How My Views of the World Have Evolved
Alvin Urquhart
(3/12/2025)
As I approach age 94 I wonder ‘how do I think about my life?’ and ‘what is the culture within which I have grown, participated, and helped shape?’ I have lived a privileged life–as a male, White, educated, modestly wealthy, English-speaking, and in a predominately Judaeo/Christian American society. But I also have had unique life experiences that question the bases of those privileges. Indeed, now I know that the worldview that supports many of those privileges underlies the environmental predicament facing humanity and all biota today.
The dominant moods and feelings of a culture and the unique life experiences of an individual shape worldviews. Much of my outlook on life has emerged unconsciously simply by being a middle-class American who has lived through the Great Depression, the Second World War, the Post-War acceleration of the growth of goods and services, the digital revolution, and the recent disintegration of many of those older cultural unities. I describe the worldview that I derive from my family and life associated with my childhood. Next, I describe the ways in which my worldviews were questioned intellectually by my experiences as a geography student at the University of California, Berkeley. Then, I express the conflicts in my thinking that arose by living most of a year in Portuguese Angola in 1957 and from 1967to 1969 in Nigeria within completely different cultural settings.
Returning to the United States in 1969, I did not understand the radical changes to American culture in the late 1960s and the turmoil of the early 1970s. Teaching at the University of Oregon, I realized that I needed to respond to some of these changes. I did so by becoming actively involved in major environmental questions of the day, both as a teacher/administrator and as a citizen of the Eugene community. Twenty-five years later, I retired. Ever since, I have tried to give public expression to my thoughts and worldview.
A Depression Baby.
We Americans who were born between the late 1920s and the end of World War II (1945) have experienced a unique trajectory through life. Maybe we have been called the “Silent Generation” because we have gone quietly along our own, rather traditional, paths. We have been wedged in between the more numerous “Greatest Generation”, who preceded us, and the more prominent “Boomers”, who followed us. The “Greatest Generation” came to prominence and political power during and after the Second World War. The “Boomer generation” has prospered and provided leaders to the growth and expansion of the American economy. And we who were born during the ‘Great Depression’ and were teenagers during the Second World War were largely unaware of the larger world around us. All very young children, are focused on their immediate families and intimate contacts. Like many families, mine was primarily concerned with getting enough food, housing, hard work, and an education for my sisters and me. As teenagers, we were too young to be drafted to serve in the military forces of World War II. Only older “Depression Babies” were likely to have served in the Korean War. Our parents began to climb out of the Depression in the late 1930s. During and after World War II, they found employment in a growing economy. I was able to get a job picking berries, later, delivering papers, and working in a greenhouse. Subsequent educational, employment, and retirement opportunities became available at critical stages in our lives.
The beginnings of my political and economic worldview were derived from Franklin Delano Roosevelt during his more than three terms as President of the United States—1933-1945, most of my first fourteen years of life. His explicit views of strong government intervention in economic activities and huge societal problems overwhelmed and largely superseded the views of the preceding decade during which largely unfettered market forces within a Christian, nativist society were thought to offer the necessary authority to create a prosperous nation. The “New Deal,” with its rational approaches to both society and natural resource use, was underlain by pragmatic views of making life for all Americans better. When applied, these views had resulted in increasing employment. They also developed greater mechanisms of social support through minimum wage laws, the Social Security program, and the emergence of stronger labor unions. Major natural resource programs resulted in the building of hydroelectric dams and the creation of entities such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Bonneville Power Administration, the Rural Electrification Agency, and the Soil Conservation Service. World War II united the country to a common national purpose while awakening thoughts of external threats to “the American way.” Isolationism was replaced by commitments to cooperation within a world of nation-states. The United States was instrumental in the founding of the United Nations and NATO.
As a boy in Portland, Oregon, I was impressed by the harnessing of the Columbia River through the building of Bonneville and Grand Coulee dams, and the Golden Gate and San Francisco Bay Bridges, capped with the possible future envisioned at the New York and San Francisco World Fairs in 1939. I became aware of the wide range of progressive activities of the New Deal with the weekly arrival of Life Magazine with its extraordinary photographs. During the Second World War, I was impressed by the national unity of support expressed in newspapers, on the radio, and in newsreels at the movies that I attended. I was emotionally affected by the numerous windows with Blue and Gold Stars Flags, which represented servicemen, and by the popular songs of the day, such as When the Lights Come on Again, All Over the World. I was impressed by the way all Americans put up with rationing of gas, meat, sugar, and other staples of life. Also, I remember well my fellow classmates’ efforts to collect such items as newspapers, fat-drippings, coffee cans and other metals to support the war effort. We Americans bought War Bonds to support America. But I also remember the horrors of war depicted in pictures in Life Magazine and in movie newsreels. These ideas and images have remained with me throughout my life.
Politics, church, and sports were little discussed at my home, however, behaving well with my sisters and parents, practicing piano, and doing well in school were. Probably, my maternal grandfather’s Quaker ideas of education filtered through my mother. Ideas of hard work came from my paternal grandfather, a Canadian, who worked his way across America as a blacksmith on the railroad and then settled on a ranch in eastern Oregon. He passed down his 19th Century work ethic to my father, who had no regular employment during much of the Great Depression. My beliefs were influenced by my attendance at an excellent, lower, middle-class, public, neighborhood school, which, in addition to basic classes, taught speech and drama, art, health, and physical education. As a teenager, I was particularly impressed with science and technology, majoring in “technical radio” at Benson Polytechnic High School. My favorite subjects were chemistry and physics.
Even as a convinced supporter of Democrat social views, I came into adult life fully imbued with the nearly universal American ideas of growth, progress, and individualism. These beliefs were fueled by the great American victories in WW II and by the availability of cars and freeways, washing machines and freezers, transcontinental airplane flights, marvelous new medicines, greater educational opportunities, and the belief that ‘the economy’ would always grow. And science and technology would find a way to continue the “good life.” There appeared to be no limits to the growth of goods and services for the Boomer Generation. Now, what is sometimes called, “The Great Acceleration,” of the economy was taking off.
But outside of school, I gradually became aware of conflicting post-war worldviews. For decades, the Oregon legislature was largely Republican, However, Democrat Oregon Senators, Wayne Morse, Richard Neuberger, Maureen Neuberger, and Republican, Mark Hatfield, rose to prominence for their independent views, often in strong contrast to those of their political party. They were my political heroes. Wayne Morse, first elected as a Republican, finally left the party first, becoming an Independent, then a Democrat. Morse’s independence is best remembered because he was one of only two senators to oppose the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. Later, Mark Hatfield, a Republican, joined Morse in his out-spoken opposition to the Vietnam War.
Education at the University of California, Berkeley, 1951-1958:
Awakening to Independent Life
In 1951, having not been stimulated by my classes at Oregon State College, I transferred, to the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. I did not realize when I chose my major that its Department of Geography was the most distinguished geography department in the country. Its chairman, Carl Sauer, was honored throughout the world. His classes were memorable for their breadth of scholarship. His lectures were intellectual stories, fact-filled, and set in a rich context of ideas. The other four faculty members–a geomorphologist, a climatologist, a cultural geographer with broad interests in natural resources, and a Latin Americanist, chosen for his inquiring mind and interest in field work–supported Sauer’s views of the essence of geographical study. They opened my mind to a completely new world. My intellectual and emotional life as an adult had begun.
Underlying Professor Sauer’s views of geography was the idea that “Geography is the meeting of natural history and cultural history.” His perspective of change was historical, i.e., particularistic, rather than concerned with universals or stages. Sauer often focused on the origins of ideas, artifacts, or events and followed their diffusion through time and geographic space. Another theme in his lectures and writings was the exploration and expansion of powerful cultures, particularly Europeans’ conquests of peoples and land in the Americas. A third theme focused on how human behaviors impacted the physical world and resulted in unique landscapes. A fourth major theme was the destructive actions of humans on Nature. These themes, later became the major focus of my questioning of the dominant American worldviews.
As a geography undergraduate, I was first introduced to early twentieth century thinking that questioned the increasingly important American worldview of limitless economic growth. I learned of the transformation of the landscapes of native Americans to the economic landscapes of the United States. I was alerted to studies of soil erosion, deforestation, depletion of fisheries. I learned of the climate of the Pleistocene, of continental glaciation, and of sea-level changes. I learned of the geographic evidence for continental drift. I was introduced to the “land ethic” of Aldo Leopold’s new book, The Sand County Almanac, the first popular account of ecology. The radical views of the early Twentieth Century were talked about. And, most importantly, I learned to be intellectually curious and to question many assumptions of the time.
These ideas made me increasingly aware of the unreflective worldviews I had absorbed in my childhood. They were mind-blowing and provided a context for how I later came to think about the major questions of human existence within the natural world. My teaching and participation in the broader world has its roots in these ideas of my professors.
After two years in the Army, which, for the first time, took me to the American East Coast and to western Europe, I returned to Berkeley for graduate study. The growing prosperity of the 1950’s and the stipend for advanced R.O.T.C. and the G.I. Bill, as well as a teaching fellowship and menial jobs, paid for my education.
As an introduction to graduate studies, I enrolled in an eight-week, soil science field course, during which the class traveled hundreds of miles throughout California. We stopped over 500 times to dig four- to five-foot-deep holes and record detailed descriptions of the characteristics of the soil, of the topography and underlying geological nature of the surface and surroundings, of the climate, natural vegetation, and of the land use of the site. This class introduced me to the processes of recording data in the field and how to integrate information from many disciplines. More importantly, I learned that knowledge about soils is basic to understanding the world and the ways humans have used them.
My graduate studies in many departments also helped shape my world view. The study of nomadic societies of Asia; an anthropology class that compared cultural practices between the Old and New Worlds; an archaeology course on pre-Columbian sites in the Andes; a course in the rural sociology of California, and courses in how soils are formed, in plant ecology and taxonomy, and geomorphology from a geologist’s point of view, each offered me insights into the relations of humans’ relations to nature.
Rather than simply listening and writing term papers, graduate students did guided library research. Within the Geography Department, I was excited by research seminars led by Professor Carl Sauer, who demanded that each student explore both the cultural and natural processes of the domestication of a plant or animal. A second of his seminars dealt with pre-Columbian transfer of plants, animals, and other objects between the Old and New Worlds. Professor James Parsons’ seminar explored the many ways in which indigenous farmers cultivated crops using the periodic shifting of fields (milpa agriculture) which could maintain long-term productive farming communities. Professor Kesseli’s geomorphology seminar studied processes of hill slope and valley formations which contradicted the current ideas about the formation of large-scale topographical features. John Leighly required us to read the most recent journals in oceanography and climatology. Clarence Glacken’s seminar focused on the early appearance of environmental thought in the United States. Professor Glacken was added to the faculty to give depth to thinking about the origins of environmental thought from the Greeks to the 19th Century. His lectures and seminars inspired me to see the history of ideas that are fundamental to some current ideas about how humans see nature, even today.
My experience at the University of California during the years 1951-1958 greatly expanded the worldview I had absorbed as a child to include ideas with rich new foundations. As such, I had to evaluate how I thought about the world. The major ideas that enriched my approach to life include the following:
- Interrelations between the natural world and the cultural world are as important as concerns limited strictly to human activity and thought.
- Time has many perspectives, e.g., as immediate events, in terms of lifetimes, of climate change, of geologic history, of biology, and of evolution. Each perspective influences thought and behavior differently.
- Thinking systematically–especially ecologically–and of the ways parts interact with wholes broadens my worldview. The context for ideas and actions is always important in understanding behaviors and actions.
- Diverse ways of representing data have unique standards of truth and beauty. I learned the values of graphs and maps, as well as of conversation, writing, and photos.
- Every spot on the Earth, from a soil-auger hole to a remote desert or tundra, is interesting if you are curious. And every place has a context as well as is made up of interacting parts.
On My Own and Testing Ideas with Experience
My field research experiences were set completely outside the bubble of American views. As a result, my life in Jamaica, Angola, and Nigeria greatly influenced my outlook on the world. They tested what it was to be an American, what it was to be surrounded by different landscapes and peoples, and what were some of the responsibilities of being an adult.
I had done geomorphological research on karst (limestone) topography in Jamaica, a British colony that had been founded and based on growing and processing sugar for European markets. The population, mainly descendants of African slaves, and the landscape had been completely transformed from its Arawak Indian occupation. Jamaica was a poor country on the verge of becoming a focus for tourism. I had gone there strictly as a scientist in the academic tradition, only secondarily as an observer of a culture.
However, I had to confront, directly, my newly informed ideas when I went to Angola to do research for a doctoral dissertation. My topic was native African patterns of settlements where each ethnic group had a unique way of life. There, the context for living was not of early 20th century America nor of the scholarly research demands of a university. It was the world of a colony that had been exploited for centuries with little concern for the land or the people who lived on it. And my wife and I had to adjust to new ways, mostly without the support of the world within which we had grown up.
Angola was the first, and last, African colony. Claimed by Portugal in the 15th Century, it became independent only in 1975. It had few modern facilities. Angola, the combined size of Oregon, Washington, California, Nevada and part of Idaho, had only 16 miles of paved rural roads in 1958. I saw that Portugal, in most of its 500 years of rule, had disrupted traditional, subsistence agricultural communities by trading in slaves. Twentieth century colonial ‘developments’ saw the exportation of fish, coffee, a few other agricultural products, and the building of railroads and ports to ship them. The settling of poor Portuguese immigrants in agricultural colonatos was a recent attempt to preserve the colonial status. More recently, diamonds and petroleum, which are still Angola’s most valuable exports, were developed by foreign companies. Road-building and forced local labor were practiced. Resistance could result in jailing or beatings. The traditional agricultural lives of most native people were disrupted by the periodic loss of male labor. Small surpluses from indigenous farms were traded for cloth, kerosene, and padlocks at tiny ‘bush’ stores owned by Portuguese or mulatto men.
I became aware of how my American worldviews of ‘growth and progress’ meant little in colonial Africa. Nevertheless, as a rich outside observer, I simply could not have lived in the bush’ without outside help. I needed assistance from both the American and Portuguese governments. It was a great relief when my wife and I, after two or three weeks of camping, got hot baths and a hotel room with running water and without ‘bush’ food that we had cooked ourselves. With joy, we talked with Americans, Europeans, and educated Portuguese–the major agents of modernization. They were associated with international oil and trading companies, agricultural schemes, or Christian missions. I saw the contrast between my ‘good life’ and the lives of native people, whose sustainable traditional ways were forcibly disrupted with no benefits from the modern world. ‘Development’ was a tragedy for many. Never again could I accept, unthinkingly, that the ‘growth’ that underlies the dominant American worldview is ‘progressive’, even as I required its remote tentacles to do my research.
In Angola, I learned that the worldviews of an authoritarian, exploitative colonial power had little concern for the lives of indigenous Africans or for the land on which they lived. I came to realize that the cultural and physical “development of under-developed lands” was an imposition of Portuguese, and American, worldviews of what was ‘good or best’ on people, who did not benefit from that development.
After returning to the United States in 1959, I taught geography classes at Dartmouth College and the University of Oregon. Lecture classes were the usual form of teaching, sometimes to hundreds of students at a time. Each year, preparing and teaching nine different classes each week and starting a family, I was simply too busy to reflect on my views of the world. Now, I see that I then participated in traditional ways of education–simply to pass on facts and not to try to express the values I had learned from my education and foreign field work. I enjoyed the benefits of a booming economy based on energy from fossil fuels and new technologies. That same energy indirectly empowered expanded educational and research opportunities of the next several decades.
In 1967, I continued my academic life at Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria, Nigeria. After more than seventy years as a British colony, Nigeria became an independent nation in 1960, little prepared for the ways of modern nation states. The difficulties of governing tens of tribal, linguistic, and ethnic groups had been temporarily united under British colonial domination. The differences between Nigerian culture and those of modern Britain or the United States are extraordinary. Neither traditional ethnic nor colonial worldviews are compatible with the imposition of modern capitalism.
Regional differences contributed greatly to the Nigerian Civil War (1967-1969). My family and I arrived in Lagos harbor on the only night it was bombed by a Biafran airplane. Frazzled and confused, we made our way to northern Nigeria, which was not directly involved in military action. Ahmadu Bello University was recently established several miles from the old walled emirate city of Zaria. Like many new Nigerian educational institutions, ABU followed a British model. The faculty was overwhelmingly European or American. The language of education was English.
Our lives were centered on the University. As invited expatriates, we continued many of the privileged ways of colonial times. We lived in a campus compound of new and comfortable faculty housing. We hired a cook, who lived nearby, and a house boy and a gardener, who lived in the neighboring village. We shopped in local African markets or from itinerant traders. We went to ‘the club’ and pool. We lived the daily life of a British colonial, but within a newly independent nation that saw western-style education as a key to a modern life. We were part of ‘development’ that was favorably viewed because it held out the promise of a life with more material goods, extended services, and profits for those in power.
Although northern Nigeria was predominantly Muslim, most of the students were from the southwestern part of Nigeria, had attended English-speaking high schools, and were mainly Christian. My classes were like those I had taught in Eugene–the passing on of information. Participation by faculty in university activities was limited strictly to teaching because the administration was instituting new, Nigerian ways of control. [They were successful because Ahmadu Bello University is now the second largest university in all of Africa, only exceeded in enrollment by Cairo University.]
In addition to teaching, I explored and mapped the walled city of Zaria with its palace, dye pits, shops, and narrow roads lined with solid rows of houses and gardens. I studied the market districts, old colonial landscapes, and the institutions of a modernizing nation. I did research in the crumbling archives left over from colonial days. I was a scholarly recorder of aspects of the colonial world and its effect on the Nigerian landscape.
In Nigeria, I encountered landscapes and peoples whose lands and lives were rapidly being transformed. In fifty years since independence, the population increased more than four times. Local subsistence agricultural patterns, tribal kingdoms, Muslim emirates, and vestiges of British colonial rule were adjusting to unique, modern, capitalistic ways of a recently independent Nigeria. My role as an expatriate teacher was an extension of colonial views. My observations, however, tested and gave a larger context to my cautionary views of growth and progress. Yet they also made me question how disruptive ‘development’ and economic growth could upset the traditional, conservative lives of people and their relationship to nature.
Applied Worldviews and Ideas
After two years teaching in Nigeria, I returned to a radically different America. I was unaware of the mood of the country, the adaptations to new business models, to rapid changes in technology, to dominant societal patterns. I did not recognize the America of 1971. Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King had been assassinated; the Chicago Democratic convention had been accompanied by riots; Americans were shocked by the Kent State Massacre. Discord over the Vietnam War was rampant. Fear of nuclear warfare and concern for environmental issues were apparent. I rapidly became aware that what I had been teaching was irrelevant to the important problems of the day. I needed to become ‘relevant’, and express my concerns about issues that I had largely ignored while living in Africa. As a geographer, I realized that I was well prepared to contribute to discussions on ‘the environment’.
In the 1970s, a mere handful of books on environmental issues had been published. However, I was particularly alarmed by the publication of ‘Limits to Growth’ in 1972. Based on early, complex computer programming, the authors showed that the current trends in use of resources, growth of population and pollution, availability of food, and the production of industrial goods would lead to a collapse of modern civilization in the 21st century. The environmental predictions of Paul Ehrlich, Lester Brown, and René Dubos also attracted my attention. Although several authors had discussed the increased use of fossil fuels, only while reading Howard and Elizabeth Odum’s book, ‘Environment, Power, Society,’ did I see how their ideas about how energy operated within biological ecological systems could also be applied to modern society. By combining the ideas of ‘Limits to Growth’ with Howard Odum’s ideas about the flows of energy within nature and society could I integrate many of the ideas that I had learned as a geography student at the University of California with contemporary environmental problems.
As a result, I reoriented my classes to voice contemporary environmental concerns. My geography courses focused on three topics: 1.) the ways humans created their landscapes; 2.) the ways in which humans negatively altered the physical world; and 3.) the history of ideas of how humans view their relationship with Nature. I and several other faculty members also created an Environmental Studies Program at the University of Oregon. Our efforts resulted in an interdisciplinary Master’s degree program with an environmental emphasis. Because it was only one of three university masters environmental programs in the United States, it attracted several hundred applicants. All participants in the program had professional or practical work experience and were highly motivated to see how they could be involved in environmental issues. The discussions with and among these students was the most stimulating of my teaching career.
My views as an environmental activist were also honed as the chair of the University Campus Planning Committee which was looking for a firm to design a new campus plan. We selected the architectural firm of Christopher Alexander, who emphasized ways of involving the actual users of a building project from its inception. It did not rely solely on architects, experts, nor underwriters in developing projects. Rather, Alexander was concerned with how prospective users of a designed environment would best experience the places in which they would live and work. He was concerned with creating emotionally satisfying built environments and the processes by which they could come about. He developed ‘patterns’—detailed descriptions of good spatial arrangements at many levels—from the shape and orientation of windows to the size of effective community action groups. All relevant patterns had to be considered in building projects. The “Oregon Experiment” was a success as a planning process for the University. Alexander changed, forever, the way I look at the communities and landscapes within which I live. Not only must they perform desired functions, but they must be beautiful and emotionally satisfying.
Planning also came to play a big part in my civic life. A regional transportation plan proposed building a network of freeways in Eugene that was much denser than that of central Los Angeles. The freeways were to ring the university neighborhood, encircle downtown, and connect along the riverfront. With negligible success, I protested that the freeway plans would destroy neighborhoods, access to both the University and the central business district, and, in particular, the open space along the Willamette River. Fortunately, federal funding for freeway construction stopped and the plans were abandoned.
I later objected to the building of a research park on University of Oregon land bordering the Willamette River. The area had been designated by a special state law to preserve open and natural areas bordering the Willamette River. Subsequently, that law had been incorporated in a landmark statewide plan that required preservation of agricultural, forest, and natural areas, as well as establishing boundaries beyond which cities could not expand. Within that law, economic issues must be considered with all new projects. The University President had approved the area of the proposed research park for playing fields and as an ecological study area. This plan conformed to the older Willamette Greenway legislation. But an economic recession prompted the mayor of Eugene and the president of the University of Oregon to propose building a research park on that site. I raised objections in tens of hearings before many government agencies that environmental concerns were not heeded. My briefs before the Oregon State Court of Appeals were rejected in favor of economic growth. However, thirty years later, after large investments from the State, the University, and the City of Eugene, no buildings exist on the site.
At the level of the City of Eugene, I testified and wrote opposing positions to several efforts to ‘grow’ the local economy to provide new jobs by attracting ‘clean’ industries. As an example, a now-abandoned microchip factory at the fringe of the built-up area was approved. It consumed a third of the civic water supply. Again, ‘growth and progress’ won out over environmental concerns. After several years, the plant now remains closed.
Three neighbors and I developed a plan to preserve the historic character of our neighborhood. The State Historic Review Board honored our proposal for democratically surveying all neighbors in the planning process. Initially without resident opposition, the plan was later objected to by two residents, one who disrupted neighborhood meetings and the other who spent $100,000 circulating lies about the nature of historic districts. These lies raised fears among neighbors and the plan eventually languished in the mayor’s office.
Since returning from Nigeria, I tested my worldviews, primarily on environmental issues. I changed my classroom teaching and created an academic program focused on human relationships to Nature. I also reinforced my fundamental environmental worldviews through expressing ideas about caring for the campus of the University of Oregon, for public places in the local city and region, and for neighborhood spaces.
Mostly, however, my environmental planning concerns could not compete with the dominant ideas of ‘growth and progress’. The national worldviews had shifted with the election of Ronald Reagan, who challenged many social, economic, and political views that had dominated the post-war Democrat period. Even the strong environmental concerns of President Carter had been overturned by President Reagan, who in 1981, symbolically, removed solar panels from the White House. As a person trying to participate actively in my academic and local society, I learned that many of the ideas that I developed as a university student, in particular concern for Nature, community, and the character of ‘place’, were of much lesser public value than political and economic views.
Reflections in Retirement
Since retirement, I have tried to summarize the major sources of my worldview. I realize that I have absorbed the important ideas and feelings from my middle-class American family and life in the first half of the 20th century, especially after the Great Depression and World War II. Science, technology, education and innovation, the use of fossil fuel energy, and the worldwide expansion of investment capitalism have dramatically combined to improve the health, education, and material well-being of most Americans. As a result, I have led a privileged life because of my participation in the optimism and opportunities basic to this American worldview.
My college professors introduced me to other ways of looking at the world. They saw problems associated with the diffusion of many modern American ideas. Slavery had been abolished less than 100 years earlier, and colonialism was on the ropes. In 1950, agriculture still directly supported most people’s lives. American ideas of growth and progress were being introduced to the underdeveloped world through foreign aid and the application of Western ways of economic and political development. However, when applied to regions still suffering from the effects of slavery and colonialism, as I learned through my experiences in Angola and Nigeria, they were not easily transferable without disastrous results. In many ways I now understand that many of the poorer nations of the world continue to suffer from economic colonialism as their undervalued resources and labor are exported to the major economic powers of the world.
Environmental concerns emerged to public notice when they became directly observable and affected public and personal health. The Environmental Protection Act and Earth Day of 1970 symbolize a growing national concern for problems created by pollution. Many concerns found possible solutions: regulations to prevent air pollution from smoke that damaged human lungs and defaced buildings; terracing and abandoning steep slopes to prevent soil erosion that washes away valuable farmland and pollutes rivers and lakes; keeping industrial and human wastes from polluting rivers; lining landfill dumps that leaked into surrounding countrysides; removal of trash that accumulated along roads and seashores; eliminating pesticides that contaminate food; cleaning of oil leaks from damaged tankers; etc. However, these environmental problems are local, at best regional, in scope and possible solution. ‘Environment’, is still often thought of as it relates directly to humans, their health, aesthetics or their livelihoods. Solutions are thought of in terms of cleanup, preserve, restore, recycle, reuse, or becoming more efficient. These views of environment remain a dominate theme of environmentalism. As positive as these solutions are, they largely ignored global environmental problems except as studied by science.
As a student, I read Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth. This book introduced knowledge of the damage done to the natural world in the last 10,000 years. In my classes, I was disturbed to learn of the alacrity with which Americans had, in their brief history, gobbled up forests, soils, and other natural resources. I could observe, directly, that logging old growth, now second- and third-growth forests, depleting salmon-filled rivers, lowering of ground waters, and overgrazing of dry-land vegetation offered Oregonians evidence of how they have exploited nature. Because Americans now do not have enough resources, we import organic and mineral matter as well as the cheap energy that has been expended by humans in the preparation of exports to the United States. It would take the resources of seven Earths to support the demands of all peoples on Earth if they lived an American lifestyle. Unthinkingly, most leaders of the nations of the world still act as if the Earth’s energy and matter are without limits.
Twenty years ago, I summed up the major thoughts that I had developed while teaching geography and environmental studies in my book, ‘Nature & Culture–A Personal Crisis.” I looked for roots of the ‘environmental crisis’ and found it in the words and terms in which environment is described. For the most part, the crises is seen strictly in human terms, not in context of the organic world of nature. I have come to understand that a fundamental divide separates the thoughts and stories that we tell ourselves from the facts of nature. Culture is strictly a human creation that is filled with stories and institutions that explain our lives, societies, ethics, and morals. Throughout most of the lifetime of humanity, stories were primarily interpersonal, supernatural, religious, social, political, or economic. With the scientific writings of Charles Darwin and Alexander von Humboldt 165 years ago, it became possible to question the basis of many human stories. By understanding evolution, ecology, and energy, we know that we, like all organisms, are minor parts of an encompassing physical nature, no matter what cultural stories we have told ourselves. And as with all organisms, the animal that is human wants to reproduce and grow until it is limited. In the last 150 years those limits have not been reached.
However, today, humans still ignore nature’s lessons of evolution and ecology. Instead, we rely on scientific discoveries, technologies, and the use of fossil fuel energy and other forms of nature. These discoveries and applications have been incorporated within economic and political stories that contribute to creating human goods and services. But these resources are also elements of the ecological processes of nature, which humans cannot control. Thus, we have created the environmental predicament in which we, modern humans, find ourselves–cultural stories that largely ignore the facts of nature and human made goods and services that are approaching limits to their further growth.
In retirement I have had to confront the radical changes associated with the digital world. I made early use of computers; I use search engines as my library; I read books and articles of the internet; I use streaming videos and YouTube; and I use email to communicate with friends. But like other technological changes since World War II, they are not used widely to address the lessening of the conflicts between culture and nature. The digital world is being directed to increasing the power of its designers, entrepreneurs, financiers, and now directly by President Trump, not to recognizing the natural limits that will underlie the collapse of modern society.
I am an American by birth and experience. My worldview has allowed me to appreciate the many privileges and opportunities that I have had in American society. I during the last fifty years I have become aware that the great benefits of modern American life depend on massive consumption of energy from burning fossil fuels and do not result simply from the genius of the intelligence of scientists, technologists, and economic leaders. To me, the cultural stories of modern civilization are in direct conflict with the natural processes of evolution and ecology. In a shorthand version of this , we humans cannot live with the goal of continued economic growth in a natural world of which humans are but a minor part. I am unable to envision a society in which humans can exist for long if they continue to ignore the conflicts between our cultural stories and natural processes.
To postpone worldwide natural disasters as long as possible, humans need to reduce the use of fossil fuels, immediately. This is not likely to happening, especially with the election of Donald Trump, who pursues the ideas of unlimited economic growth, actively promotes greater use of fossil fuels, and believes climate change is a ‘hoax’. Modern civilization is beginning to crumble and Donald Trump is leading the way. With this ominous worldview, I search for ways to understand my personal crisis: the conflict between my privileged life largely based on the Twentieth Century worldview of growth and progress and my Twenty-first Century worldview of inevitable decline in human civilization within the natural processes of ecology and evolution.
[Elsewhere on this blog, I present ideas of how we have created this predicament; and Include a few ideas of how to live equably within this crisis.]