ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES  Green Imperialism – Richard Grove

POOR CITIES population is growing faster than income

Origins of Modern Environmental Thought

local environmental problems have been largely solved, edenic romantic physiocentric
but whose residents make consumption and investment
RICH CITIES choices with distant environmental impacts that are
hard to perceive
 Principle of Plentitude – Arthur Lovejoy

‘presupposes a richness, an expansiveness of life, a tendency to fill

aesthetic up, so to speak, the empty niches of nature’, pointing out that
CENTRAL TENETS OF
TRADITIONAL ‘implicit in it is the recognition of the great variety of life and perhaps
FORMS OF utilitarian FRAMEWORKS its tendency to multiply’
ENVIRONMENTALISM
scientific
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AESTHETIC / PHILOSOPHICAL
ENVIRONMENTAL sustenance
HUMAN RIGHTS security Like all gardens, Yosemite presupposed barriers against
Simon Schama the beastly. But its protectors reversed conventions by
keeping the animals in and the humans out.

 Traces on the Rhodian Shore – Clarence Glacken Nature had taken pains to gather her choicest treasures
to draw her lovers into close and confiding communion
with her’. … But of course, nature does no such thing.
Central conceptions have shaped human attitudes to the We do.
natural environment since classical antiquity John Muir
aesthetic judgements have shaped attitudes
human beings are towards nature to the point of ignoring important facts
creative ‘critters’, of history
natural environments
designed earth always seeking to
influence human life
modify nature for
Religion has often been a source of aesthetic imaginaries. Indeed one of the
their purposes foundational debates in environmental history was over the issue of whether or not
the Judeo-Christian tradition precipitated the environmental crisis.
AESTHETIC / PHILOSOPHICAL
By the eighteenth century, this quest morphed into organized attempts to reorganize
landscapes in order to mirror the fantasy of edenic divine order, although this
reorganization was also accompanied by a quest to profit from nature’s bounty.
wrote that he photographed Yosemite in the manner he
Ansel Adams did to sanctify a ‘religious idea’ and to ‘inquire of my
own soul just what the primeval scene really signifies’
Although religious impulses drove human attitudes to nature throughout much
of history, the secular tradition has also produced a parallel aesthetic.
Consider the following passage from Kant’s essay on the sublime and the
beautiful:
The finer sentiment which we propose to consider here is primarily of two kinds:
the sentiment of the lofty or sublime (Erhabenen) and the sentiment of the
beautiful. … We must have a sense of the sublime to receive the first
impression adequately, and a sense of the beautiful to enjoy the latter fully.
Sublime
Emmanuel Kant
Beautiful
The intent of the essay from which this passage is excerpted was by no means
to merely wax eloquent about the natural world. As Richard Norman argues,
Once we introduce the idea of the sublime as an object of aesthetic
appreciation distinct from the idea of beauty, the way is open for us to
recognize a whole range of other aesthetic objects and aesthetic values in
nature...
these features of nature just are part of the world we
have to make sense of; we find them powerfully
Richard Norman expressive in these ways, and given that we do so, our
experience would be diminished if they were to be
destroyed.
By the mid twentieth century, religious and secular traditions alike combined,
in North America and a few other regions of the world, to produce a radical
environmental ethic. As Roderick Frazier Nash wrote:
The new ethically oriented environmental movement seethes with such
unprecedented ideas.
An educator discusses abuse of the environment in
terms of ‘prejudice against nature’ and relates it
ecological
explicitly to racial, sexual, national and economic
egalitarianism prejudice. He aspires to nothing less than liberating the
earth.
recommend a morality based on the ‘spiritual
Ecotheologians democracy’ of God’s creation, including everything from
sub-atomic particles to spiral nebulae...
ultimate plants and animals
join people as rights holders.
democracy
carries an essay proposing a constitutional amendment
stating that wildlife must not be deprived of ‘life, liberty
Environmental
or habitat without due process of law’. Clearly the old
Law boundaries that limited liberalism to human
freedom are breaking down.
However, both passages, and those described earlier, are
ontologically united by an esssentially aesthetic judgement that
holds the natural world as sublime, fundamental and inviolable.
END of AESTHETIC / PHILOSOPHICAL
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UTILITARIAN / POLITICAL passed a conservation Ordinance intended to preserve
Jean-Baptiste forests in order to ensure the existence of resources for
the natural world has, since at least the mid eighteenth century, been Colbert activities such as grazing, mast feeding and the
equally valued from within a utilitarian calculus. gathering of forest litter.

The environmental crisis’, if not expressed in exactly those terms, was definitely an discussion of problems of forest management and
issue for governance from at least the sixteenth century in Europe, and in several utilisation in his great encyclopedia, Histoire
other parts of the world. Naturelle.

The evidence is enshrined in local laws: for example, between 1535 and 1777, 322
forests were proclaimed protected by official ordinances.
The writings of: shows,
Comte Buffon
began experiments concerning tree growth, and also
conducted pioneering research on wood technology,
establishing a correlation between the density and the
strength of wood for the first time.

George Perkins John Croumbie Franklin His objective was to study the complexinterrelationships
Élisée Reclus of the physical, the biological and the human, for the
Marsh Brown Benjamin Hough
efficient use of natural resources.
Alexander von
Humboldt encouraged research and education in forest
management and in particular assisted in the
there had begun a systematic body of scientific establishment of the forest school at Eberswalde
Early modern in 1830.
observations and the development of research
period onward programmes which culminated

That approaches to conservation were framed by economic considerations

in the recognition that human beings are akin to
should not surprise any historian of this period, for at least three reasons.
Mid nineteenth geological agents, capable of making undesirable and,
century from the standpoint of human societies, catastrophic
changes in nature.

many of the scientific environmentalism

From the earliest writers, with their roots in Baconianism, this tradition Improvement was practitioners who during this period was,
was deeply enmeshed with, and a central commitment of, the drive one of the propounded in many significant
towards progress. fundamental tenets environmental theories ways, connected with
of the Enlightenment were landowners or one interpretation of
managers the dominion myth

Advocated tree-planting, was primarily economic,

John Evelyn directed at raising the value of estates.

END of UTILITARIAN / POLITICAL

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SCIENTIFIC / SYMBIOTIC However, speaking explicitly in terms of valuation and ethical commitments towards
nature, the case can be made that this long ‘classical’ tradition has seen
environmentalist valuation assume one of two forms.
The aesthetic and utilitarian imaginaries come together in the history of
the environmental sciences.

this period saw the first systematic evidence-gathering that established natural
connotes the notion of the sacred,
history and subsequently the environmental sciences. It can also be argued that an inviolability establishing boundaries that should not
important undertone of work in natural history, regardless of teleological be crossed in humanity’s use of nature.
commitments either religious or secular, was

In understanding the workings of nature to improve the material

Nature is valued as a means to something
conditions for human existence. instrumental else

natural history evolved into the

both argue from the standpoint that environmental ethics is
environmental sciences.
fundamentally about discovering the normative rules for
negotiating the relationship between humanity and the rest of
nature.
Nineteenth and This period also saw the emergence of a
Twentieth long and sustained tradition in ecological
centuries economics
They differ only in their purported solution to the problem.

the question of the relationship

between physical environments and human
survival went through a sea change END of SCIENTIFIC / SYMBIOTIC

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cultural ecology and its interest in the
Mid-twentieth
relations between environment, subsistence
century
and system https://www.researchgate.net/publicati
on/314412557_Classical_environmentali
sm_and_environmental_human_rights_
an_exploration_of_their_ontological_ori
gins_and_differences
what unites these vast and diverse disciplinary histories is a combination of
some normative (aesthetic or moral) sensibility; a commitment to https://static.sustainability.asu.edu/4ad
systematic or scientific investigation, and a utilitarian thrust eed0921abe474d0f1d55caba23c9f866cc
8497554cdafc34dbcd338b5901e.pdf