Environmentalism is more popular than ever—and with good reason: never has our dependency on the natural world or our culpability in its ongoing destruction been clearer. I’ll spare you the customary roll call of ecological crises that tends to open articles about the environment (for every person spurred into action, another is sunk into despondency), but suffice it to say that our planet is in serious trouble. If humanity is to survive this century with any semblance of the quality of life enjoyed today, all of us need to act quickly to limit and reverse anthropogenic climate change and environmental destruction.
It’s therefore heartening to see enthusiasm for environmentalism on the rise. Across much of Europe, support for Green parties is increasing. In the United States, three-quarters of people think more should be done to end the country’s dependence on fossil fuels. The 2019 climate strike was one of the largest protests ever staged with an estimated six million people around the world—from Antarctica to Zambia—protesting leaders’ continued inaction over the destruction of the planet.
By itself, however, environmentalism doesn’t necessarily translate into effective action. An appreciation of the natural world and a concern for its future can inspire us to act, but it can’t tell us how to act. How do we develop renewable sources of energy? How do we best preserve remaining areas of wilderness? And how do we build sustainable agricultural systems capable of feeding a global population rapidly hurtling toward ten billion? To answer these vital questions, we need science.
Unfortunately, environmentalism and science are not always the same thing. Indeed, throughout its history, environmentalism has been shaped by a range of fringe beliefs that have nurtured a tradition of unscientific thinking about the natural world. As a result, many sincere and well-meaning environmentalists today are wary of pragmatic, science-based solutions to the climate crisis—the very solutions that can get us out of this mess. It’s time for environmentalism to acknowledge, and renounce, its long dalliance with the fringe.
The Origins of Environmentalism
To understand why environmentalism has been so vulnerable to fringe influences, we need to travel back to the 1920s and the dawn of modern environmental awareness. In some ways, our planet was much healthier. The global population had yet to reach two billion. Atmospheric carbon dioxide was around 300 ppm, compared to 410 ppm today. Nevertheless, it was a world undergoing rapid and unsettling change. Cities were expanding at unprecedented speed. Industrialization was consuming natural resources at ever-greater rates. And it was a world still ringing with the echoes of the First World War.
The prospect of an increasingly mechanized and inhuman society heralded by these developments concerned many who lived through them. The ways in which people acted on these concerns, however, were very different. On the one hand, biologists and agronomists, worried about the rates of soil erosion and deforestation around the world, set about developing sustainable forestry practices, improved farming methods, and higher-yield crops, thereby laying the foundations for much of modern environmental and agricultural science (Barton 2018).
On the other hand, many artists and intellectuals, especially in Europe, sought not to address the challenges of the modern world but to reject modernity altogether. Fueled by nostalgia for a rural era that was rapidly being lost to the slums and smokestacks of urbanization, they attempted to recapture in some form a pre-industrial way of life. They championed traditional farming methods and outdoor living as the key to healthy, meaningful lives. They searched for worldviews that celebrated a spiritual connection with the natural world, from Hinduism to transcendentalism to paganism. And they constructed a farrago of unscientific philosophies they hoped would restore humanity’s relationship with the environment.
Modern environmentalism is the heir to both these traditions: the scientific and pragmatic and the spiritual and nostalgic. However we choose to measure environmentalism’s success—laws passed, acres protected, lives improved—the former has been to its merit; the latter, ultimately, has been to its detriment.
Life Force and Cow Dung
An early example of the spiritual approach to the environment was biodynamic farming, which dates back to 1924 when Austrian philosopher and self-declared psychic Rudolf Steiner gave a series of lectures in the German city of Breslau on a new discipline he called “anthroposophy.” Steiner was interested in improving agricultural yields without damaging the environment. What he wasn’t interested in was investigating this important cause with science or even basic logic. Anyone masochistic enough to read his lectures will find themselves swallowing an indigestible word salad. In a single sentence, Steiner appeals to astrology, radiation, ether, and the metabolism of cows to explain the workings of anthroposophy. Elsewhere, he discusses the imagined effects of cosmic forces, karma, and “moon rays” on the life force of plants and animals, which he believes are at the heart of environmental and agricultural processes. Ultimately, Steiner argues—without a shred of evidence—that the earth is home to a range of mystical and magical forces and that agriculture can be revolutionized by harnessing these forces (Steiner 2007).
Steiner’s lectures were a hit. Although he died just a few months later, a small but dedicated following continued his teachings under the new name of biodynamics. People were attracted to it for various reasons. Those wary of modern agricultural methods were drawn to its disdain for industrialization. Those left cold by the sterility and order of the modern world found comfort in its pseudo-pagan mysticism. In truth, there was nothing venerable about biodynamic farming. Despite his frequent allusions to ancient wisdom, Steiner invented his anthroposophical worldview entirely from scratch in the 1920s.
So how does biodynamic farming work? Well, in short, it doesn’t. Biodynamic farmers attempt to enhance a farm’s life force by applying potions, known as “preparations,” to the soil, either directly or by mixing it into manure before spreading. These preparations are invariably concocted by subjecting natural substances to a series of bizarre, lengthy processes. One requires cow manure to be stuffed into a cow horn and then buried fifty centimeters underground for an entire winter. Another asks for a deer bladder to be bunged with yarrow blossoms and left out in the summer sun. And even if the resulting potions did somehow work, biodynamic farming guarantees its own uselessness by insisting that preparations should be applied in homeopathic amounts, with some processes asking for as little as one gram of potion per ten tons of manure (Dunning 2007). As Steiner himself confessed: “To our modern way of thinking, this all sounds quite insane” (qtd. in Barton 2018).
Flower Power
In the decades that followed, biodynamics’ influence spread throughout Europe and North America. At the same time, others with an interest in agriculture and the environment also looked to the past—or, at least, an idealized imagining of the past—for direction. In the 1920s, a Swiss teacher named Hans Müller created the Swiss Farmer’s Movement for Native Rural Culture, through which he expounded the benefits of pre-industrial farming techniques and peasant lifestyles. In the 1940s, the English folklorist Rolf Gardiner (later a founding member of the Soil Association, a prominent organic advocacy group) established the Kinship in Husbandry, a secretive organization with the aim of restoring rural ways of life in Britain. His acquaintance Gerard Wallop ran the English Mistery, a hyper-conservative group that hoped to revive feudalism in England. These various groups were united not just by nostalgia but a belief that there was more to the natural world than science could explain: something intimate, mystical, and unquantifiable (Reed 2010).
It wasn’t until the 1960s and 1970s, however, that eco-spiritualism really took off. After all, this was the age of counterculture, a time when people throughout the West were looking for new and exciting things to believe in. As biologist Arthur Galston noted in 1972, a desire to reject “the synthetic, plastic world” of the establishment encouraged many to turn to nature for meaning and authenticity. Even his own students at Yale were attracted to this “anti-intellectualism,” he glumly observed (Galston 1972).
Those looking to escape the establishment sought out any number of alternative beliefs. Some looked to Hinduism, Buddhism, and the Far East in the hopes of finding environmental philosophies uncontaminated by Western industrialism. Others turned to indigenous peoples such as Native Americans, who were said to retain an ancient spiritual connection with the natural world. Then there were those who looked to paganism for answers, reviving and reimagining nature-worship religions such as Wicca and Gaianism. Like biodynamics before, the resulting smorgasbord of beliefs was characterized by a desire to retrieve an older, more meaningful relationship with the earth and its ecosystems. In the words of one New Ager, it was about “regaining the intimate connection and awareness of our place in nature” (qtd. in Ferguson 1981).
Believers were typically motivated by a sincere concern for the environment. And their love of the esoteric didn’t necessarily prevent them from participating in the practicalities of environmentalism. They could be found out in the Pacific Ocean, disrupting whale hunts; sitting in trees slated to be bulldozed by developers; or rustling up support for Earth Day in 1970, which proved a galvanizing moment for the environmental movement both in the United States and around the world. All too frequently, however, the spiritual dimension to their environmentalism fomented distrust of science and technology. To many counterculture environmentalists, these were part of the problem, not the solution. They represented, in the words of writer Edward Abbey, “the ever-expanding industrial megamachine” (qtd. in Drake 2013).
Take the neo-pagan movement. The emphasis on freedom and individuality makes New Age beliefs notoriously hard to generalize, but a representative sample of neo-pagans in the 1970s might have spent their free time growing organic vegetables, immersing themselves in nature, and attending group “apologies,” in which they showed contrition to the earth for humanity’s environmental destruction. Guided by the conviction that our planet is sacred, they also raised awareness of various environmental causes, including recycling, renewable energy, and the protection of wildlife refuges (Bloch 1998).
Campaigning and awareness-raising are of course good things. However, neo-paganism’s suspicion of modernity all too often soured into a hostility toward mainstream society. Cities in particular were condemned as representing everything wrong with twentieth-century civilization. “If you look at [Earth] from space,” explained one neo-pagan, “you’ll see giant cancer cells called cities across the face of the planet” (qtd. in Bloch 1998). As a result, many neo-pagans were—and still are—wary of mainstream environmental efforts that are, by definition, best placed to generate change.
Moreover, by combining environmental causes with spiritual beliefs, neo-pagans and their fellow New Agers tainted environmentalism for many in mainstream society who didn’t share their interest in things such as astrology, reincarnation, and “sexual magic.” The influence of fringe beliefs such as neo-paganism led to environmentalists, even those who approached the subject as a strictly scientific matter, being lampooned as tree-hugging hippies. This caricature not only dissuaded people from becoming environmentalists but allowed environmentalism itself to be dismissed as a fringe belief. It’s taken decades for the movement to shake off the stigma and reassert itself as a global and urgent concern.
Rebellion, Inc.
Eventually, even tree-hugging hippies grow up, get jobs, and settle down. This is what happened to the baby boomers who had formed the vanguard of New Age environmentalism. By the 1990s, their generation had ascended to the positions of power they once scorned: they were now politicians, lawyers, and business owners. This isn’t to say that they abandoned their beliefs once they joined the mainstream. On the contrary: although they no longer chained themselves to trees or boarded anti-whaling boats, they still carried their anti-establishment dreams with them. The only difference was that they now had the power and influence to enact them. Seemingly blind to the irony, counterculture became mainstream (Heath and Potter 2005).
This is why the 1990s mark the moment when previously radical environmental beliefs became widely accepted, further compounding environmentalism’s relationship with the fringe. Organic produce began appearing on supermarket shelves, where it was marketed as the green choice for shoppers worried about the environment. Alternatively, the ethically minded could head to their local farmers’ markets and buy locally grown produce. Even biodynamic farming achieved some mainstream acceptance: today biodynamic vineyards cover an estimated 11,000 hectares around the world. In terms of influencing contemporary environmentalism, the commercialization of fringe beliefs and practices in the 1990s was just as influential as the rise of counterculture movements some thirty years previously.
At the heart of this commercialization was the desire, undimmed since the 1920s, to escape the chemicals and corporations of modernity for an older, gentler relationship with the earth. Organic farms contrasted the human scale of their enterprises with the sprawling monocultures of industrial farming. Farmers’ markets likewise peddled nostalgia for a time before sterile supermarkets and faceless production lines. It would be unfair and inaccurate to claim that organic farming or local produce are unscientific in the way that, say, biodynamics is. But their origins and subsequent success owe just as much, if not more, to the spiritual and nostalgic strain of environmentalism as they do to the scientific and pragmatic. Consequently, when environmentalists today encourage us to buy local and eat organic, they often find themselves at odds with more pragmatic and scientifically grounded approaches.
Let’s stay with organics for a moment. In some ways, organic farming can indeed be very good for the environment. Organic farms can help maintain local biodiversity, for example, and their soils can store more carbon than those on non-organic farms. But organic farming isn’t a viable solution to the problem of sustainable agriculture, at least for most people. This is because organic agriculture is less efficient than modern, industrial farming methods and therefore requires a greater amount of land—typically 40 percent more—to grow the same quantity of food as a non-organic farm. Remember that the global population is currently approaching eight billion and is forecast to reach ten billion by around 2060. There’s simply not enough land on earth to feed that many people using organic methods—at least not without converting the planet’s remaining wildernesses into farmland, with the loss of ever more habitats and species. Despite this, many environmentalists today continue to advocate organic produce as the only ethical choice for those concerned about the natural world.
What about locally produced food? The principle behind it seems like common sense: the fewer miles your food has traveled to reach your plate, the fewer greenhouse gases released during its transit. In some situations, this is indeed the case—but not always. When you factor in other variables affecting the environmental impact of food production—water use, growing methods, storage techniques, and so on—in many cases transport is no longer the most significant source of emissions. In 2006, a team from Lincoln University in New Zealand did just this and found that the dairy, lamb, and apple farming industries emit more carbon dioxide in the United Kingdom than in New Zealand. As bizarre as it may seem, for U.K.–based environmentalists like me, the green thing to do is therefore to buy apples imported from New Zealand rather than buy the locally grown alternatives (Saunders et al. 2006).
Perils of Nostalgia
It’s time for environmentalists to reassess our relationship with the megamachine. The hope of escaping modernity for some rural idyll was a pipe dream even in the 1920s. Today it’s deluded to the point of being dangerous. Like it or not, the world is either industrialized or industrializing and, short of something catastrophic, will remain so for the foreseeable future. Environmentalists, if we are serious about saving the planet, need to accept this. We need to abandon false hopes of subverting our industrialized, urbanized societies and instead think about how we can work with them to change them for the better. Earlier I described environmentalism as a movement of two halves: one scientific and pragmatic and the other spiritual and nostalgic. Over the past century, the latter has become increasingly self-defeating as it grows ever more out of touch with reality. The future of environmentalism must be grounded in science and pragmatism.
It’s worth remembering that the megamachine doesn’t just destroy the natural world. Indeed, as science and technology get to grips with the scale of environmental crisis facing us, they are coming up with many ingenious solutions. Genetically modified crops have been developed that use 25 percent less water than their unmodified counterparts. State-of-the-art herbicides such as glyphosate improve crop yields while reducing costs, all without harming humans. Even nuclear power plants, once the supervillain of the environmental movement, have dramatically improved in terms of safety and reduced waste. In fact, a 2017 study found that the world will probably fail to meet the emissions targets set by the Paris Agreement without relying on nuclear power to some extent (Peters et al. 2017).
And yet, time and time again, we have witnessed the embarrassing spectacle of hazmat-clad Greenpeace activists ripping up genetically modified crops or of countries outlawing glyphosate on the basis of unfounded environmental concerns or of environmentalists simultaneously demanding that countries dramatically cut emissions while abandoning nuclear power. We have to contend with green activists regarding organic food as a matter of principle and not privilege or insisting that the solution to the climate crisis lies in the wholesale “decommercialization” of the West’s “toxic economic system.” This is the legacy of the environmental fringe.
The saving grace in all this is that these people mean well. Most share a sincere concern for the natural world. But as long as they continue to advocate solutions rooted in the nostalgia and spiritualism of the environmental fringe, they are hindering their own cause.
So keep the passion. Keep the compassion. But, for the earth’s sake, drop the disdain for science.
References
Barton, Gregory. 2018. The Global History of Organic Farming. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bloch, Jon. 1998. Alternative spirituality and environmentalism. Review of Religious Research 40(1): 55–73.
Drake, Brian. 2013. Loving Nature, Fearing the State: Environmentalism and Antigovernment Politics Before Reagan. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Dunning, Brian. 2007. Biodynamic agriculture. Skeptoid (January 18). Available online at https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4026.
Ferguson, Marilyn. 1981. The Aquarian Conspiracy: Personal and Social Transformation in the 1980s. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd.
Galston, Arthur. 1972. The organic farmer and anti-intellectualism. Natural History 81(5): 24–8.
Heath, Joseph, and Andrew Potter. 2005. The Rebel Sell: How the Counterculture Became Consumer Culture. Chichester: Capstone Publishing Ltd.
Peters, Glen, Robbie Andrew, Josep Canadell, et al. 2017. Key indicators to track current progress and future ambition of the Paris Agreement. Nature Climate Change 7(2): 118–122.
Reed, Matthew. 2010. Rebels for the Soil: The Rise of the Global Organic Food and Farming Movement. Abingdon, U.K.: Earthscan.
Saunders, Caroline, A. Barber, and Gregory Taylor. 2006. Food miles-comparative energy/emissions performance of New Zealand’s agriculture industry. Lincoln University Research Report No. 285 (January 18). Available online at https://researcharchive.lincoln.ac.nz/handle/10182/125.
Steiner, Rudolf. 2007. The agricultural course. Rudolf Steiner Archive (January 16). Available online at https://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA327/English/BDA1958/Ag1958_index.html.