Environmentalism (Seminar Studies) [2 ed.] 1408255588, 9781408255582

Citation preview

Environmentalism

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Environmentalism David Peterson del Mar

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ISBN: 978-1-4082-5558-2 QCL

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A CIP catalogue record for this book can be obtained from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Peterson del Mar, David, 1957–. Environmentalism / David Peterson del Mar. p. cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4082-5558-2 (pbk.) 1. Environmentalism–History. 2. Nature conservation–History. 3. Natural areas–History. I. Title. Ge195.P478 2011 333.7209–dc22 2011001745 Set in 10/13.5pt Berkeley Book by 35

Introduction to the series

History is narrative constructed by historians from traces left by the past. Historical enquiry is often driven by contemporary issues and, in consequence, historical narratives are constantly reconsidered, reconstructed and reshaped. The fact that different historians have different perspectives on issues means that there is also often controversy and no universally agreed version of past events. Seminar Studies was designed to bridge the gap between current research and debate, and the broad, popular general surveys that often date rapidly. The volumes in the series are written by historians who are not only familiar with the latest research and current debates concerning their topic, but who have themselves contributed to our understanding of the subject. The books are intended to provide the reader with a clear introduction to a major topic in history. They provide both a narrative of events and a critical analysis of contemporary interpretations. They include the kinds of tools generally omitted from specialist monographs: a chronology of events, a glossary of terms and brief biographies of ‘who’s who’. They also include bibliographical essays in order to guide students to the literature on various aspects of the subject. Students and teachers alike will find that the selection of documents will stimulate discussion and offer insight into the raw materials used by historians in their attempt to understand the past. Clive Emsley and Gordon Martel Series Editors

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Contents

Acknowledgements Publisher’s acknowledgements Chronology Who’s who Glossary Map

PART ONE ANALYSIS AND ASSESSMENT

x xi xii xiv xvii xxiii

1

1

INTRODUCTION

3

2

DOMESTICATING THE WILD Background The birth of conservation Nostalgia and nature loving The birth of nature tourism Pets Environmentalism in the colonies and early US

6 7 8 10 12 14 15

3

INDUSTRIAL NATURE LOVING The spread of conservation and preservation Nature and nation Wild nature Domesticating the wild

18 19 21 26 28

4

THE FRIENDLY WILD OF POST-WAR AFFLUENCE Background American suburbs

32 33 34

viii

ENVIRONMENTALISM

The friendly wild Meaning and ecology

35 38

5

THE COUNTER-CULTURE’S NATURE Prosperity and alienation Wild = good Nature loving goes mainstream Farley Mowat and the world we have lost Mother nature’s sons: Cousteau and Denver

41 41 43 45 46 48

6

EPIPHANIES Silent Spring Green surge Western Europe The rest of the West Green nationalism

50 51 52 53 56 58

7

RADICAL DEPARTURES Background Deep ecology Bioregionalism and ecofeminism Friends of the Earth Greenpeace and Earth First!

60 60 62 64 65 67

8

THWARTED Background Western European Greens Central and Eastern Europe Backlash and accommodation Success stories Divisions

70 70 72 74 75 79 81

9

EXTREME NATURE LOVING Wilderness and technology Wild playgrounds Consuming nature Aquariums and dogs Freeing Keiko and finding Nemo

83 84 85 87 90 93

ASSESSMENT

95

10

Contents

PART TWO DOCUMENTS 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

Beowulf William Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey The Cruelty to Animals Act of 1835 George Perkins Marsh, Man and Nature Anna Sewell, Black Beauty William Morris, News from Nowhere Robert Baden-Powell, Scouting for Boys John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierras J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac Rachel Carson, Silent Spring Farley Mowat, Never Cry Wolf Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness Richard Adams, Watership Down Donella H. Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind Arne Naess, ‘The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movements’ Endangered Species Act of 1973 Where You At? A Bioregional Quiz Earth First! Action in Oregon, 1985 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, Rio de Janeiro, 1992 Petra Kelly, ‘Creating an Ecological Economy’ Kyoto Protocol, 1997 Bjørn Lomborg, The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World ‘10 Steps to Animal Communication’ Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It Rural Manifesto of the Countryside Alliance, 2009 Report of the League Against Cruel Sports, 2010

ix

99 100 102 106 108 109 111 112 115 116 118 120 121 123 124 126 128 133 133 134 137 138 139 142 145 147 149 150

GUIDE TO FURTHER READING

152

REFERENCES

159

INDEX

169

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Gordon Martel, both for inviting me to write this book and for insisting that I do so boldly. He also straightened many kinks in my prose and reasoning. Josie O’Donoghue at Pearson was very helpful throughout the revision process. This book depends on the work of many researchers and writers. I am particularly indebted to Michael Bess, Jon Katz, Roderick Frazier Nash, Jennifer Price, Harriet Ritvo, Keith Thomas, and Meredith Veldman. As always, Wendy del Mar has been a wonderfully warm and supportive life partner. Peter, my son, allows me to see the whole world with new eyes.

Publisher’s acknowledgements

We are grateful to the following for permission to reproduce copyright material:

Photographs Plate 1. The Bridgeman Art Library and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts, USA (Henry Lillie Pierce Fund). Plate 2. Maurice Branger/ Roger-Viollet. Plate 3. Three Lions/Getty Images. Plate 4. NASA. Plate 5. Weyler/Greenpeace. Plate 6. Gary Crabbe/Alamy Ltd. Plate 7. Arco Images GmbH/Alamy Ltd. Plate 8. Painting by Nantucket Artist, Louis Guarnaccia.

Map Map from An Inconvenient Truth, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc (Al Gore 2006)

Text Poetry on pages 100–2 adapted by David Breeden from Beowulf; Extract on pages 115–6 from My First Summer in the Sierras, Houghton Mifflin ( John Muir 1911); Extract on pages 121–2 from Never Cry Wolf, McCelland & Stewart Ltd (Mowat, F 1963); Extract on pages 138–9, Reprinted from Thinking Green! Essays on Environmentalism, Feminism, and Nonviolence (1994) by Petra K. Kelly with permission of Parallax Press, Berkeley, California, www.parallax.org; Extract on pages 142–5 from The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World, Cambridge University Press (1998) pp. 330–332, Copyright Bjorn Lomborg 2001, published by Cambridge University Press, reproduced with permission; Extract on page 69, Copyright 1999, from the book Animal Talk by Penelope Smith, Reprinted with permission of Beyond Words Publishing, Inc., Hillsboro, Oregon. All rights reserved. In some instances we have been unable to trace the owners of copyright material, and we would appreciate any information that would enable us to do so.

Chronology

1669

French Forest Ordinance

1761

Jean Jacques Rousseau, The New Heloise

1798

William Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey

1824

Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals founded in England

1831

British Association for the Advancement of Science founded

1854

Henry David Thoreau, Walden

1859

First dog show held in England

1864

George Perkins Marsh, Man and Nature

1872

Yellowstone National Park established in the US

1877

Anna Sewell, Black Beauty

1879

Royal National Park established in New South Wales, Australia

1885

Banff National Park established in Canada

1889

Society for the Protection of Birds founded in Great Britain

1892

Sierra Club founded in the US

1895

National Trust founded in Great Britain

1902

Beatrix Potter, The Tale of Peter Rabbit

1905

Federation of Rambling Clubs founded in England

1907

Boy Scouts founded in England

1914

France’s first national park

1917

Spain’s first national park

1920

First national park in the Soviet Union

1934

Germany becomes the first nation to protect wolves

1942

Disney’s Bambi

1949

Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

1952

London smog

Chronology

1956

Dam on Colorado River blocked in US

1962

Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

1963

Partial Test Ban Treaty

1964

Wilderness Act in US

1967

Torrey Canyon oil spill

1968

Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire

xiii

Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau premieres Sweden’s Environmental Protection Law 1969

Radical student protests in western Europe Friends of the Earth founded in the US

1970

Earth Day

1971

Greenpeace founded in Canada

1972

Club of Rome, Limits to Growth Arne Naess coins the term ‘deep ecology’ West Germany’s Council of Environmental Experts established United Nations Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment

1973

British Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution established Peter Singer coins the term ‘animal liberation’

1975

Great Barrier Reef Marine Park founded

1978

Toxic wastes found at Love Canal in US

1980

Earth First! founded in US People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals founded in US

1983

West Germany’s Green Party wins representation in the Bundestag

1986

Accident at Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Soviet Union

1987

World Commission on the Environment stresses sustainable development

1989

The Green Parties of the United Kingdom and France win 15 and 10 per cent of the vote, respectively, in European elections

1991

Founding of the People of Color Environmental Leadership in the US

1992

United Nations Rio de Janeiro Summit

1998

Keiko returns to Iceland

2004

Hunting Act passes UK Parliament

2006

Release of An Inconvenient Truth

Who’s who

Abbey, Edward (1927–1989): US novelist and essayist, radical environmentalist. Adams, Richard (1920– ): British writer whose best known book (Watership Down, 1972) expressed sympathy for rabbits victimized by human development. Bookchin, Murray, aka Lewis Herber, (1921–2006): US socialist and a leading social ecologist who linked social and environmental exploitation. Brower, David (1912–2000): US environmentalist, founder of Friends of the Earth. Buffon, George Louis Leclerc de (1707–1788): French scientist and author, perhaps the most prominent naturalist of the eighteenth century. Carson, Rachel (1907–1964): US biologist and writer, author of Silent Spring, the book that jump-started the modern environmental movement after it appeared in 1962. Clements, Frederic Edward (1874–1945): US botanist and pioneering ecologist who emphasized climax communities and other expressions of ecological stability. Cousteau, Jacques (1910–1997): Popular French oceanographer who achieved great fame on television. Denver, John (1943–1997): Popular US country singer who celebrated wild places. Foreman, Dave (1947– ): US environmentalist who left the Sierra Club to help found the much more radical Earth First! Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1749–1832): German Romantic poet, philosopher, and scientist who greatly influenced European artists and scholars. Goodall, Jane (1934– ): English primate researcher whose work on the human-like characteristics of chimpanzees has enjoyed a wide readership outside of academia.

Who’s who

Kelly, Petra (1947–1992): Charistmatic West German Green Party leader. Leopold, Aldo (1887–1948): US ecologist, author of A Sand County Almanac, promulgated the ‘land ethic,’ which anticipated Deep Ecology. Linnaeus, Carl (1707–1778): Swedish scientist whose elaborate system of nested classification dominated natural history well into the nineteenth century. Lomborg, Bjørn (1965– ): Danish scholar whose The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World, first published in 1998, seeks to debunk more alarmist assessments of environmental health and world poverty. Marsh, George Perkins (1801–1882): Pioneering US conservationist, particularly of forests, author of Man and Nature. McTaggart, David (1932–2001): Canadian radical environmentalist who headed Greenpeace for many years. Morris, William (1834–1896): Leading English socialist, designer, and author who urged a return to rural places and values rather than embracing industrialization. Mowat, Farley (1921– ): Widely read Canadian author of many nature books. Muir, John (1838–1914): US wilderness advocate, writer, founding president of the Sierra Club. Naess, Arne (1912–2009): Norwegian philosopher, founder of Deep Ecology. Pinchot, Gifford (1865–1946): Influential forester and the founding head of the US Forest Service. Potter, Beatrix (1866–1943): British author of children’s books featuring animals that dressed and acted like humans, starting with The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Redford, Robert (1936– ): US actor, entrepreneur, outdoor enthusiast, conservationist. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712–1778): Swiss-born French writer and philosopher, perhaps the leading Romantic celebrant of nature of the eighteenth century. Schumacher, E.F. (1911–1977): British economist, author of Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, a highly influential book published in 1973 whose thesis is in its title.

xv

xvi

ENVIRONMENTALISM

Seton, Ernest Thompson (1860–1946): Born in England to Scottish parents who soon moved to Canada, he moved to the US as an adult and was a widely read naturalist and observer of animals. Sewell, Anna (1820–1878): English writer whose sole novel, Black Beauty, appeared in 1877 and stimulated a great deal of sympathy for the plight of horses. Singer, Peter (1946– ): Australian philosopher and leading intellectual of the animal-rights movement. Snyder, Gary (1930– ): US poet, radical environmentalist, leading proponent of bioregionalism. Tansley, Arthur George (1871–1955): English botanist and ecologist who pointed out that communities of plants did not necessarily evolve in predictable or stable ways. Thoreau, Henry David (1817–1862): US transcendentalist, nature advocate, author of Walden. Tolkien, J.R.R. (1892–1973): English scholar of literature but much better known as author of the wildly popular Lord of the Rings, a series of novels set in the fictional past and celebrating nature. Turner, J.M.W. (1775–1851): Perhaps the leading landscape painter of England during the nineteenth century whose work strongly reflected Romanticism. Wordsworth, William (1770–1850): English Romantic poet and champion of hiking, nature loving.

Glossary

Animal Liberation Animal-rights movements date back to the early nineteenth century. More radical groups formed in the later decades of the twentieth century, such as the Animal Liberation Front. These groups have both advocated more extreme forms of animal rights, such as vegetarianism, and have protested medical research and other forms of animal cruelty. Anthropomorphism The practice of imputing human characteristics and motives to non-humans. The thickly-drawn line between humans and animals began to blur with the spread of pet ownership in eighteenth-century Europe, and by the turn of the twentieth century wild animals who spoke, wore clothes, and formed human-like families were common in children’s and adult literature alike. Though modern ecologists are critical of anthropomorphism, the belief that animals are essentially people continues to shape western culture and inspire environmental movements. Audubon Society This US organization formed in 1905 and led the fight against killing birds for their ornamental plumage. In recent decades it has become one of America’s largest organizations devoted to preserving wildlife habitat, and it has also fostered the hobby of birdwatching. Bambi This Disney animated movie, based on Sigmund Salzmann’s novel of the same name, appeared in 1942. Its protagonist is a young deer, and it pits the creatures of the forest against evil hunters. Boy Scouts Founded by Robert Baden Powell in 1907, the scouting movement quickly spread across the western world. It combined military organization with outdoor life. It targeted growing numbers of middle-class boys who would otherwise have little experience with camping and other aspects of rural life. Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament This organization appeared in 1958 in Great Britain and spread quickly. Members engaged in many demonstrations and lobbying efforts before the organization declined in the 1960s. It became popular again early in the 1980s.

xviii

ENVIRONMENTALISM

Chernobyl The 1986 accident at this Ukrainian (then part of the Soviet Union) nuclear power plant was the most serious in the history of the world and provoked widespread concern and protests inside and outside the Soviet Union. Club of Rome This international think tank formed in 1968 to consider global political issues. Its most influential publication was Limits to Growth, which appeared in 1972 and argued for a widespread commitment to sustainability rather than continued growth so that the earth could restore its environmental equilibrium. Conservation This broad term became common in the nineteenth century as western nations sought to use natural resources such as timber and water more wisely and rationally. Counter-culture The counter-culture blossomed in the mid-1960s, as growing numbers of young people rejected the verities of growth and conformity that had long resided at the centre of western civilization. Although nurturing radical political movements attacking capitalism, imperialism, and racism, the counter-cultural movement was often amorphous and more focused on altering people’s consciousnesses than political structures. Affinity for nature resided at the heart of the counter-cultural movement and was expressed symbolically – through having long hair, for example. Deep Ecology Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess coined this term early in the 1970s. Deep Ecologists argue that humans must be understood as part of, rather than separate from, the rest of nature. Deep Ecology implies and argues that conventional environmental movements and philosophies are shallow by comparison inasmuch as they accept western civilization’s dualistic assumption of a human/nature divide and therefore cannot get at the roots of why modern humans exploit the nonhuman world. Earth Day Conceived as a national ‘teach-in’ on the environment, Earth Day drew approximately 20 million people – mostly students – across the US on April 22, 1970. Probably the biggest demonstration of its very eventful era, it was much more celebratory and less shrill than protests having to do with war or racism. Subsequent American Earth Day celebrations were smaller but spread to other countries. Earth First! This radical environmental organization emerged in the 1980s and quickly spread across much of the western world. Its members often participated in creative demonstrations to preserve wilderness and reduce humanity’s footprint. Ecofeminism This movement emerged in the 1970s as part of the growing radical environmentalist impulse. As its name implies, it combines feminism

Glossary

and environmentalism. Like so-called ‘cultural feminists,’ ecofeminists argue that women’s biological and psychological processes make them uniquely close to nature and that misogyny and hatred of nature share a common, masculine root, namely western civilization’s mania for domination of the natural and the feminine. Ecology This scientific field of study arose early in the twentieth century and emphasized the relationship between elements of an environment that had been studied or approached discretely. Ecologists understood forests, for example, as a complex organism whose various parts – plants, mammals, insects, soils, bacteria – acted in concert with and relation to each other. Many environmentalists since the 1960s have embraced varieties of ecological thought. Ecotourism This movement emerged in the 1970s and expressed the desires of many western peoples to enjoy exotic travel in an environmentally responsible manner. In its pure form, ecotourism is environmentally and socially sustainable, respectful of both the integrity of local ecosystems and businesses. In practice, any form of tourism ordinarily creates a great deal of pollution, and businesses have commonly claimed the ecotourism label without substantially altering their practices. Enlightenment This multi-faceted intellectual and cultural movement swept across much of Europe in the eighteenth century. Proponents of the Enlightenment shared optimism over human capacity to master and manipulate the non-human environment. Federation of Rambling Clubs This organization of groups concerned with preserving people’s access to the British countryside formed in 1905, an effort that had begun nearly a century before. Many Britons believed that they should have a right to hike across private property. Forestry This term refers to the scientific and systematic management of forests that emerged in Germany in the eighteenth century and spread across the western world. It was at first concerned primarily with the rational use of timber and later with maintaining forests to prevent flooding and erosion and, more recently, as part of sustaining healthy ecosystems. Friends of the Earth This organization began in the US in the 1970s before spreading across the globe to become one of the world’s most influential environmental groups. By 2002 Friends of the Earth had a total of 5,000 local groups in 68 countries. Friends of the Earth addressed a multiplicity of issues, many of them highly controversial: nuclear power, acid rain, trapping fur-bearing animals, toxic waste, over-packaging, and much more.

xix

xx

ENVIRONMENTALISM

Global warming Scientists had long hypothesized that industrialization, through the production of CO2, could lead to global warming by trapping warm air in the earth’s atmosphere. The theory gained traction from scientists and then from a growing proportion of the public and politicians late in the twentieth century. By the 1980s scientists and policymakers alike commonly identified global warming as the most serious environmental problem confronting the planet. Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Australians created this park in 1975 to protect the world’s largest reef. The reef had by then become a very popular tourist destination. Greenpeace This radical group emerged in 1969 in Canada and soon flourished across the western world. It combined both large numbers of members and contributors and a dedicated corps of activists who engaged in creative and highly publicized protests against such activities as nuclear testing, whaling, and pollution. Kyoto Protocol The plan resulting from the United Nations’ conference in Japan in 1997 which focused on halting climate change. Nearly all western nations agreed to work toward limiting their emissions of greenhouse gases. Minimal-impact camping This variety of camping emerged in the 1970s as part of the solution to overcrowding in North America’s back country. Hiking and camping more carefully served to increase popular areas’ carrying capacities, allowing more people to enjoy them without degrading the environment. Low-impact camping entailed using established camping areas, not using wood for fuel, and carefully disposing of all waste products. National Trust Founded in 1895 by prominent philanthropists, this soon became the leading organization devoted to preserving natural and historical landscapes in Great Britain. It has focused on landscapes heavily shaped by humans and on buildings and remained strong and influential at the turn of the twenty-first century. Nationalism This movement emphasized pride of country, including its natural features, and emerged across the western world in the nineteenth century. It often led to the preservation of places and species deemed intrinsic to a nation’s identity. Parks Parks in areas considered wild became common in the United States, Canada, and Australia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and soon spread to Europe. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) Founded by Ingrid Newkirk in the US, PETA had become perhaps the most successful environmental

Glossary

organization in the world by the turn of the twenty-first century. PETA’s well-developed websites attack pet stores that take insufficient care of their animals, animal experimentation, circuses, factory farms, the fur industry, and fishing, among other activities. PETA blends idealism and pragmatism. Its leaders advocate and practise veganism, a form of vegetarianism that abjures the eating or use of any animal product, but they also work to improve the conditions under which animals such as chickens and cattle are raised and slaughtered. Preservation This broad term emerged late in the nineteenth century as growing numbers of people in the western world advocated setting aside and protecting lands considered particularly scenic. Recycling Re-manufacturing material such as paper, metal, and plastic. It became common during the 1970s and soon became one of the most widely practised forms of conservation, particularly in Europe. Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit This 1992 United Nations’ conference on the environment was the largest to date, with 17,000 attendees and representatives from 172 governments. It explored interrelated problems of world poverty, development, pollution, and climate change. The government representatives agreed to join in a global partnership of sustainable development and pledged to reduce greenhouse gases, an agreement that was refined five years later, at Kyoto, Japan. Romanticism Romanticism emerged from the eighteenth century Enlightenment and acted as a counterweight to its more scientific, rational aspects. Proponents of Romanticism emphasized the importance of emotion, of feeling, and Romantic poets, painters, composers and philosophers commonly turned to nature for inspiration and material. Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) Founded in 1824 in London, this organization quickly gained the backing of influential people, and in 1840 Queen Victoria allowed it to include ‘Royal’ in its title. For several decades the society focused on encouraging the enforcement of legislation penalizing the abuse of working animals. Later in the nineteenth century the RSPCA paid increasing attention to the abuse of pets and sporting or fighting animals. It spread to much of the British Empire. Sea Birds Preservation Act This piece of 1869 British legislation was a landmark in the movement toward protecting selected species of birds. Sierra Club Founded in 1892 and headed for many years by John Muir, the Sierra Club was for many decades the principal advocate of large parks and wilderness preservation in the US. It emerged as a potent political force in the 1960s before being joined by and in some respects eclipsed by

xxi

xxii

ENVIRONMENTALISM

more radical movements. But it remains a strong political force with a large membership. Smoke abatement Concern over air pollution in England grew along with industrialization. Strong, effective measures to improve urban air quality did not appear until the 1950s, however. Student movement The student movement emerged across the western world in the 1960s on burgeoning university and college campuses. It soon focused on broad issues such as war, imperialism and environmentalism. The protection of nature implied a critique of both the older generation and the status quo. The student movement faded in the 1970s, though campuses would remain a fertile ground for groups concerned with social and environmental reform. Suburbanization Suburbs began to ring England’s cities in the first half of the nineteenth century as improved forms of transit allowed more and more prosperous families to live farther away from where they worked and shopped. This process accelerated with the invention of electric trolley cars and of course privately-owned automobiles, and by the 1950s more people lived around than inside many large cities of the western world. Suburban developments appealed to families who desired to live closer to nature and often featured extensive plantings of trees and shrubs and other landscape features deemed natural. Sustainable development This term became popular late in the 1980s and implied a compromise or rapprochement between economic development and environmental protection. Woodcraft Movement This broad movement emerged in Britain, North America, and Europe in the early decades of the twentieth century. It championed camping and other outdoor activities, particularly for youth.

3.8%

CENTRAL AMERICA SOUTH AMERICA

2.5% AFRICA

2.6%

MIDDLE EAST

27.7% EUROPE

This map shows the disproportionate impact the West, particulary the U.S., has on climate change, 2006

Developing nations

Other industrialized nations

United States

Contributions to global warming

30.3%* UNITED STATES *Includes Alaska and Hawaii

2.3% CANADA

1.1% AUSTRAUA

3.7%

JAPAN

CHINA

12.2% SOUTHEAST ASIA INDIA

13.7% RUSSIA

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Part 1

ANALYSIS AND ASSESSMENT

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1 Introduction

T

he project seemed reasonable enough. Americans’ consumption of energy continued to climb at the dawn of the twenty-first century, and wind offered a relatively ‘green’ or clean source of electricity. Locating some 170 energy-producing turbines on windy Nantucket Sound, off the New England coast, would serve area homes and businesses without the pollution attached to oil, natural gas, or coal. But residents and their sympathizers raised $3 million to oppose the plan, and they did so in the name of nature preservation. ‘Our national treasures should be off limits to industrialisation,’ explained Walter Cronkite, the retired news anchor (Burkett, 2003: 48). The wind generators would not belch smoke, create acid rain, or require extensive mining. But they would mar the horizon, would constitute a pimple on the smooth cheek of sand, sky, and ocean. Of course Cronkite’s ocean-front home consumed a great deal of nature in its construction and maintenance, and the power which ran it had to come from somewhere. But opponents of the project evidently thought that people living inland, where views and property values were more modest, ought to bear the burden of producing energy for those whose capacious living rooms enjoyed better vistas. Indeed, another opponent of the project pointed out that the turbines would be part of a working industry, would not resemble the ‘quaint, scenic windmills . . . scattered across the Cape’ (Phadke, 2010: 13). Nostalgia-inducing remnants of earlier manufacturers were welcome; modern industry was not (see Plate 8). The battle over wind-generated power off Cape Cod illustrates this book’s salient themes. Environmentalism dwells on the paradoxical relationship between prosperity and nature loving. Professions of concern and affection for the environment have been most powerful among the eras, nations, and people that have most successfully subjected and consumed it. This relationship has been, in some respects, logical. Worries over nature’s wellbeing should indeed rise as its health is compromised, and environmentalists have

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Parks Parks in areas considered wild became common in the United States, Canada, and Australia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and soon spread to Europe.

Conservation This broad term became common in the nineteenth century as western nations sought to use natural resources such as timber and water more wisely and rationally. Preservation This broad term emerged late in the nineteenth century as growing numbers of people in the western world advocated setting aside and protecting lands considered particularly scenic. Forestry This term refers to the scientific and systematic management of forests that emerged in Germany in the eighteenth century and spread across the western world. It was at first concerned primarily with the rational use of timber and later with maintaining forests to prevent flooding and erosion and, more recently, as part of sustaining healthy ecosystems.

ENVIRONMENTALISM

succeeded in regulating the exploitation of natural resources, preserving many parks and other areas, rescuing from extinction many animals and plants, and reducing some pollutants. But nature loving has more often embodied than challenged the western march of material progress and comfort. People who buy the expensive homes on the shores of Cape Cod may consider themselves refugees from industrial capitalism. Yet only the very wealthy can afford the view, a prized window onto a ‘natural’ world that is every bit as much of a consumer good as the luxury cars in the driveway. We revere nature not so much because it provides us with food, shelter, and tools, but because it offers meaning. Western peoples have become progressively ignorant of and disinterested in how soil, water, animals, trees, and other plants sustain our bodies, more and more adamant that these things feed our souls, that they transport us to a pure place beyond our superficial, everyday lives. Most environmental histories do not focus on these sort of broad cultural themes. The field has historically divided itself between scholars who study how humans have shaped the environment – a sort of blending of natural and human history, if you will – and historians who focus on particular environmental movements, such as the development of forestry or nature reserves. One problem with this set of approaches is that it skirts one of the central ironies in the field: Why have we seen a steady increase in conservation and preservation, the setting aside of areas deemed especially scenic even as human exploitation of the environment has continued apace? This book focuses on the recent history of western people’s understandings of and sentiments about nature. It is a cultural history of nature loving. This book will spend considerable ink on the development of ideas and practices having to do with the conservation and preservation of particular parts of the environment, including some, like forestry, that have been highly technical in nature. But we shall study these political and economic movements in the context of much broader cultural forces, a growing embrace of places, species, and experiences deemed precious and beneficent: nature loving. Unlike programmes of rational conservation, nature loving has been much more concerned with transcending this world, our environment, than with coming to terms with it. Hence upon being confronted with the choice of lowering the rate of pollution and climate change or preserving a good view, many Cape Cod residents opted for the latter. Environmentalism explores the recurring tension between science and emotion, conservation and preservation. The former has taken up the business of establishing a sensible, sustainable way of interacting with nature, which is understood as providing humans with life’s necessities, from

Introduction

building materials to clean air. Preservation has been more likely to focus on nature’s intangible gifts – the spiritual or national regeneration said to spring from certain places or species. Class or economic divisions have informed these clashes. Poor people’s reliance on plants and animals has often been direct – as has their experience of environmental problems like toxic waste. Well-to-do westerners have been more apt to perceive nature in abstract or symbolic terms and to disguise their reliance on it, like the prosperous Victorians who replaced vegetable with flower gardens, chickens and pigs with pets and cast-iron deer. Ideas about and movements concerned with nature loving have provided venues for people to malign the character of and attack the material interests of people different from themselves. This book’s emphasis on the complexities, divisions, and paradoxes of environmentalism should not be understood as an indictment of environmental movements, a brief for unfettered capitalism. But in exploring the history of nature loving I have become convinced that many of our environmental problems are rooted not simply in the western world’s commitment to prosperity and growth but also in environmentalism’s tradition of incoherence and irrelevance, its tendency to complement rather than to confront the attitudes and practices behind our growing environmental problems. I am optimistic and vain enough to hope that Environmentalism can play a role in helping a worthy set of impulses and movements become more self-reflective and therefore more relevant and effective.

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2 Domesticating the wild

M

en on trains were not supposed to behave this way. The gentleman was sticking his head out of the window, exposing himself to the storm. Finally he withdrew, then sat back, with eyes closed, as if trying to memorize the unpleasant sensations he had just subjected himself to. Landscape painter J.M.W. Turner’s odd behaviour seemed to make a mockery of the hard-won comforts of mid-nineteenth-century England. For millennia travellers had slowly toiled along at the mercy of the elements. To travel several hundred miles overland was the work of weeks or months, through all manner of weather. The railroad had finally changed all of that, had annihilated time and space, cheated sun, wind, cold, and rain. So why was this Englishman sticking his head into the storm? Europeans had a long legacy of distrusting and trying to dominate the environment. Indigenous peoples across the world emphasized their dependence on a powerful, animate world that had the power to bestow or withhold sustenance. East Asians, notwithstanding their technological achievements, perceived nature as a potent force that humans ought to contemplate and learn from. But Christians viewed untamed nature as a threat to their survival, livelihoods, and salvation. The economic and scientific transformations of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries made western people less fearful of nature, more confident in their ability to unlock its bounties. Indeed, thoughtful scientists and bureaucrats began to realize that woods and soils were being exploited too successfully, that without programmes of conservation, nations’ future prosperity and security would be compromised. But the emergence of sensible programmes of conservation do not explain the spread of sensibilities such as Turner’s, the growing affinity for a nature that appealed precisely because it still lay beyond human control. By the mid-nineteenth century the most prosperous western peoples had turned to nature for instruction and meaning even as they transformed it into a machine that predictably produced wheat, timber, and other crops.

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7

Christianity dominated medieval Europeans’ views of nature. The JudeoChristian God transcended the earth rather than residing in or emanating from it. Worldly existence was a fleeting prelude to eternal, hopefully heavenly, life. Like the Greeks and Romans before them, medieval Christians asserted that nature made itself available and useful to humans. Even Francis of Assisi, a thirteenth-century figure often invoked by modern nature lovers, placed humanity squarely at the head of creation. St Bonaventure noted approvingly that St Francis had ‘subdued ferocious beasts, tamed the wild, trained the tame and bent to his obedience the brute beasts that had rebelled against fallen mankind’ (Coates, 1998: 54). When medieval people expressed appreciation for nature, they had in mind orderly and productive fields, land that they had cleared or drained, and animals that they had domesticated, not the uninhabited places where wild beasts, monsters, and perhaps Satan himself lurked [Doc. 1, p. 100]. Nature’s toils and fruits alike could distract good Christians from pursuing a heavenly reward outside this world. Its terrors – drought, wolves, trolls, and worse – could kill, and its pleasures could divert people’s attention from God. Then capitalism emasculated nature. Scientists such as Galileo Galilei, Francis Bacon, René Descartes, and Isaac Newton described nature as passive, a collection of inert materials and mechanistic processes that humans could and should manipulate to further their own ends. Leon Battista Alberti, a fifteenth-century writer, celebrated ‘the Rocks cut, Mountains bored through, Vallies filled up, Lakes confined, Marshes discharged into the Sea, Ships built, Rivers turned, their Mouths cleared, Bridges Laid over them, Harbours formed’ (Glacken, 1967: 464–5). Humanity had found the golden key to unlock prosperity’s stubborn door. Transportation, commerce, agriculture, and industry accelerated. Yields of wheat and other staples swelled with such inventions and innovations as the seed drill, more efficient ploughs and other implements, and intensified crop rotations – all the fruits of a more experimental, scientific, market-oriented approach to farming. Pastures, heaths, fens, and marshes were drained and put to work, forests cut to create space for more fields. Western peoples approached nature with less trepidation, more confidence. Scientists such as Galileo and Descartes reduced what had been a mysterious and daunting world to mathematics. The experimental method, not passive piety, made the world apprehensible. This optimism accelerated with the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, a movement, as its name implies, suffused with a spirit of confidence in the ability of human beings to fathom and manipulate their world. Progress in abstract and practical science validated this growing faith in human reason and intellect. Christians had

Enlightenment This multifaceted intellectual and cultural movement swept across much of Europe in the eighteenth century. Proponents of the Enlightenment shared optimism over human capacity to master and manipulate the non-human environment.

BACKGROUND

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previously understood dominion over the earth as an unmerited gift from God. Now that dominion, made much more complete, was their own hardwon achievement. God had become a remote entity that set the universe in motion and then stood aside as people seized their futures. Practical men of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries created machines for spinning and weaving cotton, harnessing steam, harvesting crops, and casting metals, all of which multiplied the rate at which food, minerals, and wood were extracted from the earth and bent to human will.

THE BIRTH OF CONSERVATION But growing numbers of Europeans realized that their new machines and techniques could endanger the very prosperity they had fostered. Agriculture had less to do with subsistence, with feeding local populations, more to do with generating money by producing crops for distant markets. But these shifts put more pressure on the land. Thoughtful farmers compensated by rotating crops more carefully, using legumes such as peas and clover to restore nitrogen to depleted soils, for example. Others worried about the consequences of shrinking forests. Sixteenthcentury landslides and floods provoked a ban on logging in parts of Florence. Germans began noticing wood shortages around 1600, and in the late eighteenth century they began regulating logging in an attempt to provide a reliable annual supply of firewood and building material. The first forestry school appeared in 1763 and was accompanied by many articles and books on the subject. ‘From the State Forest not more and not less may be taken annually than is possible on the basis of good management by permanent sustained yield,’ remarked a 1795 text (Rubner, 1984: 171). The Danes created Forest Acts in 1763 and 1805, with the latter set of regulations requiring both preservation and replanting. Russia’s reform-minded Peter the Great touted forest preservation as a means to both slow erosion and ensure a reliable supply of oak trees for masts in the early eighteenth century. The French expressed similar concerns as early as the twelfth century. Their Forest Ordinance of 1669, though routinely ignored, covered human activities from grazing and charcoal production to logging, even how many seed-bearing trees were to be left standing. Forestry became not an exercise in cutting down trees as quickly as possible, but a process of establishing rational, even mathematical, equations to ensure that trees were utilized with maximum, long-term efficiency. This emphasis on conservation, on using natural resources in a sustainable manner, flew in the face of western tradition and local demands, but it

Domesticating the wild

fitted well the requirements of the new science and the modern economy. Trees could best be understood as timber, as material to be converted into fuel, fences, houses, and railroad ties. Like the earth itself, they were expansive yet finite and ought therefore to be used judiciously. Empirical study and mathematical equations should determine the rate at which they should be cut and the uses to which they should be put. Forestry was a scientific study in which specially trained humans used reason to address concrete, practical problems. Natural history in some ways resembled forestry. The rational exploitation of the earth’s flora and fauna, after all, required an exhaustive cataloguing of those commodities. Botanists and other collectors commonly accompanied explorers such as Captain James Cook because the sponsors of such expeditions wanted to know the commercial and agricultural potential of lands that they hoped to colonize. But by the eighteenth century a growing array of enthusiastic amateurs who gathered plants and insects in the fields and hills around their homes had joined the self-conscious professionals. These collectors eventually formed natural history societies, such as the British Association for the Advancement of Science. British publishers produced books on natural history that sold very, very well in the nineteenth century, and British newspapers included natural history sections. ‘By the middle of the century, there was hardly a middle-class drawing-room in the country that did not contain an aquarium, a fern-case, a butterfly cabinet, a seaweed album, a shell collection, or some other evidence of a taste for natural history’ (Barber, 1980: 13). Natural history collecting and societies spread to Canada and other English colonies. These collectors were fired by several impulses, not all of them instrumental. The amateurs, to be sure, believed that they were advancing scientific knowledge. They fitted their discoveries into an interminable Linnaean catalogue of nested classification in which plants, animals, and minerals were assigned places in an extensive but fixed hierarchy. The collectors ‘were strong on staying power, weak by comparison on speculation and insight’ (Allen, 1976: 820). Status accrued to those who assembled and organized the most specimens and facts. Unlike twentieth-century ecologists, they were not much interested in how their insects or plants related to everything else. This interest in the jots and tittles, the genus and species, of beetles and ferns embodied the Enlightenment confidence that nature could be, literally, pinned down, that it could be sorted and contained in a finite, if vast, system of kingdoms, classes, and genera. Nature was a static collection of species and data that could and would be fully defined, not a dynamic set of interactions. Discovering, describing, and cataloguing the world’s flora and fauna represented Europeans’ growing sense of mastery over the natural world.

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NOSTALGIA AND NATURE LOVING Yet amateur naturalists also looked backward, to a time when nature constituted not a scientific laboratory, but God’s handiwork. They were apt to be pious Protestants, particularly Quakers, for whom plants, insects, and shells suggested the beautiful, intricate, and wondrous work of God’s creation, ‘through Nature up to Nature’s God,’ as British collectors liked to put it (Lowe, 1983: 333). European gardens illustrated the same ambivalence over man’s growing power. By the time of the Reformation, in the 1520s, Italians had the most elaborate and celebrated. Fine gardens spread north, with economic growth. Holland’s urban elite purchased country estates in the seventeenth century that they surrounded with elaborate arrangements of plants, especially foreign and flowering varieties. These gardens provided a foil to wild landscapes. They served not simply to please the eye, but to demonstrate how human artifice made nature orderly and pleasant. Gardens also performed political functions. The overwhelming Versailles gardens of Louis XIV, which consumed more water than the 600,000 denizens of Paris, suggested that a monarch who could so successfully control nature should also control his nation. The ability to make a thousand flowers bloom betokened a sort of supernatural command of the rest of creation. Likewise, the tree-lined avenues leading up to important people’s homes connoted power as well as taste. Yet the unprecedented wealth of the eighteenth century brought gardens that were not only larger, but less orderly. Geometric and rigid landscapes – patent in their human artifice – gave way to less linear arrangements of plants, hills, water, and temples. These gardens required a great deal of intervention, not only in planting and cultivating various types of vegetation, but also in fashioning the very features that lent the gardens such a ‘natural’ appearance. An English landscape garden created in 1764 included a forty-acre lake. Indeed, the fences that separated the gardens around British estates from the fields and woods (and cows) beyond them were sunken so as not to jar people’s line of vision, to blur purposefully the division between two very different landscapes. From the windows of aristocratic homes, no discernible line separated the contrived and calculated nature of the garden from the relatively unkempt lands beyond them. Eighteenth-century landscape gardens fed people’s souls. The Duke of Buckingham wrote that ‘the works of nature appear to me the better sort of sermons; and every flower contains in it the most edifying rhetorick, to fill us with the admiration of its omnipotent Creator.’ A half century later, in 1755, writer Edward Young turned Milton on his head by asserting: ‘A garden to the virtuous is a paradise still extant; a paradise unlost’ (Coffin,

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1994: 67, 69). As God became more remote, flowers and other domesticated plants became not simply tokens of the creator’s blessings but emblems of perfection in and of themselves. Well-to-do Britons alarmed religious authorities by choosing their gardens over their churchyards as burial grounds, as if to say that these places were their Eden, and their heaven, too. Western Europe’s leading artists and intellects embraced nature. Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, Blake, Goethe, Balzac, Beethoven, Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner turned to the non-human world for inspiration. Jean-Jacques Rousseau inaugurated the movement in the mid-eighteenth century when he turned the rational wing of the Enlightenment on its ear by celebrating ‘primitive’ people as authentic and independent precisely because they lived outside the artificiality and selfishness of civilized, urban life. ‘I closed all my books,’ explains one of his characters. ‘There is one book open to all eyes, that of nature’ (Gay, 1977: 547). Nature served to stimulate modern people’s souls and imaginations, fostering a healthy, reflective individualism. Like other Enlightenment writers, Rousseau had an optimistic view of the human condition. He denied the religious and political orthodoxies of the day, that human beings were abject sinners incapable of thinking for or governing themselves. Individualism resided at the heart of this cult of nature loving. ‘I rustle with the wind,’ wrote German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder, ‘and become alive – give life – inspire – I inhale fragrance, and exhale it with the flowers; I dissolve in water; I float in blue sky; I have all these feelings’ (Cartmill, 1993: 116). The poet William Wordsworth believed that nature and human consciousness mirrored each other: ‘. . . what I saw/ Appeared like something in myself, a dream,/ A prospect in my mind’ (Brennan, 1987: 55). Wordsworth found in nature not a collection of substances to be studied and prodded and put to good use, but divinity itself. The contemplation of nature could and should be intensely and personally mystical and enlightening – a religious experience [Doc. 2, p. 102]. Ludwig Van Beethoven, one of the era’s consummate and crotchety individualists, professed himself ‘only happy in the midst of untouched nature’ (Schauffler, 1933: 261). Romantics embraced the self and nature, the natural self. Nature was not always agreeable. True, many aesthetes celebrated a picturesque, quaint nature. The movement peaked in the 1790s in England, where John Constable’s paintings offered a harmonious palette of trees, fields, sky, and rural folk, a countryside shaped but hardly spoiled by humanity. But more and more artists turned from the picturesque to the sublime, from the pleasant to the forceful. Beethoven pioneered the use of dissonant, even sinister musical compositions, and his evocations of nature, as in his Sixth Symphony, featured a fearsome storm as well as pastoral themes. Wordsworth described solitary, dark pools surrounded by ‘huge stones and masses of

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Romanticism Romanticism emerged from the eighteenth century Enlightenment and acted as a counterweight to its more scientific, rational aspects. Proponents of Romanticism emphasized the importance of emotion, of feeling, and Romantic poets, painters, composers and philosophers commonly turned to nature for inspiration and material.

rock,’ a vista that ‘excites a sense of some repulsive power strongly put forth and thus deepens the melancholy natural to such scenes’ (Byatt, 1970: 273–4). Nature could be ‘awful & immeasurable.’ Likewise, the landscape painter J.M.W. Turner forsook pleasant British country scenes for indistinct, menacing representations. To capture the terror of a storm at sea he asked to be lashed to a ship’s mast for several hours, an ordeal so awful that ‘I did not expect to escape’ (Brennan, 1987: 79, 90). The fear this experience induced is palpable in The Slave Ship, a painting in which indistinct sea monsters devour slaves that have been pitched from a vessel swallowed by malignant, squatting clouds (see Plate 1). Picturesque depictions of nature invited people to feel good about nature. The sublime, like other elements of Romanticism, simply required them to feel – and strongly. In either event, nature provided a sanctuary that excised banal society so that the solitary, sensitive soul could connect with primal forces and emotions. These ideas soon spread beyond artists and intellectuals. Intrigued by Rousseau’s celebration of primitivism, Marie Antoinette and her retinue played at being peasants in the gardens of Versailles. The growing urban, middle class was particularly interested in celebrating nature. Mountains and seas had long been regarded as dreadful and threatening places unsusceptible to improvement. Now the burgeoning cities had become degraded and diseased, less populated places vivifying and restorative.

THE BIRTH OF NATURE TOURISM The search for pastoral peace created a rural tourist industry. By the 1780s guide books directed sensitive tourists to Rousseau’s Hermitage, where he had written some of his most influential works. Germans flocked to the Rhineland for inspiration, a pilgrimage facilitated by steamship and then rail travel. ‘Between Mainz and Cologne,’ observed an engraver in 1840, ‘hardly a house, hardly a tree can be found which has not set in motion a pen or a gouge’ (Lekan, 2004: 26). Wordsworth was hosting some 500 visitors annually to his home in the Lake District by the 1840s, where his poems instructed less articulate souls what to feel as they trekked across the landscape he had made famous. Genteel tourists were soon worrying that their less-cultivated counterparts did not approach nature properly. Wordsworth wrote several editions of a guidebook to his beloved Lake District between 1810 and 1842, which he hoped would be of use to ‘the Minds of Persons of taste, and feeling for Landscape’ (Buzard, 1993: 30). But as growing numbers of travellers flocked northward, he fretted over ‘cheap trains pouring out their hundreds at a time

Domesticating the wild

along the margin of Windermere,’ that the countryside would soon be plagued by ‘wrestling matches, horses and boat races without number’ (Ousby, 1990: 192). A wealthy woman complained that the Derbyshire valley was defaced by throngs of mill hands . . . tearing through the fields like swarms of devastating locusts, and dragging the fern and hawthorn boughs they had torn down in the dust, ending the lovely spring day in pot houses, drinking gin and bitters, or heavy ales by the quart, and tumbling pell-mell into the night train . . . sodden, tipsy, yelling, loathsome creatures, such as make the monkey look a king. (Winter, 1999: 211) The same thing was happening in North America. Niagara Falls, on the border of Canada and the US, moved from being ‘the ultimate test of the “civilized” man or woman’s ability to feel deeply . . . to hear Nature speak,’ to a mere tourist destination. A writer in 1846 complained that the site was plagued with ‘Chinese pagoda, menagerie, camera obscura, museum, watch-tower, wooden monument, sea gardens, “curiosity shops” ’ ( Jasen, 1995: 33, 43). European and especially English beaches were similarly transformed. The waters of mineral and hot springs had long been celebrated for their healing properties. By the early eighteenth century physicians were prescribing saltwater bathing. This recommendation, coupled with a growth in disposable incomes, brought a trickle and then a stream of vacationers to English resorts. The bathers were soon appreciating more than the ocean’s water. Many, ubiquitous guidebooks in hand, collected seashells or seaweed. Shells and pebbles could be arranged into intricate mementos of a stay at the beach. Other, more ambitious collectors, started (short-lived) aquariums. The ocean itself drew many pilgrims. Its boundless expanses provided the anvil upon which artists and other aesthetes could forge their identities and refine their sensibilities. Fishing villages had turned their backs to the threatening sea, seeking refuge and vistas inland. But in the early nineteenth century resorts began staking out ground near the water’s edge and installing large windows where visitors could absorb ‘all the grandeur of the storm’ while staying warm and dry. As in Wordsworth’s Lake District, more Spartan nature lovers lamented the commercialization of what they argued should be a more elemental experience. ‘What are they doing here?’ asked a man observing a group of stockbrokers at the seaside. ‘If they had true relish of the ocean,’ he wondered, ‘why have they brought all this land luggage with them?’ (Howell, 1974: 46). But – then as now – nature loving and comfort in fact correlated more often than not. By the mid-nineteenth century, middle-class English families were going to the seaside for a month or more, soaking in the resplendent

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ocean even as they enjoyed most, if not all, of the amenities of home. By that date seaside resorts were also common in southern Europe and the eastern US. This would not be the first time that the people most insulated from nature’s bite, people who had time and money on their hands, were the most apt to celebrate its beneficence and beauty.

PETS Prosperity also reworked people’s relationships with animals. Oxen, cattle, and other creatures had played a key role in Europe’s economic transformation. By the fourteenth century the average European used much more animal power than his or her counterpart in China or Africa, let alone the Americas. But urbanization and economic growth removed a larger and larger proportion of people from direct contact with working animals. Pets stepped into the breach. Royal menageries expanded during the seventeenth century. Louis XIV kept ostriches, camels, elephants, crocodiles, and gazelles, animals from across the Mediterranean lands that he dominated. Like the elaborate gardens of Versailles, such collections served political and imperial ends by suggesting the long reach of his power. Royals and aristocrats of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries kept animals as pets, especially dogs, a practice that soon spread to the growing urban middle class. Dogs, cats, squirrels, monkeys, tortoises, otters, rabbits, mice, hedgehogs, toads, and a variety of birds made themselves at home among the bourgeois. Song birds were popular in London by the late seventeenth century. Pets became quasi-family members. They typically lived indoors and might go to church. They seldom performed work and certainly were not to be eaten. Pets showed up in family portraits and graveyards, and not a few owners expected to meet their departed friends in heaven, since dogs had souls, too (see Plate 2). Russian writers suggested that dogs committed suicide when their masters died. The multiplication of pets engendered attempts at animal protection by the late eighteenth century in Great Britain. Some became so enamoured of birds that they abjured putting any type on their plates – and criticized their Italian and French counterparts for being so barbarous as to keep consuming them. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals appeared in the 1820s in London and quickly gained influential members. Bull-baiting, the practice of setting dogs or other animals on bulls, was banned in 1835, cock-fighting in 1849 [Doc. 3, p. 106]. France’s Society for Protection of Animals denounced bullfighting and using dogs to pull carts. The affinity of members of the middle class for animals, like their love of the outdoors, reflected their economic and social position. Lamenting animal cruelty served to criticize both the idle aristocracy for hunting wild and the

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struggling lower classes for abusing domesticated animals. Popular forms of amusement such as cock- or dog-fighting also offended the reformers. Bloody, working-class spectacles were out of step with the emerging Victorian ethos of self-restraint and public order. Prosperous animal lovers liked to point out that the lower classes should learn from, rather than exploit, animals, creatures that accepted their station in life and went about their work cheerfully, without complaint. Victorian animal lovers reserved their highest praise for creatures that exhibited the most subservience (dogs much more so than cats) or that performed the most beneficial work (horses). Elephants were one of the few wild animals to receive much respect, as they purportedly surrendered their freedom to work cheerfully for humans. If only servants could be so tractable. Concern for animal welfare also constituted a platform from which the growing middle class could criticize the indolent rich. By the late eighteenth century country gentlemen were creating gargantuan cattle and oxen that could carry more and more meat. The British were proud of consuming more flesh than their continental counterparts, particularly the French. Beef – on the plate or in the field – represented British superiority. But the fat-laden, monumental creatures that aristocrats produced stood for more narrow concerns: the wealth and magnificence of their owners. Indeed, less prosperous Britons found these creatures more grotesque than useful. They were incapable of sustained labour and produced gelatinous, unsavoury meat. These excrescences of aristocratic vanity were ‘a collection of agricultural luxuries’ fattened by ‘Dukes and Earls’ who ‘can afford a fancy, whether it is the purchase of a Titian [painting], or the production of a prize bullock.’ A clergyman criticized the practice from even higher moral ground and wondered if the creation and showing of animals suffering from ‘overwhelming and torturing obesity’ did not constitute a ‘cruel and unchristian exhibition’ (Ritvo, 1987: 72, 75). The growing concern for animals was circumscribed and conditional. Sympathy for the wellbeing of congenial dogs and horses was accompanied in England by a ruthless slaughter of those deemed deleterious to human endeavours: rats and moles, of course, but also badgers and hedgehogs. Animals, like people, were expected to be useful.

ENVIRONMENTALISM IN THE COLONIES AND EARLY US Nature remained utilitarian in Europe’s colonies. Settlers in the Americas and the Pacific were too concerned with overcoming nature to give much thought to protecting or celebrating it.

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Nationalism This movement emphasized pride of country, including its natural features, and emerged across the western world in the nineteenth century. It often led to the preservation of places and species deemed intrinsic to a nation’s identity.

ENVIRONMENTALISM

But the young US constituted something of an exception, not so much because of its growing prosperity, rather because of its distinctive and potent strain of nationalism. Here, as in so many other fields, Thomas Jefferson played a crucial role. The Virginia planter was among the nation’s most enthusiastic and skilled naturalists, and he itched to put the lie to George Louis Leclerc de Buffon’s theory of American degeneracy. Buffon, the most celebrated naturalist of the day, found ample natural grounds for American inferiority. The unimpressive size of North America’s mammals and the purported lack of agricultural and technological accomplishments by its indigenous peoples indicated that the continent could produce only ‘cold men and feeble animals’ (Semonin, 2000: 125). Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia, written during the American Revolution, countered this theory. Did not American bears, for example, weigh twice as much as their European counterparts? Jefferson went so far as to send Buffon a large panther skin and the skeleton of an American moose. If bigger were better, the new nation had nothing to be ashamed of. These sorts of sentiments multiplied after the US achieved its independence. Clearly the young nation could not compete with its European counterparts in the conventional measures of civilization: art and architecture. But America’s weakness, its newness, could be made a virtue. Enthused a patriot in 1833: What are the temples which Roman robbers have reared, – what are the towers in which feudal oppression has fortified itself, – what are the blood-stained association of the one, or the despotic superstitions of the other, to the deep forests which the eye of God has alone pervaded, and where Nature, in her unviolated sanctuary, has for ages laid her fruits and flowers on His altar! (Nash, 2001: 73) ‘Nature’s nation’s’ want of cathedrals and castles underscored its innocence and virtue, its democracy. Its unsurpassed forests and mountains offered proof enough of God’s favour – and a fresh canvas on which God’s chosen people would create the mightiest and best nation of all, the New Jerusalem. That God’s chosen nation was ploughing up, cutting down, and otherwise subduing the very wilderness that distinguished it was an irony lost on the young country’s patriots. In the century following the American Revolution they quickly spread across the continent, laying waste to forests, grasslands, predators, and other animals with good cheer and industry. It would not be the last time that nature’s loudest partisans would be its most ambitious destroyers.

Domesticating the wild

Nature conservation had become well developed in western Europe by the mid-nineteenth century. Germany and other nations had by then realized that a reliable supply of timber required active management by specialized scientists – foresters – who would determine the time and place and rate of harvesting and a substantial bureaucracy to enforce forestry laws. But most expressions of concern over and affinity for nature were less calculated and logical. Natural history societies devoted to the collection and exhibition of nature’s bounty dotted western Europe and some of its colonies. Pets and gardens were commonplace, especially in England, where people inside and outside the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) were lamenting the suffering of some animals. Educated Christians no longer feared the rugged mountains and seashores but sought from them, in paintings and on vacation, meaning and transcendence. The sprawling landscape gardens of English and Welsh country estates perhaps best expressed the paradoxical relationship between conservation and efficiency on the one hand and nature appreciation on the other. The owners of such estates made their bread and butter by enclosing what had once been marginal land used by villages. Sometimes they absorbed and destroyed even the villages themselves. The profit-minded capitalists cultivated these expanded fields more intensively and efficiently – by turning forests into tree plantations of rapidly growing softwoods, such as larch and pine, for example. But the casual eye would not have detected such enterprises from the windows of the manor house. These domestic views were carefully constructed to include broad expanses of lawn, noble oaks, placid lakes, perhaps some faux ruins evoking ancient Rome. A few cattle grazed in the distance, near a church steeple or, better yet, the crumbling walls of an old castle. Like the residents of expensive beach homes at the turn of the twenty-first century, the owners of these estates drew a thick line between the increasingly commercialized and rationalized nature that supported their prosperity and the nature of the drawing room, garden, library, concert hall, and vacation destination. Nature provided both wealth and a counterbalance to wealth. That is why nature loving advanced most quickly in England, the nation that had most fully subdued it, among people of ample education and leisure who were most insulated from its vagaries. This ironic relationship between material progress and nature loving would become more widespread and intense in the century preceding the Second World War. Western people would have more reasons than before to conserve nature for purposes that were both rational and irrational, economic and spiritual.

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Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) Founded in 1824 in London, this organization quickly gained the backing of influential people, and in 1840 Queen Victoria allowed it to include ‘Royal’ in its title. For several decades the society focused on encouraging the enforcement of legislation penalizing the abuse of working animals. Later in the nineteenth century the RSPCA paid increasing attention to the abuse of pets and sporting or fighting animals. It spread to much of the British Empire.

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ne can read a lot of books extolling the virtues of western environmentalism without running across the name of Hermann Göring. Yet the notorious Nazi leader expressed a great deal of affinity and concern for nature. Like many of his colleagues, including Hitler, he believed that German identity and strength resided in its natural landscape and that the nation’s wellbeing depended on the preservation of those features. A vegetarian, he hoped to somehow resuscitate aurochs, long extinct animals, and populate the woods of Lithuania and Poland with them. Yet Göring was all for progress. He headed up a four-year plan to prepare Germany for war that entailed reclaiming more than 2 million hectares of undeveloped land for agriculture and increasing the timber cut by 50 to 60 per cent. The nation required, he remarked, ‘not a natural forest, but rather a natural economic forest’ (Lekan, 2004: 210). He also commanded the Luftwaffe, the German air force, a key component in the most efficient war-making machine the world had yet seen. Göring and other Nazi leaders venerated both natural landscapes and industrial growth. So did many other westerners. The western world changed dramatically and irrevocably between the midnineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. Industrialization and urbanization brought larger concentrations of people and much prosperity. Big factories spewed out goods that railroads and then automobiles distributed far and wide. Yet western peoples’ approach to the environment still followed the path laid out in the eighteenth century. True, arguments for conserving natural resources became more numerous and persistent as those resources shrank, just as those concerned with the filth of western cities insisted that something had to be done about smoke and other pollutants. But the rising chorus of voices advocating nature preservation were more often concerned with humans’ spiritual than material welfare. Even as more and more people relied more heavily than ever before on minerals, plants, and animals, they described themselves as turning to nature not for food, shelter, and clothing,

Industrial nature loving

but for succour. Nature loving more commonly embodied than contradicted material progress.

THE SPREAD OF CONSERVATION AND PRESERVATION Industrialization’s maw consumed an unprecedented amount of natural resources, and governments scrambled to balance production for the present with conservation for the future. France, where enforcement of ambitious forest laws had lagged, began overseeing its wood supply more effectively in the 1840s. Norway set aside and nurtured small pieces of forests starting in the late 1860s. Germany, long the world’s leader in forest conservation, had over 2,000 members in its foresters’ association by 1900. Great Britain paid a price for its intense logging and by 1900 was importing about 90 per cent of its softwoods. It began reserving much larger tracts of land and planting them with uniform species in the late nineteenth century. The Spanish government tried to limit logging and require replanting after the First World War, though with limited success. Conservation took longer to catch on in the US than in western Europe. New England’s George Perkins Marsh had warned back in the 1840s that unfettered logging caused erosion and other problems. Marsh, who was no democrat, blamed these difficulties on the untrammelled individualism of North America’s pioneers. He argued that humans should be sensitive to what nature required, that there existed a natural and potentially stable equilibrium that people should discern and facilitate. Logging in the European style and setting aside some areas for wilderness would well serve both wildlife and people in search of wild nature, and it would ensure a steady supply of logs and clean drinking water. Few people paid much attention to him. The first edition of Man and Nature, published in 1864, sold about 1,000 copies [Doc. 4, p. 108]. The tide turned in the 1890s. Gifford Pinchot, who had studied forestry in France and Germany, became the federal government’s leading forester in 1898. Pinchot spread the gospel of scientific forest management, including sustainable yield, fuller utilization of forest products, fire prevention, and reforestation. He charged government foresters with implementing good forestry practices. Theodore Roosevelt, who became president in 1903, agreed. By 1906 over 150 million acres, nearly 20 per cent of the nation’s standing timber, was under federal control – though millions of Americans resented the fact. Fire suppression became widespread by the 1920s, reforestation a decade later.

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Forest conservation proceeded fitfully in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, where thinly populated lands seemed all too robust. By the 1870s some Australians worried that logging practices both wasted wood and degraded soils and water. New Zealand passed a Forest Act in 1874 that required each province to set aside 3 per cent of its land for government timber. But the law was repealed just two years later, the victim of popular fear of government and desire for development. By 1880 some lumbermen and foresters in eastern Canada favoured closer regulation of logging, though they made little headway. Conservationists pointed out how unregulated logging brought erosion, climate change, and poor water. But their message of wise, calculated use flew in the face of economic individualism and opportunity, ideals that had flourished throughout the western world and remained particularly potent in recently colonized areas. Those concerned with urban environmental problems encountered the same sort of difficulties. A sanitary movement to improve western Europe’s drinking and sewage systems arose in the middle of the nineteenth century, and in the coming decades the growing urban, middle-class citizens of Prussia and Germany were spearheading a movement demanding that government provide these amenities. By 1914, 94 per cent of Prussian and German towns and cities had a central water supply. But industrial pollution grew. Manchester, brimming with factories and residences, was covered by black soot by the century’s close. ‘The very birds of the air are tarred,’ remarked an observer. Industrialists and workers alike associated smoke with prosperity. Poor people were reluctant to stop burning coal, which connoted comfort, and expressed suspicion over antipollution measures that might jeopardize their jobs. ‘Wheer there’s smook there’s brass,’ (money), they explained (Mosley, 2001: 45, 185). Conservation fared poorly when it appeared to threaten people’s livelihoods, and effective pollution control would not appear until after the Second World War. Urban parks did not much threaten economic growth and were therefore established more easily. England began creating large numbers of them in the 1840s, and other western nations eventually followed suit. ‘Let our children develop in sunshine and flowers,’ proclaimed an Australian city planner (Freestone, 1987: 98). Tending even window flower gardens would beautify slums and uplift the morals of their residents. ‘It was a well-established fact that whenever a pink, or a carnation, or a rose was seen outside a cottage, there was a potato or a cabbage for the pot within,’ remarked an advocate (Winter, 1999: 202). British factory owners encouraged their employees to grow vegetables and flowers, and the gardens of the well-to-do continued to increase in number and size. ‘The enjoyment to be derived from a suburban residence depends principally,’ wrote the British author of The Suburban

Industrial nature loving

Gardener, ‘on a knowledge of the resources which a garden, however small, is capable of affording’ (Longstaff-Gowan, 2001: 247). Early suburbs featured extensive plantings. Later in the century advocates of garden cities called for widely spaced suburban homes separated by ample woods, an arrangement that only the very prosperous could achieve.

NATURE AND NATION Many wanted to make a garden out of entire swaths of the British countryside. By 1850 half of England’s people lived in cities. By 1921 four out of five did. Anti-industrialists such as John Ruskin, William Morris, and Edward Carpenter advocated a literal return to the rural past, for agricultural communes and manual labour [Doc. 6, p. 111]. This pre-industrial economy would recreate a pre-modern and virtuous economy. Hence Morris celebrated medieval architecture as ‘the outcome of corporate and social feeling, the work not of individual but collective genius; the expression of a great body of men conscious of their union’ (Lowe and Goyder, 1983: 20–2). Less ideological Britons also embraced the countryside. Industrialization, the broad set of processes that had drawn so many to cities, both provided the means to travel from the city to the countryside (railroads and then bicycles and automobiles) and the motive (a desire to escape a society that was becoming more comfortable and mechanized). Rural England’s fields, forests, and old buildings became ‘a special source of value: an organic place, one of continuity and organic accumulation and of enduring values’ that counterbalanced the ‘disorder and false values’ of the city (Simmons, 2001: 225). ‘There is sublimity in every hedgerow,’ asserted one early devotee (Taylor, 1997: 32). England’s economic power resided in its manufacturing centres, its military power in its navy. But its soul was to be found in rural lanes. As James Winter points out, however, England could afford to set aside so much of its countryside for gardens and other forms of leisure ‘because free trade and the huge extent of formal and informal empire ensured an abundance of primary products regardless of what estate owners did with their arable soils, woods, or subsurface resources’ (Winter, 1999: 256). The English could literally afford to use rustic landscapes to foster nationalism. Wild places represented nationalism in former colonies. The US had identified itself as nature’s nation soon after gaining its independence. Urban, middle-class Canadians were taking to the woods in large numbers by the twentieth century’s turn, at a cabin by a lake or, as a writer in Man-to-Man Magazine hoped, tracking bears or mountain goats with ‘a real gun . . . strapped over your shoulder . . . making your way through a God-made

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wilderness’ (Colpitts, 2002: 71). Canada’s geography, particularly its boundless north, bequeathed to it a rough, masculine tone which set it apart from the mother country. ‘As long as the north wind blows, and the snow and sleet drive over the forests and fields,’ remarked a patriot, ‘we must be a hardy, a virtuous, a daring, and if we are worthy of our [purportedly Nordic] ancestors, a dominant race’ (Sandlos, 2001: 8). Early Australian settlers found the continent’s flora and fauna bizarre and disturbing and sought to replace them with European species. But by the early twentieth century artists and academics were embracing peculiar indigenous plants and animals as symbols of the young nation’s vitality. Many well-to-do urban Australians self-consciously styled themselves as ‘bushwalkers’ who sought ‘the canyons, ranges, and wildest parts of this country’ (Dunlap, 1999: 195). Regeneration came not from English culture or manufactures but in the Australian bush. Urban residents, complained one writer, focused on the ‘sentiments of every country but their own.’ But in the desert ‘the danger-waves of bloated social organisms curl, break and recede’ (Hains, 1997: 159). ‘The New Zealand forest looks best when no foreign element intrudes,’ a politician explained in 1903, adding ‘European and American trees that are very beautiful in themselves do not always look well among those of New Zealand’ (Star, 2002: 285). Germans had long forged nationalism in the bowels of nature. ‘The German people need the wood as man needs the wine,’ asserted Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl in the mid-nineteenth century. The Rhine River was particularly beloved, and Germans were willing to spill blood to control its banks. Soldiers marched to battle in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 singing The Watch on the Rhine. Early twentieth-century intellectuals such as Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse described the creation of nature parks as ‘a truly patriotic deed!’ The Friends of Nature, 30,000 strong by 1914, argued that nature offered a model of freedom for the working class – their slogan: ‘Free Mountains, Free World, Free People.’ This association of nature with Germany’s essence opened the door for chauvinism or worse. German imperialists justified their domination of colonial peoples and places by arguing that their rule ensured more productive and sustainable practices. By the same token, the emigration of purportedly inferior peoples to Germany threatened both the nation’s identity and its environment. An essay for the Nature Park Society blamed pollution on an ‘unwashed brood of Croats and Pollacks’ said to be shouldering aside Germany’s ‘flaxen-haired and blue-eyed boys and girls’ (Dominick, 1992: 55, 61, 88). The Nazis paired nature loving with racism more consistently and patently. They believed that Germany’s spirit sprang from its soil and woods and that their programme of racial superiority and purification was a natural process, not a cultural invention. Germany could flourish only if it preserved

Industrial nature loving

and created the environment in which its essence, its strength, resided. Blood and soil were one. Hence the purportedly inferior, Slavic lands to the east would be transformed into forested, German-like landscapes as German colonizers pushed aside purportedly inferior Slavic peoples. With the exception of dogs, deemed loyal and fierce, the Nazis criticized pets, which they associated with soft sentimentality, the very sort of trait they hoped to purge from the Aryan race. They praised wild animals, particularly the wolf, thought to be without peer in fierceness and courage. Hitler commonly referred to himself as a wolf. The Nazis did not just talk about nature. Under their rule Germany became the first modern nation to safeguard wolves, and they created the strongest animal-protection law in the world. (They associated animal cruelty with Judaism, claiming that kosher butchering prolonged the suffering of dying animals.) The Nazis created hundreds of nature reserves and thousands of natural monuments. Yet none of this much interfered with the Nazis’ relentless industrial and technological development. A forest overseer who objected to soldiers drilling in a protected area was branded a ‘communist.’ The autobahn completed in 1939 provided views of mountains, lakes, ruins, and windmills (see Plate 3), and its many curvilinear sections suggested harmony with the rest of the landscape. ‘The straight line does not stem from nature,’ explained a designer (Lekan, 2004: 208, 221). But it was no less an engine of economic and military development for that. The Nazis’ opposite number, Soviet communists, evinced a much less romantic view of the landscape. Russia’s conservationists were soon on the defensive after the Bolsheviks came to power. Lenin had long enjoyed the outdoors. But he and other leaders were obsessed with efficiency and production, and Russian peasants resisted regulation of their access to forests. The Soviet Union established the nation’s first park, or zapovednik, in 1920, and it soon added more. But these parks served narrow, utilitarian ends. Here, it was hoped, scientists could discern both the ‘carrying capacities of nature’ and provide space for commercially valuable species to recover. Conservationists who pronounced these goals too narrow invited censure. Stalin was more preoccupied with immediate productivity than Lenin had been, and his first five-year plan called for ‘the great transformation of nature.’ A writer depicted the great leader considering a map of the Karelia Republic: ‘Primeval forests. Too much forest as a matter of fact; it covers the best soil. And swamps. The swamps are always crawling about, making life dull and slovenly. Tillage must be increased. The swamps must be drained.’ Intellectuals concerned with how this affected the environment could find themselves condemned for indulging in ‘apoliticism,’ with living in a sort of ‘zapovednik for the Endangered Species of Bourgeois Scientists.’ The editors

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Boy Scouts Founded by Robert Baden Powell in 1907, the scouting movement quickly spread across the western world. It combined military organization with outdoor life. It targeted growing numbers of middle-class boys who would otherwise have little experience with camping and other aspects of rural life. Woodcraft Movement This broad movement emerged in Britain, North America, and Europe in the early decades of the twentieth century. It championed camping and other outdoor activities, particularly for youth.

ENVIRONMENTALISM

of the field’s leading journal prudently changed its name from Conservation to Nature and the Socialist Economy, and the All-Russian Society for Conservation added ‘and Promotion of the Growth of Natural Resources’ to its name. An editorial forsook ‘the old tendencies of “conservation of nature” for the sake of nature itself’ (Weiner, 1988: 62, 135, 137, 147, 169, 170). The zapovedniki survived until the 1950s, but were used for grazing, mining, logging, and to host exotic animals that might prove useful. The Soviets’ association of nature preservation with the bourgeois was nearly as accurate as it was self-serving. Australia’s early bushwhacker clubs were patently elitist. The Mountain Trails Club, formed in 1914, admitted just fifty-five members in its first fifty-six years – all of them men. Educated men across the western world asserted a special claim to camping and other outdoor activities. Prosperous males, it seemed, had been enervated by progress. ‘No nation facing the unhealthy softening and relaxation of fibre that tends to accompany civilization can afford to neglect anything that will develop hardihood, resolution, and the scorn of discomfort and danger,’ asserted Theodore Roosevelt (Nash, 2001: 151). Military service and rugged sports – rugby and cricket in the British Commonwealth, boxing and American football in the US – could provide the danger and violence that everyday life had once offered. So could the outdoors. The Boy Scouts began in England in 1907 and quickly spread to Australia and the US, where it was soon the nation’s largest youth organization [Doc. 7, p. 112]. The likeminded Woodcraft Movement, defined by one proponent as ‘the art of getting along well in the wilderness by utilizing nature’s storehouse,’ was very popular from the 1890s to the 1930s (Turner, 2002: 464). But white people made it clear that the wilderness would not interfere with civilization. Armchair adventurers regaled themselves with male adventure novels, including the exploits of Tarzan, a white Englishman raised by apes who somehow incorporated nature’s virility without losing his civilized essence – or his superiority to Africans. In the 1920s many Caucasians overcame their fear of dark skin sufficiently to sunbathe for the first time. Yet they continued to insist that dark-skinned peoples possessed an insufficient understanding and appreciation of nature, that they both failed to develop their natural resources and to protect the big-game animals that Europeans liked to hunt. Working people commonly opposed conservation and preservation. More than one in five residents of the Palatinate region of Germany were arrested annually from 1830 to 1845 for stealing wood or otherwise violating its forest laws, regulations that bore heavily on poor residents who used the woods for fuel, food, and forage. Plans to transform the pastures of Auzat, France into forests prompted its residents to lament the prospect of ‘no flocks, no fertilizer, no harvests, nothing at all in fact, if not flight or death’

Industrial nature loving

(Whited, 2000: 72). In the US, too, prosperous and marginal people sparred over environmental protection. The campaign to end the feather trade, the shooting of beautiful birds whose bodies adorned women’s hats around the twentieth century’s turn, associated this fashion choice with the ‘real loidy who . . . with hat cocked over one eye, pink tie, scarlet waist . . . haunts the cheaper shops . . . chews gum, and expectorates with seeming relish’ (Dunlap, 1988: 15). The growing number of recreational hunters who shot wildlife denigrated those who killed such animals to feed their families as ‘pot hunters,’ vulgar men who did not give their prey a sporting chance. A burgeoning political force, the sport hunters lobbied to create and enforce laws that regulated and licensed hunters and set aside protected areas for game. Poorer, rural residents who used these same animals to put food on their tables and much-needed coin in their pockets resisted such efforts. Taking wild meat, an Alberta farmer explained, was ‘the custom of every free-born son of the soil’ (Colpitts, 2002: 87). ‘Wild game, wild fish and wild birds belong to the people,’ asserted a resident of the Adirondack Mountains of New York ( Jacoby, 1997: 335). Wealthy outsiders such as William Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, and Alfred Vanderbilt rubbed salt into the wounds of locals by establishing private parks where only they and their guests could hunt. Residents of the eastern US and Canada retaliated by tearing down ‘no trespassing signs,’ destroying fences, and shooting at game wardens or guards. Such battles were particularly bloody in Great Britain. The upper class continued to exclude from the countryside ‘poachers’ who took wild game for food, even as they raised the ever-growing number of pheasants that well-to-do sportsmen shot down on private reserves. Game keeping – the work of keeping out poachers – was a very dangerous occupation. At least forty-one were shot between 1833 and 1843. The number and extent of public nature reserves and parks expanded dramatically in the century leading up to the Second World War. Several British groups formed to protect the countryside: the Federation of Rambling Clubs in 1905, the Councils for the Protection of Rural England and Rural Wales in 1926 and 1928, respectively, and a Youth Hostels Association (for rural lodging) in 1930. The National Trust for England and Wales began conserving rural landscapes in the 1890s, and England established a National Parks Commission soon after the Second World War. These organizations succeeded in preserving both selected bits of countryside and walkers’ access to rural places. Denmark also removed land from agricultural or industrial production. Lightly populated West Jutland had been the target of ambitious development programmes for much of the nineteenth century, but by the century’s turn these endeavours were criticized for moving ‘like an iron roller over this beautiful and unique landscape,’ for fostering ‘the crassest materialism.’ The

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Federation of Rambling Clubs This organization of groups concerned with preserving people’s access to the British countryside formed in 1905, an effort that had begun nearly a century before. Many Britons believed that they should have a right to hike across private property. National Trust Founded in 1895 by prominent philanthropists, this soon became the leading organization devoted to preserving natural and historical landscapes in Great Britain. It has focused on landscapes heavily shaped by humans and on buildings and remained strong and influential at the turn of the twentyfirst century.

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Danes shifted from trying to integrate the marshy heaths into the national economy to treating them as ‘a fairy tale land’ set aside for nostalgia and other forms of recreation (Olwig, 1984: 87). Other European nations followed suit. France established its first national park in 1914, high in the mountains near Grenoble. Its stated purpose was to ‘conserve and protect against all destruction, deterioration or disfiguration by man, the natural elements, fauna, flora, picturesque sites and distinctive geological and hydrological formations’ (Pincetl, 1993: 85). Spain created its first national park in 1917 and established a list of protected Natural Areas of National Interest and Catalogue of Notable Trees. Nature lovers in younger nations focused their attentions on wilderness preservation. ‘Heaven grant that we may be able to retain many solitary places in this beautiful island of ours where nature in all her grandeur will reign supreme,’ wrote a devotee of the Tasmanian backcountry, who hoped to keep such sacred places forever free from ‘sulphur fumes, and axes and jam tins’ (Hutton and Connors, 1999: 76). The Royal National Park was established in 1879, near Sydney, Australia. Canada established parks in its breathtaking Rocky Mountains in the 1880s. The US led the world in creating national parks. In 1864 the federal government granted the Yosemite Valley to California as a park. Eight years later it created Yellowstone National Park, which began as a collection of natural curiosities, a tourist attraction touted by the Northern Pacific Railroad. But in the 1880s Congress astonished many observers by refusing to let mining interests develop it. New Jersey’s William McAdoo explained: ‘Civilization is so universal that man can only see nature in her majesty and primal glory, as it were, in these as yet virgin regions’ (Nash, 2001: 115). Many other expansive national parks would follow. The number of visitors to US national parks increased from less than 70,000 in 1908 to 335,000 in 1915. Nature’s nation had become determined to preserve and enjoy parts of its wild scenery.

WILD NATURE The young US eventually produced passionate advocates for wilderness. Not many paid New England’s Henry David Thoreau much heed when he proclaimed that ‘in Wildness is the preservation of the World’ in 1851, and not many read Walden, his most sustained account of nature, when it appeared three years later (Nash, 2001: 84). Thoreau’s mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, enjoyed a wider audience. Emerson was a leading transcendentalist who believed, like Wordsworth, that God was immanent in nature, that humans could intuit God and truth through the contemplation of nature. Like most of his peers, he found walks through the countryside sufficient to satisfy this

Industrial nature loving

urge. Thoreau, though put off by exposure to wild, uninhabited landscapes, desired a more intense interaction. He spent over two years at Walden Pond, near Concord, Massachusetts, where he observed the world around him, tended his beans, wrote in his journal, and pondered the relationships between humans and the rest of the world. Thoreau distrusted the American mania for speed and growth and busyness and found at Walden an antidote. ‘Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature,’ he counselled, ‘and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito’s wing on the rails.’ Nature offered not simply a respite from frantic commerce and progress, but intimations of a different and compelling way of living. ‘Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?’ (Krutch, 1962: 177, 207). Like Rousseau before him, Thoreau did not reject the core values of western civilization, did not literally counsel a return to the woods. Rather, he wished those ideals to be buffered, to be chastened, by the other, less rational and more primitive, components of human nature. The ideas explored by Thoreau gained traction late in the century. Indeed, John Muir found Thoreau’s nature too tame and sought out wilderness, places seemingly untouched by human hands. Like Thoreau, he believed that ‘civilized man chokes his soul.’ Forests and mountains offered a balm. Muir coveted uncouth wilderness, and, unlike most nature lovers, he also asserted the intrinsic importance of all creatures, including rattlesnakes and coyotes, regardless of whether people found them useful or appealing. But he much preferred to dwell on less bloody and more uplifting elements of wild areas. ‘Nature’s peace will flow into you as the sunshine into the trees. The winds will blow their freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.’ Wilderness embodied God. Of the Sierra Mountains he remarked: ‘everything in it seems equally divine – one smooth, pure, wild glow of Heaven’s love’ (Nash, 2001: 126, 128) [Doc. 8, p. 115]. Many followed him – by seeking out remote mountains or, more commonly, by reading his many articles in popular magazines. ‘Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home,’ enthused Muir (Fox, 1981: 116). Nature lovers such as Muir commonly clashed with conservationists. Pinchot complained that preservationists ‘hated to see a tree cut down . . . but you cannot practice forestry without logging’ (Budiansky, 1995: 55). Many bridled at an 1876 plan to turn Thirlmere Lake into a reservoir for the residents of Manchester. Promoters of the project claimed that it would both provide two million people with water and enhance the beauty and accessibility of the lake region and accused their opponents of being impractical ‘sentimentalists’ who did not realize that nature could be improved upon, made more useful without losing its scenic and recreational qualities. Developers, countered Ruskin, were bent on sending an ‘ancient shepherd life into exile, and diverting the waves of . . . streamlets into cities which are

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the very centres of pollution, of avarice, and impiety [and] blasting the cultivable surface of England into a treeless waste of ashes’ (Winter, 1999: 180, 184). Nature was best left alone. Yet western peoples brought to their parks and other protected areas the urban culture they were purportedly seeking to escape. Automobiles and buses eased access to the British countryside, even as they compromised the very tranquillity that their occupants sought. Ugly billboards, petrol stations and telephone boxes dotted the roadside, though Boy Scout troops made the telephone boxes less offensive by planting small gardens around them. Others found even the visitors’ persons unsightly: ‘sweating girls in shorts that enlarge without enhancing their charms’ (Moore-Colyer, 1999: 115). Tourism shaped the nature of even remote parks, as planners decided which landscape elements to accent or disguise, create or destroy. North American managers introduced exotic species and routinely poisoned and shot wolves, coyotes, mountain lions, hawks, and other predators well into the twentieth century. They also tried to excise indigenous peoples, whose long-standing presence in places such as Yellowstone violated Caucasian expectations of wilderness. Park managers hesitated to stand in the way of economic progress. Canada’s park managers tolerated logging and mining. Australia’s Royal National Park was intended as much for recreation as preservation and included a zoo. New Zealand bureaucrats assured citizens that they did not ‘withhold from settlement areas of rich soil . . . well adapted to pastoral or agricultural pursuits merely because they are also suited for scenery preservation’ (Pawson, 2002: 148). Scenery preservation, moreover, was no end in itself. The Superintendent of the Department of Tourist and Health Resorts defended leaving uncut the forest along the rail line stretching from Wellington to Auckland because it would ‘afford a great attraction to travellers . . . whereas miles of burnt and blackened logs would prove a weariness to the spirit’ (Star, 2002: 283). Wilderness preservation and nature for its own sake, though eloquently advanced by Muir, would not make much headway until well after the Second World War. Western people domesticated the very landscapes whose primitiveness they celebrated.

DOMESTICATING THE WILD Domestication of animals also proceeded rapidly. Pet ownership continued to grow in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as more and more people associated animals with leisure rather than work or food. Dog shows

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became widespread in England after 1865 and helped fuel the creation of dozens of new breeds. Human intervention in genetics, from wheat to plough horses, was of course nothing new. But the creators of new varieties of dogs made no pretence of serving any practical purpose. Undomesticated animals also drew admirers and defenders. Britons began tending to wild birds late in the nineteenth century, first leaving out crumbs during cold spells then building feeders, baths, and houses for their little friends. Beatrix Potter’s drawings faithfully rendered rabbits, squirrels, and other creatures even as she had them wearing human clothing or using human utensils and described them acting very much like humans. Her children’s books blended ‘scientific knowledge and fablelike stories’; her characters ‘live in a never-never land somewhere between people and real-life animals’ (Gates, 1998: 231–2). Ethel Pedley dedicated Dot and the Kangaroo in 1899 to Australia’s children ‘in the hope of enlisting their sympathies for the many beautiful, amiable, and frolicsome creatures of their fair land’ (Dunlap, 1999: 108). Pedley’s creatures earned such sympathy. One, a mother kangaroo, rescued a little girl who had become lost in the bush. Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty, a bestselling English novel termed ‘the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the Horse,’ had in 1877 jump-started a genre populated by noble animal protagonists (Lutts, 1998: 3) [Doc. 5, p. 109]. Canada’s Ernest Thompson Seton’s Wild Animals I Have Known appeared in 1898 and also attracted a wide readership. Seton and other writers, such as William J. Long and Sir Charles G.D. Roberts, depicted wild animals as being very much like humans. Birds made casts to heal broken bones. In Seton’s words, animals possessed ‘the virtues most admired in Man,’ including dignity, sagacity, obedience, and fidelity. Long transported readers to the ‘School of the Woods’ which offered ‘a wholesome, cheerful life to make one glad and send him back to his own school with deeper wisdom and renewed courage’ (Schmitt, 1990: 47, 49). Detractors scoffed at the ‘nature fakers’’ outlandish stories. But the assertion that ‘we and the beasts are kin’ claimed millions of readers (Dunlap, 1999: 106). Zoos were by this time making flesh-and-blood, exotic animals accessible to millions of urban residents across the western world. Jumbo the elephant was one of many celebrities of London’s Regent’s Park, and his sale to P.T. Barnum, the US showman, prompted a national outpouring of patriotic indignation. Close familiarity with captured creatures bred, if not contempt, considerable condescension. The bear pit, in which the imposing mammals were made to beg for food, was a key component of late-nineteenth-century zoos: ‘the animal that had long been associated with fear, the woods, and aristocratic hunting privileges was reduced in a controlled, urban, and bourgeois environment to a comic figure asked to perform for ladies, gentlemen, and perhaps most important, children’ (Rothfels, 2002: 23–4).

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Sea Birds Preservation Act This piece of 1869 British legislation was a landmark in the movement toward protecting selected species of birds.

Anthropomorphism The practice of imputing human characteristics and motives to nonhumans. The thicklydrawn line between humans and animals began to blur with the spread of pet ownership in eighteenth-century Europe, and by the turn of the twentieth century wild animals who spoke, wore clothes, and formed human-like families were common in children’s and adult literature alike. Though modern ecologists are critical of anthropomorphism, the belief that animals are essentially people continues to shape western culture and inspire environmental movements. Audubon Society This US organization formed in 1905 and led the fight against killing birds for their ornamental plumage. In recent decades it has become one of America’s largest organizations devoted to preserving wildlife habitat, and it has also fostered the hobby of birdwatching.

ENVIRONMENTALISM

This denatured and contrived relationship with animals – as pets, fictional protagonists, and zoo residents – was accompanied by a continued concern over how people treated certain animals. England’s anti-cruelty movement had begun early in the nineteenth century, when it had focused on the abuse of domesticated and especially working animals. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reformers increasingly tried to protect wild animals. Birds received a great deal of attention. The Sea Birds Preservation Act of 1869 was the first piece of national legislation devoted to a particular species, and reformers across the western world soon criticized women for wearing hats featuring the feathers and carcasses of birds. Australians began passing laws protecting birds in 1901, though they were seldom enforced. England approved legislation safeguarding grey seals and badgers early in the twentieth century, and a 1921 act stopped the plumage trade. Anthropomorphism continued to characterize western animal lovers. Bird devotees still referred to predators as ‘cannibals’ (Barrow, 2002: 75). A German naturalist celebrated ‘the bird’s beauty, its grace, its innocence, its admirable flight and, above all, its magnificent song.’ Birds were tidy and hard working. They got along well with each other and took good care of their children, were ‘freedom loving yet socially oriented’ (Schmoll, 2005: 163). Early twentieth-century Australians centred concerns for wild animals on the koala, a cute, meek-appearing animal. ‘It was humane sentiment and sentimentality that mobilized the Australian public, not the animal’s place in Australian nature’ (Dunlap, 1999: 193). Nothing trumped motherhood for generating sentimentality, and the realization that many birds were mothers fired the campaign to end the feather trade. Traditionalists – and the milliners who created hats – could and did argue that nature was a source of beauty and that for lovely women to adorn themselves with nature’s gifts was to pay nature a compliment. ‘The earth and the sea give up their gems for her,’ explained one. ‘Let the air do the same.’ Practical-minded conservationists countered that birds ought to be left alive because they served humans by consuming insects. But saving birds so that they could kill bugs did not rally many to the cause. So Audubon Society members described how Florida hunters attacked snowy egret nests soon after their young had hatched, when mothers (devoted fathers generated little ink) were most reluctant to flee. ‘When the killing is finished,’ a writer explained, ‘the slaughtered birds are left in a white heap to fester in the sun and wind in sight of their orphaned young that cry for food and are not fed’ (Price, 1999: 82, 89). Women who wore white egret feathers were stained by the innocent blood of women and children. But what was really being defended here – birds or motherhood? And did the preservation of either or both counter in the least humanity’s growing subjection of the non-human world?

Industrial nature loving

Nature loving had made considerable progress throughout the western world by the eve of the Second World War. Growing numbers of people – and not just intellectuals – spoke fondly of the untamed outdoors and sought respite and refreshment there. Nations created parks where their citizens could enjoy nature and, in some instances, restricted economic development that might compromise a landscape’s primitive character. The gap between wild animals and humans narrowed as children and adults alike read stories depicting these creatures in a very favourable light. Audubon societies and other organizations formed to protect birds and other animals. But nature loving hardly slowed the relentless course of western industrialization and progress. In the former colonies, especially, even the notion that natural resources should be consumed efficiently raised a firestorm of criticism. Preservationists, for their part, criticized conservationists such as Pinchot for allowing sheep to graze on federal land and countenancing a reservoir in the beautiful Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park. But Muir’s wide readership seldom translated into policies. Most preservationists and other nature enthusiasts, furthermore, pursued programmes that dovetailed rather than contradicted their economic interests. They were highly selective and favoured the protection of pieces of scenery deemed especially beautiful or picturesque, animal species defined as most akin to humans. The growing cult of nature appreciation co-existed side by side with the industrial era’s growing prosperity. Hence the narrator in a 1916 novel finds in a forest both a beauty reflecting God’s glory and ‘acres of the finest milling timber in New Zealand’ (Kuzma, 2003: 459). Automobiles brought city dwellers to the suburbs, the countryside, and to parks. Hunting for sport rather than necessity, keeping animals as pets instead of food, even abjuring from wearing feathered hats served to demonstrate both wealth and sensitivity to nature. The development of a substantial environmentalist movement that questioned rather than complemented the western programme of increased prosperity still lay well ahead by the eve of the Second World War.

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4 The friendly wild of post-war affluence

T

he English scholar J.R.R. Tolkien, a city-dwelling intellectual, described himself in 1957 as ‘a Hobbit,’ who liked ‘gardens, trees and unmechanized farmlands’ and ‘good plain food’ (Veldman, 1994: 79). Tolkien’s fictional hobbits inhabited the rural, pre-modern world of his trilogy, The Lord of the Rings, that was on its way to becoming one of the most beloved stories in western literature. The Lord of the Rings is an adventure story featuring a struggle between good and evil, and there is never any doubt which side nature is on. The admirable creatures of Middle Earth live simply and naturally. The unassuming, pre-industrial hobbits reside close to the earth [Doc. 9, p. 116]. The elves understand horses and trees. The lands in which they live are beautiful, even enchanted. The forces of evil flourish in filth and darkness. In Mordor, Sauron’s lair, ‘nothing lived, not even the leprous growths that feed on rottenness. The gasping pools were choked with ash and crawling muds, sickly white and grey, as if the mountains had vomited the filth of their entrails upon the lands about’ (Veldman, 1994: 82). The cackling, ill-tempered Orcs take delight in destroying nature. They cut down trees for the fun of it and leave a sort of slime in their wake. Like Sauron, they are devoted to consuming the earth’s plants and minerals to create monstrosities, death-dealing creatures and machines. Sauron’s apocalyptic hatred of green, living things prompts even ancient tree-herds (Ents) to bestir and uproot themselves to thwart him. Tolkien also complained of modern, industrial life outside of his fiction. He lamented the arrival of atomic weapons, the mechanization of warfare, and the traffic around Oxford: ‘This charming house has become uninhabitable – unsleepable-in, unworkable-in, rocked, racked with noise, and drenched with fumes. Such is modern life. Mordor in our midst’ (Veldman, 1994: 87). Tolkien was ahead of his time. The Lord of the Rings enjoyed only modest success in the 1950s. Most expressions of nature loving in the two decades

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following the Second World War lacked Tolkien’s harsh, anti-modern edge and were more likely to utilize than criticize technology. The privations that accompanied and followed the war left most Europeans desperate for economic progress. Expressions of affinity for nature grew more readily in the prosperous US. Nature loving occurred very much on human terms, on manicured suburban lawns, in comfortable campers, and with beloved pets. Even as scientists began to argue that nature was more chaotic and less predictable than had been imagined, millions constructed a friendly wild that complemented, not challenged, the substantial material comforts that unprecedented numbers of them enjoyed.

BACKGROUND The threat of nuclear annihilation hung over the world like a sword of Damocles, and the anti-nuclear movement constituted the most potent challenge to the status quo between 1945 and 1960 in the US. The National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy in 1957 urged an end to nuclear testing and called for Americans and others to set aside nationalism in the interests of survival: ‘The sovereignty of the human community comes before all others’ (Brands, 1993: 63). But most Americans expressed anxiety over nuclear war more obliquely, through exposure to popular films, novels, and songs rather than participation in protest movements. Movies such as The Blob, Attack of the Crab Monsters, It, and Them described the fearsome, monstrous mutants created by nuclear radiation. Americans had nothing but praise for the four-wheeled monsters that were consuming so much of their time, money, and land. The automobile seemed to open up a world of pastoral possibilities. A driver early in the twentieth century found driving along Lake Michigan made the world ‘everlasting, and unbelievable . . . Being in it was beyond understanding, it was incomprehensible joy.’ By the 1950s the roads were bigger, the automobiles much faster and numerous, the roadside businesses ubiquitous and monotonous. Novelist John Steinbeck groused that it soon would ‘be possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a single thing’ (Jakle, 1985: 65, 190). But more and more Americans were taking to the road to find nature. A survey of vacationers in Colorado, the heart of the West, found that six in ten planned to picnic, four in ten to fish, camp, or hike. The number of people camping in Illinois increased more than fivefold from 1949 to 1957. National, state, and local parks blossomed after the Second World

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War, and many featured space for a parking spot, picnic table, fire pit, and spot of ground where the new, lightweight and waterproof nylon tents could be erected and inhabited for a week or a day. Portable stoves, folding chairs constructed of aluminium and nylon, and a host of other inventions made getting away from it all while taking much of it along easier than ever before; campers lived more comfortably than their grandparents had at home. This was especially true of the growing number of Americans who purchased trailers that could be pulled behind their automobiles. Electrified and plumbed campers featured not only beds, but also refrigerators, ovens, and toilets. Vacationers enjoyed nature through the mediation of sophisticated technology, particularly automobiles.

AMERICAN SUBURBS Suburbs brought millions of Americans closer to nature in their everyday lives, offered them a refuge from the very processes that made their prosperity and the suburbs themselves possible. Suburbs had appeared in much of the western world by the mid-nineteenth century. After the war, a much broader swath of Americans could afford to live in them. Interstate highways and other new roads provided rapid, convenient access to jobs. Bulldozers, plywood, and wall-board simplified building and drove down prices. Nearby strip malls offered a panoply of consumer goods – but were tucked out of sight of residences. Indeed, the genius of the suburb lay in suggesting a simple, pastoral life far removed from commerce and industry even as it more fully embraced the comforts of modern capitalism. Residents enjoyed a stable and comfortable climate year round through the intensive use of energy-gobbling technology. Solar power was discussed, then discarded, in favour of oil and natural gas. Air conditioners, invented during the Depression, increased from 43,000 in 1947 to more than one million just six years later. Trees and lawns quickly materialized where bulldozers had so recently trodden. Large lots and curvilinear ‘roads’ or ‘lanes’ (developers believed that the word ‘street’ connoted urbanism) added to the sense of being in a parklike, rural setting ( Jackson, 1985: 236). Indeed, the amount of public land reserved for community parks shrank. New York City set aside 27 per cent of areas developed from 1900 to 1940 for parks, less than 3 per cent for post-war developments. ‘Every house will have its own “park” when all the trees are grown,’ explained an advertisement (Rome, 2001: 122). The tending of lawns became, as the title of one history puts it, an ‘American Obsession’ after the Second World War ( Jenkins, 1994). The first mechanical mowers had appeared in the 1860s, but by 1900 only a very

The friendly wild of post-war affluence

small proportion of the nation’s homes featured a carefully maintained lawn. Most people could not afford the substantial time and equipment to keep them up, and, in any event, needed that space for vegetable gardens or forage for cattle, horses, or goats. Indeed, cast-iron deer appeared on the lawns of the well-to-do, as if to signify that the owners were wealthy enough to turn their property into a sort of park land – though the era’s leading landscape architects found such accoutrements gauche. Lawns grew in number and extent early in the century before multiplying after the Second World War. New types of grass seed, fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides made it easier than before to maintain an attractive lawn, a single species of grass. Gasolinepowered push mowers had appeared shortly before the war and were now widely available. Riding mowers soon replaced them in many garages. Americans had purchased about 35,000 lawnmowers a year in the 1930s. In 1951 they bought well over one million. Environmentalists since Rachel Carson have been at pains to explain the costs of conventional lawns. These green seas have devoured massive amounts of water and noxious chemicals. But, like urban planners who favour high-density housing, such naysayers have made little impression on most Americans. Suburbanization and the sylvan landscapes that accompanied it have represented both material success and an affinity for the natural world, the trees, flowers, shrubs, and neat lawns that have surrounded these new, spacious, and beloved homes. Working-class suburbs were, of course, less expansive, and here nature loving took a peculiar twist. Unable, through lack of space and money, to create the park-like grounds favoured by well-to-do counterparts, Americans of more modest means often populated their lawns with all manner of plastic animals and plants, from toadstools to pink flamingos, ornaments which suggested that the yard’s owners could afford some conspicuous, if tasteless, consumption of their own.

THE FRIENDLY WILD Post-war American society celebrated the domestication of nature. Reader’s Digest, which had nearly 15 million subscribers around the world by 1950, consistently depicted a friendly wild. This emblem of middle America of course spilled a great deal of ink on ‘man’s best friend,’ faithful dogs that insisted on loving and serving their masters. But it also claimed that wild animals were dogs at heart. ‘The Friendly Wild’ was a regular column with protagonists such as the ‘White Lady,’ a bat that shared caresses with a man; Svea, ‘The Moose Who Liked People;’ and a stick-fetching fox that ‘confided’

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Suburbanization Suburbs began to ring England’s cities in the first half of the nineteenth century as improved forms of transit allowed more and more prosperous families to live farther away from where they worked and shopped. This process accelerated with the invention of electric trolley cars and of course privately-owned automobiles, and by the 1950s more people lived around than inside many large cities of the western world. Suburban developments appealed to families who desired to live closer to nature and often featured extensive plantings of trees and shrubs and other landscape features deemed natural.

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Bambi This Disney animated movie, based on Sigmund Salzmann’s novel of the same name, appeared in 1942. Its protagonist is a young deer, and it pits the creatures of the forest against evil hunters.

to the author that ‘he’d like to be a dog.’ Contributors described a peccary that acted ‘like a kitten,’ a caribou that ‘trotted behind me like a dog,’ a goose that became ‘as sociable as a collie pup,’ an eagle that followed a man ‘like a puppy’ (Peterson del Mar, 1998: 30–1). Guns were out of place in the friendly wild. Several authors recalled the moment of epiphany when they realized that they could not shoot creatures that ‘were practically human.’ But Reader’s Digest was no hotbed of vegetarianism and animal-rights activists. The people who blanched at the thought of shooting animals had no qualms about eating them. The few articles describing farm animals indicated that these creatures were happy to sacrifice their lives for human comfort. Indeed, a piece describing laboratory animals being slowly starved to death championed ‘man and animal joining together’ to improve people’s lives (Peterson del Mar, 1998: 32, 35). The only animals censured by Readers’ Digest in the 1950s were those that damaged the interests of humans. The tree-destroying bark-beetle was a ‘hungry gangster,’ the screwworm fly that preyed on farm animals was ‘vicious,’ and the sea lamprey, which harmed commercial fisheries, was ‘an evil marine vampire,’ a ‘monster’ (Peterson del Mar, 1998: 33). These malicious animals were the exception that proved the rule. The great majority of pets, wild animals, and farm animals were friends to humanity, were familiar and beloved creatures eager to serve people. The metamorphosis of Lassie perhaps best illustrates Americans’ determination to depict animals as being obsessed with people’s welfare. The collie first appeared in a Saturday Evening Post short story in 1938 written by Eric Knight, an Englishman who had emigrated to the US. A book, Lassie Come Home, followed in 1940. Knight’s Lassie is a product of canine rather than human impulses. True, she generates a tremendous sense of pride and devotion in her young owner, who credits her return with restoring harmony to his family, and her trek from Scotland constituted an impressive feat of endurance. Yet Knight attributes this accomplishment to good breeding and instinct, an innate sense of home and habit, not to squishy emotions like loyalty and love. The long-running US television version of Lassie, which began in 1954, presented a very different sort of dog. In these stories the loyal and perceptive collie worried over and saved her family and others from calamity. This dog was no mere creature of instinct. She loved and protected her people. Nothing did more to popularize the anthropomorphism of animals than Walt Disney’s films, and none of his many films did a better job of it than Bambi. As with so many Disney productions, the film took considerable liberties with the book on which it was based. Hungarian Sigmund Salzmann had published Bambi: A Forest Life, in 1926, and the novel was soon

The friendly wild of post-war affluence

translated into English. Salzmann (whose pen name was Felix Salten) depicted a forest suffused by death. Young Bambi witnesses the killings of a mouse, a baby hare, a fox, and a squirrel which, when wounded by a ferret, ‘raised his forepaws desperately and clutched his head in terror and agony while the red blood oozed on his white chest.’ The Disney version, which appeared in 1942, excised these parts of the book. ‘There’s nobody swooping down and eating someone else,’ remarked the film’s story editor (Cartmill, 1993: 163, 171). Disney’s Bambi depicts a pristine forest populated by good-hearted animals that happily co-exist without having to hunt each other. Winter brings hardship, but nature is good, and spring comes without owls feeling compelled to eat mice. There are killers in the forest, but they are not animals. Bambi first learns that the world is not safe when his mother tells him to be cautious about entering a meadow. When shots resound the pair flee. ‘Man was in the forest,’ his mother explains. She does not survive her next brush with hunters, and it is left to his father to offer an explanation: ‘Your mother can’t be with you anymore.’ The hunters return, their arrival heralded by dark, cackling birds, and we learn that these insatiable killers are the opposite of all that is natural and good. They readily shoot everything that moves, all the lovable animals that we have been prompted to care about, and they loose ravenous dogs and fire upon the forest. Bambi and his mate, Feline, escape, but the moral of the film is clear enough: humans are evil, relentless, destroyers of innocent nature. Other Disney nature films depicted a world of amiable animals in which humans were absent. The ‘True-Life Adventure’ series ran from 1948 to 1960, beginning with Seal Island. These shows were the most complete nature documentaries to yet appear, as camera operators laboured for months to capture arresting footage of animals in their natural habitat. These animals did not talk, and they seldom – on screen, at least – interacted with humans. But the films took considerable liberties with biology. Disney observed that a pair of courting tortoises depicted in the Living Desert looked ‘like knights in armour, old knights in battle’ and decreed that the film should underscore this parallel with ‘a music cue, a tongue-in-cheek fanfare.’ Reviewers decried the studio’s ‘disposition to edit and arrange . . . so that it appears the wild life . . . is behaving in human and civilized ways.’ One critic observed that these nature films patronized animals by ‘summoning us to see how very nicely the humble creatures do, considering that they lack our sophistication and know-how’ (Schickel, 1968: 288–90). ‘True Life’ animals were at once exotic and familiar, wild and domesticated. Disney films, like Reader’s Digest, often stressed animals’ service to people. Old Yeller, released in 1957 and based on a novel by Fred Gipson, features a dog that shows up on a Texas homestead in the late 1860s to stand in for the

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head of the house, who has left to sell some cattle. Old Yeller at first does more harm than good by driving a mule and its plough into a fence. But he never turns down a chance to risk his life to protect his family and faces down a bear, some wild pigs, and a wolf. This last act of heroism leaves him with rabies. Travis, the eldest son who has become utterly devoted to his pet, must now kill him. Old Yeller becomes a sort of Jesus, who willingly sacrifices his life to save his family – and brings young Travis into a deeper and more profound understanding of life. ‘I’m mighty proud of how my boy stood up to it,’ says his father, upon returning. ‘Couldn’t ask no more of a grown man.’ This accomplishment, Travis’s coming of age, is made possible by Old Yeller’s gift of his life and death. The nature constructed by Disney and Reader’s Digest was actively interested in human welfare. Like backyards, it was a highly domesticated extension of the suburban house itself, whose air conditioning and central heating had transformed life into comfortable predictability. Nature had become less autonomous, less threatening. The animals depicted by Reader’s Digest and Walt Disney liked people, and people liked them. The hunters in Bambi, to be sure, were anything but kind. But few viewers felt implicated in their sins. They never appear on screen, and the great majority of Disney’s audience no longer killed animals in any event and were therefore amenable to treating those who did as scapegoats, as cruel, avaricious murderers too thick-headed to understand that hunting created widows and orphans. Films like Bambi made animals beloved and familiar. In people’s beliefs and imaginations, animals became thoroughly familiar, lost their agency, the capacity to follow their own scripts, to have a life beyond the pale of human understanding. Like Tolkien’s hobbits, animal kingdoms had become a sort of paradise lost, a simple, virtuous society free from machinery, aggression, greed, the features and anxieties of modernity.

MEANING AND ECOLOGY This search for meaning and simplicity coloured more faithful representations of nature. Sally Carrighar, the survivor of a wretched childhood and troubled adulthood, decided to live in Sequoia National Park and to observe the animals around a large outcropping. The book which in 1944 emerged from this experience, One Day on Beetle Rock, seldom engaged in explicit anthropomorphism. Much like her contemporary, Rachel Carson, Carrighar made good biology accessible and interesting. Her actors are driven by instinct and largely concerned with food and safety. But behind the scenes, in researching and writing this book, Carrighar described herself as

The friendly wild of post-war affluence

befriending these animals. She learned to share her food with them, to talk to them sincerely, with warmth. When a goshawk killed a grouse, the animals she had been observing rushed into her cabin for safety. The animals stayed for some days, and Carrighar realized that she had found ‘home at last – and with these delightful children’ (Carrighar, 1973: 330). In Carrighar’s books, as in Carson’s, readers were left with the impression of an orderly, harmonious world. The emerging field of ecology in some respects validated this Edenic perspective. Frederic Edward Clements dominated the field for most of the first half of the twentieth century, and Clements emphasized the climax community. Weather and other stable geographic variables created distinctive and stable plant communities. These communities could, of course, change suddenly. Fire constituted an obvious example. But, left alone and given time, they would, through the process of succession, eventually produce a predictable and durable ecosystem. This ecosystem was ‘an organism’ whose diverse elements supported and interacted with each other predictably and harmoniously. J. Arthur Thompson, a Scottish biologist, referred to it as the ‘web of life.’ Thinking of plants, animals, and other elements of the physical environment as a single organism or ecosystem had obvious practical ramifications. It called into question modern humans’ tendency to favour some parts over others. Ecologists therefore began to argue that predators ought to be allowed to live because they formed an essential and unique function within an ecosystem. ‘I dislike no animal because he eats,’ remarked one (Nash, 1989: 56–8). The emerging field of ecology provided scientific grounds for criticizing utilitarian foresters and fish and wildlife biologists who treated pine trees, cod, and deer like so many rows of turnips to be harvested at rates determined by static mathematical formulas. Ecologists argued that sustained human intervention in ecosystems was bound to alter and often degrade a given landscape, that pollution, exotic species, and other human-induced disruptions brought profound, often unpredictable changes. Modern humanity disrupted and degraded complex but stable ecosystems. But more nuanced ecologists were pointing out that even ‘natural’ ecosystems were much more dynamic than they seemed. Herbert Gleason and A.G. Tansley, of the US and England, respectively, suggested before the Second World War that plants succeeded each other in capricious ways and that human interventions in such communities were not necessarily harmful. Post-war ecologists followed them in depicting even ecosystems outside direct human influence as indeterminate and unpredictable. One could draw up a model of how a patch or field free from human incursions would become a climax forest in one thousand years. But only a small fraction

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Ecology This scientific field of study arose early in the twentieth century and emphasized the relationship between elements of an environment that had been studied or approached discretely. Ecologists understood forests, for example, as a complex organism whose various parts – plants, mammals, insects, soils, bacteria – acted in concert with and relation to each other. Many environmentalists since the 1960s have embraced varieties of ecological thought.

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of such places could, in fact, remain free from unanticipated, perhaps catastrophic, events during that time: fires, wind storms, or climate shifts, for example. Nature, it turned out, was not particularly stable. ‘We are foundering on the rocks of complexity,’ wrote one ecologist (Barbour, 1995: 247). This sort of complexity did not much influence the writings of Aldo Leopold, who emerged as the most popular ecologist in the US after the Second World War. A Sand County Almanac, the rambling and eloquent book he was working on when he died in 1948, tried to get people to take the requirements and rights of nature more seriously. ‘We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us,’ he explained. ‘When we see it as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect’ (Nash, 1989: 69). He advocated a ‘land ethic’ in which people shifted their role from ‘conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it.’ This required an end to narrow economic and utilitarian thinking. ‘A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community,’ he asserted. ‘It is wrong when it tends otherwise’ (Leopold, 1970: 240, 262) [Doc. 10, p. 118]. Yet increasing numbers of Leopold’s colleagues were not so sure that nature was inherently stable, a sort of Eden that could be preserved or restored, and of course beauty was in the eye of the beholder. Some ecologists offered a rationale for preservation. Others questioned the premises that lay behind it. Ecology still had a low public profile in the western world in the fifteen years following the Second World War, a period when the environmental movement grew slowly – if at all. Moving to the suburbs and tending one’s lawn and garden prompted little concern over the bulldozing of ecosystems. Camping and other forms of outdoor recreation did not elicit criticism of the automobile culture that made parks and wild areas so much more accessible. Watching films and reading stories about friendly and lovable wild animals which created harmonious communities did not spawn an animal-rights movement. As the 1960s opened, western people in general and Americans in particular found no contradiction in celebrating and subduing nature, in simultaneously seeking nature and a growing standard of living. But the longstanding, if seldom acknowledged, tension between enjoying prosperity and nature was about to attract a great deal of attention.

5 The counter-culture’s nature

J

ack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums, a 1958 novel, proved to be prophetic in questioning prosperity and conformity while touting an expansive individualism. Like Thoreau before him, Kerouac believed that a higher, more conscious self was to be forged in nature, away from the artificialities of the modern world. He urged his readers to travel and live simply in wild areas, to instigate ‘a great rucksack revolution’ of ‘thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray . . . giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures’ (Tamney, 1992: 65). In the 1960s and early 1970s, western people embraced the wild and the natural with much more enthusiasm than ever before. Nature loving cut a wide swath in these years, captivating strident students, beatific hippies, John Denver fans, and the millions of television viewers who delighted in the Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau. By the mid-1970s, a reverence for the wild and the natural resided at the heart of western culture.

PROSPERITY AND ALIENATION The 1960s brought unprecedented prosperity to most of Europe. In the Netherlands just 8 per cent of households had a car in 1957, 4 per cent a television. A decade later those numbers had risen to 45 and 80 per cent, respectively. Most citizens of France and Italy lacked the household appliances that were proliferating in the US in the years following the Second World War. But even working-class and rural couples were apt to own an automobile, radio, washing machine, refrigerator, and a gas stove by the late 1960s. Parisians’ expenditures on consumer goods rose nearly twentyfold between 1949 and 1974. Just 10 per cent of French people indicated no

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Student movement The student movement emerged across the western world in the 1960s on burgeoning university and college campuses. It soon focused on broad issues such as war, imperialism and environmentalism. The protection of nature implied a critique of both the older generation and the status quo. The student movement faded in the 1970s, though campuses would remain a fertile ground for groups concerned with social and environmental reform.

sense of deprivation of material goods in 1957. In 1969 that percentage had risen to 35. West Europeans by then enjoyed synthetic clothes, frozen food, and a wide array of plastics. They were also much more likely to live in cities. Agriculture, forestry, or fishing occupied 42 per cent of Italian workers in 1951, just 17 per cent two decades later. Americans had been enjoying the fruits of prosperity before Europeans did, but their comforts also expanded in the 1960s. The proportion who enjoyed some sort of air conditioning tripled during the decade, for example. As before, prosperity spawned a backlash against itself, a search for deeper meanings beyond the bounds of modernity and technology. Many of ‘the rainbow colours of the culture of the sixties were painted on the fragile bubble of a despised affluence, an economic boom that was simply taken for granted’ (Dickstein, 1977: 210). The universities that young people flocked to became breeding grounds for alienation and dissent. These children of the growing middle class were accustomed to being heard and taken seriously. Away from home for the first time, they ran smack into implacable and impersonal institutions indifferent to their sensibilities, opinions, and desires. The number of university students in Britain multiplied from 50,000 before the war to more than 200,000 by the late 1960s. In West Germany, too, higher education grew dramatically, as the government struggled to meet the economy’s demand for a more knowledgeable workforce. But university culture remained decidedly premodern and hierarchical, government funding inadequate to meet the new, ambitious goals. Students paid more and more money for anachronistic courses in unresponsive institutions. The ensuing protests that convulsed western campuses in the late 1960s were seldom about the environment per se. Student movements from Berkeley to Berlin demanded more control over university decisions, an end to imperialism, and class revolution. But a deep distrust of modern, mechanistic society underlay these diverse protests. ‘No to the consumer society!’ shouted students at the Sorbonne in 1968 (Keniston, 1971: 313). Youthful dissenters soon split into two camps, particularly in the US. Political activists, by definition, sought to change the way their world was structured, sought to reform government policies or to overturn government itself. They wanted to create Black Studies departments, to compel France and the US to withdraw from Algiers and Vietnam, respectively. More alienated youth lacked the optimism or dedication of their militant counterparts. They sought fulfilment through individual acts of pleasure and meaning.

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Cultural or lifestyle radicals commonly embraced the natural, non-human world as an alternative to the drab conformity of modern life. They had ‘a semiconscious concept of almost mystical union with nature, with their own inner lives, or with other people’ (Keniston, 1971: 239). Drugs such as marijuana or LSD commonly fuelled this sense of fusion and transcendence, as did frequent and uninhibited sexual encounters. Observers commonly referred to hippies as ‘flower children,’ an appellation that, in the words of Arthur Marwick, ‘expressed the beautiful essence of nature and the exact opposite of the plastic.’ Flowers were sometimes used to make more particular political statements, as when anti-war protestors gently placed them in the barrels of guns. But they more commonly signified the achievement of a more amorphous, inner sort of peace that depended not on changing the minds of warmongers but on deciding to live more authentically, more naturally. ‘If you’re going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair,’ crooned Scott Mackenzie (Marwick, 1998: 483). Thousands of young people followed this advice literally, and parts of that city were soon full of young, long-haired men and women seeking their peculiar version of the good life. Other hippies took to the countryside. Here, as one advocate of rural communalism put it, one could return ‘to the primal source of consciousness, the true basis of culture: the land’ (Rudnick, 1996: 218). Northern New Mexico had become a hub for such movements by the late 1960s. Captain America of Easy Rider, the classic 1969 film, celebrates living on the land: ‘You do your own thing in your own time’ (Ingram, 2001: 145). A sixteenyear-old making himself at home in Yosemite National Park explained: ‘There are no real values left in society. We come here because it is beautiful, it is real’ (Stucker, 1971: 8). Nature served as the unifying force in ‘Woodstock,’ Joni Mitchell’s anthem for the counter-culture. ‘A child of God . . . walking along the road’ was ‘gonna camp on the land/ And try and get my soul free.’ Bombers ‘were turning into butterflies above our nation.’ The chorus: ‘We are stardust, we are golden/ And we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.’ More conventional thinkers were also embracing the wild. The FaithMan-Nature Group of the US began working with the National Council of Churches in the mid-1960s and linked theologians with scientists. The World Council of Churches began holding regular conferences on the environment in the 1970s, and the Presbyterian Church and American Lutheran Church officially expressed concern over the state of the environment early in that decade. Western Christians had long asserted a right to use the earth

Counter-culture The counter-culture blossomed in the mid-1960s, as growing numbers of young people rejected the verities of growth and conformity that had long resided at the centre of western civilization. Although nurturing radical political movements attacking capitalism, imperialism, and racism, the countercultural movement was often amorphous and more focused on altering people’s consciousnesses than political structures. Affinity for nature resided at the heart of the countercultural movement and was expressed symbolically – through having long hair, for example.

WILD = GOOD

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as they saw fit. Now many were urging each other to reconsider humans’ relationship with the rest of the world. Non-Christian thinkers embraced environmentalism with a religious, even apocalyptic faith. Alan Watts, once an Episcopal priest, turned to Zen Buddhism and by the late 1950s was arguing in widely read books that people were part of, not separate from, nature. Charles Reich, in a book tellingly entitled The Greening of America, prophesied that the coming revolution would create ‘a renewed relationship of man to himself, to other men, to society, to nature, and to the land.’ This revolution was necessary to rescue the nation from the tyranny of technology and environmental destruction, developments he associated with both the disappearance of community and the ‘loss of self.’ ‘Of all the changes that have happened to man,’ he concluded, ‘perhaps the deepest and least understood is his loss of the land, of weather, of growing things, and of the knowledge of his body that these things give.’ The various cultural and social movements devoted to re-establishing a deeper connection with one’s environment, one’s friends, and oneself were therefore monumental developments. ‘For one who thought the world was irretrievably encased in metal and plastic and sterile stone,’ Reich concludes, ‘it seems a veritable greening of America’ (Reich, 1970: 4, 9, 173, 395). Theodore Roszak’s The Making of a Counter-Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition also deprecated the scientific consciousness for ‘progressively estranging us from the magic of the environment.’ ‘The strange youngsters who don cowbells and primitive talismans and who take to the public parks or wilderness to improvise outlandish communal ceremonies’ were therefore revitalizing democracy (Roszak, 1969: 252, 265). More than three decades later, blessed with hindsight, it is difficult to read Reich and Roszak without laughing out loud. The hippie movement proved to be more flash than substance. It made little headway outside the US, where perhaps 200,000 young men and women out of a population of 300 million dropped out of school, jobs, and other encumbrances to seek inner bliss. Most of these people soon pursued more conventional lives. Indeed, it was only the parachute of a prosperity so certain that one could take it for granted that made ‘dropping out’ possible and desirable. ‘It is only after technology has triumphed, and only for those whose lives are glutted with the goodies it provides, that some of the youth can begin to look nostalgically back at the delights of shamanism’ (Keniston, 1971: 341–2). For the youthful counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s, however, the ‘green turn’ was part of a much broader cognitive shift. Nature signified simplicity and contemplation. It has ever been so, from Rousseau to Morris to Tolkien. But the youth of this era went much further than their Romantic

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predecessors in constructing a critique of modern civilization. West German nature lovers shifted from the 1950s to the 1970s from ‘a proud elite defending innocent nature to that of an oppressed group committed to social justice and resistance’ (Chaney, 2008: 245).

NATURE LOVING GOES MAINSTREAM Corporate culture was not a bit shy about appropriating people’s growing affinity for the wild and free and turning it towards consumption. Everyone from cereal makers to automobile manufacturers to record executives were literally capitalizing on people’s new-found love of ‘nature.’ Movements, practices, and gestures that began as protests of mass, technological society had a habit of circling back around to the very sort of values their founders had derided. Technological advances, fibreglass and Styrofoam made surfboards much lighter and surfing more popular in the 1950s in California, Hawai’i, and Australia. But the elemental nature of the pastime, the blending of young, tanned bodies, crashing surf, and expansive beaches, soon made it a symbol of nonconformity and self-expression among young men with increased leisure time on their hands. ‘The surfers are the new noble savages,’ remarked an observer in 1974 (Howell, 1974: 199). Surfing films and photographs commonly depict it as Edenic, ‘the sublime communion of the “green cathedral” ’ (Taylor, 2007: 934). One Australian devotee termed it ‘the ultimate liberating factor on the planet’ (Booth, 1995: 196). Recreation had become a political act. ‘By simply surfing,’ asserted a believer in 1970, ‘we are supporting the revolution’ (Booth, 2003: 319). But surfing, like rock music, was by then more a part of corporate and consumer society than an alternative to it, and although some described it as ‘working with nature,’ the titles of Australian books asserted a domineering ethos: Surf: Australians Against the Sea and Gladiators of the Surf (Booth, 1995: 194, 196). More people than ever before were finding meaning in the outdoors, through camping, hiking, surfing, downhill and water skiing, boating, snorkelling, or scuba diving. But although these activities represented an increased affinity for nature, they hardly constituted the sort of counter-cultural ‘greening,’ the renunciation of technology and materialism, that Reich had prophesied. Indeed, such activities commonly entailed a great deal of pollution and other forms of environmental destruction. The explosion of interest in skiing the Alps, for example, brought some 40,000 ski runs and millions of automobiles to the mountains. A yearning for simpler times ran deep in the popular culture of the 1960s and 1970s. National Geographic, which had long featured peoples and places

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deemed primitive and exotic to western readers, increased its circulation more than fivefold from 1957 to 1971, to over seven million. England’s Jane Goodall, who had lovingly put earth worms under her pillow as a two-yearold, flouted scientific protocol in her studies of chimpanzees in Africa by cultivating personal relationships with her subjects. One day, when she offered a chimp she had named David Greybeard a nut, he ‘gently held my hand’ to acknowledge her kindness. ‘We had communicated in a language far more ancient than words, a language that we shared with our prehistoric ancestor, a language bridging our two worlds’ (Goodall, 1999: 81). Goodall found an audience eager for these stories of connection across this divide in her books, articles in National Geographic, speeches, and television appearances. This was also the time when J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, which lovingly depicted the beauty and triumph of pre-modern sensibilities and landscapes, became an international bestseller. Another British writer, Richard Adams, captivated millions of western readers with his tale of virtuous creatures searching for home in a chaotic, mechanized world. Watership Down, published in 1972 after a succession of rejections, chronicled the struggle of a group of independent rabbits to establish their own warren. Like Tolkien’s hobbits, Adams’s rabbits were threatened by the forces of industrial progress. One group, influenced by Fiver’s premonition of disaster, fled their homes shortly after the appearance of a sign announcing the planned development of ‘HIGH CLASS MODERN RESIDENCES.’ Only a few of the remaining rabbits escaped the poisoning and shooting that ensued, which was followed by a bulldozer that ‘tore the field to bits.’ ‘Men will never rest till they’ve spoiled the earth and destroyed the animals,’ explained one (Adams, 1972: 7, 136, 140) [Doc. 14, p. 124]. (Life imitated art inasmuch as the profits from Watership Down delivered Adams to escape his mechanistic job as a government bureaucrat to the freedom of making a living as a writer.)

FARLEY MOWAT AND THE WORLD WE HAVE LOST This same distrust of modern humanity and society suffuses the work of Farley Mowat, the widely read Canadian writer. Mowat’s first book, People of the Deer, depicted Eskimos’ struggle to survive in the face of bureaucratic indifference. Mowat also used animals as a foil to critique modern Canadian society. In The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be, condensed by Reader’s Digest, he celebrated the life of his boyhood dog, the beloved and mischievous Mutt. Mutt’s death at the hands of irresponsible

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modernity (in the form of a careening truck) ‘made an end to the best years that I had lived,’ pushing Mowat ‘into the darkening tunnel of the years’ (Mowat, 1957: 238). The themes explored in The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be were more patent in Never Cry Wolf, a popular book published in 1963 that eventually became a Disney movie. The story recounted Mowat’s work for the Canadian Wildlife Service, when he claimed to discover that wolves subsisted largely on mice and maintained a reciprocal rather than predatory relationship with caribou by hunting diseased rather than healthy animals. But the biology of Never Cry Wolf was more romantic than scientific. Mowat became a sort of wolf. He adjusted his sleep and diet to mirror the animals he was studying. He marked his territory by urinating. His admiration for the wolves grew apace. He hoped to someday meet a woman as attractive as ‘Angeline,’ the female wolf of the den. He peppered his prose with unflattering (to humans) comparisons between wolves and people. ‘The wolf never kills for fun,’ he remarked, ‘which is probably one of the main differences distinguishing him from man.’ He had found no evidence of wolves ever taking a human life in northern Canada, ‘although there must have been times when the temptation [due less to hunger than to human cruelty and obtuseness] was well-nigh irresistible’ [Doc. 12, p. 121]. That Mowat could not really join their society signified the tragedy of the human condition, the inability to re-enter ‘the lost world which once was ours before we chose the alien role’ of modern life (Mowat, 1963: 203, 228, 246). The gulf between human and animal had grown still wider by the time Mowat wrote A Whale for the Killing a decade later, in 1972. He and his wife then lived in a remote part of Newfoundland, among elderly, independentminded neighbours whom he was glad to report had no use for the ‘poor bloody bastards’ who were ‘grateful for the chance to work for de owner in dat stinkin’ shithole [the local factory] down to t’Reach for de rest of dere lives, so’s dey can buy some goddamn t’ing.’ Mowat’s new friends seemed to share his disgust with modern life. But local opinion turned against Mowat and his sensibilities when he used his celebrity to defend a Fin Whale that became stranded in a local lake. As in Never Cry Wolf, Mowat thought more highly of the whale than of most of his fellow humans. The trapped animal was noble and longsuffering, meek and mild. He approvingly quoted an elderly fisherman who described whales as likely being ‘the smartest creatures in God’s ocean . . . and maybe out of it as well.’ But the locals, whom he had admired ‘as a natural people, living in at least some degree of harmony with the natural world,’ seemed ‘nauseatingly anxious to renounce all that and throw themselves into the stinking quagmire of our society which has perverted everything natural within itself,

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and is now busy destroying everything natural outside itself.’ They shot the whale, which soon died from these wounds. Mowat wept, and ‘not just for the whale that died, but because the fragile link between her race and mine was severed’ yet again (Mowat, 1972: 33, 43, 147, 223).

MOTHER NATURE’S SONS: COUSTEAU AND DENVER More mainstream nature lovers produced less melancholy treatments of their subject. Jacques Cousteau, who had pioneered scuba diving before and during the Second World War, attracted international attention with his stunning underwater photography in the 1956 film, The Silent World. A decade later his Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau captured unprecedented numbers of television viewers. He saw nature, particularly the ocean, as a place of adventure. The shows were a pot-pourri of instruction and entertainment, ‘a slice of aquatic life with the dull bits cut out,’ as one biographer put it (Madsen, 1986: 153). In ‘Octopus, Octopus,’ for example, Cousteau hoped to generate understanding and sympathy for these much maligned animals. But he prompted two octopuses to fight for the camera by pushing them together, nearly killing one. The film also featured a local diver and marine biologist described by Cousteau as ‘well rounded, quite striking in a bathing suit . . . A James Bond heroine.’ Much of the show was devoted to shots of her brushing her long hair (Munson, 1989: 136). Though Cousteau was also dedicated to protecting the ocean, environmentalists and scientists alike criticized him for being a huckster more interested in spectacle and self-promotion than in conservation or knowledge. A French critic said that he bore the same relation to oceanography as the ‘French cancan . . . to Swan Lake’ (Munson, 1989: 227). But Cousteau realized that nature, individualism, and adventure were tightly braided in the western mind. So did John Denver, a folksinger who much admired Cousteau and turned to nature for solace during a rootless childhood. There was nothing subtle about Denver’s appeal. He sang ‘about the mountains, the wilderness, about love and family.’ Many found his offerings saccharine and shallow. Ensconced in his beloved Colorado mountains, he dismissed critics as ‘people working in big cities, on big newspapers or magazines’ (Collis, 1999: 15). His anthem, ‘Rocky Mountain High,’ took a swipe at developers: ‘Why they try and tear the mountains down/ To bring in a couple more, more people, more scars upon the land.’ But, like Denver’s other hits, this was no protest song. ‘Rocky Mountain High’ was a paean to the beautiful place where Denver felt he

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belonged: ‘Coming home to a place he’s never been before,’ to ‘starlight,’ ‘silver clouds,’ ‘the forests and the streams,’ a ‘clear blue mountain lake,’ and soaring eagles. His music conjured up a vision of ‘America before the fall’ (Collis, 1999: 15). Denver claimed to be ‘more effective in achieving the revolutionary goal of transforming the collective conscience of the world in what I do than politicians are.’ A New York Times review of a performance disagreed: ‘An ecologist and a strip miner would have been able to leave Mr Denver’s concert with equally clear consciences’ (Collis, 1999: 102). Denver devoted millions of dollars to Windstar, an organization devoted to improving the environment. But like so much of nature loving, his music had more to do with salving the wounds inflicted by an increasingly anonymous, mechanized society than with transforming that society. Like Denver, Cousteau’s popularity was ultimately rooted in a widely shared, transcendent vision. Impatient with the strictures of governments, marriage, old age, and conventional religion, Cousteau advocated the unfettered pursuit of ‘instincts, needs, pleasures, drives’ and desired ‘to play without measuring the consequences.’ The aquatic world that he introduced millions of people to seemed to hold out that promise. We are drawn to him, a biographer concludes, ‘because he embodies that yearning we have to live by our impulses’ (Munson, 1989: 249, 252). Nature constituted the counter-culture’s alternative to conformity and sterility. It symbolized freedom. Prosperous people’s romantic attachments to nature were nothing new. The 1960s and early 1970s differed from previous eras in the breadth and depth of that affinity for nature. But they also constituted a departure in the extent to which western citizens were willing and determined to undertake political battles on nature’s behalf.

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he scene: a fictional town ‘in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings,’ a place replete with fine farms and orchards, foxes, deer, birds, clear, trout-filled streams. ‘Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change.’ Livestock died. Fish expired. Trees and shrubs browned and withered. Children sickened, then died. The birds stopped singing. The town confronted a ‘silent spring’ [Doc. 11, p. 120]. Eden had been defiled, and Rachel Carson pointed her finger at the snakes. After depicting the death throes of ground squirrels poisoned by insecticides, she wonders ‘who among us,’ who among the millions of Americans and others who mutely tolerated the wanton killing of innocent creatures, was not ‘diminished as a human being?’ Could any people, she wondered rhetorically, ‘wage relentless war on life without destroying itself, and without losing the right to be called civilized’ (Carson, 1970: 13, 95, 96). Carson’s Silent Spring, published in 1962, ignited the green fire of environmentalism because the western world was ready to hear her eloquent message. The number of prosperous people had increased dramatically since the Second World War, and most of the people enjoying comfortable homes and automobiles lacked a first-hand, everyday acquaintance with wringing their food or their livelihood from nature. Millions of young people took prosperity for granted and questioned the verities and platitudes of their elders, tendencies that primed them to question the necessity of war, industrial capitalism, and environmental exploitation. Never before had people with so much been uneasy over so much. Previous environmental movements had been small, moderate, or both. In the decade following Silent Spring, for the first time in the history of the western world many people and even entire nations took the health of the environment seriously.

Epiphanies

SILENT SPRING Rachel Carson seemed an unlikely revolutionary. A reclusive, middle-aged writer and biologist from the eastern US, she was close to death when Silent Spring appeared. Yet her book galvanized people – and not a few governments – to change substantially the way in which they understood and interacted with nature. Carson, like the heart of the environmental movement she energized, was more moderate than radical. She had a faith in human reason and science, and the movement she inspired reformed, not transformed, modern, industrial uses of nature. In an era of extreme, even utopian, blueprints for reworking western life, environmental reform tended to be moderate and pragmatic. Silent Spring drew a great deal of attention. The chemical industry, accustomed to being congratulated for fostering agricultural prosperity and eradicating malaria, felt the sting of Carson’s slings and arrows and spent a quarter of a million dollars depicting her as a ‘hysterical fool’ (Sale, 1993: 4). But President Kennedy cited the book approvingly, and a 1963 Presidential Scientific Advisory Committee validated her charges. More to the point, perhaps, the book sold more than half a million copies in hardback alone and soon spread to many other nations. Her voice was not alone. Our Synthetic Environment by the intellectual, Murray Bookchin (whose pen name was Lewis Herber), and The Quiet Crisis by politician Stewart Udall appeared about the same time. But Carson’s voice was by far the most clear and compelling. Silent Spring depicted environmental degradation as insidious, a cancer that weakened ecosystems and animals for years or even decades before people awoke to its presence. More patent environmental catastrophes appeared in the book’s wake. The sewage in the Great Lakes became so noxious that a popular magazine deemed Lake Erie ‘a North American Dead Sea’ (Steinberg, 2002: 248). More than one million people signed a petition to save it. In 1966 a pile of coal sludge in Wales washed over and killed 144 people. Soon after, the tanker Torrey Canyon spilled many tons of crude oil on Britain’s beaches. Three years later an accident off the coast of California resulted in a similar disaster, and a river in Cleveland caught fire. Toxic wastes poisoned tens of thousands of birds along those shores and along Germany’s Rhine. Birds and beaches coated with tarry oil made for great television, as millions of viewers across the globe watched innocent animals suffering and dying because of human folly. Carson’s prophecies were bearing putrid fruit in the western world’s living rooms.

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GREEN SURGE

Sierra Club Founded in 1892 and headed for many years by John Muir, the Sierra Club was for many decades the principal advocate of large parks and wilderness preservation in the US. It emerged as a potent political force in the 1960s before being joined by and in some respects eclipsed by more radical movements. But it remains a strong political force with a large membership.

The growing concern for the environment had legs, particularly in the US. ‘We were just sitting here,’ recalled a member of the National Wildlife Federation, ‘and suddenly there they were, knocking at the doors’ (Sale, 1993: 13). That organization had over 500,000 members by 1970. The Sierra Club had 113,000, up from 20,000 in 1959. These sorts of numbers gave environmental organizations unprecedented political clout. The trend had begun in 1956, when the Sierra Club and Wilderness Society succeeded in stopping a dam on the Colorado River. Never before had the preservation of wilderness so soundly trumped economic development. Emboldened by victory, environmentalists proposed an ambitious national wilderness system encompassing about 2 per cent of the nation’s land. The bill met stiff resistance. But thousands of citizens wrote letters to Congress supporting it, and a more moderate version passed easily in 1964. Plans to build dams in the Grand Canyon prompted full-page advertisements by the Sierra Club in the New York Times and the Washington Post and prompted what a senator called ‘one of the largest letter-writing campaigns which I have seen.’ In 1967 Secretary of the Interior Udall announced that the Johnson administration had changed its mind. ‘Hell has no fury like a conservationist aroused,’ observed a congressman. Congress in 1968 passed legislation instituting the National Wild and Scenic Rivers System to ensure that some rivers, at least, would be preserved ‘in their free-flowing condition’ (Nash, 2001: 230, 235, 236). Concern over pollution and other broad environmental problems also grew. Los Angeles had begun cleaning its air after the Second World War by targeting both industrial sources and private garbage incinerators. But its resolution was unusual. This changed in the 1960s. Congress passed the Clean Water, Clean Air, and Solid Waste Acts between 1960 and 1965, and subsequent legislation soon stiffened their provisions. A welter of additional laws followed. The impact of suburban development on wetlands and floodplains elicited criticism, then regulation. Dolphins killed in the taking of tuna were protected, many toxic pesticides and herbicides were banned, and much, much more. Two pieces of legislation were particularly important. The Environmental Protection Agency, established in 1970 and soon staffed with several thousand employees, was charged with enforcing environmental laws, particularly the identification and rehabilitation of toxic waste sites. The Endangered Species Act of 1973 put the preservation of threatened species ahead of economic development [Doc. 17, p. 133]. ‘Ecology,’ observed one politician, had ‘become the political substitute for motherhood,’ and Richard Nixon, the president that liberals loved to hate, was astute enough to recognize it (Dowie, 1995: 33). Three months before

Epiphanies

Earth Day, Nixon called for ‘reparations for the damage we have done to our air, to our land and to our water’ (Gottlieb, 1993: 108). He arguably passed the most substantial set of environmental laws of any president in the nation’s history and even went so far as to call for an end to the poisoning of predators on private land and for closer regulation of lead-based paints. Critics, then and later, asserted that Nixon was opportunistic, even cynical, that appropriating the least threatening component of the counter-cultural and protest movements served to contain and isolate their radical cores. Nixon in fact identified the environment as the nation’s ‘common cause,’ a way for its strife-ridden people to move ‘beyond factions’ (Dryzek et al., 2002: 665). But the degree to which a Republican president proved willing to regulate free enterprise testifies to the depth and breadth of environmentalism’s political power in the US in the years around 1970. Environmental sensibility peaked in the US with the first Earth Day, a phenomenon that exhibited both the potential and the limitations of the movement. Appearing in 1970, just when mainstream Americans felt whipsawed by violence and extremism at home and abroad, Earth Day was self-consciously wholesome and moderate. One of the event’s organizers, a young, radical law student, later explained that he and other planners ‘didn’t want to alienate the middle class; we didn’t want to lose the “silent majority” just because of style issues’ (Gottlieb, 1993: 107). Nearly all of the Earth Day gatherings were therefore more celebratory than political. The federal government and several corporations, including Dow Chemical, provided funding. Leftist naysayers not surprisingly dismissed Earth Day as an attempt to use ‘rock and roll, idealism and non-inflammatory social issues to turn the youth off from more urgent concerns which might really threaten our power structure’ (Dowie, 1995: 25). The radical left was ambivalent over the emerging environmental movement. Environmental and social devastation alike could simply be understood as the logical end of capitalism. Yet most environmentalists seemed more interested in cleaning up around the edges of modern industrialism’s excesses than in mounting a fully-fledged critique of it. Environmentalism provided a congenial home for moderates determined to curb pollution and protect selected species.

WESTERN EUROPE Environmentalism also flexed its muscles in western Europe from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s, though the movement was at first more modest than in the US.

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Earth Day Conceived as a national ‘teach-in’ on the environment, Earth Day drew approximately 20 million people – mostly students – across the US on April 22, 1970. Probably the biggest demonstration of its very eventful era, it was much more celebratory and less shrill than protests having to do with war or racism. Subsequent American Earth Day celebrations were smaller but spread to other countries.

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Smoke abatement Concern over air pollution in England grew along with industrialization. Strong, effective measures to improve urban air quality did not appear until the 1950s, however. Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament This organization appeared in 1958 in Great Britain and spread quickly. Members engaged in many demonstrations and lobbying efforts before the organization declined in the 1960s. It became popular again early in the 1980s.

ENVIRONMENTALISM

Like their counterparts in Los Angeles, necessity had driven Londoners to get serious about smoke abatement in the 1950s, when authorities implicated the London Fog of December 1952 in the deaths of some 4,000 people. Greenbelts (around cities), national parks, and National Trust land proliferated. An anti-nuclear movement spread in the late 1950s. A 1960 demonstration in Trafalgar Square in London drew close to 100,000 people, and a year later the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament had about 900 local branches. Membership in the National Trust, the venerable organization devoted to preserving places of historic interest or natural beauty, skyrocketed. The Conservation Society, concerned with broad issues such as population and economic growth, doubled its membership between 1970 and 1974. Letters to editors expressing concern over the environment increased more than twenty fold between 1965 and 1973. A Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution appeared, and a spate of legislation followed from 1973 to 1976: the Water, Control of Pollution, Dumping at Sea, and Endangered Species Acts. ‘It is a bold politician who risks’ the ‘disapprobation’ of environmentalists, an observer noted (Vogel, 1986: 43). Britain also produced a pair of influential books in the early 1970s. Blueprint for Survival urged readers to recognize and respect the earth’s limits. ‘The principal defect of the industrial way of life with its ethos of expansion is that it is not sustainable,’ read the first sentence of the first chapter (Goldsmith et al., 1972: 3). E.F. Schumacher (1975), in Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, was more optimistic but also called for a radical restructuring of western society and priorities, arguing that smaller-scale technologies and economies were more humane and durable. Yet British environmentalism remained something of a top-down movement and reflected, as one scholar puts it, ‘the deep cultural alienation of the British upper classes with the industrialization process’ (Rüdig, 1995: 225). Aristocratic members of the National Trust shepherded legislation through Parliament. The government funded the Trust and other conservationminded organizations, and leaders of these groups advised bureaucrats at the Department of the Environment. Even the Conservation Society, one of Britain’s leading radical environmental groups, cautioned members to ‘beware of even appearing to be associated with those who are simply agitators or protestors’ (Vogel, 1986: 52). Working within the system had its costs. Government administrators consulted with the National Trust, but they continued to work most closely with industry, agriculture, and labour, powerful groups whose interests seldom intersected with those of environmentalists. Britain’s centralized, semi-private system of regulation muffled the influence of reformers. Environmentalists also met with mixed success on the continent to the mid-1970s. West Germany opened its first national park in 1970 and

Epiphanies

established a Council of Environmental Experts and required environmental impact assessments in 1975. But its days as an environmental leader lay in the future. It did little to regulate automobile emissions, as the industry had proved crucial to its post-war recovery. France, like Germany, had a substantial anti-nuclear movement in the 1970s. Some 15,000 rallied for that cause in a 1971 demonstration. But the movement fragmented, and France soon led the world in the proportion of electricity generated from nuclear power. French environmentalists succeeded in stopping a proposed ski resort in Vanoise National Park when half a million citizens wrote to object to it, and a small Ministry of the Environment appeared in 1971. The Dutch, long accustomed to manipulating the land and waters of their small country, were generally optimistic about overcoming environmental problems. The Ministry of Public Health and Environmental Hygiene, established in 1971, emphasized regulation at the ‘end of the pipe.’ Radicals at first articulated a broader vision. Around 1970 counter-cultural groups such as the ‘Gnomes’ began focusing on healthy air and water. A leftist environmental movement also emerged in Denmark. In 1969 the annual seminar of the University of Copenhagen’s natural history society was disrupted by some twenty students who locked themselves in the room, shut off its ventilation, burned garbage, and doused a wild duck in oil. ‘Come on and save it,’ they screamed at the elder conservationists. ‘You talk about pollution. Why don’t you do something about it?’ ( Jamison et al., 1990: 66). But Danish environmental groups soon became more practical and pragmatic, especially as the government, which had been committed to growth at any cost, integrated environmental concerns into its policies. Sweden entered the late 1960s with a strong, centralized government that responded quickly to environmental problems. Silent Spring attracted many readers and helped to prompt a ban on mercury in the pulp industry in 1967. The amount of literature on environmental problems multiplied over the years. Sweden’s 1968 Environmental Protection Law was probably the world’s most comprehensive. When a discrete environmental movement arose late in the decade the government integrated many of its concerns. Norway’s governments also tended to cooperate with rather than oppose environmentalists, and its environmentalists tended to be pragmatists. Norwegian identity resided in its landscape, to be sure, but it also rested on using that landscape to make a living. Hence Norwegian environmentalists were relatively unconcerned over whaling or other aspects of animal rights and instead focused on broader environmental issues. They protested a dam that would affect a majestic waterfall but continued to embrace whaling. Mountains connoted nationalism, the ocean people’s livelihoods.

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THE REST OF THE WEST

Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Australians created this park in 1975 to protect the world’s largest reef. The reef had by then become a very popular tourist destination.

Southern Europeans expressed much less concern over the environment in the 1960s. Italian conservationists, for example, remained focused on birds and old buildings. The environmental movement fared much better in Australia. Each of its states had laws addressing water and air pollution by the 1970s. As in the US, Australians were particularly concerned with protecting their wildest areas. The amount of land reserved for conservation began to grow dramatically in the late 1960s. The Little Desert Settlement plan of 1968 helped to galvanize a wilderness movement. Part of an attempt to relocate urban dwellers to Australia’s extensive, largely unpopulated hinterland, the proposal alarmed those who wished the Little Desert’s plants, animals, and landscape to remain undisturbed. The preservationists won. They turned their attentions to the Great Barrier Reef. The world’s largest reef had become, in the years following the Second World War, a popular tourist destination. By the 1960s conservationists worried over several developments: oil spills and blowouts; the prolific Crown of Thorns starfish, which was evidently consuming the reef’s hard coral; and a proposed fertilizer mine on the reef. Six years of advocacy bore fruit in 1975, when the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park was born. This early legislation emphasized multiple use, but setting aside appreciable chunks of land that could have been simply mined or developed nevertheless constituted a major shift in Australian priorities. An observer had complained in 1968: ‘any suggestion of restraint, or request for second thoughts on some local development guaranteed to provide a quick and sure economic pay-off, is only too easily brushed aside as unrealistic or even unpatriotic.’ This growth-oriented tradition was at last confronted by a potent and growing ecological sensibility. Secondary students routinely studied ecology by the early 1970s, and Premier Henry Bolt spoke favourably of ‘conservation’ in his 1970 election speech (Robin, 1998: 134, 137). A similar transformation transpired in Canada, another place whose residents had long regarded nature as more robust than fragile. In 1970, 69 per cent of Canadians agreed that pollution constituted a very serious problem, and by then the federal government was passing environmental legislation. In Ontario, the nation’s largest province, hunters, canoeists, and naturalists demanded in the early 1960s that more land be protected from development – and that land already set aside be preserved more fully. ‘A lax and indecisive parks policy’ had ‘allowed many national parks to deteriorate into commercialized, honky-tonk resorts’ dedicated to ‘separating tourists from their money’ (Warecki, 2000: 117–18). By 1974 the Algonquin

Epiphanies

Wildlands League had succeeded in reserving large swaths of land for primitive use only. The same organization got logging stopped in a large provincial park. As in the US, Canadian biologists and ecologists began considering how broader environmental factors – including overfishing and pollution – affected the falling numbers of economically valuable fish. The environmental movement soon went international. The Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963 reflected the concerns of many people and nations over the radioactive fallout from more than 400 detonations by the US, Soviet Union, Great Britain, and France since 1945. The International Union for the Protection of Nature was formed in 1948 to help sundry national and international preservation groups co-ordinate their activities, and it began to receive adequate funding in the mid-1950s. The United Nations, long indifferent to environmental issues, turned a corner in 1972 by sponsoring a conference in Stockholm on the Human Environment that drew more than 400 organizations and government representatives from across the globe. It paid particular attention to acid rain, a phenomenon which elicited criticism from Canada and Scandinavia of the US, Great Britain, and West Germany. The Stockholm conference also created the United Nations Environmental Programme, which would monitor and research a host of global environmental issues, despite modest funding. A surprising amount of concern over the environment had surfaced by the mid-1970s in the Soviet Union, where strongly worded laws about people’s health had always given way to economic imperatives. Environmental activism rose after Stalin’s death. In 1958 students at Tartu State University and the Estonian Agricultural Academy formed the first organization devoted to nature protection. They patrolled the druzhina, or nature reserves, to harass poachers, a pastime that won them few friends among the hardpressed populace or Soviet officials who winked at violations of anti-hunting regulations. A growing number of intellectuals associated preservation of nature with nationalism. ‘The Russian character is impossible to imagine without’ its ‘expanses of forest,’ asserted Vladimir Chivilikhim. ‘Does the introduction of such good things as electricity and residential neighbourhoods obligatorily have to be accompanied by the crushing of the flowers? Must industrial beauty replace natural beauty?’ (Weiner, 1999: 335, 338). Like Europeans before him, Chivilikhim located the essence of his country’s identity in the forests, history, and folk culture of the countryside. This growing discomfort with unfettered change and modernization coalesced around plans to dam Lake Baikal, the largest body of fresh water in the world. ‘We don’t have the right to destroy the harmony and beauty of this unique gift to nature,’ asserted a scientist (Weiner, 1999: 357). The effort to preserve Lake Baikal failed. But the effort was historic.

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GREEN NATIONALISM The Soviet leadership particularly feared conservation movements in its satellite countries, discerning, quite correctly, that these movements expressed and fuelled nationalism. ‘Folksongs, folklore, old traditions, one’s own language, dialect, never die in the countryside,’ remarked a Lithuanian patriot in 1971 (Idzalis, 1983: 302). By that year the Lithuanian Nature Protection Association had some 20,000 members, and those numbers quickly grew. One opponent of Soviet development was sent to a prison camp. Others died mysteriously. Most eastern Europeans were more circumspect. Much of East Germany’s environmentalism found expression in its churches, which took urban children to the countryside, planted trees, tended organic gardens, and sponsored meatless days – all under the rubric of simple living, not nationalism. But nationalism was embedded in celebrations of regional nature. Western Europeans also used environmentalism to express nationalism. British opponents of nuclear weapons found in the bomb a symbol of technology run amuck and expressed nostalgia for times in which life was more meaningful – and England more powerful. Hence a Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament pamphlet likened the movement to ‘our finest hour in 1940’ (Veldman, 1994: 145). Charles de Gaulle hoped that his ‘nation of 120 cheeses’ could put itself at the forefront of ‘scientific and technological progress . . . without France ceasing to be France’ (Bess, 1995: 836).

Club of Rome This international think tank formed in 1968 to consider global political issues. Its most influential publication was Limits to Growth, which appeared in 1972 and argued for a widespread commitment to sustainability rather than continued growth so that the earth could restore its environmental equilibrium.

The association of nature loving with nationalism was of course nothing new. The extent of concern over the environment certainly was. Barely ten years after Silent Spring’s publication, awareness of and legislation regarding the environment had increased exponentially across most of the western world. The Club of Rome, an international consortium of prominent scientists and intellectuals, issued its influential The Limits to Growth in 1972. As its title implied, this book argued, with an overwhelming battery of statistics, that the world would reach its bursting point within a century if radical steps were not taken to create a ‘sustainable state of global equilibrium’ (Meadows et al., 1972: 180) [Doc. 15, p. 126]. The Limits to Growth and similar books which appeared in the 1970s signified a new chapter in the history of nature loving. The environmental movement of the 1960s and early 1970s was broad and multifaceted. Some focused on the preservation of wilderness, others on the threats of various forms of pollution. Many western nations had powerful and influential environmental lobbies by the end of this period, others did not. But the great majority of the various movements across the western world shared a

Epiphanies

reformist orientation. Like Rachel Carson, they believed that western civilization was a very positive development that required adjusting, not overturning. Preservationists sought to rescue but a tiny fraction of public land from mining and logging. The great majority of those concerned with pollution – members of environmental groups and government regulators alike – sought to mitigate and minimize the impact of industry upon people and the rest of nature, not to close these industries down. The Limits to Growth and other pronouncements called gradualist, reformist measures into question and began to deconstruct the intellectual assumptions that long supported western civilization and expansion. The left edge of the environmental movement would soon become more extreme in its condemnation of modern society and in the solutions it proposed.

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7 Radical departures

L

ate at night, in the wild river canyon, Dr A.K. Sarvis was cataloguing a long list of evils, including: mines, pipelines, smelters, and coalburning and nuclear power plants. He ended with ‘the people who throw beer cans along the highways.’ But at this point his audience of two demurred. ‘Why the fuck shouldn’t I throw fucking beer cans along the fucking highway?’ demanded one. ‘Any road I wasn’t consulted about that I don’t like, I litter,’ added the other. ‘It’s my religion’ (Abbey, 1976: 65). This interchange, near the beginning of Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang, neatly exhibits a new sensibility emerging by the mid-1970s, when this influential novel appeared. Earth Day and most of the environmental activism and legislation of the past decade had been about tidying up capitalism’s excesses. Roadside litter was offensive because it symbolized modern people’s disregard for nature’s beauty. But growing numbers of environmentalists took issue with the road, not the cans, bottles, and other refuse spattered beside it. Meaningful change, they argued, entailed and required far more than cleaning up our garbage. People in the western world needed to think and to live in a radically different way. Environmentalism had attracted moderate reformers in the 1960s. By the 1970s, as more radical movements shrivelled, concern over the environment attracted many of the West’s most utopian and determined leftists.

BACKGROUND The so-called ‘doomsday’ environmentalists prophesied that nothing less than a radical departure from the status quo would save the world from environmental catastrophe. Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, published in 1968, argued just what its title implied: that overpopulation was leading

Radical departures

humanity to the brink of a massive die-off. It quickly became the best-selling environmental book ever published, and by 1970 Ehrlich was speaking to groups of up to 10,000. In Britain the best-selling A Blueprint for Survival, published in 1972, warned that ‘if current trends are allowed to persist, the breakdown of society and the irreversible disruption of the life-support systems on this planet, possibly by the end of the century, certainly within the lifetimes of our children, are inevitable’ (Sale, 1993: 29). A spate of other books which appeared in the 1970s made the same prediction: The Last Days of Mankind, The Death of Tomorrow, The Coming Dark Age, among others. Humanity’s very existence was imperilled. Other radicals expressed concerns for the rest of creation. Peter Singer in 1973 proposed an addition to Black Liberation, Gay Liberation, and Women’s Liberation: Animal Liberation. A year later, in an article unsubtly entitled ‘All Animals Are Equal,’ he remarked: ‘If a being suffers, there can be no moral justification for refusing to take that suffering into consideration.’ He then catalogued the cruelties that humans subjected modern animals to, cages too small for chickens or pigs to even turn around in, the cosmetics and shampoos forced into the eyes of rabbits, the shocks administered to laboratory dogs. Unthinking consumption of meat, asserted Singer, was ‘a clear instance of the sacrifice of the most important interests of other beings [a decent life – and life itself ] in order to satisfy trivial interests of our own.’ To stop eating meat ‘may be difficult,’ but it is no more difficult than it would have been for a white Southerner to go against the gradations of his society and free his slaves’ (Singer, 2001: 31, 32). To equate eating meat with owning slaves was strong stuff and augured a radical reconfiguration of humanity’s place in the cosmos. But a still less measured voice did as much or more than any other to change young people’s minds and lives, especially in the US. Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire ‘almost singlehandedly made it impossible for nature writing to lapse back into babbling brooks and heavenly birdsong’ (Zakin, 1995: 136). Abbey’s 1968 book celebrated inhospitable environments, especially the deserts of Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah, landscapes that forced humans to ‘confront directly the antehuman, that other world which frightens not through danger or hostility but in something far worse – its implacable indifference.’ Indeed, Abbey dwelled fondly on the desert’s danger, on how humans who neglected to bring sufficient water would likely find themselves pondering death, that their ‘flesh will be working its way through the gizzard of a buzzard, your essence transfigured into the fierce greedy eyes and unimaginable consciousness of a turkey vulture,’ a transformation that would constitute, for most, ‘a promotion in grade’ (Abbey, 1971: 135, 216). Like many American nature lovers before him, Abbey asserted that modern, industrial people required regular exposure to wilderness, that living outside

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Animal Liberation Animalrights movements date back to the early nineteenth century. More radical groups formed in the later decades of the twentieth century, such as the Animal Liberation Front. These groups have both advocated more extreme forms of animal rights, such as vegetarianism, and have protested medical research and other forms of animal cruelty.

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modernity’s mechanized landscapes fostered independence and self-reliance. But he had in mind a much more ambitious transformation than simply enlarging the amount of land set aside for recreation. The nation’s much celebrated national parks, after all, had become some of the leading victims and purveyors of ‘industrial tourism,’ places to drive through rather than to savour and to learn from. His solution? No cars or roads. ‘We have agreed not to drive our automobiles into cathedrals, concert halls, art museums, legislative assemblies, private bedrooms and the other sanctums of our culture; we should treat our national parks with the same deference,’ he explained (Abbey, 1971: 60) [Doc. 13, p. 123]. The parks and the nation as a whole also needed more predators, fewer people. Sheep and dogs he would tolerate, but largely because coyotes liked to eat them. Such pronouncements were not calculated to appeal to politicians hoping to be re-elected or environmental groups trying to convince mainstream Americans and lawmakers of their reasonableness. But they resonated with youth grown disillusioned by the possibilities of political reform. Most of the radicals and reformers of the 1960s believed that they could redeem their society and its politics. The Vietnam War, a string of political assassinations, Richard Nixon, and the stubborn and growing conservatism of Middle America gave the lie to such aspirations. Not a few of the disillusioned ‘turned toward the green tunnel of wilderness.’ Desert Solitaire’s pastiche of irreverence, macho individualism, and gritty transcendence spoke to them. ‘A man wrote a book and lives were changed,’ recalled one reader. ‘That doesn’t happen often’ (Zakin, 1995: 38, 135). Deep Ecology Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess coined this term early in the 1970s. Deep Ecologists argue that humans must be understood as part of, rather than separate from, the rest of nature. Deep Ecology implies and argues that conventional environmental movements and philosophies are shallow by comparison inasmuch as they accept western civilization’s dualistic assumption of a human/nature divide and therefore cannot get at the roots of why modern humans exploit the nonhuman world.

DEEP ECOLOGY Abbey’s ideas were too undisciplined, contradictory, and playful to constitute a coherent set of environmental ethics. That task fell to Arne Naess, a Norwegian philosopher who distrusted the technical, human-centred approach of mainstream environmentalists. Naess coined the phrase ‘deep ecology’ in the early 1970s. Naess contrasted deep ecology with shallow approaches, such as the pollution-oriented proposals of the 1960s which had focused on ‘the health and affluence of people in the developed countries.’ Deep ecologists instead urged a paradigm shift in which humans would recognize that they were part of their ecosystems. They preferred a ‘relational, total field image’ in which organisms constituted ‘knots in the biospherical net or field of intrinsic relations,’ thereby dissolving ‘the man-in-environment concept’ (Naess, 1995a: 151) [Doc. 16, p. 128].

Radical departures

Naess’s prose was not always clear, and deep ecology did not immediately find a substantial audience. But his ideas spread in the 1980s, in part because he and his growing number of disciples laid out more clearly the philosophy’s content and consequences. An eight-point platform began with deep ecology’s foundational assertion: ‘The well-being and flourishing of human and non-human life on Earth have value in themselves’ that were ‘independent of the usefulness of the non-human world for human purposes.’ It therefore followed that people should foster ecological diversity and had ‘no right to reduce this richness and diversity except to satisfy vital needs.’ This would require both shrinking the number of people in the world and their ‘economic, technological, and ideological,’ impact. This change could only occur if people committed themselves to achieving a higher quality of life ‘rather than adhering to an increasingly higher standard of living.’ We must realize that ‘bigness and greatness’ are not one and the same. Those who acknowledged the foregoing had a responsibility to walk the talk, to ‘directly or indirectly . . . try to implement the necessary changes’ (Naess, 1995b: 68). At the heart of deep ecology lay the assertion that humans were not really separate from the rest of the world. This paradigm shift was necessary to turn western civilization away from the dead end of individualism and accumulation, the exploitation of other people and the earth, to turn instead to a way of living that was at once more gentle and meaningful. ‘When I realize that I don’t have any independent existence,’ explained Australian John Seed, ‘that I am part of a food chain, for instance, then at a certain point Me-first and Earth-first become inseparable . . . “Myself” now includes the rainforest, it includes clean air and water’ (Zimmerman, 1994: 40). Unlike Leopold and Singer, who urged readers to extend their ethics, their concerns to landscapes and animals, respectively, deep ecologists argued that we must expand our definition or understanding of ‘self’ to include the rest of the world. For Naess, environmentalism is not primarily a moral imperative to repair the damage humans have inflicted upon the world. Deep ecology invites modern humanity to consider a radically different way of thinking and living, to contemplate a way of being in which we join mountains and forests and other non-human entities in a life that will be at once more reciprocal and meaningful. A philosophy so at odds with the central tenets of western civilization appealed to only a small fraction of readers. Indeed, moderate environmentalists liked to cite some of its more radical assertions to underscore their own reasonableness. But deep ecology elicited the allegiance of a growing number of environmental activists and thinkers across the western world during the 1980s and after, though many of them altered its tenets or emphases.

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BIOREGIONALISM AND ECOFEMINISM

Ecofeminism This movement emerged in the 1970s as part of the growing radical environmentalist impulse. As its name implies, it combines feminism and environmentalism. Like so-called ‘cultural feminists,’ ecofeminists argue that women’s biological and psychological processes make them uniquely close to nature and that misogyny and hatred of nature share a common, masculine root, namely western civilization’s mania for domination of the natural and the feminine.

Bioregionalism became an important environmental movement in parts of the US, especially. Bioregionalists believed that ecological boundaries trumped political ones and that people needed to become intimately familiar with and committed to the landscape, the bioregion, in which they lived. They sought, in the words of an early platform, ‘to re-create a widely shared sense of regional identity founded upon a renewed critical awareness of and respect for the integrity of our natural ecological communities’ (Sale, 1993: 62–3). A realization of humanity’s place and stake in ecosystems would be fostered by concrete interactions with the plants, creatures, and other characteristics of specific places. Bioregionalists formed – or, as they would put it, recognized – bioregions in the Ozarks, the San Francisco Bay Area, Cape Cod, and elsewhere. They touted the importance of consuming products from within one’s bioregion and learning about its particular needs. Hence the ‘Bioregion Quiz’ asked questions like where one’s water came from and garbage went to, the annual precipitation, the material culture of the area’s pre-contact indigenous peoples, its edible plants, and when the first wildflower bloomed [Doc. 18, p. 133]. Like deep ecologists, bioregionalists combined a reverence for and knowledge of nature with a determination to treat it in a more sustainable manner. Bioregionalists have insisted that nature is no place apart. The poet Gary Snyder, for example, in 1993 celebrated the work of ‘watershed or ecosystem-based groups’ that were finding ways to ‘enhance wildlife survival’ without turning areas settled by humans into wildlife reserves (Snyder, 1995: 461–2). Ecofeminism also located humans within rather than above or outside nature. They added a gendered analysis to this understanding, arguing that male values and institutions were primarily responsible for humanity’s separation from and destruction of the environment. Ecofeminists posited a biological and essential correspondence between nature and woman. Susan Griffin’s Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her and Pornography and Silence: Culture’s Revolt Against Nature argued that men’s abuse of women and nature was one and the same, a cruelty springing from a masculine fear of life and mania for domination. Rosemary Radford Ruether, another early exponent, asserted in 1975 that women ‘must unite the demands of the women’s movement with those of the ecological movement to envision a radical reshaping of the basic socioeconomic relations and the underlying values of this society’ (Warren, 2001a: 253). Like deep ecology, ecofeminism struck many as more philosophical than practical, but proponents tried to live out the philosophy. Karen Warren described how ecofeminism affected the way in which she rock climbed:

Radical departures

‘One recognizes the rock as something very different, something perhaps totally indifferent to one’s own presence, and finds in that difference joyous occasion for celebration.’ The self and the rock are ‘in relationship if only because the loving eye is perceiving it, responding to it, noticing it, attending to it.’ Since ‘the dismantling of patriarchal conceptual frameworks is a feminist issue, how one climbs a mountain and how one narrates – or tells the story – about the experience of climbing are also feminist issues’ (Warren, 2001b: 331, 332). Gender also shaped how one tried to protect the environment. Some women members of Earth First! in California who found themselves on the margins of male-dominated protests decided to conduct nocturnal ‘yarnings’ in which they wound yarn – certainly a traditional feminine symbol – around and among trees they wished to save, as well as trucks and other logging tools. The loggers found the tangled yarn discommoding, or worse. ‘This is the web of life, and when the web is cut, the spell is cast,’ the women warned (Gaard, 1998: 28). If ecofeminists criticized deep ecology’s neglect of gender, social environmentalists regretted its inattentiveness to class. Murray Bookchin, the movement’s leading exponent, pointed out ‘that nearly all our present ecological problems arise from deep-seated social problems,’ and that therefore ‘present ecological problems cannot be clearly understood, much less resolved, without resolutely dealing with problems within society’ (Bookchin, 2001: 436). Like many other leftists, Bookchin found himself uncomfortable with the assertion that people were merely one among many species, let alone that they constituted, as some deep ecologists were wont to say, a ‘human pox.’ He argued that the modern exploitation of nature lay not in an androcentric culture, but in the dictates of modern capitalism (Stoll, 2001: 413).

FRIENDS OF THE EARTH Many of these radical intellectuals were people of action as well as debate. In the 1970s they converged with veterans of the mainstream environmental movement who had become sceptical about the possibilities of changing the status quo through conventional politics. David Brower led the way in the US. Raised in California, Brower began reading Muir at twelve and was an avid mountaineer by the 1930s. He joined the Sierra Club in 1933 and was soon among its chief decision makers. He played a critical role in blocking dams in Dinosaur National Monument and the Grand Canyon, leading the Sierra Club into an effective programme of public relations and lobbying.

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Earth First! This radical environmental organization emerged in the 1980s and quickly spread across much of the western world. Its members often participated in creative demonstrations to preserve wilderness and reduce humanity’s footprint.

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Friends of the Earth This organization began in the US in the 1970s before spreading across the globe to become one of the world’s most influential environmental groups. By 2002 Friends of the Earth had a total of 5,000 local groups in 68 countries. Friends of the Earth addressed a multiplicity of issues, many of them highly controversial: nuclear power, acid rain, trapping fur-bearing animals, toxic waste, over-packaging, and much more.

ENVIRONMENTALISM

But by 1969 Brower and the rest of the Sierra Club’s leadership were at sword points. Many felt that he was going too far, too fast. Brower had come out against nuclear power, which most environmentalists then favoured. Years before he had proclaimed his allegiance for ‘wilderness for itself alone,’ and he had become very impatient with moderates who counselled patience and compromise (Sessions, 1995: 170). Upon being fired, Brower founded Friends of the Earth, which blazed a trail in radical environmental action. What distinguished Friends of the Earth was not so much the targets of its wrath, but its methods. Decentralized from its outset, local chapters were free to pursue their particular concerns. This grassroots structure fostered creativity. The London chapter at first confronted issues ranging from mining to whaling. Then Graham Searle stood up at a public seminar and remarked: ‘Well, I’m going to take my bottles Saturday morning over to Cadbury Schweppes,’ the company that had just announced that it would not make returnable bottles. ‘Anyone else who wants to do it can come along,’ he added. The first effort was modest: about twelve handcarts of empty bottles. But lined up they ‘made a terrific photograph’ (Lamb, 1996: 38). Friends of the Earth was nothing if not media savvy. Cadbury Schweppes refused to budge on its policy, but widely published images of a sea of bottles brought waves of publicity, members, and money to the young group. When the organization turned its attention and efforts to the wearing of cheetah and leopard skins it spurned the back-channel deals brokered by groups such as the World Wildlife Fund and went public. Protestors bearing large photographs of slaughtered animals marched outside stores that sold furs. Sympathetic or simply intrigued journalists broadcast this message, and growing numbers of voters demanded passage of the Endangered Species Bill. Friends of the Earth excelled at bringing seemingly distant environmental issues home. One poster featured a garment made from the fur of a large cat and this caption: ‘Like the coat? The last owner was killed in it’ (Lamb, 1996: 63). British environmental organizations had been sensible and prim. Friends of the Earth was confrontational, imaginative, even playful. Success prompted Friends of the Earth to become more conservative. Its annual budget grew to $15 million, and in 1985 its US office moved to Washington DC to improve access to the federal government, a decision that prompted Brower to resign from its board, lamenting that his brainchild had become ‘just another lobbying group’ (Sale, 1993: 54). Like Protestant sects, radical environmental groups tended to become more practical and moderate over time, only to be replaced in turn by new, more extreme, organizations.

Radical departures

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GREENPEACE AND EARTH FIRST! In 1969 a group of British Columbian radicals tried to block nuclear weapons from being transported across the Canadian–US border. Two years later, after brainstorming over how to stop a nuclear test planned for the North Pacific, a member remarked: ‘Why the hell doesn’t somebody just sail a boat up there and park right next to the bomb? That’s something everybody can understand.’ The activists decided to do just that and, though deterred by the US Coast Guard and adverse weather, the spectacle of people willing to put their bodies on the line to protect the earth spread across the western world. Greenpeace quickly broadened its concerns to include whaling, seal hunting, and more – without losing its feel for political theatre and public relations. Film captured the drama of a harpoon from a Russian whaler passing within a few feet of activists who had positioned their boats between the whalers and their prey off the coast of California. ‘For the first time in the history of whaling,’ the New York Times noted, ‘human beings had put their lives on the line for whales.’ ‘When you do an action,’ explained an early member, ‘it goes through the camera and into the minds of people’ (Wapner, 1996: 39). (See Plate 5.) Greenpeace paired vivid photography with direct mail to create unprecedented levels of environmental fundraising. Many thousands of people opened letters to find photographs of baby harp seals being clubbed to death above the words: ‘Kiss this baby goodbye’ (Zakin, 1995: 308). Thoughtful Greenpeace leaders conceded, privately, that they were propagandists. Actress Brigitte Bardot’s participation in the campaign against seal hunting transformed the story from ‘blood and death’ to ‘blood and death and sex.’ Nor did Greenpeace point out that whale stocks were recovering or that biologists found them ‘about as sophisticated as cattle’ (Pearce, 1991: 27, 30). Harpooned whales and bloodied seal pups tugged at heartstrings and brought results. The European Community banned the two main sources of seal skin in 1983, and whale hunting declined precipitously. This combination of arresting acts and savvy marketing transformed Greenpeace into a behemoth. It spread from Canada to the US to Europe and beyond. Membership swelled to nearly two million by 1988, more than six million by 1994. Of course only a tiny fraction of these members engaged in direct action. But Greenpeace continued to conduct highprofile and imaginative demonstrations. Banners protesting acid rain appeared on factory smokestacks across Europe in the mid-1980s. Behind the scenes and off camera, Greenpeace became an international player in negotiating environmental treaties and employed a growing number of scientists.

Greenpeace This radical group emerged in 1969 in Canada and soon flourished across the western world. It combined both large numbers of members and contributors and a dedicated corps of activists who engaged in creative and highly publicized protests against such activities as nuclear testing, whaling, and pollution.

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In the 1980s some of Greenpeace’s most determined North American activists left the organization for a more radical one. Earth First! paired Greenpeace’s flair for dramatic acts with scorn for anything resembling conventional politics. The organization’s founders adopted the slogan ‘no compromise in defence of Mother Earth’ (Sale, 1993: 66). Believing that the planet teetered on the brink of collapse, Earth First! members argued that the time for tinkering with measures such as pollution control had long passed. They adopted deep ecology’s embrace of all life, ‘from virus to the great whales.’ Asserted founder Dave Foreman: ‘The only true test of morality is whether an action, individual, social or political, benefits the earth.’ Like Edward Abbey, an inspiration and fellow traveller, Earth First! called for more wilderness, fewer people. Some went so far as to advocate forced sterilization: ‘Education’s too slow’ (Lee, 1995: 39, 63). No politician in her or his right mind took these sorts of recommendations seriously, and some Earth First! members worried about the organization’s misanthropic element. As the 1980s progressed, more and more members disavowed ‘monkey wrenching’ (sabotage) and advocated more strictly nonviolent forms of protests, such as blocking logging roads or tree sitting [Doc. 19, p. 134]. Many were put off by Foreman’s apocalyptic vision of inevitable global collapse and argued that Earth First! could in fact play a role in making the world better – by forming alliances with timber workers to make logging more environmentally and socially responsible, for example. By the mid-1980s, Earth First! had become popular in spite of itself and had more than 10,000 members. Its growing profile drew federal lawsuits and the attention of the FBI, which infiltrated the group. By 1990 Earth First! was in pieces – though many of those pieces remained potent. The group had remained decentralized and radical by design. In 1986 it had rebuffed people who had run Greenpeace’s overwhelmingly successful direct-mail campaign. The organization remained ‘a kamikaze operation,’ as Foreman put it, intended to ‘stir the stew,’ ‘to jolt the conservation movement out of its middle-age lethargy and re-inspire it with passion, joy, and humor’ (Foreman, 1995: 54–5). In the early 1990s Earth First! members in England created a still more decentralized group, Earth Liberation Front, that began damaging mining equipment and bulldozers. In 1997 Earth Liberation Front allied with the Animal Liberation Front in the US and, a year later, did $12 million worth of damage at a Colorado ski resort. Other targets have included mink ranches, timber companies, and expensive homes. Earth First! was not alone in finding itself divided over how to put its ideology into action. It was one thing to assert the unity of all living things, all entities on earth, quite another to translate that assertion into a political programme that would even begin to make a dent in western people’s growing subjection of the earth.

Radical departures

Yet the radicals were not without victories. Thousands of university students and others have been exposed to the philosophy of deep ecology and its cousins over the past quarter-century. The well-publicized tactics of Friends of the Earth made the wearing of fur less acceptable and therefore less common in the West. Greenpeace won a global moratorium on whaling in 1982. Earth First! activists blocked the logging of some old-growth timber long enough for judges to issue injunctions protecting, at least temporarily, those forests. But these successes were, by the radicals’ admission, modest. Activists struggled to link the ethereal, even utopian, values of deep ecology with practical actions that would preserve the earth they professed such devotion for. Like all radicals, they often found themselves pulled apart by the warring imperatives of ideological purity and political efficacy. Greenpeace, for example, enjoyed its greatest successes when it resorted to bloody depictions of animals that humans regarded as cute or noble – a tactic that alienated environmentalists who argued that anthropomorphism simply confounded humanity’s regrettable tendency to care only for animals that reminded them of themselves. But this need to compromise spoke to a broader failing: radical environmentalism in fact captured only a small fraction of the western world. Political leaders and the electorates they represented were willing to preserve certain places and species and to address selected aspects of pollution – but seldom at the cost of ever-expanding levels of comfort and consumption.

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ate in 2002 Ben Affleck bought a chinchilla coat for Jennifer Lopez. He soon received a letter from PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) pointing out that the garment contained the hides of up to one hundred animals and detailing how they were electrocuted. A video describing the grisly process accompanied the letter. Affleck, no doubt sensitive to the havoc PETA might wreak on his public image, assured the organization that the letter had ‘opened my eyes to a particularly cruel and barbaric treatment of animals’ and that he ‘will not do anything in the future that supports it.’ He also promised to write PETA a cheque (Specter, 2003: 52). That powerful movie stars and models feel compelled to tread softly around selected environmental concerns suggests the growing power of environmentalism, a movement that became more professional and well-funded. But setbacks and division arose beneath the glossy advances. The largest environmental organizations – swelling budgets notwithstanding – compromised to achieve partial legislative victories. Conservative politicians gelded environmentalism even as they selectively embraced it, an approach their electorates seldom held them accountable for.

BACKGROUND Chernobyl The 1986 accident at this Ukrainian (then part of the Soviet Union) nuclear power plant was the most serious in the history of the world and provoked widespread concern and protests inside and outside the Soviet Union.

The number of people who identified themselves with environmental causes grew dramatically after the mid-1970s. The shift was particularly dramatic in western Europe. By the mid-1970s residents of most nations rated ‘protecting nature and fighting pollution’ as ‘very important’ or ‘important’ (Hofrichter and Reif, 1990: 128–9). Support for nuclear power declined dramatically after the Chernobyl accident in 1986. A 1986 poll found that 12 per cent of citizens in the European

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Community gave money to environmental groups, ranging from 4 per cent in Greece to 39 per cent in the Netherlands. One out of three Europeans considered themselves potential members of such organizations. Six per cent had joined a local environmental action. More than two million people belonged to the National Trust, an eightfold increase from 1971. The French, more wary of international organizations such as Greenpeace, had formed some 160 local or regional societies with about 850,000 members. Western Europe passed the US in most measures of environmental performance in the twentieth century’s last quarter. New technologies removed chemicals such as sulphur dioxide from industry. Britain’s smoke emissions declined 80 per cent in the two decades after 1960. Biodegradable soap, recyclable packages, and other ‘green products’ proliferated. People insulated their houses so that they would require less heat. Movements in Austria, Italy, and Germany halted nuclear-power plants. West Germany made the most impressive advances. From 1970 to 1995 it was the only major industrial nation to cut its per capita waste. By the mid-1980s the European Union’s comprehensive environmental programmes were deeply integrated into its economic life. Support for environmentalism cropped up in new places. By 1985 Italians were demanding solutions to industrial pollution, traffic, and other problematic aspects of the urban landscape. Bulgaria devoted 2.5 per cent of its 1986 budget to addressing pollution. Australia more than doubled its amount of protected land from 1978 to 1996. The number of Greenpeace members in New Zealand increased from 4,000 in 1985 to 170,000 in 1991. International organizations had assumed a great deal of leadership in debating and settling environmental issues by the 1980s. Greenpeace, led by Canadian David McTaggart, transformed itself into a global player, as did Friends of the Earth. These groups tackled environmental problems in undeveloped nations, from logging Amazonian rain forests to poaching rare African mammals. They also addressed a growing list of global issues: whaling, oceanic pollution, the future of Antarctica, climate change, and acid rain. Much of the toxic waste emitted from US and German smokestacks ended up in Canada and Poland, respectively, and nations that imposed rigorous environmental controls on factories put their companies at a competitive disadvantage in the growing global economy with nations that did not. The 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment was a major marker in the globalization of environmentalism. British economist Barbara Ward told delegates that they were taking part in ‘one of those turning points in man’s affairs when the human race begins to see itself and its concerns from a new angle of vision.’ Representatives from 113 nations unanimously agreed that ‘the protection and improvement of the human environment’ was ‘the urgent desire of the peoples of the whole world’ (Sale,

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Global warming Scientists had long hypothesized that industrialization, through the production of CO2, could lead to global warming by trapping warm air in the earth’s atmosphere. The theory gained traction from scientists and then from a growing proportion of the public and politicians late in the twentieth century. By the 1980s scientists and policymakers alike commonly identified global warming as the most serious environmental problem confronting the planet. Kyoto Protocol The plan resulting from the United Nations’ conference in Japan in 1997 which focused on halting climate change. Nearly all western nations agreed to work toward limiting their emissions of greenhouse gases.

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1993: 41). Indeed, nations signed 47 international agreements regarding the environment from 1971 to 1980 and created the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). The first major treaty came in 1987, when nations from across the world agreed on what proved to be an effective plan to reverse the earth’s thinning ozone layer. Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) had been introduced in 1928 and long thought to be harmless. By the 1980s, however, scientists and policymakers believed that CFCs were depleting the ozone layer, which in turn led to the globe being exposed to higher amounts of ultraviolet radiation. A 1985 convention established a commitment to explore the problem, and concrete steps to regulate CFCs soon followed. UNEP was by then also calling attention to climate change, loss of arable land, declining biodiversity, acid rain, and the persistence of pollution. The rise of ‘green diplomacy’ reflected ‘a growing awareness of a new realpolitik that must be addressed not by competition but by cooperation and not by unilateral exercise of sovereign power but by pooling that power to confront the complex array of environmental and economic problems that threaten all nations’ (DiMento, 2003: 90). Yet globalization could also work against environmental action. In 1997 the United Nations meeting at Kyoto, Japan, established targets for minimizing the production of greenhouse gases, the key cause of global warming or climate change. But the US and Russia refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol [Doc 22, p. 139]. Lack of consensus over controlling global pollution could punish companies and nations that regulated emissions and reward those who did not by handing the latter a competitive advantage. Landlocked nations might feel that they had little reason to regulate their production of greenhouse gases that would inflict a great deal of harm on island nations but relatively little on their own citizens. But the creation of global forums and (albeit flawed) mechanisms for addressing the growing number of global environmental issues cheered environmentalists.

WESTERN EUROPEAN GREENS So powerful was European environmentalism by the 1980s that it became the foundation of new political parties. West German leftists from peace, anti-nuclear, and other environmental causes coalesced in the late 1970s to form the Green Party. They established four key concepts or areas of agreement: ‘ecology, social responsibility, grassroots democracy and non-violence’ (Bramwell, 1994: 100). The Greens spoke to marginal Germans. ‘We will be a lobby for all those who have no lobby,’ promised a leader in 1983 (Hülsberg, 1988: 100). But their programme ultimately rested on their

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conception of people’s proper relationship with nature. They desired ‘a better, non-alienated life, in which the human being will be restored to his or her full creative powers;’ humankind would ‘give up its autonomy and integrate itself into the pre-determined cycle of nature’ (Dirke, 1997: 185, 192). The Greens offered a radical alternative to modern, industrial society. They pointed the way to a way of living that was more humane and sustainable, just and peaceful – a sort of deep ecology for all. It seemed, for a time, that the Greens might pull it off. The German party crossed the critical 5 per cent threshold in 1983, when they won nearly thirty seats in the Bundestag, West Germany’s legislature. In 1984 they were represented in the legislative bodies of 54 districts or large towns. In the 1989 European elections the British Greens won 15 per cent of the national vote, the French Greens over 10 per cent. But these successes were misleading. A vote for the Greens was not necessarily a vote for their idealistic agenda. The British and French Greens did so well in 1989 because they articulated a moderate programme. The German Greens were more radical but had the good (and short-lived) fortune to appear when West German voters desired an alternative to Helmut Kohl’s ineffectual and corrupt government. But by the late 1980s mainstream German politicians were able to paint the Greens as extremists who would legalize drugs, free dangerous prisoners, and leave the country undefended by NATO or even a conventional police force. Unification, furthermore, brought into the political equation eastern Europeans who ‘wanted more individualism, not less, more material benefits, not fewer.’ Mainstream political parties learned to appropriate the Greens’ most appealing ideas, leaving the Greens ‘with the residue – radical, romantic and wrong’ (Bramwell, 1994: 110, 111). Time also served to bring out often bitter differences among Germany’s Greens: liberals who argued for the use of market forces, realists who favoured coalitions with other left-of-centre parties, socialists who focused on the evils of capitalism, and hard-core ecologists who stressed issues such as conservation and animal rights. In France, too, the Greens split over whether to remain doctrinally pure or to pursue compromises. Germany’s Petra Kelly, the Greens’ most prominent leader, was unable to turn her global celebrity into political power. The tedium of party debates tried her patience (‘arguing and bickering among our various factions,’ she called it), and her speeches in the Bundestag fell upon sceptical ears (Kelly, 1994: 7) [Doc. 21, p. 138]. Many of her Green colleagues resented her fame, and they became angry when she violated party policy by refusing to rotate out of office in 1985. The Green rubric served to bring together a diverse group of western European radicals, but that group remained both small and divided.

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CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE The popularity of environmental politics proved more fleeting still in central and eastern Europe. Bulgaria’s first non-governmental organization dedicated to environmental protection appeared in 1988. Less than a decade later there were over 120. Opposition to the Soviet Union’s assault on nature became part and parcel of growing unease with the Soviet leadership. The 1986 accident at Chernobyl sharpened criticism. Tens of thousands of citizens gathered to protest nuclear power and industrial pollution. A demonstration at Kirishi, a city of 52,000 near Leningrad, began with a solitary father holding a black-bordered photograph of the dead infant child whom he claimed had been a victim of a biochemical plant’s toxic emissions. He was eventually joined by more than 12,000 protestors. Residents of eastern Russia refused to let a nuclear-powered freighter dock in their ports. By 1990 over 300 environmental organizations had formed across the Soviet Union. Politicians struggled to keep ahead of the movement. Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev won global acclaim by proclaiming at the United Nations that environmental problems affected ‘the very foundations of the existence of civilization’ (Ziegler, 1991: 83). Four out of five nominees for the Supreme Soviet addressed environmental issues in 1989. But concern for the environment waned as the Soviet Union fragmented and Russia became more democratic. Environmental problems had underscored the old system’s abuses and shortcomings, but by the early 1990s attention turned to securing a livelihood: ‘It is better to have a paying job and a dirty plant than to have neither,’ explained two observers (Wolfson and Butenko, 1992: 80). Concern for the environment had dovetailed with nationalism in places such as Hungary and Poland, for Soviet leaders had buffered Russian citizens from the worst pollution by focusing much of the environmental exploitation in the hinterlands. East Germany’s per capita sulphur dioxide emissions were fifteen times higher than West Germany’s in 1988, for example. Central and eastern Europeans became more aware of and vocal over these abuses in the 1970s and 1980s. Hungarians began objecting to the production and dumping of toxic wastes in 1977 and turned out in large numbers to protest against Soviet plans to dam the Danube River. Solidarity, the leading Polish independence group, embraced environmental concerns in the late 1980s. Polls found that environmental problems topped Slovakians’ list of worries in 1990. But, as in Russia, environmentalism declined along with communism. Environmental organizations inside and outside of new governments found that economic growth routinely overrode their agendas. Researchers summed up the general public sentiment in the mid-1990s: ‘a clean environment is

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a nice asset to have and maintain, once other more important needs are satisfied, namely economic’ (Francis et al., 1997: 280). The conservative Klaus administration of Czechoslovakia claimed that environmental regulations interfered with the free market and prosperity. By the mid-1990s Greenpeace, one of the region’s pioneering environmental organizations, had just 500 members in that country, and Czechs contributed just 2 per cent of the funding for its work there. Concern for the environment had dovetailed with anti-Soviet dissent – it offered ‘a training ground for democracy, a focus of anti-regime sentiment, and a foil for nationalism’ (Kabala, 1991: 386). But polluting factories were now controlled by East Germans, Hungarians, Poles, and Czechs, not Soviet leaders in faraway Russia.

BACKLASH AND ACCOMMODATION Conservative, pro-business politics made a strong comeback across the western world in the late twentieth century. Britain’s Margaret Thatcher embraced unfettered private enterprise and branded environmentalists as the ‘enemy within.’ Pro-growth, anti-regulation governments also took over in Australia and New Zealand in the 1980s. The Reagan administration infiltrated radical environmental groups in the US and dismantled much of the environmental legislation passed during the 1960s and 1970s. Promising to slash government and regulation to set private enterprise free, it cut the Environmental Protection Agency by more than 25 per cent during Reagan’s first two years in office. James Watt, who likened environmentalists to Nazis and Bolsheviks, served as the Secretary of the Interior. President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, talked in the 1990s of raising automobiles’ fuel economy and taxes on energy use but quickly backed down from these unpopular measures. ‘The USA featured by far the strongest connection between environmental values and core state imperatives around 1970, but that peak and American leadership are distant memories,’ a group of researchers concluded in 2002 (Dryzek et al., 2002: 675, 679). Likewise, President Barack Obama spoke early in his presidency of the need to address climate change but risked little of his political capital to propose any measures that might seem to threaten economic growth. Radical environmentalists blamed their moderate counterparts for some of these reverses. The major environmental groups grew larger and more professional in the 1980s, even as their influence shrank. Representatives from some of America’s largest polluters sat on some of their boards. The Ford Foundation provided funding to environmental groups with the stipulation that it could essentially vet lawsuits that the groups were considering.

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Conservative politicians, like corporations, had learned to speak green by the late 1980s. Thatcher remarked that ‘stable prosperity can be achieved throughout the world provided the environment is nurtured and safeguarded. Protecting the balance of nature is therefore one of the great challenges of the late twentieth century’ ( Jordan and Maloney, 1997: 9). Republican George H.W. Bush campaigned successfully for the Presidency in 1988 by pledging to echo Teddy Roosevelt’s concern for the environment, and he claimed to have ‘crafted a new common-sense approach to environmental issues, one that honors our love of the environment and our commitment to growth’ (Sale, 1993: 77). This sort of rhetoric became standard among conservative political leaders who reassured mainstream voters that environmental protection and prosperity were fully compatible, that no hard choices between the two needed to be made. As most voters appeared to agree, liberal politicians hesitated to demur. Conservatives had detected and exploited a critical difference dividing radical environmentalists from their fellow citizens. Most westerners evinced some apprehension over the environment’s health. But they were prepared to sacrifice little, if any, material comfort. Germans have become the world’s most passionate environmentalists. In 1997 they recycled nearly 90 per cent of the packaging material that they produced. But only the most determined Greens, a tiny proportion of Germany’s population, have been willing to consume fewer resources than they could afford to. A small minority of Germans regularly use trains. Automobile use has continued to boom. Travel consumed about 17 per cent of Germans’ energy use in 1950, nearly 28 per cent in 1997. Westerners seldom recognize that their environmental beliefs and behaviour are so profoundly at odds with each other. A poll of French business leaders from the early 1990s found that 94 per cent expressed a deep concern for the environment but that just 27 per cent favoured strengthening laws (by imposing higher taxes or tougher regulations) to protect that environment. Sympathy for the environment ran high among the increasing numbers of people employed in the service industry, and such people tended to support the growing regulation of manufacturing, farming, and mining, activities that seemed to have little relevance to their own lives and livelihoods. But these same people have been likely to both underestimate their own contribution to environmental problems and to resist government regulation of those contributions. Wariness of environmental regulations has been particularly strong in the libertarian-leaning US. Advocates of more thoughtful and careful land use in the late 1960s and 1970s confronted charges that they intended to ‘turn loose upon the hapless citizens of the various states a horde of planners and lawyers paid by the taxpayers, whose advancement requires success in preventing those citizens from making normal use of their own property’ (Rome,

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2001: 244). Cries of government interference were especially strident in the western US. Miners, ranchers, farmers, city administrators, and outdoor enthusiasts asserted their right to utilize or even take federal property. ‘I intend to fight for my rights to use public land and wrest its control from their greedy paws,’ averred a snowmobile and motorcycle rider (Cawley, 1993: 64). The so-called ‘Sagebrush Rebellion’ morphed into a less confrontational Wise Use Movement in the 1980s in which a wide range of developers argued for fully opening up the nation’s remaining natural resources. Neither of these campaigns represented the sensibilities of mainstream Americans, who favoured a significant degree of conservation and preservation. But distrust of government has resonated very well among US moderates. Al Gore’s very popular An Inconvenient Truth, the 2006 film and book which made a compelling case for addressing climate change, made some headway against such attitudes. Gore emphasized individual more than governmental choices, and growing numbers of Americans have taken modest steps such as making their homes more energy-efficient [Doc. 25, p. 147]. But they have remained loath to accept the sort of taxes, regulations, and other choices that Europeans have lived with to decrease their carbon footprint, and a large fraction of the American public doubts that humans have anything to do with climate change. The Competitive Enterprise Institute ran ads with the slogan: ‘Carbon dioxide: they call it pollution; we call it life’ (Economist, 2006). Steve Forbes joined many conservatives in characterizing the idea – widely accepted by scientists – that humans were causing the climate to warm as ‘an unproved theory’ (Forbes, 2007: 26). Environmental progress stalled on many fronts in the 1990s. UK Prime Minister Tony Blair seldom addressed environmental issues. Public interest in and regulation of the environment waned in Canada. Mainstream American politicians commonly dismiss the problem of climate change altogether – or stress scientists’ disagreements over it. Politicians who suggest raising America’s minuscule gasoline tax court disaster. Despite pledges made at and after the 1992 United Nations’ Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit, greenhouse automobile emissions were up even among members of the European Union in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Growing numbers of politicians embraced sustainable development, a term coined at the 1987 World Commission on Environment and defined as ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ (Bernstein, 2002: 63). But this proved to be a highly malleable definition, in part because the World Commission was charged with drawing conclusions that a wide range of global and economic interests would find acceptable. The World Bank’s 1992 report, Development and the Environment, denied that there were any ‘fundamental ecological

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Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit This 1992 United Nations’ conference on the environment was the largest to date, with 17,000 attendees and representatives from 172 governments. It explored interrelated problems of world poverty, development, pollution, and climate change. The government representatives agreed to join in a global partnership of sustainable development and pledged to reduce greenhouse gases, an agreement that was refined five years later, at Kyoto, Japan. Sustainable development This term became popular late in the 1980s and implied a compromise or rapprochement between economic development and environmental protection.

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Recycling Re-manufacturing material such as paper, metal, and plastic. It became common during the 1970s and soon became one of the most widely practised forms of conservation, particularly in Europe.

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limits to growth’ [Doc. 20, p. 137]. Likewise, in 1995 the US Council on Sustainable Development called for ‘changed patterns of consumption,’ not less consumption (Daly, 1996: 6, 14). Sustainable development, an eminently reasonable concept, has become another way in which harmful environmental policies are made palatable by framing them with green rhetoric. Even very comfortable people and nations have proved highly reluctant to reduce their level of consumption. Studies from the 1990s, for example, found that most West Germans were pleased to cooperate in more efficient programmes of recycling, and West Germany was able to reduce substantially the quantity of waste that the average household created. But West Germans have continued to own more cars. French stores began offering organic produce in the 1960s, and the French have put a great deal of emphasis on preserving their countryside. But surveys in 1998 found that just 11 per cent of shoppers bought organic produce regularly, and the use of agricultural chemicals and industrial-style farms grew steadily late in the century. France tripled its amount of garbage between 1973 and 1996 – even as standards for disposing of and storing that garbage rose. Bess concluded early in the new millennium that France was ‘still borrowing from the future in order to live richly in the present,’ that the nation remained far removed from ‘anything remotely resembling a sustainable equilibrium’ (Bess, 2003: 232). Environmental doomsayers bear some responsibility for the growing numbers of consumers who believe that they can have their environmental cake and eat it, too. Alarmists of the 1960s and 1970s prophesied calamities that, by the century’s close, seemed less and less likely to materialize – that the world would soon exhaust its supply of oil, for example. Environmental groups continue to exaggerate to gain people’s attention – and money. Greenpeace recently asserted: ‘It is expected that half the Earth’s species are likely to disappear within the next seventy-five years,’ a possibility that it privately acknowledged is remote. A Greenpeace leader explained, through a Norwegian reporter, their strategy: ‘When most people do not feel that the world is about to fall off its hinges at any moment, they have problems taking the environmental organizations seriously’ (Lomborg, 2001: 18). Indeed, Danish statistician Bjørn Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World has generated so much criticism not simply because it may overstate the environmental progress we have made but because scientists and others who measure environmental problems fear that acknowledging that progress will hurt their cause [Doc. 23, p. 142]. But ignoring accomplishments and exaggerating problems can breed cynicism and fatalism. Conservatives across the western world have successfully depicted environmentalists as wackos, elitists, or both. In hard-hit, timber-dependent communities of the north-western US, bumper stickers appeared asking: ‘Are

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You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?’ (White, 1996: 171). Nature loving, as we have seen, has for centuries been associated with material comfort, and modern European environmentalists have generally belonged to what one scholar terms ‘the new middle class’ of young and well-educated people working in professions or the booming service sector (Dalton, 1994: 133). A 1973 US survey found that 98 per cent of the members of environmental organizations were white and that 35 per cent were professionals. A majority of Sierra Club members surveyed in 1972 opposed engaging the ‘conservation problems of such special groups as the urban poor and ethnic minorities’ (Rubin, 1994: 230).

SUCCESS STORIES It is not surprising, then, that mainstream US environmental groups at first overlooked or dismissed the toxic-waste movement. César Chávez’s United Farm Workers had begun pointing out the consequences of pesticides for Chicano labourers in California in the 1960s, about the same time that urban poor people began complaining of lead poisoning in their homes. Residents of Indian reservations protested against uranium contamination in the 1970s. The discovery of toxic wastes at the middle-class community of Love Canal in 1978 at last won the attention of major media as journalists swarmed to the site. Thousands of local organizations devoted to keeping toxic wastes out of their communities formed during the 1980s. Hundreds of African Americans were arrested for trying to stop contaminated soil from being dumped in North Carolina. Mothers of East Los Angeles fought local waste-treatment plants. More than six hundred activists came together in 1991 to create the People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit and coined the term ‘environmental racism’ to point out that poor minorities bore the brunt of pollution (Edwards, 1995: 42). These groups differed profoundly from established, centrist environmental organizations. The CEO of a Texas company called them ‘the most radicalized groups I’ve seen since Vietnam’ (Dowie, 1995: 134). Their leaders tended to be poor, people of colour, and women, often housewives, with little previous experience in politics. Juana Gutierrez, a grandmother of eight, led the Mothers of East Los Angeles. Unlike more mainstream environment groups, which largely fought rearguard actions in the 1980s and 1990s to keep existing legislation from being watered down or ignored, the grassroots organizations broke new ground. Los Angeles groups stopped several projects, including a large incinerator. Such activists charge the

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People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) Founded by Ingrid Newkirk in the US, PETA had become perhaps the most successful environmental organization in the world by the turn of the twenty-first century. PETA’s well-developed websites attack pet stores that take insufficient care of their animals, animal experimentation, circuses, factory farms, the fur industry, and fishing, among other activities. PETA blends idealism and pragmatism. Its leaders advocate and practise veganism, a form of vegetarianism that abjures the eating or use of any animal product, but they also work to improve the conditions under which animals such as chickens and cattle are raised and slaughtered.

well-funded ‘Group of Ten environmental organizations’ with continuing to ‘support and promote policies which emphasize the cleanup and preservation of the environment on the backs of working people in general and people of color in particular’ (Pellow, 2002: 75). They are put off by the overwhelmingly white, middle-class composition of the boards of organizations such as the Audubon Society and the National Wildlife Federation and with these groups’ poor track record of consulting with poor people who rely on extractive activities. The new activists were not much inspired by traditional environmentalists’ affection for wild places or radical notions of approaching the nonhuman world with a sense of kinship. They based their campaigns on humancentred problems that directly and immediately affected the health of their communities. People such as Juana Gutierrez were fighting for their lives, for the physical wellbeing of their families and neighbours. This sort of self-interest led some to dismiss the anti-toxins movement as just another manifestation of Nimbyism (Not In My Back Yard). But the strongly felt sense of danger that such activists shared galvanized people’s energies in a way that most other environmental issues failed to do. A similar trend began in Europe near the century’s end. Earth First! and Reclaim the Streets! joined local residents to oppose road building in Great Britain, sometimes by direct action. Grassroots French environmentalists also combined lobbying and civil disobedience to block proposed transportation projects. The other sort of environmental organization to flourish at the century’s end was organized on a much larger scale: the animal-rights movement. In the mid-1990s Finnish activists attacked fur farms, trucks transporting animals to slaughterhouses, and laboratories that used animals in testing. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) appeared in the US in 1980 and spread across much of the world. Its motto was as simple as it was radical: ‘Animals are not ours to eat, wear, experiment on or use for entertainment.’ An observer describes its tactics as ‘eighty per cent outrage, ten per cent each of celebrity and truth’ (Specter, 2003: 54). Strategies include in-your-face advertisements, websites, and demonstrations. Parents outside a Barnum & Bailey Circus, for example, may find their children pondering large video screens showing elephants being tortured or even shot by their trainers. PETA successfully exploits the growing gap between our first-hand experience and the actual extent of animal suffering. It gets donations of over $15 million dollars a year and has had some notable successes. McDonald’s, the hamburger chain, and the voters of Florida recently decided to require people who raise chickens and hogs, respectively, to treat them less cruelly. More progress still has been made in Europe, where by 2012 chicken

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farmers will have to provide hens with perches and nesting boxes and sufficient room to move about. The two most successful components of contemporary western environmentalism are far apart from each other. The anti-toxins movement is based on human self-interest, on people’s health and very survival. The animalrights movement seeks to jar people out of comfortable and familiar habits to take the lives of other mammals seriously.

DIVISIONS Animal-rights advocates and ecologists sometimes clash. This has been particularly true in Australia, where many environmentalists are devoted to preserving or recreating indigenous landscapes, an endeavour which requires ‘species-cleansing,’ the destruction of introduced flora and fauna (Franklin, 2006: 197). But the shooting from helicopters of brumbies (feral horses) in a New South Wales national park in 2001 aroused the ire of animal-rights activists and much of the general public. British nature lovers divided deeply over hunting around the century’s turn, also, when hunting foxes with dog packs became illegal in England and Wales. Hunters argued that their pastime served the interests of preserving both foxes and their habitats. Their opposition argued that ‘cruelty to any animal in the name of sport is wrong.’ Each side liked to depict the others as privileged. A hunter identified the ‘antis’ as part of the new urban elite ‘with shaved heads and five earrings and their husbands just as bad.’ A member of the League Against Cruel Sports countered that hunters harboured ‘an attitude of entitlement,’ that hunters were elitist (O’Rourke, 2005: 149–58) [Doc. 27, p. 150]. But hunting had in fact spread in popularity late in the twentieth century, as many more people than ever before avidly followed the hunts with automobiles and binoculars. Fox hunting was becoming more inclusive even as a greater proportion of the public disapproved of it. Indeed, the Countryside Alliance succeeded in gathering some 250,000 people to a rally in support of fox hunting in 1998, enough to give Labour leaders pause as they prepared to make fox hunting illegal. The pro-hunters presented themselves as country folk defending an activity that ‘was an outpost of tradition in a modern, changing world’ (Griffin, 2007: 217) [Doc. 26, p. 149]. Each side identified strongly with nature, even as they disagreed with how to express that affinity. The urban/rural divide was one of many that fractured nature lovers. Environmentalism became a house with many rooms and contending factions. In his 2006 book, Patriots: Defending Australia’s Natural Heritage,

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William J. Lines took to task not simply developers but individuals or groups who threatened to undermine the concept and preservation of wilderness, an entity that he associated with the nation’s very identity and survival. Attention to indigenous rights could lead to allowing them to hunt rare animals in national parks. The anti-racist movement might also erode patriotism, the handmaiden of conservation. Internationalism might distract people from ‘a concrete patriotism derived not from abstract discourses about freedom and rights but from living in and breathing a physical, tangible, sunlit Australia.’ Rhetoric about ecological sustainability ‘encouraged use and exploitation, not conservation’ and avoided the patriotic work of defending Australia’s ‘natural heritage’ and ‘re-wilding the continent’ (Lines, 2006: 312–14, 355). Many environmentalists would disagree with at least some of these assertions. Environmentalism arrived as a major political and social movement in the West during the 1960s and 1970s and proved its staying power in the 1980s and 1990s. A majority of people across the western world reported that they took environmental problems seriously. Membership in environmental organizations swelled. Government departments monitored and regulated pollution. Many large environmental organizations responded to an increasingly conservative climate by trimming their sails and lowering their sights, which created room for more radical organizations that sometimes enjoyed significant success. Environmental movements became much more varied and divided. But environmentalism had not, at the millennium’s close, much disturbed older western traditions: the desire for perpetual expansion, of ever-increasing prosperity and comfort. Most of us perceive no contradiction between environmentalism and growth. We therefore have a ‘ “light-green society”: a polity in which virtually every activity is touched by environmentalist concerns . . . without upsetting the existing state of things too much’ (Bess, 2000: 16). Indeed, the most impressive environmentalist victories of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries occurred when activists successfully depicted pollution as an immediate, life-and-death issue for particular communities. In the absence – or, to put it more accurately, perceived absence – of such threats, the overwhelming majority of western peoples at the millennium’s turn were reluctant to undertake significant sacrifices on behalf of the environment. But the same cannot be said of environmentalism’s cultural manifestations. By 2000, western people’s enjoyment of nature had assumed increasingly extreme forms.

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o you want to go . . . where there are no crowds?’ asks the advertisement showing a young couple preparing to cycle on a stark plateau overlooking deep canyons. But this is no brief for bicycling. The star of this advertisement is a Toyota 4Runner, the SUV (sports utility vehicle) that has brought the pair to this pristine place (see Plate 6). SUVs are the poster child of American indifference to gasoline consumption, climate change, safety, and the paving over of urban and rural landscapes. But these oversized vehicles sell like hot cakes, in large part because advertisers represent them as natural. Caption: Ads since the 1990s have commonly depicted gas-guzzling SUVs as integral to encountering nature. Automobiles have always made the countryside more accessible for nature lovers. But, as William Rollins observes, until recently they ‘massively reinforced a sense of separation.’ A thick, well-drawn line separated the autobahn from German hills and forests and parkways from America’s scenery. This sense of separation underscored that tourists were seeking nature ‘not in order to live there, but rather in order to experience a civilization-affirming thrill of contrast.’ Polished chrome bumpers hardly blended with weathered granite. But SUVs, which offered the possibility – though seldom undertaken – of going off-road, connoted ‘an active outdoor lifestyle.’ SUVs are so commonly depicted in natural settings, then, because such vehicles suggest that we ‘can become a self-determining, free-roaming, free agent at the turn of a key,’ that we reside in a postmodern world ‘in which there are, as the Ford ads put it, “no boundaries” ’ (Rollins, 2006: 693, 689, 697, 699). We can be wild, free, and incredibly prosperous – simultaneously at one with and insulated from nature. Most westerners had in fact embraced both environmentalism and consumption by the twentieth century’s close, and products or experiences deemed natural or wild constituted a growing part of their leisure time and disposable income, particularly in the US.

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WILDERNESS AND TECHNOLOGY

Minimal-impact camping This variety of camping emerged in the 1970s as part of the solution to overcrowding in North America’s back country. Hiking and camping more carefully served to increase popular areas’ carrying capacities, allowing more people to enjoy them without degrading the environment. Lowimpact camping entailed using established camping areas, not using wood for fuel, and carefully disposing of all waste products.

Wilderness, as we have seen, became a touchstone of mainstream North American culture in the 1960s as housewives, accountants, even Republicans, grew their hair long, enjoyed John Denver’s music, and otherwise cultivated a ‘natural’ image. At the same time, technological changes made it possible for more and more North Americans to reach wild places. The spread of highways and other roads improved access. Nylon and other lightweight materials shouldered aside canvas tents and woollen blankets, and freeze-dried foods replaced bulky and heavy canned goods. Aluminium-framed backpacks enabled hikers to carry comfortably clothes, food, bedding, and shelter. Guidebooks proliferated, and by the 1970s a reasonably fit person with an automobile and a few hundred dollars for equipment and supplies could sally forth into the wilderness for a week or a day with little preparation or distress. Millions of North Americans did just that. Traffic on backcountry trails grew exponentially during the 1960s and 1970s until managers began to limit access to some areas. Hikers were no longer finding solitude. Those in New Hampshire’s White Mountains ran across another person every 73 yards, on average, by the early 1970s. Good campsites were quickly taken, and disposing of human waste became problematic. A Forest Service employee at California’s Mirror Lake reported: ‘You literally can’t find a square yard of ground without human faeces on it’ (Nash, 2001: 320). Radical environmentalists from Thoreau to Naess had asserted that regular explorations to wilderness were essential for modern humans. But well-intentioned visitors were, by the 1970s, loving these places to death. Technology offered solutions. Minimal-impact camping emerged in the 1970s as a method to expand the carrying capacity of wilderness. Lightweight portable stoves and foam pads made it unnecessary to cut wood for fires or bedding. Unlike their less numerous counterparts of the early twentieth century, who had taken to the woods to build shelters and trap animals, the modern, ecologically sensitive backpacker left no trace of his or her passing. But this emphasis on wilderness as a museum, a place to be visited but not touched, ‘denied a working knowledge of nature’ (Turner, 2002: 476). It also dovetailed perfectly with the burgeoning outdoor recreation industry. Camping without leaving a trace turned out to require a great deal of pricey equipment, a closer relationship with the very modern forces from which the wilderness promised a respite.

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WILD PLAYGROUNDS An even more expensive solution to finding wilderness emerged in the 1970s and 1980s: exotic ecotourism. Part of a larger trend in global tourism (which grew from about 70 million people in 1960 to some 500 million in 1995), ecotourism brought adventure seekers to remote and spectacular settings. The goal was twofold: enjoy an authentic, wilderness experience without degrading its ecosystem. Both goals proved elusive. By 1991 nearly 40,000 western hikers were trekking annually through western Nepal, leaving deforestation, excrement, and erosion in their wake. A researcher in Belize, a small, Central American country, found that ecotourists seemed concerned with cosmetic problems, such as littering, and oblivious to the pollution generated by their heavy use of natural resources in travelling to and living in the tropical locale. Unlike ecotourists, hunters made no bones about their desire to intervene violently in nature. The proportion of people in the US who killed – or tried to kill – wild animals had declined to about 12 per cent by the early 1990s, a casualty of increases in both urbanization and squeamishness over spilling other creatures’ blood. The shrinking minority of hunters developed a new set of justifications. Some still used hunting as an excuse to gather with other men to ‘drink beer, shoot at inoffensive animals, and talk about pussy,’ as one indelicate observer put it. But others articulated more esoteric hopes. They wished ‘to get out into the hills, away from the crowds, to live, if only for a few days, beyond the wall’ so that they would not become ‘isolated from the natural world.’ Killing was natural. ‘I go hunting,’ explained one, ‘to have shadowy, sometimes violent encounters with my brother animals.’ Taking a life forced one to confront ‘the physical responsibility you take for the death of your food,’ and ‘the smell of the prey, and the feel of warm blood help restore our sense of belonging to nature’ (Cartmill, 1993: 233–6). Hunters and vegetarians perhaps share more in common with each other than with meat-eaters who pretend that chicken is a root crop. ‘The [animalrights] activist and the devout hunter worship at different chapels in the same church,’ writes historian Matt Cartmill. ‘Both long to break through the animal-human boundary, and both tend to see the wilderness as a realm of order and harmony from which the human species is alienated’ (Cartmill, 1993: 235–6). Other forms of outdoor recreation depict nature as a sanctuary. Rock climbing’s popularity began to soar in the late 1970s. Like mountain biking and skiing, it offers thrilling, often dangerous challenges in wild, elemental settings. Climbing, explained one devotee, entails ‘experiencing in a short, concentrated time the extremes of human emotion, the extraordinary joy in

Ecotourism This movement emerged in the 1970s and expressed the desires of many western peoples to enjoy exotic travel in an environmentally responsible manner. In its pure form, ecotourism is environmentally and socially sustainable, respectful of both the integrity of local ecosystems and businesses. In practice, any form of tourism ordinarily creates a great deal of pollution, and businesses have commonly claimed the ecotourism label without substantially altering their practices.

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being fully alive, and the naked fear in facing up to great risk.’ The uncivilized setting for these adventures is critical, for ‘the personal encounter with wild and distinctive places enfolds the individual climbing experience within a deeply felt sense of the power of the landscape’ (Rex-Atzet, 2003: 54). Backpackers, hunters, rock climbers, and other outdoor enthusiasts described intense, quasi-mystical, elemental encounters with a life force both beyond and connected to themselves, a confrontation that cut through the suffocating dreariness of ordinary, modern life. ‘The world has become far too safe, and heretofore unknown lands are mapped in far too much detail,’ explained one (Watters, 2003: 259). Yet the wilderness’s diverse devotees relied heavily on modern, often very expensive modes of transportation and equipment to stage their confrontations with primitive, unfiltered nature. They also carried with them the very modern attitudes that wilderness was supposed to shelter them from. Rock climbing, for example, became ‘a form of recreation in which marketing and play go hand in hand,’ observes Joseph E. Taylor III, for ‘extreme sports, slick sheet magazines, and outdoor competitions are normative’ (Taylor, 2006: 130–5). North America’s wild places have become integrated into its voracious consumer culture, have become a tour package of costly options from which well-heeled visitors extract experiences rather than minerals, meat, or timber. Fly-fishing boomed in the 1970s, as new materials simplified what had been a very difficult skill. A River Runs Through It, Robert Redford’s popular 1992 film, made thousands of converts, neophytes who flocked to stores where they ‘bought high-end equipment, signed up for casting lessons, and booked their first trips to go fishing in Montana, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico, or Idaho – somewhere away from home, somewhere in the New West of the advertising brochures’ (Owens, 2003: 118). Mountain biking followed much the same pattern. Bicycles with fat tyres and flat handlebars quickly multiplied in the 1980s, shouldering aside the old-fashioned road bikes with their narrow tyres and awkward frames. Most mountain bikes never encountered anything rougher than a suburban curb, but a significant minority of owners took to the woods to display their expensive equipment and physical accomplishments. Serious devotees moved to, or established vacation homes in, places with easy access to extensive trails, and mountain biking became a key economic component of many western towns and cities. Fly-fishing and mountain biking were purely recreational activities. The fishing was catch and release, not for food, and the biking was for fun, not transportation. Both activities required a lot of money, time, and, often, travel. Like rock climbing or hunting, they occurred outside and away from the daily grind, the nine-to-five routine of life. David Brooks, in Bobos in Paradise, remarks that the search for authentic outdoor experiences draws ‘the compassionate cardiologists from Chicago, the rugged realtors from

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Atlanta, the naturalist probate lawyers from San Jose. They’ve all found a place to recharge their batteries, smell the pines, and feel lonely and hard – in the summer months’ (Brooks, 2000: 220). The American West as playground/retreat centre violates more traditional notions of how land should be used. In the 1990s, environmentalists succeeded in bringing wolves back to parts of the western US over the objections of many local residents. Ranchers complained that wolves, like coyotes, would kill their cattle and sheep, that they were bad for business. Predators needed to be stamped out, pure and simple. More far-sighted conservatives warned that wolf reintroduction was a wedge opening the West to all manner of liberal and utopian interventions in western economies and landscapes, a step that ‘will give environmentalists the tool they need to stop or appeal power lines, timber sales, road building, hunting seasons, oil and gas exploration, grazing’ (Jones, 2003: 39). But wolves turned out to be profitable. One federal report estimated that Yellowstone Park’s contingent would bring about $43 million of business to the region annually. Thousands of people, in fact, flocked to Yellowstone for the opportunity to catch a glimpse of, photograph, and, yes, howl with the creature that, in the words of historian Karen Jones, brought ‘vibrancy to an emasculated landscape’ ( Jones, 2003: 36).

CONSUMING NATURE Most Americans sought wild animals under more controlled conditions. Southern California’s SeaWorld, part of the Anheuser-Busch Corporation, assures visitors: ‘Just by being here, you’re showing that you care’ (Davis, 1997: 228). But the nature that these visitors are invited to care about is in fact more than a little denatured. SeaWorld’s famous killer whales are awesome, but affectionate, powerful but domesticated, part of Anheuser-Busch’s corporate blending of the outdoors, leisure, and consumption. The link between commercialism and nature is more patent at the West Edmonton Mall of western Canada, the world’s largest indoor shopping centre when it opened in the early 1980s. Among the hundreds of stores resides a beach fringed by palm trees, a lake populated by dolphins, and hundreds of other animals, from penguins to peacocks, spider monkeys to piranhas. For a price, one can be photographed with many of these creatures. A growing number of retailers were selling nature by the 1980s. The Nature Company by 1994 had 124 stores in the US and another 22 in Canada, Australia, and Japan. Their calling card was ‘authenticity.’ There were no talking bears on the Nature Company’s shelves. One could find realistically

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rendered wild animals on T-shirts, calendars, note cards, key chains, and paperweights. CDs and videos featured authentic animals in natural settings. There were bird feeders and bat shelters, plus equipment to help one find and appreciate animals: field guides, walking sticks, and periscopes. Historian Jennifer Price has brilliantly analysed the contradictions of the Nature Company and its imitators, places where we are urged to consume products made from oil, wood, and other natural resources in the name of saving the environment. We seldom think about the raw materials that go into, say, a CD of wildlife sounds because such products strike us as ‘natural,’ as unrelated to modern civilization and industry. ‘The Nature Company,’ explains Price, ‘has billed itself as your direct connection to the natural world.’ Yet this natural world has little of the feel of actual wild areas with their extremes of heat, cold, sand, and nettlesome bugs. Rather, one brings these talismans of nature, these sounds and photographs, into our most comfortable spaces, our climate-controlled automobiles and homes – where they serve as a critique of the very technological and commercial forces that made possible their creation and purchase. Purveyors of automobiles, perfume, tampons, household appliances, credit cards, beer, soda, and much, much more, made the same pitch by using wild nature to associate their products with ‘Freedom, Adventure, Leisure, Tranquility, anti-Materialism, Simplicity, Place, the Past’ (Price, 1999: 174, 237). If backpacking, fly-fishing, or rock climbing had become consumer goods, then consumer goods had become nature. Prosperous westerners more fully incorporated nature into their homes in the late twentieth century than ever before. The number of second homes in the countryside grew dramatically by the 1970s. About 7 per cent of Wales’s rural dwellings, nearly 9,000, belonged to people who spent most of their time elsewhere. In Sweden about one out of every five urbanites owned a cottage in the country. Some million and a half people in France and three million in the US had a second home. Australians in 1984 noted that there were ‘thousands of empty holiday homes along the coast,’ in communities where many poor people were ‘forced to sleep in cars, under bridges’ (Brown, 1998: 214). The growth in well-to-do people’s income in the 1980s and 1990s of course fuelled this trend. North America’s most beautiful resorts featured some of its most glaring social disparities, as low-wage workers serviced the needs of affluent, often temporary, residents. Many high-income people made their primary homes in small towns or rural areas, as computers enabled consultants, professionals, and business people to live away from urban centres. Rural life offered access to nature, and nature offered liberty and goodness. ‘I know all the woods, the fields, and it’s part of me,’ explained a resident of an English village in the late 1980s. ‘Because I’m out in the country, I’m free.’ Such residents, explains the sociologist who lived among them,

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viewed nature as standing ‘apart from the selfishness, greed, power, and domination they see in social life’ (Bell, 1994: 137, 138). Retailers have capitalized on this connection between nature and freedom by marketing replicas of rural life. Robert Redford became famous as a movie star who embodied the rugged individualism of the American West in films ranging from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid to The Horse Whisperer. Ensconced in rural Utah, he both encourages innovative films and peddles tokens of the Old West. The 2004 Sundance online catalogue features Redford’s meditation on how the Zen exercise of getting ‘out of the traffic and into quieter calmer regions’ drew him to ‘the industry of animal husbandry. The life force exchange of moving milk from udder to sustenance was completely attractive to me.’ Those unable to milk cows on a regular basis could presumably capture something of the same ‘life force exchange’ by purchasing a ‘farmhouse stool’ for $178.00 plus shipping. Redford’s West is a place to be consumed through leisure, via movies, shopping, and vacations rather than resource extraction. Being a green consumer can mean paying attention to where goods are made and how much energy is consumed in their transport. Eating food produced locally is a way not simply to feel more connected to one’s bioregion. It is also a way to cut energy costs, the price tag paid by the environment when we consume products created thousands of miles away. But being a green consumer is not always so simple. An electric car may emit few greenhouse gases while it operates, but its production may have produced a great deal. The ‘diaper wars’ conducted in Great Britain and the US in the 1990s pitted manufacturers of cloth diapers who pointed out the evils of landfills against makers of disposable diapers who argued that their product created less water pollution (Bess, 2003: 187). Consumers tend to express their ‘ecofriendliness’ not by researching the complexities of such choices but rather by simply purchasing products that present themselves as green. Hence green shopping can be a green light to consume more, such as the celebrities who believed that if owning one Prius was good for the environment, owning several would be still better. Ecological sensitivity is often expressed by buying more, not less. National identity continues to shape our understandings of nature. Nuclear power has attracted a great deal of opposition in the US but strong support in France because technological solutions suggest independence and autonomy to the people of that once-powerful nation. Residents of England have expressed a great deal of concern over the killing of whales; Scandinavians have regarded it as a traditional and therefore innocuous activity. By the same token, the British have resented continental Europe’s concern over tainted beef in part because to attack its beef is to question the purity of its beloved countryside. Smaller landscapes are also shaped by

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highly anthropocentric concerns. Michael Pollan describes how garden catalogues lay out a richly textured mosaic of status and taste: From White Flower Farm or Wayside Gardens we can have a perennial border that fairly bristles with class distinctions, floral testimony to our sophistication; from Harris or Park or Gurney’s we can order a middleclass garden that proudly announces to the neighbors our family’s enterprise, independence and togetherness; from Johnny’s Selected Seeds or Pinetree Garden Seeds we can get a garden that reflects our environmental consciousness; and from Seeds Blum or J.L. Hudson one that proclaims our political convictions, in particular our zeal to protect the planet’s genetic diversity from the depredations of big business. (Pollan, 1991: 242–3) A perusal of such catalogues reveals ‘that, just beneath its placid surface, the garden is buzzing with social and political controversy.’ Nature loving more often reflects than challenges very human conceptions of status and power. Lawns remain highly popular, though maintaining the standard, monospecies variety requires large doses of water, fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides – not to mention the pollution-spewing mowers that keep them looking tidy. By the early 1980s, people in the US lavished more fertilizer on their lawns than people in India used to grow their food. These flawless, homogeneous expanses of green continue to advertise their owners’ capacity to create and maintain a thoroughly unnatural sort of nature.

AQUARIUMS AND DOGS Much the same could be said of privately owned aquariums, stunning arrays of tropical fish, plants, and other living things that require a great deal of time, money, and, often, ecological devastation. The Chinese had bred fancy varieties of goldfish for centuries when westerners started keeping fresh and saltwater creatures in glass containers in the mid-nineteenth century. The quality of aquariums and their heaters and filters and water improved steadily during the twentieth century, and by the 1920s fresh-water aquariums were well established in western Europe and North America. Scuba diving and jet-powered aircraft made collecting tropical saltwater fish and invertebrates much easier after the Second World War, but keeping them alive for more than a few months remained problematic. The discovery of methods for establishing the nitrogen cycle (which transforms toxic ammonia and nitrite into relatively innocuous nitrates) and

Extreme nature loving

the use of live rock as a filter system made it possible by the 1990s for a reasonably well-informed hobbyist to maintain a diverse array of fish, corals, anemones, clams, and other oceanic creatures. The most ambitious set-ups included live sand and rock packed with small invertebrates (sponges, algae, and tiny shrimp and crabs) together with vibrant hard and soft corals, pastel anemones, brilliant clams and starfish, and, of course, a rainbow of fish. A full-blown reef-tank of 150 gallons literally brings to your home an approximation of the world’s most dazzling ecosystem: the coral reef (see Plate 7). But a great deal of human expense, effort, and artifice lies beneath and behind these crystalline waters. To outfit that 150-gallon reef tank ordinarily costs several thousand dollars upfront and a hundred dollars a month or more in electricity, replacement parts, food, and new livestock. Equipment includes not only a tank and a stand, but also lighting, heaters, a pump and power heads to circulate water, a protein skimmer to extract toxins, filters to remove particulate and chemical contaminants, and equipment or kits for testing water quality. The dutiful aquarium keeper will change a significant fraction of the tank’s water each week, replacing it with water that for several days has been mixed, heated, and otherwise prepared to exact specifications. She or he will also keep a quarantine tank in which to isolate specimens that have just been purchased (and may therefore carry parasites) or that show signs of disease. Keeping the occupants of a reef tank alive and attractive requires no small amount of expense, expertise, and vigilance. It has become increasingly clear that the creation of countless miniature reefs in homes across the western world and Japan has not been good for the reefs located in oceans. Like zoo keepers, aquarists can claim to foster an appreciation for nature. But the nearly 2 million marine aquaria in the world (half of them in the US) annually consume about 24 million fish and 12 million pieces of coral. Unlike freshwater aquariums, tank-bred fish constitute a tiny fraction (about 2 per cent) of the saltwater trade. The harvesting of millions of fish, corals, and invertebrates from the world’s reefs has inflicted a substantial amount of damage. The dispersal of cyanide makes fish much easier to catch but causes mortality rates up to 90 per cent and can bleach or otherwise damage the reefs. Some rare organisms have become scarcer, and even commonplace species have dwindled. A study of the Yellow Tang off Hawai’i, where at least 100,000 are annually exported, concluded that this species and others were diminishing significantly, in part due to the aquarium trade. The removal of live rock near Fiji may be undermining the structure of its reefs. Live rock, corals, and fish are being cultivated in captivity, and some governments and organizations are attempting to regulate the ways in which marine organisms are captured. But these attempts are still in their infancy and do not appear to be keeping pace with the robust saltwater aquarium industry. A flourishing hobby devoted to the re-creation of

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breathtaking oceanic landscapes is playing a growing and apparently substantial role in the deterioration of such ecosystems. Aquariums are small potatoes compared with the booming business of keeping dogs fed and otherwise happy. Readers of Bark and Animal Wellness magazines are confronted with a truly bewildering collection of goods and services. Dietary options include organic, free-range, and ‘holistic dog food.’ Dogs can sleep on beds (with choices of hardwoods) resembling miniature couches, and store their clothing, collars (which may include a ‘Handcrafted Swiss’ number), and other belongings in armoires. Health-conscious owners may be drawn to acupuncture, acupressure, insect repellent, sunscreen, herbal concoctions to remove plaque from teeth, vitamins, antioxidants, and other supplements such as salmon oil that promise to decrease ‘the risk of cancer development, severe skin conditions and premature aging symptoms like stiffness and lack of energy’ (Animal Wellness magazine, volume 5, issue 5, 2003, 28). Travelling dogs may need seat belts, a ramp to get comfortably from automobile to ground, even goggles (‘doggles’) to protect the eyes of dogs who like to stick their heads out of car windows. Services include pet photographers and painters and dog-oriented summer camps, bed and breakfasts, and motels. Other products and services speak to dogs’ emotional or psychological well being: anti-depressants, yoga, reiki, aromatherapy, ‘Anxiety Wraps’ to calm pets during thunderstorms, and herb-laced chew bones ‘designed to gently calm dogs without sedating them.’ Sue Becker, a specialist in ‘Interspecies Communication,’ offers to help pets overcome ‘problems and stress, improve behaviour, deepen understanding and your relationship’ [Doc. 24, p. 145]. Such services do not end at death. Bereaved owners can purchase Furry Angel Pet Memorial candles, urns for ashes, and memorial stones in the likeness of one’s departed friend. Sharon Callahan, author of Healing Animals Naturally with Flower Essences, recalls how a terminally ill cat, Tangie, allowed Callahan to be her voice ‘so she could help her family better understand what was happening to her and what action they should take on her behalf.’ Tangie made it known that she wanted to ‘lie in her favorite spot surrounded by candles and sacred pictures,’ to be sung to, hear some stories, and to be buried in nature (Callahan, 2003: 50). Pet magazines proclaim that cats and especially dogs are as important as people. Indeed, increasing numbers of owners are paying thousands of dollars on surgical procedures unavailable to most of the world’s people. Americans spent about $19 billion on pet care in 2002, nearly twice what they spent in the mid-1990s. Jon Katz, who writes for the New York Times and Bark, among other publications, argues in The New Work of Dogs: Tending to Life, Love, and Family that more and more Americans find their primary companionship with canines. Dogs have assumed therapeutic roles with people who are near death or

Extreme nature loving

severely disturbed. But most of their new work occurs with more ordinary folk, particularly the growing proportion of the population who live alone. About one third of people in an American Animal Hospital Association survey report that they rely more heavily on their pets for affection and companionship than on people. Katz describes a woman disappointed by men and work who at last found, in a dachshund, ‘raw, pure, completely unconditional love;’ a driven attorney emotionally estranged from his children and wife who proclaimed that his Labrador would ‘take a bullet for me;’ a sensitive youth who looked to his pit bull for both friendship and credibility in his tough neighbourhood; a group of women who turned to dogs to nurture them through divorce; lonely seniors whose only reliable companions were their pets. ‘She’s all I have now,’ said a widower of his little dog. ‘Everyone else is gone’ (Katz, 2003: 37, 85, 172). The New Work of Dogs is often a depressing book, though the reader is apt to feel a certain gratitude for the plucky pets gamely bolstering a sagging social structure once maintained by spouses, children, other kin, friends, neighbours, churches, fraternal orders, and bowling leagues. But these pets are often injured by our social expectations. Dogs may be steadfast, but people are not. The woman who loved her dachshund so much that she could not bear to potty train it eventually grew weary of and irritated with her ill-mannered pet. The boy who had relied on his pit bull for status sent it to the pound after he made the basketball team. Katz found that even much-beloved dogs often suffered from their owners’ ignorance, especially regarding the amount of exercise that they required. This sort of negligence, and the frustration that it fosters, helps explain why millions of dogs a year are sent to shelters, where many will be killed.

FREEING KEIKO AND FINDING NEMO Americans, especially, have continued to view wild animals as pets. Free Willy describes a troubled boy’s friendship with a killer whale. Life soon imitated art, as thousands of children and not a few adults became determined to free Keiko, who had played ‘Willy,’ from captivity in a Mexico theme park. Millions of dollars were spent to return Keiko to the North Atlantic – where he soon died. Critics pointed out that the time and money spent on Keiko could have gone to more substantial conservation efforts. Nor were Keiko’s most devoted fans of one mind about freeing him. In the movie that made him famous, Willy’s most intense relationship is, after all, with a boy, and when he swims away at the end, we are not sure whether to cheer or to weep. Hence the film generated both protests of and visits to SeaWorld,

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which holds in captivity the largest collection of killer whales. We want animals to be simultaneously free and friendly. Finding Nemo, a 2003 film, generates the same paradoxical reactions. Nemo is a young clownfish who strays from his overprotective father and is then netted by a diver who confines him to his dental-office tank. Nemo’s father then ventures from his home to retrieve his son, who escapes from the tank by feigning death and getting flushed down the toilet. The popular movie prompted both criticism of saltwater fish keeping and a boom in that business. Some children flushed their pets down the toilet in the misplaced hope that they, like Nemo, would rejoin their families in the freedom of the ocean. Our concern for animals on film or television has become so great that dozens of viewers called to protest against the killing of a mouse in The Green Mile. They were relieved to learn that the mouse was computer generated. Indeed, the industry spends a great deal of time and money meeting the standards of the American Humane Association’s Film and Television Unit. One can do only three takes a day of a fish, for example, and no animals, including cockroaches or worms, are to be harmed – though actors and actresses are, of course, free to squish insects off the set. Our views and uses of animals are a wonderful metaphor for and microcosm of modern nature loving. Pets, like mountains or sea anemones, do not talk back. If our dog licks our wounds, it will not assert that it does so not out of love but because it likes the taste of blood. If we spend our precious money and time to trek to the Himalayas, those mountains will not remark that they would just as soon that we cut our greenhouse-gas emissions by staying home and taking walks in our neighbourhood. Because dogs and mountains do not speak, nature loving can mean whatever we wish it to. We can express our allegiance to it by backpacking, hunting, rock climbing, fly-fishing, howling with the wolves, buying a poster of a howling wolf, gardening, commuting by bicycle or commuting by SUV, buying a second house in the country, going to the West Edmonton Mall, or keeping a reef tank or a German Shepherd. In our postmodern, atomistic western world, environmentalism, like truth and beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. In all of these activities, moreover, we consume nature – sometimes acutely – even as we celebrate it. Modern nature loving often entails harming the environment as we establish our sensitivity to it.

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ature loving has served a dizzying number of ends over the past several centuries: nostalgia; status; nationalism; sociability; various strains of radicalism; or simply the desire to construct or inhabit, for an hour or a lifetime, a perfect place. Prosperity has been the common denominator of our varied expressions of affection and concern for the non-human environment. Our worries over nature have risen with capitalism and a steadily increased material standard of living. They quickened during the Renaissance, intensified during the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, reached the growing middle class of the industrializing nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, then became a major cultural and political force with the arrival of unprecedented levels of affluence in the 1960s. Environmentalism worked its way into culture through poetry, prose, gardens, pet keeping, music, and religion. But it also spawned powerful political movements that regulated the extraction of natural resources; protected selected vistas, fauna and flora, and ecosystems; and dramatically reduced some types of pollution. The association between prosperity and nature loving can be traced between nations as well as over time. England was much more concerned with preserving its countryside and cherished animals than continental Europe at the peak of England’s political and economic power, from the nineteenth century into the twentieth. Western nature preservation and pollution controls alike have lagged behind after the Second World War in the places with the most rudimentary economies: the Soviet Union and its satellites, of course, but also Spain, Italy, Greece, and Ireland. The same generalization can be made within nations. Environmental activists, like other reformers, have tended to be young, but they have also been well-educated, often prosperous. Well-to-do nations and people have been most likely to express an affinity and concern for nature. Environmentalism has been the child of affluence. There is a positive correlation between prosperity and environmental achievement in areas such as pollution control, water treatment, and

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recycling. Hence West Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Denmark rate much higher in these areas than do Ireland, Spain, and Italy. But at some point rising per capita income ‘is associated with declining performance’ (Scruggs, 2003: 76). Canada and especially the US are the leading examples of this phenomenon. Indeed, a 2003 study of 21 powerful countries placed the US last in global environmental stewardship, with Canada and Australia also ranking in the bottom four. In 1990 the average US urban resident drove 16,045 kilometres and used public transport for just 474. In Europe the figures were much closer: 6,601 kilometres by auto and 1,895 by public transport. Canada and Australia fell between the US and Europe. Prosperous nations have been reluctant to protect the environment at the risk of undermining the pursuit of prosperity that has long resided at the centre of the western world. Environmental improvements that can be had through technological innovations, such as catalytic converters, are one thing. Driving less is quite another. Hence pollutants such as sulphur dioxide have fallen even as the amount of gasoline burned has soared, but carbon dioxide, which has proved much more difficult to extract from internal-combustion engines, has continued to rise. Rich nations and their citizens have been unwilling to curtail their consumption of resources. This commitment to prosperity has existed alongside a professed and growing commitment to nature. By the 1990s, more than four out of five people in the US identified themselves as environmentalists. In France, writes historian Michael Bess, ‘practically every nook and cranny of French society eventually came to acquire an environmentalist tint.’ But this sentiment ‘ran shallow and wide’ and constituted a sort of ‘light-green society’ in which people have wanted both ‘all the comforts of material abundance and the cheery prospect of limitless economic expansion’ and ‘a safe, clean, verdant environment in which to enjoy these boons’ (Bess, 2000: 6–26). Freedom and individualism reconcile this contradiction, this simultaneous embrace of nature and prosperity. We are willing to preserve places and animals associated with freedom: mountains, ocean shores, eagles, wolves, whales, and other ‘charismatic megafauna.’ But our commitment to individual rights undercuts attempts to slow, let alone reverse, the growing pressure humanity is putting on the rest of the world through population growth, larger homes, increased automobile use, and general consumption. Automobiles, like nature, make us feel free, which is why automobile advertisements so frequently place their products in wild places. One would be hard put to identify a more environmentally damaging activity than driving. Automobiles gobble oil, metals, and other resources, create a great deal of pollution, require the paving of land, and kill untold numbers of people and other animals. But we associate automobiles, like mountains and birds, with boundlessness. That so few of us consistently perceive a contradiction between our allegiance to material comfort and environmental health owes something to

Assessment

human nature and frailties, to our ample capacity for ignoring inconvenient truths. Many of us are also confused by the apparent lack of scientific consensus on whether and exactly how the environment is declining and precisely what must or ought to be done to improve matters. In the US, for example, no small number of highly educated and influential people profess to believe that global warming is a myth and that government measures to improve fuel efficiency would constitute an unwarranted attack on the liberty of the individual. President George W. Bush had a particularly remarkable record of ignoring or denying acute environmental problems. That not a few environmentalists have issued prophecies that have been at once apocalyptic and absurd has served to discredit reasonable and credible warnings. But our capacity to increase our consumption of nature even as we express affection and concern for it also depends on our ability to compartmentalize these two elements of our lives, our practice and our beliefs. Susan Davis’s fine analysis of SeaWorld points out that the San Diego theme park depicts nature as ‘remote, pure, balanced, and teeming with life’ while reassuring us ‘that nature is going to be all right’ (Davis, 1997: 242). Indeed, many of our self-conscious encounters with nature serve to affirm our ecological sensitivity while disguising the ways in which these very encounters contribute to ecological problems. One thinks of the ecotourists who pump massive amounts of waste into air, land, and sea to arrive and live at exotic and remote locales where they conscientiously avoid violating the repose of a blade of grass or piece of coral. Modern westerners have become extremely isolated from the nature-killing processes that support our comfortable life: the coal plants, slaughterhouses, smelters, corporate farms, and manifold factories that transform all manner of natural resources into the growing stream of energy, food, and products – not a few of them pitched and packaged as eco-friendly – that we happily consume. We are therefore easily convinced that we are treading lightly upon the earth, that nature is not the source of our food and shelter and tools and electronics but is rather a place apart, a sacred space of leisure, tranquillity, and purity. This conception of nature as untouched and pristine has been particularly strong in the US. Gardener Michael Pollan notes that Americans have done fine work in preserving places considered wilderness and ‘a terrible job of managing the rest of our land,’ for once a landscape is no longer ‘ “virgin” it is typically written off as fallen, lost to nature, irredeemable’ (Pollan, 1991: 223). Environmentalism has been more concerned with offering a symbolic escape from modernity than a programme for coming to terms with it. Our approach to animals conjures up a childlike utopia in which wild creatures are both free and friendly, a Nemo never-never land where clownfish fathers worry about their sons instead of eating them and no animals are inconvenienced, let alone killed, by human activity. Historian Keith Thomas observes that ‘nature parks and conservation areas serve a function not unlike that

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which toy animals have for children; they are fantasies which enshrine the values by which society as a whole cannot afford to live’ (Thomas, 1983: 301). Radical environmentalists are more consistent than mainstream nature lovers inasmuch as they argue that healthy ecosystems demand dramatic reductions in human consumption. But it is sometimes unclear if rejecting the western tradition is the means or the end, and many radicals seem driven by desires that seem more psychological and utopian than practical. Susan Zakin points out that movement icons such as Edward Abbey and Dave Foreman posit and advocate a sort of absolute freedom ‘that is possible only in childhood’ – or in our memories of childhood (Zakin, 1995: 181). ‘Man seeks to draw from nature the meaning he cannot find in society,’ explained social critic Leo Lowenthal in 1937. Nature loving offers us the possibility of becoming ‘a “thing,” like the tree or brook, and find more pleasure in this surrender than in a hopeless struggle against manmade forces’ (Lowenthal, 1978: 320–1). This often reflexive hostility towards practical matters helps to explain why widespread nature loving has not translated into stronger environmental laws and policies. Successful political movements require considerable tolerance for friction and frustration, working through differences in philosophy and personality, building coalitions, testifying at public hearings, creating and maintaining bureaucratic institutions to monitor and regulate industry. Determining sustainable levels and patterns of resource use and designing technologies that will enable people to live in an ecologically sustainable manner demands a great deal of patient scientific research and technological innovation. These are precisely the sort of tedious, quintessentially modern activities that so much of nature loving, from Rousseau to Abbey, has been calculated to escape. Nature loving has often constituted a distraction from the work of bequeathing a liveable planet to our progeny, has been more about transcending the constraints of life than adapting to them. Ever since the Enlightenment we have turned to nature – forests, fields, trees, dogs, dolphins, ecosystems – for meaning. Sometimes this search for meaning has led to preserving selected landscapes or species. But pet ownership, backpacking, gardening, exotic vacations, visits to the Nature Company and zoos more often dovetail with the imperatives of industrial capitalism, the increased consumption of nature. Our acts of nature loving have expressed our unease with material comfort while seldom challenging it. Loving nature and pushing the planet to the brink of catastrophe have been, more often than not, compatible. Yet certainly our collective future depends on our ability to make ourselves at home here, to make our peace with and adjust ourselves to the earth’s constraints even as we celebrate its beauties.

Part 2

DOCUMENTS

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Document 1

BEOWULF

Beowulf is an epic poem created as early as the eighth century CE and set in Scandinavia. Beowulf, the hero, battles the fearsome Grendel and his mother as well as a dragon. It is one of the earliest and most influential works of Northern European literature and illustrates traditional European views of nature. Hrothgar, protector of the Danes, spoke: ‘Don’t ask about happiness! Sorrow is renewed among the Danish people. Aeschere is dead, Yrmenlaf’s elder brother, my confidant, the bearer of my advice, my shoulder companion when troops clash and boar helmets smashed. As a noble prince should be, such Aeschere was! Now he has been slain in Herot by the hands of a restless, murderous spirit. I do not know where his carcass has gone to be gladly feasted on. She has avenged the feud for your violent killing with hard hand clasps of Grendel yesternight for diminishing and destroying my people for so long. Grendel fell in battle, forfeited his life, and now another has come, a mighty man-eater to avenge her kin, as is seen by many a warrior who mourns for me, treasure giver, weeping in their minds for my heavy sorrow, a hand lying lifeless who gave good things to you. I have heard tell among my people

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and councilors that they had seen two mighty wanderers in the waste land moors keeping guard, alien spirits. One was, as far as they could see, the likeness of a woman. The other miserable thing in the stature of a man, though he was larger than any other man, as they trod the paths of exiles. In the days of old earth dwellers called him Grendel. We have no knowledge of a father, of any forebears among evil spirits. They occupied the secret land, the wolf’s retreat – windy bluffs, perilous fens, where a waterfall darkens under bluffs and goes down under the ground. It is not far from here, by measure of miles, that the mere stands. Over it hangs a frost-covered grove, woods rooted deepshadowing the water. There each night a portent may be seen: fire on the water. No wise one among the sons of men knows the bottom. Though the heath-stalker, the strong-horned hart, harassed by hounds, seeks the forest in his flight, he will give his life rather than protect his head by going there. That is not a good place!

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There water surges up, black, to the clouds, and the wind stirs up hateful weather so that the sky turns gloomy and weeps . . . Again it has happened that the remedy lies with you alone. The land, the dangerous place where you might find this criminal is unexplored. Seek it if you dare . . . For that fight I will pay as I did before with wound gold and ancient treasures . . . if you survive.’ Source: http://www.lone-star.net/literature/beowulf/beowulf5.htm

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WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, TINTERN ABBEY

This poem appeared in 1798 and is one of Wordsworth’s most effusive and widely read tributes to the English countryside. Composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour, July 13, 1798 Five years have past; five summers, with the length Of five long winters! and again I hear These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs With a soft inland murmur. Once again Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs, That on a wild secluded scene impress Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect The landscape with the quiet of the sky. The day is come when I again repose Here, under this dark sycamore, and view These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts, Which at this season, with their unripe fruits, Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves ‘Mid groves and copses. Once again I see

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These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines Of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms, Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke Sent up, in silence, from among the trees! With some uncertain notice, as might seem Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods, Or of some Hermit’s cave, where by his fire The Hermit sits alone. These beauteous forms, Through a long absence, have not been to me As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye: But oft, in lonely rooms, and ’mid the din Of towns and cities, I have owed to them In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart; And passing even into my purer mind, With tranquil restoration: feelings too Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps, As have no slight or trivial influence On that best portion of a good man’s life, His little, nameless, unremembered, acts Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust, To them I may have owed another gift, Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood, In which the burthen of the mystery, In which the heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world, Is lightened: – that serene and blessed mood, In which the affections gently lead us on, Until, the breath of this corporeal frame And even the motion of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul: While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things. If this Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft In darkness and amid the many shapes Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,

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Have hung upon the beatings of my heart – How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee, O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro’ the woods, How often has my spirit turned to thee! And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought, With many recognitions dim and faint, And somewhat of a sad perplexity, The picture of the mind revives again: While here I stand, not only with the sense Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts That in this moment there is life and food For future years. And so I dare to hope, Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first I came among these hills; when like a roe I bounded o’er the mountains, by the sides Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams, Wherever nature led: more like a man Flying from something that he dreads, than one Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then (The coarser pleasures of my boyish days, And their glad animal movements all gone by) To me was all in all. – I cannot paint What then I was. The sounding cataract Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock, The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, Their colours and their forms, were then to me An appetite; a feeling and a love, That had no need of a remoter charm, By thought supplied, nor any interest Unborrowed from the eye. – That time is past, And all its aching joys are now no more, And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur, other gifts Have followed; for such loss, I would believe, Abundant recompense. For I have learned To look on nature, not as in the hour Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes The still, sad music of humanity, Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power To chasten and subdue. And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy

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Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man; A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still A lover of the meadows and the woods, And mountains; and of all that we behold From this green earth; of all the mighty world Of eye, and ear, – both what they half create, And what perceive; well pleased to recognise In nature and the language of the sense, The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul Of all my moral being. Nor perchance, If I were not thus taught, should I the more Suffer my genial spirits to decay: For thou art with me here upon the banks Of this fair river; thou my dearest Friend, My dear, dear Friend; and in thy voice I catch The language of my former heart, and read My former pleasures in the shooting lights Of thy wild eyes. Oh! yet a little while May I behold in thee what I was once, My dear, dear Sister! and this prayer I make, Knowing that Nature never did betray The heart that loved her; ’tis her privilege, Through all the years of this our life, to lead From joy to joy: for she can so inform The mind that is within us, so impress With quietness and beauty, and so feed With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues, Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men, Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all The dreary intercourse of daily life, Shall e’er prevail against us, or disturb Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold Is full of blessings. Therefore let the moon

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Shine on thee in thy solitary walk; And let the misty mountain-winds be free To blow against thee: and, in after years, When these wild ecstasies shall be matured Into a sober pleasure; when thy mind Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms, Thy memory be as a dwelling-place For all sweet sounds and harmonies; oh! then, If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief, Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts Of tender joy wilt thou remember me, And these my exhortations! Nor, perchance If I should be where I no more can hear Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams Of past existence – wilt thou then forget That on the banks of this delightful stream We stood together; and that I, so long A worshipper of Nature, hither came Unwearied in that service: rather say With warmer love – oh! with far deeper zeal Of holier love. Nor wilt thou then forget, That after many wanderings, many years Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs, And this green pastoral landscape, were to me More dear, both for themselves and for thy sake! Source: http://www.bartleby.com/145/ww138.html

Document 3

THE CRUELTY TO ANIMALS ACT OF 1835

This British law superseded and expanded legislation passed thirteen years before. It was the most ambitious effort to date to protect domestic animals from mistreatment. Great Britain Parliament [5 & 6 William IV. c. 59] Cruelty to Animals Act, 1835 An Act to Consolidate and Amend the Several Laws Relating to the Cruel and Improper Treatment of Animals, and the Mischiefs Arising from the Driving of Cattle, and to Make Other Provisions in Regard Thereto [9 September 1835]. WHEREAS frequent Accidents arise from improperly driving Cattle, and many and great Cruelties are practised by improperly driving and conveying

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Cattle to, at, and from public Markets and otherwise, as well as in slaughtering and keeping and detaining the same without Food and Nourishment, to the great and needless Increase of the Sufferings of dumb Animals, and to the Demoralization of the People, and whereby the Lives and Property of His Majesty’s Subjects are greatly endangered and injured: And whereas it is expedient to reduce into One Act, and to alter, amend, and enlarge the Powers and Provisions of several Acts now in force relating to the cruel and improper Treatment of Cattle, and the Mischiefs arising from the driving thereof, and also to prevent as far as possible the cruel and improper Treatment of Cattle and other Animals, and to make divers Provisions in regard thereto: [The Act 3 G. 4. c. 71. and Part of the Act 3 W. 4. c. 19. repealed.] Be it therefore enacted by the King’s most Excellent Majesty, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons, in this present Parliament assembled, and by the Authority of the same, That the Act hereinafter mentioned, (that is to say,) an Act passed in the Third Year of the Reign of His late Majesty King George the Fourth, intituled An Act to prevent the cruel and improper Treatment of Cattle, and so much of an Act passed in the Third Year of the Reign of His present Majesty, intituled An Act for the more effectual Administration of Justice in the Office of a Justice of the Peace in the several Police Offices established in the Metropolis, and for the more effectual Prevention of Depredations on the River Thames and its Vicinity for Three Years, as recites and enacts as follows, (that is to say,) And whereas divers Places in and about the Metropolis are kept and used for the Purpose of fighting or baiting of Bears or other Animals, at which Places idle and disorderly Persons commonly assemble, to the Interruption of good Order and the Danger of the public Peace; be it therefore enacted, that any Person who shall, within Five Miles of Temple Bar, keep or use or shall act in the Management or conducting of any Premises or Place whatsoever for the Purpose of fighting or baiting of Bears, Cock-fighting, baiting or fighting of Badgers or other Animals, shall, on Conviction thereof before any One Justice of the Peace, forfeit any Sum not exceeding Five Pounds, and in default of immediate Payment shall be liable to be imprisoned and kept to hard Labour for any Time not exceeding Two Months, unless the said Penalty shall be sooner paid, shall be and the same are hereby severally repealed, and made null and void to all Intents and Purposes, save and except as to any Penalties or Forfeitures incurred and not recovered, and to any Offences or other Matters committed and done before the passing of this Act. Source: A Collection of the Public General Statutes Passed in the Fifth and Sixth Year of the Reign of His Majesty King William the Fourth (London, 1835) 344–51; Digitized by Google, Online at Google Books. http://www.animalrightshistory.org/animal-rightslaw/romantic-legislation/1835-uk-act-cruelty-to-animals.htm

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Document 4

GEORGE PERKINS MARSH, MAN AND NATURE

Though little noticed upon its publication in 1864, Man and Nature anticipated later ecological arguments, particularly in relation to the many functions of forests. Another advantage of the artificially regulated forest is, that it admits of such grading of the ground as to favor the retention or discharge of water at will, while the facilities it affords for selecting and duly proportioning, as well as properly spacing, the trees which compose it, are too obvious to require to be more than hinted at. In conducting these operations, we must have a diligent eye to the requirements of nature, and must remember that a wood is not an arbitrary assemblage of trees to be selected and disposed according to the caprice of its owner. ‘A forest,’ says Clavé, ‘is not, as is often supposed, a simple collection of trees succeeding each other in long perspective, without bond of union, and capable of isolation from each other; it is, on the contrary, a whole, the different parts of which are interdependent upon each other, and it constitutes, so to speak, a true individuality. Every forest has a special character, determined by the form of the surface it grows upon, the kinds of trees that compose it, and the manner in which they are grouped.’ [Études Forestières, p. 7.] All human institutions, associate arrangements, modes of life, have their characteristic imperfections. The natural, perhaps the necessary defect of ours, is their instability, their want of fixedness, not in form only, but even in spirit. The face of physical nature in the United States shares this incessant fluctuation, and the landscape is as variable as the habits of the population. It is time for some abatement in the restless love of change which characterizes us, and makes us almost a nomade rather than a sedentary people.* We have now felled forest enough everywhere, in many districts far too much. Let us restore this one element of material life to its normal proportions, and devise means for maintaining the permanence of its relations to the fields, the meadows, and the pastures, to the rain and the dews of heaven, to the springs and rivulets with which it waters the earth. The establishment of an approximately fixed ratio between the two most broadly characterized distinctions of rural surface – woodland and plough land – would involve a certain persistence of character in all the branches of industry, all the occupations and habits of life, which depend upon or are immediately connected with either, without implying a rigidity that should exclude flexibility of accommodation to the many changes of external circumstance which human wisdom can neither prevent nor foresee, and would thus help us to become, more emphatically, a well-ordered and stable commonwealth, and, not less conspicuously, a people of progress.

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* It is rare that a middle-aged American dies in the house where he was born, or an old man even in that which he has built; and this is scarcely less true of the rural districts, where every man owns his habitation, than of the city, where the majority live in hired houses. This life of incessant flitting is unfavorable for the execution of permanent improvements of every sort, and especially of those which, like the forest, are slow in repaying any part of the capital expended in them. It requires a very generous spirit in a landholder to plant a wood on a farm he expects to sell, or which he knows will pass out of the hands of his descendants at his death. But the very fact of having begun a plantation would attach the proprietor more strongly to the soil for which he had made such a sacrifice; and the paternal acres would have a greater value in the eyes of a succeeding generation, if thus improved and beautified by the labors of those from whom they were inherited. Landed property, therefore, the transfer of which is happily free from every legal impediment or restriction in the United States, would find, in the feelings thus prompted, a moral check against a too frequent change of owners, and would tend to remain long enough in one proprietor or one family to admit of gradual improvements which would increase its value both to the possessor and to the state. Source: http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/consrv:@field(DOCID+@lit (amrvgvg07div94)).

ANNA SEWELL, BLACK BEAUTY

Sewell wrote this highly influential novel from the perspective of an English horse. It played a major role in rallying support for animal rights. I had often wondered how it was, that Sir Oliver had such a very short tail; it really was only six or seven inches long, with a tassel of hair hanging from it; and on one of our holidays in the orchard I ventured to ask him by what accident it was that he had lost his tail. ‘Accident!’ he snorted with a fierce look, ‘it was no accident! it was a cruel, shameful, cold-blooded act! When I was young I was taken to a place where these cruel things were done; I was tied up, and made fast so that I could not stir, and then they came and cut off my long beautiful tail, through the flesh, and through the bone, and took it away.’ ‘How dreadful!’ I exclaimed. ‘Dreadful! ah! It was dreadful; but it was not only the pain, though that was terrible and lasted a long time; it was not only the indignity of having my best ornament taken from me, though that was bad; but it was this, how could I ever brush the flies off my sides and my hind legs anymore? You who

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have tails just whisk the flies off without thinking about it, and you can’t tell what a torment it is to have them settle upon you and sting and sting, and have nothing in the world to lash them off with. I tell you it is a life-long wrong, and a life-long loss; but thank Heaven! they don’t do it now.’ ‘What did they do it for then?’ said Ginger. ‘For fashion!’ said the old horse with a stamp of his foot; ‘for fashion! if you know what that means; there was not a well-bred young horse in my time that had not his tail docked in that shameful way, just as if the good God that made us, did not know what we wanted and what looked best.’ ‘I suppose it is fashion that makes them strap our heads up with those horrid bits that I was tortured with in London,’ said Ginger. ‘Of course it is,’ said he; ‘to my mind, fashion is one of the wickedest things in the world. Now look, for instance, at the way they serve dogs, cutting off their tails to make them look plucky, and shearing up their pretty little ears to a point to make them look sharp, forsooth. I had a dear friend once, a brown terrier; “Skye”, they called her, she was so fond of me, that she never would sleep out of my stall; she made her bed under the manger, and there she had a litter of five as pretty little puppies as need be; none were drowned, for they were a valuable kind, and how pleased she was with them! and when they got their eyes open and crawled about, it was a real pretty sight; but one day the man came and took them all away; I thought he might be afraid I should tread upon them. But it was not so; in the evening poor Skye brought them back again, one by one in her mouth; not the happy little things that they were, but bleeding and crying pitifully; they had all had a piece of their tails cut off, and the soft flap of their pretty little ears was cut quite off. How their mother licked them, and how troubled she was, poor thing! I never forgot it. They healed in time, and they forgot the pain, but the nice soft flap that of course was intended to protect the delicate part of theirs ears from dust and injury, was gone for ever. Why don’t they cut their own children’s ears into points to make them look sharp? Why don’t they cut the end off their noses to make them look plucky? One would be just as sensible as the other. What right have they to torment and disfigure God’s creatures?’ Sir Oliver, though he was so gentle, was a fiery old fellow, and what he said was all so new to me and so dreadful, that I found a bitter feeling toward men rise up in my mind that I never had before. Of course Ginger was much excited; she flung up her head with flashing eyes, and distended nostrils, declaring that men were both brutes and blockheads. Source: Anna Sewell, Black Beauty (1877) pp. 48–50, http://www.archive.org/stream/ blackbeautyhisgr00seweiala/blackbeautyhisgr00seweiala_djvu.txt

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WILLIAM MORRIS, NEWS FROM NOWHERE

Morris was one of the most prolific and influential members of Britain’s arts-and-crafts movement. In this widely read novel first published in 1890 his narrator is visiting a community set far in the future in which people live simply and close to nature. Romantic as this Kensington wood was, however, it was not lonely. We came on many groups both coming and going, or wandering in the edges of the wood. Amongst these were many children from six or eight years old up to sixteen or seventeen. They seemed to me to be especially fine specimens of their race, and enjoying themselves to the utmost; some of them were hanging about little tents pitched on the greensward, and by some of these fires were burning, with pots hanging over them gipsy fashion. Dick explained to me that there were scattered houses in the forest, and indeed we caught a glimpse of one or two. He said they were mostly quite small, such as used to be called cottages when there were slaves in the land, but they were pleasant enough and fitting for the wood. ‘They must be pretty well stocked with children,’ said I, pointing to the many youngsters about the way. ‘O,’ said he, ‘these children do not all come from the near houses, the woodland houses, but from the countryside generally. They often make up parties, and come to play in the woods for weeks together in summer-time, living in tents, as you see. We rather encourage them to it; they learn to do things for themselves, and get to notice the wild creatures; and, you see, the less they stew inside houses the better for them. Indeed, I must tell you that many grown people will go to live in the forests through the summer; though they for the most part go to the bigger ones, like Windsor, or the Forest of Dean, or the northern wastes. Apart from the other pleasures of it, it gives them a little rough work, which I am sorry to say is getting somewhat scarce for these last fifty years.’ He broke off, and then said, ‘I tell you all this, because I see that if I talk I must be answering questions, which you are thinking, even if you are not speaking them out; but my kinsman will tell you more about it.’ I saw that I was likely to get out of my depth again, and so merely for the sake of tiding over an awkwardness and to say something, I said – ‘Well, the youngsters here will be all the fresher for school when the summer gets over and they have to go back again.’ ‘School?’ he said; ‘yes, what do you mean by that word? I don’t see how it can have anything to do with children. We talk, indeed, of a school of herring, and a school of painting, and in the former sense we might talk of a school of children – but otherwise,’ said he, laughing, ‘I must own myself beaten.’

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Hang it! thought I, I can’t open my mouth without digging up some new complexity. I wouldn’t try to set my friend right in his etymology; and I thought I had best say nothing about the boy-farms which I had been used to call schools, as I saw pretty clearly that they had disappeared; so I said after a little fumbling, ‘I was using the word in the sense of a system of education.’ ‘Education?’ said he, meditatively, ‘I know enough Latin to know that the word must come from “educere”, to lead out; and I have heard it used; but I have never met anybody who could give me a clear explanation of what it means.’ You may imagine how my new friends fell in my esteem when I heard this frank avowal; and I said, rather contemptuously, ‘Well, education means a system of teaching young people.’ ‘Why not old people also?’ said he with a twinkle in his eye. ‘But,’ he went on, ‘I can assure you our children learn, whether they go through a “system of teaching” or not. Why, you will not find one of these children about here, boy or girl, who cannot swim; and every one of them has been used to tumbling about the little forest ponies – there’s one of them now! They all of them know how to cook; the bigger lads can mow; many can thatch and do odd jobs at carpentering; or they know how to keep shop. I can tell you they know plenty of things.’ Source: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3261/3261.txt

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ROBERT BADEN-POWELL, SCOUTING FOR BOYS

Baden-Powell drew heavily on his experience training young men for the British military in founding the Scout Movement, an organization dedicated to getting a much broader range of the nation’s boys into the outdoors. His Scouting for Boys first appeared in 1908 and became one of the best-selling books in history. Camp Fire Yarn No. 9 Camping Some people talk of ‘roughing it’ in camp. Well, a tenderfoot may find it rough and uncomfortable. But there is no ‘roughing it’ for an old Scout; he knows how to look after himself and make himself comfortable. If he has no tent, he doesn’t sit down to shiver and grouse, but sets to work to rig up a shelter or hut for himself. He chooses a good spot for it where he is not likely to be flooded out if a storm of rain were to come on. Then he lights a camp fire, and makes himself a soft mattress of ferns or straw.

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An old Scout is full of resource. He can find a way out of any difficulty or discomfort. Ground When you go camping, you must first decide where you will have your camp, and then what kind of camp it shall be. The nearer it is to your homes, the less will be the expense of traveling. To my mind, the best place for a camp is in or close by a wood where you have permission to cut firewood and to build huts. So if you know of an owner in your neighbourhood who may let you use a corner of his wood, there is your chance. Inside a wood the ground may be damp and the trees will continue dripping in wet weather. Be on the look-out for this. If you build good rainproof huts, you need no tents. The seaside also gives some good camp grounds if you find a place where boats are available and bathing possible. Sometimes you can get the use of a boathouse to live in. Don’t forget that you will want good water and some firewood. Or you can go to mountains, moor, or river, and get permission to pitch your camp. In choosing the camp site, always think what it would be if the weather became very rainy and windy. Choose the driest and most sheltered spot, not too far away from your water supply. Remember that a good water supply is of first importance. And make sure that your drinking water is pure. Tramping Camps Instead of a fixed or ‘standing camp’, many Scouts prefer a ‘tramping camp’. Of course, it is much better fun to go over new country. But to make a tramping camp enjoyable you want good weather. In arranging your tramp, your first point will be to select the line of country you want to visit, and mark out from the map where you will halt each night. You will find that about five miles a day is as much as you will want to do. You might want to make a trek-cart for carrying your tents, blankets, waterproof sheets, and so on. At the end of each day’s march you would get permission from a farmer to pitch your camp in his field, or get the use of his barn to sleep in – especially if the weather be wet. Tents Before you know which type of tent you will want, you must decide whether it will be wanted for a standing or moving camp. For a standing camp, from which you don’t mean to move, I prefer the kind used by explorers called a ridge tent or wall tent. They are unequalled for comfort and for making the camp look neat. If they have fly-sheets, they

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will be quite waterproof, even if you touch the inside of the tent, and the flysheet will keep the tent cool in hot sunshine and warm in frosty weather. Smaller Scout tents also do very well for camp if you have two or more for each Patrol. You can make your own tent during the winter months – and this, perhaps, is the best way of all, as it comes cheapest in the end. And if, while you are about it, you make one or two extra ones, you may be able to sell them at a good profit. Where the expense of tents prohibits buying them, remember that used tents may often be hired for a week or more at small cost . . . Camp Routine Here are two suggested time-tables for the day: 7:00 a.m. 8:00 a.m. 8:15 a.m. 9:45 a.m. 10:00 a.m. 1:00 p.m. 1:30–2:30 p.m. 2:30–5:30 p.m. 6:30 p.m. 8:30–9:30 p.m. 9:30 p.m. 10:00 p.m.

Turn out, air bed, wash, etc. Hoist the flag; prayers: (It may be found better to have this directly after inspection.) Breakfast Inspection Scouting practice. Swimming Lunch Rest (compulsory) Scouting games in neighbourhood. Swimming Dinner, followed by free time Camp fire (Or 9:00–11:00 p.m. Night practices) Turn in Lights out. Silence in camp.

7:00 a.m. 8:00 a.m. 8:15 a.m. 10:00 a.m. 10:15 a.m.–12 Noon 1:00 p.m. 1:30–2:30 p.m. 2:30–5:00 p.m. 5:00 p.m. 5:30–8:00 p.m. 8:00 p.m. 8:30–9:30 p.m. 10:00 p.m.

Turn out, air bed, wash, etc. Flag break, prayers Breakfast Inspection Scouting activities Dinner Quiet Hour Wide games Tea and biscuits Recreation and camp games Cocoa Camp fire Lights out.

Source: http://www.docstoc.com/docs/33297017/CAMP-FIRE-YARN-NO-9

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JOHN MUIR, MY FIRST SUMMER IN THE SIERRAS

Muir was the nation’s leading exponent of wilderness by the time this book appeared in 1890. It describes Yosemite Park, his most beloved place. Apart from the human interest of my visit to-day, I greatly enjoyed Yosemite, which I had visited only once before, having spent eight days last spring in rambling amid its rocks and waters. Wherever we go in the mountains, or indeed in any of God’s wild fields, we find more than we seek. Descending four thousand feet in a few hours, we enter a new world – climate, plants, sounds, inhabitants, and scenery all new or changed. Near camp the gold cup oak forms sheets of chaparral, on top of which we may make our beds. Going down the Indian Cañon we observe this little bush changing by regular gradations to a large bush, to a small tree, and then larger, until on the rocky taluses near the bottom of the valley we find it developed into a broad, wide-spreading, gnarled, picturesque tree from four to eight feet in diameter, and forty or fifty feet high. Innumerable are the forms of water displayed. Every gliding reach, cascade, and fall has characters of its own. Had a good view of the Vernal and Nevada, two of the main falls of the valley, less than a mile apart, and offering striking differences in voice, form, color, etc. The Vernal, four hundred feet high and about seventy-five or eighty feet wide, drops smoothly over a round-lipped precipice and forms a superb apron of embroidery, green and white, slightly folded and fluted, maintaining this form nearly to the bottom, where it is suddenly veiled in quick-flying billows of spray and mist, in which the afternoon sunbeams play with ravishing beauty of rainbow colors. The Nevada is white from its first appearance as it leaps out into the freedom of the air. At the head it presents a twisted appearance, by an over folding of the current from striking on the side of its channel just before the first free out-bounding leap is made. About two thirds of the way down, the hurrying throng of comet-shaped masses glance on an inclined part of the face of the precipice and are beaten into yet whiter foam, greatly expanded, and sent bounding outward, making an indescribably glorious show, especially when the afternoon sunshine is pouring into it. In this fall – one of the most wonderful in the world – the water does not seem to be under the dominion of ordinary laws, but rather as if it were a living creature, full of the strength of the mountains and their huge, wild joy. From beneath heavy throbbing blasts of spray the broken river is seen emerging in ragged boulder-chafed strips. These are speedily gathered into a roaring torrent, showing that the young river is still gloriously alive. On it goes, shouting, roaring, exulting in its strength, passes through a gorge with sublime display of energy, then suddenly expands on a gently inclined pavement, down which it rushes in thin sheets and folds of lace-work into a quiet pool – ‘Emerald Pool,’ as it is called – a stopping-place, a period separating

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two grand sentences. Resting here long enough to part with its foam-bells and gray mixtures of air, it glides quietly to the verge of the Vernal precipice in a broad sheet and makes its new display in the Vernal Fall; then more rapids and rock tossings down the cañon, shaded by live oak, Douglas spruce, fir, maple, and dogwood. It receives the Illilouette tributary, and makes a long sweep out into the level, sun-filled valley to join the other streams which, like itself, have danced and sung their way down from snowy heights to form the main Merced – the river of Mercy. But of this there is no end, and life, when one thinks of it, is so short. Never mind, one day in the midst of these divine glories is well worth living and toiling and starving for . . . It seems strange that visitors to Yosemite should be so little influenced by its novel grandeur, as if their eyes were bandaged and their ears stopped. Most of those I saw yesterday were looking down as if wholly unconscious of anything going on about them, while the sublime rocks were trembling with the tones of the mighty chanting congregation of waters gathered from all the mountains round about, making music that might draw angels out of heaven. Yet respectable-looking, even wise-looking people were fixing bits of worms on bent pieces of wire to catch trout. Sport they called it. Should church-goers try to pass the time fishing in baptismal fonts while dull sermons were being preached, the so-called sport might not be so bad; but to play in the Yosemite temple, seeking pleasure in the pain of fishes struggling for their lives, while God himself is preaching his sublimest water and stone sermons! Source: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/32540/32540-h/32540-h.htm#photo5

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J.R.R. TOLKIEN, THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING

Published in 1954, this first instalment of the Lord of the Rings was written by a distinguished English professor of literature. Tolkien’s novels became wildly popular a decade after they first appeared. In this excerpt he is setting the stage for his epic story by describing the characteristics of hobbits, one of whom will be the story’s protagonist. Hobbits are an unobtrusive but very ancient people, more numerous formerly than they are today; for they love peace and quiet and good tilled earth: a well-ordered and well-farmed countryside was their favourite haunt. They do not and did not understand or like machines more complicated than a forge-bellows, a water-mill, or a hand-loom, though they were skilful with tools. Even in ancient days they were, as a rule, shy of the ‘the Big Folk’, as

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they call us, and now they avoid us with dismay and are becoming hard to find. They are quick of hearing and sharp-eyed, and though they are inclined to be fat and do not hurry unnecessarily, they are nonetheless nimble and deft in their movements. They possessed from the first the art of disappearing swiftly and silently, when large folk whom they do not wish to meet came blundering by; and this art they have developed until to Men it may seem magical. But hobbits have never, in fact, studied magic of any kind, and their elusiveness is due solely to a professional skill that heredity and practice, and a close friendship with the earth, have rendered inimitable by bigger and clumsier races. For they are a little people, smaller than Dwarves: less stout and stocky, that is, even when they are not actually much shorter. Their height is variable, ranging between two and four feet of our measure. They seldom now reach three feet; but they have dwindled, they say, and in ancient days they were taller. According to the Red Book, Bandobras Took (Bullroarer), son of Isengrim the Second, was four foot five and able to ride a horse. He was surpassed in all Hobbit records only by two famous characters of old; but that curious matter is dealt with in this book. As for the Hobbits of the Shire, with whom these tales are concerned, in the days of their peace and prosperity they were a merry folk. They dressed in bright colours, being notably fond of yellow and green; but they seldom wore shoes, since their feet had tough leathery soles and were clad in a thick curling hair, much like the hair of their heads, which was commonly brown. Thus, the only craft little practised among them was shoe-making; but they had long and skilful fingers and could make many other useful and comely things. Their faces were as a rule good-natured rather than beautiful, broad, bright-eyed, red-cheeked, with mouths apt to laughter, and to eating and drinking. And laugh they did, and eat, and drink, often and heartily, being fond of simple jests at all times, and of six meals a day (when they could get them). They were hospitable and delighted in parties, and in presents, which they gave away freely and eagerly accepted. It is plain indeed that in spite of later estrangement Hobbits are relatives of ours: far nearer to us than Elves, or even than Dwarves. Of old they spoke the languages of Men, after their own fashion, and liked and disliked much of the same things as Men did. But what exactly our relationship is can no longer be discovered. The beginning of Hobbits lies far back in the Elder Days that are now lost and forgotten. Only the Elves still preserve any records of that vanished time, and their traditions are concerned almost entirely with their own history, in which Men appear seldom and Hobbits are not mentioned at all. Yet it is clear that Hobbits had, in fact, lived quietly in Middle-earth for many long years before other folk became even aware of them. And the world being after all full of strange creatures beyond count,

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these little people seemed of very little importance. But in the days of Bilbo, and of Frodo his heir, they suddenly became, by no wish of their own, both important and renowned, and troubled the counsels of the Wise and the Great. Source: http://www.angelfire.com/rnb/zaibar/download/lord_of_the_rings.pdf

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ALDO LEOPOLD, A SAND COUNTY ALMANAC

Published posthumously in 1949, this book by a professor at the University of Wisconsin had become by the 1970s the most widely read book on ecology ever written. All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. His instincts prompt him to compete for his place in the community, but his ethics prompt him also to co-operate (perhaps in order that there may be a place to compete for). The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land. This sounds simple: do we not already sing our love for and obligation to the land of the free and the home of the brave? Yes, but just what and whom do we love? Certainly not the soil, which we are sending helter-skelter downriver. Certainly not the waters, which we assume have no function except to turn turbines, float barges, and carry off sewage. Certainly not the animals, of which we have already extirpated many of the largest and most beautiful species. A land ethic of course cannot prevent the alteration, management, and use of these ‘resources,’ but it does affirm their right to continued existence, and, at least in spots, their continued existence in a natural state. 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. It is inconceivable to me that an ethical relation to land can exist without love, respect, and admiration for land, and a high regard for its value. By value, I of course mean something far broader than mere economic value; I mean value in the philosophical sense. Perhaps the most serious obstacle impeding the evolution of a land ethic is the fact that our educational and economic system is headed away from, rather than toward, an intense consciousness of land. Your true modern is separated from the land by many middlemen, and by innumerable physical gadgets. He has no vital relation to it, to him it is the space between cities on which crops grow. Turn him loose for a day on the land, and if the spot does

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not happen to be a golf links or a ‘scenic’ area, he is bored stiff. If crops could be raised by hydroponics, instead of farming, it would suit him very well. Synthetic substitutes for wood, leather, wool, and other natural land product suit him better than the originals. In short, land is something he has ‘outgrown.’ Almost equally serious as an obstacle to a land ethic is the attitude of the farmer for whom the land is still an adversary, or a taskmaster that keeps him in slavery. Theoretically, the mechanization of farming ought to cut the farmer’s chains, but whether it really does is debatable. One of the requisites for an ecological comprehension of land is an understanding of ecology, and this is by no means co-extensive with ‘education’; in fact, much higher education seems deliberately to avoid ecological concepts. An understanding of ecology does not necessarily originate in courses bearing ecological labels; it is quite as likely to be labeled geography, botany, agronomy, history, or economics. This is as it should be, but whatever the label, ecological training is scarce. The case for a land ethic would appear hopeless but for the minority which is in obvious revolt against these ‘modern’ trends. The ‘key-log’ which must be moved to release the evolutionary process for an ethic is simply this: quit thinking about decent land-use as solely an economic problem. Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and esthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. 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. It of course goes without saying that economic feasibility limits the tether of what can or cannot be done for land. It always has and it always will. The fallacy the economic determinists have tied around our collective neck, and which we now need to cast off, is the belief that economics determines all land-use. This is simply not true. An innumerable host of actions and attitudes, comprising perhaps the bulk of all land relations, is determined by the land-users’ tastes and predilections, rather than by his purse. The bulk of all land relations hinges on investments of time, forethought, skill, and faith rather than on investments of cash. As a land-user thinketh, so is he. I have purposely presented the land ethic as a product of social evolution because nothing so important as an ethic is ever ‘written.’ Only the most superficial student of history supposes that Moses ‘wrote’ the Decalogue; it evolved in the minds of a thinking community, and Moses wrote a tentative summary of it for a ‘seminar.’ I say tentative because evolution never stops. The evolution of a land ethic is an intellectual as well as emotional process. Conservation is paved with good intentions which prove to be futile, or even dangerous, because they are devoid of critical understanding either of the land, or of economic land-use. I think it is a truism that as the ethical

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frontier advances from the individual to the community, its intellectual content increases. The mechanism of operation is the same for any ethic: social approbation for right actions: social disapproval for wrong actions. By and large, our present problem is one of attitudes and implements. We are remodeling the Alhambra with a steam-shovel, and we are proud of our yardage. We shall hardly relinquish the shovel, which after all has many good points, but we are in need of gentler and more objective criteria for its successful use. Source: San Francisco and New York: Sierra Club and Ballantine, 1970, pp. 239–40, 261–4. Originally published in 1949.

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RACHEL CARSON, SILENT SPRING

Rachel Carson, a reclusive biologist and writer, authored the most influential book in the history of the environment. It first appeared late in 1962. A fable for tomorrow There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings. The town lay in the midst of a checkerboard of prosperous farms, with fields of grain and hillsides of orchards where, in spring, white clouds of bloom drifted above the green fields. In autumn, oak and maple and birch set up a blaze of color that flamed and flickered across a backdrop of pines. Then foxes barked in the hills and deer silently crossed the fields, half hidden in the mists of the fall mornings. Along the roads, laurel, viburnum and alder, great ferns and wildflowers delighted the traveler’s eye through much of the year. Even in winter the road-sides were places of beauty, where countless birds came to feed on the berries and on the seed heads of the dried weeds rising above the snow. The country-side was, in fact, famous for the abundance and variety of its bird life, and when the flood of migrants was pouring through in spring and fall people traveled from great distances to observe them. Others came to fish the streams, which flowed clear and cold out of the hills and contained shady pools where trout lay. So it had been from the days many years ago when the first settlers raised their houses, sank their wells, and built their barns. Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change. Some evil spell had settled on the community: mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens; the cattle and sheep sickened and died. Everywhere was a shadow of death. The farmers spoke of much illness among their families. In the town the doctors had become more and more puzzled by new kinds of sickness appearing among their patients. There had been several sudden

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and unexplained deaths, not only among adults but even among children, who would be stricken suddenly while at play and die within a few hours. There was a strange stillness. The birds, for example – where had they gone? Many people spoke of them, puzzled and disturbed. The feeding stations in the backyards were deserted. The few birds seen anywhere were moribund; they trembled violently and could not fly. It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh. On the farms the hens brooded, but no chicks hatched. The farmers complained that they were unable to raise any pigs – the litters were small and the young survived only a few days. The apple trees were coming into bloom but no bees droned among the blossoms, so there was no pollination and there would be no fruit. The roadsides, once so attractive, were now lined with browned and withered vegetation as though swept by fire. These, too, were silent, deserted by all living things. Even the streams were now lifeless. Anglers no longer visited them, for all the fish had died. In the gutters under the eaves and between the shingles of the roofs, a white granular powder still showed a few patches; some weeks before it had fallen like snow upon the roofs and the lawns, the fields and streams. No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves. Source: http://core.ecu.edu/soci/juskaa/SOCI3222/carson.html

FARLEY MOWAT, NEVER CRY WOLF

Before he made a living as a writer, Farley Mowat worked for the Canadian Wildlife Service. In this excerpt from Never Cry Wolf he explains what happened when he examined what he thought was an empty den. The den ridge was, as I had expected . . . wolfless. Reaching the entrance to the burrow I shed my heavy trousers, tunic and sweater, and taking a flashlight (whose batteries were very nearly dead) and measuring-tape from my pack, I began the difficult task of wiggling down the entrance tunnel. The flashlight was so dim it cast only an orange glow – barely sufficient to enable me to read the marks on the measuring-tape. I squirmed onward, descending at a forty-five-degree angle, for about eight feet. My mouth and eyes were soon full of sand and I was beginning to suffer from claustrophobia, for the tunnel was just big enough to admit me.

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At the eight-foot mark the tunnel took a sharp upward bend and swung to the left. I pointed the torch in the new direction and pressed the switch. Four green lights in the murk ahead reflected back the dim torch beam. In this case green was not my signal to advance. I froze where I was, while my startled brain tried to digest the information that at least two wolves were with me in the den. Despite my close familiarity with the wolf family, this was the kind of situation where irrational but deeply ingrained prejudices completely overmaster reason and experience. To be honest, I was so frightened that paralysis gripped me. I had no weapon of any sort, and in my awkward posture I could barely have gotten one hand free with which to ward off an attack. It seemed inevitable that the wolves would attack me, for even a gopher will make a fierce defense when he is cornered in his den. The wolves did not even growl. Save for the two faintly glowing pairs of eyes, they might not have been there at all. The paralysis began to ease and, though it was a cold day, sweat broke out all over my body. In a fit of blind bravado, I shoved the torch forward as far as my arm would reach. It gave just sufficient light for me to recognize Angeline and one of the pups. They were scrunched hard against the back wall of the den; and they were as motionless as death. The shock was wearing off by this time, and the instinct for self-preservation was regaining command. As quickly as I could I began wiggling back up the slanting tunnel, tense with the expectation that at any instant the wolves would charge. But by the time I reached the entrance and had scrambled well clear of it, I had still not heard nor seen the slightest sign of movement from the wolves. I sat down on a stone and shakily lit a cigarette, becoming aware as I did so that I was no longer frightened. Instead an irrational rage possessed me. If I had had my rifle I believe I might have reacted in brute fury and tried to kill both wolves. The cigarette burned down, and a wind began to blow out of the somber northern skies. I began to shiver again; this time from cold instead of rage. My anger was passing and I was limp in the aftermath. Mine had been the fury of resentment born of fear: resentment against the beasts who had engendered naked terror in me and who, by so doing, had intolerably affronted my human ego. I was appalled at the realization of how easily I had forgotten, and how readily I had denied, all that the summer sojourn with the wolves had taught me about them . . . and about myself. I thought of Angeline and her pup cowering at the bottom of the den . . . and I was shamed. Source: Farley Mowat (1963) Never Cry Wolf, Boston: Little, Brown, pp. 243–6.

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EDWARD ABBEY, DESERT SOLITAIRE: A SEASON IN THE WILDERNESS

Writer and environmentalist Edward Abbey spoke to a generation of young Americans who craved intense relationships with the outdoors – and were willing to go to great lengths to defend wild places. There’s another disadvantage to the use of the flashlight: like many other mechanical gadgets it tends to separate a man from the world around him. If I switch it on my eyes adapt to it and I can see only the small pool of light which it makes in front of me; I am isolated. Leaving the flashlight in my pocket where it belongs, I remain a part of the environment I walk through and my vision though limited has no sharp or definite boundary. This peculiar limitation of the machine becomes doubly apparent when I return to the housetrailer. I’ve decided to write a letter (to myself ) before going to bed, and rather than use a candle for light I’m going to crank up the old generator. The generator is a small four-cylinder gasoline engine mounted on a wooden block not far from the trailer. Much too close, I’d say. I open the switch, adjust the choker, engage the crank and heave it around. The engine sputters, gasps, catches fire, gains momentum, winds up into a roar, valves popping, rockers thumping, pistons hissing up and down inside their oiled jackets. Fine; power surges into the wiring, the light bulbs inside the trailer begin to glow, brighten, becoming incandescent. The lights are so bright I can’t see a thing and have to shade my eyes as I stumble toward the open door of the trailer. Nor can I hear anything but the clatter of the generator. I am shut off from the natural world and sealed up, encapsulated, in a box of artificial light and tyrannical noise. Once inside the trailer my senses adjust to the new situation and soon enough, writing the letter, I lose awareness of the lights and the whine of the motor. But I have cut myself off completely from the greater world which surrounds the man-made shell. The desert and the night are pushed back – I can no longer participate in them or observe; I have exchanged a great and unbounded world for a small, comparatively meager one. By choice, certainly; the exchange is temporarily convenient and can be reversed whenever I wish. Finishing the letter I go outside and close the switch on the generator. The light bulbs dim and disappear, the furious gnashing of pistons whimpers to a halt. Standing by the inert and helpless engine, I hear its last vibrations die like ripples on a pool somewhere far out on the tranquil sea of desert, somewhere beyond the Yellow Cat badlands, beyond the shadow line. I wait. Now the night flows back, the mighty stillness embraces and includes me; I can see the stars again and the world of starlight. I am twenty miles or more from the nearest fellow human, but instead of loneliness I feel loveliness. Loveliness and a quiet exultation.

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In deep stillness, in a somber solemn light, these beings stand, these fins of sandstone hollowed out by time, the juniper trees so shaggy, tough and beautiful, the dead or dying pinyon pines, the little shrubs of rabbitbrush and blackbrush, the dried-up stalks of asters and sunflowers gone to seed, the black-rooted silver-blue sage. How difficult to imagine this place without a human presence; how necessary. I am almost prepared to believe that this sweet virginal primitive land will be grateful for my departure and the absence of the tourists, will breathe metaphorically a collective sigh of relief – like a whisper of wind – when we are all and finally gone and the place and its creations can return to their ancient procedures unobserved and undisturbed by the busy, anxious, brooding consciousness of man. Grateful for our departure? One more expression of human vanity. The finest quality of this stone, these plants and animals, this desert landscape is the indifference manifest to our presence, our absence, our coming, our staying or our going. Whether we live or die is a matter of absolutely no concern whatsoever to the desert. Let men in their madness blast every city on earth into black rubble and envelope the entire planet in a cloud of lethal gas – the canyons and hills, the springs and rocks will still be here, the sunlight will filter through, water will form and warmth shall be upon the land and after sufficient time, no matter how long, somewhere, living things will emerge and join and stand once again, this time perhaps to take a different and better course. I have seen the place called Trinity, in New Mexico, where our wise men exploded the first atomic bomb and the heat of the blast fused sand into a greenish glass – already the grass has returned, and the cactus and the mesquite. On this bedrock of animal faith I take my stand, close by the old road that leads eventually out of the valley of paradox. Source: Edward Abbey (1971) Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness, New York: Ballantine, pp. 14–15, 300–1. First published in 1968.

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RICHARD ADAMS, WATERSHIP DOWN

Britain’s Richard Adams leaped to fame with this novel of a group of rabbits who flee a warren that is about to be destroyed for a housing development. In this section a survivor relates the carnage. “I was in a burrow near one of the holes that the men were using. They made a lot of noise putting the bramble thing in and I’ve got an idea it wasn’t working properly. As soon as I picked up the smell of the stuff I jumped out of the burrow, but I was still fairly clear-headed. I came up the run just as the men were taking the bramble out again. They were all looking at it and talking

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and they didn’t see me. I turned round, actually in the mouth of the hole, and went down again. “Do you remember the Slack Run? I suppose hardly a rabbit went down there in our lifetime – it was so very deep and it didn’t lead anywhere in particular. No one knows even who made it. Frith [sun god] must have guided me, for I went straight down into the Slack run and began creeping along it. I was actually digging at times. It was all loose earth and fallen stones. There were all sorts of forgotten shafts and drops that led in from above, and down those were coming the most terrible sounds – cries for help, kittens squealing for their mothers, Owsla [the ruling clique] trying to give orders, rabbits cursing and fighting each other. Once a rabbit came tumbling down one of the shafts and his claws just scratched me, like a horse-chestnut bur falling in autumn. It was Celandine and he was dead. I had to tear at him before I could get over him – the place was so low and narrow – and then I went on. I could smell the bad air, but I was so deep down that I must have been beyond the worst of it. “Suddenly I found there was another rabbit with me. He was the only one I met in the whole length of the Slack Run. It was Pimpernel and I could tell at once that he was in a bad way. He was spluttering and gasping, but he was able to keep going. He asked if I was all right, but all I said was, ‘Where do we get out?’ ‘I can show you that,’ he said, ‘if you can help me along.’ So I followed him and every time he stopped – he kept forgetting where we were – I shoved him hard. I even bit him once. I was terrified that he was going to die and block the run. At last we began to come up and I could smell fresh air. We found we’d got into one of those runs that led out into the wood.” “The men had done their work badly,” resumed Holly. “Either they didn’t know about the wood holes or they couldn’t be bothered to come and block them. Almost every rabbit that came up in the field was shot, but I saw two get away. One was Nose-in-the-Air, but I don’t remember who the other was. The noise was very frightening and I would have run myself, but I kept waiting to see whether the Threarah [head rabbit] would come. After a while I began to realize that there were a few other rabbits in the wood. Pine Needles was there, I remember, and Butterbur and Ash. I got hold of all I could and told them to sit tight under cover. “After a long time the men finished. They took the bramble things out of the holes and the boy put the bodies on a stick – ” Holly stopped and pressed his nose under Bigwig’s flank. “Well, never mind about that bit,” said Hazel in a steady voice. “Tell us how you came away.” “Before that happened,” said Holly, “a great hrududu [motor vehicle] came into the field from the lane. It wasn’t the one the men came in. It was very noisy and it was yellow – as yellow as charlock: and in front there was a great

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silver, shining thing that it held in its huge front paws. I don’t know how to describe it to you. It looked like Inlé [the moon], but it was broad and not so bright. And this thing – how can I tell you – it tore the field to bits. It destroyed the field.” He stopped again. “Captain,” said Silver, “we all know you’ve seen things bad beyond telling. But surely that’s not quite what you mean?” “Upon my life,” said Holly, trembling, “it buried itself in the ground and pushed great masses of earth in front of it until the field was destroyed. The whole place became like a cattle wade in winter and you could no longer tell where any part of the field had been, between the wood and the brook. Earth and roots and grass and bushes it pushed before it and – and other things as well, from underground. Source: Richard Adams (1972) Watership Down, New York: Macmillan, pp. 139–41.

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DONELLA H. MEADOWS ET AL., THE LIMITS TO GROWTH: A REPORT FOR THE CLUB OF ROME’S PROJECT ON THE PREDICAMENT OF MANKIND

This book by the Club of Rome became very popular upon its publication in 1972, despite its technical content. Limits to Growth, as its title pointed out, argued that humans needed to turn their attentions from growth to sustainability to avoid environmental catastrophe. Since ours is a formal, or mathematical, model it also has two important advantages over mental models. First, every assumption we make is written in a precise form so that it is open to inspection and criticism by all. Second, after the assumptions have been scrutinized, discussed, and revised to agree with our best current knowledge, their implications for the future behavior of the world system can be traced without error by a computer, no matter how complicated they become. In spite of the preliminary state of our work, we believe it is important to publish the model and our findings now. Decisions are being made every day, in every part of the world, that will affect the physical, economic, and social conditions of the world system for decades to come. These decisions cannot wait for perfect models and total understanding. They will be made on the basis of some model, mental or written, in any case. We feel that the model described here is already sufficiently developed to be of some use to decisionmakers. Furthermore, the basic behavior modes we have already observed in

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this model appear to be so fundamental and general that we do not expect our broad conclusions to be substantially altered by further revisions. It is not the purpose of this book to give a complete, scientific description of all the data and mathematical equations included in the world model. Such a description can be found in the final technical report of our project. Rather, in The Limits to Growth we summarize the main features of the model and our findings in a brief, nontechnical way. The emphasis is meant to be not on the equations or the intricacies of the model, but on what it tells us about the world. We have used a computer as a tool to aid our own understanding of the causes and consequences of the accelerating trends that characterize the modern world, but familiarity with computers is by no means necessary to comprehend or to discuss our conclusions. The implications of those accelerating trends raise issues that go far beyond the proper domain of a purely scientific document. They must be debated by a wider community than that of scientists alone. Our purpose here is to open that debate. The following conclusions have emerged from our work so far. We are by no means the first group to have stated them. For the past several decades, people who have looked at the world with a global, long-term perspective have reached similar conclusions. Nevertheless, the vast majority of policymakers seems to be actively pursuing goals that are inconsistent with these results. Our conclusions are: 1. If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years. The most probably result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity. 2. It is possible to alter these growth trends and to establish a condition of ecological and economic stability that is sustainable far into the future. The state of global equilibrium could be designed so that the basic material needs of each person on earth are satisfied and each person has an equal opportunity to realize his individual human potential. 3. If the world’s people decide to strive for this second outcome rather than the first, the sooner they begin working to attain it, the greater will be their chances of success. These conclusions are so far-reaching and raise so many questions for further study that we are quite frankly overwhelmed by the enormity of the job that must be done. We hope that this book will serve to interest other

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people, in many fields of study and in many countries of the world, to raise the space and time horizons of their concerns and to join us in understanding and preparing for a period of great transition – the transition from growth to global equilibrium. Source: Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, and William W. Behrens III (1972) The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind, New York: Universe, pp. 22–4.

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ARNE NAESS, ‘THE SHALLOW AND THE DEEP, LONG-RANGE ECOLOGY MOVEMENTS’

A professor at the University of Oslo, Naess became in the 1970s the leading exponent of ‘Deep Ecology’, a movement that built on Leopold’s land ethic. It sought to establish a philosophical basis for the emerging radical environmental movements and to distinguish those movements and the beliefs that underlay them from more moderate environmental groups and philosophies. The emergence of ecologists from their former relative obscurity marks a turning point in our scientific communities. But their message is twisted and misused. A shallow, but presently rather powerful movement, and a deep, but less influential movement, compete for our attention. I shall make an effort to characterize the two. I. The Shallow Ecology movement: Fight against pollution and resource depletion. Central objective: the health and affluence of people in the developed countries. II. The Deep Ecology movement: (1) Rejection of the man-in-environment image in favor of the relational, total-field image. Organisms as knots in the biospherical net or field of intrinsic relations. An intrinsic relation between two things A and B is such that the relation belongs to the definitions of basic constitutions of A and B, so that without the relation, A and B are no longer the same things. The total-field dissolves not only the man-in-environment concept, but every compact thing-in-milieu concept – except when talking at a superficial or preliminary level of communication. (2) Biospherical egalitarianism – in principle. The ‘in principle’ clause is inserted because any realistic praxis necessitates some killing, exploitation, and suppression. The ecological fieldworker acquires a deep-seated respect, or even veneration, for ways and forms of life. He reaches an understanding

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from within, a kind of understanding that others reserve for fellow men and for a narrow section of ways and forms of life. To the ecological fieldworker, the equal right to live and blossom is an intuitively clear and obvious value axiom. Its restriction to humans is an anthropocentrism with detrimental effects upon the life quality of humans themselves. The quality depends in part upon the deep pleasure and satisfaction we receive from close partnership with other forms of life. The attempt to ignore our dependence and to establish a master–slave role has contributed to the alienation of man from himself. Ecological egalitarianism implies the reinterpretation of the futureresearch variable, ‘level of crowding,’ so that general mammalian crowding and loss of life-equality is taken seriously, not only human crowding. (Research on the high requirements of free space of certain mammals has, incidentally, suggested that theorists of human urbanism have largely underestimated human life-space requirements. Behavioral crowding symptoms, such as neuroses, aggressiveness, loss of traditions, are largely the same among mammals.) (3) Principles of diversity and of symbiosis. Diversity enhances the potentialities of survival, the chances of new modes of life, the richness of forms. And the so-called struggle for life, and survival of the fittest, should be interpreted in the sense of the ability to coexist and cooperate in complex relationships, rather than the ability to kill, exploit, and suppress. ‘Live and let live’ is a more powerful ecological principle than ‘Either you or me.’ The latter tends to reduce the multiplicity of kinds of forms of life, and also to create destruction within the communities of the same species. Ecologically inspired attitudes therefore favor diversity of human ways of life, of cultures, of occupations, of economies. They support the fight against economic and cultural, as much as military, invasion and domination, and they are opposed to the annihilation of seals and whales as much as to that of human tribes and cultures. (4) Anti-class posture. Diversity of human ways of life is in part due to (intended or unintended) exploitation and suppression on the part of certain groups. The exploiter lives differently from the exploited, but both are adversely affected in their potentialities of self-realization. The principle of diversity does not cover differences due merely to certain attitudes or behaviors forcibly blocked or restrained. The principles of ecological egalitarianism and of symbiosis support the same anti-class posture. The ecological attitude favors the extension of all three principles to any group conflicts, including those of today between developing and developed nations. The three principles also favor extreme caution toward any overall plans for the future, except those consistent with wide and widening classless diversity.

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(5) Fight against pollution and resource depletion. In this fight ecologists have found powerful supporters, but sometimes to the detriment of their total stand. This happens when attention is focused on pollution and resource depletion rather than on the other points, or when projects are implemented which reduce pollution but increase evils of other kinds. Thus, if prices of life necessities increase because of the installation of anti-pollution devices, class differences increase too. An ethics of responsibility implies that ecologists do not serve the shallow, but the deep ecological movement. That is, not only point (5), but all seven points must be considered together. Ecologists are irreplaceable informants in any society, whatever their political color. If well organized, they have the power to reject jobs in which they submit themselves to institutions or to planners with limited ecological objectives. As it is now, ecologists sometimes serve masters who deliberately ignore the wider perspectives. (6) Complexity, not complication. The theory of ecosystems contains an important distinction between what is complicated without any Gestalt or unifying principles – we may think of finding our way through a chaotic city – and what is complex. A multiplicity of more or less lawful, interacting factors may operate together to form a unity, a system. We make a shoe or use a map or integrate a variety of activities into a workaday pattern. Organisms, ways of life, and interactions in the biosphere in general, exhibit complexity of such an astoundingly high level as to color the general outlook of ecologists. Such complexity makes thinking in terms of vast systems inevitable. It also makes for a keen, steady perception of the profound human ignorance of biospherical relationships and therefore of the effect of disturbances. Applied to humans, the complexity-not-complication principle favors division of labor, not fragmentation of labor. It favors integrated actions in which the whole person is active, not mere reactions. It favors complex economies, an integrated variety of means of living. (Combinations of industrial and agricultural activity, of intellectual and manual work, of specialized and nonspecialized occupations, of urban and non-urban activity, of work in city and recreation in nature with recreation in city and work in nature . . . ) It favors soft technique and ‘soft future-research,’ less prognosis, more clarification of possibilities. More sensitivity toward continuity and live traditions, and – more importantly, towards our state of ignorance. The implementation of ecologically responsible policies requires in this century an exponential growth of technical skill and invention – but in new directions, directions which today are not consistently and liberally supported by the research policy organs of our nation states. (7) Local autonomy and decentralization. The vulnerability of a form of life is roughly proportional to the weight of influences from afar, from outside

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the local region in which that form has obtained an ecological equilibrium. This lends support to our efforts to strengthen local self-government and material and mental self-sufficiency. But these efforts presuppose an impetus towards decentralization. Pollution problems, including those of thermal pollution and recirculation of materials, also lead us in this direction, because increased local autonomy, if we are able to keep other factors constant, reduces energy consumption. (Compare an approximately selfsufficient locality with one requiring the importation of foodstuff, materials for house construction, fuel and skilled labor from other continents. The former may use only five percent of the energy used by the latter.) Local autonomy is strengthened by a reduction in the number of links in the hierarchical chains of decision. (For example a chain consisting of a local board, municipal council, highest sub-national decision-maker, a statewide institution in a state federation, a federal national government institution, a coalition of nations, and of institutions, e.g., E.E.C. top levels, and a global institution, can be reduced to one made up of a local board, nationwide institution, and global institution.) Even if a decision follows majority rule at each step, many local interests may be dropped along the line, if it is too long. Summing up then, it should, first of all, be borne in mind that the norms and tendencies of the Deep Ecology movement are not derived from ecology by logic or induction. Ecological knowledge and the lifestyle of the ecological fieldworker have suggested, inspired, and fortified the perspectives of the Deep Ecology movement. Many of the formulations in the above seven-point survey are rather vague generalizations, only tenable if made more precise in certain directions. But all over the world the inspiration from ecology has shown remarkable convergences. The survey does not pretend to be more than one of the possible condensed codifications of these convergences. Secondly, it should be fully appreciated that the significant tenets of the Deep Ecology movement are clearly and forcefully normative. They express a value priority system only in part based on results (or lack of results, cf. point (6)) of scientific research. Today, ecologists try to influence policymaking bodies largely through threats, through predictions concerning pollutants and resource depletion, knowing that policy-makers accept at least certain minimum norms concerning health. But it is clear that there is a vast number of people in all countries, and even a considerable number of people in power, who accept as valid the wider norms and values characteristic of the Deep Ecology movement. There are political potentials in this movement which should not be overlooked and which have little to do with pollution and resource depletion. In plotting possible futures, the norms should be freely used and elaborated.

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Thirdly, insofar as ecology movements deserve our attention, they are ecophilosophical rather than ecological. Ecology is a limited science which makes use of scientific methods. Philosophy is the most general forum of debate on fundamentals, descriptive as well as prescriptive, and political philosophy is one of its subsections. By an ecosophy I mean a philosophy of ecological harmony or equilibrium. A philosophy is a kind of sophia wisdom, is openly normative, it contains both norms, rules, postulates, value priority announcements and hypotheses concerning the state of affairs in our universe. Wisdom is policy wisdom, prescription, not only scientific description and prediction. The details of an ecosophy will show many variations due to significant differences concerning not only ‘facts’ of pollution, resources, population, etc., but also value priorities. Today, however, the seven points listed provide one unified framework for ecosophical systems. In general systems theory, systems are mostly conceived in terms of causally or functionally interacting or interrelated items. An ecosophy, however, is more like a system of the kind constructed by Aristotle or Spinoza. It is expressed verbally as a set of sentences with a variety of functions, descriptive and prescriptive. The basic relation is that between subsets of premises and subsets of conclusions, that is, the relation of derivability. The relevant notions of derivability may be classed according to rigor, with logical and mathematical deductions topping the list, but also according to how much is implicitly taken for granted. An exposition of an ecosophy must necessarily be only moderately precise considering the vast scope of relevant ecological and normative (social, political, ethical) material. At the moment, ecosophy might profitably use models of systems, rough approximations of global systematizations. It is the global character, not preciseness in detail, which distinguishes an ecosophy. It articulates and integrates the efforts of an ideal ecological team, a team comprising not only scientists from an extreme variety of disciplines, but also students of politics and active policy-makers. Under the name of ecologism, various deviations from the deep movement have been championed – primarily with a one-sided stress on pollution and resource depletion, but also with a neglect of the great differences between under- and over-developed countries in favor of a vague global approach. The global approach is essential, but regional differences must largely determine policies in the coming years. Source: http://www.alamut.com/subj/ideologies/pessimism/Naess_deepEcology.html

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ENDANGERED SPECIES ACT OF 1973

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This landmark piece of US legislation created a legal framework and procedures for protecting endangered species. Here is part of the law’s opening section on ‘Findings, Purposes, and Policy’. 2.(a) FINDINGS The Congress finds and declares that: (1) various species of fish, wildlife, and plants in the United States have been rendered extinct as a consequence of economic growth and development untempered by adequate concern and conservation; (2) other species of fish, wildlife, and plants have been so depleted in numbers that they are in danger of or threatened with extinction; (3) these species of fish, wildlife, and plants are of esthetic, ecological, educational, historical, recreational, and scientific value to the Nation and its people; (4) the United States has pledged itself as a sovereign state in the international community to conserve to the extent practicable the various species of fish or wildlife and plants facing extinction . . . (5) encouraging the States and other interested parties, through Federal financial assistance and a system of incentives, to develop and maintain conservation programs which meet national and international standards is a key to meeting the Nation’s international commitments and to better safeguarding, for the benefit of all citizens, the Nation’s heritage in fish, wildlife, and plants . . . Source: http://epw.senate.gov/esa73.pdf

WHERE YOU AT? A BIOREGIONAL QUIZ

Bioregionalists emphasized the importance of local ecosystems. This muchproduced test was designed to create awareness of how knowledgeable people were of their natural surroundings. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Trace the water you drink from precipitation to tap. How many days til the moon is full? (Slack of 2 days allowed.) What soil series are you standing on? What was the total rainfall in your area last year ( July-June)? (Slack: 1 inch for every 20 inches.) When was the last time a fire burned in your area?

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6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

What were the primary subsistence techniques of the culture that lived in your area before you? Name 5 edible plants in your region and their season(s) of availability. From what direction do winter storms generally come in your region? Where does your garbage go? How long is the growing season where you live? On what day of the year are the shadows the shortest where you live? When do the deer rut in your region, and when are the young born? Name five grasses in your area. Are any of them native? Name five resident and five migratory birds in your area. What is the land use history of where you live? What primary ecological event/process influenced the land form where you live? (Bonus special: what’s the evidence?) What species have become extinct in your area? What are the major plant associations in your region? From where you’re reading this, point north. What spring wildflower is consistently among the first to bloom where you live?

Scoring • 0–3 You have your head up your xxx. • 4–7 It’s hard to be in two places at once when you’re not anywhere at all. • 8–12 A firm grasp of the obvious. • 13–16 You’re paying attention. • 17–19 You know where you’re at. • 20 You not only know where you’re at, you know where it’s at. Source: http://www.dlackey.org/weblog/docs/Where%20You%20At.htm. Developed by Leonard Charles, Jim Dodge, Lynn Milliman, and Victoria Stockley, Coevolution Quarterly 32 (Winter 1981): 1.

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EARTH FIRST! ACTION IN OREGON, 1985

Earth First! quickly became a set of decentralized movements that engaged in imaginative and usually nonviolent acts to defend wilderness. This account describes how a group of activists created a new form of protest in 1985 as they tried to stop logging in an Oregon forest. Ron Huber describes the brainstorming session that led to the first Earth First! old growth tree-sitting action – an effort to save a thousand-year-old

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Douglas Fir and its companion trees from being cut down in Oregon in June 1985, and what followed. Earth First’s first treesitting civil disobedience action. A tactic born of frustration with the failure of road blockades to save ancient forests for more than an hour or two. Mike Jakubal, aka Wenatchee, is Earth First!’s first-ever tree-sitter, whose rock climbing skills I’d convinced him to transfer to old growth forest protection. Here’s how it happened: We’d been sitting around a campfire with a group of other out-of-state activists who’d answered the call put out by the Corvallis Oregon-based Cathedral Forest Action Group to protect Oregon’s Old Growth at the Witness camp. CFAG was a citizen’s group that brought Gandhian tactics of non-violent civil disobedience to the Earth Firstian struggle to protect the remaining ancient Douglas Fir stands of Willamette National Forest from the clearcuttery the Reagan Administration had unleashed there. The group’s organizers’ tactics included setting up a ‘witness camp’ and logging road blockades. Witness Camp visitors were taken to the Cutting Edge, where they could see both ancient forest ecosystems and freshly killed remains of recent logger attacks on neighboring areas. The group’s logging road blockades tried to both halt further roadbuilding into the wild woods and to block loggers from entering the forest via the spaghetti of roads they’d already cut. One memorable blockade featured Brian Heath, a key organizer of Cathedral Forest Action Group, holding a (solitary) sit-in athwart a crate of explosives about to be used for blasting a roadway through a rugged ridge; citizens were arrested in well-orchestrated peaceful sit-in actions across logging roads, bringing the media to cover the issue of the Reagan Admin-sanctioned destruction of those ancient forests. The fines were light, jail time brief, but one consequence of those arrests that rankled many of the visiting forest activists was the order by the judge barring the convicted road blockaders from entering the Willamette National Forest for one year. We hadn’t travelled thousands of miles to get busted and bumped from the forest after spending no more than an hour ‘defending’ the trees in a road blockade. Even the Oregon media had begun to lose interest. This spawned our little outsider activists brainstorming session round the Oak Flat campfire that hatched the Earth First! tree-sitting offensive, a tactic that now occupies an important place in the toolbox of earth activism. Asked what skills he had, Wenatchee described his rock climbing experience, but shrugged. ‘We’re not protecting cliffs.’ ‘So couldn’t you . . .’ I blew a smoke ring, goggling at an idea that had just struck me. ‘Couldn’t you “rock climb” your way up a tree? Hold the protest there?’

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The outsider activists contemplated the notion. ‘I mean, killing trees with people in them would be bad PR for the Willies, not to mention get them murder raps. They wouldn’t do it.’ Jakubal seized upon the idea. Yeah! yeah!’ he shouted, leaping to his feet, ‘I can do it! . . . I WILL do it!’ The next evening he brought the idea up with CFAG leader Brian Heath and got his blessing, though the action was to be carried out as an Earth First! action, not a Cathedral Forest Action Group one. (This tactical split presaged a more serious CFAG/Earth First! schism that summer.) Totting up a list of the supplies he’d need to pull it off, Mike set plans for a speedy recon of the Santiam to locate his soon-to-be-host tree. Days later, we’d give Mike, (now nom de guerred ‘Doug Fir’) a send-off as he pounded his way up the side of a tall fir tree in Willamette National Forest. A day of havoc and desolation followed, as the wild forest was killed around him. Sudden aftermath In the early evening, Jakubal quietly lowered himself to the ground to inspect the freshly killed stumpland around his tree. He remained on the ground more than an hour, then was busted around 7:30 pm by forest service law enforcement agent Slagowski, who got between Mike and the tree; which tree was then speedily cut down first thing next morning. Luckily Mike’s camera survived the fall, though he didn’t get it, or his other gear back from the freddies for some months. Upon his release in Sweet Home late that night, Jakubal walked for miles toward the Sanctuary until being picked up by some loggers coming home drunk from a party. One, who let him sleep on his couch, was a shelf fungus collector, Mike recollected, two decades later. The house was full of forest scenes scratched into the bottoms of the dried fungi. Mike got up at dawn, thanked his host – who mumbled a blurry acknowledgement through his open bedroom door, and continued heading toward the Sanctuary camp, finally to be picked up by passing forest activists who brought him to the sanctuary camp, where he related his tale of woe. Despite the Wright Brothers-like brevity of Mike’s first-ever Earth First! tree-sit, the tactic of tree climbing to hold sit-ins in the canopies was validated. (So long as one never leaves one’s tree human-free; always have a replacement come up the tree before you come down.) Shortly thereafter we’d brought the tree-climbing sit-in concept to a Washington state Earth First! rendezvous, hanging try-out platforms from tree limbs at the rendezvous site and demonstrating tree-climbing techniques. This resulted in a wave of aerial activist wannabes surging south to

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the Santiam, joining with others from around the nation to set up the first Aerial Village in the Squaw Creek watershed in Willamette National Forest in June 1985. Source: http://www.penbay.org/ef/treesit_first1985.html

UNITED NATIONS CONFERENCE ON ENVIRONMENT AND DEVELOPMENT, RIO DE JANEIRO, 1992

This press summary of Agenda 21 described an agreement reached at the Earth Summit held in 1992 in Brazil. Agenda 21 is a highly significant document in the history of sustainable development. Changing consumption patterns (Section I, Chapter 4 of Agenda 21) Poverty and environmental degradation are closely interrelated. While poverty results in environmental stress, the major cause of global environmental deterioration is an unsustainable pattern of consumption and production, particularly in the industrialized countries, which aggravates poverty and imbalances. Achieving sustainable development will require efficiency in production and changes in consumption in order to optimize resource use and minimize the creation of waste. This will require reorienting patterns of development in industrial societies which have been copied in much of the developing world. Proposals in Agenda 21 call for greater attention to issues around consumption and for new national policies to encourage the shift to sustainable consumption patterns. Other chapters of Agenda 21 address related issues such as energy, transportation, wastes, economic instruments and the transfer of environmentally sound technology. All countries, led by developed countries, should strive to promote sustainable consumption patterns. If developing countries are to avoid environmentally hazardous levels of consumption, they will require access to improved technology and other assistance from industrialized countries. More research on consumption is needed. Some economists question traditional concepts of economic growth and underline the importance of pursuing economic objectives which take account of the full value of natural resources. New concepts of wealth and prosperity should be developed which allow higher standards of living through changed lifestyles that are less dependent on the Earth’s finite resources and more in harmony with its carrying

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capacity. This idea should be reflected in new systems of national accounts and other indicators of sustainable development. To encourage greater efficiency in the use of energy and resources, Governments should reduce the amount of energy and materials used per unit in the production of goods and services, promote the dissemination of existing environmentally sound technologies, promote research and development in environmentally sound technologies, assist developing countries in using these technologies and encourage the use of new and renewable sources of energy and natural resources. To minimize the generation of wastes, Governments, together with industry, households and the public, should encourage industrial recycling, reduce wasteful packaging and promote environmentally sound products. Governments can exercise leadership through their own purchasing power. Environmentally sound pricing policies (environmental charges, taxes and other mechanisms) which make clear to producers and consumers the costs of energy, materials, natural resources and the generation of wastes, can help to achieve significant changes in consumption and production patterns. Source: http://www.un.org/esa/sustdev/documents/agenda21/english/A21_press_ summary.pdf

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PETRA KELLY, ‘CREATING AN ECOLOGICAL ECONOMY’

Kelly, the Green politician and environmental activist from Germany, was working on this book when she was murdered in 1992. This excerpt is from a chapter entitled ‘Creating an Ecological Economy.’ We in the Greens say that we have borrowed the Earth from our children. Green politics is about having just ‘enough’ and not ‘more,’ and this runs counter to all of the economic assumptions of industrial society. We must question those assumptions. The ecological crisis is a crisis of consumption, not of scarcity of resources. The industrialized countries must move from growth-oriented to sustainable economies, with conservation replacing consumption as the driving force. In the Third World, economic and ecological development must be addressed together if we wish to achieve just and sustainable results. But this cannot happen if the North’s exploitative policies continue. Ecologically balanced development depends on a just redistribution of wealth from the North to the South. Environmental problems cannot be addressed apart from the economic issues they are linked with. We have to ask, How would an ecological economy function, and what can we do to bring it about?

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An ecological economy would measure the prosperity of a society not in terms of the numbers of goods produced, but rather in terms of production methods that conserve the environment, protect human health, and result in durable consumer goods. The measure of value would include clean air, pure water, unpoisoned food, and the flourishing of diverse life forms. In an ecological society, the economy, lifestyles, and consumer expectations would be characterized by considerations of human and environmental health. The economy would not regard industrial growth as its guiding value, but would be guided by respect for life and the inherent worth of nature. The relationship between humans and nature would not be a one-way exploitative process, but a partnership based on interdependence. The establishment of an ecological economy would require the partial dismantling and conversion of existing industrial systems, in particular those branches of industry that are hazardous to life, above all the nuclear, chemical, and defense industries. Wherever possible and ecologically meaningful, mass industry would be replaced by small, decentralized production units that are sparing in their use of natural resources and produce a minimum of hazardous waste. Decentralized production can be more ecologically sound, more responsive to the needs of workers and the immediate community, and the basis for greater local economic autonomy. Ecological production would reject the sharp national and international division of labor that has led to large economic imbalances between regions, between city and countryside, and between industrialized nations and the Third World, and that has brought about high transportation costs and correspondingly excessive energy and land requirements. Locating production facilities closer to consumers would reduce transportation costs and energy consumption. These changes are within our means. Their implementation depends only on our will but will require grassroots organizing, because national political leaders cannot see or refuse to recognize the limits of growth, and they lack the vision or the motivation to base their decisions on environmental ethics. Source: Petra K. Kelly (1994) Thinking Green! Essays on Environmentalism, Feminism, and Nonviolence, Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, pp. 23–5.

KYOTO PROTOCOL, 1997

This well-known United Nations agreement was created in 1997 to address the growing problem of global, human-made climate change. Below is one of the crucial parts of the lengthy document.

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Article 3 1. The Parties included in Annex I shall, individually or jointly, ensure that their aggregate anthropogenic carbon dioxide equivalent emissions of the greenhouse gases listed in Annex A do not exceed their assigned amounts, calculated pursuant to their quantified emission limitation and reduction commitments inscribed in Annex B and in accordance with the provisions of this Article, with a view to reducing their overall emissions of such gases by at least 5 per cent below 1990 levels in the commitment period 2008 to 2012. 2. Each Party included in Annex I shall, by 2005, have made demonstrable progress in achieving its commitments under this Protocol. 3. The net changes in greenhouse gas emissions by sources and removals by sinks resulting from direct human-induced land-use change and forestry activities, limited to afforestation, reforestation and deforestation since 1990, measured as verifiable changes in carbon stocks in each commitment period, shall be used to meet the commitments under this Article of each Party included in Annex I. The greenhouse gas emissions by sources and removals by sinks associated with those activities shall be reported in a transparent and verifiable manner and reviewed in accordance with Articles 7 and 8. 4. Prior to the first session of the Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to this Protocol, each Party included in Annex I shall provide, for consideration by the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice, data to establish its level of carbon stocks in 1990 and to enable an estimate to be made of its changes in carbon stocks in subsequent years. The Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to this Protocol shall, at its first session or as soon as practicable thereafter, decide upon modalities, rules and guidelines as to how, and which, additional human-induced activities related to changes in greenhouse gas emissions by sources and removals by sinks in the agricultural soils and the land-use change and forestry categories shall be added to, or subtracted from, the assigned amounts for Parties included in Annex I, taking into account uncertainties, transparency in reporting, verifiability, the methodological work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the advice provided by the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice in accordance with Article 5 and the decisions of the Conference of the Parties. Such a decision shall apply in the second and subsequent commitment periods. A Party may choose to apply such a decision on these additional human-induced activities for its first commitment period, provided that these activities have taken place since 1990. 5. The Parties included in Annex I undergoing the process of transition to a market economy whose base year or period was established pursuant to

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decision 9/CP.2 of the Conference of the Parties at its second session shall use that base year or period for the implementation of their commitments under this Article. Any other Party included in Annex I undergoing the process of transition to a market economy which has not yet submitted its first national communication under Article 12 of the Convention may also notify the Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to this Protocol that it intends to use an historical base year or period other than 1990 for the implementation of its commitments under this Article. The Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to this Protocol shall decide on the acceptance of such notification. 6. Taking into account Article 4, paragraph 6, of the Convention, in the implementation of their commitments under this Protocol other than those under this Article, a certain degree of flexibility shall be allowed by the Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to this Protocol to the Parties included in Annex I undergoing the process of transition to a market economy. 7. In the first quantified emission limitation and reduction commitment period, from 2008 to 2012, the assigned amount for each Party included in Annex I shall be equal to the percentage inscribed for it in Annex B of its aggregate anthropogenic carbon dioxide equivalent emissions of the greenhouse gases listed in Annex A in 1990, or the base year or period determined in accordance with paragraph 5 above, multiplied by five. Those Parties included in Annex I for whom land-use change and forestry constituted a net source of greenhouse gas emissions in 1990 shall include in their 1990 emissions base year or period the aggregate anthropogenic carbon dioxide equivalent emissions by sources minus removals by sinks in 1990 from land-use change for the purposes of calculating their assigned amount. 8. Any Party included in Annex I may use 1995 as its base year for hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons and sulphur hexafluoride, for the purposes of the calculation referred to in paragraph 7 above. 9. Commitments for subsequent periods for Parties included in Annex I shall be established in amendments to Annex B to this Protocol, which shall be adopted in accordance with the provisions of Article 21, paragraph 7. The Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to this Protocol shall initiate the consideration of such commitments at least seven years before the end of the first commitment period referred to in paragraph 1 above. 10. Any emission reduction units, or any part of an assigned amount, which a Party acquires from another Party in accordance with the provisions of Article 6 or of Article 17 shall be added to the assigned amount for the acquiring Party.

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11. Any emission reduction units, or any part of an assigned amount, which a Party transfers to another Party in accordance with the provisions of Article 6 or of Article 17 shall be subtracted from the assigned amount for the transferring Party. 12. Any certified emission reductions which a Party acquires from another Party in accordance with the provisions of Article 12 shall be added to the assigned amount for the acquiring Party. 13. If the emissions of a Party included in Annex I in a commitment period are less than its assigned amount under this Article, this difference shall, on request of that Party, be added to the assigned amount for that Party for subsequent commitment periods. 14. Each Party included in Annex I shall strive to implement the commitments mentioned in paragraph 1 above in such a way as to minimize adverse social, environmental and economic impacts on developing country Parties, particularly those identified in Article 4, paragraphs 8 and 9, of the Convention. In line with relevant decisions of the Conference of the Parties on the implementation of those paragraphs, the Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to this Protocol shall, at its first session, consider what actions are necessary to minimize the adverse effects of climate change and/or the impacts of response measures on Parties referred to in those paragraphs. Among the issues to be considered shall be the establishment of funding, insurance and transfer of technology. Source: http://unfccc.int/essential_background/kyoto_protocol/items/1678.php

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BJØRN LOMBORG, THE SKEPTICAL ENVIRONMENTALIST: MEASURING THE REAL STATE OF THE WORLD

Danish academic Lomborg is perhaps the world’s most influential ‘skeptical environmentalist.’ In his book of that name, first published in 1998, Lomborg argues for a sensible, cost-benefit approach to the environment and against making alarmist claims for ecological disaster that stretch the truth. Humanity still has a whole series of challenges to tackle, now and in the future. Things are better now, but they are still not good enough. However, being presented with the real state of the world makes us realize that, given our past record, it is likely that by humanity’s creativity and collected efforts we can handle and find solutions to these problems. Consequently we can approach the remaining problems with confidence and inspiration to create an even better world.

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And honestly, we are perfectly aware of the true challenges for our globe. There are still 800 million people who starve. While the number of starving people has decreased and the percentage had decreased rapidly since 1950, this is still far too many. Equally, there are still 1.2 billion poor people. While the share of poverty has declined rapidly since 1950, this is also still far too many. We need to set these challenges as top priorities, and this entails helping the developing countries with structural changes and committing them to the path of democracy and the rule-of-law, while fulfilling our UN pledge of donating 0.7 percent of the GNP, which currently only Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands and Sweden fulfill. But it also entails allowing the developing countries into the global economy, letting them compete precisely in the areas where they have the competitive advantage. This means we need to lift restrictions and cut subsidies on labor-intensive products such as agriculture and textiles, two of the areas most protected by the developed countries. As far as the Western world is concerned, we also know the challenges. Many people still die needlessly because of air pollution. While air pollution has decreased dramatically over the past 30 years, it is still too high, especially with regard to particulate pollution. Thus, stringent pollution restrictions in areas where benefits outweigh costs will still be a necessary goal. Beyond that, we need to quit smoking, avoid fatty foods, get more exercise, and as a society we need to achieve a whole series of social and educational improvements. However, these areas are unfortunately not quite as sexy as focusing on pesticides, oxygen depletion, global warming, forests, wind power, biodiversity, etc. – issues which are more clearly someone else’s fault. One of the most serious consequences of the Litany of Brown, Gore and the entire environmentally worried elite is that it undermines our confidence in our ability to solve our remaining problems. It gives us a feeling of being under siege, constantly having to act with our backs to the wall, and this means that we will often implement unwise decisions based on emotional gut reactions. The Litany gets to modern man and impacts us directly: the Litany frightens us. The social scientist Aaron Wildavsky pondered this paradox: ‘How extraordinary! The richest, longest lived, best protected, most resourceful civilization, with the highest degree of insight into its own technology, is on its way to becoming the most frightened.’ This fear becomes evident when people are interviewed. We are afraid. We fear the future. In the Health of the Planet survey, people were asked how much they believed environmental problems affected their health ten years ago and now, and how it would affect their children 25 years from now. . . . The respondents believe that the environmental problems of the future will

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consistently affect our health much more in the future than they did in the past. This is – at least as far as the industrialized world is concerned – astonishing: we know that atmospheric pollution, which accounts for more than half the incidences of environment-related cancer, has been drastically reduced. But we still believe that it has become worse and worse. This feeling is in large part caused by the Litany. It is due to the steady flow of information about the terrible state of the environment. But how is it possible to believe that things are getting worse when objective figures show the exact opposite? This apparent paradox seems to be a consequence of prosperity often described by the expression: ‘No food, one problem. Much food, many problems.’ We are now so well off in so many different respects that we have time to worry about a whole series of other minor problems. Some sociologists see this as an expression of modern society having begun systematically to produce risks which are invisible (e.g. pesticides and radioactivity) and about which we can thus only be informed by experts. However, this argument seems misplaced. In times past, our society produced large numbers of invisible risks – tuberculosis, the plague and smallpox could not be seen by the naked eye and seemed to strike at random. These risks were far greater, as is reflected by much shorter life expectancy. It seems more plausible that our society has changed character because it has begun to produce far more information about risks. This was the point made in the introduction. Our fear is due to a high degree to the fact that we are given ever more negative information by scientists, the organizations and the media. We are being made aware of things we had no idea we needed to worry about. More research is being conducted than ever before. One obvious consequence is that we find ever more causal connections. Many of these connections are extremely marginal. And given the statistical nature of most of the studies, some of them will later prove to be wrong. There is nothing improper in that, since this is the way science works, but it does mean that there are ever more bits of accessible information about things which are not necessarily either relevant or even correct. We are familiar with this tendency from the world of medicine and the continuous bombardment of information about dos and don’ts: now salt is good for you, now it is bad for you; now estrogens cause breast cancer, now they don’t. At the same time both the organizations and the media have an everincreasing need to profile themselves in the struggle for attention and market segments. The environmental organizations fight for the environment, and as we pointed out in the introduction, they therefore also have an obvious interest in presenting a specific image of the world: that the environment is in an awful state and getting poorer. The worse they can portray the

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environment, the easier it is for them to convince us that we need to spend more money on the environment rather than on hospitals, child day care, etc. The organizations are keen to tell us when the deforestation rate in the Amazon was gone up, but not when it was dropped. The media look for interesting and sensational news but often end up focusing on the negative aspects and giving us yet more worries to consider. When the harvest is good we hear about how low prices will be bad for the farmers; however, when the harvest is bad we hear how the consumers will suffer from high prices. When in February 1992 NASA predicted that a hole might open in the ozone layer above the US, the story hit the front page of Time magazine. NASA’s withdrawal of the story two months later was only given four lines inside the magazine. Unless readers are extremely observant they would in both situations be left with the distinct impression that the state of the world had deteriorated. Source: Bjørn Lomborg (2001) The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 330–2 (footnotes omitted). First published in 1998.

‘10 STEPS TO ANIMAL COMMUNICATION’

This article appeared in a 2000 issue of Animal Wellness magazine, one of a growing number of publications for people devoted to dogs and cats. Mention animal communication and many people imagine Dr Doolittle quacking away with a duck. In reality, though, animal communicators connect telepathically with animals to help understand physical or emotional problems, to support them in their passing, or just so their humans can get to know them better. Penelope Smith, an expert in interspecies telepathic communication, believes anyone can develop this skill. Results will take time in coming, she says, so practice these steps frequently and remain confident that through continued patience and faith in your innate psychic ability, you and your animal companion will connect on a spiritual level. ‘Telepathic communication with our fellow animals,’ says Penelope, ‘is so natural and easy that we may miss it by looking for something more difficult. Communication with animals is just like having a conversation with another person’. Preparing Yourself 1. Find a time when you and your animal companion can be together in an environment that is peaceful with no distractions. Get rid of thoughts and

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images of other things and quietly observe your animal. Continue until you feel calm and relaxed. 2. Get the animal’s attention by saying his name or touching him. You will sense when he is receptive to your communication. Eye contact is only necessary, Penelope says, when you are actually wanting to correct a certain behavior. Make sure that the message you choose is clear and that what you are saying coincides with the image or feeling you are projecting; otherwise, your animal will respond only to the nonverbal message. Words are not even necessary unless you feel more comfortable uttering them out loud. 3. Practice visualizing. Create a mental picture, then project it a short distance from you. Next send a visual image to a specific point in the room and then try sending it to your animal. 4. Finally, get your animal’s attention, say hello and send him a simple wish or image, adding words if you like. Penelope cautions against overdoing the same images as your animal may get bored and not respond. Making the Connection 5. Once you have practiced the preceding steps several times, find that quiet space again for you and your animal companion. Remember that imagination will play a big role in your ability to see, hear and sense what your animal will be communicating to you. 6. Open up to the idea of a response from your animal and imagine he says hello when you greet him. Ensure that you have his attention and ask him: ‘How are you doing?’ 7. Quiet your own thinking and expectations and be willing to accept whatever thought or mental picture your animal sends you. Don’t attach to that answer your own interpretation. (Note: After being tuned out for so long, your animal may at first be unwilling to cooperate, but be patient and persevere.) 8. Acknowledge through a verbal or physical gesture that you received what your animal said. This reassures him that you were listening. 9. Reask the question if you are unclear about his response or ask additional questions for further clarification. 10. Your animal may also want to relay information not related to your question but which he has been wanting to share with you. Acknowledge receipt of it, then return to your original question. Once that has been answered, ask another, such as: ‘Is there anything you want to tell me?’ With time, practice and patience, you can gain a greater understanding and appreciation of your animal companion through telepathic communication. Pointers on Enhancing Telepathic Communication • Respect and revere animals as fellow beings that have the same spiritual essence and potential as humans.

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• Believe in your own intuitive ability to give and receive telepathic communication. • Adopt habits that reduce stress and increase calmness, including a wholefood diet, exercise, rest, yoga and meditation. Commune with nature and spend quiet time with your animal companion. • Be willing to learn from all beings and to change your ideas; beware of judgements and preconceptions that will limit your receptivity to what your animal is really communicating. • Practice often to build your confidence; you’ll improve and it will get easier to communicate. • Avoid conveying any strong emotions as they will cloud your receptiveness to your animal and his response to you. • Be alert and calm and don’t force the communication or try too hard. • Increase your animal’s willingness to communicate by admiring and appreciating him daily for his beautiful qualities, both physical and spiritual. Source: Penelope Smith (1999) Animal Talk, Hillsboro, OR: Beyond Words Publishing, Inc. Published in the Fall 2000 issue of Animal Wellness magazine, http://www. animalwellnessmagazine.com/art/aV23_12.htm

AL GORE, AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH: THE PLANETARY EMERGENCY OF GLOBAL WARMING AND WHAT WE CAN DO ABOUT IT

Former Vice President Al Gore’s treatment of climate change, An Inconvenient Truth, became perhaps the most influential environmental film ever created after it appeared in 2006. Here is an excerpt from the accompanying book’s introduction. The voluminous evidence now strongly suggests that unless we act boldly and quickly to deal with the underlying causes of global warming, our world will undergo a string of terrible catastrophes, including more and stronger storms like Hurricane Katrina, in both the Atlantic and the Pacific. We are melting the North Polar ice cap and virtually all of the mountain glaciers in the world. We are destabilizing the massive mound of ice on Greenland and the equally enormous mass of ice propped up on top of islands in West Antarctica, threatening a worldwide increase in sea levels of as much as 20 feet. The list of what is now endangered due to global warming also includes the continued stable configuration of ocean and wind currents that has been in place since the first cities were built almost 10,000 years ago.

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We are dumping so much carbon dioxide into the Earth’s environment that we have literally changed the relationship between the Earth and the Sun. So much of that CO2 is being absorbed into the oceans that if we continue at the current rate we will increase the saturation of calcium carbonate to levels that will prevent formation of corals and interfere with the making of shells by any sea creature. Global warming, along with the cutting and burning of forests and other critical habitats, is causing the loss of living species at a level comparable to the extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. That event was believed to have been caused by a giant asteroid. This time it is not an asteroid colliding with the Earth and wreaking havoc; it is us. Last year, the national academies of science in the 11 most influential nations came together to jointly call on every nation to ‘acknowledge that the threat of climate change is clear and increasing’ and declare that the ‘scientific understanding of climate changes is now sufficiently clear to justify nations taking prompt action.’ So the message is unmistakably clear. This crisis means ‘danger!’ Why do our leaders seem not to hear such a clear warning? Is it simply that it is inconvenient for them to hear the truth? If the truth is unwelcome, it may seem easier just to ignore it. But we know from bitter experience that the consequences of doing so can be dire. For example, when we were first warned that the levees were about to break in New Orleans because of Hurricane Katrina, those warnings were ignored. Later, a bipartisan group of members of Congress chaired by Representative Tom Davis (R-VA), chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, said in an official report, ‘The White House failed to act on the massive amounts of information at its disposal,’ and that a ‘blinding lack of situational awareness and disjointed decision-making needlessly compounded and prolonged Katrina’s horror.’ Today, we are hearing and seeing dire warnings of the worst potential catastrophe in the history of human civilization: a global climate crisis that is deepening and rapidly becoming more dangerous than anything we have ever faced. And yet these clear warnings are also being met with a ‘blinding lack of situational awareness’ – in this case, by the Congress, as well as the president. Source: Al Gore (2006) An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It, New York: Rodale, p. 10.

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RURAL MANIFESTO OF THE COUNTRYSIDE ALLIANCE, 2009

The Countryside Alliance has been among the leading groups in Great Britain opposing regulation of hunting. Here is a section from their Rural Manifesto, published in 2009. Country pursuits such as hunting, fishing, shooting and falconry make an important contribution to the environment. They are a focus for the communities in which they take place and encourage stewardship and responsible habitat management. The shooting community alone spends £250 million and 2.7 million days a year on conservation. These combined activities are hugely valuable to the UK economy. They also have important social benefits and contribute to the health and general well being of the nation. Fishing, for example, has been shown to play an important role in tackling truancy and anti-social behaviour. Country pursuits are more popular than ever and lie at the heart of many people’s way of life. To ensure that these benefits are available for all, and survive into the future, it is vital that the Government and its agencies do all that they can to increase the opportunities for people of all ages and backgrounds to participate. Those who choose to participate should be able to do so free from prejudice and discrimination. The Hunting Act is unique in that its effects are entirely negative. It diminishes respect for Parliament; it puts law-abiding people at risk of prosecution; it diverts police attention from real crime; it brings no benefit to the environment; it is a blatant example of political prejudice and it does nothing for the welfare or conservation of the species it claims to ‘protect’. Key Facts • More than four million people went fishing last year. The annual economic activity associated with fishing is as much as £2.75 billion. • Game shooting is worth £1.6 billion to the UK economy and supports the equivalent of 70,000 full-time jobs. • Two-thirds of the UK rural land area is managed for shooting. • Over 1.5 million days have been spent hunting by individuals since 2004. The Way Forward Country pursuits need support and encouragement to thrive so that people from all backgrounds have the opportunity to participate in them. It should be the responsibility of government, together with the respective governing bodies, to ensure that there is an understanding amongst the public of these activities and their benefits.

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We Call For . . . • Country pursuits to receive a fair and balanced hearing in Parliament and in public. The Government should fund and empower the third sector to deliver increased opportunities for people to participate in country pursuits and outdoor life. The Countryside Alliance Foundation’s Fishing for Schools and Casting for Recovery, which is funded by The Foundation, are successful examples that could easily be expanded. • Home Office guidance should be provided to police forces to ensure they enforce, consistently and rigorously, the law against animal rights intimidation and violence in the countryside. • Shooting sports should receive the full support of government and sports funding. Game shooting’s importance to rural tourism and the economy should be recognised. There should be no further unnecessary restrictions on firearms or shooting in the UK. • The Hunting Act should be repealed. The Act is unworkable, bad law and bad for animal welfare. The Act is fundamentally illiberal, based not on principle and evidence but prejudice. Such laws should have no place in a modern, tolerant and free society. Source: http://www.countryside-alliance.org.uk/our-campaigns/rural-manifesto/ country-pursuits/

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REPORT OF THE LEAGUE AGAINST CRUEL SPORTS, 2010

The Countryside Alliance is opposed by the League Against Cruel Sports. Here is their description of their work, published in 2010. The Report This report provides an overview of the League Against Cruel Sports’ hunting campaign during the 2009/2010 hunting season. Five years on from its introduction in February 2005 the Hunting Act continues to protect wild mammals in England and Wales from the unnecessary suffering inherent in the sport of hunting with dogs. Despite a concerted effort from within the hunting community to discredit the legislation, this report records that the total of convictions secured under the Hunting Act to date stands at over 130. By focusing on four key elements of the League’s work on hunting, this report highlights the League’s unrivalled position as the leading animal welfare charity working to inform and educate the public on the progress of the Hunting Act 2004.

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The League Against Cruel Sports The League Against Cruel Sports is a registered charity that brings together people who care about animals. Like the majority of the public, we believe that cruelty to animals in the name of sport has no place in modern society. We have no political bias. We were established in 1924 and are unique because we focus on cruelty to animals for sport. Our aim: We work to expose and bring to an end the cruelty inflicted on animals in the name of sport. What we do: • We expose the barbaric nature of cruel sports and the people involved, identifying what action should be taken. • We raise awareness and campaign for change by lobbying government, politicians and businesses. This includes campaigning for new laws and helping to enforce existing laws by working with the police to bring to justice those who commit illegal acts of cruelty for sport. • We also offer advice to people whose lives are being detrimentally affected by cruel sports. Our approach: • Through investigation and lawful campaigning, we encourage the public and law makers to recognise their responsibility to protect animals from suffering cruel acts in the name of sport. • We raise awareness of the issues through the media and enlist public support to put pressure on law makers. We work to change people’s behaviour, gain new legislation, and enforce existing laws that are in place to protect animals from cruel sports in the UK and across the globe. Source: http://www.league.org.uk/uploads/media/28/7382.pdf Page 4 of 24.©League Against Cruel Sports 2010.

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Guide to further reading

Primary sources Matthew Alan Cahn and Rory O’Brien (eds), Thinking about the Environment: Readings on Politics, Property, and the Physical World (Armonk, NY: Sharpe, 1996) and Derek Wall (ed.), Green History: A Reader in Environmental Literature, Philosophy, and Politics (New York: Routledge, 1993) both contain a broad array of documents on the development of ideas about the environment and ecology in the western world. Carolyn Merchant (ed.), Major Problems in American Environmental History, 2nd edn, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005) and Louis S. Warren (ed.), American Environmental History, (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003) contain both essays by historians and documents. The Reference section includes citations for many literary treatments of the environment by authors such as William Wordsworth and Edward Abbey.

Domesticating the wild Surveys of ideas about nature include: Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1967); Peter Coates, Nature: Western Attitudes since Ancient Times (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998); Ramachandra Guha, Environmentalism: A Global History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Joachim Radkau, Nature and Power: A Global History of the Environment (Washington, DC and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Keith Thomas’s Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility (New York: Pantheon, 1983) is outstanding. More specialized but useful studies include: Lynn Barber, The Heyday of Natural History, 1820–1870 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1980); Louise E. Robbins, Elephant Slaves and Pampered Parrots: Exotic Animals in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); D.G. Charlton, New Images of the Natural in

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France: A Study in European Cultural History, 1750–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Tamara L. Whited, Forests and Peasant Politics in Modern France (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000); Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994); Sarah Howell, The Seaside (London: Studio Vista, 1974). Romantic artists’ views of nature are addressed by: Newton P. Stallknecht, Strange Seas of Thought: Studies in William Wordsworth’s Philosophy of Man and Nature (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1958); A.S. Byatt, Wordsworth and Coleridge in their Time (London: Nelson, 1970); Matthew Brennan, Wordsworth, Turner, and Romantic Landscapes: A Study of the Traditions of the Picturesque and the Sublime (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1987); Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740–1860 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986).

Industrial nature loving I.G. Simmons, The Environmental History of Great Britain: From 10,000 Years Ago to the Present (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001) contains some strong material on ideas. Kenneth Olwig’s Nature’s Ideological Landscape: A Literary and Geographic Perspective on its Development and Preservation on Denmark’s Jutland Heath (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1984) is far-ranging and provocative. Other excellent specialized studies include: Harriet Ritvo’s incisive The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987); Nigel Rothfels, Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); David Evans, A History of Nature Conservation in Britain, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 1997); James Winter, Secure from the Rash Assault: sustaining the Victorian Environment (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999); Stephen Mosley, The Chimney of the World: A History of Smoke Pollution in Victorian and Edwardian Manchester (Cambridge: White Horse Press, 2001); David Elliston Allen, The Naturalist in Britain: A Social History (London: Allen Lane, 1976); Barbara T. Gates, Kindred Nature: Victorian and Edwardian Women Embrace the Living World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Kathleen Kete, The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995); Thomas M. Lekan, Imagining the Nation in Nature: Landscape Preservation and German Identity, 1885–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Boria Sax, Animals in the Third Reich: Pets, Scapegoats, and the Holocaust (New York: Continuum, 2000). Raymond H. Dominick III, The Environmental Movement in Germany: Prophets and Pioneers, 1871–1971 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992); Thomas

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Lekan and Thomas Zeller (eds), Germany’s Nature: Cultural Landscapes and Environmental History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005); Douglas R. Weiner, Models of Nature: Ecology, Conservation and Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia (Indiana University Press, 1988); Brian Bonhomme, Forests, Peasants, and Revolutionaries: Forest Conservation and Organization in Soviet Russia (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 2005) are detailed national studies. The former colonies are surveyed in Thomas R. Dunlap, Nature and the English Diaspora: Environment and History in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Roderick Frazier Nash’s magisterial Wilderness and the American Mind, 4th edn (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001) is indispensable. Other strong treatments of the US include: Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959); Ralph H. Lutts, The Nature Fakers: Wildlife, Science & Sentiment (Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 1990). Thoreau is treated in James McIntosh, Thoreau as Romantic Naturalist: His Shifting Stance toward Nature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974), Thoreau and Marsh in Robert L. Dorman, A Word for Nature: Four Pioneering Environmental Advocates, 1845–1913 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). Strong studies of Canada include: Carl Berger, Science, God, and Nature in Victorian Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983); Patricia Jasen, Wild Things: Nature, Culture and Tourism in Ontario, 1790–1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995); George Colpitts, Game in the Garden: A Human History of Wildlife in Western Canada to 1940 (Vancouver, BC: UBC Press, 2002); Tina Loo, States of Nature: Conserving Canada’s Wildlife in the Twentieth Century (Vancouver, UBC Press, 2006). New Zealand is treated by Eric Pawson and Tom Brooking (eds), Environmental Histories of New Zealand (Victoria, Australia: Oxford University Press, 2002) and Australia by: Drew Hutton and Libby Connors, A History of the Australian Environment Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Geoffrey Bolton, Spoils and Spoilers: Australians Make their Environment, 1788–1980 (Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, 1981); Tom Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Adrian Franklin, Animal Nation: The True Story of Animals and Australia (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2006).

The friendly wild of post-war affluence Meredith Veldman’s Fantasy, the Bomb, and the Greening of Britain: Romantic Protest, 1945–1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) includes a fascinating interpretation of Tolkien and some other fine material on

Guide to further reading

romanticism and nature loving. Strong studies of post-war nature loving in the US include: Virginia Scott Jenkins, The Lawn: A History of an American Obsession (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994); Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); David Ingram, Green Screen: Environmentalism and Hollywood Cinema (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2001); Roderick Frazier Nash, The Rights of Nature: A History of Environmental Ethics (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989). Leopold is treated in James I. McClintock, Nature’s Kindred Spirits: Aldo Leopold, Joseph Wood Krutch, Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard, and Gary Snyder (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994).

The counter-culture’s nature Protest movements are addressed in: Arthur Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the US, c.1958–c.1974 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Kenneth Keniston, Youth and Dissent: The Rise of a New Opposition (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971). Strong treatments of individuals include: Alex Lucas, Farley Mowat (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1976); Axel Madsen, Cousteau: An Unauthorized Biography (New York: Beauford Books, 1986); Richard Munson, Cousteau: The Captain and His World (New York: William Morrow, 1989); John Collis, John Denver: Mother Nature’s Son (Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 1999); Sy Montgomery, Walking with the Great Apes: Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, Biruté Galdikas (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1991).

Epiphanies Broad treatments include: John McCormick, Reclaiming Paradise: The Global Environmental Movement (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989); Anna Bramwell, The Fading of the Greens: The Decline of Environmental Politics in the West (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994); B.W. Clapp, An Environmental History of Britain since the Industrial Revolution (London: Longman, 1994); David Evans, A History of Nature Conservation in Britain, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 1992); Albert Weale, The New Politics of Pollution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992); Sandra Chaney, Nature of the Miracle Years: Conservation in West Germany, 1945–1976 (New York: Berghahn, 2008); Andrew Jamison, et al., The Making of the New Environmental Consciousness: A Comparative Study of the Environmental Movements in Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990); Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation

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of the American Environmental Movement (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1993); Stephen Dovers (ed.), Australian Environmental History: Essays and Cases (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1994). Gunnar Grendstad et al., Unique Environmentalism: A Comparative Perspective (New York: Springer, 2006) treats the peculiarities of the Norwegian environmentalist movement. Kirkpatrick Sale’s The Green Revolution: The American Environmental Movement, 1962–1992 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1993) is a concise and strong survey of its subject. Useful specialized studies include: George M. Warecki, Protecting Ontario’s Wilderness: A History of Changing Ideas and Preservation Politics, 1927–1973 (New York: Peter Lang, 2000); Libby Robin, Defending the Little Desert: The Rise of Ecological Consciousness in Australia (Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 1998). Mary A. McCay’s Rachel Carson (New York: Twayne, 1993) is a fine biography. Charles T. Rubin, The Green Crusade: Rethinking the Roots of Environmentalism (New York: Free Press, 1994) includes several biographies of environmental leaders.

Radical departures A wide range of radical environmental ideas is presented and analysed in George Sessions (ed.), Deep Ecology for the Twenty-First Century (Boston: Shambhala, 1995). Susan Zakin, Coyotes and Town Dogs: Earth First! and the Environmental Movement (New York: Penguin, 1995), is a readable, incisive, and detailed treatment of radicals. Also useful are: Paul Wapner, Environmental Activism and World Civic Politics (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996); Fred Pearce, Green Warriors: The People and Politics Behind the Environmental Revolution (London: Bodley Head, 1991); Robert Lamb, Promising the Earth (London: Routledge, 1996); Michael Brown and John May, The Greenpeace Story (Scarborough, Ontario: Prentice-Hall Canada, 1989); Martha F. Lee, Earth First! Environmental Apocalypse (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1995).

Thwarted Broad treatments include: Michael Bess’s splendid The Light-Green Society: Ecology and Technological Modernity in France, 1960–2000 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Russell J. Dalton, The Green Rainbow: Environmental Groups in Western Europe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994); Kenneth Hanf and Alf-Inge Jansen (eds), Governance and Environment in Western Europe: Politics, Policy, and Administration (Harlow: Longman, 1998); Axel Goodbody (ed.), The Culture of German Environmentalism:

Guide to further reading

Anxieties, Visions, Realities (New York: Berghahn, 2002); Joseph Szarka, The Shaping of Environmental Policy in France (New York: Berghahn, 2002); Douglas R. Weiner, A Little Corner of Freedom: Russian Nature Protection from Stalin to Gorbachev (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999); Samuel P. Hays, A History of Environmental Politics since 1945 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000); Joan DeBardeleben (ed.), To Breathe Free: Eastern Europe’s Environmental Crisis (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991); Jürg Klarer and Bedrich Moldan (eds), The Environmental Challenge for Central European Economies in Transition (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 1997); Mark Dowie, Losing Ground: American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). Joseph F.C. DiMento, The Global Environment and International Law (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2003) is a strong survey of its subject. Spencer R. Weart, The Discovery of Global Warming, rev. edn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008) is an historical survey of how science has treated climate change but also pays attention to politics. Emma Griffin, Blood Sport: Hunting in Britain since 1066 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007) has a strong chapter on the recent hunting controversy. Steven Bernstein, The Compromise of Liberal Environmentalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002) provides a sceptical treatment of sustainable development. Assessments of the world’s current environmental status include: Bjørn Lomborg, The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Lyle Scruggs, Sustaining Abundance: Environmental Performance in Industrial Democracies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). The Greens are addressed in: Sabine von Dirke, ‘All Power to the Imagination!’: The West German Counterculture from the Student Movement to the Greens (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1997) and Sara Parkin, The Life and Death of Petra Kelly (London: Pandora, 1994). The grassroots movement is covered by Bron Raymond Taylor (ed.), Ecological Resistance Movements: The Global Emergence of Radical and Popular Environmentalism (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995).

Extreme nature loving Various aspects of modern nature loving are treated by: David NicholsonLord, The Greening of the Cities (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987); Susan G. Davis, Spectacular Nature: Corporate Culture and the Sea World Experience (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997); Colette Wabnitz et al., The Global Trade in Marine Ornamental Species (Cambridge: UNEP World Conservation Monitoring Centre, 2003). Jon Katz’s The New Work of Dogs: Tending to Life, Love, and Family (New York: Villard, 2003) is

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extremely useful, as is Liza Nicholas, Elaine M. Bapis, and Thomas J. Harvey (eds), Imagining the Big Open: Nature, Identity, and Play in the New West (Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, 2003), which treats some aspects of extreme sports, as does Robert E. Rinehart and Synthia Sydnor (eds), To the Extreme: Alternative Sports, Inside and Out (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2003). Rosaleen Duffy, A Trip Too Far: Eco-tourism, Politics, and Exploitation (London: Earthscan, 2002) and Erlet Cater and Gwen Lowman, Ecotourism: A Sustainable Option (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 1994) analyse ecotourism. Jennifer Price’s Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America (New York, NY: Basic) is splendid cultural history.

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Index

Abbey, Edward, 60–2, 68, 98, 123–4 acid rain, 67, 71–2 Adams, Richard, 46, 124–6 advertising and nature, 83, 86–9 Affleck, Ben, 70 agriculture, 7, 78 air conditioning, 34 Alberti, Leon Battista, 7 Algonquin Wildlands League, 56–7 All-Russian Society for Conservation, 24 American Humane’s Film and Television Unit, 94 Anheuser–Busch Corporation, 87 Animal Liberation, 61, 68 Animal Liberation Front, 68 animal welfare, 14–5, 23, 30, 67, 80–1, 85, 93–4 Animal Wellness, 92, 145–7 animals, 14–5, 28–30, 35–9, 61, 67, 71, 90–4, 97–8 anthropomorphism, 30, 36–7, 67 anti-nuclear movement, 33, 54–5, 57–8, 67, 70–1, 74, 89 Antoinette, Marie, 12 aquarium keeping, 90–2 Attack of the Crab Monsters, 33 Audubon Society, 30, 80 aurochs, 18 autobahn, 23 automobiles and nature, 77, 83, 96–7

Barnum & Bailey Circus, 80 Becker, Sue, 92 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 11 Bess, Michael, 96 Bioregion Quiz, 64, 133 bioregionalism, 64, 89, 133 birds, 14, 25, 29–31 Black Beauty, 29, 209–10 Blair, Tony, 77 Blake, William, 11 The Blob, 33 Blueprint for Survival, 54, 61 boating, 45 Bobos in Paradise, 86–7 Bolt, Henry, 56 Bonaventure, 7 Bookchin, Murray, 51, 65 Boy Scouts, 24, 28, 112–4 British Association for the Advancement of Science, 9 Brooks, David, 86–7 Brower, David, 65– 6 Buddhism and nature, 44 Buffon, George Louis Leclerc de, 16 bull-baiting, 14 Bush, George H.W., 76 Bush, George W., 97 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, 89

Bacon, Francis, 7 Baden-Powell, Robert, 112–4 Balzac, Honoré de, 11 Bambi, 36–8 Bambi: A Forest Life, 36 Bardot, Brigitte, 67 Bark, 92 Barnum, P.T., 29

Cadbury Schweppes, 66 Callahan, Sharon, 92 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, 54, 58 camping, 33–4, 45, 86 Carpenter, Edward, 21 Carrighar, Sally, 38–9 Carson, Rachel, 35, 38, 50–1, 59, 120–1 Cartmill, 85

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Catalogue of Notable Trees, 26 Chávez, César, 79 Chernobyl, 70, 74 Chivilikhim, Vladimir, 57 Chlorofluorocarbons, 72 Christianity and nature, 7, 10–1, 43–4 Clean Air Act, 52 Clean Water Act, 52 Clements, Frederic Edward, 39 climate change, 71–2, 77, 97 Clinton, Bill, 75 Club of Rome, 58, 126–8 cock-fighting, 14–5 Coleridge, Samuel, 11 The Coming Dark Age, 61 Competitive Enterprise Institute, 77 conservation, 8–9 Conservation, 23–4 Conservation Society, 54 Constable, John, 11 Control of Pollution Act, 54 Cook, James, 9 Council for the Protection of Rural England, 25 Council for the Protection of Rural Wales, 25 Council of Environmental Experts, 54–5 counter-culture and nature, 41–9 Countryside Alliance, 81, 149–50 countryside preservation, 20–1, 25, 27–8, 81 Cousteau, Jacques, 48–9 Cruelty to Animals Act, 106–7 Cronkite, Walter, 3 Davis, Susan, 97 de Gaulle, Charles, 58 The Death of Tomorrow, 61 ‘Deep Ecology,’ 62–4, 68–9, 128–33 Denver, John, 48–9, 84 Department of the Environment, 54 Descartes, René, 7 Desert Solitaire, 61–2, 123–4 Development and the Environment, 77–8 Dharma Bums, 41 Dinosaur National Monument, 65 dog fighting, 15 dog shows, 28–9 The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be, 46–7 ‘doomsday’ environmentalism, 60–1, 78 Dot and the Kangaroo, 29 Dow Chemical, 53 druzhina, 57 Dumping at Sea Act, 54

Earth Day, 52–3 Earth First!, 65, 68–9, 80, 134–7 Earth Liberation Front, 68 Easy Rider, 43 ecofeminism, 64–5 ecology, 38–40, 52 ecotourism, 85, 97 Ehrlich, Paul, 60–1 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 26–7 Endangered Species Act (Great Britain), 54 Endangered Species Act (US), 52, 133 Endangered Species Bill, 66 Enlightenment, 7–8, 11–2 environmental movements, backlash, 75–9, 87 environmental racism, 79–80 Environmental Protection Agency, 52, 75 Environmental Protection Law, 55 Faith-Man-Nature Group, 43 Federation of Rambling Clubs, 25 films and nature, 33, 36–8, 43, 48, 86, 89, 93–4 Finding Nemo, 94, 97 fly fishing, 86 Ford Foundation, 75 Foreman, Dave, 68, 98 Forest Act, 20 Forest Ordinance of 1669, 8 forestry, 8–9, 19–20, 23 Francis of Assisi, 7 Free Willy, 93–4 Friends of Nature, 22 Friends of the Earth, 66, 69, 71 fur, protests against, 66, 69 Galilei, Galileo, 7 game reserves, 25 garden cities, 21 gardens, 10–1, 14, 17, 20–1, 90 Gipson, Fred, 37 Gladiators of the Surf, 45 Gleason, Herbert, 39 ‘Gnomes,’ 55 Goethe, Johann, 11 Goodall, Jane, 46 Gorbachev, Mikael, 74 Gore, Al, 77, 147–8 Göring, Hermann, 18 Great Barrier Reef, 56 Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, 56 The Green Mile, 94 Green Party, 72–3

Index

The Greening of America, 44 Greenpeace, 67–9, 71, 78 Griffin, Susan, 64 Gutierrez, Juana, 79–80 Healing Animals Naturally with Flower Essences, 92 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 11 Hermitage, 12 Hesse, Hermann, 22 Hetch Hetchy Valley, 31 hiking, 45, 84–6 hippies and nature, 42–4 Hitler, Adolf, 18, 23 The Horse Whisperer, 89 hunting, 25, 38, 81, 85

Little Desert Settlement plan, 56 Living Desert, 37 logging, 65, 68–9, 71 Lomborg, Bjørn, 78, 142–5 London Fog, 54 Long, William J., 29 Lopez, Jennifer, 70 Louis XIV, 10, 14 Love Canal, 79 Lowenthal, Leo, 98

Katz, Jon, 92–3 Keats, Ezra, 11 Keiko, 93–4 Kelly, Petra, 73, 138–9 Kennedy, John F., 51 Kerouac, Jack, 41 Klaus, Vaclav, 75 Knight, Erik, 36 Kohl, Helmut, 73 Kyoto Protocol, 72, 139–42

Mackenzie, Scott, 43 The Making of a Counter-Culture, 44 Man and Nature, 19, 108–9 Mann, Thomas, 22 Man-to-Man Magazine, 21 Marsh, George Perkins, 19, 108–9 Marwick, Arthur, 43 McDonald’s, 80 McTaggart, David, 71 Milton, John, 10 minimal-impact camping, 84 Ministry of Public Health and Environmental Hygiene, 55 Ministry of the Environment, 55 Mitchell, Joni, 43 The Monkey Wrench Gang, 60 Morgan, J.P., 25 Morris, William, 21, 111–2 Mothers of East Los Angeles, 79 mountain biking, 85–6 Mountain Trails Club, 24 Mowat, Farley, 46–8, 121–2 Muir, John, 27–8, 31, 65, 115–6 music and nature, 11, 22, 43, 48–9 My First Summer in the Sierrqs, 115–6

Lake Baikal, 57 Lassie, 36 Lassie Come Home, 36 The Last Days of Mankind, 61 lawn ornaments, 35 lawns, 34–5, 90 League Against Cruel Sports, 81, 150–1 Lenin, Vladimir, 23 Leopold, Aldo, 40, 63, 118–20 Limits to Growth, 58–9, 126–8 Lines, William J., 81–2 Linnaean, 9 Liszt, Franz, 11 Lithuanian Nature Protect Association, 58

Naess, Arne, 62–3, 84, 128–33 National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, 33 National Council of Churches, 43 National Geographic, 45–6 National Parks Commission, 25 National Trust, 25, 54, 71 National Wild and Scenic Rivers System, 52 National Wildlife Federation, 52, 80 nationalism, 16, 18, 21–6, 57–8, 74–5, 81–2, 89 Natural Areas of National Interest, 26 natural history, 9 Nature and the Socialist Economy, 23–4 Nature Company, 87–8 ‘nature fakers,’ 29

An Inconvenient Truth, 77, 147–8 International Union for the Protection of Nature, 57 It, 33 Jefferson, Thomas, 16 Johnson, Lyndon Baines, 52 Jones, Karen, 87 Jumbo, 29

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Nazis, 18, 22–3 Never Cry Wolf, 47, 121–2 The New Work of Dogs, 92–3 New York Times, 67, 92 News from Nowhere, 111–2 Newton, Isaac, 7 Niagara Falls, 13 Nixon, Richard, 52–3, 62 Notes on Virginia, 16 Obama, Barack, 75 Old Yeller, 37–8 One Day on Beetle Rock, 38–9 Our Synthetic Environment, 51 ozone layer, 72 painting and nature, 6, 12 parks, 23–6, 62 parks, urban, 20, 33–4 Partial Test Ban Treaty, 57 Patriots: Defending Australia’s Natural Heritage, 81–2 Pedley, Ethel, 29 People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, 70, 80–1 People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, 79 People of the Deer, 46 pesticides, 52, 79 Peter the Great, 8 pets, 14, 28–9, 35–8, 90–4 Pinchot, Gifford, 19, 31 poetry and nature, 11–2 Pollan, Michael, 90, 97 The Population Bomb, 60–1 pollution, 20, 50–9, 70–2, 74, 96 Pornography and Silence, 64 Potter, Beatrix, 29 Price, Jennifer, 88 Promotion of the Growth of Natural Resources, 24 prosperity and environmentalism, 3–4, 7, 14, 17, 24, 32–42, 45, 76, 83–98 The Quiet Crisis, 51 racism, 24 radical environmentalism, 60–9, 98 Reader’s Digest, 35–6, 46 Reagan, Ronald, 75 Reclaim the Streets!, 80 recycling, 66, 71, 78 Redford, Robert, 89 Regent’s Park, 29

Reich, Charles, 44 Riehl, Wilhelm Heinrich, 22 The Ring Trilogy, 32, 46, 116–8 Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit, 77, 137–8 A River Runs Through It, 86 roads, 23, 33–4, 60, 62, 71, 80 Roberts, Charles G.D., 29 Rockefeller, William, 25 ‘Rocky Mountain High,’ 48–9 Rollins, William, 83 romanticism, 11–2 rock climbing, 85–6 Roosevelt, Theodore, 19, 24, 76 Roszak, Theodore, 44 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 11–2, 27 Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, 54 Royal National Park, 26, 28 Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, 14 Reuther, Rosemary Radford, 64 rural life, embrace of, 88–9 Ruskin, John, 21, 27 sabotage, 68 ‘Sagebrush Rebellion,’ 77 Salzmann, Sigmund, 36–7 A Sand County Almanac, 40, 118–20 sanitary movement, 20 Schumacher, E.F., 54 Scouting for Boys, 112–4 scuba diving, 45 Sea Birds Preservation Act, 30 SeaWorld, 87, 93–4, 97 seal hunting, protests of, 67 Seal Island, 37 Searle, Graham, 66 seashore, 1, 13 second homes and nature loving, 88 Seed, John, 63 Sequoia National Park, 38 Seton, Ernest Thompson, 29 Sewell, Anna, 29, 109–10 Shelley, Percy, 11 Sierra Club, 52, 65, 79 Silent Spring, 50–1, 55, 58, 120–1 The Silent World, 48 Singer, Peter, 61, 63 The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World, 78, 142–5 skiing, downhill, 45, 85 skiing, water, 45

Index

The Slave Ship, 12 Small is Beautiful, 54 smoke abatement, 20, 54 snorkeling, 45 Snyder, Gary, 64 social class, 5, 14–5, 24–5, 54, 78–9, 90 social environmentalism, 65 Society for Protection of Animals, 14 Solid Waste Act, 52 Solidarity, 74 sports utility vehicles, 83 Stalin, Josef, 57 Stockholm conference, 57 student movement, 42–4 The Suburban Gardener, 20–1 suburbanization, 34–5 sun bathing, 24 Sundance, 89 Surf: Australians Against the Sea, 45 surfing, 45 sustainable development, 77–8 Tansley, A.G., 39 Taylor, Joseph E., III, 86 television and nature, 36–7, 48–9 Thatcher, Margaret, 76 Them, 33 Thomas, Keith, 97–8 Thompson, J. Arthur, 39 Thoreau, Henry David, 26–7, 41, 84 Tintern Abbey, 102–6 Tolkien, J.R.R., 32–3, 38, 46, 116–8 Torrey Canyon, 51 tourism and nature loving, 12–4, 26–8, 33–4, 56, 83–7 toxic-waste movement, 79–80 ‘True Life Adventure,’ 37 Turner, J.M.W., 6, 12 Udall, Stewart, 51–2 Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau, 48 United Farm Workers, 79 United Nations, 57, 71–2, 74, 77, 137–8, 138–9, 139–42 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, 71–2

United Nations Environmental Programme, 57, 72 US Council on Sustainable Development, 78 Vanderbilt, Alfred, 25 Vanoise National Park, 55 Versailles, 10, 12, 14 Wagner, Richard, 11 Walden, 26 Walt Disney, 36–8, 46 Ward, Barbara, 71 Warren, Karen, 64–5 The Watch on the Rhine, 22 Water Act, 54 Watership Down, 46, 124–6 Watt, James, 75 Watts, Alan, 44 West Edmonton Mall, 87 A Whale for the Killing, 47–8 whaling, protests of, 67, 69, 71 Wild Animals I Have Known, 29 wilderness, 26–8, 52, 61–2 Wilderness Society, 52 wind power, 3–4 Windermere, 12–3 Wise Use Movement, 77 wolves, 23, 47, 87 Woman and Nature, 64 woodcraft movement, 24 Woodstock, 43 Wordsworth, William, 11–3, 26, 102–6 World Bank, 77–8 World Commission on Environment, 77 World Council of Churches, 43 Worldwide Wildlife Fund, 66 Yellowstone National Park, 26, 28, 87 Yosemite Park, 26, 43 Young, Edward, 10 Youth Hostels Association, 25 Zakin, Susan, 98 zapovedniki, 23–4 zoos, 14, 29–30

173