Thinking Like a Mountain

"Thinking Like a Mountain:"
A Survey of Environmental Ethics
by Martha Ellen Stortz

Aldo Leopold's challenge to "think like a mountain"1 has shaped thinking on the environment. He does not ask his readers to think about mountains; nor does he exhort them to analyze a mountain, its veins of rock and mineral, its flora and fauna. Leopold urges his readers to think like a mountain. The imperative moves environmental ethics out of a conservationist mentality where humans manage the natural world, which they regard as a collection of "resources"for development or "raw materials" for refinement, and thrusts it into an ecological age where humans are part, perhaps not even the central part! of a biosphere, a huge and interdependent community of life. An analogous shift would be the shift away from the Ptolemaic conception of the universe, with earth and the human person at its center, to a Copernican conception of the universe, with the sun at its center, with earth and all planets circling around this central star.

"Think like a mountain."The challenge has not gone unanswered; yet, the answers have been legion. The discipline of environmental ethics is a loose guild that encompasses a wide and wild variety of proposals, all of them calling for something new: a new way of reading history, a new way of thinking, a new religious consciousness or a new interpretation of the old one, and finally, a new consciousness altogether.

A New Way of Reading History
Another pivotal essay in the ecological movement is Lynn White, Jr.'s essay, originally in Science Magazine, entitled "The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis."2 White blames the current environmental crisis on the Judeo-Christian tradition and the passage in Genesis 1:28 that accorded to humans "dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth."(NRSV) The theological sanction for domination of the earth's bounty is buttressed by material changes in Western civilization: in particular, the invention of the vertical plow in the 11th century, the scientific revolution of the 17th century, and the industrial revolution of the 19th century. These various theological and material factors have brought humanity to the brink of environmental disaster. But White's proposal for change is not to jettison the Judeo-Christian tradition, but to retrieve a minority voice within it, and he concludes his article by proposing St. Francis of Assisi as the patron saint of ecology.

Clarence Glacken's lyrical Traces on the Rhodian Shore3 outlines a history of attitudes toward nature and agency in nature. The first is the image of nature as the product of a divine design; God orders and controls it. The second image of nature makes of nature itself an agent, and nature is portrayed as a wild, powerful, and implacable force. The third image of nature is nature as the realm of human agency, the stuff with which and on which humans create their world. Glacken notes that when the third portrait of nature as the realm of human agency is put together with an argument of natural design, imposed by God and expressed by humans, there is particular destruction to the natural world. His work offers other attitudes with less toxic effects.

Carolyn Merchant's The Death of Nature4 argues that the exploitation of nature and the oppression of women are intertwined. Nature has historically been portrayed as female and treated no better than a woman! She traces two opposing approaches to nature, the organic and the mechanistic, identifies problems and possibilities in each, and cautiously proposes a return to the organic approach to nature as an approach avoiding exploitation.

These three authors represent an approach within environmental ethics to grapple with traditions in religion and culture that have sanctioned gross exploitation of the natural world. Each locates a strand or attitude in these same traditions that would suggest a different understanding of nature.

A New Way of Thinking
Ways of thinking ethically have generally taken three forms. A deontological ethic focuses on actions, on the rules and principles that direct them, and on the rights and duties that determine their propriety. A teleological ethic focuses on the consequences of actions or inactions, on the aims that direct them and the goals toward which they tend. An aretaic ethic focuses on the moral agent, on the virtues she practices and the vices she tries to avoid, on motivations, dispositions, and intentions that direct her deeds. All of these various ethical proposals surface in environmental ethics.

A deontological ethic surfaces strongly in Roderick Nash's ethics, as he articulates rights for the whole of life, organic and inorganic. Nash traces an expanding conception of rights that has been legally stated in the United States, culminating in the Endangered Species Act of 1973. He suggests the extension of such rights to the whole of the biotic community as well as a sense of what the duties these rights entail for humans.5 Tom Regan focuses more specifically on the rights accorded to animals. Using animals for food and forcing their participation in research trials and health experiments violates their categorical rights.6 Both Nash and Regan focus on actions toward nature, the rights that protect creation and their resulting responsibilities for humans.

Holmes Rolston III combines a discussion of duty with a teleological ethic, proposing a "good-of-its-kind" toward which every organism tends. Humans are duty-bound to respect this "good," thus enabling the organism to achieve it.7 Charles Birch and John B. Cobb, Jr. utilize the insights of process philosophy to argue that viewing creation as a continuous process bridges gaps between humans and other species. Humans are internally related to the whole of life, the purpose of which is to achieve "optimum value" in each moment.8 The teleological moments in each of these writers reflect some good or value toward which every creature and the whole of creation tends.

Other authors focus on the moral agent as the focus for environmental change: an aretaic ethic. Wary of abstract rules and universal goals, Mary Midgley emphasizes that a lot of moral decision-making resides in the realm of feeling. She argues eloquently for compassion as a moral resource which should inform our treatment of other creatures; she proposes "intelligent, informed observation" as a way of discerning what is good for any given species.9 Jay McDaniel is quite specific about the virtues that will inform the ecologically compassionate human creature: a reverence for life, ahimsa or non-injury of other beings, and active good will.10 Both Midgley and McDaniel attend to the character of the moral agent: the kind of person she is will determine her bearing toward the natural world. Both seek to shape the character of that person.

These ethical proposals vary. Some focus on the actions of humans and accordingly emphasize the rules or principles, the duties or rights that inform them (a deontological ethic). Other proposals focus on the goal or "good" of a particular organism or on the goal of the whole of life (a teleological ethic). Still other proposals focus on the human creature and seek to shape him into being the kind of person who respects and protects the natural world (an aretaic ethic). All attempt a new way of thinking about the environment.

A New Religious Consciousness or a New Interpretation of the Old One
Christians approaching the environmental crisis cannot avoid the questions: To what degree has a conception of stewardship based on Genesis 1:28 contributed to the rape of the earth? Can a reinterpretation of stewardship address environmental issues? In an excellent exegetical study of this text, W. Lee Humphreys argues that the operative Hebrew verbs in the passage, kabash ("to subdue, to bring into bondage") and radah ("to rule over, to exercise dominion over"), are as hard to soften as their historical impact is difficult to ignore.11 In the aforementioned essay, Lynn White, Jr. states bluntly that "dominion" has justified blatant domination. Yet, rather than cast such a destructive strain into the outer darkness, he proposes attention to a minority report: the tradition of St. Francis of Assisi.12 H. Paul Santmire similarly responds to the ambiguous heritage of the Christian tradition, yet he turns away from Genesis 1:28 to a central problem in theology: its preoccupation with human salvation. Santmire argues that there is both biblical and historical evidence to suggest that God intends the salvation of the whole of God's creation, and he cites Augustine as his witness: "the whole history of creation [comes] to an ultimate rest, totally renewed in eternity with God."13 Jay McDaniel draws on "postpatriarchal Christianity" to buttress his aretaic ethic: he traces his virtues back to the Christian notion of love (agape).14 Each of these authors charges aspects of Christianity with environmental neglect, but also finds within the tradition resources for environmental enhancement.

Other ethicists are not so sanguine, suggesting that we may need to go beyond the Christian tradition as we know it for religious resources in the environmental crisis. Eugene Hargrove agrees with Lynn White's sense that, if the problem is religious, the solution needs to be religious, because religion shapes the affections that move people to action. But Hargrove wonders if Christianity has all the answers. He edits a series of essays which survey the ways in which various religions have shaped attitudes toward nature: Taoism, Islam, Latin American Catholicism, Greek polytheism, Christian realism, and process philosophy.15

A New Consciousness Altogether
"Deep ecologists" reject religion because of its role as an environmental oppressor: it could not possibly pose as environmental liberator. Rather, they call for a new consciousness altogether, one suggested by a simple maxim: "all things hang together."16 Norwegian ecologist Arne Naess distinguishes between "shallow ecologists," who concern themselves with pollution and resource depletion and concentrate on the health and affluence of people in the First World and "deep ecologists," who try to create a "relational total field" perspective. Deep ecologists raise the question of "species-ism" or "anthropocentrism:" the view that humans are the crown of creation, and therefore ought to be privileged in any environmental ethics. They would argue that there is a dangerous "anthropocentrism" lurking behind any Christian interpretation or reinterpretation of stewardship.

A final call for a new consciousness altogether is issued by ecofeminism.17 Ecofeminism also calls for a new consciousness, arguing with Carolyn Merchant that the domination of the earth is similar to the domination of women. Moving from a picture of the order, proportion, and harmony within the whole of life, their ethic could be called a cathekontic ethic.18 Its focus is spatial; its emphasis, on the place each part occupies within the whole. Energy is directed toward attending to the whole, and attention is a critical habit of mind in a new ecological consciousness.

Conclusion
The challenge to "think like a mountain" can evoke new ways of reading history, new ways of thinking, a new religious consciousness, and a new consciousness entirely. The diversity of responses dazzles the brain, demands of a Christian critical analysis of her tradition, and pleads for conversion of the heart. Annie Dillard names a prayer that precipitated a conversion for her. Interestingly, she is attending to mountains, the mountains of the Pacific Northwestern coastal range.

"I came here to study hard things - rock mountain and salt sea - and to temper my spirit on their edges. 'Teach me thy ways, O Lord' is, like all prayers, a rash one, and one that I cannot but recommend. These mountains - Mount Baker and the Sisters and the Shuksan, the Canadian Coastal Range and the Olympics on the peninsula - are surely the edge of the known and comprehended world. They are high. That they bear their own unimaginable masses and weathers aloft, holding them up in the sky for anyone to see plain, makes them, as Chesterton said of the Eucharist, only the more mysterious by their very visibility and absence of secrecy."19

Perhaps this is a good prayer for all Christians who would be, if not environmental ethicists, at least respectful of creation and its Creator.

"Teach me thy ways, O Lord."

Martha Ellen Stortz is Associate Professor of Historical Theology and Ethics at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary in Berkeley, California.

1. Aldo Leopold. A Sand County Almanac. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966.
2. Lynn White, Jr. "The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,"Science 155:3767 (1967), pp. 1203-1207. Reprinted in Attitudes toward Nature and Technology. Menlo Park, CA: Addison-Wesley, 1973.
3. Clarence J. Glacken. Traces on the Rhodian Shore. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.
4. Carolyn Merchant. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980.
5. Roderick Frazier Nash. The Rights of Nature: A History of Environmental Ethics. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.
6. Tom Regan. The Case for Animal Rights. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.
7. Holmes Rolston III. Environmental Ethics: Duties to and Values in the Natural World. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988.
8. Charles Birch and John B. Cobb, Jr. The Liberation of Life: From the Cell to the Community. Denton, TX: Environmental Ethics Books, 1990, p. 198.
9. Mary Midgley. Animals and Why They Matter. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1983.
10. Jay B. McDaniel. Of Gods and Pelicans: A Theology of Reverence for Life. Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1989.
11. W. Lee Humphreys. "Pitfalls and Promises of Biblical Texts as a Basis for a Theology of Nature." Glenn C. Stone, ed. A New Ethic for a New Earth. New York: Friendship Press, 1971, pp. 99-118.
12. Lynn White, Jr. "The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis." Cited above in endnote 2.
13. H. Paul Santmire. The Travail of Nature: The Ambiguous Ecological Promise of Christian Theology. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985, p. 64.
14. Jay B. McDaniel, op. cit.
15. Eugene C. Hargrove, ed. Religion and the Environmental Crisis. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1986.
16. The phrase was coined by Arne Naess in his article, "The Shallow and Deep Long-range Ecology Movements: A Summary," Inquiry 16 (1973), pp. 95-100. Naess elaborated on deep ecology in his book, Ecology, Community, and Lifestyle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Other deep ecologists include: Warwick Fox. Toward a Transpersonal Ecology: Developing New Foundations for Environmentalism. Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1990; and Bill Devall and George Sessions. Deep Ecology. Salt Lake City, UT: Peregrine Smith Books, 1985.
17. For other resources in ecofeminism, see Judith Plant, ed. Healing the Wounds: The Promise of Ecofeminism. Philadelphia: New Society, 1989. Irene Diamond and Gloria Orenstein, eds. Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism. San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1990. Greta Gaard, ed. Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, and Nature, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993. Elizabeth Dodson Gray. Green Paradise Lost. Wellesley, MA: Roundtable Press, 1979. Hypatia 6:1 (1991), special issue on ecofeminism, edited by Karen J. Warren. Marti Kheel. "From Heroic to Holistic Ethics: The Ecofeminist Challenge," in Carol Robb and Carl Casebolt, eds. Covenant for a New Creation: Ethics, Religion and Public Policy. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1991, pp. 141-164.
18. A cathekontic ethic emphasizes the relationship between parts and a whole. For some discussion of this relationship, see H. Richard Niebuhr's The Responsible Self: An Essay in Christian Moral Philosophy. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1963.
19. Annie Dillard. Holy the Firm. New York: Harper and Row, 1977, pp. 19-20.