image courtesy of Nesster

Last week I watched the first episode of Ken Burns’s new documentary series on America’s National Parks. It focused largely on John Muir, the Scots-born American writer and philosopher who many think of as the first environmentalist.

Muir’s outlook was based largely on his deep spiritual connection with nature, gained through epic walks in the mountains of Yosemite and other wild places in the world, and conveyed through his writings. His words touched me as they touched so many of his contemporaries. He saw nature as God’s greatest expression and worked tirelessly to protect it from the encroachments of industrial society and its half-baked notions of “progress.”

Much of the environmental movement still has this anti-progress bias today. But I wonder, is this historically inherited bias still serving us? Backing up even more, can we look objectively at the concept of progress? I’m not sure that we can, but it’s worth a shot.

In its most basic, least historically loaded sense, progress simply means moving forward. Time progresses. Babies progress through stages as they develop into adults. Evolution progresses from simple structures to more complex ones: life couldn’t have evolved before matter, and people couldn’t have evolved before bacteria. Similarly, human culture progresses through stages of development: Obama couldn’t have come before Martin Luther King, Jr., who couldn’t have come before Harriet Tubman.

Culturally, a lot of us have a problem with the word “progress” because of the terrible things done in its name. We think of it as the weapon used to drive Native Americans off their lands, the rationale for turning a living mountain into a dead hole of a coal mine, the attitude of superiority and entitlement that allowed some peoples to claim the role of conqueror and others to assume the role of conquered. And these charges are all accurate. The concept of progress has been used to justify some of the worst acts in human history.

At the same time, though, progress has also been a force for good. Some (especially environmentalists) may romanticize historical periods and long to go back (whatever that means) but they are clearly in the minority. Most of us have no desire to live in the past, especially if we happen to be poor, non-white, or female. Even as “progress” has been used to wrongly oppress, progress without quotes has pushed us forward into the new and beneficial. We take much for granted, from indoor plumbing to individual civil rights, but our ancestors would marvel at the power that millions of us have at our fingertips every day of our lives.

In this exploration, though, the question of whether progress is a blind justification for terrible things or a real force pushing us ever further into a better future is the wrong one to ask. Like sexual desire, electricity, and the power contained in the nucleus of an atom, progress is a force, a fact of nature, and its impact is largely a matter of the consciousness with which we engage it.

The right questions are: How do we see this force and what do we do with it? Do we stick with our 20th Century ideas of “progress,” or do we look more deeply into progress as the forward-pointing arrow underscoring everything we know, past, present, and future? Do we use it to oppress and conquer and divide the world into categories of care about this/don’t care about that, or do we widen the circle and concern ourselves with the progress of the whole enchilada?

Instead of our knee-jerk rejection of progress, I believe we need to understand it more thoroughly so that environmentalism itself can evolve to value not only the plants and animals that comprise nature, but also the highest attainments of human culture, which need just as much protection. Because the reality is that all of creation—mountains, industry, and everything in between—springs from the same force: that singular arrow pointing ever forward.