Melissa Lane, Eco-Republic: Ancient Thinking for a Green Age
(Peter Lang,  2011)

Times Higher Education

1 December 2011

No sooner had I reviewed for this publication William Ophuls’ Plato’s Revenge: Politics in the Age of Ecology, which asks us to rethink our relationship with the most famous Greek philosopher from an environmental perspective, than Melissa Lane’s Eco-Republic came along. Interestingly, she manages to make the same request with scarcely any echo of Ophuls’ argument. This is due not only to the comprehensiveness of Plato’s thought, but also to Lane’s capacity for original insight.

While mindful of the declared elitism of the Republic, she believes that its general thrust can serve as a useful corrective to modern liberal democracy, which has long since abandoned the ideal of civic responsibility in favour of a market that functions by the artificial creation and satisfaction of the individual consumer’s desires. Plato offers an alternative ideal: the concurrence of social harmony and individual virtue, of “city” and “soul”. A properly functioning constitution, or “republic”, would not simply be a chaos of competing greeds; it would be a model of balance, mutual cooperation and sustainability.

Sustainability is a term that might seem anachronistic in a thesis that reminds us of what we can learn from a political programme addressing the demands of the ancient Athenian state. But Lane is thoroughly convincing in her closely argued progression from the idea of civic integration to that of natural equilibrium. A sustainable society is a stable society; a stable society is possible only if it is also ecologically sustainable.

The trouble is that we have been plunged into a condition of inertia; and the task is to move from here to a capacity for initiative. But how can we get beyond a sense of negligibility and helplessness in order to take responsibility for our actions? The answer is imagination: we need to refigure our relationship with the wider world.

In effect, Lane is addressing the whole topic of mythology. It is one on which she offers some passing thoughts, although not quite enough. She rightly insists that it is the psychosocial dimension of human endeavour that matters as much as the technical-legal dimension. We need to be moved as individuals to change the way we act, not rely on politicians and advisers to sort things out. In short, we need to challenge the norm that holds us in thrall. This is a reasonable enough argument, but the pedant in me complains that this kind of insight might best be supported by a more thorough enquiry into the relationship between myth, society and ecology.

However, it is not difficult to forgive an author who neglects to expound a proper theory of myth if she can make me see for the first time what a powerful vision is contained in the episode in the Republic that we usually refer to as “Plato’s Cave”. You will remember the scene: the prisoners in the cave see only the shadows of objects cast by a fire, and are ignorant of the existence of the sunlit outer world. Lane’s brief exposition is a model of clarity and cogency: “By positing that the citizens are trapped and unable to move, the Cave models their inability to escape the limited, artificial horizon of the existing city, lit by the distorting light of a man-made fire than by the limpid and natural light of the Sun.” In such statements, we see how mythic imagination, political philosophy and ecological awareness might conjoin, and any minor doubts about this or that aspect of Lane’s case for Plato’s relevance are dispelled.

 Laurence Coupe

William Ophuls,  Plato’s Revenge: Politics in the Age of Ecology
(MIT Press, 2011)

Times Higher Education

3 November 2011

I find it difficult to think about Plato and ecology without recalling Val Plumwood’s remarkable 1993 book, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. For me the chapter entitled “Plato and the philosophy of death” remains the most challenging critique of a philosopher’s legacy that I’ve ever read. Plato’s dualism, we are told, issued in a “logic of colonisation” that sanctioned an oppressive hierarchy. By privileging spirit above matter, soul above body, reason above nature, Plato and his followers effectively denied the very life of the Earth.

While not engaging directly with Plumwood’s argument, William Ophuls clearly thinks that Plato has been generally misunderstood. According to him, the philosopher was much closer to shamanism than to rationalism; he had a mystical view of nature, and his concern was consistently for the harmony of the whole. Where Plato’s critics see a remorseless dialectic, we should rather respond to the imaginative, exploratory and dialogical form of his writings.

In this light, it is a shame about Ophuls’ chosen title, Plato’s Revenge. While this is clearly meant to translate as “Plato Proved Right”, the word “revenge” unintentionally conjures up the aggressive impact addressed by Plumwood. Again, the title puts inappropriate emphasis on a single thinker, whereas Ophuls wants to align Platonism with Taoism, Stoicism and Native American religion. In fact, what he successfully demonstrates is that we have got ourselves into our current environmental mess by ignoring traditional wisdom generally, not just Plato.

Perhaps a phrase such as “The Way Lost and Found”, although less dramatic, might be preferable as a title? That at least would convey the positive and persuasive case Ophuls is making. The best kind of society, he proposes, is one in which individuals are in direct contact with ecological reality, and so respect the necessary limits to their freedom, finding true liberty in observing “natural law”. In order to do this they need to “live more simply and naturally in small face-to-face communities rooted in the land”. At the same time, there is “no return to the primal innocence of the state of nature”. So what is required is “a way of life that is materially and institutionally simple but culturally and spiritually rich”, Ophuls says.

Reading such statements, we might be reminded of Leopold Kohr, who argued that it is “bigness” (big business, big government, big growth) that is the problem. He doesn’t feature here, but perhaps he doesn’t need to. After all, Ophuls has Rousseau, Jefferson and Thoreau to remind him of what might be involved in a truly ecological politics. He does a good job of demonstrating how their preoccupations are more relevant than ever: for instance, the need to facilitate “participation” and discourage “profusion”.

But there’s no way of ending this review without coming back to Plato. By way of support, I’d like to point out that the idea of a “Platonic ecology” is not so far-fetched. It was hinted at by Gregory Bateson 40 years ago, on the basis that “mind” is present in nature, as “the pattern which connects”. In that sense, he could suggest that Platonic “form” is more real than the “things” of philosophical materialism. Bateson, however, features only very briefly in Ophuls’ book, and the ideas just indicated don’t receive due attention: an opportunity lost, perhaps.

That said, I would strongly recommend Plato’s Revenge as a clear and compelling polemic that deserves to be read alongside Bateson’s 1972 work Steps to an Ecology of Mind … and yes, alongside Plumwood’s Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. Beyond the debate about Plato, all three have something important to say about the fate of our planet.

Laurence Coupe

Jules Pretty, This Luminous Coast (Full Circle Editions, 2011)

Times Higher Education

14 April 2011

More than a century ago, the poet Edward Thomas began producing a series of books celebrating the countryside, the most famous being The Heart of England, The South Country and The Icknield Way. However, he soon became disenchanted with the vogue for rural prose that he had unwittingly encouraged. True, he felt able to single out for praise an early work by George Sturt, an author who would in due course make his name with Change in the Village. But Thomas’s commendation of Sturt relied on contrasting the latter’s “intimacy” and “simplicity” with the sanctimonious posturing of most of Sturt’s peers, whose language Thomas saw as excessively “didactic” and “oracular”. As to Thomas’s own concern, he wanted to learn, by exploring a locality, what might be involved in becoming “a citizen of the Earth” – his own telling phrase from A Literary Pilgrim in England.

Nature writing is currently enjoying a revival in England, thanks to Richard Mabey, Robert Macfarlane and others. Of course, the land has been drastically altered since Thomas’ day; but that only means that the dual sense of belonging and responsibility that he sought is needed more than ever. He would surely seek out those writings that register what is happening – without becoming either didactic or oracular, of course. He would surely approve of this handsome, austerely illustrated book by Jules Pretty.

A biologist by training and now an environmentalist, Pretty is the author of two indispensable works of theory, Agri-Culture: Reconnecting People, Land and Nature (2002) and The Earth Only Endures: On Reconnecting with Nature and our Place in It (2007). In the latter, he argues that “green places are good places” and that it is only through reaffirming our bond with the natural world that we will retain our humanity. Without abandoning this general principle, Pretty has now produced a much more particular kind of work – a personal account of a year spent walking along the edge of the East Anglian “bulge”, taking in Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk.

He begins This Luminous Coast by telling us: “This is a coast which is about to be lost. Not yet, but it will happen soon.” However, his book is not just a documentation of coastal erosion: it is a series of images of coastal nature and coastal culture; it is also a celebration of lives lived, both human and non-human, with birds, badgers, foxes and seals featuring as often as workmen, farmers, wildlife reserve managers and tourists.

It is a difficult book to categorise: part travel guide, part memoir, part meditation, part elegy. Although it is occasioned by a sense of urgency, it never preaches; nor does the author claim any privileged knowledge, despite the wealth of information that he discreetly imparts. It doesn’t demand our response, or even insist that we follow up the author’s findings. However, if we let it do its work, we will be subtly changed.

His avowed aim in setting out on his journey is to “walk the whole coast and its communities and ecologies, and learn what I could about the specificities of place”. This sets the tone, concerned but calm; we are not being offered an ecological jeremiad. That said, he does not hesitate to refer to constructions such as the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge as “monsters”, demonic characters in a myth that seems to lack a hero to challenge them.

But he avoids being sweepingly negative about change, always being prepared to differentiate between degrees of despoliation. Refusing to sneer at those scattered, basic dwellings with names such as “Shangri-la” and “The Haven” that were erected on the seaside plotlands of Essex in the mid-20th century, he laments the replacement of that clumsy approximation of a rural idyll by an arid landscape of sprawling housing estates and huge supermarkets. But it is enough for him simply to say so, then move on. This is an extensive journey, after all.

In undertaking it, he does not travel as a stranger. He teaches at the University of Essex; his family’s roots are in Suffolk and Norfolk; his own childhood home, which he visits towards the end of his trek, was in Blundeston, Norfolk. Past and present are continually overlapping.

In this respect, Pretty’s book is representative of a development in nature writing known as psychogeography. Uniting soul and land in one term, this discipline involves what Marina Warner calls “memory maps”. To paraphrase crudely, it seeks to demonstrate that a sense of place is also a sense of the past.

This approach is beautifully illustrated by Pretty’s account of his visit to the Norfolk farm owned by 98-year-old Eric Wortley. The farmer reports that the previous day he sat face to face with a robin, when it briefly flew into his kitchen and perched on a chair. This event prompts a recollection of his boyhood, duly recorded by the author: “If a robin came into the house, his mother would say, ‘Tha’ll be a death in the family.'” Past and present meet in an ostensibly trivial moment, allowing for further observations and insights. Eric and his two sons, who work with him, “are men of the land, perhaps a dying breed, and are in no way worldly. Their world is here, in this Fenland field, the bright-green leaves scattered over the ground, the roots of the beet crusted with inky soil.” It is this proximity to the land, we infer, that informs the farmer’s equanimity in the face of mortality: “Remembering that robin, he remarks: ‘You come in a year, and I won’t be ‘ere.'”

Pretty’s account of that visit has the intimacy and simplicity that Thomas praised in Sturt. These qualities come through, too, in his parting reflections: “The land, shaped, drained, hunted and farmed, sown and cropped, is better than when he started. It is also chock full of memories and a century of stories. It is firmly imprinted. And haunted.”

His own prose is haunted, not only by his family’s past, but also by the work of predecessors. Most notable is W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, which is both a record of a walking tour of East Anglia and a meditation on the nature of time. This Luminous Coast inevitably echoes Sebald’s text, but it gives equal weight to the time of nature – which may always be relied on to put human beings in their place.

Certainly, we are repeatedly invited to see a given experience in the longest possible perspective. When Pretty hears a nightingale, no sooner has he pondered the meaning of its Roman and Saxon names than he’s speculating about the longstanding relationship of bird, flower and habitat. For instance: “Bluebells and nightingales don’t get on. The one needs open mature woodland; the other thick scrub.” Nor is that in itself enough. The author reminds us that the proliferation of plants depends on spring following winter in proper sequence – which now increasingly is not the case: “The old weather patterns seem disturbed. We might have to get used to this.”

We might also have to get used to this kind of book; but if it can help each of us become Thomas’s “citizen of the Earth” in these unpropitious times, that’s all to the good.

Laurence Coupe

Timothy Morton,  The Ecological Thought (Harvard University Press, 2010)

Times Higher Education

26 August 2010

About 15 years ago, the poet Gary Snyder published an article titled “Is Nature Real?”. In it he made a heartfelt complaint: “I’m getting grumpy about the slippery arguments being put forth by high-paid intellectuals trying to knock nature and knock the people who value nature and still come out smelling smart and progressive.” He had in mind those literary theorists and philosophers who, having discovered the joys of deconstruction, think they are being ever so clever in declaring nature to be nothing more than a cultural construct.

As a Zen Buddhist, Snyder is fully aware that the standard human experience of nature is riddled with illusion. But in all his writings, he has always insisted that it would be absurd to infer that there is no such thing as nature; Zen, after all, involves learning to live at one with it.

It might be said that post-structuralist thinking attempts something similar to the Buddhist exposure of illusion, but it falls far short of it when it merely results in a high-handed denial of the more-than-human world (here I use David Abrams’ phrasing). I am afraid to say that this is what seems to happen in the course of Timothy Morton’s new book, The Ecological Thought. Let me say that I do appreciate what Morton is attempting to do: that is, correct our unthinking attitudes to nature – or Nature, as he calls it – to make us think more carefully about the way we reify, consume or idealise it. But alas, the effect is far more deconstructive than reconstructive: “In the name of ecology, we must scrutinize Nature with all the suspicion a modern person can muster. Let the buyer beware.”

Morton’s case for a natureless ecology is not aided by the fact that he has such difficulty in defining it. “Ecology has to do with love, loss, despair and compassion. It has to do with depression and psychosis … It has to do with reading and writing … It has to do with sexuality.” That is from the introduction, but after nearly 80 pages we are none the wiser: “The ecological thought is about people – it is people.” Nor does it get much clearer by the final page, I’m afraid.

If we can trace a thesis, it is that, as far as nature is concerned, we should move from a Romantic-style piety towards a postmodern scepticism. In other words, we must abandon our loyalty to our local place and embrace the wider sphere of global space. It is perplexing, however, that Morton should invoke Buddhism to convey this sense of space: he shows no knowledge of Snyder’s well-informed Buddhist ecology, but seems to rely on the odd insight gleaned from a fortnight’s holiday in Tibet.

Philosophically, in fact, he is much closer to Marxism than to Buddhism. Hence his agitprop denunciation of ecological thinkers such as Arne Naess and James Lovelock: “Deep ecology, which sees humans as a viral blip in the big Gaian picture, is nothing other than laissez-faire capitalism in a neofascist ideological form.”

If such pronouncements make one wince, at least Morton’s political leanings mean that he feels obliged to address the ideas of the most important reinterpreter of Marxist theory of the 20th century, namely Theodor Adorno. But again, it is worrying that Morton seeks to draw on that philosopher’s specific insights while discounting the central importance he gave to the concept of nature. It was Adorno who insisted that “domination over nature” is paid for with “the naturalisation of social domination”.  And it was Adorno who memorably declared: “Art is not nature, but wants to redeem what nature promises.”

There is an interesting book to be written about Adorno’s importance for ecological thought, but it would not be one dedicated to the idea that you can have ecology without nature. While I am sure that many readers will benefit from the challenge of reading Morton, I hope they then go back to Adorno. If they also go back to Snyder, they might benefit even more.

 Laurence Coupe

Please note: I have corrected the quotation in the penultimate paragraph.

Thomas Princen, Treading Softly: Paths to Ecological Order (The MIT Press, 2010)

Times Higher Education

22 April 2010

In Arthurian legend, when Sir Perceval comes upon the castle of the wounded Fisher King, he is given the chance to restore fertility to the Waste Land. All he has to do is speak. Upon being granted a vision of the Holy Grail, he should pose the ritual question: “Whom does it serve?” That would release the healing power of Christ’s blood, and the kingdom would be restored to health. On his first visit, he fails to do so.

As we ponder our chances of restoring our own Waste Land, we would do well to ask the same question of any publication with “ecological” in the title. Does it serve the gloom and doom brigade, who relish the catastrophe to come? Or does it serve the advocates of business as usual, who say that all we have to do is to “green” our production and consumption?

Happily, Thomas Princen’s salutary and beautifully simple book does neither. What we need, he tells us, are “images of the possible” that may help us envisage what is involved in “living well by living well within our means”.

His aim, he says, is to lay the groundwork for an ecological order: one based on a “home economy” that would be “grounded in place”, would be guided by respect for resources and so would involve minimum consumption.

Whom, then, does this book serve? Speaking frankly, one would have to say that, in the first instance, it serves the impractical green theorists among us who need to bring our ideas, as it were, down to earth; more generally, it serves people of goodwill who realise we are at a turning point, but don’t know which way to turn.

This emphasis on groundwork and economy is a reminder that Karl Marx used the metaphor of a building to explain the workings of a given society. He proposed that its real foundations were the means and relations of production. Now, of course, we must wake up to the fact that the foundations that are even more important are those of nature itself. Notoriously dismissed by Marx as humanity’s tool house, it is now in a perilous condition.

Marxism does not get a mention in Treading Softly. So what philosophy does Princen espouse? “Principles”, he declares, are successful if “they fit the needs of the times”. Yesterday “the issue was prohibiting competitive trade practices and preventing economic collapse all via international cooperation and economic growth”. Today? “Now the issue is saving the planet’s life-support system.” This reads very much like pragmatism, and is none the worse for that, given the urgency of his task.

Of course, labelling his approach is useful only if it helps us to grasp what he is saying, and to think and act accordingly. Thus: “We do not so much need a revolution as we need well-defined problems, networks of diverse peoples, and good old hard work. It is possible and it will happen.” The ideal proposed will lead us back to reality.

Existing “realism”, says Princen, tells us that the existing economy, “the Great Industrial Edifice”, is “the one and only path”. Its premises are twofold: “consumers rule” and “technologies save”. The bizarre assumption is that “the planet, aided by clever technologies and well-functioning markets, can withstand yet more abuses, more mining, more consuming, more disposing; we just have to do it better”. In other words, realism turns out to be fantasy, and the industrial edifice turns out to be a house of cards.

The need now, Princen suggests, is to articulate a “new normal” beyond the “old normal”. The latter assumes that “endless material expansion on a finite planet is possible” and is dedicated to cheap energy and consumer demand; it assumes also that risks can be managed, indeed that “economic, technological and demographic growth will solve all problems, including the problems of economic, technological and demographic growth”. Against this muddled thinking, the premise of the new normal stands out crystal clear: “the era of ‘protecting the environment’ is over, and the era of ensuring life support has begun”.

How to proceed? We need to find the right words before we can enact the right deeds. We need to define the problems that confront us in a new kind of language: a language that “has ecological content and a long-term ethic”. Hence Princen is more anxious that we get our “metaphors of the environment” right than he is that we understand statistics, scientific reports or specific forecasts. His list of potential images includes “network (complex and with emergent properties)”, “homestead (crops, shelters, neighbours)” and “gift (precious, non-proprietary)”.

Because Treading Softly is about words, it is also about world views – those frames, constructed in language, through which we see reality. According to Princen, today we have four dominant world views of what we call the environment. First, there is the “naturist”: environment as non-human nature, which needs to be understood in its own right. Second, there is the “mechanistic”: environment as nature as machine, which can be manipulated and even redesigned for human use. Third, there is the “agrarian”: environment as nature as a source of produce for humanity, which must be managed but which takes time to understand. Fourth, there is the “economistic”: environment as a world of human exchange, production and consumption.

The important thing is not to opt for one world view exclusively, but to think in terms of creative clusters, and to allow the different world views to play off one another. For example, the naturist has a helpful notion of limits (how much an ecosystem can withstand without collapsing), which can readily be combined with the agrarian, which has a helpful notion of husbandry (caring for natural elements so as to supply human necessities).

The economistic may yet bear some fruit, if adapted to a genuinely ecological economy. Princen lists various financial maxims that may prove useful: “Spend within one’s means. Diversify the portfolio. Draw on the interest, not the principal. Balance the budget.”

As for the mechanistic, that is even now being tested and queried – for instance, by extreme weather that exposes the ineffectiveness of flood defences – and so will have to be radically redefined in relation to the other world views.

Such an inclusive, adaptive approach may lead some readers to dismiss Princen’s proposal as all too modest. Yet there are many interesting trails leading off from his paths to ecological order. To cite just one: suggesting that because natural sources have no substitutes, they must be regarded as “ultimate”, he adds: “Spiritually speaking, ultimate sources are sacred. To sacrifice an ultimate resource is a sacrilege. In contrast, to sacrifice the benefits otherwise derived from using up an ultimate source – to refrain from stripping topsoil, from draining an aquifer, from driving an organism to extinction, from opening the ozone layer, all for commercial gain – to sacrifice these benefits is to elevate human action.”

Princen says no more, but it suggests that there may be a fifth world view of the environment available to us, namely the spiritual. Part of the ecological task must surely be to challenge those who would demean nature by honouring the sacred as a remote, transcendent state, quite distinct from the profane, and to promote what Michel Serres calls a religion of the world. Like Sir Perceval, we have to find the right words with which to do it justice. Only now, the crucial question is not “Whom does it serve?” but “How may I serve?” Let us hope that, like him, we succeed in due course.

 Laurence Coupe

The Handbook of Sustainability Literacy: Skills for a Changing World, edited by Arran Stibbe (Green Books, 2009)

Times Higher Education

26 November 2009

In 1933, F.R. Leavis and Denys Thompson’s Culture and Environment: The Training of Critical Awareness was published. Now widely regarded as unpardonably elitist in its assumptions, it was in fact designed for use by schools, teacher training colleges and the Workers’ Educational Association. The idea was to offer a means of resisting the “standardisation” of life caused by mass production and entertainment.

Looking again at the title of Leavis and Thompson’s volume, it is clear that by “environment” they meant two different things. First, they meant the social structure of modern, urban England. This they saw as having suppressed a living culture – the rural way of life that had been expressed most powerfully in the language of William Shakespeare, and the demise of which was documented by writers such as George Sturt, author of Change in the Village (1912) and The Wheelwright’s Shop (1923). Because the worlds of Shakespeare and Sturt were rooted in a way of life that itself had roots in the land, they saw culture as an embodiment of the environment in a second sense: the rhythms of a natural order, manifest in a specific (English) locality.

Turning to The Handbook of Sustainability Literacy, an important collection of essays produced in a situation far more daunting than that faced by Leavis and Thompson, we can still trace some continuity. In his introduction, editor Arran Stibbe addresses the need for people to “become empowered to read society critically”. Moreover, he advocates starting not with the problems that are undermining the ability of the Earth to support human life, but with what has gone wrong with our culture in order for those problems to arise.

What is required is something contributor Stephen Sterling calls “ecological intelligence”: that is, an understanding of the interrelationship of all living things. This is the principle informing Karen Blincoe’s case for “re-educating the person”, and Kate Davies’ model of a “learning society”. If ecological intelligence is to survive and flourish, we need to resist what Stibbe calls, in his essay on advertising, “the pseudo-satisfier discourse” of the contemporary mass media. One stratagem might be the “ecocritical” approach to everyday experience, as persuasively set forth by Greg Garrard.

We are also reminded that the forces that are oppressing nature are simultaneously repressing our humanity. We are exhorted to “find meaning without consuming” (Paul Maiteny), to widen our aesthetics to include natural beauty as a “way of knowing” (Barry Bignell), and to discover new ways of “being-in-the-world” (John Danvers). This last initiative involves regarding the self as “open work”, as process rather than as object. As such, it is continually emerging and merging with “the unfolding communal mind”, itself inseparable from the whole “web of being”. In that sense, we may say that the self makes sense only when it is viewed in the context of a human culture that is tied to a more-than-human nature.

Leavis and Thompson had too limited a view of both these spheres, and reading Danvers’ essay, along with many others in this volume, brings into focus just how far we have to move beyond them. Again, although Leavis and Thompson’s intuition that to promote a way of life that is in touch with the Earth demands critical awareness was sound enough, it has to be understood in a much wider and deeper sense. Sustainability Literacy helps us to do just that, and in doing so equips us to confront the unprecedented challenges to come.

Laurence Coupe

Harriet Ritvo,  The Dawn of Green: Manchester, Thirlmere, and Modern Environmentalism (University of Chicago Press, 2009)

Times Higher Education

12 November 2009

Prior to picking up The Dawn of Green, I had been re-reading Edward Abbey’s novel The Monkey Wrench Gang. First published in 1975, it concerns the activities of four misfits with a shared love of wilderness. They wage a war on behalf of nature by using monkey wrenches to disable any machinery that is being deployed to degrade, pollute or destroy the environment. Having some success in this venture, they decide on their ultimate project: to destroy the Glen Canyon Dam, which Abbey believed had had disastrous consequences for the Colorado River and its surrounding ecosystem. Abbey, the self-styled “desert anarchist”, wanted the novel to have an impact on global environmentalism, even though in the real world, Glen Canyon was a lost cause. But he was not disappointed. Four years after the novel appeared, a group of “wilderness warriors” called Earth First! was founded with the express aim of realising his dream of direct action: that is, violence against the machine but not against people. It is still going strong.

After such excitement, the case scrupulously documented by the historian Harriet Ritvo in her new book may seem very tame, and even irrelevant. In 1875, the Waterworks Committee of Manchester planned to transform Thirlmere, a lake in Cumberland, into a reservoir, thereby ensuring a plentiful supply of clean water for Mancunians. News of the plan led to the formation of the Thirlmere Defence Association, a highly respectable body comprising landowners, small farmers, residents, regular visitors and journalists. The association failed, the work was undertaken (after a series of delays) and, by 1894, the reservoir was functioning.

There were no crazy activists involved, there was no sabotage and there was no positive outcome. So why should we be interested? One good reason is the quality that may initially seem unpromising: Ritvo’s attention to detail. Her book conveys in vividly minute particulars how difficult and frustrating the campaign must have been, and how divided the campaigners were in their loyalties. Without such detail, lessons cannot be learnt. Nor is documentation allowed to obscure the larger picture. Ritvo shows the whole business to be, in contrary ways, representative of its times: “if Manchester was the icon of the Victorian future, the Lake District was the icon of nature, poetry and heritage”.

It was in the spirit of the poet William Wordsworth that the Victorian cultural critic John Ruskin spoke out passionately against the Thirlmere scheme. Inspired by both, Canon H.D. Rawnsley took a leading role in the Thirlmere Defence Association. He found, in the end, that compromise was the only answer – coaxing concessions to the environment from the committee here and there – but it was his experience of this campaign that prompted him to go on to help found the National Trust in 1895. All this material is clearly and carefully narrated here, with the added interest of copious illustrations.

But what of the wider significance of Ritvo’s painstaking scholarship? In her penultimate chapter, she informs us that, in the first decade of the 20th century, the city planners of San Francisco designated the spectacular Hetch Hetchy Valley as the site of the city’s future water supply. The fact that the valley was part of the Yosemite National Park did not deter them. To counter a well-orchestrated protest campaign, the planners turned to Manchester for advice. The advice worked, and the project was completed. As Ritvo remarks: “The defenders of Thirlmere … never stood a chance, and the same was true of the defenders of Hetch Hetchy Valley.”

I began reading this book with the assumption that Edward Abbey would have thought life too short to bother with it. But I ended it by reflecting that he may well have read it carefully, resolved to learn its sombre, scholarly lesson – and then renewed the struggle more vigorously than ever.

Laurence Coupe

Terry Eagleton,  Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (Yale University Press, 2009)

Times Higher Education

10 September 2009

With this witty and polemical book, Terry Eagleton finally fulfils the promise of his early years as a left-wing Catholic. Here at last is his defence of Christianity as a radical movement comparable to, and compatible with, Marxism. It is prompted by his sense of outrage at the arrogant pronouncements on religion made by those self-appointed guardians of rationality, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, whose names he satirically conflates into one entity, “Ditchkins”.

Ditchkins believes that religion is infantile, superstitious nonsense that deserves no respect because it provides a false explanation of the world. In doing so, Ditchkins declares himself to be nothing more than a throwback to the 19th-century school of liberal rationalism and, beyond that, the Enlightenment.

He still has not woken up to the fact that scripture is not the same sort of thing as a scientific treatise. Thus, Ditchkins – here, specifically, Hitchens – claims that “thanks to the telescope and the microscope, (religion) no longer offers an explanation of anything important”.

This is risible enough as it stands, but Eagleton was never one to resist a humorous analogy: “Christianity was never meant to be an explanation of anything in the first place. It is rather like saying that thanks to the electric toaster we can forget about Chekhov.”

So much for the “reason” in the book’s title. What about the faith? The very conviction that reason offers all the answers is itself a matter of belief, persuasion … and faith. For we are dealing with a language that is “performative rather than propositional”, and that goes for liberal rationalists in their colleges as much as for devout believers in their churches.

While religious piety can escalate into fanaticism, so too can the secular fetish of pure reason. Here theology has a distinct advantage: reason, for St Thomas Aquinas, is inseparable from ethical commitment, from communal responsibility, from fellow-feeling – in short, from “love”.

And so we come, in a roundabout way, to the third term in the book’s title: revolution. What Eagleton’s reading of the Gospels tells him is that we should not be anticipating the Messianic kingdom (Jesus himself refused to play the expected role of Messiah), any more than the forcible and final establishment of a classless society. Rather, we should be following Jesus’ example in identifying with the poor and the persecuted, trying to ensure that there is no more exploitation, hunger, war or torture.

Eschewing violence himself, Eagleton cannot avoid addressing the atrocities carried out in the name of Islam. What he concludes is this: “The solution to religious terror is secular justice.” Here he might seem to hover around a contradiction, since he could be read as giving succour to those who say that the Enlightenment would be acceptable if only it had worked. In this connection, he is not apologetic enough for my liking about Karl Marx himself, who notoriously praised capitalism for its rapid process of industrialisation because it fitted into his own progressive scheme.

That said, it is reassuring to see Eagleton conclude his book with a brief defence of the “tragic humanism” that he sees as the necessary alternative to the absurdly confident “liberal humanism” of Ditchkins.

Moreover, as someone who agrees with Michel Serres that what we need is an ecologically informed “religion of the world”, I am particularly pleased to see Eagleton express more than once his concern about the damage that humanity is doing to nature in the name of progress.

Perhaps in his next book, we may see him espouse a politics that is as much green as red, and a theology based not only on Aquinas but also on St Francis of Assisi and Hildegard of Bingen.

Laurence Coupe