“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 life, to lead
From joy to joy: for she can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty…”
~William Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey”
Long before Ecotopia brought the sacredness of nature into the mainstream of environmental discourse, writers have delved into the nuances of our perception of nature. The Romantic poets of the 18th and 19th centuries were amazed and humbled by the sublime, the peaceful, the wild. As a species, our spiritual relationship with nature has a fundamental place in the looming crises.
Lynn White argues that Christianity gave our species a doctrine of dominion over the natural world, over the animals, the plants, and the earth. At the same time, God made all of this nature, the Alps, the trees, and wildlife, and designed all these intricate and complex systems that we barely understand. White contends that while Christianity bolsters our right to conquer the world around us, to rape and pillage the earth for resources, there is a way to bring Christianity and environmentalism together. And anyways, haven’t we spent thousands of years trying to get back to the Garden, to Eden? To reach Paradise, that garden of nothing but nature? Nature is instrumental in our Judeo-Christian understanding of spirituality.
What do the deep ecology movement, “sustainability”, Utopia, American exceptionalism, and Saint Francis of Assisi have to do with the a poem written a few miles away from Tintern Abbey??
Nature is exceptionally complicated. We discovered just how complex the word “environment” is last week when we discovered that “the environment” never ends. In order to save “nature,” we cannot simplify the solution to fighting against pollution and resource depletion, as the shallow ecology movement, a movement run by reductionists focused on developed countries. Naess described a decentralized deep ecology movement which really accounts for the nuances of our ecosystems. This is a multi-lateral, interdisciplinary approach to solving our eco-crises. The deep ecology movement needs scientists to measure pollution and take core samples of Antarctic ice. It needs engineers to build models of electric cars and design zero-waste college campuses. It needs to have an ideal, a Utopia, a place to move towards, be it the “none-zone” we live in or a sexy forest colony somewhere in the future. The deep ecology movement wants to try and approach this daunting, humbling “everythingness” that is the environment and the environmental crisis with as many of our resources in as many places as possible. Like Ostrom, deep ecology knows that environmental problems and solutions must be situated because every locality is very different.
Wordsworth was humbled by the sublime, by the life-force that pulsed through the trees and the rocks and the grass and himself. We need to romanticize nature just like he and his comrades did, because if nature never did betray the heart that loved her, we need to foster a loving, cooperative relationship between ourselves and nature, and depart from the dominion we have exercised over our natural worlds since Adam named those animals. Because there seems to be a deep connection between ourselves and the wilderness on our planet, almost like we are one and the same.