“To preserve the benefits of what is called civilized life, and to remedy at the same time the evils it has produced, ought to be considered as one of the first objectives of reformed legislation”
In Agrarian Justice, one of Thomas Paine’s later works written in 1797, Paine lays out his ideal vision for society, one that combines human equality with respect for the natural world.
Paine could surely have had no notion the impact the birth of the industrial revolution he witnessed would have some two centuries later. The benefits anyone reading this blog has through the hyper-accelerated technological advances of human society since Paine’s time have in turn created “evils” the likes of which could hardly have been imagined in the dawn of the Enlightenment. Not the least of which is the reality of a warming global environment.
Yet, legislation introduced today by the newly-sworn Congress calling for benchmarks toward a drastic reduction of CO2 emissions by 2050 reflect the notion Paine felt so long ago that our natural world is the foundation of all humanity’s higher endeavours.
Is it not an innate sense in all of us that only through the bounty of nature, the aggregate beneficence of our “Mother Earth” that we have any notion at all of life itself, let alone anything resembling the artistic expressions and higher aspirations that we consider civilized life?