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N . J . Sl a b b e rt

Charles A. Reich: Technology, History, and the Greening of America The greening of America has been a recurrent refrain in the mass media in recent years. On April 25, a Washington Post story about tree-planting programs made the headlines. Before that, this subject had headed articles in publications including Forbes magazine and the British Observer. “The Greening of America’s Youth” was the title of an

Pa i n t i n g : Da n i e l D u f f y / p h o t o : R o b e r t L i s a k / Ya l e U n i v e r s i t y

A popular philosophical manifesto of the 1960s sheds unexpected light on the psychology of the U.S. environmental movement.

April 2007 NBC television feature. On January 8, 2006, the New York Times published “The Greening of America’s Campuses,” a piece on the increasing desire of colleges to establish their environmentally correct credentials. Greening America is also a Falls Church, Virginia–based nonprofit organization that has promoted energy conservation and sustainable design in campaigns 156

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with sponsors that have included the U.S. Department of Energy. All these titles echo, consciously or not, one of the most controversial bestsellers of the 1960s, The Greening of America, by Charles A. Reich. Reich’s work is surrounded by ironies. Its title has become a catchphrase of the environmental movement, yet ecological issues received minor reference in it. It was concerned largely with social and cultural changes for which environmentalism was at best a symbol, yet its themes are highly relevant to the intellectual history and present state of ecological discussion. It reported a historical shift that proved to be nonexistent, yet aspects of that shift may well have to be incorporated into 21st-century society, albeit in forms unexpected by its author. At the heart of these ironies is the meaning of the 1960s for America—a time that continues to cast its shadow over the baby boomers who came to intellectual maturity in those years. Reich was born in New York City in 1928. He attended Yale, where he was editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal, served as clerk to Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, worked for a law firm founded by Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas, and then returned to Yale in 1960 to teach law, eventually becoming a tenured full professor. He published many scholarly legal articles, including “The New Property” (1964), listed in 1991 as the Yale Law Journal’s most cited article. By 1966, the scope of his intellectual interests had evolved beyond the narrow confines of legal scholarship to encompass a broader view of social issues, and he started conducting a course titled “The Individual in America” in which contemporary society was discussed and class texts included works of fiction and sociology.

Extracts from Greening were initially published by The New Yorker. Reich skyrocketed to celebrity, and when the book was published, it rose to number one on the New York Times bestseller list. As a literary work, Greening belongs to the tradition of apocalyptic, philosophical history for a general audience—a genre that includes Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West (1918–1923). This genre appeals to readers seeking a grand diagnosis of the ills of their time and a map into the future informed by sweeping historical vision. Reich delivered a product that met this audience’s need. He postulated three phases of American national awareness, the first of which he called “Consciousness I.” This was the culture of 19th-century America. He then described a contemporary America that he believed was undergoing a massive, traumatic change from a materialistic, technologydriven, corporate-governed social consciousness—“Consciousness 2”—to a more spiritually enlightened, community-driven society dedicated to moral principles, or “Consciousness 3.” This was represented by the 1960s counterculture, as embraced by college students during that period. Because much of today’s leadership comes from that generation of students, the illustrative value of greening as a historical document is that it provides a window on the philosophical background of many current policy makers. A better knowledge of this background can enhance the understanding that we bring to current policy debate. Greening is conspicuously a book of the counterculture revolution of the 1960s, when the prevailing culture of the 1950s came under concerted attack from dissidents and social critics, creating a climate

of social change that was enormously exciting to young people. It manifested itself in popular culture in numerous ways, from new styles in popular music and comic books to different modes of dress. Every generation expresses itself afresh in its visible artifacts, but behind the fashions and mannerisms of the 1960s was a deeper cultural ferment, portending more serious cracks in the established body of beliefs that had dominated through the Eisenhower presidency. In fact, “the establishment” became a pejorative term that summed up a wide-ranging discontent with customary social habits. This discontent was evident internationally and took different forms in various countries, although with common themes. In the United States, rebellion against conventions of parental authority and sexual conduct was mirrored by reaction against U.S. military policy in Vietnam and conventional thinking about patriotism, gender stereotypes, race relations, civil rights, recreational drugs, the quest for material possessions, the respect due to mainstream religions, and the fundamental rightness of the American way of life as distinct from, for example, communist societies or those governed by non-Western faiths. In the counterculture that emerged, all of these tropisms interlocked in ideological opposition to the entrenched values of upward social mobility and conformist suburbia that had seemed to define middleclass America after World War II. In this furnace of contrarian ideas Greening was written. Where it spoke of environmentalism, it was not that of the relatively conventional persona of the science writer and civil servant Rachel Carson, but instead a creed strongly aligned with the overall iconoclastic currents of the 1960s, and especially with the notion that a higher moral wisdom could be found by overturning the existing order of society. While some

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elements of the counterculture movement were attracted to the drama of revolutionary subversion through civil disorder, the highly visible and vocal hippie subculture gravitated around a call to return America to a simpler, more contemplative way of life, free of cutthroat competitiveness, and less dependent on industrial contrivances. The tranquility of rural imagery was a favored rhetorical device in the songs, poetic writings, and slogans of this constituency. The spiritually superior was equated with the natural. Flowers, the wind, and grass became symbols of emancipation and enlightenment, and “Flower Power” became a catchword of the day, with a return to nature serving as a metaphor for other kinds of social transformation. Greening tapped effectively into this milieu. Reich wrote that rebellious college students, giving voice to America’s new consciousness, had “emerged out of the wasteland of the corporate state, like flowers pushing up through the concrete pavement.” By linking environmentalism even faintly to the idealism, optimism, and energy of the 1960s, and to that decade’s exhilarating sense of excitement about the capacity of societies to reinvent themselves, to undo evils, and to breathe fresh air into stale mindsets, it might be argued that Reich did environmentalism a service, securing for it a compartment on a fast-moving cultural train. To the extent that contemporary environmentalism in America is linked to a sense of national renewal, this link can be traced back to the 1960s and to the voice Reich gave it. Yet, that voice also embodied grave errors that are worth examining, not so much for a critique of Reich, after all these years, as for what they say about the environmental thought that succeeded him and that was rooted in the general culture that Greening vividly represented. One such mistake was to

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encourage environmental education as a useful metaphor to describe a larger social agenda rather than as an end in itself, of the highest priority. Although Reich incorporated environmentalism in his call for change, he also in a sense trivialized it by making it no more, really, than a romantic badge for his crusade. A second mistake occurred when, driven by a passionate desire to usher in a new wave of thought, Reich assumed the roles both of reporter and prophet. On the one hand, he described the belief system of the new America that he saw was coming. On the other hand, he maintained that this ecological and sensitive belief system had such obvious merit and historical momentum that its adoption was inevitable in the dawning era. The kind of philosophical transformation of America that appeared imminent to Reich and others in the 1960s did not occur. The environmental movement continued to make progress, but the Earthfriendly subculture of the 1960s was succeeded by a continuation and even an intensification of environmentally damaging practices by younger generations of consumers no less materialistic than those of the 1950s. However, the most serious error propagated by the culture that Greening represented was a philosophical prejudice against the kind of rigorous and linear intellectualism that is necessary to science and technology. This bias was evident in many cultural products identified with the ideological atmosphere of the milieu for which Reich advocated. For example, a fashionable campus intellectual of that time was Herbert Marcuse, whom Reich cited with approval. Marcuse was a German-American philosopher and author of critiques of American society like One-Dimensional Man (1964). He regarded science and technology as sinister tools of

military and commercial interests, and associated them with those attributes of American society he considered undesirable. Similarly, the philosopher Norman O. Brown portrayed logic, science, and technology as stultifying obstacles to personal self-fulfillment. This tradition persists today in the books of Morris Berman, for example, The Twilight of American Culture (2000). Assaults on the growth of science and technology are extremely harmful to American society, global society, and environmentally responsible policy making. The most valuable information about the functioning of ecological systems tends to come from scientists and technologists. Yet, is America currently producing enough scientists and engineers, and funding enough original scientific research and technological innovation to meet the needs of the 21st century? The answer is highly debatable. A search for the intellectual origin of this underestimation of the importance of science, technology, and proactive innovation would reveal that at least some of it can be found in the philosophy that Greening represented. This philosophy disparaged the laboratories of large organizations and the boardrooms that funded them. A subtler thinker than Reich, in this regard, was his contemporary Loren Eiseley, who was both a pioneering environmentalist and a scientist, and sought to create a new environmental conscience that incorporated the sensibility of science. (See “Loren Eiseley: Science, Ethics, and Environmental Leadership” June 2007, page 138.) Finally, it is questionable that a process as complex as the evolution of civilizations can come under an analysis as simplistic as Reich’s. For instance, when did the American environmental movement begin? Was it with the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s celebrated book Silent Spring, or with President Theodore Roosevelt’s

profile launching the Wildlife Refuge sys­ tem in 1903 and allocating some 194 million acres to national parks and nature preserves, or with John Muir’s founding the Sierra Club in 1892, or with John James Audubon’s 19th-century paintings of birds? The answer, of course is all of the above, and more. Public awareness of the fragility and interconnectedness of ecological systems has been developing for centuries. Each generation has made its own contribution to the process, defining a fresh environmental agenda that speaks to a particular society and moment in history. Greening remains an important milestone in its emphasis on the importance of larger social change as a condition of lasting environmental improvement, on the moral dimension of cultural progress, and on the value of a sense of national awakening. It is profoundly relevant to the success of the environmental movement today. Not least among Reich’s positive qualities was his recognition that to talk meaningfully of significant social change, a multidisciplinary vocabulary must be fully used. However, today, this vocabulary increasingly includes the language of technologies that will likely shape a future significantly different from any that Reich had imagined. The further evolution of environmentalism, in coming decades, will eventually be technologically advanced far beyond what we can now anticipate. Quite possibly, it could produce an America that differs markedly not only technologically but also culturally from that of today. Greening’s prophecy of a new or greatly renewed nation may well prove correct, although resulting in a very different society from the kind Reich expected. UL N.J. Slabbert is U.S. representative of the Belgium-based Truman Group, which focuses on geopolitical and economic analysis for business and government leaders.



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