La Nature est morte, vive la nature!

In a notorious passage of The Gay Science, Friedrich Nietzsche portrays a madman carrying a lantern in broad daylight and searching for God. Nietzsche's mirthless character then declares that "God is dead" and says that we have murdered Him. Three years ago, Bill McKibben, with the dramatic flourish of a contemporary Nietzsche, proclaimed "the end of nature." His book by that title was serialized in the New Yorker magazine and went on to become a best seller.[1] Once flourishing nature, he argues, has as such come to an end--and we are the terminators. The death of God in the nineteenth century was the death of an idea. The end of nature in the twentieth century seems to be a much more literal matter. According to McKibben, one can no longer find any place on earth untrammeled by the works of man.[2] The forests, lakes, and streams of the Adirondacks, where McKibben lives, famously designated in 1885 by the New York state legislature to be "forever wild," are ubiquitously affected by acid rain. In addition to such evident works of man as the trans-Alaska pipeline, the permafrost in the erstwhile arctic wilderness is everywhere contaminated with measurable traces of toxic chemicals--everything from DDT to PCBs. There is a hole in the ozone over the Antarctic created by fugitive chlorofluorocarbons. And once autonomous nature can only become more compromised by human technology as the greenhouse effect kicks in, followed by a higher sea level, changed weather patterns, hotter summers, milder winters, desiccated forests, enlarged deserts, irruptions of weedy fauna and flora, and impoverished ecosystems. Nature as Other is over. Everywhere man's works insidiously pervade, if they do not palpably dominate, the landscape. Nowhere is the earth and its community of life unaffected by man. There are precious few places where man is merely a visitor and not an inhabitant: even the South Pole has a permanently occupied research station. The once impenetrable and mysterious Amazon basin is riddled with roads, power plants, gold mines, boom towns, cattle ranches, settlers' swiddens, and coca plantations. Here in the United States, man's visitation of designated wilderness areas is so intense that permits are required to limit density, and the restrictions on what backpackers can and cannot do make a mockery of Bob Marshall's equation of wilderness with freedom and the absence of constraints. Before we all go into mourning, however, let me suggest that what has come to an untimely end is not nature per se, but the modern idea of nature. We have no more literally killed nature than we have God. Indeed, we might want to celebrate, rather than mourn, since the modern picture of nature is false and its historical tenure has been pernicious. A new dynamic and systemic postmodern concept of nature, which includes rather than excludes human beings, is presently taking shape. From the point of view of this new notion of nature, human technologies should be evaluated on their ecological merits, not condemned wholesale. Indeed, there is some hope that a new generation of technology may be not only ecologically benign, but might even help to disseminate broadly an ecological world view and an associated environmental ethics. The Modern Idea of Nature The first and most fundamental feature of the modern idea of nature is a sharp dichotomy between man and nature--a dichotomy that is all the more radical because it is a feature of both wellsprings of the Western intellectual heritage. In the first book of the Bible, alone among all the other creatures, God makes man in His own image, giving him dominion over and charging him to subdue the earth and all its denizens. In ancient Greek philosophy, man is set apart from nature because he alone among the animals is supposed to be rational. In the late medieval and early modern periods, thinkers as different from one another as Thomas Aquinas and Rene Descartes synthesized these two strands of thought, the Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman. …