the New Pantagruel

John A. Livingston, Requiescat In Pace

by Gavin C. Miller

The Primacy of Being in Ecological Thought

recently learned from a colleague about the passing of Canadian naturalist John Livingston on January 17, 2006 at the age of eighty-two. He was at his home on Saltspring Island in British Columbia in the company of his dogs. I have to say that in the strange ways of Providence, he was a formative inuence on me.

Livingston is perhaps best known for his television programmes from the 1960s to 1980s such as The Nature of Things and A Planet for the Taking, and for his books on natural history and the ecological crisis. But it was in a more direct and personal context that I knew him.

In the late 1980s, John was a professor of environmental studies at York University in Toronto. At the time, I took my master’s degree there and chose him, together with Neil Evernden, as one of my advisors.

The concern of these two men was to struggle with “environmental thought.” Essentially, this is philosophy applied to ecological concerns. Their project sought to uncover the roots of human destructiveness towards nature and to somehow, by awakening us to being, undo that evil from within.

Livingston helped introduce me to the reality that the ecological crisis is first and foremost a metaphysical crisis. While most people concerned with it were and are preoccupied with finding “solutions” and, even more to the point, attempting to justify their conservation efforts by appealing to potential benefits to us, Livingston insisted that nature was worth protecting for its own sake, regardless of its utility. It is good because it exists. Being and goodness are equated. To think of nature primarily as a “resource” is a kind of sin against being. This essential insight must never be forgotten when thinking about the intersection of conservation, philosophy, religion, and modernity.

Livingston was a passionate man – he freely expressed his disgust toward much of the human enterprise: particularly towards technology and the managerial mindset common to both business and government. Such procedures as “environmental impact assessment” and “resource conservation” he considered abominations. Humanism was his term for the absolute sense of entitlement man has and all the beliefs that justify it. He defined humanism as “the ideology of the necessary primacy of the human enterprise” coupled with “the customary infallibility of reason.” Christianity and secularism were for him both forms of humanism. He considered Christianity a form of humanism because he saw it placing the human person at the pinnacle of creation with dominion over the earth. Secularism he saw as a form of humanism because it places all its hope on human reason in a meaningless world. In such a world, the best we can do is to promote our material interests, and nothing else matters much. There can be no restraints whatsoever to the advance of industrialism in this view.

When I was doing my master’s degree, it was John Livingston who invited me to review the Jesuit palaeontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin for my major paper (essentially a thesis). For Livingston, the New Age movement, inspired in a significant degree by Chardin, was yet another form of humanism, and perhaps the most devastating kind, for it spoke of no limits. What I discovered was fascinating – Chardin’s almost absolute identification of spiritual advancement with technological mastery (at least in his evolutionary reections), his replacement of providence by progress, and the profundity of his (relatively few) critics. The critics were a motley assortment of “deep ecologists” (such as Livingston himself) and religious scholars ranging from Jacques Maritain and Ivan Illich to a Sufi called Seyyed Hossein Nasr.

As might be expected, Livingston exemplified some of the preoccupations of the environmental movement in its most radical form. Some of what he says in such books as Rogue Primate (1994) could be simply seen as a misanthropic rant loaded with Malthusian ideas . And one could rightly critique that. There is certainly a place for critical examination of the ecological movement’s thinking, but I will not do this now in remembering John Livingston. The charge that “environmentalists see nothing special about the human person” – that we are just another species thrown up randomly by evolution, could indeed be applied to him, but we have to be careful. Too often such issues become red herrings used in order to avoid thinking about what naturalists are calling our attention to. In this case it is our assault on beauty. I can only say that a) in our fallen world, profound spiritual intuition can coexist with confused and even crazy ideas (perhaps, as Jacques Maritain hinted, Teilhard was an example of this phenomenon); and b) I want to focus on John now as I knew him.

All Pages | 1 |  2