The Human Factor: Our Natures, Ourselves

It’s hardly surprising that a sentient species such as ours would be attentive to its immediate environment. Nor is the extension of that immediacy to the planet overall difficult to understand: mankind has always been interested in nature for both practical and aesthetic reasons. It follows that the broad effort toward scientific explanation of the impact of people and systems on nature has supported what has become a global environmental movement, at least conceptually. And not only conceptually, because there have been repeated gatherings of concerned leaders intent on responding to current and future problems associated with environmental impact, such as warming trends and sea levels. Perhaps not since the Communist International has there been such a self-conscious and comprehensive effort to accomplish large-scale goals.

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The matter is global and local. Students with clipboards on summer break stop pedestrians and ask if they have “ten minutes for the environment.” Chemical and oil companies spend heavily on advertisements affirming their squeaky-clean or pollution-reduced environmental signatures. I personally witnessed the heiress of a smelly industrial drug company refuse to eat an oyster after she considered the “carbon footprint” of this legless shell brought from across the continent. An English judge has ruled that environmentalism is a religion and supported a plaintiff who charged that his employer violated his system of belief by failing to provide exemplary environmentalism in the workplace.

The cause has attracted traditional politicians such as Al Gore and those honed under other quite different regimes, such as Germany’s Daniel Cohn-Bendit (“Danny the Red”) of l968 fame and Jose Bove, the accomplished bulldozer of a French McDonald’s outlet. They turned the 1.3 percent of the vote that the French Green Party won in 2007 into the 16.3 percent that the new Europe Écologie Party claimed in the European Parliamentary election—just a shade less than the total percentage won by the venerable Socialist Party.

This is all very interesting and may or may not lead to the results to which so much assertion and governmental rearrangements have been directed.

But an unasked question remains: why has physical nature become such a salient factor in the public debate, while human behavioral nature has not? Is there no human nature worth protecting as zealously as the physical? It is broadly agreed, for instance, that certain levels of ambient atmospheric lead are clearly damaging to physical health. Are there no equivalent behavioral toxicities that should generate equivalent alarm, and lead to the scale of purposeful remedial action underlying the sharp reduction of lead in gasoline and paint? Is it so much more difficult to identify miserable thwarted behavior than polluted air?

Lionel Tiger is the Charles Darwin Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University. His new book, God’s Brain, coauthored with Michael McGuire, will be published this spring.