Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
In all of this, many modern environmental historians are intellectually
closer to Thomas Jefferson and Ralph Waldo Emerson—to Enlightenment
and even early Romantic America—than to the later Romantic America
of John Muir and the modern cult of wilderness.
There are real limits to Jefferson and Emerson, but they did not divorce
the human from the natural. They retained a sense of the human body as
natural and a sense of human work as providing a connection between cul-
ture and nature.
There springs from Jefferson and Emerson a line of thinking about tech-
nology, culture, and nature that is more interesting, and I think more influ-
ential, than cruder views of a separation between technology and nature
and a process in which the cultural, the technological, subordinates the nat-
ural. For Jefferson, the farmer and his plow represented not a conquest of
nature but a finishing of nature. For Emerson, “Nature, in the common
sense, refers to the essences unchanged by man: space, the air, the river, the
leaf. Art is applied to the mixture of his will with the same things, as in a
house, a canal, a statue, a picture. But his operations taken together are so
insignificant, a little chipping, baking, patching, and washing, that in an
impression so grand as that of the world on the human mind, they do not
vary the result.”
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Emerson obviously had little conception of how far a little baking could
take us in modifying the world. But the general conception of the entwin-
ing of the human and the natural, the inability to separate the two even in
human works and art, did not die with a recognition of the extent of
human alterations of the planet.
One response to the power of humans and their technology to transform
the planet has consisted of an arrogant joy and a desire for more of the
wealth produced. A second set of responses have been anti-technological
and anti-industrial; these romantic responses have shown up in a variety of
back-to-nature movements and nostalgia for pre-industrial societies. But it
is the third set of responses that I think is more critical. The Jeffersonian-
Emersonian responses have tried to distinguish between environmentally
beneficial technologies and environmentally malignant technologies.
Believers think the right technology will transform us and our world for
the better.
Belief in environmentally transformative technologies is probably most
easily discerned in the work of Lewis Mumford, perhaps the most influen-
tial and certainly the longest-running public intellectual of the middle of
