Ed. note: This is Part 2 of a six-part series. “America’s Enlightenment Heritage” (Part 1) is here; “Inhuman Rights” (Part 3) is here; “Philosophic Conflict” (Part 4) is here; “The Value of Nature” (Part 5) is here; and “The ‘Ideal’ of Primitivism” (Part 6) is here.
“The ultimate goal of the mainstream environmentalist movement, therefore, is not conservation of natural resources for human use. It is preservation of nature as an end in itself.”
Nowhere was the traditional fear of self-responsibility and the hatred of individualist economies more evident than among intellectuals. Over the years, they began to translate the pre-modern Zeitgeist into more intellectually palatable terms: into formal philosophical critiques of reason, individualism, and capitalism.
Early Environmentalism
The Eden Premise lay at the core of the thinking of philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau, the intellectual godfather of today’s “counterculture.” Rousseau preached the inherent goodness of untouched nature and undisciplined emotion; the corrupting influence of reason, culture, and civilization; economic egalitarianism and small-scale participatory democracy; the mystical infallibility of the collective will; and the sacrifice of the individual to the group.
The Eden Premise also was a central tenet of American transcendentalists and pantheists, notably including John Muir, Henry David Thoreau, Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold, and Ansel Adams—individuals who co-founded such groups as the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society. “In wildness is the preservation of the world,” said Thoreau. “The most alive is the wildest.”1
In 1860, Thoreau wrote that forests—when left untouched by Man—would evolve toward “the greatest regularity and harmony.”2 Thoreau’s ideas had a great impact on the thinking of the polymath George Perkins Marsh—a Vermont lawyer and Congressman (1843–49), and U. S. diplomat (to Italy, 1861–82)—who in 1864 wrote the seminal work of American environmentalism, Man and Nature. Marsh argued that natural forces and processes exist in a stable, harmonious balance, but that human activity was destroying that balance.
“Man is everywhere a disturbing agent,” Marsh declared. “Wherever he plants his foot, the harmonies of nature are turned to discord.” He went on to call men “brute destroyers” who “destroy the balance which nature had established.” However, Marsh took solace in the belief that “nature avenges herself upon the intruder,” reducing Man to “depravation [sic], barbarism, and perhaps even extinction.”3
Pinchot and Muir
Man and Nature was read widely in America and abroad, and in turn affected the thinking of the two pivotal figures in the history of American environmentalism: Gifford Pinchot and John Muir.
Pinchot was the first chief of the U. S. Forest Service, under President Theodore Roosevelt. A utilitarian, he opposed private ownership of natural resources, regarding them as collective goods to be managed for the benefit of “the greatest number” and conserved for the benefit of future generations.
To this end, Pinchot was largely responsible for vastly increasing the federal government’s land holdings. Today, one quarter of the entire land mass of the United States is owned by the federal government, an area five times the size of France. By 1980 the federal government held 44 percent of Arizona, almost half of California and Wyoming, well over half of Idaho, Oregon, and Utah, three-quarters of Alaska, and over 86 percent of Nevada. These holdings contain over half of America’s known resources. This includes a third of our oil, over 40 percent of salable timber and natural gas, and most of the nation’s coal, copper, silver, asbestos, lead, and other minerals.
Whatever might be said of Pinchot’s socialistic philosophy, it was still predicated on human values. In his chronicle of American environmentalism, Shabecoff observes that “Pinchot wanted the forests managed for their usefulness, not for their beauty.… He was not interested in preserving the natural landscape for its own sake.”4
Like Pinchot, most of the millions who now call themselves environmentalists are really just nature-loving “conservationists.” Like him, they see the earth’s bounty as resources for human use, appreciation, development, and spiritual enjoyment. At root, then, their values are still homocentric—that is, Man-centered.
But among intellectuals, this conservationist ethic quickly fell out of favor. Today’s environmentalist leaders have a different pedigree: the preservationist lineage that traces back to Pinchot’s arch-rival, John Muir. A mystical Scotsman who co-founded the Sierra Club in 1892, Muir’s basic tenet was that wilderness existed not for Man, but for its own sake.
“How narrow we selfish, conceited creatures are in our sympathies!” Muir declared in his 1867 journal. “How blind to the rights of all the rest of creation! …Well, I have precious little sympathy for the selfish propriety of civilized man, and if a war of races should occur between the wild beasts and Lord Man, I would be tempted to sympathize with the bears.”5
It was not long before Muir’s preservationist thinking began to dominate the emerging conservation movement. For instance, Horace M. Albright, an early director of the National Park Service (1929–33), saw it as his mission to “keep large sections of primitive country free from the influence of destructive civilization.”6
The Victory of “Deep Ecology”
Beginning with the scholar George Marsh, the American environmentalist movement wrapped itself in a mantle of scientism, adapted from European philosophy. Borrowing the idea of “holism” from philosopher G. W. F. Hegel, German zoologist Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) argued that individuals per se don’t exist—that they’re simply parts of greater wholes that include their races, societies, nations, and environment. In 1866, he coined the term “ecology” to describe “the whole science of the relations of the organism to the environment.”
Soon, others began to connect the dots between The Eden Premise, Thoreau’s and Marsh’s idea of a natural balance, Hegel’s “holism,” the moral imperatives of Muir’s preservationism, and Haeckel’s ecology.
In 1935 Oxford botanist A. G. Tansley introduced the concept of an “ecosystem.” To Tansley, ecosystems—not individual living entities—were “the basic units of nature on the face of the earth.”7
In 1948, Wilderness Society co-founder Aldo Leopold wrote his famous Sand County Almanac. Leopold argued that maintaining the “pyramid of life” required the preservation of a biodiversity of species. To accomplish this, he promoted a “land ethic” which “enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals” and which “changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it.”8
All these ideas lay like dry, rotting timber on a forest floor, waiting for a spark. And the spark that ignited the organized environmentalist movement was Rachel Carson’s 1962 book, Silent Spring.
Carson’s thesis was that man-made chemicals and pesticides were wreaking horrific impacts on what she referred to as “the web of life–or death–that scientists know as ecology.”9 Weaned on the ideal of Eden and the goal of preservationism, indoctrinated in the new pseudo-science of ecology, and skeptical of the fruits of Western culture, millions uncritically swallowed Carson’s easily refuted claims. In the wake of Silent Spring, conservation groups became radicalized; classroom curricula began to promote hard-core preservationism; and a spate of environmental laws, agencies, and regulations were enacted.
Motivating it all was the pantheistic spirit of Muir and Thoreau. In a famous 1967 essay, UCLA historian Lynn White Jr. blamed the ecological “crisis” on the West’s Judeo-Christian heritage, which, he said, was based on the “axiom that nature has no reason for existence save to serve man.” He called instead for a “new religion” based on “the spiritual autonomy of all parts of nature” and “the equality of all creatures, including man.”10
And Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess took all this to its logical dead end. Individuals do not exist, he said; we’re all only part of larger “ecosystems.” The “shallow ecology” of mainstream conservation groups, he argued, still aimed at improving the environment only for the benefit of humans. He instead advocated “deep ecology”—a view that he described as “biospherical egalitarianism…the equal right to live and blossom.”11
In short: all things are created equal; they should be venerated as ends in themselves, intrinsically valuable apart from Man; and they have equal rights to their own kinds of “self-realization” free from human interference or exploitation.
Preservationists in Muir’s tradition are not interested in the human use or development of natural resources. They reject homocentrism in favor of what they call “biocentrism,” or nature-centeredness—the view that nature exists as an end in itself. Biocentrists regard nature as intrinsically valuable, meaning: valuable independent of any human awareness or interests. Since nature is inherently valuable as it is, biocentrists regard human changes to the “natural order” as evil. To them, resource development is resource destruction.
If this sounds radical, it is. But most people don’t realize that today, even the most mainstream of environmental groups have accepted radical preservationism as their fundamental outlook and goal. Shabecoff writes sympathetically:
The modern environmental movement has long since united behind the preservationist crusade as conceived by Muir and others…While today’s environmental organizations give lip service to multiple use [of public lands], they do so basically as a fallback position [because] they know that the public…would not accept shutting out economic activity.12
The ultimate goal of the mainstream environmentalist movement, therefore, is not conservation of natural resources for human use. It is preservation of nature as an end in itself.
Al Gore
Consider former Vice-President Al Gore—a man whom no one would consider to be on the movement’s lunatic fringe. Indeed, his Earth in the Balance became a national bestseller and an environmentalist manifesto, praised by movement leaders and hailed by hundreds of major media reviewers including Time, the New York Times Book Review, the Christian Science Monitor, the Washington Post, the New Republic, as well as by such luminaries as Bill Moyers and Carl Sagan. You don’t get more mainstream than that.
And just what was he saying to arouse the enthusiasm of the culturati? Consider what Gore wrote on the very first page of his Introduction.
Civilization itself has been on a journey from its foundations in the world of nature to an ever more contrived, controlled, and manufactured world of our own initiative and sometimes arrogant design. …It is now all too easy to regard the earth as a collection of “resources” having an intrinsic value no larger than their usefulness at the moment.13
Later, he mourned:
We are creating a world that is hostile to wildness, that seems to prefer concrete to natural landscapes. … Have our eyes adjusted so completely to the bright lights of civilization that we can’t see…the violent collision between human civilization and the earth?14
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About the Author
Robert Bidinotto is an award-winning journalist, editor, lecturer, and novelist who reports on cultural and political issues from the perspective of principled individualism. Over three decades he has established a reputation as a leading critic of environmentalism.
As a former Staff Writer for Reader’s Digest, Bidinotto authored high-profile investigative reports on environmental issues, crime, and other public controversies—including articles on global warming and the 1989 Alar scare. His Alar article was singled out for editorial praise by Barron’s and by Priorities, the journal of the American Council on Science and Health. He authored a monograph, The Green Machine,and for several years ran a website (“ecoNOT”), both critically examining the environmentalist philosophy and movement.
Bidinotto’s many articles, columns, and reviews also appeared in Success, Writer’s Digest, The Boston Herald, The American Spectator, City Journal, The Freeman, and Reason. He served as the award-winning editor of The New Individualist, a political and cultural magazine, and as editor of publications for the Capital Research Center, a nonprofit watchdog group.
In 2011, Bidinotto began writing political thrillers. HUNTER—the debut novel in his Dylan Hunter series—soared to the top of the Amazon and Wall St. Journal bestseller lists. BAD DEEDS, the first sequel, dramatizes the evils and dangers of environmentalism. A number-one best-selling Audible political thriller, BAD DEEDS was named “Book of the Year” by the Conservative-Libertarian Fiction Alliance. Bidinotto’s thrillers are available on Amazon.
Learn more about Robert Bidinotto at his fiction website, “The Vigilante Author” and at his nonfiction blog.
