Political environmentalism is a movement shaped by twentieth century romanticism. And that is one source of its political difficulties, especially in America.
Twentietth century romanticism presumes a sharp divide between the creativity of the arts, which draws inspiration from the untamed natural world we perceive with our unaided senses, and the routinized development of scientific knowledge whose goal is to give us the power to transform, and thereby destroy, nature with our machines. It thinks of the natural state of nature as pure, peaceful, and unchanging and humans as malignant interlopers in thus natural world. Thus it looks incessantly back to the past¸ to the time before mankind interfered with the natural world and it only appreciates with some reluctance how we use technology to shape the natural world to serve the interests of human beings.
This is a romanticism that stands against both science and humanism. And, the environmental movement it has inspired also stands opposed to science and to humanism and is, consequently, profoundly pessimistic.
It is also deeply unpopular except among the professionals who have imbibed this romanticism and whose careers—or inherited wealth—enables them to stand apart from struggle with nature that characterizes the worlds of science and technology even while they still benefiting from the economic riches that struggle has created. One source of the huge gap between strong environmentalists and the rest of the American people is this: strong environmentalists seem to assume that there is opposition between human well being and the well being of nature. And given this choice, the American will always choose the former over the latter.
There is, however, another, earlier romanticism. It is the romanticism of the great scientists and the great poets of the late 18th and 19th centuries. It is the romanticism of Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge and of great scientist / artists like Humphy Davy and William Herschel. It is also the romanticism of Erasmus Darwin which greatly influenced his illustrious grandson, Charles.
This older romanticism understands that science and technology are endeavors that, no less than poetry, exhibit not only human discovery but human invention. It celebrates the genius of scientists and sees Newtown as an adventurer not a calculator.
This older romanticism understands that nature is never static or unchanging and that change is often product of tension and strife. The natural world is something both for which we are grateful, not least because we can transform it to suit us, and something that can be threatening to us. The natural world is made up, as Blake saw, of both lambs and tigers and the sensible approach for humans is to emulate both lambs and tigers, depending upon our circumstances.
This older romanticism does not welcome every change, whether caused by humans or by natural processes untouched by our hands. Rather it encourages diversity and individuality in all spheres of nature and evaluates the human interaction with nature in terms of how far we go to protect and encourage diversity and individuality.
This older romanticism does not see humanity as standing above the natural world ready to use and abuse it. Rather it sees humanity as part of the natural world and our efforts to understand and change nature as coming from deeply natural impulses within not just us but the rest of the nature.
Thus this older romanticism is profoundly optimistic because, rather than fleeing from human technology as something that is always dangerous, it embraces the human capacity to understand and transform the natural world. It certainly does not sanction every way in which we transform nature. Rather it judges our powers and what we create and invent in human terms, asking that they serve our long term purposes, purposes served by growing diversity and individuality and that requires us to be grateful for what we have been given as well as what we can create.
This romanticism is not only humanistic but welcomes scientific and technological progress. Thus if we could revive it, it is well suited to serve as the spirit of a new 21st century environmental movement that is in keeping with the romantic aspiration that, as much as the enlightenment, gives power to the American experiment, and animates so many of our citizens.
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BTW, Blake’s take on Newton was pretty subtle.
The famous engraving of Newton with his compass is described on a Princeton website (http://www.princeton.edu/~his291/Newton.html) as a portrait of a “misguided hero whose gaze was directed only at sterile geometrical diagrams drawn on the ground.” But the portrait is definitely that of an out-sized scientific hero. The scrolls upon which Newton creates his geometrical diagrams seems to be pouring out Newton, suggesting that Blake saw Newton, rightly, as a creative thinker not merely a calculator. And not only do I see nothing to imply that these diagrams are sterile, Blake has Newton firmly situated within the natural world, sitting nude in a rock outcropping. Newton’s thought is clearly seen as an abstraction from nature but one that emanates from nature and embodies nature’s powers.
Blake was a critic of the way Newton’s particle theory of light was taken over into Locke’s theory of experience. He rejected the notion that sense experience is made up wholly of the impression of individual ideas just as he rejected the notion that we could reduce the world to the pay of particles. But that was, I think, a criticism of the goal of reducing human experience to matter in motion, a rejection of the particle theory itself.
In Mock On, Mock On, Blake criticizes the philosophic use of Newton, in the hands of Voltaire (and for reasons I don’t understand Rousseau). But the lines “You throw the sand against the wind / And the wind blows it back again,” are not a denial that we are made of particle but that we can be reduced to particles in motion. Our motion is imparted by spirit that animates those particles. Here Blake stands with the Bible which holds that God imparts the spirit—the Hebrew ruach means wind as well as spirit—that enlivens the gathered dust of the earth out of which we are partly made.
Wordsworth also saw Newton as in the line he wrote about the statue of Newton in the entrance hall to the chapel at Trinity College.
Her pealing organ was my neighbour too;
And from my pillow, looking forth by light
Of moon or favouring stars, I could behold
The antechapel where the statue stood
Of Newton with his prism and silent face,
The marble index of a mind for ever
Voyaging through the strange seas of Thought, alone.
The progression of my ideas tend to move from complete and utter confusion to a drastic oversimplification that clarifies our alternatives to a recognition of complexity that is usually dialectical in nature. I’m clearly in the oversimplification phase here.
But that’s the reason I said “political environmentalism.” A lot of the policy work I read is written by scientists or policy analysts who understand the science. And what I say here really does not apply to them at all.
Indeed one way to look at what I’m calling the “old romanticism” is that it already is the dialectical resolution of the tension in contemporary thought between what Habermas calls “science and technology as ideology” and what I’m calling the “20th century romanticism.” (This wouldn’t be the first time that philosophy or philosophical poetry that was great precisely because it balanced or held together two poles of thought degenerated at the hands of epigones who could or would only grab onto one pole. That is, I think, precisely neo-Platonism and Christianity did to Plato.)
The “old romanticism” gives a better account of the best environmental policy work, which is far more sophisticated and multi-sided than the political or ideological face of environmentalism. So I’m proposing the old romanticism as a better political or ideological stance for environmentalists who want build a strong and effective movement both because it better represents the truth of our relationship to the natural world and the kinds of public policies that will address our current environmental problems but also because it will help us build more public support.
Blake specifically cast Newton as the calculator, the opposite and opponent of creativity. But as he said, without opposites there is no progression.
Also, modern political environmentalism is a broad movement. In some cases it may be anti-science, but for the most part it uses science as the basis for its argument. Also, by necessity, environmentalism has come to an uneasy accord with the human engagement with the natural world.
I think if you were writing about 19th century environmentalism, you would have a stronger case. The image of vast unpeopled (well, only Indians) wildernesses was clearly a nationalistic enterprise as well as a misguided and ill informed romantic notion.
This is complicated stuff, and does not yield easily to the kind of schematic representation you are making in this elegant essay.