Breakthrough Generation

By Jerome E. Roos, Breakthrough Fellow

For many years, a key focus of the environmental movement has been the quest of finding a way to live in harmony with nature. But what does this mean? Do we really understand the meaning of the concept of 'harmony'? Do we have any idea how to attain it? Unfortunately, the stereotypical environmentalist conception of harmony, stripped of its social and economic context, turns out to be a romantic idealization of an otherwise highly impermanent and profoundly humanized natural world.

In order to come to an understanding of what harmony truly means, and how we can attain a state of concord with our natural environment, we need to first reassess our idealization of nature - embracing instead the Buddhist principle of impermanence. Subsequently, we need to go back to the roots of the concept of harmony in Greek mythology, recognizing that it is fundamentally intertwined with both security and prosperity - issues which are still mostly overlooked within the environmental movement.

Ecologists have long revered the seemingly harmonious essence of the natural world. Stretching back all the way to Thoreau, the idea of man becoming self-sufficient and living in harmony with nature has been a powerful rallying principle. Many environmentalists - like David Suzuki in The Sacred Balance - follow Spinoza in deifying nature, essentially turning harmony into a theological construct. In his book The End of Nature, the environmentalist and devout Methodist Bill McKibben writes the following:

The chief lesson is that the world displays a lovely order, an order comforting in its intricacy. And the most appealing part of this harmony, perhaps, is its permanence - the sense that we are part of something with roots stretching back nearly forever, and branches reaching forward just as far.

But how real is this harmony, and how permanent and sacred is it really? Has natural history not been a series of brutal experiments with different life forms rising and falling in a relentless onslaught of epic destabilizing events?

Over the course of 4.5 billion years, our planet has been bombarded with asteroids and meteor showers as it spat out burning molten rock, spewing toxic fumes and subjecting entire populations of helpless creatures to torrential downpours, deluges, earthquakes, forest fires, ice ages and cataclysmic geomagnetic reversals. This would hardly seem like a strong track record of harmony to the 99 percent of species ever to have lived on Earth that have abjectly been pushed into extinction over time.

So let us disregard the geological record for a second. What about humanity's relationship to nature? Surely past populations, like the pre-modern tribal peoples of Australasia and the Americas, lived in a relative state of harmony with nature, no? Wrong again.

In fact, as the great paleoanthropologist and conservationist Richard Leaky has emphasized in The Sixth Extinction, the mass extermination of the anthropocene started not just two centuries ago with the advent of industrial society, but already began with the spread of early humans out of Africa - leading to the eradication of most of the world's megafauna as early as 10,000 years ago.

Later in human history, smallholder farmers in Mesopotamia destroyed their ecosystems through unintended silting, early pastoralists in northeast Africa undermined their own livelihoods by overgrazing sparse fields of green, and local communities from Britain to Crete and from Easter Island to the Maya Empire entirely cut down their forests, leading to an inglorious collapse of their 'harmonious' civilizations.

Even if we disregard both the geological and the paleoanthropological records, it remains difficult to unearth the harmony in nature. From the cruel slaughter of defenseless cubs by an invading male lion, to the seemingly pointless tossing around of a baby seal by giant killer whales, on to the oral rape of a frog by a sexually utilitarian chimpanzee, nature actually presents itself as a fascinatingly dissonant place.

Even more importantly, however, nature appears to be permanently in flux, constantly remaking itself in adjustment to external shocks and internal contradictions. If anything, it is eternally out of balance.

Indeed, if there is one overarching theme in nature, it is not a Christian sense of harmony and permanence, but rather a Buddhist sense of constant change, or impermanence. The Buddha taught that as a result of this impermanence, or anicca, all attachment to the conditioned phenomena of the universe inevitably leads to suffering, or dukkha. The environmental movement, by staking most of its political and cultural capital in conservation efforts - itself a display of attachment - is thus bound to prolong its own suffering in a samsaric cycle of sorts.

But the fact that environmentalists prolong their own suffering should not be our greatest concern. A far more serious problem is that ecologists, by taking the concept of harmony out of its social and economic context, are at risk of perpetuating suffering for millions - if not billions - of human beings. In order to understand why, we first have to go back to the roots of the concept of harmony in Greek mythology.

Unlike many environmentalists, who see development and global increases in prosperity as antithetical to the quest for harmony, the ancient Greeks often depicted their Goddess Harmonia carrying either a cornucopia - the horn of plenty - or a kerykeion - a herald's staff symbolizing peace and commerce. Harmonia's Roman counterpart, Concordia, was often depicted alongside Pax, the Goddess of peace, and Hygieia, the Goddess of health, cleanliness and sanitation and daughter of the God of medicine - or, alternatively, alongside the female deities Securitas and Fortuna.

These depictions are not coincidental. They point towards an early understanding among ancient Greeks and Romans that harmony could not exist independently of peace, security, good health and prosperity. Time and again, history has borne out this unshakable truth: environmental concern peaks during economic high tide, and collapses in the midst of crisis. A recent poll shows that concern about climate change has declined as unemployment has gone up. Security concerns engendered by financial collapse are simply more easily expressed through xenophobic rhetoric than through ubiquitous conservation measures.

The reasons for this are simple. As Abraham Maslow pointed out decades ago, human nature is characterized by a hierarchically unfolding set of needs, in which the physiological needs for food, water, shelter and security are pre-potent to the higher needs for aesthetics, authenticity and harmony. In Maslow's words, these higher needs are simply "by-products of general need gratification, that is, of a generally improving psychological life condition, of surplus, plenty, affluence." In the absence of such affluence, there is unlikely to be much harmony.

None of this is to say that we should endorse the widespread destruction of nature's beautiful manifestations and the depletion of our natural resources in the name of ever more conspicuous consumption. It only means that we Greens, if we truly care about expanding our movement, might just need to reintroduce Securitas and Fortuna alongside Concordia - and once again adorn Harmonia with her cornucopia and her kerykeion. In other words, if we truly want to bring about a world of harmonious post-materialism, rather than maintaining a small bourgeois elite of ecologically conscious college graduates, we first need to focus on the emancipation of the pre-materialist poor.

In the end, only through an aggressive redistribution of wealth, an ambitious effort to eradicate poverty, and radical reform and stabilization of our financial sector, will true harmony begin to arise out of humanity. And only through a profound meditation on the very meaning of harmony and the impermanence of nature can we environmentalists begin to understand why Harmonia and Fortuna go hand-in-hand.