I 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 inuence 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 reections), 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.
It is hard to describe the connection that could sometimes arise between John, supposedly an atheist (give me an honest atheist any day over someone who subscribes to amorphous “spirituality”), and this master’s student, me, at the time on the way to becoming a Catholic. It was, on the most obvious level, our mutual delight in nature and rejection of utilitarian ethics (e.g. as expressed in thinking of nature as a “resource”). Love casts out utilitarianism as well as fear. And in fact, there was an almost lightning-like something that passed between him and those with whom he was present. Call it discernment, call it perception, call it intuition, there was something transcendent about it.
John could be intimidating in his outspokenness and his impatience with rationalization. But his apparent abruptness was in fact a manifestation of awareness and sensitivity. For instance, when I was undergoing a personal crisis, I recall how present he was to me in his gruff, wild way. His response was absolutely free of political correctness and completely authentic. This is what the man was like. It is absurd to say that he did not care about people, only about nature. What he did see was that the destruction of nature by our greed and arrogance was evil – a fact that mainstream liberal environmentalists tend to sidestep.
Livingston’s own words illustrate that no ethic, no analysis, can have any worth whatsoever, except when rooted in the primacy of being:
…I found myself at 2:30 in the morning on a vast moonlit beach watching a seven-foot-long leatherback sea turtle dig a deep pit in the loose sand, lay forty-two eggs in it, cover the nest, and laboriously make her way back into the shimmering South China Sea… She remained on the surface for several moments, possibly to catch her breath. In those moments, as gentle ripples broke soundlessly over the gigantic carapace, now wetly silver in the moonlight, my universe was no longer mine alone. It was ours. With the leatherback turtle, I slipped beneath the smooth surface of the sea… As the ceaseless cycle turns, universe without end, life without beginning, pulse without destiny, form without function, love without self, circling among unknown stars, we are once again in touch… The group of which I was part had moved a little distance down the beach to watch another leatherback going through the same ancient procedures. Though I too watched the second one, there was really no need to, and I knew it. All had been accomplished and incorporated – finally and forever – already.
It is precisely in this that John Livingston manifested what the ancients called the spiritual intellect – universal to the human race, the faculty by which, as Hans Urs von Balthasar wrote, “every flower we see is an expression, every landscape has its significance, every human or animal face speaks its wordless language. It would be utterly futile to attempt a transposition of this language into concepts… This expressive language is addressed primarily, not to conceptual thought, but to the kind of intelligence that perceptively reads the gestalt of things.” It is here, and not in cleverness or technological mastery that the meaning of man being made in the image of God is revealed. Stratford Caldecott elaborates: “[this] intelligence… sees the meaning in things… reads them as symbols – symbols, not of something else, but of themselves as they stand in God… A thing can be known only when it draws us out of ourselves, when we grasp it in its otherness from ourselves, in the meaning, which it possesses as beauty, uniting truth and goodness… It is an encounter with the Other which takes the heart out of itself and places it in another centre, which is ultimately the very centre of being, where all things are received from God.”
The West, at least since the sixteenth century, has often fallen prey to a kind of unhealthy compartmentalization in which the vision of all things being oriented toward divine love has been lost. May John enter into that glory and there help us to recover the sacramental sense of the cosmos, which we as Church so desperately need.
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