Dale Easley's Favorite Quotations
| A Fierce Green Fire: the American Environmental Movement |
| Shabecoff, Philip |
| Christopher Columbus: This people is very gentle and timid, naked as I
have said, without arms or law; these lands are very fertile... they have
beans and kidney beans very different from ours, and much cotton... and a
thousand other kinds of fruit that I can't describe; and all should be
very profitable. [p.~9] North America was already inhabited by about four million Indians. Over the centuries the indigenous people had created their own complex cultures. But the European saw an empty land that offered a chance to create a quiet, fruitful, bucolic life free of the poverty, turmoil, complexity, and decadence of England and the Continent. It was the ideal of the peaceful shepherd living a life of contemplative plenty in a setting of natural but tamed beauty. If the garden was a myth, it nevertheless exercised a powerful hold on the European mind and continues to this day to color the American perception of our landscape. [p.~20] But another, conflicting vision also filled the imagination of the earliest settlers---that of a fierce and frightening wilderness. It was an image strongly buttressed by the immediate reality the early arrivals were forced to confront. America was not a garden. It was the very antithesis of Eden, or so it seemed to the brave but apprehensive early colonists. The explorers and first settlers were faced by a dark, forbidding line of forest behind which was a vast, unmapped continental interior, inhabited, they thought, by savages and filled with ferocious wild beasts. William Bradford, looking over the water to Cape Cod from the deck of the Mayflower in September 1620, gloomily contemplated ``a hideous and desolate wilderness full of wilde beasts and wild men.'' [p.~12] To the New England Puritan, the biblical injunction to subdue the earth and make it fruitful was at once an imperative of survival and a holy mission. That mission was no less than the planting of a perfect Christian community in the virgin, hostile land [p.~13] Captain William Clark: The plains of this country are covered with a leek green grass, well calculated for the sweetest and most nourishing hay---interspersed with copses of trees, spreading their lofty branches over pools, springs, or brooks of fine water. Groups of shrubs covered with the most delicious fruits is to be seen in every direction, and nature appears to have exerted herself to beautify the scenery by the variety of flowers, delicately and highly flavored, raised above the grass, which strikes and perfumes the sensations and amuses the mind, throws it into conjecturing the cause of so magnificent a scenery...in a country far removed from the civilized world. By the middle of the nineteenth century, romanticism held sway in the more settled areas of the United States. Rousseau had now won his argument with Hobbes on both sides of the Atlantic. Life in a state of nature was no longer perceived as mean, brutish, and short but, in some ways, more fulfilling and desirable than civilization. ``The earth left to its own natural fertility and covered with immense woods, that no hatchet has disfigured, offers at every step food and shelter to every species of animals'' including humans, Rousseau taught. Men are freer, happier, and more honest the closer they are to nature, he argued. [p.~49] Thoreau can be regarded as the spiritual founder of the modern crusade to preserve what is left of our wilderness. ``In wilderness is the preservation of the world,'' he proclaimed, and to many of today's environmental militants his dictum is still a call to battle. To Thoreau, wilderness was the counterbalance to the heavy burdens placed on the human soul by labor and the cares of living in an increasingly materialistic, urbanized society. The errand into the wilderness prescribed by Thoreau was far different from that of the fearful, God-driven Puritans of two centuries earlier. Humanity would save itself and plant the spirit of God, not by destroying wilderness, but by becoming one with it. [p.~52] ``I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and a close shave, to drive life into a corner and reduce it to its lowest terms.'' [p.~54] An essay entitled ``Tragedy of the Commons,'' by the ecologist Garrett Hardin, published in 1968 in Science, made an influential if hotly debated case for social intervention to limit population growth and resource consumption. The essay offered a parable which purported to show how a commons, a publicly owned pasture, would inevitably be destroyed by its users. Any individual user of the pasture, he noted, stood to profit by grazing as many of his or her own cattle as possible, because the grass was free. But if all members of the community did the same thing, the commons would be quickly be overgrazed, eroded, and useless for feeding animals---and humans--- in the future. A ``Social Darwinian,'' Hardin argued that society should not assist the impoverished and undernourished through welfare programs or send food to starving people in other countries. Or, Hardin insisted, if these people accepted social help they should be required to agree to limits on their rights to procreate. While Hardin's precepts were assailed as unnecessarily harsh, even within the growing environmental community, the notion that population control was a key to the ecological health of the planet and the well-being and possibly the survival of humanity continued to gain wide, although by no means universal currency. Some radical environmentalists continue to urge draconian measures to curb population growth. [p.~95] Barry Commoner: Human beings have broken out of the circle of life, driven not by biological need, but by the social organization which they have devised to ``conquer'' nature: mans of gaining wealth that are governed by requirements conflicting with those which govern nature. The end result is the environmental crisis, a crisis of survival. Once more, to survive, we must close the circle. We must learn how to restore to nature the wealth that we borrow from it. [p.~99] Silent Spring by Rachel Carson ... is now recognized as one of the truly important books of this century. More than any other, it changed the way American, and people around the world, looked at the reckless way we live on this planet. Focusing on a specific problem--- the poisoning of the earth by chemical pesticides--- Silent Spring was a broad examination of how carelessly applied science and technology were destroying nature and threatening life, including human life. [p.~107] Rachel Carson, 1962, in Silent Spring: ``The most alarming of all man's assaults upon the environment is his contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials. This pollution is for the most part irrecoverable; the chain of evil it initiates not only in the world that must support life but in living tissues is for the most part irreversible. In this now universal contamination of the environment, chemicals are the sinister and little recognized partners of radiation in changing the very nature of the world---the very nature of its life.'' Club of Rome, 1972, The Limits to Growth: 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 with the next one hundred years. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity. [p.~96] |