![[tmbchr]™](/journal/popocculture-blog-logo.jpg){kind=logo}
The Wilderness Ethic
Another bit I wanted to share from Michael Pollan’s excellent book, Second Nature. In a chapter entitled, The Idea of a Garden, Pollan uses the slippery case of Cathedral Pines to explore the idea of America’s old-fashioned wilderness ethic.
Cathedral Pines is (or was) a white pine grove near the author’s home town of Cornwall, Connecticut. I’m not sure what year it happened in (original publication date of the book is 1991), but the forest, a local landmark deeply enmeshed in the history of the town, was devastated by a freak tornado. After the winds died down, people in the town had various ideas about what to do: cull the lumber and use it industrially (rather than let it just go to waste), torch the remnants so as to prevent a later uncontrolled forest fire, plant news trees to someday restore the wilderness area for future generations. But Pollan relates instead how the Nature Conservancy ultimately stepped in and took the reigns, deciding that no human intervention was permissible, and they had to allow for nature to restore itself through the cycle of forest succession. He even quotes a member of the Conservancy who suggests that for humans to intervene in the renewal of the forest whatsoever, well then they may as well just put up condos.
It’s an extremist point of view based on the wilderness ethic pioneered by Romantics and Transcendalists like Emerson and Thoreau - an ethic which Pollan says is valuable in its own right, but which doesn’t really help us answer any deep questions about nature, and in effect places mankind squarely outside of nature as a distant awed worshipper. There are a number of excellent passages in this chapter that help explode those notions and replace them with options that are more realistic and which give mankind a more active, rather than passive role in natural workings. Pollan writes on page 183-4:
Many ecologists will now freely admit that even the concept of an ecosystem is only a metaphor, a human construct imposed upon a much more variable and precarious reality. An ecosystem may be a useful concept, but no ecologist has ever succeeded in isolating one in nature. Nor is the process of evolution as logical or inexorable as we have thought. […]
Yet our metaphors still picture nature as logical, stable, and ahistorical - more like a watch than, say, an organism or a stock exchange to name two metaphors that may well be more apt. Chance and contingency, it turns out, are everywhere in nature; she has no fixed goals, no unalterable pathways into the future, no inflexible rules that she herself can’t bend or break at will. She is more like us (or we are more like her) than we ever imagined.
To learn this, for me at least, changes everything. I take it to be profoundly good news, though I can easily imagine how it might trouble some people. For many of us, nature is a last bastion of certainty; wilderness, as something beyond the reach of history and accident, is one of the lat in our fast-dwindling supply of metaphysical absolutes, those comforting transcendental values by which we have traditionally taken our measures and set our sights. To take away predictablee, divinely ordered nature is to pull up one of our last remaining anchors. We are liable to float away in the trackless sea of our own subjectivity.
But the discovery that time and chance hold sway even in nature can also be liberating. Because contingency is an invitation to participate in history. Human choice is only unnatural if nature is deterministic; human change is unnatural only if she is changeless in our absence.
I have to point out again just how blown away I am by Pollan’s writing. It really is a breath of fresh air into a musty closed off area of thinking in America and I really appreciate the changes it is effecting in my own understanding of ourselves, nature and our place in it. I really like the passage above as well, because it makes me understand a little better the appeal of people in the counter-culture who say we need to “go back to nature” to find our salvation. What they are looking for isn’t necessarily nature, it is their idea of what nature is: namely, a last bastion of certainty in a world where certainty is bleeding away more and more every day. In that direction though, Pollan goes on to prove that “going back to nature” or a natural state vis-a-vis Cathedral Pines is an impossibilty, because nature is constantly changing. Which version of nature should we go back to?
For what is the “real” state of nature in Cathedral Pines? Is it the way the forest looked before the settlers arrived [he points our earlier the current white pine forest was planted in the late 1700’s by European settlers]? We could restore that condition by removing all traces of European man. Yet isn’t that a rather Eurocentric (if not racist) notion of wilderness? We now know that the Indians were not the ecological eunuchs we once thought. They too left their mark on the land: fires set by Indians determined the composition of the New England forests and probably created the “wilderness” we call the Great Plains. For true untouched wilderness we have to go a lot further back than 1640 or 1492. And if we want to restore the landscape to its pre-Indian condition, then we’re going to need a lot of heavy ice-making equipment (not to mention a few wooly mammoths) to make it look right.
But even that would be arbitrary. In fact there is no single moment in time that we can point to and say, this is the state of nature in Cathedral Pines. […] The inescapable fact is that, if we want wilderness here, we will have to choose which wilderness we want - an idea that is inimical to the wilderness ethic. For wasn’t the attraction of wilderness precisely the fact that it relieved us of having to make choices - wasn’t nature going to decide, letting us off the hook of history and anthropocentrism?
Pollan believes that if we are truly honest in our study of nature, we will see that it doesn’t fit the metaphors we use to understand it. It’s not that these metaphors aren’t truthful, but it may be that they are no longer useful and that we need to create new and better ones.
The only thing that’s really in danger of ending is a romantic, pantheistic idea of nature that we invented in the first place, one whose passing might well turn out to be a blessing in disguise. Useful as it has been in helping us protect the sacred 8 percent, it nevertheless has failed to prevent us from doing a great deal of damage to the remaining 92 percent. This old idea may have taught us how to worship nature, but it didn’t tell us how to live with her. It told us more than we needed to know about virginity and rape, and almost nothing about marriage.
One other great part I wanted to include here as well, where he compares the wilderness ethic to laissez-faire economics and shows how the two are mirror images of one another:
“All or nothing,” says the wilderness ethic, and in fact we’ve ended up with a landscape in America that conforms to that injunction remarkably well. Thanks to exactly this kind of either/or thinking, Americans have done an admirable job of drawing lines around certain sacred areas (we did invent the wilderness area) and a terrible job of managing the rest of our land. The reason is not hard to find: the only environmental ethic we have has nothing useful to say about those areas outside the line. Once a landscape is no longer “virgin” it is typically written off as fallen, lost to nature, irredeemable. We hand it over to the jurisdiction of that other sacrosanct American ethic: laissez-faire economics. “You might as well put up condos.” And so we do.
Indeed, the wilderness ethic and laissez-faire economics, antithetical as they might at first appear, are really mirror images of one another. Each proposes a quasi-divine force - Nature, the Market - that, left to its own devices, somehow knows what’s best for a place. Nature and the market are both self-regulating, guided by an invisible hand. Worshippers of either share a deep, Puritan distrust of man, taking it on faith that human tinkering with the natural or economic order can only pervert it. Neither will acknowledge that their respective divinities can also err: that nature produces the AIDS virus as well as the rose, that the same markets that produce stupendous wealth can also crash. (Actually, worshippers of the market are a bit more realistic than worshippers of nature: they long ago stopped relying on the free market to supplu us with such necessities as food and shelter. Though they don’t like to talk about it much, they accept the need for society to “garden” the market.
Incidentally, that passage in turn makes me realize one root of conspiracy-thinking around the AIDS virus: people think that beautiful nature could never have invented such a disease, and that it must be man-made, and a tool of oppression. Whether that’s true or not, though, remains to be seen.
In any event, I have to say that Pollan’s simple book on gardening is one of the most quietly revolutionary (and beautifully written) philosophical tracts I have had the pleasure to read. He delves into so many areas of culture that are deeply unresolved and does so with rare subtlety and grace. He is, in a lot of ways, the type of writer (and thinker) I aspire to be.
But, of course, feel free to criticize or pick apart what he’s saying here as the whole reason I posted it was to expose the ideas contained therein to a wider audience who may be thinking in very different ways.
- “Make It Look Natural!”
- Luthier in NYC Wanted for Apprenticeship
- The demons of Yom Kippur
- the Man-Woman thing
- Dream Angel Sighting
- Prev: Suicide & Genocide
- Next: The Value of Life
September 10th, 2006 at 5:53 pm
for some reason, the first thing i thought of with this was the buddhist approach to the self.
the buddha taught that people have the same kind of naive, neurotic relationship to the idea of ’self’ that many people also have to the idea of ‘nature’ as some kind of taboo sacrosanct reality that must not be tampered with, rather than treating that as human conceptual constructs that are subject to reinterpretation, reconstruction or even outright transcendance.
September 10th, 2006 at 7:02 pm
Right, which is what I emailed you about recently: that some people believe the self and the mind must be allowed to grow wild. Others think it is okay to actively “garden” it
September 10th, 2006 at 9:16 pm
Talk about weird coincidences. Earlier this evening I was looking at ghost stories across New England and I came across Dudleytown Connecticut, which is with-in the town of Cornwall. http://www.ghostvillage.com/legends/dudleytown.htm
On another note- in Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks civilization comes to an end. A boy makes the wise suggestion we all live in tee-pees- better than the unsustainable cheap energy of suburbia. I always felt native Americans were more free, it was their influence upon early American settlers which gave them their thirst for liberty.
John Mohawk said
September 10th, 2006 at 9:50 pm
Thanks for posting these quotes. Awesome stuff. Please excuse me now for thinking out loud…
Way back in the day, the bacterial community was outraged at the actions of the cyanobacteria, whose irresponsible actions lead to a dramatic increase in atmospheric oxygen which threatened to destroy the environment. The cyanobacteria said, “Get stuffed. We ARE the environment.”
We are the world they made. It’s all good.
It’s interesting that the authorities will scream “No intervention!” to defend some trees (only when it suits them, of course), but will not hesitate to meddle with every single bloody aspect of human lives. There is a hill near my home that has a wicked grass slope, and every kid who grew up round here has ridden down this hill on sheets of cardboard. Not anymore. Now there is a heavy fine for doing this because it damages the grass. “Fuck off, children. The grass is more precious than you, since it’s part of nature and you’re not.” And when these disconnected kids wind up on a Ritalin school shooting spree we’ll all wail, “Oh humans are such beasts. Please, Machine, come save us from our animal nature!”
Then, in the face of such obvious stupidity, some of us will run back to Nature, only to find (like some shitty thriller) that she was behind it all: “I made you in my image, and you made the machine in yours. Can’t you see that it’s all the same? Everything is reflected in everything else. I will not save you from your creation, any more than I expect to be saved from mine. If you don’t like things as they are, then fucking well change it yourself. That’s why I gave you thumbs and brains, so you can solve your own damn problems. Do what thou wilt, bitches. Nature out.”
So what do we (humans) really want the world to be? That is, what do we want to see when we look in the mirror?
PS. Gnomely, the Mohawk quote is awesome too. *sniff* I love you guys.
September 10th, 2006 at 11:31 pm
Yeah! He talks about Dudleytown in one of his chapters and uses it as a metaphor for what happens if you let “nature take its course”
September 10th, 2006 at 11:33 pm
Freaking awesome!
September 11th, 2006 at 6:08 am
At what point does a watch become an organism? Seriously: PKD fans will appreciate the question posed in a different way: when does an android become human? Once an ecology is sufficiently complex, I would argue that it is really an organism, not a mechanical “system”. How many variable states must there be in a “system” in order to consider it “alive”?
Pollan is arguing that the wilderness is more like an organism than a watch. I would counter that the wilderness is an organism. And so, I don’t really understand what he means when he says this:
What does he mean by “pantheistic”? Does he mean the animistic view taken by pre-civilized peoples (e.g. native Americans)? If so, I would argue that Americans as a whole do not hold that view, and that’s the problem (or part of the problem). I would not characterize the following as “pantheistic”:
This is exactly the same dualistic thinking that is so characteristic of Judeo-Christian thought. What we need is more animism. If we recognize wilderness as an organism or collection of organisms with whom we are in relation, then we can work towards mutual benefit, rather than just taking what we want and pissing on the rest.
I have no problem with “gardening”. But at what point does “gardening” become “farming”, and at what point does “farming” become “mining” the soil? At what point does making love become rape?
Again, it comes down to homeostasis. If the relationship is working to mutual benefit, then all is fine in the world. If the relationship is abusive and unsustainable, then we are all out of balance and the system comes crashing down.
September 11th, 2006 at 8:11 am
Perhaps the distinction is more evident from the perspective of *building* versus *growing*.
September 11th, 2006 at 8:42 am
No, he means ‘nature-worshipping’, not as in animism, but like in organized religion where god is held aloft and apart, only found in designated areas. (Like if you want god then go to church and if you want nature then go to a national park, never thinking that both are everywhere.) His use of the term ‘pantheism’ is imprecise. Reread the paragraph and ignore that word altogether and you’ll see what he means.
When it refuses to die.
Seriously though, you’ve seen the dizzying attempts to chart metabolic pathways, and you’ve mentioned recently about funding mainly going to the clockwork-omics areas of science. That is certainly the way the wind blows at the moment, and that is what Pollan is referring to when he accuses Americans of embracing clockwork models and “drawing lines around certain sacred areas”. I agree that more animism would be healthy. In that spirit I should mention that I think everything is an organism. Trees, watches, rocks, proteins, ideas; I’ll talk to the spirit of each of them as if they were people. Take enough indole alkaloids and it’s hard not to.
Paging Jason Godesky.
I think you’re right that homeostasis is the key to a successful marriage, and I’m sure that is the point Pollan is making.
September 11th, 2006 at 9:37 am
I agree. I’m mostly waxing rhetorical when I ask whether something is an organism.
But many people (especially the alkaloid-free ones) will squirm if you talk about a watch as an organism, so for the sake of discussion I’ll draw a line at X degrees-of-freedom, where watches lie below X and plants/animals/ecosystems lie above X.
September 11th, 2006 at 11:35 am
Wunnerful stuff. Great quotes and posts!
I wonder if the common draw to either romanticize nature, or seek to explain it objectively, is simply to re-root ourselves. Nature never exemplified any “certainty,” but is certainly more natural to our core than the artificial constructs of an overwhelming modern technical culture … which I would say, contrary to the above point, seeks to create and insert “certainty” out of the chaos of nature, e.g. grocery stores, fresh running water, sanitized waste disposal, etc., giving the illusion we are safe, secure, and life is now predicable & routine.
I’m reminded of Grizzy Man Timothy Treadwell, who tirelessly sought to integrate himself into a fluffy bear-world concept. He succeded, being finally ‘et by one.
So too, the protectors of the Amercan wild horse - symbols of unharnessed liberty. They fail to see beyond their romantic view that the horse’s 300yo legacy is decidedly NOT natural to our environment and is destroying many ecosystems in the western states.
I once met a wild looking old man at a bus stop with huge eyes, I’ll never forget. After talking about the weather, he tells me of living on a mountain. The important thing was that when living on a mountain, you live according to the mountain, not yourself, if you wish to survive the mountain.
September 12th, 2006 at 1:01 pm
What I cannot quite grasp about the quotes from Pollan and the comments by everyone so far is the strange insistence on America, as if it truly is somewhere separated from the rest of the world. Is nature different there? Does it observe the political boundaries of the USA? Are Americans genetically different from the rest of us?
I know this is a different question, Tim, but it’s one I hope you will address. In what ways does America fail to see itself as just a part of the whole world? Is this a replay of the imperialism which once infected Britain, with its own notions of Empire?
Of course America is entitled to construct for itself a cultural identity, but it seems strange in discussing Nature; or even when discussing Thoreau and Emerson, whose sphere of influence also transcends national boundaries.
September 12th, 2006 at 1:44 pm
Just had another thought here. It could be that this space - this blog - is intended as a conversation between Americans only. It’s kind of odd that the internet is constructed in such a way as to inhibit that, so that for example China has to ask Google and others to erect a bamboo curtain, not to keep others out of a Chinese conversation but to keep China from doing what I feel that I am doing - eavesdropping.