Redefining nature
“Nature, in the common sense, refers to essences unchanged by man; space, the air, the river, the leaf.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson
For Emerson, it was important to define nature in a way that clearly distinguished it from the changed landscapes of towns and cities, factories and farms brought on by increasing urbanization and the Industrial Revolution. For him, nature was a refuge for the soul, a precious jewel in an increasingly human-made and yet dehumanizing landscape.
His reverence for nature as distinct from the human-made landscape fostered a movement to preserve and protect the remaining unchanged lands, a movement that culminated with Teddy Roosevelt and the National Parks system. Today’s parks and wilderness preserve the idea of nature as untouched, but in fact Yosemite, Yellowstone and most other “natural” landscapes are carefully engineered. Forests, wildlife and waterways are all managed, a far cry from the untouched expanse that greeted the first settlers.
Emerson foresaw that technology threatened to overwhelm nature, leaving us precious few landscapes untouched by human intervention. And time has proved him right. Today it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish between natural and artificial landscapes, and most of us, when we picture a scene from nature in our minds, in fact picture one of these managed environments.
In one sense this represents the end of nature as distinct from the human touch, as almost every inch of the earth has been altered, either directly through development or environmental management, or indirectly through side effects of industrialization like acid rain and global warming.
But while technology has overwhelmed nature, it has left its fundamental building blocks—trees, rocks, animals—unchanged. We may alter or design the relationship between these things when we manage a forest or carve out a subdivision, but we have yet to change the essence of a tree. Until now. Nanotechnology and biotechnology have already empowered us to change the essence of nature’s most basic building blocks. Most of the corn we eat, for instance, has been genetically modified. In some cases, these modifications are irreversible and contagious; genetic modifications cannot be simply engineered out, and genetically modified organisms frequently spill over into the unmodified population, spreading uncontrollably.
Emerson faced the challenge of technology encroaching on nature, and since his day we have used increasingly powerful technologies to eradicate much of nature, leaving the rest equally subject to human design, conforming only to our contrived image of “nature”.
What Emerson did not foresee was the development of technologies so powerful they could alter the genetic or molecular makeup of nature’s works. The convergence of biotechnology, nanotechnology and information technology now empowers us to change not just the appearance of nature, but its essence. In Emerson’s day, nature was that which lay beyond human intervention. An inheritance from God, it would remain pure in its essence as long as we chose not to disturb it. Now it appears irrevocably altered in its appearance, and increasingly altered in its essence. Now, having already undone it as Emerson defined it, we must consciously choose how we will define nature, what we want it to be.
February 3rd, 2007 at 2:59 pm
Please be careful here. North America was not an “untouched expanse” nor relatively so. That has been part of the same lie that encouraged the genocide of native peoples, that the land was being “wasted.” Emerson’s conception of “nature” as the “not me” can be be a very interesting way of viewing the world, but one cannot abstract it from the actual interrelationships and manipulation that always has gone on.
Places like Yellowstone are “contrived”, but are image of what it was is no less so, occupied by numerous bands and tribes who burned forests, hunt big horn sheep, mined obsidian, etc. The difference between then and now isn’t that nature was once unspoiled but the attitude, mostly by Euroamericans, that the land and its “resources” belong to us and can be harnessed for the “greater good” of humanity first. In other words, a moral and economic system has been built to insulate and promote the manipulation of land. That has produced the maddeningly fast drive toward technology.
Anyhow, please be careful in how you talk about this. Don’t confuse the ontological difference between the individual and what she/he is not with a history that never existed.
Jim Macdonald
http://www.yellowstone-online.com/eclecticworld.html
February 3rd, 2007 at 8:19 pm
Rest assured my comments were carefully conceived, but perhaps not clearly understood. For instance, putting “untouched expanse” in quotes creates the impression that I referred to pre-modern North America as an untouched expanse, which I did not.
But I appreciate that you take care to attribute the “nature” as the “not me” mentality to Emerson rather than me, which is accurate. And you are right on that nature is now too often seen as an endless resource for our consumption (and I might add, as a receptacle for our waste.)
So let’s be clear: I’m not confusing the ontological difference between the individual and what she/he is not with a history that never existed. I am asking what the effect will be as the Western attitudes that created the “nature as not me” (mis)interpretation of native land are applied with the extreme power of new technologies.