I just finished an article given to me by a third level Eden colleague, Tommi Boeder. It's written by the late Lynn White, Jr., a scholar of medieval and Renaissance thought and former professor at Princeton University, and is entitled "The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis." (Applied Ethics, 155-162) White roots the attitudes that led to our environmental crisis first with the Jewish myth of Creation, found in Genesis 1, and then with the interpretation and appropriation of that myth in combination with the beginnings of scientific thought in the Middle Ages.
On the one hand, one could argue that Genesis 1 and its affirmation that all things (including humans) are created by God and are Good is beneficial for the environmental cause (as I did, in fact, argue in a previous post). On the other hand, the often problematic translation of the Hebrew word "radah" - to have dominion over, or to 'scrape out' as in hoe, plow, till - leads medieval theologians (and many of those before and after) to conclude that humans are at the top rung of creational hierarchy. Nature subjugated to humanity instead of humanity subjugated to nature as in many other primitive myths of creation (Gonzalez, Justo. A Concise History of Christian Doctrine. p. 36)
White traces modern science and technology - the major perpetrators (and the whistle blowers) of global warming - to medieval thought. Gonzalez (see above) goes so far as to trace science to Thomas Aquinas, my esteemed conversation partner in this project (47). Much of this shift to 'scientific thought' in medieval Christianity occurs with the acquisition of Islamic texts on the disciplines of math, medicine, and their translations of Aristotle. In addition to having access to this scholarship (most of which was far superior to its Greek counterparts), medieval theologians were in the thick of some advances that put humans in control of nature instead of vice versa. In the late 7th century, northern European peasants had developed a new plowing technology that, rather than just scraping the upper layer of sod, actually turned the earth over. It doesn't seem like much of an advance until one considers that the earlier plow only required two oxen and limited the size of a farm to what was necessary to provide for a single family while this new invention required eight oxen (a number no single peasant would have been able to maintain) and enlarged the farm to a size that provided for multiple families. Not only was the plot enlarged and the friction and violence of the plow increased, but the division of the shares was now shifted from provision for each family to proportional harvest to each farmer according to his contribution to the labor (and livestock) required to work the larger field. So, we see not only a shift in the domination of the environment but also a system that rewards those who have more and penalizes those who have less. (White, 157)
Within this context, medieval theologians such as Aquinas develop the idea that creation can be studied as an exercise that reveals God's own intentions (Gonzalez, 47; White, 160). As White states, natural theology "was ceasing to be the decoding of the physical symbols of God's communication with man and was becoming the effort to understand God's mind by discovering how (God's) creation operates," thus, "Western science was cast in a matrix of Christian theology." If creation is Good, then surely the study (and consequent manipulation)of creation must also be Good. This is the slippery slope that will eventually lead to our current crisis. It is said that the road to Hell is paved with Good Intentions.
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