SOC301

In this week’s reading, you will explore how various Native tribes perceive the earth and how European colonization stands in stark contrast with Native worldviews. In this lesson, we will explore the Western worldview. Through this lecture I will argue that the west has not always maintained a “mastery over nature” perspective, but that worldviews continually evolve over time. As you read through this, try and see where in Western history perspectives regarding nature may have connected with Native perspectives, and where such views disconnect from various Native perspectives.

A belief in mastery over nature rather than harmony is one of the most fundamental, taken-for-granted parts of American culture. While it is true that eco-consciousness runs heavily against America's cultural grain, it is not at all inconceivable that such a consciousness could not in time become a significant part of American culture. The arguments I present to support this are based on a sense that such shifts in worldview occur over long periods of time- over generations and centuries. It is unlikely that such dramatic shifts in culture can occur in a single generation, though such shifts do happen. While dramatic shifts in social arrangements do occur within single generations, dramatic shifts in fundamental ways of thinking usually take much longer.
American culture, while having unique characteristics, is also a product of thousands of years of Western civilization. Yet, we have seen throughout the history of Western civilization dramatic shifts in worldviews. The West has not always believed in mastery over rather than harmony with nature. While for the past 500 years this has been our general orientation, a larger view of human history shows us that mastery of nature is a very recent phenomenon. As will be shown, when taking a broader view of history, we see drastic transformations in worldviews which must lead us to consider that this most recent historical perception of the relationship between humans and nature is not necessary a permanent one. Additionally, perceptions of harmony with nature have never left Western culture completely and appear to manifest themselves in various forms.
As Carolyn Merchant (1980) explains, the ancient Greeks saw the cosmos as an organic unity where all components, including human beings, exist in harmony together. Platonism, Aristotelianism and Stoicism were the basis for a medieval worldview that emphasized the importance of the whole before the parts and emphasized the importance of maintaining a harmonious relationship between all parts. The Neoplatonic conception of the world perceived the soul as the source of all life in the world. Magic was condemned as heretical because it assumed that nature was passive and could be manipulated. Medieval worldviews were also influenced by Aristotle's earth-centered hierarchical cosmos where everything was connected into a living chain of being and humans were dependent on the animal world from below and the angels above. Furthermore, the Stoics held that God and matter were synonymous and that the world reasons; has sensations and generates living rational beings (Merchant (1980), 23). Essentially prior to and throughout the medieval period the world was considered a living sentient being which created (through God) rational human creatures. Human beings were considered a part of nature and nature was considered a product of God.
Yet, the organismic worldview so prevalent in Western societies since ancient times did in fact change. Romanyshyn (1992) demonstrates how the invention of linear perspective painting in the 15th century ...became the cultural vision which has shaped our contemporary technological world (Romanyshyn, 32) and which redefined our relationship to the natural world. Linear perspective vision predated the scientific revolution and created a geometricization of space whereby we became observers of a distant world. No longer were we integrated members of this world, but outsiders who could order what we saw. As Romanyshyn states:

But insofar as we see with linear perspective eyes we come to discount this living relation between our flesh and the flesh of the world, and both size and distance as indices of value are eclipsed by size and distance as measured functions. The former becomes a subjective matter while the latter becomes an objective account of the way things really are. In this space, then, things are neutralized. Emptied of value, they are arranged in the same homogeneous space of the world, and in that calculable space they are placed well along the path toward becoming calculable objects (Ibid., 56).

Thus, with this sense of perception, the natural world was seen as discrete matter to be manipulated. Romanyshyn holds that the very way in which we literally see is a historical invention which therefore changes over time. Mastery over nature in this light can be viewed as a historical cultural phenomenon that transforms over time.
A perception of mastery over nature requires a perception of the self as both separate and superior to nature. However, again such a perception is historical. As Rifkin (1991) explains, the idea of self was not well developed in the middle ages. Nature was not severed from the self. Farm animals lived and slept beside the medieval family. Manners and hygiene were not concepts. Europeans ate like animals with their hands, ripping into entire animal carcasses, drinking soup from a communal bowl where they spit back undesirable bits, emptying one's bowels on the floor where one ate, etc. In other words, there was less of a distinction been human, animal, and physical environment in the medieval world. In fact, as Rifkin explains, it was not until the European enclosure movements of the 16th century that peasants saw their lives as distinct from the land. When viewed with this broader historical lens, we see that a sense of connection to the rest of nature was part of our cultural heritage for thousands of years. It only took a few hundred years to change this perception. Thus when looked at historically no worldviews are fixed and the current one is a relatively recent phenomenon.
Even while the perception of harmony with nature was rejected, it has made its way back into our cultural conscience in a different form- this time, ironically, through the very views that created a sense of mastery over nature. As Rifkin notes, the worldwide enclosure movements, which lead to a detachment from nature and sense of mastery over it, also helped to trigger a new understanding of the earth. As humanity seized control of the various spheres of the planet- land, ocean, atmosphere, electromagnetic spectrum, and gene pool- it slowly began to realize that each realm could not be neatly sealed off and isolated from others (Rifkin, 256). Mastery over the environment has lead to a growing environmental crisis which has lead to a slow growing ecological awareness. Rifkin (as well as Nash, Elgin and others) demonstrates that ecological awareness has been slowly growing. Rifkin holds the first modern acknowledgment of the earth as a living organism occurred with Vladimir Vernadsky's (1911) argument that geochemical and biological processes on the planet evolved together and aided each other. In the 1970's scientists James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis furthered this notion with the Gaia hypothesis which argued that the earth functions like a self-regulating organism.
Rifkin, furthermore, points to a growing ecological awareness through comparing the American public's sense of the geosphere (nation states and political boundaries) to their sense of the biosphere (the envelope of life, the area of living matter). In a 1988 Gullup pole of geographic literacy only 57 percent of the respondents could identify England on a map; 55 percent could locate New York State; one in seven could not identify the United States; one in four could not identify the Soviet Union. There was even less knowledge of geopolitics where one in three Americans could not name one member country of NATO; 16 percent thought the Soviet Union was a member of NATO. Yet, there is a drastic difference in American's knowledge of the biosphere. Of the same respondents 84 percent were aware that CFCs may be destroying the earth's ozone layer; 94 percent of those realized this loss would be felt all over the planet; 68 percent of all respondents were aware of acid rain problems; one in three was aware of deforestation in Brazil and the impact that has worldwide. Essentially, worldviews change and evolve. Geographic boundaries and certain aspects of politics may not be as much a part of our collective knowledge base as environmental concerns. This suggests shifts in our culture with the younger generation especially demonstrating a recognition that everything in nature is connected to everything else (Rifkin, 256).

The United States of America was born during the industrial and scientific revolutions which did transform western views of nature into seeing nature as an object to be mastered. Yet, it would be short-sighted to resolve that since the country was born into such a worldview, that that is the way it will stay. In addition, many countervailing forces have existed since the inception of the U.S. that have rejected such a view and have continued to gain support. We know from history that certain latent aspects of a culture can enter mainstream consciousness depending on a range of social forces. We see this specifically throughout the history of the U.S. For example, in the mid 1800's very few individuals believed that slavery was morally wrong. It was once considered stupid to think that colored men were really human and must be treated humanely. Today, this stupidity has become truth (Albert Sweitzer, 1923, in Nash). Today, slavery is considered a moral outrage by Americans. An anti-slavery stance is just as much a part of our contemporary cultural fabric as slavery was during the 17 and 1800's. If beliefs regarding mastery over humans (which was once a taken-for-granted given) can change within one generation, how inconceivable is it to imagine that beliefs regarding mastery over nature could not change as well?
We see further forms of eco-consciousness and the potential for it to enter mainstream American thought when looking at the history of securing rights in the U.S. As Roderick Nash (1989) demonstrates, the U.S. has been a history of securing rights. This first started with the rights of man (Declaration of Independence, 1776), and has extended to: Slaves (Emancipation Proclamation, 1863); Women (Nineteenth Amendment, 1920); Native Americans (Indian Citizenship Act, 1924); Laborers (Fair Standards Act, 1938); African Americans (Civil Rights Act, 1954). We begin to see this tradition extend to the rights of nature as epitomized in the Endangered Species Act, 1973.
The movement to liberate nature has its roots in the transcendental movement of the 19th Century and extends to the present day environmental movement. The Animal Welfare Act (1966), the Marine Mammal Protection Act (1973), and the Endangered Species Act (1973) all represent the beginning of the institutionalization of environmental concerns and represent the political influence of eco-consciously minded people. The Endangered Species Act even held that harm to the environment was connected to harm to species. This is a more holistic interpretation of the natural world that has been institutionalized through laws into American society. Yet, this law was also undermined in 1978 when the Supreme Court placed restrictions on it as pressure by various industrial developers mounted. This translated into granting exemptions to the requirement to protect threatened species in cases where doing so would clash with overriding economic interests (Nash, 178). Furthermore, the law does not say anything about endangering the species in the first place, it simply states what must be done once species are endangered. Faced with legal disappointments, environmental radicals turned toward more direct forms of action and protest. As Nash demonstrates, the route that the environmental movement followed is comparable to the ethical and political situations faced by the abolitionists and given the influence abolition eventually had in this country, we must consider the fact that fundamental, taken-for-granted parts of American culture do in fact change. Yet, not all social concerns enter mainstream consciousness and there are unforeseen events and other social forces which come into play in shaping cultural views.

Some contemporary theorists on the environment have suggested that transformations in consciousness are rooted not only in social movement pressure, changed legislation, more ecological problems that are directly felt and experienced, and other social forces, but are dependent upon the march of evolution. These theories are very comprehensive and site enormous volumes of evidence. My major concern with them are that they have the potential to remove the role of agency. Yet, these theories do suggest how a social milieu may arise in which actors, individual and social, then play a significant role.
Ken Wilber (1995) places eco-consciousness as one among infinite phases in the ongoing march of evolution. Wilber theorizes that reality is composed of what Arthur Koestler terms holons, ... that which, being a whole in one context, is simultaneously a part in another (Wilber, 18). Holons emerge hierarchically, as each holon transcends but includes its predecessor (Ibid., 51). Wilber holds that holons evolve along four different but connected scales, what he calls quadrants. For eco-consciousness to evolve, all quadrants must develop together and reach the next evolutionary step.

Paul Shepard (1982) would disagree with Wilber's notion that we need to enter the next stage of evolution to bring about eco-consciousness. It is not so much that eco-consciousness runs so heavily against the American grain, but that Western civilization has turned away from eco-consciousness and has entered a pathological state that may be beyond a state of repair. To Shepard, rational thinking is not necessarily a higher level of thinking that nonetheless must be transcended as Wilber holds, but rather is possibly the end of wisdom. Mastering the world and

the dream of omnipotence is an infantile dream that should diminish, rather than grow, with personal maturity. Unchecked... it becomes an obsession, leading to an overpolarized world view in which everything is either good or bad. According to Louis J. Halle, such a view is the womb of all ideology of 'us against them.' (Shepard, 99).

Ultimately, Shepard holds:

The evidence is good that our fellow creatures individually and collectively show distorted behavior when their members go beyond a norm for the species .... In higher animals of many kinds, including man, the depletion of physical resources may not begin to signal 'too much' until long after psychological damage has begun. By the time the subsistence base of physical resources begins to show signs of excessive withdrawals, some behavioral processes may be so distorted that the group lacks the flexibility to make an adjustment (Shepard, 94).

Thus Shepard suggests that eco-consciousness is actually not possible while we remain in a pathological state of rationality that if not derailed will lead to our demise.
In conclusion, a broad historical outlook and evolutionary models strongly suggest that culture is unfixed and ever-changing. If it does remain fixed devastating consequences may be the result. Our cultural past is filled with notions of harmony with nature and such notions have remained latent in American society. Some studies (Nash, Rifkin, Elgin) suggest that eco-consciousness is a growing phenomenon. Hopefully the U.S. and other Western countries will not continue in a state of arrested development as perceived by Shepard for too long and such eco-consciousness will continue to manifest itself.

References:


Badiner, Allan Hunt. (1990). Dharma Gaia: A Harvest of Essays in Buddhism and Ecology.

Barth, Gunther. (1990). Fleeting Moments: Nature and Culture in American History.

Berry, Wendell. (1977). The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture.

Devall, Bill and Sessions, George. (1985). Deep Ecology.

Haraway, Donna J. (1995). Cyborgs and Symbionts: Living Together in the New World Order.

Merchant, Carolyn. (1980). The Death of Nature.

Nash, Roderick F. (1989). The Rights of Nature.

Rifkin, Jeremy. (1991). Biosphere Politics: A New Consciousness for a New Century.

Ross, Andrew. (1994). The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life: Nature's Debt to Society.

Romanyshyn, Robert D. (1992). Technology as Symptom and Dream.

Shepard, Paul. (1982). Nature and Madness.

Shepard, Paul. (1991). Man in the Landscape: A Historic View of the Esthetics of Nature.

Short, John Rennie. (1991). Imagined Country: Society, Culture and Environment.

Wilber, Ken. (1995). Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution.

Go on to Comparative Analysis
or
Go back to Home

E-mail Janine Minkler at Janine.Minkler@nau.edu
Call Janine Minkler at (928) 523-7482

Copyright 2002 Northern Arizona University
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED