Lynn Townsend White, Jr.

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Lynn Townsend White, Jr. (April 29 1907 – March 30 1987) was a professor of medieval history at Princeton, Stanford and, for many years, University of California, Los Angeles. He was president of Mills College, Oakland from 1943 to 1958.

White's main area of research and inquiry was the role of technological invention in the Middle Ages. He believed that the Middle Ages were a decisive period in the genesis of Western technological supremacy, and that the "activist character" of medieval Western Christianity provided the "psychic foundations" of technological inventiveness. He also conjectured that the Christian Middle Ages were the root of ecological crisis in the 20th century, and wrote a highly influential article, "The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis", published in the journal Science in 1967.

The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis

White's article was based on the premise that "all forms of life modify their context", that is: we all create change in our environment. He believed man's relationship with the natural environment was always a dynamic and interactive one, even in the Middle Ages, but marked the Industrial Revolution as a fundamental turning point in our ecological history. He suggests that at this point the hypothesis of science were married to the possibilities of technology and our ability to destroy and exploit the environment was vastly increased. Nevertheless, he also suggests that the mentality of the Industrial Revolution, that the earth was a resource for human consumption, was much older than the actuality of machinery, and has its roots in medieval Christianity and attitudes towards nature. He suggests that "what people do about their ecology depends on what think about themselves in relation to things in their environment." He argued that Judeo-Christian teleology was fundamentally exploitative of the natural world because:

The Bible asserts man's dominion over nature and establishes a trend of anthropocentrism.
Christianity makes a distinction between man (formed in God's image) and the rest of creation, which has no "soul" or "reason" and is thus inferior.

He posited that these beliefs have led to an indifference towards nature which continues to impact in an industrial, "post-Christian" world. He concludes that applying more science and technology to the problem won't help, it is humanity's fundamental ideas about nature that must change; they must abandon "superior, contemptuous" attitudes that make them "willing to use it [the earth] for our slightest whim." White suggests adopting St. Francis of Assisi as a model to imagine a "democracy" of creation in which all creatures are respected and man's rule over creation is delimited.

The debate

White's ideas set off an extended debate about the role of religion in creating and sustaining the West's destructive attitude towards the exploitation of the natural world. It also galvanised interest in the relationship between history, nature and the evolution of ideas, thus stimulating new fields of study like environmental history and ecotheology. Equally, however, many saw his argument as a direct attack on Christianity and other commentators, amongst them the 2000 presidential candidate Al Gore, think his analysis of the impact of the Bible, and especially Genesis is misguided. They argue that Genesis provides man with a model of "stewardship" rather than dominion, and asks man to take care of the world's environment.

Lynn Townsend White, Jr.

The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis

The debate

Further reading