Modern Man and The Obsession

...At heart, environmentalism favors the affluent over the poor, the haves over the have-nots...

...Doesn't the former president of the National Academy know about those "ticking bombs" out there—nuclear reactors, that is—spewing out their cancer-causing and death-dealing radiation waves day and night...

...A nation utterly absorbed in the present had to be brought to consider the future...

...Its record is matchless among fuels so far as life, health, and comfort are concerned...

...Tucker examines in detail the difference between contemporary conservation and the conservation associated with the names of Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot that was little more than the gospel of efficiency applied to natural resources instead of, say, labor and machinery...

...On the evidence of the best—and overwhelming majority—of physical scientists, nuclear energy is the cleanest and safest yet developed...

...The number of demons to be combated increases exponentially, in proportion not to anything tangible or empirical in the world, but to rising intensity of faith...

...A primitive people, for example, may believe that the greatest dangers faced by man are the invisible but puissant evil spirits abroad everywhere...

...The question is a fair one, and it does no good to turn to scientists, for although armed with greater factual information, they too are often seized by this modern manifestation of what Levy-Bruhl called the primitive mentality...

...Man's mere presence as a species will be sufficient evidence to environmentalists of the future of the absolutely vital nature of their redemptive labors...

...it has been declining slowly for some years...

...A great many environmentalist sects today fall easily in the social category that historically has included Anabaptists, Quakers, Shakers, Jacobins, Abolitionists, Socialists, Anti-fluoridationists, and many, many others...

...It was entirely in the spirit of Taylorism and its time and motion studies in the factories...

...Just as Christianity and Judaism posit an age of the prelap-sarian Adam, just as Marxist theology has its sacred age in the primitive communism from which all history is a falling-away, so environmentalists have their myth of an original, immaculate earth where only man proved vile...

...Many environmentalist leaders are no different, Tucker argues...

...But during the past twenty or thirty years we have seen the aims and ideals of the great John Muir and the original Sierra Club transposed from nature alone to the whole social system we live under...

...We seem to have changed places—no, we have joined the primitives in refusing to quench our concern...

...It is the indelible mark of every major social movement that in time it loses or else transforms its initial cult- and sect-like character, and, through processes and techniques of differentiation, strategic liaisons, routinization of the charismatic, and, above all, consecrated missionary work, becomes ever-more different from its early roots, though it declaims mightily on the sacred continuity of it all...

...Their work is as much a study of the sect as recurrent social form as it is of environmentalism as such...

...The processes of syncretism have operated for environmentalism just as they did for primitive Christianity and for socialism of the past century...

...The West's Jewish and Greek roots have made it virtually alone the embodiment of intellectual, scientific, and moral, as well as economic and technological, progress...

...Each form of social life has its own typical risk portfolio...

...There seems to be no issue, large or small, that can win more support, year in and year out, than the notion of 'protecting the environment.' " True, there are a great many Americans whose primary interest in economic growth, jobs, and profits leaves them largely untouched by environmentalist pleas for a steady state, zero-growth economy in the interests of the wilderness...

...Environmentalism is the conservatism—in both senses of that word, political as well as naturalist—of the liberal classes...

...The conservation movement that began to flourish at the turn of the century under men like Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot was a movement in prudence and efficiency, designed to increase and prolong economic growth...

...Anchor Press/Doubleday, $17.95...

...That the United States could have been sucked as far as it was into the elegantly fatuous Law of the Sea is tribute at bottom to the political clout of environmentalism...

...But they lack for the most part the kind of lobbying in Washington, D.C...

...All in the name of sacred nature...

...Francis and his followers...

...They see environmentalist fervor as a kind of risk-intoxication caused as much by subjective as objective forces, by the ineradi-cability of risk-perception among human beings as by anything directly and objectively attributable to technology and industry...

...Having made it to the top, they become far more concerned with preventing others from climbing the ladder behind them, than in making it up a few more rungs themselves...

...Christianity had a suffering mankind to save through Christ, Marxism a suffering proletariat, and the Com moners, Ehrlichs, and Browers a suffering nature...

...He argues persuasively that for the last couple of decades we have been living in nothing less than "the Age of Environmentalism," where environmentalism "comes close to being a national religion...

...This is more nearly the nature our ancestors knew and feared, the nature that the God of the Old Testament ordered man to subdue and have dominion over...

...Friedrich Engels, in his history of Christianity, took astute note of how like the Marxism of his day was to apostolic Christianity, each attracting to its banner, Engels observed wryly, cranks and crackpots of every description—faith-healers, perpetual motionists, apocalyptics, millennialists, sun-worshippers, earth-worshippers, and so on...

...We can be grateful to the environmentalists, Tucker says, for pointing to pollutants and contaminants we had become careless of...

...It is no different with militant environmentalism...

...Had Franciscan pantheism prevailed utterly, the cost would have been nothing less than Western civilization...

...As the result of incessant, around-the-clock challenges to every aspect of nuclear energy—by lawyers, scientists, and professionals of all kinds in service to immaculate nature—this clean, safe, and potentially liberating form of energy is about to enter history's dustbin, casualty of the Levy-Bruhlian primitive mentality that feeds upon discovered evils, real or imaginary, making man's life a thing of incessant escape...

...The more enthusiastic the environmentalist's belief in the sanctity of nature, the less attention he will give to the causes which have traditionally interested liberals, such as minority rights, social welfare, and the like...

...After all, Western civilization can be said to rest upon the ancient Jewish injunction to be fruitful and multiply and to have dominion over the earth and all that lives on it...

...Not so, says Philip Handler, former head of the National Academy of Sciences...

...which, starting with the late 1960s, it did...

...They too have for the vastly larger part made it in life and thus have the time and the means to protect the wilderness from whatever alterations might be required for others to know the exhilaration of rising in economic and social status...

...Man, not the wilderness...

...Robert Nisbet is Albert Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities, Emeritus, at Columbia University and Adjunct Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute...

...The choice of risks "to worry about depends on the social forms selected," i.e., patterns of social and cultural existence...

...It will be interesting to see at the next Earth Day just how many have heeded Tucker's advice...

...More and more, in both structure and aim, environmentalism resembles other fundamentally revolutionary movements in Western religious and political history...

...Man's greatest accomplishment on earth is the development of cities and thus civilization, and this development has always been and must be at the expense of the environmentalists' beloved wilderness, a form of love that only an advanced technology and an upper-class mode of living makes attractive...

...Thus the appalling overgrowth in many of the forests which have been made off-limits by legislators in service to environmentalist lobbies...

...He writes that "the United States is not suffering an 'epidemic of cancer,' it is experiencing an 'epidemic of life'—in that an ever greater fraction of the population survives to the advanced ages at which cancer has always been prevalent...

...Tucker, however, presents the panoramic view: it is environmentalism as such, not as mere case history in the annals of human perceptions of risks, that interests him...

...But for right-thinking, born-again Friends of the Earth, nuclear energy is diabolical, its radioactivity (far less actually than what nature-lovers absorb naturally in their mountain-safaris) cousin to the fallout of nuclear bomb explosions...

...The appeal of environmentalism, in its more extreme manifestations at least, becomes irresistible to that permanent cadre of political and social radicals Western society has nurtured ever since the Enlightenment...

...that has become the hallmark of the multitude of conservation societies, many of them rich and powerful...

...All social movements are built around what Kenneth Minogue calls "suffering situations...

...For environmentalism has become a phenomenon even more formidable than Tucker and also Douglas and Wildavsky appear to realize...

...Pinchot was explicit: "The object of our forest policy," he declared at a meeting of the American Society of Foresters, "is not to preserve the forests because they are beautiful...

...Highly skilled and well-paid public-relations experts together with a universally compliant press have accustomed us to this view of environmentalism...

...Tucker usefully likens the environmentalists, or at least the more dedicated and militant of them, to an aristocracy, one to which the relatively well-established American middle class enjoys attaching itself...

...This cadre has never been primarily interested in the protection of nature, but if such a movement carries with it even the possibility of political and social revolution, it is well that the cadre join it...

...thus the infinite variety of ways by which the residents of a Marin County—those who got there early —repulse a later generation that would also like to build houses there, even though an ecosystem or two might be damaged...

...The last has reached the proportions of diabolism in the minds of a very large number of environmentalists, and efforts are unsparing in the prevention of use of nuclear sources of industrial power...

...indeed, it is absolutely indispensable to a free private-enterprise system and its continuing growth and diffusion of social and cultural benefits to mankind...

...this and the Greek Protagoras's "Man is the measure of all things...

...But the time has come for them to go home...

...Almost any use of the wilderness for other than pantheistic-mystical or austerely recreational purposes is declared profane and sacrilegious...

...Sitting at the top of the economic heap, aristocracies naturally do not want to see tod much economic or social rearrangement...

...The French anthropologist, LevyRisk and Culture, by Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky...

...When we turn to William Tucker's book we are confronted by the same genus environmentalis that Douglas and Wildavsky examine in their study of the perception of risk...

...In its more militant and aggressive manifestations environmentalism has become a social movement devoted increasingly to political, social, and economic ends...

...and vice versa...

...or because they are refuges for the wild creatures of the wilderness . . . but the making of prosperous homes...

...William Tucker believes that this Age of Environmentalism will probably pass, just as the Victorian Age did...

...As long as nothing more than nature-regard is involved, our indulgence of environmentalism is reasonable...

...It is not different at the present moment with environmentalism...

...Its base may be nature-regard, an innocent enough thing, most would say, and not to be compared seriously with socialism and Communism...

...As a historian, I am obliged by the record of the Western past to see environmentalism—of the kind espoused by the Commoners, Ehrlichs, and Browers —as the third great wave of redemptive struggle in Western history, the first being Christianity, the second modern socialism...

...It is nothing less than a major social movement, one that has brought to its own passion the passions of a large number of groups not primarily interested perhaps in the physical environment...

...Not often are we reminded that nature is also a composite of terrifying, atmosphere-polluting volcanoes, of devastating earthquakes, of hurricanes, typhoons, and tidal waves, of droughts and floods, of lethal insects, snakes, and wild animals, and of literally trillions upon trillions of microscopic organisms waiting, it may fairly be said, for man's technological guard to drop in order to commence their onslaughts against health and life...

...What is being preserved is evidently more than 'ecosystems.' It is an image of wilderness as a semi-sacred place beyond humanity's intrusion...

...This leads Douglas and Wildavsky to wonder what Levy-Bruhl would make of today's increasingly obsessed sectarians of nature who also repudiate any notion of natural death, seeing the alien presence of not hostile spirits but death-dealing carcinogens, contaminants, and pollutants everywhere, our form of economy and polity actively engaged in their proliferation...

...Of the radicalism or potential radicalism of militant environmentalism today there should be no doubt whatever...

...That environmentalism can be deadly in its power is already evident in the near-moribund state that nuclear power has reached...

...Bruhl, thought that the primitive mind was substantively different from modern, civilized consciousness, largely by virtue of the primitives' disdain for natural causes and their total attraction to incessant interventions by spirits as true causes of death...

...The system of free enterprise has been hated by the Utopian-millennialist mind for two or more centuries...

...University of California Press, $14.95...

...It is easy to think of environmentalist sects and movements in the Western world as concerned solely with the physical environment and its protection and rehabilitation...

...The choice of risks and the choice of how to live are taken together...

...Since threats to the sacred wilderness, to sky, earth, and water, are declared by environmentalists in rising fanaticism to be inseparable from the economic and political system we call capitalism, then in the interests of purity and goodness, this system must be reconstructed, radically if necessary...

...Environmentalists as such do not hate the system, or didn't in the beginning...

...What it has become in organizations like the Friends of the Earth is a sectarian struggle to abolish economic growth as far as possible, to preserve the wilderness at whatever cost to economy and democratic society...

...That nuclear energy does in fact present possible hazards is not to be doubted, but so do coal and oil, so do automobiles, railroads, and jetliners...

...In the typical environmentalist tract, nature is serene and benign, a gorgeous painting of snow-capped peaks, of mountain ranges, plateaus, meadows, lakes, and streams, of sylvan recesses and bosky retreats .for the mystically inclined, and ever-productive—when man doesn't interfere—of natural, healthful, organic foods untouched by poisonous, death-dealing chemical insecticides...

...No one can reasonably quarrel with environmentalism in this sense...

...Merely consider the number of gays, lesbians, astrologists, socialists, sexologists, organic food faddists, peaceniks, freezeniks, and assorted others who religiously observe Earth Day, gathering joyously with the nature-lovers...

...The most formidable enemy of conservation today is not the corporation, as the Sierra Club myth has it, but rather the whole preservationist mentality that has sprung up so powerfully in our time...

...And thus the holding-up of dam-building and utility construction through endless requirements of "environmental impact" statements...

...Does anyone think that for Christians man kind will ever be sufficiently saved to warrant closing down the churches and putting away the sacred books...

...No one can foretell the future, but it is by no means impossible that environmentalism will prove to be the most radical of the three...

...Progress and Privilege: America in an Age of Environmentalism, by William Tucker...

...Such an observation doubtless makes Professor Epstein and many mem-bers of environmentalist sects apoplectic...

...And elsewhere Pinchot wrote: "The job was not to stop the ax, but to regulate its use...

...Two extraordinarily good recent studies of environmentalism in present day America offer considerable substantiation of this observation.* Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky see environmentalism, or much of it, as falling within the history of sectarianism, concerned, as sects invariably are, with evils and risks and their obliteration...

...Such a study is also perforce one in some degree of enthusiasm, a pathological state of mind more often seen in the histories of religion and mass politics than in nature-study groups...

...The overall, age-corrected incidence of cancer has not been increasing...

...They demand an autopsy for every death: the day that we do that, the essential difference between our mentality and theirs will be abolished...

...Predictably, it is the sun that fascinates our environmentalists as a source of energy—and no doubt as a form of spiritual purification, for there is a renascent primitivism in the environmentalist's characteristic approach to life...

...The authors conclude the passage: "Was the primitive, then, really modern...

...What is being purveyed," writes Tucker, "is a view of the world in which human activity is defined as 'bad' and natural conditions as 'good.' The Sierra Club's definition of a 'degraded environment' is an environment that shows evidence of human habitation...

...they served for a while a worthy function...

...For such a people, as Douglas and Wildavsky write, there is no such thing as natural death: each ending of life, no matter what the age of the deceased may be, is the result of direct intervention by some hostile spirit or force...

...Not many, I should guess...

...The blue-collar worker typically sees risks that the upper-middle-class individual is indifferent to...

...The sect, it is emphasized by the authors, develops its own structural reason for being, and almost any issue can be shaped to the sect's needs for incessant enthusiasm, militance, and generalized suspicion of the rest of the social order...

...but they have come to hate many things vital to the system, starting with our sources of energy—gas, coal, oil, and, above all, nuclear energy...

...Naturally, environmentalism has its sacred-mythic past...

...In a degree rarely seen in history, liberals, conservatives, middle- and upper-classes join ardently in the cause, as they see it, of protecting the earth from its potential ravagers...

...The special interest of Risk and Culture for social scientists lies in the sophisticated framework of inquiry in which the authors set contemporary environmentalism...

...The sudden appearance of intense public concern about the environment can never be explained by evidence of harm from technology.'' It is the characteristic mentality of the sectarian that is at work in the more militant sectors of environmentalism, declare Douglas and Wildavsky...

...Ages and peoples vary widely in their identification of the really significant risks and uncertainties faced by human beings...

...Professor Samuel S. Epstein, for example, author of The Politics of Cancer (promoted not strangely by the Sierra Club), believes that cancer is becoming epidemic, the result of an obsolete form of government that refuses to regulate human lives properly...

...But it is nevertheless an incomplete and often distorted view...

...The greatest heresy preached in the Middle Ages was that of St...