Map of life expectancy at birth from Global Education Project.

Thursday, October 18, 2007

Humanity and Nature

Since I started this project, the commenters have consistently been ahead of me, getting on to the next issue. So, since ya'll bring it up . . .

The human/nature dichotomy is obviously ancient, because it is stated early in Genesis: God gives humanity dominion over the rest of nature. Archeaological evidence suggests it is much more ancient than that. When this clever, rapacious species hit cultural takeoff some 70,000 years ago (or maybe even earlier in a few places), it rapidly increased its ability to exploit its local environment, and frequently exhausted whatever resources were available. No problem -- its unprecedented behavioral flexibility and inventiveness meant it could just move on to the next place, or a different resource.

The powerful modifying effect of humans on their environment is such that it's hard to say what it would mean for humans to live in a "state of nature." The woodland Indians who lived in what is now New England before the European invasion set fires to clear the understory from the forest and make traveling and hunting easier. I have read -- and I do not doubt it -- that there are more white tailed deer in New England than there were when the Wampanoag and the Pequots and the Ho De No Shau Nee hunted them relentlessly.

But once our ancestors started planting crops and herding sheep and cattle, "nature" almost ceased to exist in those lands where they were at all populous. Now we are even strip mining the biomass from the oceans and pumping fossil water out of the bedrock to turn deserts into vast photosynthesis factories. Even places where few humans ever go -- such as large "nature" preserves and very remote, inhospitable realms such as Antarctica and that portion of the Siberian oak forest that isn't for sale yet at Home Depot -- are profoundly altered by our impact on the air, the climate, and the neighboring areas with which they interact. It's much less fun being a penguin than it used to be.

The good news is that just as our global impact is becoming absolutely, finally, untenable and unsustainable, we're gaining an understanding of exactly what it is that we're doing and how it might cost us. This has forced a lot of soul-searching and fundamental reassessment of that ancient dichotomy. We won't have the luxury of thinking of ourselves as somehow standing outside of nature if nature stops delivering breathable air, drinkable water, and edible biomass. But the "business case" for environmental protection falls far short of newly emerging values, and it is even offensive to many, who maintain that "nature" is valuable for its own sake, not just because it's useful to us.

But there are some deep conundrums in making this claim. Nature includes us. Humans emerged on the earth like every other species, and we've been modifying nature ever since. Many species have an even more profound effect than we do -- much more profound. Photosynthetic organisms created the oxygen-rich atmosphere that drove earth's original biota deep underground, and led to the realm of the aerobic bacteria and the eukaryotes with their mitochondrial endosymbionts. (That includes us, in case you didn't know.) As earthworms continue their slow recolonization of northern latitudes following the last ice age, they fundamentally change forest ecosystems, eliminating innumerable species and encouraging others. All species reshape their environment to some extent, and there is no "balance of nature" or "state of nature." Nature is fundamentally dynamic, constantly changing. How we are to judge that some change we cause is less legitimate or less acceptable than one caused by worms or plankton or wild turkeys?

Remove humans, and you won't have nature as it has ever existed before. You'll have an earth that we have already radically remade, evolving and changing in unprecedented directions. What is natural nature, what is wild nature? It's impossible to say.

So what do we really mean when we say we value nature, or want to live in harmony with it, or would even prefer us not being part of it if we're going to trash everything? I might have an answer to that question, but what is yours?

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