Today’s post is by regular contributor, Richard Jurin. Before his retirement, Richard led the Environmental Studies programme at the University of Northern Colorado, where he launched a degree in Sustainability Studies. His academic interests are environmental worldviews and understanding barriers to sustainability. As ever, with our blogs, the views expressed are not necessarily shared by NAEE.
“Twenty centuries of “progress” have brought the average citizen a vote, a national anthem, a Ford, a bank account, and a high opinion of himself, but not the capacity to live in high density without befouling and denuding his environment, nor a conviction that such capacity, rather than such density, is the true test of whether he is civilized.” Aldo Leopold.
When I talk of the need for a spiritual perspective within the sustainability solution, it’s not a religious perspective per se; indeed, I would argue that it has more to do with core values and ethics towards the natural world than beliefs in a deity. If we take the most basic look at worldviews; Anthropocentric (human centered values), Biocentric (life centered values – fauna or both fauna and flora), and Eco-centric (planetary centered values), then we can still frame everything within a scientific perspective, yet still include a deeper philosophical understanding about the value of the natural world by any technology or life choice derived from scientific-materialism.
A simple example by Jared Diamond of how value choices create widely different outcomes can be seen in the natural outcomes of two originally ecologically similar south pacific islands. The people of Easter Island acting as if the trees were an inexhaustible resource managed to denude their island of all trees. Meanwhile, the equivalent population of Henderson Island valued the trees and today, it is still a tropically treed paradise. Newer explanations posit that it is was arrival of Europeans that promoted Easter Islands decline, yet, Henderson Island, under the same pressures, did not follow that same decline.
American University of Wisconsin Professor, Aldo Leopold (wildlife biologist, naturalist, ecologist, forester, philosopher, and conservationist) is now best known for his seminal book A Sand County Almanac (SCA-1949). Had he not tragically died in 1948, there is little doubt that he would have featured alongside Rachel Carson as a pioneer of the early environmental movement. I assigned SCA to my students in a college worldviews course in order to get them to reflect deeply on their values as Leopold guides them through a history of conservationism with philosophical overtones. He never mentions spirituality or eco-centrism, but at the end of reading this book, nearly all my students felt more eco-centrically connected to the final ‘Land Ethic’ idea and how ethics are central to value choices about our natural world.
A series of quotes from Leopold’s writings should highlight how values can be understood as a major and transformative aspect of understanding our choices and how they affect us and the world in which we live. In SCA, Leopold uses the whole book to bring realization to the ultimate value inherent within his Land Ethic conclusion. Examples of how he frames an idea to provoke something profound within the readers mind, follow:
“To those devoid of imagination, a blank place on the map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part.”
“All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts.”
“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.”
“The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant, “What good is it?” If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of eons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.”
“Perhaps the most important of these purposes is to teach the student how to put the sciences together in order to use them. All the sciences and arts are taught as if they were separate. They are separate only in the classroom. Step out on the campus and they are immediately fused. Land ecology is putting arts and sciences together for the purpose of understanding our environment.
In our attempt to make conservation easy, we have made it trivial.
Leopold’s Golden Rule of 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.”
“The ‘Land Ethic’ simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land. In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such… I have purposely presented the land ethic as a product of social evolution because nothing so important as an ethic is ever ‘written’… It evolves in the minds of a thinking community.”
Science and technology without spiritual wisdom is sterile. Do we let technology dominate or do we use technology to promote the ability of all life to flourish. We are currently walking a razor’s edge of indecision, yet a decision will be made, either by us or for us. We have reached a point where the ecology of the natural world will become balanced again. We can choose to help redress that balance or the natural world will do it for us. Indigenous peoples around the globe have lessons for us to learn if we are but willing to simply listen. We can have technology and still live within the natural world. The short documentary ‘The Twelve’ by Lucy Martens and Olivier Girard (2019) explores this well in what it means to be human.
Remodeling the Plane while you are flying it – whether if continues to fly or plunge to the earth is on us to choose at this time. As educators, it is understood that we not to promote or impose values per se, but I would add it is imperative that we guide people to understand their values and that values can, and must change if we are to thrive in an ecologically changing world. If we are to thrive as a species in a technologically advancing society, we all must be a part of the discussion about what this remodeled plane will be. Interestingly, as I read the NAEE manifesto, values appear 18 times as an essential part of decision-making. Leopold understood this and endeavored to guide his readers to understand their own values and the options of other viable perspectives. This is crucial as we individually make optimal choices instead of allowing others with ethically dubious agendas to make them for us.
Humanity needs to consider whether it will strive to be an autonomous species absolutely reliant on technology (present and potential) with little regard to the rest of the ecosphere, or whether it will be a part of the ecosphere as Leopold envisioned. Questioning the values and beliefs that determine our ethics will yield that answer. The effort to tiptoe along the razors edge of indecision of technological versus spiritual solutions can no longer be maintained – it is unlikely that humanity will fall on the spiritual side unless values can be actively questioned and discussed.
We all individually now have to make the choices for the world we want to see. As scientists, both Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson promoted the need to have respect for the natural world. A prerequisite would be that we also have respect for each other and stop the derisive divisions creating war and aggression that threaten everything. We need to apply wisdom to all our technology and life choices with the intention that technology be used in a responsible way and not just for monetary profit.
To paraphrase one of Leopold’s classic quotes; “[Sustainable] development is a job not of building roads into the lovely country, but of building receptivity into the still unlovely human mind.” From my own educator experience, students given the option to freely explore their beliefs and values will come to rational conclusions about what is of real value to them versus the manufactured values of a materialistic-consumer worldview.
“We urgently need to bring about a revolution in the aims and methods of science – and of academic inquiry more generally. Instead of giving priority to the search for knowledge, universities need to devote themselves to seeking and promoting wisdom by rational means, wisdom being the capacity to realize what is of value in life, for oneself and others, wisdom thus including knowledge, understanding and technological know-how, but much else besides. A basic task ought to be to help humanity learn how to create a better world. Acquiring scientific knowledge dissociated from a more basic concern for wisdom, as we do at present, is dangerously and damagingly irrational.” Nicholas Maxwell (The Menace of Science without Wisdom).
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Richard can be contacted at: richardjurin@gmail.com