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The Progressive Environmental Prometheans pp 1–51Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Introduction: Earthviews and Worldviews

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Abstract

A stark political division exists today in the Western world on environmental issues. The left is more sympathetic to green concerns than the right, which for its part is more open to environmental Prometheanism, the belief that human beings can and should master nature and improve it. Meyer examines various theories that could explain this contemporary pattern of environmental politics. He finds that none fully succeeds and, indeed, that the opposite pattern, of environmentalism on the right and Prometheanism on the left, seems more plausible. He suggests that a historical perspective to see if the same alignments existed earlier might be illuminating and offers the English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley as an emblematic figure of a progressive Promethean—an anomalous combination today, but perhaps not in the past.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For Europe, see Jean Jacob, Histoire de l’écologie politique (Paris: Albin Michel, 1999); Neil Carter, The Politics of the Environment: Ideas, Activism, Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 72–76; Jon Burchell, The Evolution of Green Politics: Development and Change within European Green Parties (London: Earthscan, 2002); Herbert Kitschelt with Anthony J. McGann, The Radical Right in Europe: A Comparative Analysis (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 22 (noting “the frequent vilification of feminist and environmentalist movements” by the extreme right); and Kostas Gemenis, Alexia Katsanidou, and Sofia Vasilopoulou, “The Politics of Anti-Environmentalism: Positional Framing by the European Radical Right,” paper prepared for the MPSA Annual Conference, Chicago, 2012. For 2013, the most recent full year for which ratings were available at the time of writing, twenty-seven members of the US Senate received perfect scores of 100 from the League of Conservation Voters (all of them Democrats except for the Senate’s only independent, and only avowed socialist, Bernard Sanders of Vermont). Their median rating from Americans for Democratic Action was ninety-five and their mean ninety-four; their median American Conservative Union rating was four, as was their mean. The five senators (all Republicans) who received LCV scores of zero enjoyed an ADA median of zero and mean of one, and an ACU median of ninety-two and mean of ninety-three. Data from scorecard.lcv.org/, acuratings.conservatve.org/acu-ratings-chart/ and adaction.org/pages/publications/voting-records.php.

  2. 2.

    For conservative environmentalism, see, for example, John Gray, “An Agenda for Conservative Environmentalism,” in Beyond the New Right: Markets, Government and the Common Environment (London: Routledge, 1993), 124–177; John R. E. Bliese, The Greening of Conservative America (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001); and Roger Scruton, How to Think Seriously About the Planet: The Case for an Environmental Conservatism (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2012). For leftist critiques of neo-Malthusianism, see, for example, David Harvey, “Population, Resources, and the Ideology of Science,” Economic Geography 50, #3 (1974), 256–277 and Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001) and Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “A Critique of Political Ecology,” in Ted Benton, ed., The Greening of Marxism (New York, NY: Guilford Press, 1996), 17–49. (For the earlier Marxist rejection of Malthus, see Ronald L. Meek, ed., Marx and Engels on Malthus (New York, NY: International Press, 1954).) For the environmental justice critique, see, for example, Eileen McGurty, Transforming Environmentalism: Warren County, PCBs, and the Origins of Environmental Justice (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007) and Ronald Sandler and Phaedra C. Pezzullo, eds., Environmental Justice and Environmentalism: The Social Justice Challenge to the Environmental Movement (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007).

  3. 3.

    Richard Posner, Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 283; Alain Noël and Jean-Philippe Thérien, Left and Right in Global Politics (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 210. Noël and Thérien likewise cited Robert Paehlke’s assertion, in Environmentalism and the Future of Progressive Politics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 309n1, that although environmentalism could, in principle, be combined with any political ideology, “in fact it has most often been linked with the moderate left.”

  4. 4.

    Antoine Waechter, Dessine-moi une planète: L’écologie, maintenant ou jamais (Paris: Albin Michel, 1990), 156–157, 222; Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle: Nature, Man, and Technology (New York, NY: Knopf, 1971), 11–12, 41–45, 112; Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac & Other Writings on Ecology and Conservation, ed. Curt Meine (New York, NY: Library of America, 2013), p. 188; Michel Serres, The Natural Contract, trans. Elizabeth MacArthur and William Paulson (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 33.

  5. 5.

    Paul Wapner, Living Through the End of Nature: The Future of American Environmentalism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010) (quotation from 75; see also his Chap. 3, “The Dream of Naturalism,” 53–76). More concretely, a group of French ecologists in the 1970s chose Diogenes to symbolize the environmentalist virtues of living simply and in accordance with nature: Jacob, Histoire de l’écologie politique, 128–130.

  6. 6.

    For important early statements of this point, see Daniel Botkin, Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology for the Twenty-First Century (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1990) and Alston Chase, In a Dark Wood: The Fight Over Forests and the Tyranny of Ecology (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1995). Much of the critique is valid, but it does not merely make environmentalism (nor, for that matter, Prometheanism) as I have defined it an erroneous or confused way of thinking, for several reasons. First, without exception, the figures whom the main chapters of this book focus on lived before the critique was articulated, and could thus speak unself-consciously of the natural versus the human-altered state of the earth, without having to face the question of which of multiple natural states they meant or of what elements of human impact they already incorporated. Second, the critique, if accepted, does not mean that all possible human-altered ones are equally distant from those of any period that were not human-altered, or that all human-altered states are equally compatible with the long-term survival of the remaining elements that have not been drastically altered. Even if, today, no feature of the earth’s surface is “natural” in the sense of being entirely unaffected by human action, differences of degree exist; some are still more so than others. And as one proponent of the “new ecology” observes, “human-induced ecological disturbances … differ from natural ones in frequency, magnitude, and depth”: Karl S. Zimmerer, “Human Geography and the ‘New Ecology’: The Prospect and Promise of Integration,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 84, #1 (1994), 116. The greater “violence, rapidity, and scope” of human-induced than of non-human-induced change still represent, as they did for Aldo Leopold (quoted by Bryan G. Norton, Toward Unity among Environmentalists (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1991, 52), criteria for concern about it that do not presuppose some overarching balance or equilibrium in nature. (See also Donald Worster, “The Ecology of Order and Chaos,” Environmental History Review, 14, #1/2, 1990, 1–18.) Nor, finally, do environmentalists have to rely on the empirically and metaphysically questionable standard of the “natural” state. Possible alternatives include measures of “ecological integrity”: David Pimentel, Laura Westra, and Reed F. Noss, eds., Ecological Integrity: Integrating Environment, Conservation, and Health (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2000).

  7. 7.

    See, for example, David Ehrenfeld, “The Fable of Managed Earth,” 85–108 and George Wuerthner, “Why the Working Landscape Isn’t Working,” 162–173, in George Wuerthner, Elieen Crist, and Tom Butler, eds., Keeping the Wild: Against the Domestication of Earth (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2014).

  8. 8.

    Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age, trans. Hans Jonas and David Herr (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 188, 191.

  9. 9.

    On Malthus’s stature among modern environmentalists, see Robert Mayhew, Malthus: The Life and Legacies of an Untimely Prophet (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014).

  10. 10.

    Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich, Healing the Planet: Strategies for Resolving the Environmental Crisis (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1991), 6, 238. See also, e.g., Waechter, Dessine-moi une planète, 39: “we must admit that we are living beyond our means.”

  11. 11.

    Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, and William W. Behrens III, The Limits to Growth: A Report to the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind (New York, NY: Universe Books, 1972); The Editors of The Ecologist (Edward Goldsmith and others), A Blueprint for Survival (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972).

  12. 12.

    Martin H. Krieger, “What’s Wrong with Plastic Trees?,” Science n.s. 179, #4072 (1973), 446–455; Hugh H. Iltis, “Can One Love a Plastic Tree?,” Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America, 54, #4 (1973), 5–7, 19 (quotation from 7). The idea is extensively developed in the writings of Paul Shepard: see, e.g., Nature and Madness (San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books, 1982); Coming Home to the Pleistocene (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1998); and Encounters with Nature (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1999). Roderick Frazier Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, fifth edition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), Chap. 13, discusses some of its other exponents. Waechter, Dessine-moi une planète, argued that an artificial world could never match for human beings the stimulating diversity and complexity of the natural one: “A denatured world would be full of tedium.” (156). On biophilia, see Edward O. Wilson, Biophilia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984) and Stephen R. Kellert and Edward O. Wilson, eds., The Biophilia Hypothesis (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1993).

  13. 13.

    William R. Catton, Jr. and Riley E. Dunlap, “Environmental Sociology: A New Paradigm,” American Sociologist 13, #1 (1978), 41–49.

  14. 14.

    I here diverge somewhat from John S. Dryzek, The Politics of the Earth: Environmental Discourses, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), who described a cornucopian belief in the unlimited abundance of nature (when properly manipulated by human intelligence) as a component of what he and I call Prometheanism. Yet, he himself quoted even the Promethean Julian Simon’s disavowal of the label “cornucopian” (52, 59–60). Prometheanism is best understood as a belief in the desirability of the radical reform of nature by human beings, resulting in either an infinitude or merely an increased abundance of resources. “Cornucopians” are those who expect the former, but those envisioning the latter are equally Promethean in seeing nature’s essential finitude as an urgent reason for seeking all that rational human management can make it provide.

  15. 15.

    William L. Thomas, Jr., ed., Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1956).

  16. 16.

    Dryzek, The Politics of the Earth, 61, 64.

  17. 17.

    Ibid., 52; Omer C. Stewart, “Fire as the First Great Force Employed by Man,” in Thomas, Man’s Role, 115–133.

  18. 18.

    Wapner, Living Through the End of Nature (quotation from 104; see also his Chap. 4, “The Dream of Mastery,” 79–105); Clive Hamilton, Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 18. It is true that Wapner described both perspectives as increasingly outmoded, but his discussion testifies to their past importance and to their stubborn persistence today. For Hamilton, the distinction is, if anything, more meaningful than ever. The categories both use parallel in some ways the influential distinction drawn by Donald Worster between “arcadian” and “imperial” ecologists, beginning with the eighteenth-century precursors of the science: Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

  19. 19.

    For environmental readings of the conclusion of Goethe’s Faust, see Bruce Rich, Mortgaging the Earth: The World Bank, Environmental Impoverishment, and the Crisis of Development (New York, NY: Earthscan, 1994), 104–106; Hans Christoph Binswanger, “The Challenge of Faust,” Science n.s. 281, #5377 (1998), 640–641; and Hans C. Binswanger and Kirk R. Smith, “Paracelsus and Goethe: Founding Fathers of Environmental Health,” Bulletin of the World Health Organization 78, #9 (2000), 1162–1164.

  20. 20.

    Jules Michelet, Bible de l’humanité (Paris: F. Chamerot, 1864), 227–230, 238–239 (quotation from 239); see also Pierre-Simon Ballanche, Essais de palingénésie sociale: Tome premier: Prolégomènes (Paris: Jules Didot aîné, 1827), 71–72 and André Poëy, Le positivisme (Paris: Librairie Germer-Baillière, 1876), 160.

  21. 21.

    Compare, for example, Dryzek’s largely unfavorable use of the label with its adoption by Martin W. Lewis in his Green Delusions: An Environmentalist Critique of Radical Environmentalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992).

  22. 22.

    R. Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (New York, NY: E. P. Dutton, 1978). Joachim Radkau, The Age of Ecology: A Global History, trans. Patrick Camiller (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2014), 111, aptly describes the imagery of “spaceship earth” as characteristic of the 1960s rather than the present.

  23. 23.

    Dryzek, Politics of the Earth, 52–53. “It is undeniable, historically, that Marxism includes a triumphalist view of ‘man’s conquest of nature,’” Raymond Williams also wrote, but this, he argued, represented less a feature characteristic of Marxism than its infection by attitudes common to nineteenth-century thought in general: “Problems of Materialism,” New Left Review #109 (May-June 1978), 8–9.

  24. 24.

    James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath, eds., The Works of Francis Bacon, vol. 4 (London: Longman & Co., 1858), 114.

  25. 25.

    John Stuart Mill, “Nature,” in Three Essays on Religion: Nature, The Utility of Religion, and Theism (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1874), 8.

  26. 26.

    Arthur O. Lovejoy and George Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1935), 11–12.

  27. 27.

    See, e.g., Ted Steinberg, American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn ( New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 2006).

  28. 28.

    Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto, ed. Frederic L. Bender (New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 1988), 59.

  29. 29.

    Dryzek, Politics of the Earth, 53; see also Williams, “Problems of Materialism”; Val Routley, “On Karl Marx as an Environmental Hero,” Environmental Ethics 3, #3 (1981), 237–244; Ted Benton, “Marxism and Natural Limits: An Ecological Critique and Reconstruction,” New Left Review #178 (1989), 51–86.

  30. 30.

    Ayn Rand, Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, ed. Peter Schwartz (New York, NY: Meridian, 1999), 277.

  31. 31.

    Llewellyn Rockwell, The Left, the Right & the State (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2008), 153, 154.

  32. 32.

    Paul Sabin, The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble over Earth’s Future (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013) has offered the most detailed history of the bet as an expression of Simon’s resource Prometheanism. See also Mayhew, Malthus, 205–212.

  33. 33.

    Dryzek, Politics of the Earth, 67. Peter J. Jacques, in Environmental Skepticism: Ecology, Power and Public Life (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009), has likewise (1, 10, 71) described right-wing evangelical Christianity as a central constituency of modern anti-environmentalism.

  34. 34.

    Stephen R. Rock, Faith and Foreign Policy: The Views and Influence of U.S. Christians and Christian Organizations (New York, NY: Continuum, 2011), 162–166. As he observed, Prometheanism is not the only environmental belief system on the American Christian right. Two others are “end times” theology, which sees the disasters being brought about by human action as signs that the biblically prophesied end is near, and a belief that a divinely designed earth is too robust to be seriously harmed by human action: ibid., 169, 171.

  35. 35.

    Cornwall Declaration at http://www.cornwallalliance.org/2000/05/01/the-cornwall-declaration-on-environmental-stewardship/; signers’ names from http://www.cornwallalliance.org/1999/10/29/notable-signers-of-the-cornwall-declaration/.

  36. 36.

    E. Calvin Beisner, Where Garden Meets Wilderness: Evangelical Entry into the Environmental Debate (Grand Rapids, MI: Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty and W. E. Eerdmans, 1997), 12–14, 103, 178n21.

  37. 37.

    Beisner, Where Garden Meets Wilderness, 25.

  38. 38.

    Beisner, Where Garden Meets Wilderness, 25, 60–61, 63–65, 102, 108–109, 167.

  39. 39.

    Beisner, Where Garden Meets Wilderness, 158; Prosperity and Poverty: The Compassionate Use of Resources in a World of Scarcity (Westchester, IL: Crossway Books, 1988); “The Double-Edged Sword of Multiculturalism,” The Freeman 44, #3 (1994), 104–112 (quotation from 110).

  40. 40.

    Ron Arnold, “Overcoming Ideology,” in Philip D. Brick and R. McGregor Cawley, eds., A Wolf in the Garden: The Land Rights Movement and the New Environmental Debate (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996), 23, 24. Chase, In a Dark Wood, 380; see also James Morton Turner, “‘The Specter of Environmentalism’: Wilderness, Environmental Politics, and the Evolution of the New Right,” Journal of American History 96, #1 (2009), 123–148.

  41. 41.

    Dryzek, Politics of the Earth, 61 (quotation), 64, 89 (quotation); Hamilton, Earthmasters, 18.

  42. 42.

    Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary, Tales, and Memoirs, ed. S. T. Joshi (New York, NY: Library of America, 2011), 463.

  43. 43.

    Nicholas Atkin and Frank Jallett, “Introduction: Les Droites Commençent Ici,” in Nicholas Atkin and Frank Jallett, eds., The Right in France, 1789–1997 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1998), 1–17; John M. Roberts, “The French Origins of the ‘Right,’” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 23 (1973), 27–53; Lynn Hunt, “The World We Have Gained: The Future of the French Revolution,” American Historical Review 108, #1 (2003), 6 (quotation).

  44. 44.

    Alan Ryan, ed., Utilitarianism and Other Essays: J. S. Mill and Jeremy Bentham (New York, NY: Penguin, 1987), 133, 177.

  45. 45.

    Michael Oakeshott, “On Being Conservative,” in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (London: Methuen & Co., 1962), 169, 170, 171.

  46. 46.

    Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Conservative,” in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 2: Nature, Addresses, and Lectures, ed. Robert E. Spiller (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971). 184.

  47. 47.

    Richard Pipes, Russian Conservatism and Its Critics: A Study in Political Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005).

  48. 48.

    Friedrich Hayek, “Why I Am Not a Conservative,” in The Constitution of Liberty: The Definitive Edition, ed. Ronald Harmowy (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 519–533.

  49. 49.

    For a succinct presentation, see Friedrich Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism, ed. W. W. Bartley III (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989); for a fuller one, F.A. Hayek, The Market and Other Orders, ed. Bruce Caldwell, The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, v. 15 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014).

  50. 50.

    Hayek, The Fatal Conceit, 135–140.

  51. 51.

    Andrew Dobson, Green Political Thought, 4th edition (London: Routledge, 2007), 161–162.

  52. 52.

    Albert O. Hirschman, The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1991).

  53. 53.

    Oakeshott, “On Being Conservative,” 172.

  54. 54.

    Dobson, Green Political Thought, 161. For an excellent concise argument that a politically conservative stance necessarily implies an environmentalist one (focusing especially on this theme of prudence), see David W. Orr, “Conservation and Conservatism,” in The Nature of Design: Ecology, Culture, and Human Intervention (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 97–103.

  55. 55.

    Carson, Silent Spring, 245.

  56. 56.

    Leopold, A Sand County Almanac & Other Writings, 183, 406, 410. Likewise, Barry Commoner, “A Cautionary Tale,” in Joel Tickner, ed., Precaution: Environmental Science and Preventive Public Policy (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2003), 36, offered as classic environmental object lessons cases “in which unintended consequences of some new technology led to serious risks to the biosphere.”

  57. 57.

    Michael Oakeshott, “Rationalism in Politics,” in Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, 1–36.

  58. 58.

    Hirschman, The Rhetoric of Reaction, Chap. 6, “From Reactionary to Progressive Rhetoric,” 149–163.

  59. 59.

    As noted by Dryzek, The Politics of the Earth, 69. The first of these arguments is the one most commonly made by opponents of measures to prevent global climate change. For the second, see, e.g., Thomas Gale Moore, Climate of Fear: Why We Shouldn’t Worry About Global Warming (Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 1998). Hamilton, Earthmasters, 107–109, 200–201, has discussed some examples of the third.

  60. 60.

    Hayek, The Fatal Conceit, 27.

  61. 61.

    For example, Norberto Bobbio, Left and Right: The Significance of a Political Distinction, trans. Allan Cameron (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 65. Noël and Thérien, Left and Right in Global Politics, also argued for this criterion as the central basis of the left/right division.

  62. 62.

    Ronald Inglehart, Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 293. He added: “To speak in terms of Left and Right is always an oversimplification—but an extremely useful one.”

  63. 63.

    Bobbio, Left and Right, 67–68.

  64. 64.

    Edmund Burke, Revolutionary Writings, ed. Iain Hampshire-Monk (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 50, 176.

  65. 65.

    Edward Larkin, Thomas Paine and the Literature of Revolution (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 114–148.

  66. 66.

    Leon R. Kass, Toward a More Natural Science: Biology and Human Affairs (New York, NY: The Free Press, 1985), 38, 153; Yuval Levin, Imagining the Future: Science and American Democracy (New York, NY: Encounter Books, 2008), 12, 28.

  67. 67.

    Dobson, Green Political Thought, 163–165.

  68. 68.

    John Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, in John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925–1953, vol. 12, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986), 32; René J. Dubos, Mirage of Health: Utopias, Progress, and Biological Change (New York, NY: Harper, 1959), 102.

  69. 69.

    Dobson, Green Political Thought, 163–165; Carter, The Politics of the Environment, 64, made a similar suggestion.

  70. 70.

    Peter A. Coates, American Perceptions of Immigrant and Invasive Species: Strangers on the Land (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006), 151–164. Such linkages by some right-wing parties in several European countries, on the other hand, form the principal exception to the right/left environmental pattern there, but such parties focus only on environmental issues with which such connections can readily be made: Jonathan Olsen, Nature and Nationalism: Right-Wing Ecology and the Politics of Identity in Contemporary Germany (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1999) and Damir Skenderovic, The Radical Right in Switzerland: Continuity and Change, 1945–2000 (New York, NY: Berghahn Books, 2009), 206–214.

  71. 71.

    Noël and Thérien, Left and Right in Global Politics, 89–95.

  72. 72.

    Hayek, “Why I Am Not a Conservative,” 522.

  73. 73.

    Jon Elster, ed., Alexis de Tocqueville: The Ancien Regime and the French Revolution, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

  74. 74.

    For details, see Lucas A. Powe, Jr., The Warren Court and American Politics (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000). To be sure, the Warren Court also (though it aroused less controversy thereby) favored claims of government power to regulate the economy, for example in upholding the 1964 Civil Rights Act and numerous federal antitrust prosecutions. But that is the point. The factor common to the decisions that angered the Warren Court’s conservative critics was not their statism, but their classically leftist egalitarianism and scant regard for tradition (illustrated also in the Court’s rulings on legislative reapportionment).

  75. 75.

    Hayek, “Why I Am Not a Conservative,” 522–23, 525.

  76. 76.

    Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (New York, NY: Farrar and Rinehart, 1944); Fred Block and Margaret R. Somers, The Power of Market Fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi’s Critique (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).

  77. 77.

    Dean Baker, Taking Economics Seriously (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 1–2.

  78. 78.

    The possibility is explored in Roderick Nash, The Rights of Nature: A History of Environmental Ethics (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).

  79. 79.

    Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility, 188.

  80. 80.

    Two books that appeared in the same recent year claimed, each citing numerous cases in point, that certain elements in the ideologies of conservatism and progressivism, respectively, lead to a distrust of science and its findings: Chris Mooney, The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science and Reality (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2012) and Alex B. Berezow and Hank Campbell, Science Left Behind: Feel-Good Fallacies and the Rise of the Anti-Scientific Left (New York, NY: PublicAffairs, 2012). For additional considerations on both sides, see also Levin, Imagining the Future, Chaps. 5, “Science and the Left,” and 6, “Science and the Right.”

  81. 81.

    James Bieri, Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Biography (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 114–126; Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Philosophical View of Reform, ed. T.W. Rolleston (London: Oxford University Press, 1920), 13.

  82. 82.

    Ibid., 16–17, 50, 56–60, 70. See also Paul Foot, Red Shelley (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1980).

  83. 83.

    Mayhew, Malthus, 94–97; William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Modern Morals and Happiness, ed. Isaac Kramnick (New York, NY: Penguin, 1985), 769.

  84. 84.

    Thomas Jefferson Hogg, Shelley at Oxford, ed. R.A. Streatfield (London: Methuen & Co., 1904), 17–19.

  85. 85.

    Timothy Morton, Shelley and the Revolution in Taste: The Body and the Natural World (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 229–231 (quotation from 230).

  86. 86.

    Shelley, A Philosophical View of Reform, 11, 13; Percy Bysshe Shelley, “A Refutation of Deism” (orig. 1814), in E.B. Murray, ed. The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, vo. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 109.

  87. 87.

    Donald H. Reiman and Neil Freistat, eds., The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, v. 2 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 224–225, 229, 234.

  88. 88.

    M.H. Abrams, ed., The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 4th ed., vol. 2 (New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 1979), 731.

  89. 89.

    Eric Gidal, “‘O Happy Earth! O Reality of Heaven!’: Melancholy and Utopia in Romantic Climatology,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, vol. 8, #4 (2008), 74–101 (quotation from 75); see also P. M. S. Dawson, “‘The Empire of Man’: Shelley and Ecology,” in Betty T. Bennett and Stuart Curran, eds., Shelley: Poet and Legislator of the World (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 232–239, and Michael R. Page, The Literary Imagination From Erasmus Darwin to H. G. Wells: Science, Evolution, and Ecology (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2012), 67.

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    Arnold, “Overcoming Ideology,” 23.

  91. 91.

    I can read sources in the original in English, French, and Russian. Another reason for choosing these countries is their objective importance for the topic at hand, the centrality of three of them to modern Western thought and the usefully contrasting marginality of the fourth.

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    William B. Meyer

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Meyer, W.B. (2016). Introduction: Earthviews and Worldviews. In: The Progressive Environmental Prometheans. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-29263-2_1

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