by Marshall Massey

The Religious Society of Friends built its testimonies around plainness and simplicity — unadorned dress, unornamented meetinghouses, plain speech. In the twentieth century, these testimonies were extended into an ecological witness: the claim that Quakers, by virtue of their historical simplicity, had always been better stewards of the created world. In 2003, Marshall Massey — a Friend with a long record of environmental concern — offered a careful historical counter-argument. Early Friends were kind to domestic animals, yes, but Nantucket Quakers killed whales by the thousand. Midwestern Friends shot passenger pigeons by the stew pot. Penn's famous decree requiring that one acre be left forested for every five cleared was simply ignored. Plainness, Massey argues, is not ecology. Simplicity does not equate to ecological wisdom.

Posted to soc.religion.quaker in November 2003, this compact essay is an act of historical honesty from within the tradition — a Friend refusing to flatten the past into a usable myth. The comparison to paleo-Indians killing mastodons while wearing only furs crystallizes the argument: resource simplicity has never, by itself, produced ecological consciousness. That distinction matters for Friends today who want to build a credible environmental testimony on historical foundations.

Friends were pretty good about animal welfare issues. Fox and Woolman are both on record in their respective journals as having made an issue about isolated incidents of cruelty to domestic animals. Anthony Benezet became a vegetarian out of tender-heartedness. There are similar entries in the journals of some more obscure Friends (though, alas, only in a minority); and Thomas Clarkson recorded that Friends were generally kind to their livestock. Come the nineteenth century, a number of Friends (though, again, only a minority) were active members in the first animal-welfare societies.

But meanwhile, there's no evidence that Friends were any less avid in clearing the land and destroying the native forest along the American frontier than any of their neighbors. The most ecologically aware thing that I know of, that any early Friend did, was William Penn's 1681 decree that for every five acres of land the colonists cleared in Pennsylvania, one acre must be left forested. And what came of his decree? In urban Tokyo there are Shinto shrines that preserve tiny intact remnants of true virgin forest. There's nothing like that in urban Philadelphia. Penn's decree failed. Friends lacked the ecological consciousness that would have led them to follow through.

Early Friends played a substantial role in the development of commercial iron smelting in England, without worrying a bit about the pollution they were generating (which from all reports was appalling) or about any other ecological impacts. They likewise played a major role in the development of the British and Philadelphia banking and financing networks, without asking for anything like an environmental impact statement for any of the numerous commercial endeavors they underwrote. They weren't worrying about these things because, again, they lacked the ecological consciousness.

Plainness Was Not Ecology

Take the Quaker testimony of plain dress. Was their practice of wearing dresses without lace and coats without lapels really that much more eco-friendly than their neighbors' practice of wearing dresses with lace and coats with lapels? Maybe the plainer styling reduced the quantity of resources that went into each dress and coat by 3%. How much difference did that really make?

Were their unornamented wooden meetinghouses, built on land stripped of the native forest, really that much more eco-friendly than their neighbors' ornamented wooden churches, likewise built on land stripped of the native forest? Which preserved more of the original woodland habitat — the meetinghouses or the churches?

When we speak of "ecological," we are talking about biological systems, not just individual animals or plants. But one can practice "plainness" and "simplicity" while being totally oblivious to the needs of the biological systems one is destroying. Midwestern Friends killed passenger pigeons by the stew pot just as their neighbors did, and Nantucket Friends killed whales by the thousand — all the while dressing plainly. The rich shoals of freshwater mussels that the native Americans so valued perished as swiftly and as pointlessly in the defiled streams of colonial Pennsylvania as they did in those of New England.

I think it's a bit like saying the paleo-Indians of 10,000 BPE killed mammoths and mastodons while wearing only furs. Maybe it was admirable that they wore the furs of the animals they killed instead of wasting them entirely, but that doesn't change the fact that they wiped out the species. Their simplicity didn't equate to ecological wisdom.

"They Did It Too"

Before white settlement, the rich lowlands of the mid-Atlantic seaboard and the lower Midwest, where so many Quaker pioneers settled, were basically forest punctuated by occasional clearings. By 1890 they were basically cleared farmland punctuated by woodlots. I haven't heard anyone deny either fact.

Certainly, other groups like Methodists, Baptists and Presbyterians had a hand in it too. Not to mention the unchurched. But showing that other groups were just as bad isn't the same as showing that Friends had a positive ecological consciousness or witness, or a respect for the created world that actually translated into nature-saving behavior. "They did it too" isn't logically equivalent to "we didn't do it."

Colophon

Written by Marshall Massey and originally posted to soc.religion.quaker on November 6, 2003. Message-ID: <[email protected]>. Written in response to questions from Christine Greenland about whether the testimonies of plainness and simplicity constituted an ecological witness.

Marshall Massey was a Quaker writer and activist with a long-standing concern for environmental testimony among Friends. This post was part of a sustained discussion about what authentic ecological witness would require from contemporary Friends — not romantic nostalgia about the past, but honest reckoning with it.

Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.

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