Ideological Origins of American Environmentalism

• CHAPTER 2• Ideological Origins of American Environmentalism We are launced on the ocean ofan unchained democracy. - Wendell Phillips, 1859 The world, we are told, was made especially for man-a pre- sumption not supported by all the facts .... Why should man value himself as more than a small part of the one great unit of creation? -John Muir, 1867 Bernard Bailyn's The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967) called attention to the fact that for the late eighteenth century, natural-rights philosophy and the concept ofdemocratic liberty it inspired were a "contagion" so powerful it surprised even its advocates. The liberal impulse, Bailyn wrote, "swept past boundaries few had set out to cross, into regions few had wished to enter." 1 The Ameri- can Revolution may have settled the issue ofpropertied, white, male colonists' rights, but in clarifying those rights it left other categories of human beings outside the pale of ethics. Those whose ethical status was undefined remained vulnerable to those with clearly de- fined rights. The interests of these oppressed minorities, however, would gradually receive attention, as would, in time, the whole human relationship to that other component ofJohn Locke's state ofnature: nature itself. The United States played a major role in expanding the definition of democracy. Americans took freedom to be the basis of their national mission. John Adams believed his country was "designed by Providence [as] the Theater" in which humankind would crusade for 33 Copyrighted Material 34 Ideological Origins ofAmerican Environmentalism liberty.2 The boundaries of the stage expanded most dramatically after 1960 to admit actors and beneficiaries totally unanticipated by the revolutionaries of 1776. It is revealing to consider the radical environmentalists ofthe 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s as occupying the same role in the spread ofliberalism as did the political radicals ofthe 1760s, 1770s, and 1780s. Both groups of Americans used natural rights ide- ology to reach revolutionary conclusions. Both, at times, exhibited confusion and contradiction. And both experienced quite heated re- sistance from more conservative members of their society. At least one ofthe environmentalists followed John Adams in using the rights ofnature as the core ofa new national mission. "Perhaps," Michael W. Fox wrote in 1978, "America may come to lead other nations and show them alternative values ... that will benefit not only all people of one earth, but also all of earth, including all sentient beings and habitats, since all are interrelated and interdependent." 3 Bernard Bailyn was interested in knowing where the intellectuals of the American Revolution got their ethical ideas and how they ap- plied them to a major problem of their time: the relationship of the American colonists to Great Britain. The same questions arise in ex- amining the thought of the new environmentalists, although for them the compelling problem was the relationship of nature to human civilization. How was it that people could begin to talk seriously in the middle of the twentieth century about environmental ethics and the rights of nature? Where did the idealism come from that led environmental activists to blockade lumber roads, throw their bodies in front ofseal clubbers, and chain themselves to the banks of rivers scheduled for damming? What inspired them to burn billboards, de- stroy bulldozers, free laboratory animals, and at least talk about blowing up dams to "liberate" rivers? What were the ideological origins of radical environmentalism in the United States? In the United States the greatest gains in conservation or environmentalism occurred after 1960. But in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries England went far beyond her former colony in expounding an ethical philosophy of human-nature relationships and in begin- ning its legal implementation with respect to animals. There was no Jeremy Bentham orJohn Lawrence in the United States and no Mar- tin's Act. The few Americans who did talk about nature in ethical terms in the nineteenth century were not even dignified by ridicule; most often, they were ignored completely. It is well to remember in this regard that Thoreau did not become an environmental hero until well into the twentieth century. Significantly, his modern reputation depended in large part on his discovery and popularization by En- glish animal rightists, notably Henry S. Salt. 4 Copyrighted Material Ideological Origins ofAmerican Environmentalism 35 With full awareness of the risks of broad cross-cultural general- izations, three observations help explain the lag time between Ameri- can and English consideration ofthe rights ofnature. First, for much of the nineteenth century the majority of territory claimed by the United States was wilderness. The inexhaustibility of resources was the dominant American myth for a century after independence. Even utilitarian conservation seemed unnecessary, much less any view- point that challenged anthropocentrism. Even people critical of resource exploitation could not escape the feeling that there was, after all, plenty of room for people and nature in the New World. Con- sider, for instance, that until May 10, 1869, one could not cross the continent without having to go at least part of the way on foot or with the aid of animals. On May 24, 1869, two weeks after the first railroad linked the coasts, John Wesley Powell rode the new train to Green River, Wyoming, and started in boats down a thousand miles of unmapped river. The Indian wars were in full cry then; much of the West was wild. In this geographical context, progress seemed synonymous with growth, development, and the conquest ofnature. The idea of living ethically and harmoniously with nature was in- compatible with nineteenth-century American priorities. 5 A second reason for the lack ofAmerican interest in the rights of nature until well into the twentieth century was the dominant con- cern of earlier intellectuals and reformers with the rights of people. The Revolution released a flood of idealism based on natural-rights principles, but for a century it focused almost exclusively on social problems such as slavery. For almost a century after 1776, the op- pression ofblack people diverted American eyes from other wrongs. As far as natural rights idealists were concerned, slavery was the flre- bell in the night that had to be answered first. It would have been incongruous for Congress to pass legislation forbidding cruelty to cattle while millions of human beings existed as unprotected live- stock. So a Wendell Phillips or a William Lloyd Garrison devoted himself to abolitionism. In England, on the other hand, slavery was on the way to legal abolition in 1792, and a John Lawrence or a Richard Martin could turn his attention to righting other kinds of wrong. Third, when Americans at last began protecting nature in the nineteenth century, it was through a very anthropocentrically de- fined national park ideal. Americans preserved Yellowstone (1872), the Adirondacks (1885), and Yosemite (1890) for people's pleasure and for utilitarian purposes such as water and game supply. England in the same period had no wilderness and consequently directed its environmental ideals to a component of nature closer to its experi- Copyrighted Material 36 Ideological Origins ojAmerican Environmentalism ence: animals, especially domesticated ones. Henry Salt's Humani- tarian League and John Muir's Sierra Club, founded within a year of each other in the early 1890s, had vastly different objectives related to the particular experience of their respective cultures with nature. In choosing the Fourth ofJuly for his 1845 departure to Wal- den Pond, Henry David Thoreau intended to make what a later generation would call a "statement." The Massachusetts naturalist- philosopher saw little to celebrate about his nation's first sixty-nine years. Americans seemed to be obsessed with what his Concord col- league, Ralph Waldo Emerson, called "things." 6 Going to a shop to buy a blank notebook in which to record his thoughts, Thoreau could only find ledgers ruled for dollars and cents. His countrymen appeared to be oblivious to any but utilitarian values. Nature was merely an object-a resource-and they exploited it with a ven- geance. Thoreau observed the rapid recession of the New England forest and commented: "Thank God, men cannot as yet fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth!"7 He was one of the first Ameri- cans to perceive inexhaustibility as a myth. As Donald Worster has explained, there were ecologists before "ecology." Thoreau was among them. The word itself dates to 1866, but the idea that the many parts of nature fit together into a single unit-or were so fitted by a creative God-appeared frequently in scientific and religious circles since the seventeenth century.8 Holistic thinkers such as Henry More and John Ray wrote about nature from this point of view, as did the renowned Swedish botanist Carl von Linne (or Linnaeus), whose 1749 treatise The Oeconomy of Nature popularized the phrase the pre-ecologists favored. In 1793 the Rever- end Nicholas Collin asked the American Philosophical Society to support the protection oflittle-known birds, apparently on the verge of extinction, until naturalists discovered "what part is assigned to them in the oeconomy of nature." 9 God had created the creatures, Collin implied, and for humans to remove them from the natural scheme of things would be both imprudent and irreverent. This line of reasoning forecast the way the ecological perspective would pro- vide an intellectual basis for environmental ethics. The central idea was community membership and its attendant rights. As a Transcendentalist, Thoreau's holism stemmed from his be- liefin the existence ofan "Oversoul" or godlike moral force that per- meated everything in nature. Using intuition, rather than reason and science, humans could transcend physical appearances and perceive "the currents of the Universal Being" binding the world together.

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