D.H. Lawrence and Environmental Consciousness

Abstract

A belief in the superiority of our species to non-human nature and our right to manipulate it has deep roots in the Western intellectual tradition; it can be found in the earliest Judeo-Christian scripture and it is one of the basic tenets of humanistic philosophy. Yet there exist within that tradition the beginnings of an alternative worldview that acknowledges environmental realities and questions or contradicts the prevailing belief in the rightness of man's attempts to dominate nature through technology. It was evident in embryonic form in the Romantic movement of the nineteenth century; but although the Romantics valued sometimes even worshipped external nature, their emphasis was almost always on the needs and aspirations of To writers like Wordsworth, Emerson, and even Thoreau, untouched nature offered a haven from the growing distastefulness of industrial civilization or a medium for the pursuit of spiritual truth. Although the Romantics did not endorse the outright material exploitation of nature, they still looked upon it primarily in terms of its potential human utility. Some later imaginative writers, however, have called anthropocentric and humanistic assumptions sharply into question. Robinson Jeffers proposed a philosophy of inhumanism, a shifting of emphasis from man to not man. Such a shift is evident in the thought of a number of twentieth-century writers, among whom D. H. Lawrence was both the first and the most prominent. In referring to the strain of thought about the human relationship to nature that characterizes not only Lawrence's work but also that of writers like William Carlos Williams, Aldous Huxley, Jeffers, Kenneth Rexroth, Ted Hughes, and Gary Snyder, I prefer to use the term post-humanism. Jeffers, in his inhumanism, celebrates the non-human but often characterizes homo sapiens as a disastrous evolutionary mistake. Lawrence and the other modern writers who in a sense are his followers in the development of a new environmental consciousness celebrate the whole of life, and recognize human potential for creative rather than destructive participation in it. Lawrence's post-humanism looks at the human species as part of a larger living whole, valuing that whole in its complexity and integrity. Post-humanism values all living things and the inorganic environment on which they depend, recognizing that all life and the conditions that sustain life are interrelated. It asserts that man can be, if he abandons his anthropocentric assumptions, a contributor to, rather than the destroyer of, the pattern of nature. 359