SOLUTIONS
PROTECTING THE BIOSPHERE
A Lineage of Environmentalism
Summit of Mount Whitney, southern terminus of the John Muir trail, Yosemite, California
The protection of nature has deep spiritual and cultural roots. Shamanism has always recognized the sacred value of forests, lakes, rivers and mountains. Taoism, Shintoism and Buddhism revere special natural sites for spiritual purposes, while Hinduism and Buddhism share a deep spiritual appreciation for animals.
In the modern era, biological conservation became a central concern for several western philosophical movements. A romantic-transcendental tradition followed from the works of literary figures like Wordsworth and Thoreau. They believed that Nature has inherent meaning and value, seeing it as a temple where humanity can communicate with universal spirit. Wordsworth expressed this in Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey (1798):
...And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye and ear, both what they half-create,
And what perceive; well-pleased to recognize
In nature and the language of the sense
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.
John Muir (b. 1838, d. 1914) was a Scottish-born American naturalist and early advocate of the protection of the American wilderness. He sought to protect the beauty of Nature, on which, he felt, depend both human spirituality and the ongoing evolution of many other species. His great achievement was the American national park movement. He founded Yosemite and Yellowstone, remarkable precedents for all future government-sponsored conservation, and the Sierra Club, one of the most important conservation organizations in the U.S.
Gifford Pinchot formulated the utilitarian ethic of resource conservation based on complementary conservation and development. This concept, which has been widely applied by the modern environmental movement, assigns quantifiable values to nature’s "services".
Aldo Leopold is considered the father of wildlife management. He described his own dynamic approach to conservation as "evolutionary ecology":
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 [1].
Lovelock in his garden, with a statue of Gaia, the
Greek godess of the Earth.
James Lovelock invented an Electron Capture Detector that identified persistent CFC gas depletion of the stratospheric ozone layer. His studies of the global sulphur cycle provided evidence for biological control of the Earth's climate and led him to propose the Gaia hypothesis which asserts that the living and nonliving parts of the earth constitute a complex interacting system, a single ‘giant organism’. Within it, all living things have a regulatory effect on the biosphere; it promotes the overall evolution of life. In a recent book The Revenge of Gaia, Lovelock states:
My Gaia theory sees the Earth behaving as if it were alive, and clearly anything alive can enjoy good health, or suffer disease. The climate centres around the world, which are the equivalent of the pathology lab of a hospital, have reported the Earth's physical condition, and the climate specialists see it as seriously ill, and soon to pass into a morbid fever that may last as long as 100,000 years. As members of the Earth's family and an intimate part of it, we and especially civilisation are in grave danger.
Our planet has kept itself healthy and fit for life, just like an animal does, for most of the more than three billion years of its existence. It was ill luck that we started polluting at a time when the sun is too hot for comfort. We have given Gaia a fever and soon her condition will worsen to a state like a coma. She has been there before and recovered, but it took more than 100,000 years. We are responsible and will suffer the consequences: as the century progresses, the temperature will rise 8 degrees centigrade in temperate regions and 5 degrees in the tropics.
Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess described what he called Deep Ecology [3]. Naess believed that ecological science composed of facts and logic alone could not answer ethical questions about how humanity should live. That would require ecological wisdom—something based on deep experience, questioning and commitment. For him, ecosophy is an evolving, consistent philosophy of being, thinking and acting in the world that embodies ecological wisdom and harmony. Ecosophy holds that no single species of living being has more metaphysical right to live and unfold than any other.
Edward O. Wilson, eminent American biologist.
We have entered the Century of the Environment, in which the immediate future is usefully conceived as a bottleneck. Science and technology, combined with a lack of self-understanding and a Paleolithic obstinacy, brought us to where we are today. Now science and technology, combined with foresight and moral courage, must see us through the bottleneck and out…
The essence of environmentalism is something central and vastly important. Its essence has been defined by science in the following way. Earth, unlike other solar planets, is not in physical equilibrium. It depends on its living shell to create the special conditions on which life is sustainable. The soil, water and atmosphere of its surface have evolved over hundreds of millions of years to their present condition by the activity of the biosphere, a stupendously complex layer of living creatures whose activities are locked together in precise but tenuous global cycles of energy and transformed organic matter. The biosphere creates our special world anew every day, every minute, and holds it in a unique shimmering physical disequilibrium. On that disequilibrium, the human species is in thrall. When we alter the biosphere in any direction, we move the environment away from the delicate dance of biology. When we destroy ecosystems and extinguish species, we degrade the greatest heritage this planet has to offer and thereby threaten our own existence.
Humanity did not descend as angelic beings into this world. Nor are we aliens who colonized Earth. We evolved here, one among many species, across millions of years, and exist as one organic miracle linked to others. The natural environment we treat with such unnecessary ignorance and recklessness was our cradle and nursery, our school, and remains our one and only home. To its special conditions we are intimately adapted in every one of the bodily fibres and biochemical transactions that gives us life. [4].
1. Aldo Leopold [1949] A Sand County Almanac
2. James Lovelock [2000] Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth
3. Arne Næss, [1973] The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement
4. Edward Wilson [2002] The Future of Life