Environment and Society

A Reader

Maria Damon, Dale Jamieson, Christopher Schlottmann, Colin Jerolmack, Anne Rademacher

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781479805327
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Umwelt- & Energiepolitik

Environment and Society connects the core themes of environmental studies to the urgent issues and debates of the twenty-first century. In an era marked by climate change, rapid urbanization, and resource scarcity, environmental studies has emerged as a crucial arena of study. Assembling canonical and contemporary texts, this volume presents a systematic survey of concepts and issues central to the environment in society, such as: social mobilization on behalf of environmental objectives; the relationships between human population, economic growth and stresses on the planet’s natural resources; debates about the relative effects of collective and individual action; and unequal distribution of the social costs of environmental degradation. Organized around key themes, with each section featuring questions for debate and suggestions for further reading, the book introduces students to the history of environmental studies, and demonstrates how the field’s interdisciplinary approach uniquely engages the essential issues of the present.

PART I

Ideas of Nature

Environmentalists work both to improve environmental quality and to protect nature. It is thus not surprising that people sometimes use the word “environment” as if it were synonymous with “nature.” This is incorrect, however. Everything around us is part of the environment, but not everything is part of nature. When we preserve historic buildings, we protect the environment, but we do not preserve nature. When we establish a nature reserve such as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, we protect nature, but we do not improve the environment (except for a very few people and a great many caribou). Buildings, people, plants, animals, and toxic-waste dumps are all part of the environment, but toxic-waste dumps and buildings are not part of nature. Still, there are important connections between the environment and nature, and it is not a coincidence that environmentalists have been interested in both.

The English word “nature” comes from the Latin word natura, which in turn is a translation of the Greek word physis. Natura in its oldest uses means “birth.” We hear the echo of this when people speak of “Mother Nature” or nature as the source of all life. When we speak of nature, we often mean to be referring to what is essential, as when we talk of “human nature.” Sometimes nature is thought to be irresistible (“it’s in his nature”), other times as something to be overcome (when it takes the form of disease), and other times still it is regarded as good (“natural ingredients”). While environmentalists do not always endorse what they take to be natural, there is a tendency in environmental thought to think of nature as providing a norm or ideal that is at least presumptively good. While there is more to environmentalism than respecting nature, investigating the idea of nature is a good place to begin our understanding of environment and society.

This part begins with selections from the writer and activist Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature. In 1989, when climate change was much less well understood than it is today, McKibben went to what he saw as the heart of the problem. Yes, climate change will damage people and property, and that is very important. But the most profound consequence of climate change is that it will extinguish an important source of human meaning. Throughout human history, temperature and rainfall have always been the work of “some separate, uncivilizable force.” Now they are in part “a product of our habits, our economics, our ways of life.” Nature, as we have always understood it, is coming to an end. And the end of nature—the extinction of the idea that we live in a world larger than ourselves and beyond our control—brings sorrow, nostalgia, and a loss of meaning.

This new era in which humanity dominates nature is increasingly being called the “Anthropocene.” In our second selection, the distinguished scientists Will Steffen and Paul J. Crutzen and the environmental historian John R. McNeill describe this era and chart its history. The Anthropocene began, according to our authors, around 1800 with the onset of industrialization. Since about 1945, we have been in “the great acceleration.” Since “humankind will remain a major geological force for many millennia,” the challenge is to become responsible stewards of the Earth system.

The journalist Alan Weisman cautions us not to mistake the ubiquity of our impact with its permanence. In a delightful thought experiment, he asks us to imagine a world without us. Very quickly, it turns out, the world without humanity is quickly reclaimed by nature. A few signs of humanity’s impact may persist for awhile (e.g., feral cats feeding on starlings); but soon enough the glaciers will return, and all that will be left is a layer of the Earth’s crust that incorporates “an unnatural concentration of a reddish metal, which briefly had assumed the form of wiring and plumbing.”

When seen from a long-enough distance, everything of significance seems to disappear. The historian Carolyn Merchant returns us to the idea of nature in Western culture, which she sees as encompassing a recovery narrative. In the beginning was Eden, which was defiled by sin. According to this story, “aided by the Christian doctrine of redemption and the inventions of science, technology, and capitalism,” the Earth will be transformed into a “vast cultivated garden.” Merchant relates this recovery narrative to gendered conceptions of nature and technology and our fascination with biotechnology.

Pope Francis sees the Christian teachings in a different light. They have the potential to help us achieve the proper balance between the recognition of human uniqueness and the intrinsic value of all forms of life. According to Francis, “all of us are linked by unseen bonds and together form a kind of universal family.”

In the essay “The Etiquette of Freedom,” the Buddhist poet Gary Snyder reveals “the lessons of the wild.” He relates notions such as nature and wild to the Chinese tao and the Buddhist dharma. He finds the wild within as well as without: “The body is . . . in the mind. They are both wild.”

The part ends with a short passage from Aldo Leopold, the twentieth-century American scientist who is regarded as one of the foundational figures in American environmentalism. Here Leopold explains the “the land ethic,” which expands the moral community to include “soils, waters, plants, and animals.”

These ideas of nature, sometimes complementary and at times competing, form the background of the way that we think about the environment and its relation to society.

1

Excerpts from The End of Nature

BILL MCKIBBEN

Almost every day, I hike up the hill out my back door. Within a hundred yards the woods swallows me up, and there is nothing to remind me of human society—no trash, no stumps, no fence, not even a real path. Looking out from the high places, you can’t see road or house; it is a world apart from man. But once in a while someone will be cutting wood farther down the valley, and the snarl of a chain saw will fill the woods. It is harder on those days to get caught up in the timeless meaning of the forest, for man is nearby. The sound of the chain saw doesn’t blot out all the noises of the forest or drive the animals away, but it does drive away the feeling that you are in another, separate, timeless, wild sphere.

Now that we have changed the most basic forces around us, the noise of that chain saw will always be in the woods. We have changed the atmosphere, and that will change the weather. The temperature and rainfall are no longer to be entirely the work of some separate, uncivilizable force, but instead in part a product of our habits, our economies, our ways of life. Even in the most remote wilderness, where the strictest laws forbid the felling of a single tree, the sound of that saw will be clear, and a walk in the woods will be changed—tainted—by its whine. The world outdoors will mean much the same thing as the world indoors, the hill the same thing as the house.

An idea, a relationship, can go extinct, just like an animal or a plant. The idea in this case is “nature,” the separate and wild province, the world apart from man to which he adapted, under whose rules he was born and died. In the past, we spoiled and polluted parts of that nature, inflicted environmental “damage.” But that was like stabbing a man with toothpicks: though it hurt, annoyed, degraded, it did not touch vital organs, block the path of the lymph or blood. We never thought that we had wrecked nature. Deep down, we never really thought we could: it was too big and too old; its forces—the wind, the rain, the sun—were too strong, too elemental.

But, quite by accident, it turned out that the carbon dioxide and other gases we were producing in our pursuit of a better life—in pursuit of warm houses and eternal economic growth and of agriculture so productive it would free most of us from farming—could alter the power of the sun, could increase its heat. And that increase could change the patterns of moisture and dryness, breed storms in new places, breed deserts. Those things may or may not have yet begun to happen, but it is too late to altogether prevent them from happening. We have produced the carbon dioxide—we are ending nature. . . .

* * *

The argument that nature is ended is complex; profound objections to it are possible, and I will try to answer them. But to understand what’s ending requires some attention to the past. Not the ancient past, not the big bang or the primal stew. The European exploration of this continent is far enough back, for it is man’s idea of nature that is important here, and it was in response to this wild new world that much of our modern notion of nature developed. North America, of course, was not entirely unaltered by man when the colonists arrived, but it’s previous occupants had treated it fairly well. In many places, it was wilderness.

And most of it was wilderness still on the eve of Revolution, when William Bartram, one of America’s first professional naturalists, set out from his native Philadelphia to tour the South. His report on that trip through “North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, the Cherokee Country, the Extensive Territories of the Muscogulges, or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Choctaws” is a classic; it gives the sharpest early picture of the fresh continent. Though some of the land he traveled had been settled (he spent a number of his nights with gentlemen farmers on their plantations), the settlement was sparse, and the fields of indigo and rice gave way quickly to the wilderness. And not the dark and forbidding wilderness of European fairy tales but a blooming, humming, fertile paradise. Every page of Bartram’s long journal shouts of the fecundity, the profligacy, of this fresh land. “I continued several miles [reaching] verdant swelling knolls, profusely productive of flowers and fragrant strawberries, their rich juice dyeing my horse’s feet and ankles.” When he stops for dinner, he catches a trout, picks a wild orange, and stews the first in the juices of the second over his fire.

Whatever direction he struck off in, Bartram found vigorous beauty. He could not even stumble in this New World without discovering something: near the Broad River, while ascending a “steep, rocky hill,” he slips and reaching for a shrub to steady himself he tears up several plants of a new species of Caryopbyliata (Geum odoratissimum). Fittingly, their roots “filled the air with animating scents of cloves and spicy perfumes.” His diary brims over with the grand Latin binomials of a thousand plants and animals—Kalmia latifolia, “snowy mantled” Philadelphia modonts, Pinus sylvestris, Populus tremula, Dionea muscipula (“admirable are the properties” of these “sportive vegetables”!), Rheum rhubarbamm, Magnolia grandiflora—and also with the warm common names: the bank martin, the water wagtail, the mountain cock, the chattering plover, the bumblebee. But the roll call of his adjectives is even more indicative of his mood. On one page, in the account of a single afternoon, he musters fruitful, fragrant, sylvan (twice), moderately warm, exceedingly pleasant, charming, fine, joyful, most beautiful, pale gold, golden, russet, silver (twice), blue green, velvet black, orange, prodigious, gilded, delicious, harmonious, soothing, tuneful, sprightly, elevated, cheerful (twice), high and airy, brisk and cool, clear, moonlit, sweet, and healthy. Even where he can’t see, he imagines marvels: the fish disappearing into subterranean streams, “where, probably, they are separated from each other by innumerable paths, or secret rocky avenues, and after encountering various obstacles, and beholding new and unthought-of scenes of pleasure and disgust, after many days’ absence from the surface of the world emerge again from the dreary vaults, and appear exulting in gladness and sporting in the transparent waters of some far distant lake.” But he is no Disney—this is no Fantasia. He is a scientist recording his observations, and words like “cheerful” and “sweet” seem to have been technical descriptions of the untouched world in which he wandered.

This sort of joy in the natural was not a literary convention, a given; as Paul Brooks points out in Speaking for Nature, much of the literature had regarded wilderness as ugly and crude until the Romantic movement of the late eighteenth century. Andrew Marvell, for instance, referred to mountain...