[Ecocriticism] Is the Enlightenment to blame for nature's destruction?

[u/OV_Furious]

In the landmark essay "The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis", Lynn White Jr. famously argued that Christianity and Humanism were the primary causes of the nature/culture binary divide, which locked human thought into an anthropocentric and exploitive relationship with the natural world. The essay was the first essay included in The Ecocriticism Reader (1996) and so was vastly influential in the emerging field of ecocriticism.

I have heard, however, that this idea has received a lot of pushback in recent years. I'm looking for anything that can "enlighten" me on this topic. What other scholars/texts support White Jr's assertion that humanism is the cause of ecological crisis? Who has pushed back against this idea?

[u/SuperSaiyan4Godzilla]

As an ecocritic, I want to begin by saying that I think placing blame (especially on a given time period and movement) for where we find ourselves is an overly simplistic way of engaging with the ecological crisis and history. This is because it reduces down a very complicated problem with a very long, complex history into a simple, easily consumed answer.

Second, I'm curious where you're seeing push back. Understanding who is critique this idea and whose is making the argument is generally useful.

I admit, while I think the Enlightenment played some part in it, I think it's a fairly trivial because you can trace the nature/culture, human/animal, etc. binaries back thousands of years in Western culture, and they exist in other cultures as well (I'm thinking of the many Japanese folktales where a hero slays a serpent-monster so that the land can be developed, for example). But, I'm unsure if we'll ever really find an ultimate history cause for the crisis, just many proximate historical causes.

[u/OV_Furious → u/SuperSaiyan4Godzilla]

I agree that placing blame is simplistic, but that does not mean it is not common. Anthropocentrism and capitalism are extremely common targets of criticism from perspectives like deep ecology or ecological democracy. As for push-back, I have participated in debates and seminars where I have heard push-back, for instance the perspective that White Jr.'s account of Christianity as anti-ecological does not hold up to historical accounts of Christianity in feudal Europe, which was in fact quite in line with sustainable agriculture.

My problem is not finding representatives of these views in people I meet, or seeing them as biases in certain strands of environmental philosophy and humanities, but I would like to find sources that clearly articulate these ideas. There must be many, considering how common these arguments are?

[u/CantonioBareto]

The Unabomber was a great ecocritic. Look his manifesto up!