Saturn's custodians of the land
How Great Conjunctions in Capricorn in the Age of Earth heralded major developments for the conservationist movement
Last month we explored the Age of Air: our brave new astrological epoch characterised by intellectual advances, the rapid flow of information and ideas, revolution in information technology and the dissolution of earthy structures (with a side-helping of plagues and climate disruption). A fascinating phenomenon I’ve observed in my research into elemental ages is how the saturation of each element into the nature of the times deepens as its epoch progresses. If you think our world is airy now, just wait a century or so.
But the aerification process will carry within it the seeds of its own undoing. There will be those who resist Air’s dizzying dynamism, its lack of concern for the demands of embodiment, and its elevation of information technologists to the commanding echelons of society. There already are—and their numbers will grow.
The Age of Earth (1802 - 2020) is instructive. This was the era of the industrial revolution, colonialism and the nation state, and capitalism’s conquest of the planet. As those two centuries passed, humanity gained an increasing mastery over the natural world. But that mastery, married to a materialist metaphysics and a socio-economic system that prized only growth and capital accumulation, came at great cost: to the environment, to traditional and indigenous ways of life, to our souls.
Yet the epoch also spawned attempts to correct its excesses. One of them was the conservation movement, defined by Wikipedia as “a political, environmental, and social movement that seeks to manage and protect natural resources, including animal, fungus, and plant species as well as their habitat for the future.” A shadow expression of the Earth element is excessive materialism, yet it’s also the element through which respect for the natural world arises.
Today’s generation of conservationists speak from a place of existential urgency. Listen to Greta Thunberg or Extinction Rebellion and the message is stark: we must change or die. Older forms of conservationism, perhaps because they developed in less pressing times, placed more emphasis on our responsibility to care for the natural world for its own sake. It’s this older vanguard that I’ll be focusing on here. (I’d also like to acknowledge the value of worldviews that inherently see humans as part of nature and don’t necessitate a “conservation movement” at all… but that’s a story for another time.)
Conservationists are guardians of the land, and land is the domain of Saturn, traditionally a god of agriculture—hence his sickle. According to the second-century Alexandrian astrologer Vettius Valens, “Saturn makes serfs and farmers because of its rule over the land, and it causes men to be renters of property, tax farmers, and violent in action.”
Here’s Valens on Jupiter and Saturn in combination1: “When Saturn and Jupiter are together, they are in agreement with each other, and they bring about benefits from legacies and adoptions, and they cause men to be masters of property consisting of land, to be guardians, managers of others’ property, stewards, and tax gatherers.”
When we think of conservation, with its intimations of responsibility, respect for the past and concern for the material, Saturn’s sign of Capricorn comes to mind. And here’s where this gets really interesting: Jupiter-Saturn conjunctions happen every 20 years, and almost all of the major developments in the history of the conservation movement happened in the 20-year periods following the Age of Earth’s three Great Conjunctions in Capricorn. These conjunctions took place in 1842, 1901 and 1961. (For a full list of the Age of Earth’s Great Conjunctions, see here.)
In what follows, I’m going to draw heavily on this Wikipedia entry on the history of the modern conservation movement. I’d encourage you to check out the article yourself for reassurance that I’m not cherrypicking data. I’m confident you’ll agree that while there were some important developments at other times, the key periods were the three I’ve highlighted: 1842-1862, 1901-1921 and 1961-1980.
1842-1862: Walden and the first state forest reserves
The first Great Conjunction in Capricorn of the Age of Earth came in 1842. The two decades that followed would see the first stirrings of the ethos underlying the conservation movement. From our Wikipedia article:
The American movement received its inspiration from 19th century works that exalted the inherent value of nature, quite apart from human usage. Author Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) made key philosophical contributions that exalted nature. Thoreau was interested in peoples' relationship with nature and studied this by living close to nature in a simple life. He published his experiences in the book Walden, which argued that people should become intimately close with nature.
Walden, published in August 1854, when Jupiter was back in Capricorn, was an account of the two years, two months and two days Thoreau spent living in a cabin close to Walden Pond in woodland in Massachusetts. He wrote eloquently of his love of solitude and simple living, and evoked the beauty of the wild place in which he lived. Intriguingly, the Great Conjunction of 1842 had taken place at 8°54’ Capricorn in the first decan of the sign. This is a decan that 36 Faces author Austin Coppock associates with having an “understanding of the nature of territory” and the “qualities of place”, a strong feeling for the land on which we find ourselves. Walden was to become hugely influential on future conservationists, including John Muir, who we’ll meet later.
While Thoreau was exploring America’s wildernesses and formulating his thoughts, at the other side of the world, in British-ruled India, the first forests were being declared reserves, formally protecting them from destruction. From our Wikipedia article: “The Madras Board of Revenue started local conservation efforts in 1842, headed by Alexander Gibson, a professional botanist who systematically adopted a forest conservation program based on scientific principles. This was the first case of state management of forests in the world.” The system pioneered in India at this time would serve as a model for the world, including the United States several decades later.
1901-1921: Roosevelt, John Muir and the United States’ forest reserves
The US President most closely associated with environmental conservation is Theodore Roosevelt, who established the US Forest Service and applied protections to more land than any other US President in history. He took office in 1901, the year of the Age of Earth’s second Great Conjunction in Capricorn. He was born in 1858, in the 20-year period following the first Capricorn conjunction.
The Great Conjunction of 1901 took place at 13°59’ Capricorn, in the sign’s second decan. Coppock associates this decan with massive projects requiring the work of many hands, and large institutions, and it was Roosevelt who truly institutionalised American conservation. The Forest Reserve Act, which allowed the President to set aside forest lands for public domain, had been passed in 1891, and Roosevelt’s predecessors had already transferred about 50 million acres of forest into the reserve system. But Roosevelt put this trend into overdrive. According to Wikipedia:
“President Theodore Roosevelt is credited with the institutionalization of the conservation movement in the United States… The legacy of his actions as president at the turn of the twentieth century include estimated 230 million acres of land as public lands, through his aforementioned establishment of the United States Forest Service as well as dozens of national forests, national parks, and bird reserves, in addition to 4 game preserves.”
Roosevelt was a contemporary of the most famous name in conservation in the US: John Muir, who had founded the Sierra Club in 1892. Muir, known as America’s “Father of the National Parks”, was instrumental in the fight to create and preserve Yosemite National Park, to which he traveled with Roosevelt in 1903. In his later years, he devoted himself to writing, leaving a written legacy that would inspire conservationists in the century to come. Most of his most influential works were published in those early years of the 20th century, after the Great Conjunction in 1901.
1961-1980: Rachel Carson, the Sixties and the emergence of the great conservationist NGOs
The most recent Great Conjunction in Capricorn took place in 1961. That year Rachel Carson, often described as the 20th century’s finest nature writer, published Silent Spring. The book is described by Wikipedia as follows: “…a major watershed moment in American conservation. In exposing the individual dangers presented to both people and nature through the use of chemical pesticides, Carson inspired an environmental revolution, helping to root the modern conservation movement in a scientific foundation.”
The 1960s were the era of the hippy movement, when young people belonging to the Baby Boom generation began to "turn on, tune in and drop out”, as Timothy Leary had it. They began to question capitalism and the fusty conservatism of their parents and embrace the idea that it might be wise to preserve the natural world, rather than destroy it for commercial gain. (Let’s forget for a moment that the Boomers later reneged on this promise.) Perhaps singer Joni Mitchell expressed the sentiment best in her song Big Yellow Taxi:
Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you got 'til it's gone
They paved paradise and put up a parking lot
It was in this period that the great conservation NGOs were founded, organisations that used to be household names: the World Wildlife Fund (now the World Wide Fund for Nature), Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace. All these organisations were founded in the two decades following the Great Conjunction in Capricorn in 1961: the World Wildlife Fund in 1961 itself, Friends of the Earth in 1969 and Greenpeace in 1971.
The founder of Friends of the Earth, David Brower, as well as Rachel Carson, had both been born during the 20-year period following the previous Great Conjunction in Capricorn in 1901. And, in a link extending in the opposite direction, John Muir appeared on a commemorative US Postal Service stamp in 1964. We thus see in Muir’s life a line connecting the three Capricorn conjunctions, from his birth after the first Capricorn conjunction, to his major achievements after the second, to his memorialisation after the third.
Readers may wonder how these developments are relevant to the place we find ourselves in in 2022, when it seems clear we need more than forest reserves and old NGOs to achieve a sustainable future on Earth. But nothing is ever fully confined to the past: consequences echo through time and seed the future, even if at a subconscious level. Saturn, the lord of agriculture, teaches us that patience is needed to reap a harvest. Perhaps the seeds of a sustainable future were sown long ago.
h/t to astrologer Drew Levanti (@anthrosophist) for pointing me in the direction of conservation being within the domain of Jupiter *and* Saturn many months ago