Reclaiming our environmental imagination | Charlie Goulbourne

   In a matter of decades, green politics has been transformed from the niche interest of a few self-proclaimed outsiders to a defining issue of our time. Last year, for the first time, environmental protection was second only to the economy in the American public’s top political priorities.  

   Exactly how this happened is not perfectly clear. In my previous article I argue that our current environmental establishment is little more than a manifestation of a much older liberal order, however there is also something to be said for the radical green politics that emerged in the early eighties. The political-environmental synthesis created by a small sect of German social justice activists has come to define the progressive approach to political activism that we have become all too familiar with. 

   However, there is a paradox at the heart of the rise of modern environmentalism. It has been precisely accompanied by an increasing disconnect from the nature it claims to protect.

   The EPA estimates that the average American spends only 7% of their life outdoors. The story across Europe is almost identical – more time spent shut away in offices and schools and the little time we do spend in the fresh air is enjoyed only by a small subset of the population. This departure from the great outdoors has been most starkly felt by our youngest generations. Over eighty percent of children in the UK are unable to recognise bumblebees or oak leaves, no surprise when they spend over six hours each day looking at a screen. 

   However, our youngest generations also claim to be our most environmentally aware with over eight in ten children expressing a desire to do more to protect the environment. How exactly are we expecting them to responsibly inherit the ever-growing task of ecological restoration if they do not even know what a nettle looks like? It should be cause for concern that nature is so foreign to our future environmental activists.

   I would be willing to make a safe bet that if the reader were to volunteer for a local conservation group, you would find no man or women under the age of forty working alongside you. For all the noise my generation makes, when charged to be good stewards of creation, we walk away.

   Proponents of a liberal environmental revival cannot help but to appeal only to empirical utility to correct this. We too must expound these facts, yet if we refuse to think beyond them, we are at risk of jeopardising any hope of a greener future. We do not go on long walks on crisp Sunday mornings with the sole intention of reducing our risk of heart disease or releasing some serotonin. If this soulless calculated reward is presented as the primary benefit of spending time in our countryside, I cannot blame people for staying in their warm beds. As Sir Roger Scruton tirelessly warned us; that which is only valued for its utility will soon become useless. 

   Their progressive counterparts have a wildly different but equally doomed answer. They propose a radical environmentalism that is centred on an animistic veneration of biodiversity itself, as containing transcendent intrinsic value, and they therefore condemn human existence as parasitism on some new-age mother earth. Such a spiritually rootless and overtly misanthropic philosophy should have been rejected before it could ever establish itself in the panicked thought of impressionable youth.

   Both approaches are reflected today in the aimless and destructive nature of so many young environmentalists. Their protests are empty of any care for true stewardship and instead they seek to redirect all authority over our environment to the increasingly radicalised scientific establishment. They have no loyalty to the environment that surrounds them for they have never shared in its wondrous nature. If the natural concern young people have for our ailing environment is going to be directed towards culturing dutiful stewards, then we must turn to our own heritage.

“We are losing the attitude of wonder, of contemplation, of listening to creation. The implications of living in a horizontal manner is that we have moved away from God, we longer read his signs”. - Pope Francis, World Environment Day, 2015.

   The horizontal manner to which the Pope referred was lamented by his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, as the reduction of life to only one dimension of almost complete superficiality. Our experiences with creation shatter this superficiality effortlessly and inspire an interior intimacy that not only betters our character but provides us more profound reason to conserve our environment.

   Orthodox Conservatives’ Ojel Rodriguez recently argued for the ancient form of liberal education that orientates man towards freedom and virtue. Likewise, it is the cultivation of a healthy imagination that takes place in our natural surroundings that orients man towards stewardship.

   Our approach must be simple. To gently encourage children to do what they do without prompt- to explore their small patch of earth with its lonely woods and tranquil brooks, to discover and to cultivate their interior life in mirthful play here and not through the empty world that is on the other side of our phones. This is not revolutionary thinking, it is simply ordinary, wholesome fun. Imagination is our most natural of faculties and it simply requires a life that has not been neutered with the ever-indoor mass entertainment and technology in order to assert itself.

   The great Anglican metaphysical poet Henry Vaughan captures the essence that our encounter with the beauty of nature imparts into our imagination in the first stanza of his poem Religion:

“My God, when I walk in those groves,

And leaves thy spirit doth still fan,

I see in each shade that there grows

An angel talking with a man.”

   We too find this natural wonder in the books and tales that children are no longer told in our schools. Our most beloved children’s story, The Chronicles of Narnia, still remains firmly rooted in my imagination today. When the lion Aslan founds the realm of Narnia he imbues his own mysterious and wonderful essence into all of creation, saying "Narnia, Narnia, Narnia, awake. Love. Think. Speak. Be walking trees. Be talking beasts. Be divine waters." The innocent awe that this inspired in me has been denied to so many in deference to the twisted uttering of the White Witch, “The weight of the world is on our shoulders. We must be freed from all rules. Ours is a high and lonely destiny.” 

“Fairy tales and folk tales are for children and childlike people, not because they are little and inconsequential, but because they are as enormous as life itself.” - Anthony Esolen, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child.

   Perhaps we would be wise to reconsider the purpose of our ‘comprehensive’ education system. I would make the humble policy suggestion of requiring the telling of our most enduring tales in our primary school classrooms. There is simply no excuse for a society with the richest literary history that has ever been, to throw it all away and then wonder why we feel so detached from our natural and cultural surroundings.

   Secondly, outdoor education, not just physical education, must become an integral part of the national curriculum. Whether it is tending to a small allotment in the inner-city or foraging for wood sorrel and pignut in an ancient woodland, children must be allowed to forget themselves, to escape the dreary confines of the classroom once a week to nurture their imagination in the nature from which they have been shut off. For all the fuss we make about creating new green spaces and nature reserves, we seem intent that they will remain empty.

   The interdependence of natural and moral ecology must not be underestimated, they have fallen together and will rise together. We must seek to impart moral wisdom steeped in our traditions and faith and to revive our relationship with the natural world in which these mysteries can be explored. It is only in this mature imagination that this creates, that the faithful stewardship of nature, both our own and that of our environment, can be achieved. 

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