Whenever the era of nation-states may be held to have begun, whether 1066, 1648, or 1789, its characteristic values may be taken to have included, unsurprisingly enough, nationalism. Since this era is not obviously over yet, such values may be presumed to remain widespread (and experience confirms this), even if trends such as globalisation have modified them; and these values may be expected to have influenced environmental values for some centuries past. However, environmental problems transcend national boundaries, and tackling them fairly clearly requires some form of global co-operation and global ethic, plus, I suggest, much wider awareness of global citizenship across humanity. So it is worth investigating the impact of the particularist ethics characteristic of nationalism on environmental values, and by contrast the bearing on such values of ethical universalism, including recent proposals for the recognition of the common heritage of humankind, such as the proposals of the Maltese philosopher Immanuel Agius.1
Two other strands need to be interwoven into this pattern. For we cannot Whiggishly assume a progressive evolution of values from tribal to nationalist to universalist ones. Universalist ethical norms, concerned at least for humanity as a whole, are of course to be found widely scattered in the ancient world, in what most would regard as an era prior to that of the nation-state, alongside a great variety of particularist values, and their deep roots in European culture help explain the widespread adoption of universalist values such as those of Grotius and later of Kantianism during that subsequent era.2 I have in mind the universalist values of (among other ancient systems) Stoicism, Epicureanism and of Christianity, and these comprise one of the two strands that it is important not to neglect.
The other indispensable strand concerns conflicting interpretations of traditional attitudes to nature characteristic both of pre-modern (ancient and medieval) centuries and of the era of the nation-state. On some views, including that of Agius, the characteristic attitude to nature has been one of domination or mastery, an attitude that now needs to be transcended,3 while on other interpretations belief in stewardship, whether among Jews, Christians or Muslims (and sometimes the practice of stewardship too) has been at least as prevalent as approaches of the domination type throughout these centuries, involving attitudes not too far removed from those commended by Agius for the present.4 It is beyond doubt that nature has often been treated with arrogance and rapacity, and that such attitudes partially underlie recent environmental crises. Yet if it is important not to stereotype the era of the nation-state as essentially nationalist, it is also important not to stigmatise either the Christian centuries in the West or the era of nation-states as involving a uniformly despotic approach to nature. One reason why this is important is that if such stigmatising were justified, the prospects for the spread of environmentally sensitive values in the new millennium would be much bleaker than, I suggest, they are, whether at local, national or global level, because the roots of such values (at least in the West) would either be too shallow or lacking altogether.