For the environmental crisis is not only a danger to our physical and economic well-being, but a unique challenge to our fundamental sense of what it means to be human. It requires that we rethink our most important beliefs about who we are and how we ought to live. For a start, the environmental crisis creates real doubts about our sense of human worth. When we see a sign warning us “Do not under any circumstances fish in this stream because of pollution!!!” or realize that genetic engineering is threatening the monarch butterfly or that oil development in Nigeria has devastated the local tribes, we may feel a deep sense of shame, both for our whole species and for our individual selves as well. Is this really the best that corporations, governments, and communities can do? And what of our own actions? We know, even if the knowledge is suppressed most of the time, that all those long drives, all those appliances, all that stuff we’ve bought play some part. In response to this pained awareness, once again nagging questions arise, this time undermining our prevailing species smugness: What is the worth of human beings if this is what we do? How can we believe that we are the “crown of creation” when we engage in a collective and unthinking ruin of the creatures that surround us? What kinds of lives are we living if we continue to shop, drive our cars, fly ozone-destroying jets, and act as if nothing really critical is taking place?
Shame and guilt for the present give rise to deep fears about the future. We wonder, in what might be called a perennial state of environmental anxiety, how much worse it will be for our children. A sense that the future is bright, that the next decade will be better than the previous one, gives way to a kind of chronic low-level despair, a sense that it’s only going to get worse. We know that each generation will have less wilderness with which to engage and be increasingly dependent on ever more ambitious cancer treatments. Few things will become cleaner, fresher, more pure; most will become a little bit more polluted or diminished. We have moved, as Frederic Buell tells us, from thinking of the environmental crisis as some kind of apocalypse to resignedly accepting it as a way of life.
As we recognize our present moral failings and despair over the future, we must confront grim questions about our collective goals and limits. For hundreds of years we have envisioned human life as a continuous pattern of development: better machines to go along with better social values, more sophisticated science to go along with greater personal freedom. Anything we could do, we thought, we should do: What else is the human mind for if not to plumb the depths of knowledge and create new things? What purpose does the market have other than to satisfy our desires and stimulate new ones? Now, however, we wonder if in some ways we have gone too far. The explosive proliferation of industrial chemicals, the endless stream of pesticides, the unforeseen consequences surrounding genetically modified organisms—these cause us to think, and think again, about placing some restraints on our scientific and technological innovation. Further, when we see how much stuff we have, and what that stuff costs the earth, we ask if there might also be a limit to our own entitlement to consume. We come to see, if only quite dimly, that everything has a price in more than money: the nifty air conditioners in our cars depleted the ozone layer and made us more susceptible to skin cancer and blindness; the chemicals that kill mosquitoes may make us sterile; the high-powered fertilizers producing this year’s crops diminish the soil’s fertility for next year’s seeds.
Finally, the environmental crisis darkens our sense of the presence of the sacred in our daily lives. For those of us who do not see visions or hear voices, outside of scripture God’s presence on earth resides in the beauties of creation. Thus, for generations, many Christians believed that (as in the words of Psalm 19) the heavens declared “the glory of God.” Even those who do not believe in anything like the traditional God of Western monotheism often find a special kind of value in nature. It is in nature, many say, that they feel taken out of themselves, soothed, and brought into contact with the sacred. The range of all these feelings was beautifully expressed by Anne Frank, as she hid for almost two years in an Amsterdam attic to evade the Nazis: “The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely, or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quite alone with the heavens, nature, and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature. As long as this exists, and it certainly always will, I know that then there will always be comfort for every storm.”
Environmental Enlightenment
