Subjugate the Earth, by Philipp Blom – A greener life, a greener world

By Jeremy Williams

“I thank God that Donald Trump won this election,” enthused evangelical leader Franklin Graham in November. To his mind, it was a win for families and for religious liberty, but also “a win for coal miners. It’s a win for farmers. It’s a win for the oil and gas industry.” Victory for the fossil fuel industry is all part of God’s gift. I suspect Graham Franklin believes in subjugating the earth.

In his book on the idea, Philipp Blom describes what this means: “Man is outside and above nature and can – indeed must – subjugate it. This conception of humans deems them superior to animals and other living beings, and sees nature as the backdrop to its own ambitions and a warehouse for natural resources.”

Where did it come from?

This notion is not found in indigenous or ancient thought, but over time it has become “ubiquitous and all pervasive”. Where did it come from? How did it take hold? Blom, a historian based in Vienna, traces the idea back through the centuries to try to get to the root of it.

Humanity’s relationship to nature is a concern in the earliest writings. Overreach is a theme in the Epic of Gilgamesh. The Akkadian kings documented their lion-hunting prowess as evidence of their dominance, but usually, ancient people warned against elevating themselves above nature. 

That’s why it’s so striking that Genesis chapter 1, the opening section of the Bible, has a line that invites the first humans to ‘subdue the earth’ and rule over its creatures. This is a radical departure from inherited wisdom, Blom suggests, a new and bold idea. At a time when most people believed in many Gods, here was a claim that there was only one God and humans were his agents on earth.

There is a rich tradition of Christian interpretation around that text, some of it chiming perfectly well with environmental care, some of it not so much. Blom looks at the latter, how that invitation was taken up in religious justification for extraction and exploitation, leading to theologies of empire and conquest. The underlying principles were then secularised by the Enlightenment, codified into hierarchies of humans over animals, and humans over other kinds of human. We are the “masters and possessors of nature,” as Descartes put it.

Chapter by chapter, the book follows the progression through slavery and racism, to eugenics, to Stalin’s “plan for the transformation of nature”. It takes an unusual approach along the way, using short chapters that profile a contributing thinker, such as Augustine, Spinoza or Montaigne. 

Other chapters take an illustrative work of art as a starting point. They range from an Iruk vase from 3200 BC to Breugel’s The Fall of Icarus, the landscaped gardens of Versailles, William Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed, or Hagenbeck Zoo, an attraction in Hamburg that once included ‘primitive’ people from around the world among its exhibits.

It’s a diverse patchwork of sources, each nudging the story forward or sideways, before concluding with some alternatives to the idea of subjugation. Humans have always been symbiotic organisms. 

We can see the world more as relationships than objects in a hierarchy. Maps can show connections as well as boundaries. The science of the Human Microbiome Project, books like Carlo Rovelli’s writings on quantum physics, or Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life – perhaps these can point us towards a view of humanity more embedded in the natural world, Blom suggests.

Conclusion

The idea of subduing the earth might be most visible in the capitalist conservativism that people like Franklin Graham represent, but “subjugation has no ideological colour, no religious source, no political conviction,” says Blom. It’s a flattering delusion that humanity has talked itself into, and that the powerful have used and perpetuated to serve their own ends. Given the fragile state of ecology today, it’s an “operating system” in urgent need of an update.

First published in The Earthbound Report.