Rumination: Nature and the Human Environment
There’s no valid basis for division.
Popular thought holds that there’s an essential divide between the natural environment and human-fabricated landscapes. What if this perceived divide is illusory?
Some sense of a distinction between nature and the manmade world dates from the very genesis of civilization, when wilderness and weather and lack of access to natural resources presented the direst threats to human survival. It was to fend off these primeval threats that groups of families banded together in organized cooperative efforts, which cleared the first safe spaces for human accommodation and eventually for the blossoming of culture and all the infinite civilizing achievements that have developed therefrom.
But the clearing of space for habitation did not imply any dislocation or exclusion of nature so much as an adaptation of the wild world to enable human flourishing. It’s truer to describe this adaptation as a coming together of man and nature in consummation of a more perfect unified potential. Indeed, the Biblical conception of paradise wasn’t nature in the wild, untouched by husbandry: It was the pairi-daeza, or “walled gardens,” of the ancient Middle East and Asia Minor — parks designed for the pleasure of kings, carefully managed by expert gardeners.
It was much further along in the historical accreting of civilization that man constructed the idea of a high and hard barrier or categorical dividing wall separating the human sphere from the rest of creation. This categorical division persists in our collective consciousness in the modern world, where it still carries the lingering echo of medieval arrogance — legacy of the “Great Chain of Being” conceit that humans occupy a special station above the lesser creatures of Earth.
More recently yet, this idea of a categorical division has been amped up and converted into a tenet of contemporary eco-activism. In its current “green” form, the notional divide between the natural world and the human realm betrays an even more primitive prejudice than arrogance: misanthropy — the implication that human agency degrades the natural materials of the Earth when it shapes them to man’s purposes. The gray fields of human fabrication have come to be seen as permanently debased, with some natural quality of grace extinguished.
What brings about this supposed conversion (or perversion), what element distinguishes the hallowed fields of nature from the profane precincts of the human world? It must be the application of artifice (skill in fabrication) — specifically, human artifice. But right at its root, the logic of this distinction breaks down.
Artifice is not unique to the human animal. Birds craft nests, squirrels fashion dreys, spiders weave webs, worker bees extrude the walls and cells of hives, foxes and bears dig out dens, beavers fell trees and build elaborate dams and lodges. Many of these “natural” construction projects produce long-term changes in the environment: Beaver dams cause extensive flooding around stream bottoms, creating wide-open meadows where forests previously stood; prairie-dog burrows and termite mounds dramatically disrupt the terrain of the grasslands; the boring activity of bark beetles delivered the fungus that wiped out the elm populations of Europe and North America.
Even plants make long-term changes in their local environments: creeping vines and parasitic plants can sap large trees to death; some plants shed toxic leaves and bark to clear the surrounding ground of competing vegetation; and generations of trees in wild forests transform the ecosystem of the topsoil through spreading underground networks of interconnected roots and fungal filaments that enable communication and mutual sustenance.
And the Earth’s environments experience constant change quite apart from the activities of plants and animals — due to the inexorable eroding and depositing forces of water and ice, the contouring effects of volcanic activity and tectonic movements, and the long-term atmospheric fluctuations caused by variations in solar radiance.
When it comes to human artifice, there are many gradations. The simplest can have a negligible transformative effect on ecosystems, sometimes even less than beavers produce. And the more sophisticated will add to the beauty and utility of nature and, with care and intelligent regulation, can co-exist in harmony with the beneficial preservation of wild ecosystems.
Until the middle of the 19th century, indigenous tribes of the North American West lived by converting wildlife to food and clothing and by using the byproducts of animals, plants, rocks, and minerals to construct their lodges, fashion their tools and weapons, and adorn their bodies and cultural artifacts: living on buffalo meat or salmon; wearing clothes of deerskin or sheepskin, trimmed with colorful porcupine quills and locks of hair from vanquished enemies; painted with vermilion, festooned with eagle feathers and bear claws, and wrapped in buffalo robes; sheltering in movable dwellings constructed of lodgepoles and decorated buffalo hides.
They were able to sustain vibrant communities of tens of thousands of families without altering the surrounding environment, and their cultures and lifestyles preserved the animals, prairies, and woodland resources they drew upon — even after they acquired firearms and simple metal tools through trading with outside cultures and greatly improved their capacity to move, hunt, and make war by exploiting the wild horses the Spanish had introduced into the West.
Some rudimentary, even primitive, forms of human artifice can transform ecosystems in ways akin to the effects of beaver dams but often much broader in scale. Centuries of logging for fuel and shelter and the clearing of fields for agriculture and pastureland have contributed to Ireland’s iconic landscape, largely denuded of tree coverage.
Similar changes occurred in North America, where Paul Bunyan and his mates cleared great swaths of the northern woods for settlements and farmland. And in Greece, where the islands of the Aegean, thickly forested in ancient times, now lie dry and barren of topsoil:
And we’ve redirected rivers, buried countless streambeds and marshlands, and built levees, dikes, and dams along major inland waterways to lessen flooding, allow for controlled irrigation, and generate electricity. Cities, too, have grown with the help of ambitious landscaping — like Boston, where the hills were leveled, fens filled, and harbor coves reclaimed to accommodate the expanding population.
In Germany, the state actively manages the Black Forest and other forest lands to keep them open and easily accessible to cross-country hikers and to help suppress fires: underbrush is cleared away and the trees carefully spaced and pruned so the tips of their limbs barely touch. Although fundamentally transformed from their wild state, these managed woods are, nonetheless, strikingly beautiful and very popular for healthy recreation.
More advanced forms of human artifice require chemistry. We mix concrete from rock aggregates, minerals, clay, and water, melt and refine silica into glass, smelt metals from ores, and produce high-grade steels and stronger, more useful alloys through ever more sophisticated metallurgy. We’ve mastered petrochemical refining and made astounding strides in the development of carbon fiber composites and improved plastics.
The modern substances and products we produce and the electrochemical processes we’ve mastered are in no way “unnatural.” They arise from and are deeply connected to nature. Chemistry and chemical reactions pervade the materials of the Earth and are elemental to the functioning of all living systems. We support and elevate the quality of human life with homes, highways, factories, office buildings, warehouses, data centers, and transportation systems made of converted rock, minerals, silica, soda, iron, tar, and oils — naturally occurring materials transformed and refined into more useful products through the earthly processes of chemistry. And we power the productive activities of modern life by the chemical reactions of oils, coals, and gases extracted from organically occurring deposits, as well as by the electro-mechanical conversion of rushing water, wind, and solar heat into energy.
Of course, some chemical substances are toxic to living organisms and some can do serious harm to sensitive ecosystems. But through intelligent application of our skills and prudent use of the natural resources available to us, we can enhance the beauty, enjoyment, and life-sustaining capacity of the environments we occupy, and we can do so without dishonoring or desecrating the Earth’s remaining wilderness areas.
Our advanced practical arts help with this challenge. We have the capacity to reconstruct and rehabilitate nature, and even to produce works of wonder beyond anything found in the wild.
Landscape architects manipulate nature with a genius for pleasing and inspiring the human psyche. Frederick Law Olmsted did as much in reconfiguring the open spaces that became Central Park in Manhattan and Prospect Park in Brooklyn and the lands and forests surrounding the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina.
The same arts enable thousands of local streambed restorations across the United States, as well as ambitious projects to recover spent landfills, surface mines, quarries, abandoned factories, retired military bases, docks and shipping terminals, and old smelting and refining plants and to repurpose them into parks, residential developments, wildlife habitats, and other beneficial uses.
Our engineers build ever loftier and more spectacular structures, including concrete bridge spans that sweep across mountain chasms like grand flowing works of art.
We’re not aliens on this planet, we’re native born. The power we wield over nature didn’t come from extraterrestrial visitors, and it isn’t foreign to the planet’s ecological systems.
That we exercise increasing dominion over the Earth, with capacity to transform ecosystems on a broad scale (or to preserve their wild state where we choose to do so), doesn’t mean we stand separated from the natural environment. If anything, it integrates us more firmly into nature.
Understanding that all facets of human life are part of nature and that the varied products of human industry are strands in the fabric of the Earth’s biosphere should help us to act in harmony with the goal of environmental protection. As stewards and prime beneficiaries of the Earth’s natural abundance (which benefits us in more ways than any one individual can catalog), we have a powerful incentive to guard important resources and precious ecosystems from profligate contamination and to take responsible steps to rehabilitate ecosystems once exploited.
The Nation’s major environmental laws were enacted to preserve and restore the quality of our water, air, and land resources so as to promote human health and welfare and support the productive capacity of our growing population. They authorize reasonable regulatory actions by Federal, State, and local governments to achieve those purposes. Wastewater treatment, insect control, and swamp reclamation are classic examples of government action designed to protect human life from environmental dangers: lack of sanitation, lack of clean drinking water, crop pests, and mosquito-infested bogs have been the greatest environmental threats to human health throughout history. Mosquito-borne diseases and the contamination of water sources with unmanaged waste remain the world’s most pervasive environmental problems.
Environmental protection does not mean the Earth’s ecosystems must remain unchanged. All ecosystems, whether wild and undisturbed by man, rural, agricultural, urban, suburban, exurban, industrial, littoral, coastal, alpine, or whatever, are undergoing continual environmental transformation. And no change in the environment, whether or not caused by human action, is ever truly permanent.
Plants, animals, whole ecosystems continually adapt to environmental variations and most show remarkable resilience in recovering from contamination and disturbance: look, for example, at the hills and valleys surrounding Oil Creek, Pennsylvania — an area stripped and ravaged by the oil-extraction industry in the 19th century when it was the world’s primary source of crude oil for kerosene refining. Today, Oil Creek meanders through a beautiful wooded state park, a healthy restored ecosystem, sustaining wildlife and available to be enjoyed by people — with the bonus that it’s dotted with historically interesting structures from its past days of world-stirring glory.
As we advance in our ability to transform the environment, we should continue to follow reasonable, publicly open procedures and cost-beneficial means to preserve designated wilderness areas, limit pollution of air and water resources and sensitive ecosystems, and reclaim previously disturbed lands and waters where feasible.
Our manmade landscapes continually change, too, as human cultures evolve and we improve our technical capacity to engineer new materials. As our cultures adapt to change and grow more prosperous and sophisticated, the physical manifestations of the human environment morph and develop. The diversified accretions of our modern population centers are teaming ecosystems in their own right.
Seeing cities in this way, I have to say that my personal favorite natural ecosystem is Manhattan — one of the world’s great agglomerations of human life in all its organic diversity. If government restrictions on transformation of the environment had prevented the platting, paving, building, and overbuilding of Manhattan, what a profound ecological loss that would be for our planet!
