2.2: Humans and Nature

How we think about nature has long influenced our actions toward it, as well as our actions toward each other as fellow human beings. Has the relationship between humans and the natural world been understood primarily as one of harmony and care, or as one of dominion? This section will stress that traditions of dominion have produced devastating environmental and human consequences over time. A more harmonious and caring relationship between humans and nature will be essential to solving the integral challenge of climate change, which is presently not only destroying our environmental ecologies, but also threatening to destroy our human ecologies as well. Already vulnerable human communities across the globe are struggling to adapt to a warming climate, raising urgent issues of climate justice—but we and our children and grandchildren will all be affected by climate change.

Dominion over nature

Figure 2.2.1 The Garden of Eden. Painting by Lucas Cranach the Elder (German, 1472–1553).

In some religious traditions, the environment seems to exist to satisfy human need and pleasure. Exercising mastery over nature and extracting what nature provides for human ends is thus considered by these traditions a mandate of divine law or natural law. A foundational claim in the Judeo-Christian tradition, for example, is that God has given the Earth to humans for their own sustenance, use, and pleasure. The most well-known biblical statement of human dominion over nature can be found in Genesis 1:28:

Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the sky, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.

Here, humans are acting in accordance with God’s will when they subdue the natural world and appropriate the bounty of nature for human purposes (Figure 2.2.1). In Western history, this religious way of thinking about human dominion over nature evolved into a full-blown secular culture of private property. The religious orientation to dominion in the Judeo-Christian tradition became secularized in the modern period and was encoded in modern property law.

The seventeenth-century English philosopher John Locke is an important figure in this theoretical evolution. Locke is best known today for articulating the modern foundations of private property and for his theory of moderate government designed primarily to protect “human life, liberty, and property.” His theory of property is important to us here, since it was a deliberate secularization of the Judeo-Christian idea of dominion. Consider this passage, drawn from Locke’s 1690 work, the Second Treatise of Government:

God, who hath given the world to men in common, hath also given them reason to make use of it to the best advantage of life, and convenience. The earth, and all that is therein, is given to men for the support and comfort of their being.... Though the earth, and all inferior creatures, be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person.... Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property... that excludes the common right of other men.

This passage is instructive. God gives the world to humankind in common, but through the use of one’s body and mixing one’s labor with what is common, an individual can remove something from nature, privatize the commons, and make it his own. This, for Locke, is the origin of private property. According to Locke, extracting property from the commons is God’s plan for humankind: God endowed us all with reason so that we could do this. Through the exercise of our reason, individuals can conceive of the best ways to use and expropriate nature for the betterment of human life. The environment is there for us to use.

Locke’s theory of property is rooted in the ancient idea of terra nullius. Terra nullius, an old Latin term, refers to land that is empty and belongs to nobody. According to Locke’s theory, an individual can rightfully take land that is not being used by another person or group, because such land is not fulfilling God’s purpose. An individual can enclose the commons, cultivate it, make it his own, and fulfill God’s wishes for humankind on Earth.

Locke did set an ethical limit on how much an individual can take. He said that we cannot appropriate more than we can use. According to divine law, we are not permitted to allow nature to spoil in our possession and thus deprive others of its usage. We cannot enclose more of the commons than we can cultivate. We cannot gather so many apples or fish that they rot. However, Locke quickly observed that human societies had invented money to bypass the spoilage limitation. An individual thus exchanges his property for something that symbolizes its value—money—and can accumulate unlimited sums of money since money does not spoil. As human societies developed further and money became the main method of human exchange, an individual could enclose large tracts of the commons and pay people to cultivate it for him, either with money or the land’s produce. This, for Locke, was the birth of agriculture.

Figure 2.2.2 This is an eighteenth-century English enclosure map, depicting the town of Snaith. Enclosure of the Commons, Yorkshire 1754. Reproduced from Howdenshire History.

Enclosure and subdivision

Terra nullius, understood as a divine or natural justification for privatizing the commons, was useful to the British aristocracy at the time that Locke was writing. For example, it gave convenient validation to the enclosure movement, which first began in England in the twelfth century but accelerated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The commons were lands held in common by a given community; people who did not own land could pasture animals, gather wood, or grow vegetables or crops for their own use there. Enclosure referred to dividing up the commons into parcels of private property for more intense agricultural usage, a process that was nearly complete across England by the close of the nineteenth century (Figures 2.2.2 and 2.2.3).

While enclosure advanced agricultural productivity in England and other European nations through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, agriculture would not be the sole motivation for enclosing and subdividing the commons throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first (Figures 2.2.4–2.2.8).

For those seeking profit, terra nullius has been a convenient justification for enclosing the commons, encroaching on and subdividing empty or allegedly underutilized spaces, and expropriating natural resources.

Figure 2.2.3 This is what the enclosure of farmlands looks like today when you fly over the United Kingdom—small plots of private land divided by trees, shrubs, rocks, and so forth. This aerial photo is of farmland east of Great Massingham, 2018. Reproduced from Geograph.

Figure 2.2.4 Levittown, Pennsylvania, was the first master-planned development in the United States, built in the 1950s. Its 17,000 identical houses inaugurated a new symbol of American happiness—the single-family home in the suburbs—that also required freeway infrastructure and an oil-hungry automobile industry. Reproduced from Wikimedia Commons.

Figure 2.2.5 This is what suburban sprawl looks like today, in this case outside Las Vegas, Nevada. Photograph by Jan Buchholtz from Flickr.

Figure 2.2.6 Unsustainable American sprawl has been an infectious pattern around the world, in both developed and developing cities, from Dubai to Nairobi. Here, for example, is a master-planned community in Huaxi, China. Photograph by ImmerQi, May 6, 2009, from Flickr

Figure 2.2.7 Sometimes these master-planned developments abut against precious environmental zones, encroaching into wetlands and into forests. Here, for example, is a development in Kendale Lakes, Florida, encroaching on the Everglades National Park. Photograph by Fred Ward from Wikimedia Commons.

Figure 2.2.8 Sometimes master-planned developments abut on entirely unsustainable environments, like this desert in Rio Rancho, New Mexico. Reproduced from Wikimedia Commons.

Figure 2.2.9 The Plumb-Pudding in Danger (1805). Cartoon by James Gillray.

Terra nullius also became a powerful justification for European colonization around the world.

Colonization

John Locke’s theory of property, grounded in terra nullius, or empty land, had important implications for global dynamics in early modernity. Take a look, for example, at this famous cartoon by James Gillray, The Plumb-Pudding in Danger, from 1805 (Figure 2.2.9). The French Emperor Napoleon, on the right, sits with the British Prime Minister William Pitt, on the left, as they carve up the Earth, distributing terra nullius for their own national agendas. Extractions from these colonies—gold and silver, foodstuffs, wood, raw materials, and so forth—would enrich the mother country.

Figure 2.2.10 Here we see the environmental scars of mining and of deforestation, devastating the integral ecologies of northern Brazil, the lungs of our planet. Photograph by Operação Hymenaea, 2016, from Wikipedia.

Of course, when Europeans landed in terra nullius, these lands weren’t empty at all. They were richly inhabited by ancient societies with forms of life that were foreign and often surprising to Europeans. Enslaving these inhabitants allowed the conquering nation to extract resources to ship back to the mother country. Centuries of such extractive practices destroyed Indigenous cultures as well as the environmental ecologies that situated their ways of life. From Spain’s infamous Potosí silver mines in Peru and sugarcane plantations in the British Caribbean to diamond and gold mining in South Africa and the rubber boom in the Congo, modernity has been a brutal story of dominion over land and peoples and of slavery, extraction, and environmental mutilation across the world (Figure 2.2.10).

Harmony with nature: protecting the environment, protecting each other

One hundred years before we were thinking about climate change, Gandhi declared, “Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s needs but not every man’s greed.” In contrast with traditions, histories, and practices of dominion over the centuries, there are alternative religious and secular traditions that have cautioned us to respect the Earth and to find ways to live in harmony with it. These include Koranic, Buddhist, and Hindu traditions, a vast range of Indigenous traditions and practices, and strands within Judeo-Christian tradition itself. Most often these traditions recognize the inherent interdependence of natural and social systems—what Pope Francis calls our “integral ecology.” They stress that irresponsible human dominion over nature causes not only environmental harm, but human harm as well. It violates not only the integrity of nature, but also the well-being of humans.

The great variety of religious and cultural traditions that emphasize our harmony with nature, as well as our ethical responsibility toward each other, can be very helpful to us today as we tackle the urgent challenge of climate change. For example, the Koranic ayah 24:45 instructs that we are “stewards of the Earth”:

The Earth is green and beautiful, and Allah has appointed you his stewards over it. The whole Earth has been created a place of worship, pure and clean. Whoever plants a tree and diligently looks after it until it matures and bears fruit is rewarded. If a Muslim plants a tree or sows a field and humans and beasts and birds eat from it, all of it is love on his part.

The Buddhist Za Choeje Rinpoche teaches:

By injuring any part of the world’s system, you injure yourself. Think of life on this planet in terms of systems and not detached elements. See that the environment does not belong to any single country to exploit and then disregard.

Laguna Pueblo poet Paula Gunn Allen describes a Native American orientation to the Earth as inherently part of the self, and explicitly rejects a relation of dominion:

We are the land... that is the fundamental idea embedded in Native American life and culture in the Southwest... the Earth is the mind of the people as we are the mind of the Earth. The land is not really the place (separate from ourselves) where we act out the drama of our isolate destinies. It is not a means of survival, a setting for our affairs.... It is rather a part of our being, dynamic, significant, real. It is ourself.

There are countless examples of belief systems and practices that embrace harmonious views of the human relationship with the natural world.

Figure 2.2.11 Rise for Climate march in San Francisco, September 8, 2018. 350.org. Photograph by Xanh Tran, Survival Media Agency, from Flickr.

An important strategy for climate action today is to identify common views among otherwise diverse cultural, religious, and political groups to summon agreement, coordinate action, and assert political pressure to protect the planet from destructive human behavior (Figure 2.2.11). Too often commonalities are buried beneath political contestation over other issues—and this can be detrimental to building coalitions around urgent environmental and human challenges like climate change.

As an example of finding commonalities, a new and fruitful conversation has opened in recent years between climate scientists and members of the American evangelical community. Evangelical and atmospheric scientist Katharine Hayhoe gives voice to a position, rooted in scriptural commitments, that is attracting increasing support among some evangelicals:

If I say that I respect God, that I love God, and God has given us this incredible life-giving planet, then if I strip every resource at the expense of my poor sisters and brothers—one in six of whom die because of pollution-related issues, who are suffering and dying today—then I’m not somebody who takes the Bible seriously.

Along these lines, the recent “Climate Change: An Evangelical Call to Action” asserts that “love of God, love of neighbor, and the demands of stewardship are more than enough reason for evangelical Christians to respond to the climate change problem with moral passion and concrete action.” This document proceeds to cite relevant scripture to substantiate its claims:

• Christians must care about climate change because we love God the Creator and Jesus our Lord, through whom and for whom the creation was made. This is God’s world, and any damage that we do to God’s world is an offense against God himself (Gen. 1; Ps. 24; Col. 1:16).
• Christians must care about climate change because we are called to love our neighbors, to do unto others as we would have them do unto us, and to protect and care for the least of these as though each was Jesus Christ himself (Mt. 22:34– 40; Mt. 7:12; Mt. 25:31–46).
• Christians, noting the fact that most of the climate change problem is human induced, are reminded that when God made humanity he commissioned us to exercise stewardship over the earth and its creatures. Climate change is the latest evidence of our failure to exercise proper stewardship and constitutes a critical opportunity for us to do better (Gen. 1:26–28).

The ethical stand against climate change today, emerging from both religious and secular positions, typically combines care for the environment itself with care for our fellow humans, particularly those who are most vulnerable. In the next section, we turn to the human impacts of climate change, emphasizing what we call the “disproportionate impacts” on the global poor.