acres or about 84,000 acres
per day!
George Perkins Marsh
Considered by many to be the first
environmentalist! He argued for careful use of
land and showed that humanity could damage
the earth.
• Man and nature; or, Physical
geography as modified by human
action. (1864)
• The Earth as Modified By
Human Action. (1874)
The book consists of ten chapters:
•Chapter I - Introductory.
•Chapter II - Transfer, modification, and extirpation of vegetable and
of animal species.
•Chapter III - The Woods.
•Chapter IV - The Waters.
•Chapter V - The Sands.
•Chapter VI - Great projects of physical change accomplished or
proposed by Man.
Development Philosophy
•
•
•
•
(18th – 20th Century)
Forest Service
• Nature is best when
Floyd Dominy, Bureau of
managed and improved
Reclamation
upon by humans.
Bureau of Land Management
• Areas left untouched are
Army Corps of Engineers
‘wasted’ because they
could put to better use to
meet human needs.
Glen Canyon, Dam.
Page, Arizona
Los Angeles River
Aldo Leopold and The
Land Ethic (1887-1948)
“We abuse land because we
regard it as a commodity
This collection of essays on the ecology of his
belonging to us. When we
Wisconsin farmland and forests is his most famous
see land as a community to
contribution. He is famous for his concern about
land conservation (soils, etc.). He worked primarily
which we belong, we may
as a professor at the U. of Wisconsin.
begin to use it with love and
respect.”
A Sand County Almanac, 1949.
“A thing is right when it tends to preserve the
integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic
community. It is wrong when it tends
otherwise.”
Wallace Stegner
Wildnerness Letter
(Why We Need Wilderness) in
1960 helps win passage of the
1964 U.S. Wilderness Act.
“We simply need that wild country available
to us, even if we never do more than
drive to its edge and look in. For it can be
a means of reassuring ourselves of our
sanity as creatures, a part of the
geography of hope.”
“You don't go there to find something,” he once said
about wilderness, “you go there to disappear.”
Rachel Carson
•
•
•
Marine biologist Rachel Carson
sounded the alarm on synthetic
pollutants, particularly DDT, in
Silent Spring (1962).
Inspired a grassroots environmental
movement that led to the creation of
the Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA) in 1970.
Ironically, she died of complications
from breast cancer, a disease some
studies have linked to increased
synthetic pollutants.
For the first time in the history of the world,
every human being is now subjected to contact
with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of
conception until death.
- Rachel Carson
Neo-Malthusians
Paul Ehrlich, 1968. The
Population Bomb.
"To repeat the old saying, it's the top of
the ninth and humanity has been
hitting nature hard. But we must
always remember that nature bats
last.“
300 million people have starved
to death since the publication
of The Population Bomb. On
the other hand, life
expectancy has increased by
about four years.
"Humanity has already overshot
Earth's carrying capacity by a
simple measure: no nation is
supporting its present population
on income - that is, the sustainable
flow of renewable resources.
Instead, key "renewable" resources,
the natural capital of humanity, are
being used so rapidly that they
have become effectively nonrenewable.“
More Ehrlich Quotes
Paul Ehrlich
"Overpopulation exists whenever people trying to produce food allow soil to
erode faster than new soil can be generated, or drain aquifers faster than
they can be recharged, or exterminate populations and species that are
working parts of the ecosystems that support agriculture and fisheries
faster than recolonization and speciation can reestablish them. Today
overpopulation prevails worldwide."
Source: World Wildlife Fund. 2010. Living Planet Report.
http://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/all_publications/living_planet_report/2010_
lpr/
Edward
Abbey
Edward Abbey Quotes
Desert Solitaire is regarded as one of the
finest nature narratives in American
literature, and has been compared to Aldo
Leopold's A Sand County Almanac and even
Thoreau's Walden. In it, Abbey vividly
describes the physical landscapes of
Southern Utah and delights in his isolation as
a backcountry park ranger, recounting
adventures in the nearby canyon country and
mountains. He also attacks what he terms the
"industrial tourism" and resulting
development in the national parks ("national
parking lots"), rails against the Glen Canyon
Dam, and comments on various other
subjects.
The love of wilderness is more than a
hunger for what is always beyond
reach; it is also an expression of
loyalty to the earth, the earth which
bore us and sustains us, the only
home we shall ever know, the only
paradise we ever need--if only we
had the eyes to see.
Edward Abbey, 1982
• About The Monkey Wrench Gang,
The National Observer wrote, "A sad,
hilarious, exuberant, vulgar fairy tale... It'll
make you want to go out and blow up a
dam."
• Many think it inspired the creation of
radical environmental group Earth First!
Radical Environmentalism
• Greenpeace
Direct non-violent, media-saavy action against
factory whaling operations.
– Greenpeace “About Us” Web Page
• Earth First!
"No Compromise in Defense of Mother Earth!"
–
–
Earth First! Journal
Inspired by Edward Abbey’s novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang
New Science And Social Science Concepts
Most scientists and social scientists now see the economy
as a subsystem of the larger earth ecological system,
although this view is not widespread yet in economics.
• Sustainable
Development:
development that meets
the needs of the present
without compromising the
needs of the future.
• Carrying Capacity:
the maximum population of a
given organism which a
particular environment can
sustain without a tendency to
decrease or increase.
• Overpopulation
an increase in numbers of a
population and levels of
consumption beyond the natural
renewable resource base.