Ecological Science as a Creation Story
Robert H. Nelson. 2010. Ecological Science as a Creation Story. The Independent Review, v. 14, n. 4, Spring 2010.
Full text [here]
Selected excerpts:
SINCE at least the late 1980s, environmental writers have made growing use of the explicit Christian language of “the Creation.” Two 1990s books by environmental authors, for example, are Caring for Creation (Oelschlaeger 1994) and Covenant for a New Creation ( Robb and Casebolt 1991). The magazine of the Natural Resources Defense Council describes the need for a greater “spiritual bond between ourselves and the natural world similar to God’s covenant with creation” (Borelli 1988). Natural environments isolated historically from European contact are commonly described as having once been an “Eden” or a “paradise” on the earth — similar to the Creation before the fall (McCormick 1989; “Inside the World’s Last Eden” 1992).
Such creationist language has also invaded mainstream environmental politics. During his tenure as vice president, Al Gore said that we must cease “heaping contempt on God’s creation” (qtd. in Niebuhr 1993). In a 1995 speech remarkable for its religious candor, Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt said that “our covenant” requires that we “protect the whole of Creation.” Invoking messages reminiscent of John Muir, Babbitt argued that wild areas are a source of our core “values” because they are “a manifestation of the presence of our Creator.” It is necessary to protect every animal and plant species, Babbitt said, because “the earth is a sacred precinct, designed by and for the purposes of the Creator,” and thus we can learn about God by encountering and experiencing his creation.
The American environmental movement has deep roots in and still depends heavily on the conviction that a person finds a mirror of God’s thinking in the encounter with wild nature — or, in traditional Christian terms, that a person is in the presence of “the Creation.” Absent this conviction, many of the American environmental movement’s basic beliefs and important parts of its policy agenda would be difficult to explain and defend.[1] The use of creation language also reflects an increased role that the institutional churches of Christianity are now playing in the environmental movement. This involvement has worked to narrow the previously large linguistic gap between traditional Christian creationism and what might be called a secular “environmental creationism”- the use of creationist language without the explicit Christian context. …
Environmental Creationism and Darwin
Many secular environmental creationists face a substantial tension, however, between their religious way of thinking about protecting “the Creation” and their simultaneous Darwinist understanding of the evolution — now considered to have been taking place for more than a billion years — of the plant and animal worlds. As modern science tells us, it was not God who created the present-day natural world, but the workings of Darwinist evolution, reaching a result that is not divinely inspired, but a random outcome of many billions of chance events. Even if God may have made the rules for evolution, the experience of Darwin’s world of nature is less likely to inspire feelings of awe and reverence. …
For many secular environmentalists, the simplest course is to ignore this disconcerting issue — to partake of strong feelings of religious inspiration in the direct presence of “God’s creation” and then to go about their daily lives. Environmental creationism has not come under the same intense public scrutiny and criticism as Christian creationism. There have been fewer social and intellectual pressures for environmental creationists to work out their own precise thinking in this area. …
The field of “ecological science,” or “ecology,” is a response to these tensions. … In a review of the history of the field of ecology in the United States, Eugene Cittadino observes that “ecology, then, is a highly derivative science, one that by its nature relies on language fraught with meaning beyond the science” and thus may lend itself to implicit religious and other expressions of values. Although ecologists have often made strong claims to a scientific status, Cittadino points out, and ecology may be a “science” in some classificatory sense, it certainly does not fall in the same category with the “hard” sciences, such as physics, chemistry, and molecular biology (2006, 73). …
Indeed, the outward scientific appearance of ecology masks a strong underlying religious content. The powerful religious element is not necessarily a problem in itself, but in the case of ecology, at least, the presentation of religion in the guise of a value-neutral science creates major tensions and even contradictions. Ecological science develops a new creation story that differs in some respects from the original biblical version but also exhibits basic continuities. The result is often both poor science and poor theology, as judged from a rigorously analytical viewpoint based in either area. …
Secular and traditional religions are often surprisingly similar in their messages and their powerful religious effects on true believers. Marx, for example, substituted the evolutionary laws of economic history for God, and the Marxist faithful exhibited attitudes no less reverential, even showing themselves willing in some cases to be martyrs for the Communist cause, like their Christian predecessors in Rome and elsewhere. Indeed, the modern age would be filled with examples of secular gospels that had a deeply religious effect on their followers, as much as the Jewish and Christian religions grounded in the Bible historically inspired the faithful. …
Clements, Succession, and the Climax State
The scientific field of ecology was established to answer such questions. Its first great American theorist was Frederic Clements. In a comprehensive history of the field of ecology, the distinguished environmental historian Donald Worster says of Clements (who died in 1945) that in the first four decades of the twentieth century, “no individual had a more profound impact on the course of American as well as British ecological thought” (1994, 209). Clements’s great ecological contribution was his view that natural systems are constantly moving toward and often attain a “climax state.” This process might also be described as their assured evolution toward a natural “equilibrium” state. Clements thus offered a theory of how ecosystems evolve, something missing in standard Darwinist thinking about the evolution of species.
As Worster explains, in Clements’s view “nature’s course . . . is not an aimless wandering to and fro but a steady flow toward stability that can be exactly plotted by the scientist” (1994, 210). This idea closely resembles the idea of a market equilibrium employed in the discipline of economics — an idea that was achieving its height of influence in neoclassical economics at about the same time that Clements was writing. In economic equilibrium as well, unexpected disruptive events may occur, but the workings of supply and demand will move the market back to its natural equilibrium price and quantity. God had seemingly made the world, ecologists and economists were saying, to exhibit a happy harmony of all its parts (Nelson 1991). …
By 1939, Clements, as Worster describes his views, would be arguing that the climax state was a “superorganism created through [the processes of] developmental succession,” part of the workings of a natural world in which “all living organisms are united in one communal bond” throughout an ecosystem (1994, 214–15). …
Rather, as Worster comments, Clements had an “underlying, almost metaphysical faith that the development of vegetation must resemble the growth process of an individual plant or animal organism” (1994, 211). Viewed retrospectively, Clements’s thinking was thus closer to religion than to science. If natural landscapes exhibit a marvelous order that inspires a powerful sense of admiration for the workings of larger forces in the world, these forces are not those of Darwinist evolution or of anything else that is well grounded scientifically. This design might have come from only one place. Indeed, although Clements never said so explicitly, the implication of his work is that God must have sculpted the natural landscapes of the earth in such a marvelous fashion.
Thus, despite Clements’s preeminent status in the field of ecology at the time, it has become apparent that his whole enterprise has surprisingly little scientific content. Reflecting this problem, by the mid–twentieth century, climax theory was coming under severe criticism among ecologists and would soon be disavowed by the professional mainstream, at least with regard to the language Clements used. By the last few decades of the twentieth century, the standard view among ecologists would be that natural systems manifest no automatic tendency toward equilibrium. Indeed, their normal movement arises only from one isolated disturbance followed by another in somewhat unpredictable and even random fashion.
More religion than science, the theory of the climax state also includes a moment when original sin arrived in the world. Human beings were not part of the original ecological order, as Clements described it, but a foreign element. At the beginning, Clements’s nature thus exhibited a harmony much like the harmony that Adam and Eve initially encountered in the Garden. Uniquely among species, however, human beings could alter the natural harmony of the Creation. Indeed, their actions might disrupt the ecological equilibrium entirely and permanently, warping and destroying the otherwise strong tendency to reach the one climax state, as in the Jewish and Christian accounts of events in the Garden. This new presence of human sinfulness in the world would again result from humans’ quest to know more than they should. Many evils would subsequently spread across the earth, as happened at an accelerating pace in the modern era. Only if human beings renounced their false pride and arrogance and humbly accepted a lesser place within creation, leaving the climax state to evolve undisturbed, would there be any hope for the future. So far as practically possible, nature should be left untouched by human hands.
This ecological creation story would be repeated many times in many forms over the twentieth century. Indeed, it is still being heard. …
Aldo Leopold’s Religion
The environmental philosopher Max Oelschlaeger regards Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and Aldo Leopold as the three “giants” of American wilderness philosophy (1991, 205). Thoreau and Muir were products of the nineteenth century, but the events of the first half of the twentieth century shaped Leopold (Meine 1988). His signature work—he wrote less for a wide audience than did Thoreau or Muir—was A Sand County Almanac, published in 1949 (shortly after his death in 1948). Leopold here recasts Thoreau and Muir’s environmental religion in the language of ecology. Whereas Thoreau and Muir said little about Jesus, but much more about “God,” Leopold largely avoids any explicit mention of God.
This omission is misleading, however, because Leopold’s writings and his message reflect a religious understanding of the world through and through. Indeed, much like Clements’s ideas, many of Leopold’s arguments would make little sense if the existence of a divine authorship of the natural world were not being implicitly invoked. If one appropriately injects God as a newly explicit factor, however, one converts what might otherwise be vague and incomplete into something both historically familiar and theologically well developed. Leopold thus offers, if not a rigorous science, a well-crafted theology, an environmental creation story newly adapted to ecological metaphors. …
Leopold’s mission in the later part of his life, culminating in the series of essays assembled in A Sand County Almanac, was to proselytize an environmental religion. In this effort, he drew on the work of Frederic Clements and other contemporary ecologists. As noted previously, Clements had said that in the end an ecological system would naturally reach a climax state. Cittadino comments, “Leopold, never a sophisticated ecological theorist, offered readers the promise of a ‘land ethic,’ grounded in a belief in the integrity of natural systems” (2006, 94). Over time, a host of other synonyms such as healthy, stable, integrated, balanced, and sustainable would be applied to describe what in essence remained early-twentieth-century ecology’s climax state. …
Many contemporary environmentalists find in Leopold’s writings the leading inspiration for their own ethical thinking; his work is the “bible” of their environmental religion. …
When Oelschlaeger, giving a reading of Leopold that he shares with many other equally inspired environmentalists, says that nature is “animated,” that the mountain has “sentience,” that the wolf’s cry “speaks of a deeper meaning,” he obviously is not saying that the natural world is literally speaking words that a person can understand. What, then, does he mean? From a strictly scientific perspective, it would be difficult to know; perhaps the words mean nothing at all; they may simply be empty phrases that sound good to many people. Seen in the historical light of Christian religion, however, Leopold’s message is more familiar. The workings of nature reflect the mind of God, as put there at the Creation, which has now been transposed to a much earlier time than the biblical story suggest. To encounter natural systems as they existed before human impacts, as found in the climax state, is to see into the universe’s deepest meanings, to discover a divine order there, to come to know God. If we were to state this idea in an old-fashioned Christian way, we would say that a person must still read the “Book of Nature” to discover there God’s essential truths. …
Ecology as Physics
When the terrible wars and other experiences of the first half of the twentieth century showed that some very dangerous forces had been set loose in human affairs, one response was a new determination that the utmost care should be exercised to verify objectively any truth claims being made by the partisans of one worldview or another. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many grandiose ideas — ideologies or secular religions or whatever one chooses to call them — had made great claims to scientific validity that in retrospect appeared to lack such validity. Indeed, the record of Marxism, national socialism, and other all-encompassing worldviews seemed to show that even in the twentieth century, human beings were remarkably susceptible to half-baked ideas and schemes that falsely claimed to explain everything significant about human existence in the world. It seemed to affirm that, as others have said, before most people will believe in nothing, they will believe in anything.
In this intellectual climate, the methods and the historical successes of physics, which had experienced a great wave of fundamental discoveries in the first half of the twentieth century, had great appeal. In economics, MIT economist Paul Samuelson (winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize in economics for his efforts) became the professionally most admired economist of the second half of the twentieth century by leading the charge to convert the practice of economics to the quantitative methods of physics. Similar methodological pressures were being felt in the field of ecology. The climax state and Clements’s other ecological theories were increasingly criticized as portraying an organic and even metaphysical and mystical element in nature that lacked any objective scientific reality.
In the future, ecological systems would be precisely characterized in terms of the behavior of their components, and then the systems’ functioning would be explained by mathematically working out the model results. As Worster notes, beginning in the 1940s, “words like ‘energy flow’ and ‘trophic levels’ and ‘ecosystem’ appeared in the leading journals, and they indicated a view of nature shaped more by physics than [by ] botany” (1993, 159). The formal concept of an “ecosystem” in particular began to play a growing role in environmental thought. Ecologist A. G. Tansley had first defined it in 1935, borrowing the concept from Clements’s work.
Many ecologists would soon be working to model and simulate ecosystem functioning. Large sets of complicated equations could be developed, high-speed computing capacities employed, and other “scientific” apparatus deployed. The ecosystem as an organizing theme for ecological study eventually proved so successful that by the 1990s the federal government would officially adopt “eco-system management” as the guiding philosophy for public lands and other natural resources. …
A scientific status was especially important when government policy and management were at stake. Twentieth-century Americans believed that the government should not act on the basis of inspirational religious writing, but on the basis of valid professional and scientific knowledge. However, most Americans had not considered the possibility that fields such as ecology might write inspirational “scientific poetry” filled with mathematical equations.
Although environmental religion posing as ecological science won many new followers, the ecological models’ scientific success was another matter. For the most part, as the retrospective judgment has now been rendered, Odum and other ecologists of the mid–twentieth century did not produce much that was substantially new or of major intellectual interest concerning the workings of the natural order. Indeed, much that Odum said is now considered to have been misleading or even outright wrong. As Worster explains, in the present ecological consensus “there is no such thing … as balance or equilibrium or steady-state [or climax state]. Each and every plant association is nothing but a temporary gathering of strangers, a clustering of species unrelated to one another, here for a brief while today, on their way somewhere else tomorrow” (1993, 163). …
A Plant and Animal “Holocaust”
… Reflecting such developments, scientific concern grew by the 1980s and 1990s that the “wilderness” concept was no longer scientifically justifiable, however great the continuing appeal of wilderness values to the broader public. Given the pervasive human impacts on the earth, areas genuinely “untrammelled by man” (the language of the 1964 Wilderness Act) might not exist. Moreover, as noted previously, the existence of natural states of ecological equilibrium at a landscape scale, as long described by ecologists, was increasingly being questioned. Nature is apparently more chaotic. Hence, professional ecologists were making “biodiversity” their leading interest, giving less attention to the nonliving elements of the “land community.” …
Still showing debts to ecological ideas as far back as Frederic Clements, [E.O.] Wilson sees the workings of the natural world as involving a series of “successional stages” that yield a biological process by which “every habitat, from Brazilian rain forest to Antarctic bay to thermal vent, harbors a unique combination of plants and animals” (47). This natural “dynamic equilibrium” in plant and animal habitats can be disrupted, even severely, but then comes a process of “succession that circles back to something resembling the original state of the environment” (51). The workings of biological systems reflect an “assembly of life that took a billion years to evolve. It has eaten the storms — folded them into its genes — and created the world that created us. It holds the world steady” (48). In other words, there is a biological equilibrium in nature to which plant and animal communities of species will continually return—in essence, a biological climax state.
Again in the vein of earlier ecological writers, Wilson sees one great exception to the stability and adaptability of the earth’s biological systems. Like Clements, Leopold, and most twentieth-century ecologists, Wilson thinks of and studies biological systems as independent of a human presence. Human beings, it would seem, are not a part of nature, but rather strictly outside it — unnatural beings with godlike powers. …
Arrogantly abusing their new powers, humans are bringing about a “holocaust,” as Wilson labels it, for the earth’s other species. Human sinfulness is directed increasingly not only against fellow human beings, as in Nazi Germany, but also against the plant and animal creatures of the natural world.
Wilson thus has no doubts about an appropriate moral judgment with respect to current human actions that affect the other members of the earth’s biological communities. …
Wilson’s vision in fact amounts to a full-fledged environmental religion, dressed in yet another secular vocabulary that is Wilson’s own special contribution to late-twentieth-century environmentalism. His writings evoke a powerful sense that nature testifies to the glory of God’s creation. He achieves this result through the development of extensive biological metaphors in place of the landscape and other wider ecosystem imagery that Leopold and many other environmental writers used. Oxford University professor Alister McGrath, who holds doctorates in both molecular biology and divinity, thus says of Wilson that “though showing no signs of being [himself] aware of the fact, Wilson has simply smuggled in a belief system under the cover of legitimate scientific explanations.” Wilson, however, denies the existence of God or other transcendent values outside the natural world, which, argues McGrath, leaves him “vulnerable to the charge of asserting moral values that are purely arbitrary or temporary human conventions that are dependent upon culture and historical location. How can morality have credibility in a world of mere fact, from which God, religion, and any form of transcendent values have been eliminated?” (2002, 181). In terms of a rigorous theological analysis, Wilson, in short, is seemingly confused and perhaps seriously misguided as he offers religion in the guise of a biological science. …
The Book of Ecology
… As [Daniel] Botkin observes, many of his fellow ecologists advocated additional wilderness designations, even though it was no great mystery that “there is no longer any part of the Earth that is untouched by our actions in some way, either directly or indirectly.” As a result, objectively speaking, “there are no wildernesses in the sense of places completely unaffected by people” (1990, 194), despite frequent assertions to the contrary in the rhetoric of environmental policymaking. Indeed, for many environmentalists, the idea of a genuine wilderness unaffected by human action — places on earth where the Creation still exists unaltered — is virtually a necessary benchmark of their own faith. Without it, they might even lack a sense of purpose and direction in their lives. In late-twentieth-century terms, it would be as though “God is dead” or, if he does exist, as though he has become inaccessible to human understanding (McKibben 1989). …
Conclusion
… Whatever the story’s scientific validity, ecologists told and retold a creation story over the course of the twentieth century. Despite the large differences in language, this story was surprisingly similar to the older biblical version, which was also growing in popularity among traditional Christian creationists during much of the same period. Even the moment of the fall was surprisingly close: for a literal creationist, in the Garden of Eden about six thousand years ago, and for an environmental creationist, beginning with the rise of organized agriculture and then civilization about ten thousand years ago.
Given the close parallels, one might describe the religion of ecology in one of three ways. It might be seen as a new way of stating an historical Judeo-Christian message, disguising the origins in an updated, allegedly scientific vocabulary in order to attract more followers in a secular age. Or, for many true Christian believers, the ecological gospel might instead be seen as a great Christian heresy, all the more dangerous because of the many close similarities to the original. A third alternative would be to see the ecological creation story as part of a new environmental religion, much like Islam, both being offshoots from and drawing heavily on earlier Christian messages.
The religious underpinnings of ecology are not only of theological interest, however. Many government policies today are grounded in the tenets of ecosystem management, allegedly derived from the scientific principles of ecology. If these principles are also deeply religious, yet this religious aspect cannot be formally acknowledged and explored in public, widespread policy confusion in government agencies is likely to result. Surprising as it may seem, the key to improved government performance in dealing with issues of the human relationship to the natural world may lie in an improved theological understanding.
See also:
Robert H. Nelson. 2010. The New Holy Wars: Economic Religion vs. Environmental Religion in Contemporary America. The Independent Institute and Pennsylvania State University Press (co-publishers) [here]
Robert H. Nelson. 2007. The Gospel According to Conservation Biology. Philosophy and Public Policy Quarterly [here]
and a bio of Dr. Nelson with a list of his publications [here]
