The Environmental Movement is as Alienated from Nature as its Foes
By: Craig Axford
Tags: Environment, Climate Change, Vision, Philosophy, Psychology

What is nature? It’s hard to find a satisfactory answer to that question. Is Central Park a natural environment? It has trees, ponds, fish, birds, squirrels, worms, flowers, fungi… If one were to add up all the species in Central Park from the smallest microbe to the humans jogging along its trails, the list would surely reach into the thousands. That it was intentionally made to appear something like a northeastern American woods resting in the heart of a city does not obviously render it a place apart from nature.

Even the city surrounding Central Park is hardly devoid of natural processes. New York City has a Beekeepers Association. Developers have also begun to apply lessons from nature to conserve energy. Green roofs, for example, can both reduce the heat island effect common in cities and help keep building interiors cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter. At the same time, these rooftop gardens can be used to grow plants that both humans and other species can use.

In his book Love in Action, the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh writes, “Although human beings are a part of nature, we single ourselves out and classify other animals and living beings as ‘nature,’ while acting as if we were somehow separate from it.” Hanh concludes, “If we knew how to deal with ourselves and our fellow human beings, we would know how to deal with nature. Human beings and nature are inseparable. By not caring properly for either, we harm both.”

This consistent habit of dividing the world up between the “man-made” and the “natural” is as common within the environmental movement as it is in society at large. Indeed, humanity’s built environment is arguably more contemptable to environmentalists than it is to any other group. This is unfortunate, especially given it is only by dramatically changing the way our built environment functions that problems such as climate change can be resolved.

In 1996, the historian and geographer William Cronon published his controversial article The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature. Wilderness, Cronon contended, is a particularly powerful concept within the American environmental movement, albeit one that has been successfully exported to much of the world.

The contemporary definition of wilderness includes adjectives like “pristine” and “untouched.” Indeed, the Wilderness Act passed by Congress in 1964 opens by defining “Wilderness” 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.” It goes on to describe “Wilderness” as having “outstanding opportunities for solitude or a primitive and unconfined type of recreation.”

Cronon finds this view of wilderness (both with a lowercase and uppercase w) problematic to the point of being paradoxical. First of all, when used as the standard against which the sustainability or ‘naturalness’ of our human environments are to be judged, the wilderness ideal sets us up for failure over and over again. As Cronon puts it, “we seem unlikely to make much progress in solving [environmental] problems if we hold up to ourselves as the mirror of nature a wilderness we cannot inhabit.” He continues, “if nature dies because we enter it, then the only way to save nature is to kill ourselves. The absurdity of this proposition flows from the underlying dualism it expresses.”

The environmental community too often seems oblivious to the fact that these lands haven’t been “untrammeled by man” for millennia and that the people who once lived on and worked in them did not recognize any distinction between humanity and the natural world that sustained it. As with the national parks and monuments that preceded the legal designation of wilderness in the United States, written within and between the lines of the Wilderness Act is the exclusion of the very people that inhabited the areas in question for thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans and other recent immigrants to North America.