The human construction of nature (aka deep green, part two)

This post is part two of what may eventually be three posts about the ideas of the deep green movement. Part one can be found here.

In my last post, I talked about what deep green is and how I feel about its analysis of our environmental situation. Now, I want to talk about some issues I’m having trouble reconciling with deep green philosophy. I should add that I’m relatively new to deep green, and by no means have I done an exhaustive search of available writings on the topic. So it’s definitely possible that the issues I bring up have been addressed by someone else.

Many people have a tendency to construct a human/nature divide. Environmentalists say that nature is good, in balance, self-sustaining. Humans are destructive, wasteful. Nature should be fenced off, designated, set aside so that we can visit it without ruining it forever. This idea underlies the language of the 1964 Wilderness Act, which says that “a wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain”. Ed Abbey wanted to preserve wilderness as a spiritual refuge for man to escape the evils of civilization (and as a place from which to wage guerilla warfare against a fascist government). Even non-environmentalists like to separate humans and nature. Descartes argued that animals didn’t have souls and thus couldn’t feel pain—in spite of the similarity of their physical structures, they were entirely unlike humans. The Bible gives man dominion over the earth, placing him at once as separate from and above nature.

The human/nature divide is an artificial one. For most of human history, people have lived in “wild” areas, and nature was historically a place where people got food and building materials and tons of other stuff. The idea of setting aside land as “wilderness” would have seemed foreign to most cultures that have existed before ours, and American wilderness was often made by kicking native peoples off of their lands so John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt could enjoy their scenic views of mountains unmolested.

The deep green stuff I’ve read seems to be mostly on board with this, but they draw another divide—industrial civilization versus indigenous cultures. Indigenous cultures are integrated into their landbases and able to live in a sustainable way without depleting natural resources. In contrast, industrial civilization is systematically destroying the planet.

I’m not denying the awful, horrendous destructiveness of industrial civilization, nor am I denying the existence of indigenous cultures that were able to live sustainably. But I don’t think there’s anything special and magical about non-civilized and indigenous societies. There are plenty of instances throughout human history of people who destroyed their environments via deforestation, from settlers on Easter Island thousands of years ago to indigenous people in the Andean highlands in the past few centuries. Industrial technologies have managed to dramatically accelerate the speed with which we’re able to destroy things, and I absolutely believe that the mentality of Western Civilization has a particularly unsettling zeal for conquest, pillage and plunder.

However, that doesn’t mean that indigenous cultures are automatically harmonious with nature or with each other. My pre-departure readings for Ecuador have included descriptions of the indigenous people who have traditionally lived (and often still do live) in the Amazon. Warfare between groups has been common, both to defend exclusive rights to forage in a particular area, and also to capture women to increase genetic diversity for the group. Portraying traditional indigenous cultures as uniformly harmonious, peaceful, happy, feminist or any other positive attribute strike me as a reconstruction of Rosseau’s “noble savage” concept. Throughout history, there have been cultures—indigenous and non—that have systematically depleted natural resources, and there have been cultures that have managed to live sustainably in a place over a period of time. If we want to get there as a culture, we’re going to have to deal with a lot of tough issues, get over our oil addiction, figure out how to live more locally and more integrated with our landbase. For me, that’s not the same thing as bringing down civilization.

If we accept that humans are part of nature, then we run into another problem. Deep green works that I’ve read have seemed to construct nature as a relatively static entity. Plants will return to damaged areas if given time to do so, systems will bring themselves back into balance if humans stop destroying them, but overall, nature stays relatively the same. I understand the sentiment behind this idea. I’ve written before about the detached environmental view, the scientist who points out that 99% of species that have ever existed on earth are now extinct so if more species are dying off now, it’s just the natural order. The other common argument that gets thrown out is that anything humans do is natural, because we’re part of nature. If we’re stupid and kill ourselves off, it just proves that we weren’t well adapted to the earth, and anyway, the sun’s going to burn out in a few billion years, so what does it all matter anyway?

I’ve said it before, but these ideas are stupid, suicidal and self-destructive. Anyone who cares about the future of life should have a vested interest in preserving the planet in a liveable condition. Even anthropocentrists who see no intrinsic value in the existence of other species should have a vested interest in preserving clean water, productive land, un-polluted ecosystems and a climate that isn’t too hot so that future people can live and eat. So I understand why, faced with arguments like these, radical environmentalists are quick to construct nature as a permanent, fixed entity. But it’s not.

I’ve been reading a lot about evolution recently, since my study abroad program is ecology-focused and includes a trip to the Galapagos Islands. One of the books I read talked about the Galapagos finches and scientists who were studying them during a period of drought. Drought conditions dramatically altered the types of food available to the finches, such that over a single season, the average beak length of the finches changed by about a millimeter. That might not sound like much, but from an evolutionary perspective, it’s pretty significant. Evolution is a constant, ongoing process. There’s the classic example of moths in during the industrial revolution—the ones that happened to be grey started to blend in better with soot-covered buildings, so in a few generations, almost the entire population had become grey to avoid predators. When farmers in the US started spraying DDT all over everything, they quickly found that after a few seasons, bugs were becoming resistant not only to DDT, but to several similar chemical compounds. Pesticides constantly have to be changed because insects are so good at adapting quickly to new chemicals.

I don’t say any of this to defend the use of DDT. I don’t mean to suggest that animals that can’t evolve to live in the world being created by humans should die off because they’re not “fit”. But knowing the incredible dynamism that exists in nature, it’s hard for me to talk about returning nature to a former state of glory. I believe absolutely in preserving biodiversity, keeping species and ecosystems around for their own sake. I know the oil economy is a nightmare and needs to go away for so many reasons. I want people to live more harmoniously with nature, more in touch with each other, more outside, more fully. But knowing the way that humans have interacted with nature for millennia—we push, species evolve and push back—makes me reluctant to say that anything humans do to alter nature for their own benefit is bad or unnatural. I’m not talking about things like tar sands or uranium mining. I’m talking agriculture or selective land clearing to build homes. I want a world where we can live harmoniously with nature. But I don’t believe we can make that world unless we recognize that we’re neither wholly good nor inherently destructive, not separate from or above nature. Even in our hubris and arrogance, we’re still a part of the ever-evolving face of life on earth, and an honest conversation about bringing us into better balance with the rest of nature needs to start by acknowledging that fact.

Building habitat for birds

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: Roswell, New Mexico

Today, we saw birds in a wildlife refuge, where ponds are filled and drained each year to provide “natural” habitat for the migrating birds. I read the newsletter, which talked about how so many people were viewing the birds from an unsafe location on railroad tracks that the entire pond had to be closed for people’s safety. This all reminds me of a zoo, except that the birds are free to come and go. But it’s so controlled. So managed. So like Owens Lake. I wonder what the history is, if this is one of the restoration “wetlands” mandated by Congress as penance for bulldozing habitat to create another parking lot. Did this used to be a real wetland, without the drainages and surrounding fields of government-commissioned crops? And do we pay farmers to grow those crops because they’re what the birds want to eat or because the crops are in surplus and we’re trying to find as many uses as possible for them? I suppose I could’ve asked Paul or someone at the visitor’s center instead of just assuming that everything’s a conspiracy against nature and for farmers and agribusiness. But that wouldn’t be any fun.

I don’t mean to devalue the refuge for what it is—habitat for birds that need it. I’m glad we have protected areas and places for those birds to eat and hang out. Mike Prather understood the necessity of compromise better than anyone else we’ve met, and if he can see the “construction site” that is Owens Lake as a victory, then I can be grateful for man-made refuges. But it just seems to god-like. Here is nature. Here is our highway, our railroad, our thriving metropolis in the middle of the desert. So even as I accept that we grow cancerously, that we’ve spread out enough to make setting these places aside a necessity, I still wish it were otherwise.

Watchmen as metaphor

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: Paonia, Colorado, home of High Country News

I want to be a journalist so badly. I don’t know the first thing about fact-checking, establishing scientific contacts, editing sound, long-form writing or really anything professional at all. I know how to write and be interesting, I think. I know how to care about stuff. And I’ll always be doing things like that in my spare time—blogging about environmental issues, making podcasts, maybe—but I love the identity and access that comes from being a legitimate journalist. I want to fight and change the world, but I also want to teach and inspire. So many possible combinations—the ecoterrorist/journalist, the outdoor educator/activist, the concerned ecologist who advocates for a reduction in allotments…am I an Ed Abbey, passionately and unashamedly advocating my own point of view and ignoring its contradictions? A Derrick Jensen, refusing to compromise my ideals or accept anything less than the end of civilization? A Jane Goodall, doing quiet, soft-spoken research and turning to advocacy once my reputation is well-established?

I always end up thinking about Watchmen. Dan and Laurie trying to make the world better in increments—put out a fire, stop a timber sale in court. Dr. Manhattan detaches himself from the question of nuclear annihilation and leaves Earth behind. He’s the indifferent “environmentalist”/scientist, resting secure in the knowledge that some species will survive any global cataclysm and the sun’s going to burn out eventually anyway. Rorschach is the brutal idealist, willing to use whatever means necessary to reach justice. “Never compromise, even in the face of Armageddon,” he says, and I can’t help but see Jon Marvel or Derrick Jensen. Probably Derrick, because ultimately, his allegiance is to the truth, however horrific it might be. And Adrian, Ozymanides, who engineers the brutal but brilliant scheme to kill millions of people in order to end the threat of nuclear holocaust. A radical compromise, really. Its environmental equivalent is harder to pin down—Mary O’Brien, willing to sacrifice half the public lands to keep cattle off the rest? Mike, accepting square lakes because they mean some birds come back and the toxic dust clouds no longer blow over the Owens Valley? If this is our best model for solving global problems, god help us. Or else Watchmen isn’t a perfect allegory, Rorschach isn’t a villain and Adrian isn’t a hero. But Adrian accomplished lasting peace because he understood both sacrifice and political reality. He traded in human lives—New York, London, Paris, Tokyo and a handful of others for the rest of the world. We strike deals over wolves, cows, ecosystems. We gamble with the lives of other species.

Pando Clone and conservation

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: Pando Clone, Fish Lake National Forest, Utah

context: The Pando Clone is a giant stand of genetically identical aspen trees, making it the largest organism on earth. It’s also declining steeply due to disease and climate change (warmer winters mean that parasitic organisms which used to be killed off survive the winter to prey on the trees). We were divided into two groups—art and science. As part of the art group, I spent half a day wandering around taking pictures of the trees.

Aspen trees are gorgeous, especially now when the leaves are starting to turn. I’m so glad I got to see and photograph that and spend a day relaxing somewhere so beautiful. Is it bad that seeing beauty like this makes me care more about restoration? It’s such a stark contrast with yesterday, where we saw trampled streams and cowpies everywhere. The healthy trees here are beautiful, striking, even worthy of a postage stamp. But sometimes, what’s right ecologically doesn’t look as impressive aesthetically. So many exotic species were introduced because someone thought they would look better. How can we get people to care about more than appearance? How can we fight for the endangered dung beetles and seaweeds of the world when everyone’s focused on polar bears and tigers? I’m biased towards those charismatic megafauna just as much as everyone else, but I’m not even sure about ecological roles. I suspect large mammals generally play fairly key ecological roles, so perhaps our focus on them isn’t entirely misguided. But I don’t know that for a fact. Either way, they need research and money and habitat and PR, so maybe a public concerned about baby polar bears is better than a public indifferent o eubacteria or rare Amazonian lichens. But I want to believe we have more options than that. I want to get people to care about everything and the whole ecosystem, more than the sum of its parts. I want them to care because these things matter, not because they’re beautiful or they have potential for pharmaceutical research. But isn’t any kind of caring better than apathy? I’m not even sure why I care anymore, except a vague notion that my life depends on a planet in balance. I’m starting to think that balance is more subjective than I thought. I see balance in enclosures, but not the whole forest. Balance in the US, but not Brazil. How much balance do we need? How many functioning ecosystems? Is it ok to sacrifice the rest once we get there? In August, I would have shouted, “NO!” Now, I say no quietly, a bit hesitant. So many things I don’t know…

Managing nature

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: Lone Pine, California

We seek to control nature, but we’ve forgotten how to live here. In ignorance and with hubris, we slaughtered the wolves and drove away the beavers. We took fires out of forests and replaced them with prescribed burns. We plowed prairies, killed the bison and planted wheat, assuming the rain would follow. When it didn’t, we damned and diverted rivers to feed cities in the middle of deserts.

It’s not that people have never changed nature. But we’ve never done it on this scale with this attitude. Native Americans set fires and built dams, but they also understood themselves as part of the natural world. They knew that a relationship based on taking what they could from the earth would not be sustainable.

Our culture is beginning to understand this. We know wolves are needed for functional ecosystems, so we’re reintroducing them. We write Environmental Impact Statements to get funding to burn parts of forest which should have been left to burn naturally. Some people are even starting to talk about taking down the dams.

These solutions will help restore ecosystems. They are vital, necessary and absolutely should be done. But they still leave me with a bitter taste in my mouth. Can we truly restore nature without learning to live in balance with it? If the extent of our land ethic is that we go from ignorant destroyers to benevolent engineers, what are we telling ourselves about our relationship to nature?

I think back to a book I read called Thought to Exist in the Wild: Awakening From the Nightmare of Zoos. The author, Derrick Jensen spoke about the human cruelty and arrogance which underscores the idea of a zoo. Living in a cage, an animal loses its soul, its wild essence. You may go up to the bars, see the sign telling you you’re looking at a grizzly bear, Ursus arctos, or a wolf, Canis lupus. But until you’ve seen that animal in the wild, where it was born, where is knows how to life—you’ve never really seen a bear or a wolf. You’ll always be looking at a shadow, a prisoner.

I think back to Wallowa-Whitman National Forest, and it seems like a similar shadow. We’ve taken something wild—a forest—and tamed it to suit our needs. We preserve it under multiple use, but somehow habitat and intrinsic value never make it on the list. We’ve been doing this for so long that no one in living memory knows what the forest was like before cows came and industrial timber took over.

I know it’s naive and idealistic, but I want that forest back. I want our land ethic back, one based on balance and give and take, not rape, pillage and plunder. We need practical solutions to problems, so for the moment, I accept the need for radio collars, prescribed burns and fuel reduction. But we’re going to need more than that to carry us through in the long run. We’re going to need girls growing up knowing the plants two jackrabbits might eat if they got hungry hiking through a desert covered in sagebrush*. We’re going to need grandparents teaching their grandchildren to hunt deer and make jam out of wild blackberries. We’re going to need people willing to work hard to take care of themselves, people who are ok being a little too war, or cold and walking places they need to go. None of this will be easy. This isn’t about fifty simple things you can do to save the earth. It’s not even about fifty difficult things. It’s nothing less than a shift in the entire way we perceive our relationship to the natural world. We’re not gods, and we’re not meant to control everything. The sooner we accept that, the more likely it is that earth will survive with us.

*This was a reference to an essay that writer Michael Branch read to us at his home in Reno, Nevada, where we camped for a night. The essay was published in the January/February 2011 issue of Orion and can be found here.

Biotic potential and existence value

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: Baker National Forest, Baker County, Oregon

Today, we cut willows to plant by the creek tomorrow. Willows remind me of biotic potential. They’re the natural source of salicylic acid; they’re the reason humans discovered aspirin. I’ve always been a bit wary of drugs. I’ll take hardcore things for serious problems—horse pills of ciprofloxacin when I got sick in Ghana—but I’m not a fan of NSAIDs (aka non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs) in general. I feel irrational, because I’d gladly take a tincture of willow bark to relieve pain. Chemically, there’s no difference. So why the hesitancy? Part of me just wants to be a hippie, and part of me is a competitive masochist who wants to push through the pain and let it wash over me. I had to re-evaluate this philosophy over the summer, when my cramps got so bad I couldn’t stand up and was on the verge of passing out at work. I took two tiny pink pills and magically felt better. I felt good, amazing, but it seemed like I was letting the pain win and forgoing the humility I was supposed to learn. It’s healthy to know we’re human. It’s healthy to feel out of control sometimes. To feel weak.

But humans don’t like to feel weak. We always want to be in control, both as individuals and as a culture, a civilization. The most common reason I hear for preventing species extinction goes back to that same willow. If we lost another plant, frog, insect or fungi, we lost their unique DNA. We lose the opportunity to study them, to reproduce and mass produce their compounds, We lose the cure for cancer, the keys to medical progress, the fountain of youth. All this and more, lurking unsuspectingly in the Amazon or the great trenches of the Pacific Ocean. How many lives could we save, if only we brought back the habitat?

This defense reeks of arrogance and pragmatism. We have a long and bloody history of assuming we’re the only species that matters on this planet. Even those who’ve gotten past that idea act as though we have a right, a responsibility, to manipulate nature as we see fit.

I want to cry foul. The rainforests aren’t here to cure our diseases. I think most of us know that. But to expect people to care about things for their own sake—how far can we get with that? We care about things almost perfectly based on how much we will be affected. Even Ed Abbey spoke of wilderness as a place for men to retreat from civilization, a place to wage guerilla warfare against a fascist government. People cry over our disappearing rainforests, so charismatic and colorful. People care about polar bears, pandas, tigers, wolves. Who loses sleep over endangered snails or spiders? Who cries for the lichen?

And should we care? It’s easier to say that a polar bear has an intrinsic right to exist. Does a tree have that same right? How far are we willing to extend it? Until it interferes with a human life? A human’s ability to make money? Or merely dislike and distaste? If the planet we make is one we can support ourselves on, does anything else matter for its own sake?

I want to say yes. I believe in those rights, at least until they interfere with human safety. But it’s so hard to see the world from the perspective of another species. I hope we can get there. Because we need to wake up, and I don’t want to live on a world of only us and the things we immediately need.

Taking a side

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: Baker National Forest, Baker County, Oregon

context: After a week in Wallowa County, where we talked to ranchers about the negative impacts wolf reintroduction has had on their livelihood, we moved to Baker National Forest to do a week of ecology-related fieldwork with Suzanne Fouty, of the US Forest Service. Much of our curriculum, centered on the importance of having wolves in ecosystems to maintain natural balance between wolves and elk, which in turn keeps streams healthy. Also the coldest week of the semester—slicing cantaloupes for breakfast in 15 degree weather, anyone?

It’s about 9:30pm and there’s already ice on my sleeping bag. FML.

Anyway…now we’re hearing the other side of the wolves, and whole ecosystems, and I wonder what we want to accomplish. Is our goal, as young people, to take in as much information as possible so we can eventually form a firmly held opinion and be split into a side in the debate? Or do we learn this to learn the art of compromise, so we can make half changes and accomplish things without having that fire burning inside us? I guess it’s not that black and white, and I hope more than anything else that we’re learning how to be good people, even with our convictions. I want that fire, but maybe without the certainty. I’m not sure that’s even possible, and I feel too in flux to say anything certain about what I believe. Some days, I think a creative team of economists, environmentalists and politicians can save us from our own hubris. Some days, I think Western Civilization is going to collapse under the mountain of trash we’ve been building. Some days, I wish I had a chainsaw and dynamite so I could fight. Other times, I give up, go back to ordering drinks in single-use cups and running the AC in my car. Some days, I think eating real food is the most holy thing I can do, and some days I’d just rather be a person, with all of the privileges that entails. And no matter what, I’m never sure.

Fire and the unnatural

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: Starvation Ridge, Wallowa National Forest, Wallowa County, Oregon

context: We spent a few days this week learning about fire and forest management practices in National Forests. Fires play an extremely important ecological role in forest ecosystems—tall trees are resistant to ground fires, and some species have cones which are triggered to release seeds by extreme heat, ensuring the survival of the species after the fire. Periodic fires eliminate much of the understory in forests. The vision we’ve grown up with—forests with a thick, dense understory—is actually artificial, a byproduct of the Forest Service’s policy of fire suppression. In an attempt to reserve some of the ecological damage caused by fire suppression policies, the Forest Service now deliberately removes fuel from forests—to prevent catastrophic crown fires—and also selectively burns some areas of forest.

* * *

What is natural? What is unnatural? And is the natural inherently better? These are the things I find myself wondering as we learn about forestry. I wish humans had never interfered with forests on the scale we have, and I wish that, left to their own devices, forests would return to the way they were. I’ve read entire books deriding forest “management” as a euphemism for authorizing clear cuts, but I don’t think it’s really that simple. Is there value in these cuts, designed to restore the ecosystem to a past point in time? The ecologist, the environmentalist in me, wants to see spaces free from human interference. They want to let the fires burn and restore the natural order. If our version of nature involves spending millions to suppress fires and millions more to reduce fuel and deliberately set select areas ablaze, what do we become? I see arrogance in the notion that we can “manage” nature, anthropocentrism in the idea that we should. I’m having trouble letting go of wilderness as other, trouble justifying our meddling by saying it’s nothing new. I can’t decide what to accept as given. Timber harvest on public lands? The timber industry? Capitalism? Civilization? On any given day, all four of those might be fundamentally unsustainable. Tomorrow, we have no limits to growth. The next day, civilization itself it the culprit, choking the life out of nature. If timber is a given, the management we heard about today seems to make sense. But I want spaces for nature too. Is that too impractical, too idealistic? Aside from my human values, does nature have an independent right to exist, and if so, to exist free of human influence? People have always shaped their land; it’s not the concept so much as the scale that keeps me up at night. What would a wolf say? A lodgepole pine? A bird? Am I too emotional for asking these questions?

I read Grassland over the summer it had someone quoted saying, “I can’t imagine a more boring world than one made just of people and what they eat.” If we reduce everything in our world to serve us in some way, to produce for our benefit, what do we lose? If we bend nature to our will, sand down its rough edges to suit our society, what does that make us? We control what grows in the soil. We stop floods and fires. We heat and cool our buildings far beyond the limits of nature. We are not a natural people. And if we lose that connection, what do we become?