The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis

Lynn White. 1967. Science 155: 1203-1207.

A conversation with Aldous Huxley not infrequently put one at the receiving end of an unforgettable
monologue. About a year before his lamented death he was discoursing on a favorite topic: Man’s
unnatural treatment of nature and its sad results. To illustrate his point he told how, during the previous
summer, he had returned to a little valley in England where he had spent many happy months as a child.
Once it had been composed of delightful grassy glades; now it was becoming overgrown with unsightly
brush because the rabbits that formerly kept such growth under control had largely succumbed to a
disease, myxomatosis, that was deliberately introduced by the local farmers to reduce the rabbits’
destruction of crops. Being something of a Philistine, I could be silent no longer, even in the interests of
great rhetoric. I interrupted to point out that the rabbit itself had been brought as a domestic animal to
England in 1176, presumably to improve the protein diet of the peasantry.

Romantic view.

All forms of life modify their contexts. The most spectacular and benign instance is doubtless the coral
polyp. By serving its own end, it has created a vast undersea world favorable to thousands of other kinds
of animals and plants. Ever since man became a numerous species he has affected his environment
notably. The hypothesis is that his fire-drive method of hunting created the world’s greatest grassland and
helped to exterminate the monster mammals of the Pleistocene from much of the globe is plausible, if not
proved. For 6 millennia at least, the banks of the lower Nile have been a human artifact rather than the
swampy African jungle which nature, apart from man, would have made it. The Aswan Dam, flooding
5000 square miles is only the latest stage in a long process. In many regions terracing or irrigation,
overgrazing, the cutting of forests by Romans to build ships to fight the Carthaginians or by Crusaders to
solve the logistics problems of their expeditions, have profoundly changed some ecologies. Observations
that the French landscape falls into two basic types, the open fields of the north and the bocage of the
south and west, inspired Marc Bloch to undertake his classic study of medieval agricultural methods.
Quite unintentionally, changes in human ways often affect nonhuman nature. It has been noted, for
example, that the advent of the automobile eliminated huge flocks of sparrows that once fed on the horse
manure littering every street.

The history of ecologic changes is still so rudimentary that we know little about what really happened, or
what the results were. The extinction of the European aurochs as late as 1627 would seem to have been a
simple case of overenthusiastic hunting. On more intricate matters, it often is impossible to find solid
information. For a thousand years or more the Frisians and Hollanders have been pushing back the North
Sea, and the process is culminating in our own time in the reclamation of the Zuider Zee. What, if any,
species of animals, birds, fish, shore life, or plants have died out in the process? In their epic combat with
Neptune have the Netherlanders overlooked ecological values in such a way that the quality of human life
in the Netherlands has suffered? I cannot discover that the questions have ever been asked, much less
answered.

People, then, have often been a dynamic element in their own environment, but in the present state of
historical scholarship we usually do not know exactly when, where, or with what effects man-induced
changes came. As we enter the last third of the 20th century, however, concern for the problem of
ecologic backlash is mounting feverishly. Natural science, conceived as the effort to understand the
nature of things, had flourished in several eras and among several peoples. Similarly there had been an
age-old accumulation of technological skills, sometimes growing rapidly, sometimes slowly. But it was
not until about four generations ago that Western Europe and North America arranged a marriage
between science and technology, a union of the theoretical and the empirical approaches to our natural
environment. The emergence of the Baconian creed that scientific knowledge means technological power
over nature can scarcely be dated before 1850, save in the chemical industries, where it is anticipated in
the 18th century. Its acceptance as a normal pattern of action may mark the greatest event in human
history since the invention of agriculture, and perhaps in nonhuman terrestrial history as well.

Almost at once the new situation forced the crystallization of the novel concept of ecology; indeed, the
word ecology first appeared in the English language in 1873. Today, less than a century later, the impact
of our race upon the environment has so increased in force that it has changed in essence. When the first
cannons were fired, in the early 14th century, they affected ecology by sending workers scrambling to the
forests and mountains for more potash, sulphur, iron ore, and charcoal, with some resulting erosion and
deforestation. Hydrogen bombs are of a different order: a war fount with them might alter the genetics of
all life on this planet. By 1285 London had a smog problem arising from the burning of soft coal, but our
present combustion of fossil fuels threatens to change the chemistry of the globe’s atmosphere as a whole,
with consequences which we are only beginning to guess. With the population explosion, the carcinoma
of planless urbanism, the now geological deposits of sewage and garbage, surely no creature other than
this man has ever managed to foul its nest in such short order.

There are many calls to action, but specific proposals, however worthy as individual items, seemed too
partial, palliative, negative: ban the bomb, tear down the billboards, give the Hindus contraceptives and
tell them to eat their sacred cows. The simple solution to suspect change is, of course, to stop it, or better
yet, to revert a romanticized past: make those ugly gasoline stations look like Anne Hathaway’s cottage or
(in the Far West) like ghost-town saloons. The “wilderness area” mentality invariably advocates deep-
freezing an ecology, whether San Gimignano or the High Sierra, as it was before the first Kleenex was
dropped. But neither atavism nor prettification will cope with the ecologic crisis of our time.

What shall we do? No one yet knows. Unless we think about fundamentals, our specific measures may
produce new backlashes more serious than those they are designed to remedy.

As a beginning we should try to clarify our thinking by looking, in some historical depth, at the
presuppositions that underlie modern technology and science. Science was traditionally aristocratic,
speculative, intellectual in intent; technology was lower-class, empirical, action-oriented. The quite
sudden fusion of these two, toward the middle of the 19th century, is surely related to the slightly prior
and contemporary democratic revolutions which, by reducing social barriers, tended to assert a functional
unity of brain and hand. Our ecologic crisis is the product of an emerging, entirely novel, democratic
culture. The issue is whether a democratized world can survive its own implications. Presumably we
cannot unless we rethink our axioms.

The Western Traditions of Technology and Science

One thing is so certain that it seems stupid to verbalize it: both modern technology and modern science
are distinctively Occidental. Our technology has absorbed elements from all over the world, notably from
China; yet everywhere today, whether in Japan or in Nigeria, successful technology is Western. Our
science is the heir to all the sciences of the past, especially perhaps to the work of the great Islamic
scientists of the Middle Ages, who so often outdid the ancient Greeks in skill and perspicacity: al-Razi in
medicine, for example; or ibn-al-Haytham in optics; or Omar Khayyam in mathematics. Indeed, not a few
works of such geniuses seem to have vanished in the original Arabic and to survive only in medieval
Latin translations that helped to lay the foundations for later Western developments. Today, around the
globe, all significant science is Western in style and method, whatever the pigmentation or language of
the scientists.

A second pair of facts is less well recognized because they result from quire recent historical scholarship.
The leadership of the West, both in technology and in science, is far older than the so-called Scientific
Revolution of the 17th century or the so-called Industrial Revolution of the 18th century. These terms are
in fact outmoded and obscure the true nature of what they try to describe–significant stages in two long
and separate developments. By A.D. 1000 at the latest–and perhaps, feebly, as much as 200 years earlier–
the West began to apply water power to industrial processes other than milling grain. This was followed
in the late 12th century by the harnessing of wind power. From simple beginnings, but with remarkable
consistency of style, the West rapidly expanded its skills in the development of power machinery, labor-
saving devices, and automation. Those who doubt should contemplate that most monumental
achievement in the history of automation: the weight-driven mechanical clock, which appeared in two
forms in the early 14th century. Not in craftmanship but in basic technological capacity, the Latin West of
the later Middle Ages far outstripped its elaborate, sophisticated, and esthetically magnificent sister
cultures, who had gone to Italy, wrote a letter to a prince in Greece. He is amazed by the superiority of
Western ships, arms, textiles, glass. But above all he is astonished by the spectable of waterwheels sawing
timbers and pumping the bellows of blast furnaces. Clearly he had seen nothing of the sort in the Near
East.

By the end of the 15th century, the technological superiority of Europe was such that its small, mutually
hostile nations could spill out over all the rest of the world, conquering, looting, and colonizing. The
symbol of this technological superiority is the fact that Portugal, one of the weakest states of the
Occident, was able to become, and to remain for a century, mistress of the East Indies. And we must
remember that the technology of Vasco da Gama and Albuquerque was build by pure empiricism,
drawing remarkably little support or inspiration from science.

In the present-day vernacular understanding, modern science is supposed to have begun in 1543, when
both Copernicus and Vesalius published their great works. It is no derogation of their accomplishments,
however, to point out that such structures as the Fabrica and the De revolutionibus do not appear
overnight. The distinctive Western tradition of science, in fact, began in the late 11th century with a
massive movement of translation of Arabic and Greek scientific works into Latin. A few notable books–
Theophrastus, for example–escaped the West’s avid new appetite for science, but within less than 200
years effectively the entire corpus of Green and Muslim science was available in Latin and was being
eagerly read and criticized in the new European universities. Out of criticism arose new observation,
speculation, and increasing distrust of ancient authorities. By the late 13th century Europe had seized
global scientific leadership from the faltering hands of Islam. It would be as absurd to deny the profound
originality of Newton, Galileo, or Copernicus as to deny that of the 14th century scholastic scientists like
Buridan or Oresme on whose work they built. Before the 11th century onward, the scientific sector of
Occidental culture has increased in a steady crescendo.

Since both our technological and our scientific movements got their start, acquired their character, and
achieved world dominance in the Middle Ages, it would seem that we cannot understand their nature or
their present impact upon ecology without examining fundamental medieval assumptions and
developments.

Medieval View of Man and Nature

Until recently, agriculture has been the chief occupation even in “advanced” societies; hence, any change
in methods of tillage has much importance. Early plows, drawn by two oxen, did not normally turn the
sod but merely scratched it. Thus, cross-plowing was needed and fields tended to be squarish. In the fairly
light soils and semiarid climates of the Near East and Mediterranean, this worked well. But such a plow
was inappropriate to the wet climate and often sticky soils of northern Europe. By the latter part of the 7th
century after Christ, however, following obscure beginnings, certain northern peasants were using an
entirely new kind of plow, equipped with a vertical knife to cut the line of the furrow, a horizontal share
to slice under the sod, and a moldboard to turn it over. The friction of this plow with the soil was so great
that it normally required not two but eight oxen. It attacked the land with such violence that cross-
plowing was not needed, and fields tended to be shaped in long strips.

In the days of scratch-plow, fields were distributed generally in units capable of supporting a single
family. Subsistence farming was the presupposition. But no peasant owned eight oxen: to use the new and
more efficient plow, peasants pooled their oxen to form large plow-teams, originally receiving (it would
appear) plowed strips in proportion to their contribution. Thus, distribution of land was based no longer
on the needs of a family but, rather, on the capacity of a power machine to till the earth. Man’s relation to
the soil was profoundly changed. Formerly man had been part of nature; now he was the exploiter of
nature. Nowhere else in the world did farmers develop any analogous agricultural implement. It is
coincidence that modern technology, with its ruthlessness toward nature, has so largely been produced by
descendants of these peasants of norther Europe?

This same exploitive attitude appears slightly before A.D. 830 in Western illustrated calendars. In older
calendars the months were shown as passive personifications. The new Frankish calendars, which set the
style for the Middle Ages, are very different: they show men coercing the world around the–plowing,
harvesting, chopping trees, butchering pigs. Man and nature are two things, and man is master.

These novelties seem to be in harmony with larger intellectual patterns. What people do about their
ecology depends on what they think about themselves in relation to things around them. Human ecology
is deeply conditioned by beliefs about our nature and destiny–that is, by religion. To Western eyes is very
evident in, say, India or Ceylon. It is equally true of ourselves and of our medieval ancestors.

The victory of Christianity over paganism was the greatest psychic revolution in the history of our
culture. It was become fashionable today to say that, for better or worse, we live in the “post-Christian
age.” certainly the forms of our thinking and the language have largely ceased to be Christian, but to my
eye substance often remains amazingly akin to that of the past. Our daily habits of action, for example,
are dominated by an implicit faith in perpetual progress which was unknown either to Greco- Roman
antiquity or to the Orient. It is rooted in, and is indefensible apart from, Judeo- Christian theology. The
fact that Communists share it merely helps to show what can be demonstrated on many other grounds:
that Marxism, like Islam, is a Judeo-Christian heresy. We continue today to live, as we have lived for
about 1700 years, very largely in a context of Christian axioms.

What did Christianity tell people about their relations with the environment? While many of the world’s
mythologies provide stories of creation, Greco-Roman mythology was singularly incoherent in this
respect. Like Aristotle, the intellectuals of the ancient West denied that the visible world had a beginning.
Indeed, the idea of a beginning was impossible in the framework of their cyclical notion of time. In sharp
contrast, Christianity inherited from Judaism not only a concept of time as nonrepetitive and linear but
also a striking story of creation. By gradual stages a loving and all- powerful God had created light and
darkness, the heavenly bodies, the earth and all its plants, animals, birds, and fishes. Finally, God had
created Adam and, as an afterthought, Eve to keep man from being lonely. Man named all the animals,
thus establishing his dominance over them. God planned all of this explicitly for man’s benefit and rule:
no item in the physical