Nature

Western Attitudes Since Ancient Times

Peter Coates

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745665986
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

'Nature' is a deceptively simple and ahistorical term, suggesting intrinsic, unchanging reality. Yet nature has a history too, both in terms of human attitudes and human impacts. Coates outlines the major understandings of 'nature' in the western world since classical times, from nature as higher authority to its more recent meaning of threatened physical space and life forms.

Unlike many others, this book places the history of attitudes to nature within the story of human-induced changes in the material environment. And few others take a supranational perspective, or cross the divides between historical eras.

A distinctive unifying theme is Coates's interest in how 'green' writers over the last thirty years have interpreted our past dealings with nature, specifically their efforts to diagnose the roots of contemporary ecological problems and their search for ancestors. He concludes with a discussion of the future of nature in the context of developments such as the 'new' ecology, global warming, advances in genetic engineering and research on animal behaviour.

Assuming no previous knowledge, Nature provides the reader with an accessible synthesis and introduction to some of environmental history's central features and debates, confirming its status as one of the most enthralling current pursuits within historical studies.

This will be essential reading for second-year undergraduates and above in cultural history and environmental history, as well as to the general reader interested in environmental issues.

1

The Natures of Nature

An elemental juxtaposition of nature and culture is deep-seated and pervasive in Western thought, with ‘nature’ frequently serving as shorthand for the natural world and the physical environment. This polarity is enshrined in many book titles, witness George Perkins Marsh’s Man and Nature (1864) and Arthur Ekirch’s Man and Nature in America (1963). Nature is often presumed to be an objective reality with universal qualities unaffected by considerations of time, culture and place, an assumption especially evident in appeals to nature as a source of external authority (witness the ever popular saying ‘Nature knows best’). This elementary character is encapsulated in an advertisement for water-filter cartridges that shows a tumbling waterfall. The caption reads, ‘like nature, Brita is beautifully simple’.

Twenty years ago, however, Raymond Williams called ‘Nature’ ‘perhaps the most complex word in the [English] language’. ‘I’ve previously attempted to analyse some comparable ideas, critically and historically’, he had reflected a few years earlier; ‘among them were culture, society, individual, class, art, tragedy. But I’d better say at the outset that, difficult as all those ideas are, the idea of nature makes them all seem comparatively simple.’ ‘Any full history of the uses of nature’, he warned, ‘would be a history of a large part of human thought.’¹ In 1938 Ernest Robert Curtius listed fourteen ways in which a single aspect of nature, its personification as the goddess Natura, operated in Latin allegorical poetry alone.² The layers have never ceased to accumulate since Roman times and the strata of meaning are now bewilderingly dense and convoluted.

There is evidently a vibrant cultural history of nature that belies its deceptive simplicity and ahistorical charm. That we are becoming increasingly aware of it is suggested by recent titles such as Alexander Wilson’s The Culture of Nature: North American Landscapes from Disney to the Exxon Valdez (1992), I. G. Simmons’s Interpreting Nature: Cultural Constructions of the Environment (1993) and William Cronon’s Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature (1995). Accordingly, nature has been variously considered both part of us and quite apart from us, nurturing and dangerous, animate and machine-like, spiritual and material. Nature, like us, has a history.

I have tried to render this introductory survey for the non-specialist manageable by restricting its focus to the Western world, crudely defined as Western Europe and North America. (If we discount coverage of ancient Greece and Rome, however, European coverage effectively shrinks to Britain and Germany.) Even within these geographical and intellectual confines, it has proved impossible to follow a sequence that gives equal attention to each region and era. Initial chapters are chronologically organized. Thereafter, while remaining reasonably faithful to chronology, I have opted for a more thematic approach.

This introductory chapter outlines the major categories of meaning that have informed Western thought about nature since ancient times and which will be pursued in various historical contexts. It moves on to delineate the various ideological and material factors that have influenced human perceptions of, attitudes to and uses of nature, notably religion and ethics, science, technology, economics, gender and ethnicity. This is undertaken with specific reference to the establishment of human control over the natural world, the stages in the emergence of dualistic, or so-called ‘homocentric’ and ‘anthropocentric’, thinking (i.e. the separation of people and culture from nature, and culture’s elevation above nature) and, not least, the attribution of responsibility for our contemporary ecological predicament.

Historians of attitudes to nature face many of the issues confronting other historians of ideas. Lynn White’s famous essay of 1967 on the role of the Judaeo-Christian tradition in shaping Western attitudes to nature drew an explicit connection between belief and behaviour.³ But how far do intellectual transformations precipitate material changes? Moreover, do seminal thinkers stand apart, or do they essentially express the views of the less articulate? Then I examine another cluster of themes: the evolution of an appreciation and admiration of and affection for certain aspects of the natural world in various non-monetary senses; the growth of an awareness of how people can alter the natural world for the worse as well as for the better; and the expression of dismay and concern over the consequences of these actions – not to mention the formulation and execution of remedial action. The final section explores the historiography of writing about nature.

Interpretations and representations of ‘nature’: towards a historical nature

Understandings of nature in the Western world can roughly be divided (with some inevitable overlap) into five historically important categories: nature as a physical place, notably those parts of the world more or less unmodified by people (as in ‘unspoiled nature’) – and especially those threatened by human activity; nature as the collective phenomena of the world or universe, including or excluding humans; nature as an essence, quality and/or principle that informs the workings of the world or universe; nature as an inspiration and guide for people and source of authority governing human affairs; and, finally, nature as the conceptual opposite of culture.

The essential starting-point, therefore, is to recognize that ‘nature’ has both concrete and abstract meanings. The next vital step is to appreciate that, for the larger part of Western history, the first meaning – nature as a physical place, which is also currently the dominant one – has been subordinate to the others. You do not need to have heard of the government organization English Nature, nor to have visited one of its properties, to figure out that this is a body charged with the conservation of England’s natural environment. Our basic understanding of nature today derives from the Romantic ‘nature poets’ of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, who took nature to mean, in Raymond Williams’s phrase, ‘what man has not made, though if he made it long enough ago – a hedgerow or a desert – it will usually be included as natural’.⁴

Nature in this sense is usually thought of in tandem with ‘poetry’, ‘lover’ and ‘conservation’. Recent surveys of the British public’s taste in poetry have revealed the tenacity of nature poetry’s appeal. The top ten British poems (based on a BBC TV poll of 7,500 people), compiled as part of National Poetry Day in October 1995, included William Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’ (1815), which was ranked as the fifth favourite, followed by John Keats’s ‘Ode to Autumn’, with Wordsworth still Britain’s third favourite poet. A poll of 1,790 Classic FM listeners in 1997 confirmed the popularity of Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’, placing it in top position.

Moreover, the British poet James Thomson’s characterization of ‘gay’ green as ‘Nature’s universal robe’ in ‘The Seasons’ (1730) has been adopted, if unwittingly, by the entire Western environmental movement: note the names of political parties established on ecological principles – Greens, Grünen, Vertes. Many laypeople may be surprised to learn that Nature (founded in 1869) is not the organ of an environmental organization but the leading journal of the Western scientific community. (Yet even in this instance Wordsworth was influential. The first issue took its epigraph from the poet’s lines ‘To the solid ground of Nature trusts the Mind that builds for aye.’)⁵

Reflecting recent preoccupations, books with the phrase ‘nature conservation’ are those most frequently encountered when searching a library database using ‘nature’ as the keyword. By becoming identified with Wordsworth’s daffodils and a synonym for physical environments and ecosystems (as in Robert Ricklefs’s The Economy of Nature: A Textbook in Basic Ecology (1976) ), ‘nature’ has been impoverished. This overview seeks to recover some of nature’s richness and complexity by heeding a wider and older history of attitudes and approaches.

The definition of nature as material creation in its entirety informs a leading work produced before the advent of the ‘age of ecology’ in the 1960s: R. G. Collingwood’s The Idea of Nature (1945). Collingwood’s idea of nature as the universe and the cosmos in the broadest possible sense can be traced to ancient Greece and Rome. The intellectuals Collingwood discusses took their cue from Titus Lucretius, the Roman poet and philosopher (99–55 BC), who, in his De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), conceived of nature as the cosmic setting for human life – from the firmament to the changing seasons. This Lucretian approach can also be found in C. F. Von Weizsäcker’s The History of Nature (1951), a work of astronomy by an atomic physicist, with chapters on infinity, the heavens and the stars, and the age and spatial structure not only of the universe, earth and life but also of the soul. The ancients were engrossed by the relationship between the laws of nature and the laws of God (asking questions such as ‘does each blade of grass represent a separate divine act?’) rather than by the impact of human activities on nature as we understand it.

By the fifth century in Greece, a personified nature (Natura) had become an object of piety in its own right, endowed with a moral purpose and meaning independent of mankind.⁶ Nature was also personified as the creative force within the universe – the immediate cause of phenomena. Sometimes the ancient Greeks personified nature more explicitly in female form, a practice still evident in our invocation of ‘Mother Nature’. These are the origins of a singular, capitalized Nature, indicating how closely nature as essence or principle is related to nature in the plural as the totality of matter. That the Lucretian view remained at the heart of scientific understanding is suggested by the definitions of nature favoured by the seventeenth-century British chemist Robert Boyle: ‘that on whose account a thing is what it is’ and ‘the phenomena of the universe/or/of the world’.⁷ And, as is suggested by the title of a book about the atomic physicist Niels Bohr and the philosophy of quantum physics – The Description of Nature (1987) – and confirmed by the aforementioned title of the premier science periodical, it remains integral.

In Lucretius’s view, man’s body made him part of nature, but his mind set him apart and equipped him to investigate nature’s workings. The difficulty of distinguishing clearly between humans and other animate life forms was highlighted by the use of nature to refer to innate qualities. This sense of the word is still conveyed in expressions such as ‘the nature of the beast’. But the idea of nature as essence often extended to human characteristics such as an individual’s disposition, as in the characterization of a person as ‘good-natured’. This understanding could be extended to shared physiological features or mental attributes, as in ‘human nature’. The latter usage in particular conveys the sense of nature as a generic, unalterable feature and fixed order; thus we speak of ‘natural’ (i.e. born) leaders or of someone gifted at sport or music as ‘a natural’. Accordingly, to ‘denature’ something means to change or remove its essential qualities, though in practice we usually only speak of the adulteration of alcohol in this sense.

The equally venerable idea of nature as instructor was evoked in the 1790s by the sign that hung over the front door to Charles Willson Peale’s natural history museum in Philadelphia, introducing ‘the great school of nature’. At the museum’s back entrance, another sign referred to ‘the book of Nature open … a solemn Institute of laws eternal’.⁸ In this respect, nature has become part of a Manichaean division of the world into good and evil. This privileging of nature as superior ‘other’, a place of escape from the overbearing ‘works of man’, cultivated by the pastoralists of the classical world and perfected by the eighteenthcentury Romantics, suggested that everything would work out fine and everyone would be happy if only we obeyed nature’s unambiguous instructions.

Nature is in some senses an irrevocable dictate: we have little choice but to respond to ‘the call of nature’. Nature is also incontrovertibly indifferent to human fate. But the ‘laws of nature’ are formulated by certain groups for specific purposes. Nature has been attributed with approved human values and ideals to validate and raise above debate particular visions and ideologies. The Nazis, for instance, regarded war as society’s natural state, while a naturist recruitment film of the 1950s was entitled Naked, as Nature Intended. During the 1992 campaign for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination in the United States, Pat Buchanan described the AIDS disease as ‘nature’s retribution’ against what he saw as a strikingly unnatural practice. Buchanan was reiterating the thirteenth-century views of Thomas Aquinas, for whom homosexual intercourse was unnatural because animals did not engage in it. Yet over the past few decades scientists have monitored instances of same-sex attraction in the animal kingdom.⁹

If, following the original Greek definition in all its catholicity, nature is deemed to be everything material that exists, then, strictly speaking, nothing can be unnatural. However, the distinction between the natural and the unnatural (or artificial) is invariably made and, while nature has no conceptual opposite, we usually think of it as human culture. Indeed, without a concept of culture as the works of humankind, there can be no concept of nature. Many ancient Greek thinkers assumed that the original condition of mankind prior to social and political organization was a state of nature governed by natural laws. Depending on your standpoint, humanity had either fallen from this state of grace, where it had been unencumbered by institutions, or had risen beyond its barbaric confines through the salutary mechanisms of culture and human laws.

A fundamental issue for Aristotle in the Physics was the distinction between natural entities whose essence is innate – things that do what they do themselves – and artificial entities whose essence derives from an external source: the artist who sculpts a rock, the stonemason who builds a house. Hence the diff...