Eco-Watch Dialogues
8/6/99

Not long ago a friend sent me a memo written to "the file," titled "Bill Cronon Revisits the Wilderness 'Firestorm' He Created," based on Cronon's April 30, 1999 Duke University Forest and Conservation History Distinguished Lecture. The memo begins:

"William Cronon, probably the country's leading environmental historian, published "The Trouble with Wilderness; or Getting Back to the Wrong Nature" in his Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, in 1996. In that work he argued that locking up wilderness is no solution to our environmental problems, that the concept of wilderness is an invention of the human mind and a recent one at that. Although a dedicated wilderness advocate, Cronon frightened and angered wilderness advocates by seeking to press an intellectual inquiry into the meaning of wilderness--and ultimately, therefore, into the rationale for its defense."

Cronon's Moral Postulates for a Humanist Environmentalism

The memo goes on to say that Cronon is now revisiting his earlier ideas in an approach he labels humanist environmentalism, not yet fully developed but developed enough to come up with a few "moral postulates," including:

• "Nature is all we've got: we are never outside of it, and our lives depend on it. A humanist environmentalism must constantly attend to the natural context within which human beings make choices and live their lives, taking care always to preserve, protect, and honor the non-human creatures and systems whose survival is crucial to our own, and whose health and safety and right to exist are no less valuable than ours."
  
  
• "Historical understanding of our own ideas of wilderness and nature gives us greater self-knowledge, greater self-criticism for recognizing what it is we are projecting out onto the world: that which comes as much from within us [as] from the world itself: this is not to deny the existence of the world but to acknowledge that knowing the world is a much more difficult enterprise than it appears. Taking the world at face value almost always means accepting human assumptions about the world that may not be inherent in the world at all."
  
  
• "Non-use is not an option: to live in nature is to use and change it by our presence. The choice we face is not to leave no marks--that is impossible--but rather to decide what kinds of marks we wish to leave."
  
  
• "Although we may seek values and ethics that are less anthropocentric, we should never fool ourselves into believing they can be anything but anthropogenic: they come from us, from our dreams and fears and histories. Struggling to make them fit the world as we are given to understand it is our never-ending challenge, because nature itself does not speak in a language of "values." Even if we carry 90% of all species to extinction and ourselves as well, nature won't care. We'll just be another extinction event in the accumulating stratigraphy of the globe. Whatever we do will be fine with nature... but it will not be fine with US.
  
  
• "The responsible environmental ethics we defend are grounded as much in human values and motivations as the environmentally destructive values we seek to replace. Biocentrism is an anthropogenic value.
  
  
• "Values are impossible without a self-reflective consciousness projecting its goals and desires forward into the future and imagining their good and bad consequences--that is what humanity adds to nature, that is what leaves us anxious about whether we stand inside or outside the magic circle of the natural. We hold ourselves morally accountable within our circle of language in a way we hold nothing else in the universe accountable."
  
  
• "A humanist environmentalism strives to protect nature but also other, equally important values: responsible (wise?) use, social justice, democracy, fairness, tolerance, community, generosity (forgiveness of the other), love, humane living, beauty, good humor, joy."
  
  
• "Wilderness is a crucial measure of our success in building a more just and humane environmentalism, because wilderness will only survive if our culture, our political economy, our ideas and values, honor and sustain the space in which it survives--a space that is not just ecological but moral, political, cultural. But that will only happen if we abandon the dualistic illusion that it is separate from ourselves. It could hardly be more connected, and our every act affects it."

A Few Good Books

Reviewing Cronon's moral postulates forced me to dig into my stacks and revisit a few books that touch on the idea of humans and their interaction with nature. Here are the books I dug out to take a second look at:

• Landscape and Memory, Simon Schama, Vintage Books (Division of Random House), 1995
• Forests: The Shadow of Civilization, Robert Pogue Harrison, University of Chicago Press, 1993
• The Social Creation of Nature, Neil Everden, John Hopkins University Press, 1992
• The Idea of Wilderness: From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology, Max Oelschlaeger, Yale University Press, 1991

These are books of wonder, probing deeply into questions of value, being and becoming, belonging. They also probe into ideas of self, culture, and humanity derived from our experiences with and thoughts about nature and culture. As I was revisiting them I wondered, "Why is so little of this -- of humanities in general -- woven into our discussions of ecosystem management, of Nature and the Human Spirit?"

It would be interesting to invite Everden, Harrison, Oelschlaeger, and Schama into a discussion of Cronon's humanist environmentalism. Failing that, we will likely have to wait and see what each has to say, if anything, about Cronon's thesis in general and his moral postulates in particular. Still, we might get some clues as to what they would have to say from their books. Risking misinterpretation, we will probe a bit into their ideas.

Paradox: Humanity as part of Nature, Nature as part of Humanity

Schama begins and ends his sweeping look at nature and culture in Landscape and Memory by quoting Thoreau:

"It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such. It is the bog in our brain and bowels, the primitive vigor of Nature in us, that inspires that dream."

In Forests, Harrison invites us to embrace tragedy, comedy, and irony as we explore the relationships between people and forests throughout history. He suggests that both nature and culture emanate from a common source, but stops short of saying "we are never outside nature."

"If nature and culture arise from a common origin, what is it? What is it behind the landscape which generates both the forms of nature and the forms of culture?" (p. 241)

Perhaps Thoreau, Shama and Harrison would agree that we are driven to dream our dreams through "the primitive vigor of Nature in us," what Harrison calls "common origin."

In The Idea of Wilderness, Oelschlaeger asks, (p. 350), "Do we dare think that we are nature watching nature?," opening our eyes to a paradox. We are part of nature. We are apart from nature, watching it and developing our culture apart from, but in relation to nature.

Finally, in The Social Creation of Nature, Everden advises that

"if we want to prevent the realm of humanity or history becoming a subcategory of Nature, we are going to have to admit to ourselves that Nature is in fact a subcategory of Humanity or history -- that we are, after all, the authors of the system we call Nature. And moreover, that we are the authors of the dualism that facilitates the existence of humans and nature as separate and qualitatively distinct entities. We are going to have to admit our own role in the constitution of reality, which in turn means admitting something quite fundamental about the nature of our knowing." (p. 94)

Humanity apart from Nature

So it appears at least that they all might agree with Cronon that in some ways we can not really claim any complete separation from nature. At a minimum is seems that culture and nature are interdependent, codetermined. Still, each author, in his own way, makes a case that we discover ourselves (individually and culturally) by creating a separation between ourselves and what we label nature. Indeed, that we could not have become what we are without having created such a separation.

But with separation comes alienation and angst. Each author makes a case that at this point in the "modern era" -- at the end of the modern era? -- we have begun to search our souls to rethink our relationship with nature, or at least we need to, fearing that our created, "radical" separation from nature has driven us into a place where our actions have become a threat to both to our humanity, our cultural existence, perchance our existence itself, and to our ideas of nature. I have to believe that Cronon shares in this angst, providing motivation for his attempt to postulate a humanist environmentalism.

What we think? What we are?

What drives people to think so deeply about forests, about nature? Are we poorer as a culture when such thought is absent from policy discussion? I certainly think so. As I said in my review of Nature and the Human Spirit, we need to find betters ways to allow "spiritual" matters -- humanitarian matters -- to enter into our policy discussions.

How often do we "natural resource professionals" think deeply about the interrelationships between science and humanities? Do we need to infuse our ecosystem management discussions with "a sense of place," a "sense of history (perchance subsumed in "sense of place"), and a "sense of purpose?" Do we need to recast our policy and planning processes to reflect such? I think we do, but I'm not sure that we have much chance to get there as long as we continue to pretend that policy/program/project work is "science driven" and about "managing resources" rather than about living as humans in culture and in nature, both generated from an "originating source" that "remains unspeakable, for it claims human language in advance." (Harrison, p. 241).

Let us close with a lengthy quote from Harrison's Forests. It is always unfair to lift a quote, even a lengthy one, without much explanation. But space prohibits such explanation here. So I will let the passage speak for itself, as best it can, hoping that it will prompt readers to dig deeper into Harrison's remarkable essay, and to dig deeper into what forests, nature really, means to us beyond mere instrumentality in providing "re-sources" and "sinks" to deal with our waste.

"The fact that humanity depends on the integrity of the natural world; that human beings belong to the greater network of nature's biodiversity; that we are caught in a forest of interdependencies with the planetary environment; that we are, after all, one species among others--this in itself does not prove that humanity is ontologically continuous with the order of nature.

"In the past, this discontinuity was often cast in terms of humanist doctrines that privileged humanity in the order of creation. Whether in its secular or theological versions, humanism is the most naive doctrine of all when it comes to determining the place of human dwelling. One way or another it defines this place as -- the city. Be it the city of God or the city of man, it is always a question of an artificial space. For humanism, humanity closes in upon an ideal, self-sustaining autonomy of its civic institutions. Ecologically oriented doctrines tend either to challenge these assumptions by deflating the privileged place of humanity in the order of creation, or else by proposing a form of superhumanism that conceives of humanity as the steward of nature. In either case they fail to think through the discontinuity between humanity and nature radically enough.

"This discontinuity manifests itself in the phenomenon of language, which does not belong to the order of nature. Language is a differential, a standing-outside of nature, an ecstasis that opens a space of intelligibility within nature's closure. Understood not merely as the linguistic capacity of our superior intelligence but as the transcendence of our manner of being, language is the ultimate "place" of human habitation. Before we dwell in this or that locale, or in this or that province, or in this or that city or nation, we dwell in the logos.

"The Greek word logos is usually translated as "language," but more originally it means "relation." Logos is that which binds, gathers, or relates. It binds humans to nature in the mode of openness and difference. It is that wherein we dwell and by which we relate ourselves to this or that place. Without logos there is no place, only habitat; no domus, only niche; no finitude, only the endless reproductive cycle of species-being; no dwelling, only subsisting. In short, logos is that which opens the human abode on the earth.

"The word "eco-logy" names this abode. In Greek, oikos means "house" or "abode"--the Latin domus. In this sense oikos and logos belong together inseparably, for logos is the oikos of humanity. Thus the word "ecology" names far more than the science that studies ecosystems; it names the universal human manner of being in the world. As a cause that takes us beyond the end of history, ecology cannot remain naive about the deeper meaning of the word that summarizes its vocation. We dwell not in nature but in the relation to nature. We do not inhabit the earth but inhabit our excess of the earth. We dwell not in the forest but in an exteriority with regard to its closure. We do not subsist as much as transcend. To be human means to be always and already outside of the forest's inclusion, so to speak, insofar as the forest remains an index of our exclusion.

"From the very outset of this study, which began with antiquity and arrived at Molloy's ditch of historical paralysis, we have seen in how many ways the forest remains a margin of exteriority with respect to civilization. We have even found that the word itself, foresta, means literally "outside." The entire history we have recounted so far could be seen as the story of human outsideness. Because we exist first and foremost outside of ourselves, forests become something like an ancient and enduring correlate of our transcendence. And because our imagination is a measure of our ecstasis, the history of forests in the Western imagination turns into the story of our self-dispossession.

"The task that remains for this concluding chapter is to come to terms with the radical nature of this outsideness and to determine in what way it grounds human dwelling on the earth. In what follows we will approach forests from a new perspective and seek to define more rigorously the relation between the human abode and nature as such. We will find that the relation is the abode, and that this relation remains one of estrangement from, as well as domestic familiarity with, the earth. This will oblige us to ask what it means to "be at home" on the earth in the mode of estrangement.

"Here too forests will provide the essential insights, for in the final analysis, the relation between forests and civilization is an instance of the logos to which we have been alluding. To express it otherwise, the history we have been tracing in this book culminates, finally, in an effort to awaken from the oblivion that conspires with destruction--destruction not only of forests and nature, but of the human abode that establishes itself in the relation." (pp. 200-201)