The Heyday of the Environmental Movement, 1960–1979 127
DOCUMENT 106: Lynn White, Jr., on Western Religions and the
Environmental Crisis (1967)In a speech presented to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 1966, Lynn
White, Jr., a historian and expert on the development of technology, examined some of the human abuses of
the environment and suggested that no solution to the ecological crisis could be achieved until people were
willing to abandon their belief that nature exists only to serve humans. He directed Americans to reexamine
their fundamental beliefs and the attitudes underlying their relationship to the environment, saying that
Westerners should “find a new religion or abandon the old one.”^2 More than anyone else, White has been
responsible for the “greening” of Judeo-Christian thinking and for the development of ecotheology.Since both science and technology are blessed
words in our contemporary vocabulary, some may
be happy at the notions first, that, viewed histori-
cally, modern science is an extrapolation of natu-
ral theology and, second, that modern technology
is at least partly to be explained as an Occidental,
voluntarist realization of the Christian dogma
of man’s transcendence of, and rightful mastery
over, nature. But, as we now recognize, somewhat
over a century ago science and technology—
hitherto quite separate activities—joined to give
mankind powers which, to judge by many of the
ecologic effects, are out of control. If so, Christi-
anity bears a huge burden of guilt.
I personally doubt that disastrous ecologic
backlash can be avoided simply by applying to our
problems more science and more technology. Our
science and technology have grown out of Chris-
tian attitudes toward man’s relation to nature
which are almost universally held not only by
Christians and neo-Christians but also by those
who fondly regard themselves as post-Chris-
tians. Despite Copernicus, all the cosmos rotates
around our little globe. Despite Darwin, we are
not, in our hearts, part of the natural process.
We are superior to nature, contemptuous of it,
willing to use it for our slightest whim.* * *
The greatest spiritual revolutionary in Western
history, Saint Francis proposed what he thought was
an alternative Christian view of nature and man’s
relation to it: he tried to substitute the idea of the
equality of all creatures, including man, for the idea
of man’s limitless rule of creation. He failed. Both
our present science and our present technology are
so tinctured with orthodox Christian arrogance
toward nature that no solution for our ecologic cri-
sis can be expected from them alone. Since the roots
of our trouble are so largely religious, the remedy
must also be essentially religious, whether we
call it that or not. We must rethink and refeel
our nature and destiny. The profoundly religious,
but heretical, sense of the primitive Franciscans
for the spiritual autonomy of all parts of nature
may point a direction. I propose Francis as a patron
saint for ecologists.
Source: Lynn White, Jr., “The Historical Roots of Our
Environmental Crisis,” Science 155, no. 3767 (March 10,
1967): 1206, 1207.measure of the success of the economy is not
production and consumption at all, but the
nature, extent, quality, and complexity of the
total capital stock, including in this the state
of the human bodies and minds included in the
system. In the spaceman economy, what we are
primarily concerned with is stock maintenance,
and any technological change which results in
the maintenance of a given total stock with a
lessened throughput (that is, less production and
consumption) is clearly a gain. This idea that both
production and consumption are bad things rather
than good things is very strange to economists, who
have been obsessed with the incomeflow concepts
to the exclusion, almost, of capital-stock concepts.
Source: Kenneth E. Boulding, “The Economics of the Coming
Spaceship Earth,” in Henry Jarrett, ed., Environmental Quality in a
Growing Economy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1966), pp. 9-10.