The Ancient Roots of Our Ecological Crisis

The damaging changes being suffered today by the natural environment are far more rapid and widespread than anything known in ancient times.

Today deforestation proceeds on a worldwide scale, the atmosphere becomes more turbid and opaque every year, the oceans are being polluted on a massive scale, species of animals and plants are being wiped out at a rate unmatched in history, and the earth is being plundered in many other ways. But although the peoples of ancient civilizations were unfamiliar with such recent discoveries as radioactivity, insecticides, and the internal combustion engine, they faced problems sometimes analogous to those the modern world faces, and we may look to the ancients in order to see the beginnings of many of our modern difficulties with an environment which is decaying because of human misuse.

A human community determines its relationship to the natural environment in many ways. Among the most important are its members’ attitudes toward nature, the knowledge of nature and the understanding of its balance and structure which they attain, the technology they are able to use, and the social control the community can exert over its members to direct their actions which affect the environment. The ancient world shows us the roots of our present problems in each of these areas.

In a well-known and often reprinted article, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” Lynn White traced modern Western attitudes toward the natural world back to the Middle Ages. But both medieval and modern attitudes have ancient roots. Greece and Rome, as well as Judaism and Christianity, helped to form our habitual ways of thinking about nature. And it is evident that the modern ecological crisis is to a great extent the result of attitudes which see nature as something to be freely conquered, used, and dominated without calculation of the resultant cost to mankind and the earth.

These attitudes stem from similar ideas which were held by the ancient peoples who have most influenced us. Animism, which saw the natural world as sharing human qualities and treated things and events in nature as sacred objects of respect or worship, was the dominant attitude in early antiquity and persisted almost everywhere in the Mediterranean world, but it gradually gave way to other ways of thinking. In Israel, transcendent monotheism replaced animism’s “world full of gods.” Instead of being divine in itself, nature was seen as a lower order of creation, given as a trust to mankind with accountability to God. But in the later history of that idea, people tended to take the command to have dominion over the earth as blanket permission to do what they wished to the environment, conveniently forgetting the part about accountability to God, or else interpreting most human activities as improvements in nature and therefore pleasing to God.

Perhaps even more important in the history of human attitudes toward nature was the departure from animism made by the Greek philosophers. Rejecting traditional mythological and religious explanations of the natural world, they insisted on the ability of the human mind to discover the truth about nature through the use of reason. Instead of a place filled with spiritual being, or beings, a theater of the gods, the environment was to them an object of thought and rational analysis. Worship of nature became mere ritual, supposedly replaced with philosophical understanding. Since, in the words of Protagoras, “man is the measure of all things,” it followed that all things have usefulness to mankind as their reason for existence. This idea has persisted in Western thought in various forms until the present, for the belief that everything in nature must justify its existence by its purposeful relationship to mankind is firmly, though perhaps implicitly, held by most people.

What was for the Greeks a philosophical opinion became for the Romans a practical reality. Early Roman animism was overcome less by the ingestion of Greek ideas than by the Romans’ own demonstrated ability to dominate and to turn most things to their own profit, but both Greek influence and Roman practicality helped the Romans to develop attitudes toward nature which are remarkably similar to those expressed and demonstrated today. The Romans treated the natural environment as if it were one of their conquered provinces. If they needed any justification of this beyond their own pragmatism and cupidity, they could find it in Greek philosophy, which reached them in a late, skeptical form that had removed the sacred from nature and made nature an object of manipulation in thought and, by extension, in action. Our Western attitudes can be traced most directly to the secular, businesslike Romans.

Today the process of dominating the earth is seen not as a religious crusade following a biblical commandment but as a profitable venture seeking economic benefit. In this, we are closer to the Romans than to any other ancient people, and in this we demonstrate to a great extent our heritage from them.

Attitudes alone do not determine the way a human community will interact with the natural environment. People whose religion teaches them to treat the world as a sacred place may still manage to make their surroundings a scene of deforestation and erosion, because good intentions toward nature are not enough if they are not informed by accurate knowledge about nature and its workings.

The earlier civilizations of the Near East accumulated a vast amount of information about the world through trial and error, and that information was passed on through tradition. Some of what they thought they knew was correct and useful, and much was colorfully inaccurate, interwoven with myth and folk stories.

A few Greek thinkers were the first to approach the natural world in a consistently rational fashion, demanding that reasonable explanations be found for all natural phenomena. This enabled them to begin the process of gaining knowledge which eventually developed into what might be called the scientific method. Many of the Greek thinkers were also careful observers of nature and attempted to check their ideas against what could be observed, but all of them held rational thought to be superior to what could be seen in the world and assumed that the inner workings of the human mind are congruent with the outer workings of the universe. This assumption, along with the antipathy of Greek thinkers toward work done with the hands, limited the range of their discoveries and led them into some fallacious speculations. Nonetheless, the discoveries of the Greek philosophers and scientists are many and impressive.

Unfortunately, research and discovery in this field gradually diminished under the Romans, who were collectors of older bits of information about the world of nature rather than discoverers of new knowledge. A few Greek scientists continued to work under the Roman Empire, but the Romans themselves produced few creative thinkers in this field. With the advent of Christianity, the situation worsened. Living in a world which they believed to be temporary, early Christians seemed to regard study of the things of this world to be irrelevant, if not a positive barrier on the way to salvation. “The wisdom of this world is foolishness,” said Paul. He spoke in a somewhat different connection, but the Christians of the later Roman Empire, with very few outstanding exceptions, tended to look at all scientific inquiry in the spirit of that statement.

The modern world, having revived the works of the ancient Greeks, has gone beyond them in developing a rigorous methodology for gaining knowledge about the natural environment. The extent and accuracy of the understanding of nature that is available today is truly impressive, but far from complete.

Much remains to be discovered about the circulation of the earth’s atmosphere, weather, and the effects of pollution of various kinds on climate, for example. The behavior of species of animals and the interaction of all forms of life in an ecosystem are only imperfectly understood. Governments and institutions have not always seen the relevance of such knowledge, and support for research has been a sometime thing. At the same time, human activities are inexorably destroying the last few examples of relatively undisturbed ecosystems that remain on earth, so that soon they will no longer be available for study. Brazilians are proclaiming that the Amazon rain forest will be gone in thirty years, to give one example, and no one can accurately predict what effects that massive change will have on South America and the world. Careful study is still needed.

The speed, scope, and intensity of interaction with the natural environment are crucially determined by the level of technology available to a human community. Using human and animal motive power and the energy of water, wind, and fire with the relatively simple tools and machines that had been invented, the ancient peoples constructed huge monuments which still impress us, but their level of interaction with the natural environment was relatively low as compared with that of modern industrial society. The changes wrought in the environment by ancient civilizations are massive indeed, but involved centuries or millennia for their accomplishment.

(To be continued)