Historical Beliefs in Environmental Degradation and Management

Saint Francis of Assisi, depicted by the Spanish painter Jusepe de RibePhotograph by Leemage / UIG via Getty.

An assumption of environmental social sciences, is that environmental degradation and its management are irreducibly societal phenomena. They are generated by human actors operating within historically specific socio-economic structures, institutions, and meaning systems.

Cultural explanations form one distinct causal register within this ontology, ask whether particular cosmologies or value systems can function as independent drivers of systematic exploitation once fused with technological capacity. Structural accounts (capitalism, industrialization, the treadmill of production) explain much; they do not explain everything. White treats Christianity not as vague “affect” or incidental emotion but as a rule-based, enduring institution: a pattern of meaning that structures perception, legitimacy, and action across centuries. He distinguishes with precision between (a) religion as content (the Judeo-Christian creation narrative, the imago Dei, and divinely mandated dominion) and (b) religion as process (the historical victory of Latin Christianity over pagan animism, which embedded a radical dualism and desacralized nature). He further separates integral emotions (the affective charge of transcendence, mastery, and teleological progress) from incidental affect, and he isolates the unit of analysis (civilizational meaning systems) from adjacent objects such as structural drivers or policy responses.

“By destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects… The victory of Christianity over paganism was the greatest psychic revolution in the history of our culture.” (van Koppen & Spaargaren, 2019).

Humanity alone bears God’s image and nature does not exists solely to serve human purposes; every tree, spring, and hill loses its guardian spirit. Once this cultural complex allied itself with the new power of science and technology, the modern ecologic crisis became possible. White is explicit about scope conditions: the mechanism operates through institutional path dependency, not eternal essence. He even proposes an internal corrective, St. Francis of Assisi’s “democracy of all God’s creatures” (White, 1967) to illustrate that Christianity is not monolithic.

References:

• Francis of Assisi. (1999). The Canticle of the Creatures (1225). In R. J. Armstrong, J. A. W. Hellmann, & W. J. Short (Eds.), Francis of Assisi: Early documents: Vol. 1. The saint (pp. 113–114). New City Press. (Original work composed ca. 1225).

• van Koppen, C. S. A., & Spaargaren, G. (2019). Environment and society: An introduction to the social dimensions of environmental change. Environmental Policy Group, Wageningen University.

• White, L., Jr. (1967). The historical roots of our ecologic crisis. Science, 155(3767), 1203–1207. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.155.3767.1203.