Killing Nature: the False Reality of the “Natural World”

This was written by Gabe, one of our student interns. The opinions expressed herein do not reflect those of Civitas other than respect for the value of open dialogue.

It is time to kill Nature.

Considering now that every self-described environmentalist has fully abandoned this essay, if not lingering only so that they may strike the back of my head with a heavy metal bar, it is important to define what Nature even is, given that I want to kill it.

Part I: Know Thy Enemy

The word “nature” stems from the Latin “nasci” – to be born. It’s why the earliest example of the word, from the fourteenth century, was used to mean the inherent character of a thing. But a word is not its definition; a word has never been its definition; a word is its use. In the same way that the word “literally” can now be comfortably used in an inherently non-literal context, so too has the definition of Nature changed and developed beyond any reasonable understanding.

And yet, it is plain and simple to define Nature. It takes no difficulty to stumble into the wilderness beyond civilization and declare to the high heavens: Ah yes! Nature! To stand atop the mountains and investigate the valley and the alpine forests growing around the babbling brook and declare to the high heavens: Ah yes! Nature! To spot the twin moose traipsing through the brush, noble, stoic: Ah yes! Nature!

But to define Nature requires we witness Nature. One must experience the wilderness to know a place is wild. What then, is “wild”? By all accounts, the American understanding of Nature is that of the untouched wild. The place that civilization has not yet “corrupted”. A sublime reality, one that is the alleged answer to our contemporary, absurd lives. Nature is what it is not, and what it is not is civilized. What then, is civilized? What is civilization? Is a single human being enough to “civilize” a place? Must a human construct something to produce civilization? No one would argue that a town or city is civilization, but what of the lone homestead? Surrounded by nothing but prairie in the “frontier” (whatever that means), is the lone structure civilization? Is that enough? Must the structure be occupied? Is the rotting cabin civilization? Is the ruined castle civilization? Were they? Is their occupancy necessary?

This is not to say “Nature” is without goodness. Standing atop the mountains, cool wind whipping across the face, the horizon extending for hundreds of miles as the scattered pines cling up and down the walls of the valley, the whole experience exists as a memory instantly recognizable to those who may have found themselves atop the Rocky Mountains. All memories of Nature, it seems, are both unique and universal. The sun sets across the desert horizon, unveiling the night sky in a glowing moon and an endless cascade of stars. The sky ablaze as the dawn breaks over the ocean, draping the beach in warm hues while the waves skim the shore. The staccato strikes of the woodpecker into a fallen tree. The symphony of the small waterfall, falling from the end of a gentle brook. These are all experiences certainly pleasant, and it would be wrong to say that such memories could not result in what Maslow described as “rare, exciting, oceanic, deeply moving, exhilarating, elevating experiences that generate an advanced form of perceiving reality, and are even mystic and magical in their effect upon the experimenter.”

But the very possibility of this goodness, these memories, is entirely constructed. To quote William Cronon’s excellent essay “The Trouble with Wilderness”, if one were to “go back 250 years in American and European history, and [they would] not find nearly so many people wandering around remote corners of the planet looking for what today we would call ‘the wilderness experience.’ As late as the eighteenth century, the most common usage of the word ‘wilderness’ in the English language referred to landscapes that generally carried adjectives far different from the ones they attract today. To be a wilderness then was to be ‘deserted,’ ‘savage,’ ‘desolate,’ ‘barren’—in short, a ‘waste,’ the word’s nearest synonym. Its connotations were anything but positive, and the emotion one was most likely to feel in its presence was ‘bewilderment’ or terror.”

So what the hell changed?

Part Two: The Sublime Sublimated

Nature has always had a place in the societal mind of the world. Historically, that place was one of danger and fear. Civilization is inherently safe, in the way that a herd of animals encircles itself to ward off danger, so too did the construction of cities separate humankind from the world around it. It wasn’t until the 1800s that this fear was replaced by an awe. William Wordsworth described his crossing of the Alps in his autobiographical poem “The Prelude” as something akin to meeting God, comparing the trees, the winds, the mountains to “Characters of the great Apocalypse, / The types and symbols of Eternity, / Of first, and last, and midst, and without end.”

It is in this realignment to how we understand Nature that the sublime is sublimated. Just as a dog is descended from the wolf, sharing little more than shape, now thousands of years removed, so too has the natural world been domesticated, sharing its appearance but little else.

The “virgin wild”, untouched by the corrupting hand of humankind, has both never existed and cannot exist. Much of the land now placed upon the pedestal of Nature had been inhabited not terribly long ago. There is no question that the indigenous people who once lived across the continent were forcibly relocated at best and downright massacred at worst to clear the land for American settlers. Was the land still “wild” when they lived there? Was their civilization a part of Nature? Unless we are to believe in the myth of the Noble Savage, the answer is a resounding no.

Instantly the artificial beginning to Nature is unveiled. The harsh reality that the land was conquered and subsequently deemed Edenic striking with the same force as David’s stone which slew Goliath is one that Americans tend to avoid in the contemporary day. That’s not to say it’s never been done; indeed the idea of Manifest Destiny hinged in part upon conquering the West and converting it into a place welcoming to settlers and migrants from the East Coast. As America distanced itself from the other imperial powers, the nation was forced to redefine how it understood the world around it. After the “Wild West” had been tamed, the cultural idea for the West’s conquest lingered on in a slew of Westerns, often featuring Native Americans as hostile forces resisting conquest. As the Western fell out of the Zeitgeist, so too did the national pride in conquest. All of this together combined to realign the American approach to the natural world.

Nature is not real. It is a constructed sublime, and a recent one at that. And in that sublime lies a bizarre dichotomy.

Part Three: Creating the Creator

I have witnessed many self-described environmentalists, many staunch atheists, and many who decry the very notion of organized religion, approach the mythic Nature with a reverence reserved for the greatest of gods. Nature is the Garden of Eden, draped across infinite forms, present on Earth. It is a paradise which humankind can frolic through in the same way God is described waltzing through Eden. It is a fantasy in which the web of life exists free of the wickedness of man.

Our contemporary civilization, our terrible and polluting factories, our evil consumption, our wicked farms, our hideous structures: none can be found in the Edenic Nature. To enter Nature is to enter Eden, to be free of the corruption of the world we live in. We absolve ourselves of the world we live in to find ourselves in the world of our dreams. We are no longer actors, but observers of a reality we created.

It’s a great separation from all discernable history. To assert that Nature is, as the name would suggest, the “natural order” of things—a perfect, unending model of how the whole web of life lives in a perfect, family-friendly, marketable union—is to act in great ignorance of how life on Earth, and even the Earth itself, functions.

The universe is causal. The existence of physics makes the reality of influence plain. The world and the beings which live upon it are perpetually changing and manipulating the spaces around them, both human and nonhuman. It is obvious how the digging of the Suez Canal, for instance, is a manipulation of the world. So too is the building of an anthill by a colony. Is the smallest creature not too a force producing a reaction?

Even our precious Nature is not free from manipulation. Were it free from influence, there would be no need for the slogan “take only photos; leave only footprints”; there would be no need for signs begging hikers to stay on the trails; there would be no need to dissuade certain behavior, because Nature is robust and immovable. What then happens when an unstoppable force reaches an immovable object? It would appear, at first glance, that Nature is not as immovable as we are led to believe.

How then, can we be reasonably expected to protect Nature? To deny the changing climates of the planet Earth is to ignore overwhelming evidence. Winters are shorter and warmer, summers are longer and hotter, the world is changing, rapidly, and the effects will be catastrophic, potentially apocalyptic. To understand Nature as the “natural order”, specifically one that ceases upon human action, means that to protect nature humankind must destroy itself. This is, of course, absurd. First, humans are not an unstoppable force, in the same way Nature is not an immovable object. Second, the everchanging reality of Nature means that even in the most obliterating of apocalypses, Nature continues ad infinitum. Would a post-apocalyptic Nature be one we would recognize? Almost certainly not, but it is equally absurd to assume the future will appear just as the past.

Part Four: Deconstruction, or (You’re Never in Traffic)

Picture the following: you’re late for work. Oh no! Whether it was because you overslept (The alarm! Wasn’t it set last night?) or because the light lingered on red far too long (the third blink is slower man! I’m telling you!) or because the construction brought the road down to a single lane (and yet, there are still potholes on every corner!) you’re late for work. You weave in between cars, capturing precious seconds on your way to avoid the awkward confrontation with your boss. Potential excuses are rolling through your brain, none seem believable enough. Finally, after agonizing minutes, you’re so close, and then reality approaches: you’ve moved twenty feet in a minute. You’ve slowed to a crawl. All three lanes surrounding you are stuck in a creeping drag. You’ve gotten stuck in traffic!

You arrive thirty minutes late; your boss fires you instantly; you leave the office in sorrow; you’re promptly hit by a bus; you die instantly. All because of that damn traffic.

This story is, by nature, absurd. (Though, I’m sure the odds that it has happened are somehow greater than zero.) However, this story does reveal perhaps the greatest flaw in human thought: being stuck in traffic.

What is traffic? The answer is simple and straightforward enough: a whole mess of cars, most annoyingly not moving with high speed. To be stuck in traffic is to be lost somewhere in the middle of or behind this great mass. Of course, to be in either of those situations, the reality is that you are not stuck in traffic, but rather, you are traffic. How bold must one be to assert that they are the one stuck in traffic, rather than the unfeeling mass of cars? What is to prevent the driver of the car next to you, creeping forward just as slowly, bemoaning the sea of brake lights ahead of them, from crying out “I’m stuck in traffic!” The answer is nothing.

We, therefore, can never be in nature because human beings are nature. Are we not too a piece of the great web of life? Are we not as deserving of the world as the trees of the forests, the birds of the skies, the fish of the seas, the bugs of the soil? How pessimistic a view to see ourselves as undeserving of the planet which sustains us.

Part Five: Moving On, or “Getting Back to Nature”, if You Will

Nature is not a place in which we can visit. Nature has never been a place in which we can visit, because Nature cannot be beyond ourselves. It is impossible to be outside of something that humans are, by nature, already within. To do so would be as absurd as placing ourselves outside of the universe, when we are firmly planted within the universe.

“Getting Back to Nature” must be redefined. Nature cannot be an escape. We cannot escape something we are perpetually within. The flowers of the garden are just as much Nature as the flowers of the meadow. The notion that one is “wild” while the other is “manicured” is ultimately a false one.

The Earth exists as perhaps the closest to a perpetual motion machine we will ever witness. The overlapping and omnipresent web that connects all life and all non-life together acting and reacting ad infinitum to itself. We do not need grandiose change to influence that machine, for we are ourselves cogs within it. To change ourselves is to change nature. If we want to be so bold as to declare ourselves the “Protectors of Nature”, the stalwart defenders of the natural world, we cannot separate ourselves from nature. We must hold the same reverence for the backyard gardens as we do the alpine meadows. We must react to the trees in avenue medians as we do the rainforests. We must see our homes not as refuge from the outside, but as the outside reimagined. Only then, when the smallest of anthills is as mighty as the highest peaks, when the garden flowers are as beautiful as the meadows, when the most artificial creation is acknowledged as a piece of the Earth, will we find ourselves positioned to truly act as forces of Nature.

We cannot view ourselves as soldiers, garrisoned along castle walls to defend from a siege. There is no siege. There is no outside force attempting to “conquer” Nature. The reality of climate change and global warming is the fault of mankind and our actions. It is a part of Nature producing mass change to Nature. That mass change will have catastrophic effects if left unchecked, and indeed, that mass change is already producing those ill effects. To prevent that catastrophe, we must approach our relationship to Nature not as soldiers, guarding the sacred castle, but as an immune system: constantly vigilant, part of the whole, but not permanent. Nature changes; that’s good. We should not attempt to “conserve” Nature while living all the same. That won’t work; we’d just change it faster and harder. Rather, we must critically understand how our lives intersect with Nature, how our economy intersects with Nature, how our diet intersects with Nature, and how we can rebalance the inherently imbalanced systems and institutions which dominate our lives. It is in those intersections that we can redefine environmentalism as a practical, proactive force, rather than the ultimately ineffectual, reactive one it is today.