Is Ecology Heresy?

Judaism and Christianity have always placed primacy in man. Now this primacy is being attacked by what I call the neoconservative ecological approach to life: the idea that nature has primacy and man is subordinate, and thus must abandon what is best for himself in order to do what is right for the earth.

These are the words of James Schall, 43, a crew-cut Jesuit priest and teacher who takes a dim view of ecology, American style. The environmental movement that has captured the nation's imagination, says Schall, who divides the year between Rome's prestigious Pontifical Gregorian University and the University of San Francisco, is really little more than heresy.

Writing in the Jesuit magazine America, Schall says that the nation's growing commitment to the environment is a "dangerous" and "unbalanced" trend. Rather than being a "pragmatic recognition of cleanliness and conservation," it seems all too often to be a "kind of subtle undermining, in its theoretical origins, of the destiny and dignity of man himself."

Man is most undermined, Schall believes, by ecologists who want to limit population for fear that the earth's growing mass of people will soon use up available space and the dwindling natural resources. Schall takes exactly the opposite view. As the population of the United States grows and settles into urban areas, he says, there is actually more space in the country, not less. "We don't know what man can be," he argues, "and when we limit our capacities and our future [through birth control], we are basing this on the technological and social limits of today." He suggests that the man of the future will be capable of solving the problems of the future, perhaps by purposefully expanding his numbers to provide the large intellectual base needed for a more complex and technologically advanced society.

Moving into even deeper waters, Schall contends that the new faith in the environment has widened political differences between nations. Both Communists and leftists in the emerging countries, he says, believe that man is supreme. Therefore, "the old-line revolutionaries of the Second and Third Worlds, who are firmly fixed on the Christian dogma of the dignity of man, are quickly parting company with the new American ecological heresy." If this heresy were generally accepted, he warns, it would "deflate the revolutionary's whole claim to renew the face of the earth for man--to 'hominize' it, as Marx put it." As Americans continue to turn ecology into a public issue, the movement grows "more and more antirevolutionary, against people."

Doomsday Books. The heresy that Schall attacks is most evident in the U.S., the world's leading proponent of ecology. In fact, he says, the grim ecologist is a peculiarly American phenomenon. "Today," he explains, "the doomsday books are being written by the ecologists and biologists who have lost their confidence that tomorrow can be better, that something new can really come into the world through man and his intelligence." Technology, he believes, can provide that something, perhaps in the form of the mass-produced housing and unlimited electrical power proposed by Buckminster Fuller.

"There is an anticity bias in the U.S. today that you don't find in Europe," Schall says. "It would never occur to Europeans that Paris or Rome or Venice were not the centers of their countries." This downgrading of cities is joined with an antitechnology drive. While Americans complain about the pollution caused by big industry, an emerging African country with a choice between a clean environment and a steel mill would rightfully choose the steel mill. Much of the American anticity-antitechnology mood, Schall contends, has been fostered by "scare people with scare books."

Environmentalists, in turn, will consider Schall's philosophy heretical. Despite the broad spectrum of their formal disciplines, most of them are now agreed that some way must be found to brake polluting technology without, as Schall puts it, "stopping the clock." Moreover, while few would disagree with Schall that man indeed has primacy, he nonetheless lives in precarious balance with all other organisms. By pushing forward with his machines and neglecting the life around him, ecologists are convinced, man endangers not only himself but all life on this planet.

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