Run-Up
Augustine’s defense of mice and fleas was, as it remains, a minority position. At times—on the Sabbath, so to speak—people may tolerate, and even appreciate, mice in the kitchen, but the rest of the time they quite properly go about the business of exclud
- PDF / 157,080 Bytes
- 11 Pages / 432 x 648 pts Page_size
- 47 Downloads / 151 Views
Run-Up
Augustine’s defense of mice and fleas was, as it remains, a minority position. At times—on the Sabbath, so to speak—people may tolerate, and even appreciate, mice in the kitchen, but the rest of the time they quite properly go about the business of excluding them. No less a champion of nature than John Muir, when not living as a mendicant out in the woods, was a prosperous orchardist, managing a business that specifically entails excluding—or killing—mice (actually, in Muir’s case, ground squirrels and a host of other orchard pests).1 And if Augustine’s doctrine of regard for vermin anticipated Muir’s off-hours deep ecology by a couple of millennia, the utilitarian philosophy espoused by Muir’s nemesis, Gifford Pinchot, has always been well represented. Although earlier schools of thought emphasized Western indifference to nature except as a resource, modern scholarship suggests that the idea of continuous creation, which combines a deep appreciation of nature with the idea that humans have a key role to play, not only in managing nature but in fulfilling its potential, has been a predominant feature of Western thought over the past two millennia.2 Thus, St. Ambrose (339–397) described man “as a farmer improving the earth in partnership with God.” His contemporary in the eastern church, Gregory of Nyssa (born ca. 335), although he subordinated earthly things to God, affirmed the value of nature and celebrated the arts as a way of elevating both humans and nature.3 Such ideas, pervasive throughout medieval society, were fully elaborated by the monastic orders that emerged early in the Christian era. Dynamic and progressive with respect to nature, this thinking arguably underlies much of the conservation thinking of our own time, providing a foundation for meliorative if not necessarily for ecocentric forms of land W.R. Jordan III and G.M. Lubick, Making Nature Whole: A History of Ecological Restoration, The Science and Practice of Ecological Restoration, DOI 10.5822/978-1-61091-042-2_2, © Island Press 2011
25
26
making nature whole
management. The Benedictine rule, which guided the practice of this important order from its founding in the sixth century, rested on the second chapter of the Book of Genesis, especially the passages that place humans in the Garden of Eden—not as its masters but rather in a spirit of stewardship. Following St. Benedict’s (480–547) teaching that it was their duty to work as partners of God in improving his creation and re-creating Paradise out of the chaos of a fallen wilderness, the Benedictines integrated work in the fields into a life of prayer, cultivating an ethic of land stewardship. And eleven centuries before Aldo Leopold wrote of using the plow, cow, and ax to reverse environmental degradation, Irish philosopher John Scotus Erigena (815–877) first articulated the idea that the useful arts are divinely inspired pathways to salvation.4 All this may seem a bit remote from practical affairs. But the work (and land) ethic exemplified by the Benedictine rule implied a valu
