Individualism – Climate- Science.press

Climate Anxiety: The Latest Trend in Elite Neurosis – Now Blame “Individualism” for Your Panic Attacks

Oh, the elites are at it again, folks. They’ve figured out that the real reason you’re lying awake at night, sweating over whether the world will combust in a fiery climate apocalypse isn’t because of their fearmongering, but because of—wait for it—individualism. That’s right, in this gem from the Los Angeles Times, the author wrings their hands over the scourge of “climate anxiety” and, of course, traces it back to the root of all evil: the fact that you still value your personal freedom.

Conceptual shot of an anxious young woman in the middle of a circle of accusing coworkershttp://195.154.178.81/DATA/i_collage/pi/shoots/783578.jpg

From Watts Up With That?

By Charles Rotter

Oh, the elites are at it again, folks. They’ve figured out that the real reason you’re lying awake at night, sweating over whether the world will combust in a fiery climate apocalypse isn’t because of their fearmongering, but because of—wait for it—individualism. That’s right, in this gem from the Los Angeles Times, the author wrings their hands over the scourge of “climate anxiety” and, of course, traces it back to the root of all evil: the fact that you still value your personal freedom.

This masterpiece of neurotic nonsense, titled “To Fix Climate Anxiety, We First Have to Fix Individualism,” (behind a paywall), is peak elite navel-gazing. Let’s break down their neurotic argument and laugh at their complete inability to function outside their groupthink bubble.

The Anxiety Industry: The Left’s New Favorite Hobby

First, let’s talk about climate anxiety, the latest designer disorder that’s sweeping the liberal elite like avocado toast. In case you haven’t heard, it’s what happens when your climate virtue signaling turns into full-blown panic attacks. People are losing their minds because they’ve been bombarded for years by end-of-the-world rhetoric from media, politicians, and activists who’d have you believe that every breath you take is choking Mother Earth to death.

Just knowing that climate change is getting worse can trigger serious psychological responses. And the shock and trauma are all the more great if you’ve already had to live through the kinds of disasters that keep the rest of us up at night.

https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2024-09-11/climate-anxiety-essay

According to this article, people are feeling “anxious” about the climate, and naturally, the solution is not for them to step back and take a rational look at things—no, no, the solution is to dismantle individualism. Because of course it is.

Blaming Individualism: The Left’s Favorite Boogeyman
The article opens with the dramatic claim that “climate anxiety can’t be fully addressed until we confront the toxic ideology of individualism that underpins it”. You read that right. If you’re feeling uneasy about the planet, it’s not because of the endless climate alarmism or the fact that these elites have been screaming “we have 12 years to save the Earth” every year for the last 30 years. Nope, it’s because you still stubbornly believe in your right to live your life without being micromanaged by bureaucrats.

“One huge reason why climate anxiety feels so awful is this feeling of not being able to do anything about it,” Ray said. “But if you actually saw yourself as part of a collective, as interconnected with all these other movements doing meaningful things, you wouldn’t be feeling this despair and loneliness.”

The trick to fixing climate anxiety is to fix individualism, she said. Start small, tap into what you’re already good at, join something bigger than yourself.

And by fixing individualism, as many young activists like Patel have already figured out, we just might have a better shot at fixing climate change.

https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2024-09-11/climate-anxiety-essay

Apparently, individualism—yes, that awful notion that you have autonomy over your own choices—is now considered “toxic.” Forget that individualism is the cornerstone of free societies, personal freedom, and, oh yeah, human achievement. In the world of the eco-left, it’s now the villain in their ongoing climate horror show.

A Neurological Condition? Please
What’s more laughable is how they frame climate anxiety as a mental health crisis akin to depression or PTSD. They write about it like it’s an epidemic of post-traumatic stress from people being bombarded by all those horrible individual freedoms. I mean, seriously? The real crisis here is that people have been indoctrinated into believing that they’re responsible for saving the entire planet every time they use a plastic straw or don’t recycle perfectly. This is what happens when you raise a generation to believe that everything they do contributes to the imminent collapse of the world’s ecosystems.

The Author’s Prescription: Collective Climate Neurosis
So, what’s the solution according to these enlightened minds? Naturally, we need to get rid of this pesky idea that you have any individual rights or freedoms. The article practically celebrates the idea that if we can only get everyone to think collectively, like good little comrades, the anxiety will melt away.

It pushes the idea that “individualism places all the responsibility on each of us to act, making it impossible to live up to expectations, creating a cycle of guilt, shame, and paralysis”. Oh, poor babies! The very same people who lecture us about reusable shopping bags and meat-free Mondays are now telling us that the crushing weight of their own guilt is our fault. Let’s not forget who’s been creating these unrealistic standards and then weaponizing guilt against anyone who doesn’t fall in line.

But don’t worry, they’ve got a plan! Their brilliant strategy is to embrace collectivism—because nothing says mental health like forcing people into a hive mind where the individual is secondary to the group. Yep, if you could just stop thinking for yourself and let the climate overlords run your life, you’d be so much happier. Or at least that’s what the elites think.

https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2024-09-11/climate-anxiety-essay

A Reality Check for the Paranoid
Here’s the thing: climate anxiety isn’t a real problem; it’s a manufactured condition, hyped up by a generation of activists, politicians, and media hacks who’ve been making a living by scaring the living daylights out of everyone. They’re the ones who’ve been telling you the world is ending unless you stop eating hamburgers and driving your SUV.

The truth is, climate change is not an existential crisis, and certainly not one that justifies abandoning the values of personal freedom and individual rights. But for these people, it’s not even about the climate anymore—it’s about control. Every crisis, real or imagined, is an opportunity to chip away at your autonomy. And “climate anxiety” is just the latest weapon in that fight.

We hear so often today that climate change is the existential crisis of our time, but that dismisses the trauma and violence to all the people who have been fighting to survive for centuries. Colonization, greed and exploitation are inseparable from climate change, Uchendu said, but we miss these connections when we consider our emotions only through a Western lens.

https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2024-09-11/climate-anxiety-essay

Elites and Their Collective Fantasy
What really drives the article’s insane conclusion is this ongoing obsession the left has with collectivism. They yearn for a world where nobody thinks for themselves, where your life is dictated by the enlightened few who, of course, know better than you. The article barely hides its disdain for the idea that individuals should be responsible for their own actions. Instead, they fantasize about a world where everything is a group project, and we all obediently march to the beat of the latest government decree.

According to them, if you weren’t so caught up in your individual rights, you wouldn’t be so darn anxious. Yeah, because nothing calms the nerves quite like having the state control every aspect of your life.

Their Real Goal: Control, Not Climate Solutions
Make no mistake, this isn’t about fixing climate anxiety. This is about eliminating individual thought. The environmental elite knows that if they can convince you to surrender your personal freedoms for the “greater good,” they can push through their agenda without resistance. They can introduce any policy—no matter how ridiculous, no matter how intrusive—because you’ll be too busy trying to be a good little cog in their collective machine to object.

In the end, their whole argument boils down to this: your desire to think for yourself and live independently is making the planet worse and giving you panic attacks. So, naturally, the only way to fix the problem is to surrender your autonomy to the group. Because, hey, collectivism always works out great, right? Just ask Cuba or Venezuela how that’s going.

Final Thought: Don’t Fall for the Nonsense
Let’s get real: climate anxiety is a product of indoctrination by a radical environmental movement that thrives on fearmongering. And now, instead of taking responsibility for the anxiety they’ve caused, they’re trying to shift the blame onto your belief in personal freedom. It’s absurd.

You don’t need to fix individualism to “fix” climate anxiety. You need to fix the constant stream of doomsday propaganda that’s designed to scare you into submission. The real mental health crisis isn’t caused by climate change; it’s caused by the relentless bombardment of apocalyptic messaging designed to make you feel guilty for existing. Don’t let them fool you into thinking that giving up your individual rights will somehow make you feel better. The only thing that will do is make it easier for them to control you.

So, to the hand-wringing author and the climate anxiety brigade: Take a breath, grab a steak, and stop trying to guilt the rest of us into your collective neurosis. We’re not buying it.

Environmentalism or Individualism? (Part 2: Conservation vs. Preservation)

“The ultimate goal of the mainstream environmentalist movement, therefore, is not conservation of natural resources for human use. It is preservation of nature as an end in itself.”

From Master Resource

By Robert Bidinotto

Ed. note: This is Part 2 of a six-part series on the ideology of environmentalism and its incompatibility with the foundational individualist philosophy of the United States. Part 1 is here.

“The ultimate goal of the mainstream environmentalist movement, therefore, is not conservation of natural resources for human use. It is preservation of nature as an end in itself.”

Nowhere was the traditional fear of self-responsibility and the hatred of individualist economies more evident than among intellectuals. Over the years, they began to translate the pre-modern Zeitgeist into more intellectually palatable terms: into formal philosophical critiques of reason, individualism, and capitalism.

Early Environmentalism

The Eden Premise lay at the core of the thinking of philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau, the intellectual godfather of today’s “counterculture.” Rousseau preached the inherent goodness of untouched nature and undisciplined emotion; the corrupting influence of reason, culture, and civilization; economic egalitarianism and small-scale participatory democracy; the mystical infallibility of the collective will; and the sacrifice of the individual to the group.

The Eden Premise also was a central tenet of American transcendentalists and pantheists, notably including John Muir, Henry David Thoreau, Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold, and Ansel Adams—individuals who co-founded such groups as the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society. “In wildness is the preservation of the world,” said Thoreau. “The most alive is the wildest.”¹

In 1860, Thoreau wrote that forests—when left untouched by Man—would evolve toward “the greatest regularity and harmony.”² Thoreau’s ideas had a great impact on the thinking of the polymath George Perkins Marsh—a Vermont lawyer and Congressman (1843–49), and U. S. diplomat (to Italy, 1861–82)—who in 1864 wrote the seminal work of American environmentalism, Man and Nature. Marsh argued that natural forces and processes exist in a stable, harmonious balance, but that human activity was destroying that balance.

“Man is everywhere a disturbing agent,” Marsh declared. “Wherever he plants his foot, the harmonies of nature are turned to discord.” He went on to call men “brute destroyers” who “destroy the balance which nature had established.” However, Marsh took solace in the belief that “nature avenges herself upon the intruder,” reducing Man to “depravation [sic], barbarism, and perhaps even extinction.”³

Pinchot and Muir

Man and Nature was read widely in America and abroad, and in turn affected the thinking of the two pivotal figures in the history of American environmentalism: Gifford Pinchot and John Muir.

Pinchot was the first chief of the U. S. Forest Service, under President Theodore Roosevelt. A utilitarian, he opposed private ownership of natural resources, regarding them as collective goods to be managed for the benefit of “the greatest number” and conserved for the benefit of future generations.

To this end, Pinchot was largely responsible for vastly increasing the federal government’s land holdings. Today, one quarter of the entire land mass of the United States is owned by the federal government, an area five times the size of France. By 1980 the federal government held 44 percent of Arizona, almost half of California and Wyoming, well over half of Idaho, Oregon, and Utah, three-quarters of Alaska, and over 86 percent of Nevada. These holdings contain over half of America’s known resources. This includes a third of our oil, over 40 percent of salable timber and natural gas, and most of the nation’s coal, copper, silver, asbestos, lead, and other minerals.

Whatever might be said of Pinchot’s socialistic philosophy, it was still predicated on human values. In his chronicle of American environmentalism, Shabecoff observes that “Pinchot wanted the forests managed for their usefulness, not for their beauty.… He was not interested in preserving the natural landscape for its own sake.”⁴

Like Pinchot, most of the millions who now call themselves environmentalists are really just nature-loving “conservationists.” Like him, they see the earth’s bounty as resources for human use, appreciation, development, and spiritual enjoyment. At root, then, their values are still homocentric—that is, Man-centered.

But among intellectuals, this conservationist ethic quickly fell out of favor. Today’s environmentalist leaders have a different pedigree: the preservationist lineage that traces back to Pinchot’s arch-rival, John Muir. A mystical Scotsman who co-founded the Sierra Club in 1892, Muir’s basic tenet was that wilderness existed not for Man, but for its own sake.

“How narrow we selfish, conceited creatures are in our sympathies!” Muir declared in his 1867 journal. “How blind to the rights of all the rest of creation! …Well, I have precious little sympathy for the selfish propriety of civilized man, and if a war of races should occur between the wild beasts and Lord Man, I would be tempted to sympathize with the bears.”⁵

It was not long before Muir’s preservationist thinking began to dominate the emerging conservation movement. For instance, Horace M. Albright, an early director of the National Park Service (1929–33), saw it as his mission to “keep large sections of primitive country free from the influence of destructive civilization.”⁶

The Victory of “Deep Ecology”

Beginning with the scholar George Marsh, the American environmentalist movement wrapped itself in a mantle of scientism, adapted from European philosophy. Borrowing the idea of “holism” from philosopher G. W. F. Hegel, German zoologist Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) argued that individuals per se don’t exist—that they’re simply parts of greater wholes that include their races, societies, nations, and environment. In 1866, he coined the term “ecology” to describe “the whole science of the relations of the organism to the environment.”

Soon, others began to connect the dots between The Eden Premise, Thoreau’s and Marsh’s idea of a natural balance, Hegel’s “holism,” the moral imperatives of Muir’s preservationism, and Haeckel’s ecology.

In 1935 Oxford botanist A. G. Tansley introduced the concept of an “ecosystem.” To Tansley, ecosystems—not individual living entities—were “the basic units of nature on the face of the earth.”⁷

In 1948, Wilderness Society co-founder Aldo Leopold wrote his famous Sand County Almanac. Leopold argued that maintaining the “pyramid of life” required the preservation of a biodiversity of species. To accomplish this, he promoted a “land ethic” which “enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals” and which “changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it.”⁸

All these ideas lay like dry, rotting timber on a forest floor, waiting for a spark. And the spark that ignited the organized environmentalist movement was Rachel Carson’s 1962 book, Silent Spring.

Carson’s thesis was that man-made chemicals and pesticides were wreaking horrific impacts on what she referred to as “the web of life–or death–that scientists know as ecology.”⁹ Weaned on the ideal of Eden and the goal of preservationism, indoctrinated in the new pseudo-science of ecology, and skeptical of the fruits of Western culture, millions uncritically swallowed Carson’s easily refuted claims. In the wake of Silent Spring, conservation groups became radicalized; classroom curricula began to promote hard-core preservationism; and a spate of environmental laws, agencies, and regulations were enacted.

Motivating it all was the pantheistic spirit of Muir and Thoreau. In a famous 1967 essay, UCLA historian Lynn White Jr. blamed the ecological “crisis” on the West’s Judeo-Christian heritage, which, he said, was based on the “axiom that nature has no reason for existence save to serve man.” He called instead for a “new religion” based on “the spiritual autonomy of all parts of nature” and “the equality of all creatures, including man.”¹⁰

And Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess took all this to its logical dead end. Individuals do not exist, he said; we’re all only part of larger “ecosystems.” The “shallow ecology” of mainstream conservation groups, he argued, still aimed at improving the environment only for the benefit of humans. He instead advocated “deep ecology”—a view that he described as “biospherical egalitarianism…the equal right to live and blossom.”¹¹

In short: all things are created equal; they should be venerated as ends in themselves, intrinsically valuable apart from Man; and they have equal rights to their own kinds of “self-realization” free from human interference or exploitation.

Preservationists in Muir’s tradition are not interested in the human use or development of natural resources. They reject homocentrism in favor of what they call “biocentrism,” or nature-centeredness—the view that nature exists as an end in itself. Biocentrists regard nature as intrinsically valuable, meaning: valuable independent of any human awareness or interests. Since nature is inherently valuable as it is, biocentrists regard human changes to the “natural order” as evil. To them, resource development is resource destruction.

If this sounds radical, it is. But most people don’t realize that today, even the most mainstream of environmental groups have accepted radical preservationism as their fundamental outlook and goal. Shabecoff writes sympathetically:

The modern environmental movement has long since united behind the preservationist crusade as conceived by Muir and others…While today’s environmental organizations give lip service to multiple use [of public lands], they do so basically as a fallback position [because] they know that the public…would not accept shutting out economic activity.¹²

The ultimate goal of the mainstream environmentalist movement, therefore, is not conservation of natural resources for human use. It is preservation of nature as an end in itself.

Al Gore

Consider former Vice-President Al Gore—a man whom no one would consider to be on the movement’s lunatic fringe. Indeed, his Earth in the Balance became a national bestseller and an environmentalist manifesto, praised by movement leaders and hailed by hundreds of major media reviewers including Time, the New York Times Book Review, the Christian Science Monitor, the Washington Post, the New Republic, as well as by such luminaries as Bill Moyers and Carl Sagan. You don’t get more mainstream than that.

And just what was he saying to arouse the enthusiasm of the culturati? Consider what Gore wrote on the very first page of his Introduction.

Civilization itself has been on a journey from its foundations in the world of nature to an ever more contrived, controlled, and manufactured world of our own initiative and sometimes arrogant design. …It is now all too easy to regard the earth as a collection of “resources” having an intrinsic value no larger than their usefulness at the moment.¹³

Later, he mourned:

We are creating a world that is hostile to wildness, that seems to prefer concrete to natural landscapes. … Have our eyes adjusted so completely to the bright lights of civilization that we can’t see…the violent collision between human civilization and the earth?¹⁴

___________________________

Henry David Thoreau, “Walking,” The Atlantic Monthly, June 1862. Quoted in Shabecoff, pp. 52–54. ↩︎
Henry David Thoreau, Journal, November 16, 1860. ↩︎
George Perkins Marsh, Man and Nature; Or, Physical Geography, as Modified by Human Action (New York: Charles Scribner, 1864), pp. 36, 43, 44. ↩︎
Philip Shabecoff, A Fierce Green Fire: The American Environmental Movement (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), p. 63. ↩︎
The 1867 journal was published posthumously. John Muir, A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1916), pp. 98, 122. ↩︎
“Statement by Horace M. Albright to the National Park Service Personnel upon his Resignation as Director in 1933.” ↩︎
A. G. Tansley, “The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts and Terms,” Ecology 16, no. 3 (July 1935), p. 299. ↩︎
Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac & Other Writings on Ecology and Conservation, ed. Curt Meine (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 2013), pp. 172–73. ↩︎
Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1962), p. 189. ↩︎
Lynn White Jr., “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,” Science, n.s. 155, no. 3767 (March 10, 1967), pp. 1203–1207. ↩︎
Arne Naess, “The Shallow, and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement: A Summary,” Inquiry 16 (1973), pp. 95–100. ↩︎
Shabecoff, p. 67. ↩︎
Al Gore, Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit (New York: Plume edition/Penguin Books, 1993), pp. 1. ↩︎
Gore, Earth in the Balance: p. 26. ↩︎

About the Author

Robert Bidinotto is an award-winning journalist, editor, lecturer, and novelist who reports on cultural and political issues from the perspective of principled individualism. Over three decades he has established a reputation as a leading critic of environmentalism.

As a former Staff Writer for Reader’s Digest, Bidinotto authored high-profile investigative reports on environmental issues, crime, and other public controversies—including articles on global warming and the 1989 Alar scare. His Alar article was singled out for editorial praise by Barron’s and by Priorities, the journal of the American Council on Science and Health. He authored a monograph, The Green Machine,and for several years ran a website (“ecoNOT”), both critically examining the environmentalist philosophy and movement.

Bidinotto’s many articles, columns, and reviews also appeared in Success, Writer’s Digest, The Boston Herald, The American Spectator, City Journal, The Freeman, and Reason. He served as the award-winning editor of The New Individualist, a political and cultural magazine, and as editor of publications for the Capital Research Center, a nonprofit watchdog group.

In 2011, Bidinotto began writing political thrillers. HUNTER—the debut novel in his Dylan Hunter series—soared to the top of the Amazon and Wall St. Journal bestseller lists. BAD DEEDS, the first sequel, dramatizes the evils and dangers of environmentalism. A number-one best-selling Audible political thriller, BAD DEEDS was named “Book of the Year” by the Conservative-Libertarian Fiction Alliance. Bidinotto’s thrillers are available on Amazon.

Learn more about Robert Bidinotto at his fiction website, “The Vigilante Author” and at his nonfiction blog.

Environmentalism or Individualism? (Part 1: America’s Enlightenment Heritage)

Today, Master Resource begins a six-part series analyzing the philosophic basis of environmentalism, its enmity to the technologies of instrumental reason (especially energy technology), as well as its incompatibility with the foundational individualist philosophy of the United States. Written some years ago by the award-winning essayist Robert Bidinotto, this manifesto seemed worth preserving here at MR now that Bidinotto has moved on professionally to writing the best-selling Dylan Hunter political-thriller series (including one novel featuring environmentalist villains!). A fuller biographical note appears at the end of each post.

From Master Resource

By Robert Bidinotto

Ed. Note: The ideology of environmentalism has proven itself to be, by far, the most persuasive enemy of the Master Resource, energy. Pollution … Health Hazards … Species Extinction … Ecosystem Destruction … Resource Exhaustion … Global Cooling … Global Warming … Melting Glaciers … Rising Seas … Climate Change. Why do the enemies of energy industries seem always to fall back, in the end, on environmentalist themes for their strongest and most effective stands? Is there something deeply embedded in our Western culture that makes the philosophy of environmentalism the most influential instrument for opposition to the energy industry?

The new Environmentalism was the complete antithesis of the American Founders’ Enlightenment outlook of reason, science, individualism, self-responsibility, personal freedom, private property, and capitalism.

Every culture and its institutions are the living embodiments of certain dominant ideas. At its birth, America’s basic premises were part and parcel of the glorious historical period that was rightly called “the Enlightenment.”

In his book The Empire of Reason, historian Henry Steele Commager wonderfully captured the spirit of the American Enlightenment. Men such as Franklin and Jefferson, he wrote, had “a prodigality about them; they recognized no bounds to their curiosity, no barriers to their thought, no limits to their activities.” Commager cited “their confidence in Reason, their curiosity about the secular world and—with most of them—their indifference to any other, their addiction to Science—if useful—their habit of experimentation, and their confidence in improvement…” Heroic achievers, these men “exalted Reason and worshipped at the altar of Liberty.”¹

That linkage between reason and liberty wasn’t coincidental: men of reason require freedom to explore, to communicate their ideas, to realize their visions. And what is the goal of these activities? In Jefferson’s immortal words, “the pursuit of happiness”: that is, personal fulfillment and self-interest.

Such were the ideas and values of America’s Founders. Their individualist ethic, embodied in the social system of capitalism, has produced—in what amounts historically to the blink of an eye—the greatest material abundance the world has ever known. Once people were encouraged to employ their minds in the pursuit of personal values—and once they were politically free to do so—a torrent of human ingenuity and energy was unleashed, curing hunger, disease, poverty, and ignorance on an unprecedented scale.

Not just America, but every country and culture that adopted these ideas progressed dramatically to the extent it did so. On the other hand, every society that turned its back on these ideas continued to suffer, as primitive societies had suffered throughout history. Witness in our time the intellectual, economic, and political collapse of all forms of socialism, including fascism and communism.

It would seem that this practical demonstration of the extraordinary benefits of reason, individualism, liberty, and capitalism should have been enough to convince all the world—and certainly the world’s intellectuals and leaders—of their unarguable merits. Yet ironically, these Enlightenment ideas, which have given the world so much, are still considered controversial and suspect. And not just the ideas, but also the rational faculty that generates them.

——————

In fact, Man himself is no longer praised as a conqueror of nature’s obstacles, nor even accepted as just another part of the natural world. To many, he is an interloper, an alien presence on the planet—even nature’s enemy—and his creative works are increasingly regarded as a growing menace to all that exists.

“[W]e are threatening to push the earth out of balance,” warned former Vice President Al Gore in his book, Earth in the Balance. “Modern industrial civilization, as presently organized, is colliding violently with our planet’s ecological system. The ferocity of its assault on the earth is breathtaking, and the horrific consequences are occurring so quickly as to defy our capacity to recognize them, comprehend their global implications, and organize an appropriate and timely response.”²

Philip Shabecoff, formerly the chief environmental reporter for the New York Times, summed up this outlook in his history of the American environmental movement: “…[A]n unspoiled land of great beauty and wonder began to change when Europeans came here five hundred years ago,” he wrote. “Its resources were squandered…large areas were sullied, disfigured, and degraded, and…our negligent use of the Promethean forces of science and technology has brought us to the verge of disaster.”³

The Promethean allusion is strikingly appropriate, for Prometheus was the Titan of Greek mythology who loved Man, and brought to him the fire of the Gods—a tool by which he could transform nature for his own benefit. It is perhaps the archetypal myth of Western civilization.

But many—certainly, many who rally under the green banner of environmentalism—now hold that worldview in contempt.

Environmentalism vs. The Enlightenment

The essence of the environmentalist outlook is suggested in the title of Mr. Gore’s book, and made clear in its pages. It’s the view that everything in nature exists in a perfectly harmonious balance—a balance ever threatened by the activities of Man.

The roots of this outlook lie deep in antiquity. “We encounter the ‘paradise myth’ all over the world in more or less complex forms,” writes classical scholar Mircea Eliade. “Actually, all these myths show primitive man enjoying blessedness, spontaneity, and liberty, which he has most annoyingly lost as the consequence of the ‘fall’…”⁴

For example, in seminally influential writings, the Greek writer Hesiod (circa 750–650 BC) presented the so-called “myth of the ages,” or of a lost, blissful “Golden Age.” The Roman poet Ovid (43 BC–AD 17), “one of the most influential of the Latin writers of antiquity,”⁵ fleshed out the myth of the ages and transformed it into a consistent, compelling story of man’s decay that is remarkably resonant with the themes and narratives of contemporary environmentalism.

In these transcultural myths, the cause of Man’s decadence or “fall” from a previous blissful state of paradise is almost always rooted in the sin of hubris, of pride, and of self-assertion—especially intellectual self-assertion—against authority.

Consider the Greek myth of Prometheus. By giving men the knowledge of the gods, Prometheus enrages Zeus, who chains him to a rock to suffer a thousand years of torture. And to punish Man he sends him the first mortal woman, Pandora, bearing a box that he forbids her to open. But moved by curiosity, she opens it anyway, unleashing on Man all the evils of the world.

Similarly, when given wings of wax, Icarus is warned by his father not to try to fly too high, but the lad ignores him. Soaring upward, the aspiring youth flies too close to the sun, where his wings melt and he falls to his doom.

The Greeks believed that hubris had to be suppressed by recognizing something greater than oneself, by cultivating a sense of humility before the gods or some higher good. Man’s proper path lay in self-restraint, in practicing virtues centered on the idea of moderation, such as prudence, wisdom, and temperance. The importance of humility and steering a moderate course is illustrated in the cautionary Greek myth of Phaëton, who insists on driving his father’s chariot to bear the sun across the sky. But heedless of warnings, he fails to stay on the middle course through the heavens and, flying out of control, sets the world on fire and perishes.

This fear of unrestrained human aspirations, especially Man’s boundless thirst for knowledge, is equally evident in the Judeo-Christian tradition. To the ideals of humility and moderation, the Old Testament incorporates its own version of the paradise myth in the form of a pastoral ideal, symbolized by the Garden of Eden.

In Genesis 2:4–3:24 (King James Version), God plants a Garden, separate from the rest of nature, “and there he put the man whom he had formed” (2:8). This Garden is like a desert oasis, irrigated by a river from Eden—an earthly paradise that contains “every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food” (2:9–10). God also creates for Adam (“man”) a female companion, whom the man later names Eve.

Adam and Eve live together in the “pleasant” Garden as naked, ignorant primitives, eating the fruit of the trees that God has planted for them (there is no mention of killing and eating animals). Provided a virtually effortless sustenance, Adam’s only assigned tasks in the Garden are “to dress it and keep it” (2:15) and to name all the animals.

But Adam and Eve defy the authority of God and eat fruit from a forbidden Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. As a result of this Original Sin, God tells them that, as punishment, they will be expelled from the paradisiacal Garden into the harsh state of nature. Thereafter, merely to survive, Adam must “till the ground from whence he was taken”—soil that God has “cursed” and filled with thorns and thistles—and he must labor “in sorrow” to produce bread by “the sweat of [his] face” until he dies. Eve is cursed, too: she henceforth will conceive and give birth “in sorrow” and be subjugated to the will of her husband (3:16-24).

The Judeo-Christian story of Man’s fall from a pastoral “paradise” mirrors the core themes of the transcultural “myth of the ages” and similar ones. Other tales from the Bible reinforce these themes. For example, later in Genesis, when men try to build a tower that can reach heaven, God laments that “now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.”⁶ So to punish men once again for their unrestrained imagination and ambition, He scatters them across the earth and confuses their languages.

Consider the basic premises about Man and his world that these ancient morality tales have transmitted across the centuries—premises communicated in songs, sermons, images, icons, fiction, films, and scholarly works—premises that have shaped the thinking and the lives of billions. Here, in summary, is their message:

Everything in nature exists in harmonious balance and perfect order (the myth of the Golden Age and the Eden myth). Man’s duty is to accept his humble niche within this benign, bountiful, and balanced paradise, where he can exist simply and non-intrusively (the virtue of humility). However, Man’s ambition—especially his quest to improve himself by gaining and applying knowledge—represents a grave peril to this pastoral ideal (the sin of pride). Man’s ambitious exercise of his creative intelligence disturbs the tranquility and destroys the harmony of the pristine natural order (the danger of reason and the sin of selfish ambition).

To prevent chaos, therefore, Man’s evil, selfish appetites must be curbed, and his intelligence suppressed. That is the task of morality, whose virtues consist of constraints: humility, obedience, self-suppression, sacrifice of self to a “greater” good. By limiting Man’s disruptive ambitions and creative aspirations, then, morality will preserve the natural balance and order.

Since antiquity, this worldview has been drummed dogmatically into billions of brains—so successfully that it’s now the reigning interpretive template. It’s the basis for most people’s understanding of the world around them. It’s the code of values governing their choices and actions. It’s the metaphysical and moral heritage upon which writers such as Al Gore and Philip Shabecoff draw—and which they intuitively trust their readers to share.

It’s the spiritual soil in which the seeds of the environmentalist philosophy and movement have taken root and flourished.

It’s also the complete antithesis of the philosophical outlook of America’s Founders: a rejection of the Enlightenment outlook that, like Prometheus, championed Man and his requirements for living on earth: reason, science, individualism, self-responsibility, personal freedom, private property, and capitalism.

Rational individualism was the emerging worldview for people newly liberated from superstition, savagery, stagnation, and slavery—people striving to explore, develop, use, and enjoy the earth’s resources. Rational individualism was the philosophy of modernity.

But even in America, this modern, progressive ideal never fully overcame the pre-modern “ideal” of The Eden Premise. That atavistic ideal continued to hold a viselike grip upon millions who feared the prospect of self-responsibility, and hated the socio-economic system that demanded it.

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Henry Steele Commager, The Empire of Reason: How Europe Imagined and America Realized the Enlightenment (Garden City, NJ: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1977), pp. 3, 15, 241. ↩︎
Al Gore, Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit (New York: Plume edition/Penguin Books, 1993), pp. 2, 269. ↩︎
Philip Shabecoff, A Fierce Green Fire: The American Environmental Movement (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), p. xiii. ↩︎
Mircea Eliade, “The Yearning for Paradise in Primitive Tradition,” Diogenes, University of Chicago Press, Summer 1953; reprinted in Henry A. Murray, ed., Myth and Mythmaking (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1968), p. 62. ↩︎
Larry Kreitzer, Prometheus and Adam: Enduring Symbols of the Human Situation (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1994), p. 27. ↩︎
Tower of Babel story: Genesis 11:1–9 (King James Version). ↩︎