Tag Archives: White

Research Example #2 (Lynn White’s Mastery-Over-Nature)

White, L. (1967). The historical roots of our ecological crisis. Science 155(3767), 1203-1207.

Hand, C., Van Liere, K. (1984). Religion, mastery-over-nature, and environmental concern. Social Forces 63(2), 555-570.

_________________________________________________________________________

White makes the very bold claim that religion is not only connected to the environment,  but that it is the cause of environmental degradation in the United States.

This is a weird research article because it is written like a story.  Many articles do not even put themselves in the article, but talk passively about the research done. It is nice to have a better amount of understanding in this article, but it opens with an anecdote about White talking to his friend about rabbits.

Then White goes into a synopsis of science and technology in the Western world. Two pages in and he has yet to bring up religion and has only touched on environmental problems, although he did say that the environment certainly is being majorly influenced by humans. He has an extremely detailed quick view of science through the ages, starting in the Middle Ages. He follows as first Islamic countries and then Europe takes the lead in science.

Because of science and improvements in technology, says White, one of the first events that separated man from nature was the improvement of the plow. No longer was man a part of nature, rather man was a creature that could rule over nature.

However, the most known and quoted part of this paper is the second half which talks about what Christianity has to do with all of this. White calls Christianity a very anthropocentric religion that separates humans from nature by saying that we are made in God’s image. White even says that it  Christianity calls it “God’s will” to exploit nature. Worse off, this view replaced the religion of animism, which saw a spirit that needed to be accounted for when dealing with nature.

A point White does say is that this form of environmentally-degrading Christianity is not inherent totally in the religion, rather it seems to be the result of Western attitude, technology, and the Christian religion which brings the environment to its doom.

Another downfall of this article is that there is no data collection of any sort, which does not exactly make it proper research. Luckily, this paper was so controversial that research was actually done on this after it was written. One of the first research projects done was by Hand and Van Liere who used a mail survey to collect data from Washington State residents. Their survey was taken by 806 households and was analyzed for correlation. The results found that there does seem to be a mastery-over-nature attitude with some Judeo-Christian denominations, but there was not an extremely high correlation.

So, although there was not any research data taken for White’s shocking statement saying Western Christianity is the cause of an ever deteriorating natural environment, Hand and Van Liere (as well as others) have tested it and at least found a slight correlation between Christianity and mastery-over-nature.