A Critique of Lynn White

Lynn White's idea that Christianity is to blame for human beings' current ecological problems is a severely deficient theory. First and foremost one cannot simply blame one concept such as Christianity as the reason for man's relationship with nature and the state our planet's environment is in. Though Lynn does bring up other concepts such as technology and science he links these mostly western advances all back to Christianity. The problem with this linkage of environmentally detrimental western technology to Christianity is that a great deal of the technology was not simply advances made on already existing ideas from the Islamic and Greek scholars. Concepts like the oil drill or the dam were around many years centuries before the birth of Christ, and were used without paying reverence to spirits or the land.
Lynn makes note that these technologies, created by the West and thus Christianity, are being used around the world (despite some of these creations not being legitimately from the West). In countries where Christianity holds barely any control though the same if not worse events can be seen happening when concerned with nature. In countries around the world, whenever there has been an industrial boom, or a huge increase in infrastructure the environment has suffered. Even now in China, a country officially with no religion but predominantly Eastern in their though processes, does exactly what Christian 'nations' have done in the past. Whether you've been raised in an Islamic, Shinto, or Hindi life style you're just as likely to subject nature to your will as can be seen from the Middle East, through India, and all the way to Japan. Though people do exist who take the Bible literally, Lynn cannot place so much in this modern era on the book of Genesis, the world has simply changed too much.