Is The New Environmentalism A Puritan Enterprise?

I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the Earth

Genesis 9.13 King James Bible

 

Most types of environmentalists – environmental campaigners, ecologists, so-called ‘light greens’ and ‘deep greens’ – attract hostility, particularly from climate change conspiracists who label ‘believers’ as eco-fanatics. There is a general sense from the non-ecologically inclined that environmentalism is a new religion – and is therefore worthy of deep suspicion from religious persons and atheists alike. My own personal experiences of environmentalism suggest that there is indeed a religious undercurrent to modern environmental thought, but that this is more complicated than simply being ‘fanatical’ or a ‘believer’. Instead I would contend that Protestant – and Puritan – ethics have become distilled within new strands of environmentalism, in particular under the label of ‘neogreens’. Rather than debunking this as a negative force, I think examining just how this modern-day incarnation is manifested is perhaps more productive.

Two of my favourite poets who also place importance in landscapes, Elizabeth Bishop and A.R. Ammons, were descended from Baptist backgrounds. I too come from a lineage of strict Baptists. My father told me that as a child, he was terrified that a bolt of lightning would fall from the sky and strike him if he did something sinful. He was raised in a strict and particular Baptist family – my grandfather is a minister – as part of a hereditary religious past that dates back hundreds of years. My dad rejected his family’s religious beliefs, but became a prominent advisor in environmental philanthropy. Now, his environmental beliefs have also become manifested within me. Examining the passing on of this certain trait or family ‘meme’, in this article I will link the Puritan trait of ‘reading’ landscapes with modern environmentalism. What are the positive and negative implications of this mode of thought in relation to the coming climate change ‘apocalypse’? Is this an elastic legacy? Can it be accepted and played with?
 

Reading Landscapes

Keith Thomas states that “nearly every primitive religion is regarded by its adherents as a medium for obtaining supernatural power […] it offers the supernatural means of control over man’s Earthly environment”^{i [1]}. In terms of Puritanism and Protestantism this can be seen in the believer’s use of Biblical texts to interpret the world around them. Through the discerning of the workings of a divine providential hand behind outcomes, in particular natural events, the world is given a structure and the (passive) observers of these events a supernatural power in their ability to ‘read’ these mechanisms.

If the hand of God is everywhere, and every event divinely ordained, then every action and event may reveal to the observer a significant sign or symbol, to be interpreted using the Bible as a codestone. As a result, to the Puritan, all sorts of environmental details and events may be imaginatively ‘read’ using Biblical hermeneutics, from thunderstorms and earthquakes, to plagues, deaths, and personal mis/fortunes. Such a mode of thought encourages close scrutiny of both landscapes from a distance and in detail. Events reveal ‘a showing forth’, ‘emblem’, ‘antitype’, ‘symbol’, ‘significance’ and ‘shadow’ – and so on. Such a reading means perceiving, in the words of the American Puritan Edward Taylor, “the glory of the world slick’t out in types”^{ii [2]}.

The link between American Puritanism and environmentalism has already been noted by critics such as John Gatta, who theorises that “‘natural revelation’ has been pursued through successive phases of American literary and intellectual history”^{iii [3]}. America with its New World history of Puritan settlers provides some of the best examples of this link between Biblical and landscape interpretation. One of the first settlers, the preacher John Winthrop famously proclaimed of the Puritan project of America “For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us”^{iv [4]}. Likewise, William Bradford in his account ‘Of Plymouth Plantation’ took many opportunities to note examples of divine providence or “the just hand of God” in this new landscape – such as the death aboard the Mayflower of a “profane” young sailor: “It plased God before they came halfe seas over, to smite this yong man with a greeveous disease, of which he dyed in a desprate maner”^{v [5]}. Slightly less accusatorily, the Puritan poet John Newton wrote that

 

But though our dreams are often wild,
Like clouds before the driving storm;
Yet some important may be styl'd,
Sent to admonish or inform.^{vi [6]}

 

As indicated by Bradford’s sermonising, reading storms and clouds (both in dreams and in reality) were not an environmentally-friendly exercise for the Puritan settlers, but rather indicative of divine assistance in their message to conquer what they perceived as a barbaric wilderness – God/ civilisation being intrinsically linked. In his book The Idea of Wilderness^{vii [7]}Max Oeschlaeger documents extremely well the progression since the Yahweh – who were the first to reject nature Gods – of Christianity’s antagonistic stance to nature. Nevertheless, both in terms of pro and anti-environmental thought, the pre-colonial – and now global – reach of this Protestant mentality to ‘read landscapes’ has spread in liquid fashion beyond America’s territorial borders. That is to say, as in within my own family this doctrine has been maintained outside of New World exploration, and externally, missionaries have spread Protestant ideals into areas of ‘true’ wilderness such as in the Amazon basin and parts of Africa.

From a contemporary’s perspective – to whom the existence of a judgemental omnipotent being seems extremely unlikely – such a viewpoint seems superstitious and mad. But as our eyes develop and new perspectives flower, blurring or obscuring old ones, the basic structure of them changes at a pace far slower than cultural evolution. It was my grandmother, a devout believer all her life, who noticed as a young child I squinted and leaned on one side when drawing – she realised that I needed glasses. In my family at least, the notion of focusing on exterior details that manifest a wider meaning continues to have a powerful effect. What does a thunderstorm or tornado signify? What messages can be read behind the flowering of a tree? I would contend that there is not such an enormous mental leap behind seeing the hand of God in a storm and believing that an unusual spate of tornados is due to anthropogenically-induced climate change.

Indeed, whereas my grandfathers used a biblical text to ‘read’ the world, the ecologically-minded layman can now use scientific data to ‘reveal’ both the Earth as a self-regulating Gaian entity – in the style of James Lovelock – and the impacts that humans are having on ecosystems. Whereas Moses saw the divine hand of God in a burning bush, so now we can see the effects of accelerating industrialism in a far greater frequency of forest fires (Woods, 1989; Cochrane, 2003; Putz et. al, 2008^{viii [8]ix [9]x [10]}). Attempts to divine the past and predict the future are increasing, but are built on science-based rather than Biblical frameworks. ‘Reading’ the Vostok ice cores in the Antarctic, for example, we can see the climate has changed in the last 400 Kya (thousand years), and matching this with other data, predict to a degree how it will rise in the next century and beyond. (Petit et. al, 1999^{xi [11]}) Like Puritanism, such a reading leads to viewpoints that are often perceived as a radical, and are held by a minority.

In the same vein, new ecosystem technologies – satellite mapping, data-gathering such as that conducted at the Mauna Loa Institute in Hawaii, wildlife surveying, new forest monitoring and mapping hardware – have all contributed to a an enormous and continually growing body of knowledge gained from ‘reading’ the world. In the digestible graphs that ensue, we see lines accelerating to a final point, reinforcing the idea of Biblical, linear time. Such data is anxiously interpreted and re-interpreted. Furthermore this data – like the advent of the printing press which sparked the birth of Protestantism – is now available to all on the internet. These new forms of ecosystem monitoring are Biblical in scope, in that compared to the perspective of the individual observer, they are virtually omnipotent due to their use of the exterior, all-seeing eyes of satellites. As these technologies assemble, and we begin to decipher the secrets behind the functioning of our planet, it becomes clearer that Earth’s life support systems – climate, water, biodiversity, bacteria – are so interlinked that a narrative is forming, albeit one built and propagated by life itself. One example of such a connection is demonstrated by recent research that suggests that bacteria propagate rains, hail and storms, creating conditions suitable for life to thrive (Michaud, 2011^{xii [12]}). Such articles as puzzle pieces found on the internet, like fateful events to the Protestant missionary, reinforce to the environmental researcher a drive to protect such systems with a conviction bordering on faith.
 

Conversations

Such realisations of a readable landscape, built on the notion of this cohesive Earthly narrative, drive the ecologically-minded to prophecy just in the same ways that the Puritans did. This is where this legacy becomes more interesting, and more difficult.

There is a back and forth flow between historical perspectives and our time, whether we like it or not. In this sense, the Puritan mentality of having a correspondence with God through landscapes and events is a self-fulfilling prophecy – although it seems, in the modern era the conversations we are having with this self-regulating planet are quite different. What seems ironic in the light of Puritan mentality that was so convinced of the evils of the wilderness, is that it’s now very difficult for the environmentally-aware to perceive of urban areas and anthropogenic land-use change as anything other than a pestilence.

So what are the modern incarnations of this conversation? There seems to be two sorts, both of which have their weaknesses. Firstly, there is a parallel between environmentalists’ awareness of the prospect of a dangerous, if not apocalyptic, climate change event overshadowing ‘readable’ landscapes and a Puritan/ Protestant theology that considers an active providential hand at work in relation to a future Judgement Day. I suggest that this analogy lies at the heart of the ‘religious’ aspect of many strands of environmental thought. Previously, Puritans regarded providence as mechanical evidence of the linear progression depicted in The Book of Revelation, which predicted a future Armageddon, and afterwards, the Last Judgement.For contemporary environmentalists, every new piece of scientific data about the environment contributes to the rising CO₂ levels on the famous ‘ice hockey stick’ graph stretching up towards oblivion. Likewise, as Tony Tanner notes, for the Puritans, “the whole world could become a network, or a circuit, of endless analogies and images, everything ‘showing forth’ something else.”^{xiii [13]}Today, as it grows increasingly clear just how complex and interrelated ecosystems are, and how complex our climate history is, climate scientists are subject to increasing interpretative anxiety of just what is ‘showing forth’ both from within and outside their camp.

The second incarnation, found particularly within modern poetry, has been manifested as an attempt to break away from what is perceived as a didactic stance within environmental readings, or an attempt to reinvigorate the environmental conversation into something more complex. Born in a Baptist family, the strictly religious aspects of which she too renounced, the poet Elizabeth Bishop touches on this notion of this sort of correspondence in her poem ‘The Bight’:

 

Some of the little white boats are still piled up
against each other, or lie on their sides, stove in,
and not yet salvaged, if they ever will be, from the last bad storm,
like torn-open, unanswered letters.
The bight is littered with old correspondences.^{xiv [14]}

 

The poet, seeing a disconnection in the correspondences between her and the universe, or in those between the universe and humanity, hints at a rather “awful” truth behind the human enterprise, in that it seems destined to be forever at odds with nature. In this sense her poem has a Protestant sensibility, emphasised by the deliberate “not yet salvaged”, and the slight tone of a jeremiad or lament. Yet Bishop’s fear of a disconnected correspondence – or breaking of a link between landscape/ symbol/ interpretation – conflicts with both Puritan and current environmentalist thought, as in it is the climate scientist’s greatest fear that the data does not match the truth of the warming climate, or in for example the melting of the Arctic ice cap, there is no parallel with rising CO₂levels.

Indeed, it is not strange that this ‘other’ brand of reading has often been manifested in poetry concerned with environment and landscape. To the environmentally-aware poet, the eye dilates outwards to read and interpret natural messages or signals flowing back inwards – as articulated beautifully by John Kinsella in his correspondence with David Malin, whose astrophotograph inspired Kinsella’s poem ‘The Light Echo of Supernova 1987A’:

I love the lichen-like textures within the photo ‘surface’ – the echoes of life therein coupled with the immensity of the shockwave. A paradox. I like the paradox, ambiguity, tautology, contradiction etc...the impact of beauty. I also see the dilations of the eye. Which must reach a point of total expansion before it turns back [...]^{xv [15]}

Whereas other environmentally-aware poets like Robinson Jeffers may read more concrete, or doom-laden, messages in their landscapes, Kinsella like the poet John Ashbery, loves the ambiguity formed by this back-and-forth reading. In this sense, it is perhaps a transformation of the Puritan drive to ‘read’ into a more democratic and less moralistic viewpoint. Yet this blurring of meaning in landscapes particularly prevalent in modern poetry becomes problematic when going back the threat of climate change. The dawning of the climate change problem with its terrible implications re-politicises and re-invigorates the more moralistic tendencies of the Puritannical environmental eye. Kinsella, interestingly, is also an environmental activist and has now perhaps attempted to resolve the tension between these two disciplines with the release of his latest book Activist Poetics: Anarchy in the Avon Valley.^{xvi [16]}

Using Puritanism Productively

So what are the implications of this reinvigorated ‘moralistic’ link between the environmental and Puritan eye, in light of the climate problem? I contend that there are two important repercussions: 1. Puritan modes of thought have informed the ways in which environmentalists deliver apocalyptic predictions, at the expense of aggravating non-environmentalists who are convinced that they are crying wolf. 2. The Protestant mentality perhaps does have something to offer environmentalism, in terms of the notion of a ‘covenant’ with Earth.

In relation to the first point, critics such as Robert Nelson point out the parallels between the Puritan ideal of “the basic corruption of human nature since the fall of man in the Garden of Eden [and] Environmentalism [which] today often portrays a similarly corrupt and sinful world, brought to this fallen state in the modern era through the misguided attempt to remake the world in the name of ‘progress’”^{xvii [17]}. This seems to hold true for many environmentalists, who quite rightly point to industrialism and the development of late-stage capitalism as fuelling a global destruction of ecosystems and resulting in extreme CO₂emissions that seriously undermine planetary stability. Such apocalyptic predictions are environmentalists’ attempts to invigorate societies towards active reform. However, it is more complicated, in that by referring to the climate problem in apocalyptic terms, I would say more enemies than it is worth have been generated. I think this is because the Calvinist doctrine of innate sin – posited in its present form as industrialism and late-stage capitalism – does not ring true, not only to outsiders happy with modern lifestyles, but to environmentalists themselves. Furthermore, apocalyptic predictions are nothing new, but tired remnants of age-old fears of collapse which particularly in the postmodern era have become re-repeated ad nauseam, and as we are still here – thus far untrue.

Mostly, the notion of an industrial blitzkrieg-style eco-apocalypse after thousands of years of co-habitation with nature appears to be a fallacy, because ever since Homo Sapiensarrived on the planet, we have modified ecosystems at a rapid rate. Furthermore, these ecosystems in themselves are not stable but constantly shifting. A belief that hunter-gatherer or primitive lifestyles represent a state of ecological harmony is demonstrably false, as strong evidence of waves of megafaunal extinctions and the collapse of ecosystems since lower Paleolithic times have indicated (Redman, 1991^{xviii [18]}; Alroy, 2001^{xix [19]}). Admittedly, these ‘collapses’ were due to human technology – the development of hunting using rudimentary stone tools, and fire – but to such a basic cultural level that we can assert that humans have simply evolved to use technology, and it has evolved with us. Environmental determinism, not a special status, or a malign disease-like mutation, has got us to this point. In the same way, it may be that a growing environmental awareness among human beings is an evolutionary response to the shifting climate. This is not to discount the terrible environmental impacts of industrialism, but to push against the sense propagated by some that industrialism or humans themselves are somehow supernaturally evil in a religious sense. Calvinist notions of an innate sinfulness, or guilt, as re-propagated by environmentalists in light of our technological ‘downfall’, I believe, are innately pointless. This is primarily because, as entrenched in our modern lives as we are, such remonstrances can do little to encourage collective action on tackling the climate problem and simply fuel a sense of hopelessness and/ or irritability with ‘eco fanatics’.

The issue for environmentalists using this Puritan mode of ‘reading’, is that climate change, as well as the destruction of biodiversity networks, is indeed apocalyptic in scope, in terms of its extreme long-term effects on humanity. However, this would not be a tidal wave of fire and brimstone, but rather a long, slow degradation of planetary health and stability, as well of human societies. The Earth will eventually recover, but it will take countless millennia. This is not apocalyptic in the sense of an immediate event like Judgement Day or a worldwide dropping of nuclear bombs or an enormous asteroid hit. Neither would life cease to exist, or indeed some densely populated areas (notably the industrial Northern countries) cease to function at a basic level. This is hardly a romantic apocalypse but rather a problem, which like the factors that caused it, that would be slowly corrosive in scope. It could be summed up as simply the erosion of the preferred planetary conditions for a large proportion of lifeforms. It is therefore also a problem, as one composed of many components, which can be addressed, to a degree. Again, this trail of thought runs counter to the apocalyptic predictions of neo-primitivist communities like the Dark Mountain Project^{xx [20]}, who – also like the more extreme Protestant sects – believe that human civilisation is doomed and efforts to salvage it also doomed to failure. Some kinds of attempt to turn this apocalyptic prophesising on its head can be seen in the work of institutions such as the World Resources Institute’s templates for ecosystem restoration^{xxi [21]}, the McKinsey cost curves^{xxii [22]}and Princeton University’s ‘stabilisation wedges’^{xxiii [23]}.

An example of this impasse in terms of how environmentalists deliver predictions can be seen in the speeches of Carter Bales. Bales always takes a pragmatic approach to ‘reading’ the problem, using hard data and research to back up his points. An investment-banker turned passionate environmental advocate, at the end of making a strong case for immediate action on climate change, Bales stated to The Nature Conservancy in 2008:

I see the issue of climate change as the most important threat the world has ever faced, even beyond nuclear terrorism, which is also a major threat. Climate change will destroy the economies of the poor nations. It will severely impair marginal agriculture and, together with the likely death of the oceans as a source of protein, put billions of lives in danger of starvation. It will certainly bring on an age of massive extinction. Of massive disease migration. And it will likely overwhelm the world’s puny efforts at adaptation. Our generation will surely go down in history as one of the most irresponsible unless we get started on the real work of turning back climate change now.^{xxiv [24]}

After delivering his data methodically throughout his speech, Bales is inevitably drawn to apocalyptic prediction at the end. This is not to say that his conclusions are misplaced, but rather emphasises the problem of wanting to get the seriousness of a factual point across without tapping back into the apocalyptic Puritan mentality that many audiences are hostile to. One example of a typical non-environmentalist reaction to such predictions is Brian Sussman’s recent book Eco-Tyranny: How The Left’s Green Agenda Will Destroy America^{xxv [25]}. Bales is a classic model of the Puritan environmental advocate, in that his business background^{xxvi [26]}ties in with a strong Protestant work ethic and his experience in the finance sector identifies him as a ‘neo-green’ – although this is a badly defined (and I believe unfairly derogatory) category that I would like to expand on further another time.

The key difference facing those attempting to use ‘Puritanism productively’ and historical Puritanism is that these environmental revelations are anything but religious and that they are not built on faith, but scientific fact. To discount climate change is the same to discount evolutionary theory – both are built on the same amount and certainty of evidence gathered from the environment around us^{xxvii [27]}. Many try to undermine both, but beyond any grounds of reason. As Karen Lancaster summarises, “Science builds its theories in order to comply to observable facts. It is theoretical and open to revision as fact dictates […] Science accepts almost nothing as 100% proven and is always ready to change its mind when new information is discovered.”^{xxviii [28]}In contrast, religion is built on faith not fact. It is the hallmark of the seriousness of the climate problem that the evidence of climate change is so overwhelming. In light of the rampant public climate scepticism and hysteria whipped up by virtual armies of opponents, this is perhaps where the Puritan legacy becomes extremely problematic and damaging to environmentalists.

Covenant

But there is one tenet of the Puritan doctrine in light of the climate change ‘apocalypse’ that is perhaps worth retaining. As quoted at the start of this article, Calvinist doctrine strongly rests on the notion of a ‘covenant’ with God (“I do set my [rain]bow in the cloud”). Whilst this was a religious covenant based on an exemplary moral performance of the individual, perhaps a new covenant can be made by humans in the face of global warming – one based on an agreement with Earth itself or the Gaian planetary system as outlined by James Lovelock.

Rather than entering into a contract with what is essentially a rocky and hostile planet, the self-regulating life support systems on Earth are as Lovelock, and more recently Minik Rosig, ascertain, ones which have developed to support themselves^{xxix [29]}. Such a covenant of recognising these self-supporting planetary boundaries which have been instigated by life would mean that rather than out of a sense of innate guilt or sin, human civilisations begin to co-operate with the other lifeforms which have produced and continue to sustain us: from the bacteria in our gut to the ones that provide us with food, and regulate the ecosystems necessary for humans to thrive. Such a mentality would mean moving away from the more extreme forms of Puritan environmentalist ‘preaching’, to a more holistic covenant. This new covenant would importantly would include and rely on human technology within its regulation, which is not after all a pestilence, but a natural offspring of these systems that are innately shifting, although at a slower pace than human cultural evolution. As a positive force, the new covenant would rely less on negative terminology and more on beneficial output as a means of enhancing this bond. And like all good Puritans, I am tempted to end with a quote – this time from Mike Davis, who considering such a covenant in his article ‘Who Will Build the Ark?’ says, “if this sounds like a sentimental call to the barricades […] then so be it.^{xxx [30]}”