[The Historical Roots of Our Environmental Crisis; ].

The fields of environmental ethics and of religion and ecology have been shaped by Lynn White Jr.'s thesis that the roots of ecological crisis lie in religious cosmology. Independent critical movements in both fields, however, now question this methodological legacy and argue for alternative ways of inquiry. For religious ethics, the twin controversies cast doubt on prevailing ways of connecting environmental problems to religious deliberations because the criticisms raise questions about what counts as an environmental problem, how religious (...) traditions change, and whether ethicists should approach problems and traditions with reformist commitments. This article examines the critiques of White's legacy and presents a pluralist alternative that focuses religious ethics on the contextual strategies produced by moral communities as they confront environmental problems. (shrink)

Although Lynn White, jr. is best known for the critical aspects of his disputed 1967 essay, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” this article combines archival research and findings from his lesser-known publications in an attempt to reconcile his thought on democracy with the Earth Charter and its assertion that “we are one human family and one Earth Community with a common destiny” . Humanity is first and foremost, White believed, part of a “spiritual democracy of (...) all God's creatures” in which humans and nonhumans should treat each other with mutual compassion and courtesy. It is argued that the Christian, animal-inclusive “biodemocracy” envisioned by White is both compatible with, and potentially in conflict with, the tenets of the Earth Charter. This article also considers further implications of these findings for the larger fields of ecotheology and religion and ecology. (shrink)

The discovery of the first intracellular substrate for insulin, IRS‐1, redirected the field of diabetes research and has led to many important advances in our understanding of insulin action. Detailed analysis of IRS‐1 demonstrates structure/function relationships for this modular docking molecule, including mechanisms of substrate recognition and signal propagation. Recent work has also identified other structurally similar molecules, including IRS‐2, the Drosophila protein, DOS, and the Grb2‐binding protein, Gab1, suggesting that this intracellular signalling strategy is conserved evolutionarily and is utilized (...) by an expanding number of receptor systems. In fact, IRS‐1 itself has been shown to be important in other growth factor and cytokine signalling systems, including growth hormone and several interleukins. Analysis of mice lacking IRS‐1 confirms an important physiological role for this protein in glucose metabolism and general cell growth in the intact animal. Disregulation of the signalling pathways integrated by the IRS proteins may contribute to the pathophysiology of non‐insulin‐dependent diabetes mellitus or other diseases. (shrink)

Historian Lynn White, Jr.'s theory that the current ecological crisis derives from the biblical creation story still has its adherents. There is no single biblical viewpoint on ecology, nor were the biblical writers addressing twentieth–century problems. Yet the great weight of biblical tradition‐including the Genesis creation narrative‐represents God as caring actively for all living beings, and humanity as having not only dominion over, but also responsibility for the well–being of other creatures. The Bible gives no support to those (...) who would exploit the earth's resources at the cost of destroying any species of life. (shrink)

Controversy about Lynn White, Jr.’s thesis that Western Christianity is to blame for the ecological crisis we face today has recently shifted to medieval social developments and how they affected theological notions of nature. Contributing to the social perspective of the debate, in this essay I examine the emergence of materialism as an effect of the relationship between the Latin Church and Western society. Rationalism and utilitarianism, two main features of Latin theology, were appropriated by medieval political and (...) economic elites to produce a radical anthropocentric and materialist Weltanschauung. Utilitarianism and rationalism came to be so strongly embedded in Western culture that they became a diachronic feature of European thought. (shrink)

An interdisciplinary reappraisal of Lynn White, Jr.’s “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis” reopens several issues, including the suggestion by Peter Harrison that White’s thesis was historical and that it is a mistake to regard it as theological. It also facilitates a comparison between “Roots” and White’s earlier book Medieval Technology and Social Change. In “Roots,” White discarded or de-emphasized numerous qualifications and nuances present in his earlier work so as to heighten the effect (...) of certain rhetorical aphorisms and to generalize their scope and bearing well beyond what the evidence could bear. The meaning of Genesis and other biblical books proves to be just as important in White’s thesis as their historical reception. In “Roots,” White presents, alongside other contentions, the claims that Christian doctrines have all along been both anthropocentric and despotic, especially in the West, and that this is where the real roots of the problems are to be found. These claims, however, conflict with most of the relevant evidence. An adequate reappraisal of White’s work needs to recognize that there is a cultural determinism parallel to the technological determinisms alleged by R. H. Hilton and P. H. Sawyer, to endorse Elspeth Whitney’s “single-cause” critique of links between religion and technological change in the Middle Ages, and to treat sympathetically Whitney’s claim that White and some of his eco-theological critics (despite their disagreements) have in common both their valorizing of individual beliefs and values and their neglect of economic and institutional factors. Nevertheless, our ecological problems need to be understood through explanations turning on beliefs and values as well as on economics and institutions. (shrink)

Contemplative or "noetic" knowledge has traditionally been seen as the highest mode of understanding, a view that persists both in many non-Western cultures and in Eastern Christianity, where "theoria physike," or the illumined understanding of creation that follows the purification of the heart, is seen to provide deeper insights into nature than the discursive rationality modernity has used to dominate and conquer it. Working from texts in Eastern Orthodox philosophy and theology not widely known in the West, as well as (...) a variety of sources including mystics such as the Sufi Ibn 'Arabi, poets such as Basho, Traherne, Blake, Hölderlin, and Hopkins, and nature writers such as Muir, Thoreau, and Dillard, The Noetics of Nature challenges both the primacy of the natural sciences in environmental thought and the conventional view, first advanced by Lynn White, Jr., that Christian theology is somehow responsible for the environmental crisis. Instead, Foltz concludes that the ancient Christian view of creation as iconic its "holy beauty" manifesting the divine energies and constituting a primal mode of divine revelation offers the best prospect for the radical reversal that is needed in our relation to the natural environment. (shrink)

Though broadly philosophical reflections on nature and our place within it can be tracked to antiquity, the development of the field of environmental ethics as a distinct sub-discipline within contemporary academic philosophy has a far shorter history. Its landmark moments include the 1968 publication of Lynn White Jr’s influential critique of Christianity’s environmental record “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” J. Baird Callicott’s teaching of the world’s first course in environmental ethics in 1971 at the University of (...) Wisconsin-Stevens Point, the pathfinding papers “Is There a Need for a New, an Environmental, Ethic?” and “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement: A Summary” by the.. (shrink)

The classical Confucian thinker Xunzi is often characterized as a hard-nosed realist, and stands out in the early Chinese canon for his uncompromising materialist cosmology. Xunzi sees the actions of Heaven in terms of natural material forces rather than supernatural theistic ones, and this view leads him to reject various forms of supernaturalism. Xunzi's cosmological concept of the Triad formed by Heaven, Earth, and Humans also places humans at the center of the cosmos, and as such makes his stance very (...) literally anthropocentric.Anthropocentric thinking has been blamed, most famously by Lynn White, Jr., for the attitudes and prerogatives that authorize the human exploitation of nature.1 Indeed, some... (shrink)

Francis’ view of nature has been seen as positive in an ecological sense even by those who are for the most part critical of Christianity’s attitude to nature, such as Lynn White, Jr. I argue that one element of Francis’ uniqueness was that he saw the diversity of life as an expression of God’s creativity and benevolence and attempted to carry out that vision in ethical behavior. Much of what has been written about him has precedents in traditional (...) hagiography, but there remains an unmistakable impression of originality. It has been noted that Francis insisted on the goodness of creation, used terms of family relationship to refer to creatures other than human, and preached to them. However, another element has escaped notice: his emphasis on the presence of God in the diversity of created entities and his desire that humans should rejoice in this diversity and glorify God for it and with it. His devotion did not immediately dissolve multiplicity into oneness, but glorified God in each created being and delighted in their individuality. He advocated that praise be expressed by acting in ways consistent with respect for created diversity, not only by observing a strict rule of abstaining from harm to living beings, but also in positive treatment of all creatures. Nature took its meaning not from its serviceability to mankind, but from its expression of the multiple forms of God’s benevolent presence. (shrink)

By examining selected works by Stephen Gaukroger, Alfred North Whitehead, Lynn White, Jr., Benjamin Farrington, and Paul Gans, the author discusses the formation of Western culture and the intellectual tools and the social conditions that contributed (and still contribute) to its being. He concludes that a metaphysics and a realistic epistemology—based on an ancient Greek confidence in the human intellect, in its ability to reason to truths that acknowledge the immaterial character of human intellection—is required for the West (...) to retain its identity and develop its own culture. (shrink)

This essay introduces the themes that motivate the three articles that follow. Their common aim is to explore the connections between the Earth Charter and the concept of biodemocracy with the intention of highlighting ways of thinking about the relationship between science, religion, and the environment in the twenty-first century. Informed by the science of ecology and written by scholars of religion, the articles included here seek to integrate movements and ideas as diverse as postmodern thought, the much-debated thought of (...) Lynn White, jr. , and the synergy emerging between the Earth Charter and Journey of the Universe. (shrink)

In a “mixed bag” 2023-2024 session, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a series of decisions both favorable and antithetical to public health and safety. Taking on tough constitutional issues implicating gun control, misinformation, and homelessness, the Court also avoided substantive reviews in favor of procedural dismissals in key cases involving reproductive rights and government censorship.

As persons we are irreducibly unique and essentially relational. In many contexts individual uniqueness has been accentuated at the expense of communal relationality. Our age has been marked by the loss of deep and meaningful relations to one another, and still more dramatically to the earth and its living creatures. The cosmological dimension of human personhood, that is, has been largely obscured. This chapter argues that our age has been marked increasingly by anesthetizing, alienating, and anonymizing tendencies. It proposes three (...) commensurate responses: aestheticization, or embodied philosophical knowing that remains faithful to the earth; anacarnation, or willful return to the wonders of embodied life, purged of romantic sentimentality; and attestation, or speaking up on behalf of the haecceitas or thisness of living creatures systematically instrumentalized for profit and pleasure. Together these responses help us to regain touch with animality by embracing the earth that hosts us, thus becoming more gracious guests, and to become more fully human by becoming better hosts to the multitude of earth's creatures, whose lives hang in the balance. (shrink)

The spectacular development of medical knowledge over the last two centuries has brought intrusive advances in the capabilities of medical technology. These advances have been remarkable over the last century, but especially over the last few decades, culminating in such high technology interventions as heart transplants and renal dialysis. These increases in medical powers have attracted societal interest in acquiring more such knowledge. They have also spawned concerns regarding the use of human subjects in research and regarding the byproducts of (...) basic research as in the recent recombinant DNA debate. As a consequence of the development of new biomedical knowledge, physicians and biomedical scientists have been placed in positions of new power and responsibility. The emergence of this group of powerful and knowledgeable experts has occasioned debates regarding the accountability of physicians and biomedical scientists. But beyond that, the very investment of resources in the acquisition of new knowledge has been questioned. Societies must decide whether finite resources would not be better invested at this juncture, or in general, in the alleviation of the problems of hunger or in raising general health standards through interventions which are less dependent on the intensive use of high technology. To put issues in this fashion touches on philosophical notions concerning the claims of distributive justice and the ownership of biomedical knowledge. (shrink)

Controversy about Lynn White’s thesis that medieval Christianity is to blame for our current environmental crisis has done little to challenge the basic structure of White’s argument and has taken little account of recent work done by medieval scholars. White’s ecotheological critics, in particular, have often failed to come to grips with White’s position. In this paper, I question White’s reading of history on both interpretative and factual grounds and argue that religious values cannot (...) be treated independently of the political, economic, and social conditions that sustain them. I conclude that medieval religious values were more complex than White suggests: rather than causing technological innovation, they more likely provided a justification for other activity taking place for other reasons. (shrink)