As I was starting in on Coates’s Nature:
Western Attitudes since Ancient Times, I had a conversation with my
colleague Baylor Johnson, who had finished the book. "I’ve been looking
for a book to give undergraduates," he said, "that would succinctly
describe the important ways the concept of nature has been used in history, and
I was really hoping this book would be it, but it isn’t."

"Why?" I asked.

"Because it’s all
deflationary," Baylor responded, "All he does is look at accounts
that others have given of older attitudes towards nature and try to poke holes
in them."

I didn’t expect to agree with
Baylor’s diagnosis, largely because I share Coates’s antipathy to many of these
naïve, idealizing accounts of older visions of nature, but I have come to
embrace my colleague’s claim, and even take it further. The polemic nature of
Coates’s book not only makes it inappropriate for an undergraduate text, it
makes his book a poor book in general. You can’t assemble a good history out of
a bunch of pot shots.

The first chapter of Coates’s book
is promising enough. As he outlines his approach to history and nature, he
makes a nice distinction between five major denotations of the word ‘nature’:
nature as a physical space unmodified by humans, nature as the whole of the
universe, nature as the essential principle of a thing or the universe, nature
as a guide in human affairs, and nature as the opposite of culture. He also states
that he will incorporate the actual history of the environment into his history
of the concept of nature, so we can see how the two have interacted.
Unfortunately, his nice fivefold distinction is simply never seen again, so we
never get the chance to see why the focal meaning of the term nature moved from
the universe as a whole and its organizing structure to unmodified physical
spaces seen as a source of moral guidance. He does give us some ecological
history, mostly in the second and third chapters, but this is used only to show
that different cultures could not have had a robust ecological consciousness
because they inflicted so much ecological damage. On the whole, the book
promised in the first chapter never materializes.

What we get, instead, is a jumpy
tour of different individuals and social movements that others think were
predecessors to modern environmentalism but that really are not. Thus the
Pythagorean ban on eating meat was not a forebear to modern animal rights
consciousness in part because it was based on a hierarchical theory of species,
in which meat eating was a form of lower savagery. Roman pastoral poetry was
not a predecessor to the nature conservation movement because it was merely "literary
posturing" that stemmed more from contempt for the city than love of
wilderness. The literature on St. Francis, according to Coates, is "a
striking example of our proclivity for making figures of the past over in our
own image" (53). Francis did not have a conception of nature in general.
He only thought about individual natural objects, and his depiction of those
was "utterly conventional" (ibid.). Coates also digresses to deflate
claims made about ecological consciousness of non-European cultures. Thus "The
case for the American Indian the ecological activists usually offer…[fails] to
rise much above the sophistication of the portrayal of Indians in Disney’s
movie Pocahontas." The damage to the environment in Asia shows that
Buddhist and Daoist traditions are not truly ecologically conscious. Returning
to the West, Coates tells us that Thomas Jefferson’s purchase of Virginia’s Natural
Bridge was not an early act of nature conservation, as Eugene Hargrove claims,
because Jefferson preferred human-modified pastoral landscapes to pure
wilderness. Even the Romantics turn out not to be true environmentalists. According
to Coates, Emerson did not really value nature because for him it was merely a
conduit for human enlightenment.

The few times when Coates
acknowledges affinity with the contemporary environmental movement, he is
discussing social movements that environmentalists typically do not acknowledge
or do not want to acknowledge as ancestors, and the affinity he asserts is
quite weak. The most explicit connection to the modern environmental movement
is awarded to the Nazis. Hitler’s minister of agriculture, Richard Darré, is
called a "green forefather," although not a "particularly close
or influential" one (168). The Renaissance figures and early scientists whom
Carolyn Merchant blames for "the death of nature" are also
rehabilitated, if only because their attitude was not that great a break with
the past. In her critique of early modernity "Merchant virtually succumbs
to the concept of a scrupulous golden age" (77). The poet John Clare, who
resisted the British Enclosure Acts, also avoids deflation: his life and works
are simply presented without comment.

These deflationary claims aren’t
what make the book bad. There is a large amount of truth in all of them,
especially the emphasis on the connection between environmentalism and far
right nationalism. Environmentalism only became firmly associated with the left
in the sixties, and they have always made strange bedfellows. One reason Coates’s
book fails is that he never explicitly outlines his standards for being a "true
predecessor" for modern environmentalism, or even give examples of who he
thinks is a representative modern environmentalist. He says repeatedly that
current environmentalism began in 1945, motivated by fear of the atom bomb and
various new pollutants, but he never says why he draws that line. Most of the
people typically thought to be the fathers and mothers of environmentalism do
not seem to be environmentalists at all according to him. John Muir, the
founder of one of the largest environmental organizations on Earth, is awarded
two sentences in the book, and described only as a follower of Thoreau, who,
like all Romantics, was apparently not a real environmentalist. Octavia Hill,
who founded similar organizations in Britain, is portrayed largely as a
defender of aristocracy. He has nothing substantial to say about Aldo Leopold,
who at least managed to live past the magic date of 1945. Rachel Carson does
not appear in the index.

Coates’s implicit standards for
being a genuine environmentalist seem to be conflicting. It seems clear that a
true environmentalist must accord nature as a whole moral status. Thus St.
Francis was not an environmentalist because he had no concept of nature in
general. Similarly, Daoist nature attitudes are not like their Western
counterparts because they are prudential and not true attributions of moral
status. At other times, though, Coates’s environmentalist seems more like an
animal liberationist. The Romans are not environmentalists because their circuses
were as cruel to animals as they were to humans. Hunting preserves seem to be
treated differently than true parks, and hunting itself said to cause "current
sensibilities" to "shudder." But of course the conflict and
periodic rapprochement between animal liberationism and environmentalism is
well known. If belief in animal rights and the moral status of nature as a
whole are both necessary conditions for being a true environmentalist, there
are few environmentalists indeed. Perhaps Coates feels that Aldo Leopold was
not a true environmentalist because he loved hunting and managed game
preserves. 

The deepest problem with Coates’s
book, though, is that he has no positive story to tell. He is keen to tell us
that there was no environmental golden age from which we are now fallen. So
what story is there to tell? Can we tell a narrative of moral progress, as
Leopold and Dale Jamieson want to? Why not tell a story where ideas form
lineages, like genes? At points he discusses chains of influence, but if he
seriously pursued these remarks, they would undo all of his deflationary work. Based
on his own evidence, a chain of influence runs from the Roman pastoralists to contemporary
environmentalists through Rousseau. When it actually comes time to discuss contemporary
attitudes toward nature, Coates admits that there is not one environmental
position. If he had taken this fact seriously while writing the rest of the
book, he could have told a much more interesting story. Can we identify modern
heirs of Roman pastoralism and distinguish them from the ancestors of animal
liberationists? A historian interested in tracing lineages could weave many
threads here. It would also be very interesting to hear about the relationship
between environmental damage and environmental awareness beyond the crude claim
that civilizations who damage their environments probably don’t have much
environmental consciousness. Perhaps environmental consciousness actually grows
in response to environmental damage. Coates actually raises this possibility at
one point, suggesting that Native American ecological consciousness was a
response to the Pleistocene overkill. He can’t really pursue this idea, though,
because it conflicts with his more general claim that Native Americans did not
have much ecological consciousness. The blurb on the cover from a New York
Times review says that Coates ties historical attitudes to nature with the "political
goals of the times." I wish I had read that book. Coates, however, gives
us no sense of how different societies have different political goals and all
of the attitudes towards nature he reviews wind up the same. They are all
equally anti-environmental.

Coates’s writing is generally snarky
and his story is filled with gaps and jumps. He seems especially fond of
anecdotes of environmental hypocrisy, from a story about some Romans who cut
down a tree because it endangered a statue of Sylvanus to Romantics who cleared
land so they could have a better view of the wilderness. Some of the gaps in
his book are genuinely odd. I can understand an Englishman skipping over
Americans like Muir, Leopold, and Carson, but why isn’t there a chapter on
ancient Hebrew attitudes to nature? He repeatedly discusses White’s claim that
the West’s poor environmental attitudes have their roots in the Hebrew and
Christian Bibles. It is one of the Stories of the Fall that he targets. So why
doesn’t he give ancient Hebrew attitudes to nature a chapter alongside the
chapter on the Greeks and Romans? His story also jumps around a lot. The
chapter on the ancient world starts with the Hellenistic era, then moves back
to the Athenian renaissance, and then forward to the Church fathers.

I imagine that the publishers of
this book were hoping for the same book my colleague Baylor was. College
textbooks bring reliable sales. Sadly, I can’t think of any reason for anyone
to read this book, except perhaps as a guide to the literature for someone who
is writing the work that this book should have been.

 

© 2006 Robert Loftis

 

Rob Loftis, Ph.D., Department of
Philosophy, St. Lawrence University

Categories: General, Philosophical