Chapter 7 leads off this section of the book, which emphasizes the ideal factors in the ecological dialogue. Throughout the section, the text returns to material factors, showing their dialogic interaction with the ideal. For many of you, much of this section will be more difficult than the earlier chapters, as discussions of the ideal are necessarily more abstract. In order to ease you gradually into these more abstract topics, the chapters in the section are arranged in order of increasing conceptual difficulty.

This first chapter in the section investigates the social origins of Western ideologies that encourage domination of the environment, focusing on three intellectual traditions:

Christianity;
Individualism; and,
Patriarchy.

The discussion of the Christian tradition begins with the environmental implications of Max Weber’s theory of the Protestant roots of the moral ideals of hard work and ascetic denial, which intertwines Protestantism and Capitalism. Next the chapter takes up Lynn White’s argument that the Christian notion that God is transcendent over nature, rather than immanent in nature as Pagans had believed, made domination of the environment easier to contemplate. However, the Judeo-Christian tradition also has a theme of stewardship, as in the tale of Noah’s ark, indicating that Christianity alone cannot be the source of domineering attitudes toward the environment. Indeed, as the chapter goes on to describe, non-Western traditions such as Taoism may be less domineering in tone, but that has not prevented non-Western peoples from engaging in substantial transformation of the environment.

The second intellectual tradition, individualism, is illustrated through the work of the Russian social theorist Mikhail Bakhtin on Western attitudes toward the body and the self. Bakhtin argues that the conception of a classical body of separation has overtaken the conception of a carnivalesque body of connection, reinforcing hierarchy, individualism, and a sense of difference from nature. The chapter argues that the rise of environmentalism may, in part, represent a return to a more carnivalesque or ecological conception of the body. Bakhtin’s work also invites the reader into a more constructionist take on the body, which helps balance the more materialist take on the body in the previous chapter.

The chapter then examines the ecology of patriarchy, introducing ecofeminist critiques of the patriarchal dualisms that reinforce gender hierarchy, social inequality, and a similarly hierarchical and unequal attitude toward the environment. This is exemplified in the Gulf Oil crisis. The chapter discusses empirical evidence of gender differences in attitudes toward the environment and the controversy over whether or not ecofeminism presents an essentialist account of the ecology of patriarchy. The chapter concludes by drawing parallels between the environmental consequences of Christianity, individualism, and patriarchy, noting that issues of inequality run through all three of these ideologies.