Deese, Richard Samuel (Author)
Boston University
Capper, Charles
Edition Details: Advisor: Capper, Charles
Physical Details: 312 pp.
Language: English
Historians of environmentalism have generally emphasized a sharp distinction between the pastoral and progressive strains of the movement; however, the environmental thought and activism of the Huxley brothers transcends this dichotomy. In the teens and twenties, Julian and Aldous Huxley both subscribed to a progressive and essentially utilitarian view of the relationship between civilization and the natural world. By the 1930s however, Aldous had become a serious critic of the managerial view of society and nature, while Julian expressed his continuing commitment to this approach through his involvement with the British Political and Economic Planning movement and his enthusiastic promotion of New Deal projects such as the Tennessee Valley Authority. This split between the Huxley brothers became particularly stark during the Second World War, when Julian saw the managerial revolution engendered by the war as a forward step in the evolution of humanity, while Aldous retreated to a rustic life in the Mojave desert and publicly speculated that contemporary trends toward economic centralization and technological innovation were likely to hasten the spiritual demise and perhaps the extinction of the human race. In the decades following 1945, however, the transatlantic dialogue of the Huxley brothers would gradually lead to a new reconciliation if not a convergence of their worldviews. Although neither Julian nor Aldous Huxley managed to promote a broadly persuasive synthesis of the pastoral and progressive strains of environmental thought, they each had a lasting effect on the rebirth of American conservationism, as evidenced by Julian's role in the creation of the World Wildlife Fund and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, and Aldous' influence on the experiments in small-scale communal living and the rise of Deep Ecology in the decades following his death. Furthermore, Julian and Aldous Huxley's commitment to integrating the progressive and pastoral strains of environmentalism was rooted in their much larger goal of finding some common ground between the distinct epistemologies and values of science and religion, a problem that has retained its significance for environmentalists such as E. O. Wilson and James Lovelock into the twenty-first century.
...MoreDescription Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 68/04 (2007). Pub. no. AAT 3259817.
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