Infinite Nature

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2006 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2006.

Paperback edition 2013

Printed in the United States of America

22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 132 3 4 5 6

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-35944-1 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-10222-1 (paperback)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-10799-8 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226107998.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hull, R. Bruce

Infinite Nature / R. Bruce Hull

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN: 0-226-35944-1 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Philosophy of nature. 2. Ecology—Philosophy. I. Title.

BD581.H85 2006

113—dc22

2005035108

This paper meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

INFINITE NATURE

R. BRUCE HULL

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO & LONDON

To my other loves: Elizabeth, Quinn, and Constance

NATURE IS

Nurturing, providing, mothering

Competitive, indifferent, risky

Resources, jobs, wealth

Life, habitat, services

Pollen, flower, garden,

Wolf, pack, ecosystem

Human, ape, evolution

Created, perfect, God

Static, resilient, balanced

Dynamic, frail, disturbed

Known, measured, managed

Mysterious, chaotic, unpredictable

Pure, clean, healthy

Hurricane, fire, infested

Restorative, exciting, fun

Pest, plague, death

Wild, untamed, uncooked

Domesticated, feral, engineered

Remote, isolated, protected

Potted, planted, managed

Creative, persistent, other

Child, dependent, lover

Many natures

Which should exist?

Contents

Preface

1· Introduction

2· Anthropogenic Nature

3· Evolving Nature

4· Ecological Nature

5· (In)finite Nature

6· Economic Nature

7· Healthy Nature

8· Fair Nature

9· Spiritual Nature

10· Human Nature

11· Rightful Nature

12· Aesthetic Nature

13· Moral Nature

Conclusion

Notes

References

Index

Preface

I’m a rebound romantic. I once was blindly in love with nature—romantically and lustfully in love. I immersed myself in the deep waters and penetrating solitude of wilderness lakes at the border between Minnesota and Canada, bushwhacked through dense rhododendron forests up steep Appalachian Mountains in pursuit of sunsets, and lost hours meditating on changing colors deep within the Grand Canyon. I opened windows to let flies escape and did not fish for sport because I found no pleasure in causing fish pain. I followed a vegetarian diet, took short showers, turned off lights, and faithfully recycled all materials my community allowed. I tried to take only memories and leave only footprints. But I was painfully aware that by living my life, I created trails in wilderness, trash in dumps, and carbon in the atmosphere. I felt guilty about being human and destroying the nature I loved.

The guilt grew as I took advantage of life’s opportunities to travel the world and raise a family. I had to ignore or suppress this guilt in order to stay sane while leading a professional, middle-class American lifestyle. I knowingly became a hypocrite. I stocked bathrooms in my old but sturdy wood house with ample supplies of soft, clean toilet paper. I drove a car to work more often than I biked. I drank imported beer in nonreturnable bottles. I started eating steak again, and I liked it. On cold snowy days, I appreciated the warmth and comfort of my oil-fired furnace. I flew to conferences, drove on holidays to visit family members, and surfed the Web.

As I struggled with being a hypocrite, it soon dawned on me that I also am a bigamist. I love both nature and culture. I’d been captivated by fine music and literature, mesmerized by Michelangelo’s David, and awed by the Great Wall of China. I love sipping fine wine at Australian vineyards and strolling dreamily through the tended Tuscan landscapes. I eagerly enrich my life with friends and ideas from around the world and marvel at the beauty and integrity humans create.

The first part of my professional career focused on the study, management, and protection of romantic experiences in nature. I taught in landscape architecture and natural resource recreation programs, conducted studies in natural areas, and developed methods to assess and legitimize public preferences for nature. Then, with the pressures of establishing a career and family behind me, and awareness of my hypocrisy and bigamy in front of me, I sought to resolve some contradictions in my life.

As a good romantic, I looked to nature for lessons. Pillars of U.S. environmentalism such as Thoreau, Leopold, and Muir found inspiration and guidance in nature, so I searched for answers in wild places and in the scientific studies of nature. I was disappointed to find no absolutes, only qualifications. Rather than an inspiring nature that knew best and could help me establish priorities and defend values, I learned about a dynamic and capricious nature. I found deep divisions and intense debate among my natural science colleagues over issues I had taken for granted: biodiversity is good, ecosystems have integrity, forests have health, species are entities, and naturalness can be defined. And I confronted the dark side to eco-philosophy that promotes fascism, social Darwinism, and misanthropy. Where Muir found humility and interconnectedness, Hitler found genocide and brutality.

I felt like my lover had abandoned me. If nature really was dynamic, capricious, and arbitrary, then perhaps I could be too. My guilt began to ease and my embrace of things cultural grew; clearly I was on the rebound from a shattered relationship and needed to be careful of new infatuations. I remained uneasy about my inability to judge environmental policies and evaluate alternative development scenarios. In what environment did I want to live? What environmental qualities should I advocate? How could I defend my preferences? I had so many more questions than answers that I soon felt more helpless than guilty. My most troubling realization was that I could not define or defend the nature I had loved. What was my lover? A fantasy? An expectation? A social construction?

My tools and training failed to help me make sense of these questions, so I redirected my professional career and began studying environmental debates and land-use planning efforts. I wanted to learn how others were resolving life’s contradictions. Obviously many people had strong opinions (as evidenced by negotiation train wrecks, endless litigation of land-use plans, and heated scholarly debates about the nature of nature). I interviewed scores of people—some experts, some not—about their environmental preferences and concerns. I found that most people were at least as confused as I, and often became visibly anxious when my questions penetrated through their deep-seated beliefs and assumptions about nature and about humanity’s relationship to nature.

Why is nature so elusive a lover? Why did I struggle defining it, justifying its existence, explaining my values for it, and figuring out how I should relate to it? Why do we as a society have such a hard time finding agreement on essential questions about the environmental conditions we want for ourselves and our descendants? The answer, I now suspect, is because environmental fundamentalism traps us in narrow, self-reinforcing, and polarizing debates. Actively pluralizing nature provided me the means to overcome these fundamentalist traps. Hope of deliberation and discourse replaced the helplessness of polarization and paralysis. Optimism about finding common ground replaced the negativity of pointing out differences. I rebounded back into a relationship with many natures. This book describes my journey toward pluralizing nature. I wrote it as a means to help understand and inventory some natures that can, have, and might exist.

The book’s intended audience is everyone who cares about living in thriving and sustainable communities. That should include you. It certainly includes environmental professionals, environmental scientists, environmentalists, community leaders, politicians, parents, and anyone else involved with or responsible for determining the environmental qualities of our future. The book is meant to be accessible to a general audience. It makes no assumptions about prior exposure to evolution, ecology, economics, environmental history, religious philosophy, or ethical theory—but it combines and focuses these and other disciplinary perspectives on contemporary environmental issues. I’ve used the text as part of a general education course available to freshmen in every discipline and profession. The class and text evoke spirited discussion as well as frustration and joy at the complexity of our environmental challenges.

The book has been reviewed and improved by too many to mention, but I’d like to specifically acknowledge Paul Angermeier, Brian Britt, Terry Daniel, Erin DeWitt, Christie Henry, Brian Nettleton, David Robertson, Joe Roggenbuck, Gyorgyi Voros, as well as the hundreds of students who worked through early drafts.

* 1 *

Introduction

Environmental Fundamentalism Unifying Visions of Thoreau and Leopold Pluralizing Nature

Critics say environmentalism is dying; or if it is not dying, then it needs to. Traditional critics repeat well-worn complaints that environmentalism’s agenda is misplaced, oppressive, and misanthropic because it produces regulatory bungles, slows economic growth, and delays technological advances that save lives. A newer line of criticism, coming from inside the movement, argues that environmentalism’s alarmist rhetoric, polarizing ideology, and preservationist solutions are outdated and insufficient to the tasks of sustaining thriving communities in a humanized biosphere.1 All these critics are wrong in one important regard: there is not one environmentalism, one environmentalist position, or one environment. Critics know this to be true but still struggle to escape the trap of environmental fundamentalism.

The trap of environmental fundamentalism gets sprung early and often. Environmental issues tend to get framed as either-or, win-lose debates: economy or environment, humans or nature, government regulation or market economy, preservation or development, growth or steady state. Serious public dialogue about desirable future conditions quickly polarizes and degenerates into name-calling, as it did in a recent planning effort for the lands within the Adirondacks’ famous Blue Line. Environmentalists were stereotyped as forest faggots, nature Nazis, and watermelons: green on the outside, red (socialist) on the inside. Non-environmentalists were typecast as rapists, destroyers, and greedy exploiters with warped priorities that value the almighty dollar above the Almighty’s creation.2

Alternative framing of society’s social-environmental problems is possible. Biocultural visionaries advocate appropriate technology and social ecology that blend rather than separate environmental and social concerns. They try to advance solutions that benefit both the environment and jobs, human equity and biodiversity, urbanization and ecology, utility and beauty, and thriving and sustainable communities. These attractive visions of the future appeal to people of most political persuasions, broadening and deepening the political will to act. To identify and realize these visions, we need to overcome the polarization caused by environmental fundamentalism. The purpose of this book is to assist in this effort by pluralizing our conception of nature.

UNIFIERS: THOREAU AND LEOPOLD

Early and foundational environmental thinkers such as Henry David Thoreau and Aldo Leopold were unifiers, not polarizers.3 They were highly critical of economics as the sole criterion for justifying land-use decisions and social policies. However, they were not anti-economic. Thoreau, for example, went to the woods to live deliberately, and his experiment at pond’s edge was, in part, economic. The first and longest chapter of Walden is titled Economy, in which he carefully records expenses and profits down to the half cent. He describes building a house, planting and hoeing a bean field, selling excess beans, and purchasing supplies with the profits. He rejoices in the fulfillment earned through the labor of living frugally, simply, deliberately, and economically.

However, Thoreau also soundly criticized his neighbors for overemphasizing economic values. Their narrow-minded, economic-only accounting of life trapped them in a sad, desperate cycle of toiling at jobs in order to secure the funds needed to purchase the products that others toiled to produce. His neighbors seemed so focused on staying atop the economic treadmill that they forgot to smell the roses and taste the fruits of life. Thoreau was not against labor but thought people sacrificed essential spheres of life—such as self-actualization, community, place, and posterity—by too eagerly selling their humanity as labor. He encouraged people to drive life into a corner and find in it deep meaning, spiritual fulfillment, aesthetic pleasure, ecological literacy, and community vitality. His two-year experiment at pond’s edge was an effort to document different ways to understand and value living a simple life near nature.

That was 150 years ago. Today Thoreau might conclude that things have gotten worse. He also might conclude that the environmental movement he unknowingly helped found has failed to offer society a viable alternative. But he might see signs for hope that his agenda will be realized. While writing this introduction, I traveled to Walden Pond in search of Henry’s muse. Urban sprawl long ago eroded much of the solitude Thoreau found during his long walks around Concord, Massachusetts. The edge of the famous pond is now badly beaten and bruised by the hundreds of thousands of visitors who frolic there each year. The pond regularly fills with boaters, swimmers, dogs, hikers, deer, and pilgrims such as me.

Extensive efforts are under way to restore functioning ecological systems to the pond’s trampled watershed. Steel-wire fences and strongly worded signs direct visitors to narrow trails that ring the pond. Vegetation is being planted by volunteers, and soil has been secured by high-tech landscaping fabric. It is ironic that Thoreau’s nightmare of a nature completely defined, dominated, and denuded by humanity occurred at the very place where he wrote some of his most powerful prose warning us of the dangers of an unrestrained instrumental worldview. It is perhaps fitting that restoration efforts are under way to balance the needs of a thriving, creative ecological system with the needs of a thriving, creative human civilization. Perhaps neither nature nor humanity will dominate this new arrangement and both will be better off for the partnership.

Aldo Leopold also was a unifier, appreciating both the economic and cultural harvests of nature. He studied, advised, and advocated hunting, agriculture, and other consumptive economic practices, recognizing that they provide the needed material harvests of food, shelter, comfort, and safety. He strove to harmonize economic practices with the integrity of functioning ecological systems and thus was critical of land management driven exclusively for economic gain. The land, he argued, also generated cultural harvests, providing people with a life as well as a livelihood. In addition to wood and food, the land grows families, democracy, passion, biodiversity, wildness, safety, and art. He said we must cease being intimidated by the argument that a right action is impossible because it does not yield maximum profits, or that a wrong action is to be condoned because it pays. That philosophy is dead in human relations, and its funeral in land-relations is overdue.4 Leopold’s science, poetry, and practice are full of efforts to harmonize the material and cultural harvests with the integrity of ecological systems.

Leopold’s emphasis on community is important.5 Communities unify members: membership creates obligations as well as providing the benefits of protection, opportunity, and identity, and membership requires respecting and protecting qualities that define the community. Members must limit behaviors that damage the community. Membership also requires good-faith participation in negotiations that decide the norms of behavior as well as the privileges and responsibilities of community membership. Members need to explicitly negotiate their visions for a thriving community: What defines a good life? What counts as acceptable environmental quality? What ideals should be passed on to future generations? Which social institutions and behaviors will create and sustain these desired conditions? Who or what deserves membership? What rights, privileges, and responsibilities do members deserve? These negotiations unify community members by shaping shared expectations.

FUNDAMENTALISM IS A PROBLEM

Fundamentalism narrows the decision space where common interests can be found by promoting a politics of blame and shame when what is needed is deliberation and collaboration. Worse, it encourages allegiance rather than understanding. Fundamentalism discourages appreciation and respect for the many natures that evoke hope, wonder, and political action. This book pluralizes nature in hopes of moving us beyond environmental fundamentalism toward the critical tasks of understanding and sustaining the many natures that add immeasurably to the identities and qualities of our lives.

It is common in environmental debates for nature to be used in defense of policies and positions. It is rhetorically effective to justify a particular outcome because it is natural, has natural causes, or was naturally selected or because nature knows best. But these appeals invoke the naturalistic fallacy: just because something occurs in nature does not mean that it should.6 Some sociobiologists, for example, argue that evolution predisposes human males to be promiscuous because such behavior supposedly increases the number of descendants and therefore the success of a promiscuous man’s genes; this contention, if true, does not mean that modern culture should sanction infidelity, adultery, and rape. Some evolutionary psychologists argue that evolution has favored humans who were aggressive in their pursuit of food, shelter, and mates; this contention, if true, does not mean that modern culture should promote murder, warfare, and confrontation as the primary means of dispute resolution. Likewise, some social Darwinists suggest that competition for survival improves society’s fitness; this contention, if true, does not mean that modern culture should discourage welfare, public education, and other social practices that increase opportunities for the socioeconomically disadvantaged. Other invocations of nature’s moral authority are used in arguments for and against abortion, homosexuality, and the subjugation of women. In most cases, the characterizations of nature are partial and biased; in all cases, they are insufficient. The values and qualities we choose to define and guide our communities must be openly deliberated, not ignorantly justified by trite appeals to nature. Recognizing many natures mitigates against the naïveté and absolutism that hinder open deliberations.

Nature is also used to describe desired environmental conditions and goals of environmental management: keep it natural, mimic nature, or don’t exceed the natural range of variability. Scientized synonyms of nature can include biodiversity, ecological integrity, and health. These references to a singular nature are ambiguous and misleading. Pluralizing nature forces us to be more specific about the conditions we desire and why they are desired.

Environmental fundamentalism collides with other worldviews such as religious fundamentalism to produce sparks that fuel the flames of polarization and paralysis. A popular environmental critique of Judeo-Christian traditions argues that teachings of dominionism and dualism embedded in the Bible are responsible for the tendency toward environmental exploitation found in Christian Western civilizations. Alternative interpretations of Judeo-Christian traditions emphasize and mobilize concern about caring for God’s creation. The pluralizing of nature that occurs in subsequent chapters reveals enormous overlap between religious and environmental causes. Goals of environmentalism and organized religion likely have more commonalities than differences: they share common concerns about the environment, the economy, culture, and the future. The same can be said for ecologism, primitivism, capitalism, and other absolutisms.

PLURALIZING NATURE

Pluralizing nature facilitates the collaboration and deliberation that resolves environmental conflict and implements solutions. If stakeholders in community-planning efforts believe that their nature is the only possible nature, then they may fail to recognize interests they share with others and instead waste scarce civic energies defending the legitimacy of their nature. The better we understand the many natures that can exist, the better we will be able to comprehend the concerns of others, evaluate their positions, and find common ground. Resolving difficult environmental conflicts requires collaborative, deliberative efforts where participants comprehend and respect one another’s perspectives, and when conflict seems intractable, are able to reframe the conflict around issues and interests stakeholders can agree on.7 Pluralizing nature increases the decision space where acceptable conditions may be found as well as the political support for these conditions by including more community members who care and giving them more reasons why they should care. The increased number, intensity, and overlap of interests might help mobilize the political support needed to create thriving and sustainable communities.

As an example, take General Grant, a sequoia tree located in Kings Canyon National Park, California. The third largest tree in the world, it towers more than thirty-six stories in height and has a diameter exceeding forty feet. Several thousand years old, General Grant is the largest living memorial to Americans who died in war. Its existence likely can be traced back to Native American burning practices because sequoias require fire to release seeds, prepare the soil, and open the forest canopy. General Grant reminds people of their ties to these Native Americans and to the early pioneers who settled the continent. And it has value to the Judeo-Christian God, who created trees and other vegetation on the third day and declared them good.

It could provide decent jobs to hardworking people who pay local taxes that in turn build schools and hospitals if it were felled and sawed into boards to build houses. It might even host genes or chemicals to cure debilitating diseases. It does retain water, sequester carbon, purify air, and perform a myriad of other ecological services on which the lives of countless insects, bacteria, and other forms of life depend. It evokes awe and humility in most people who see it and is photographed and commemorated in countless coffee-table books and family albums. People stroll beneath its branches and ponder deep thoughts about life, ecology, and their place in the universe. They search for lessons about how to live a worthy life. The tree’s magnitude inspires still others to pursue careers as foresters or conservation biologists. Moreover, it is alive. It grows, seeks resources, and resists infections. By these actions, the sequoia demonstrates a will to live. Perhaps this willfulness to survive has value in and of itself, independent of any human value. There are indeed many ways to know and appreciate General Grant. The more we broaden and deepen our interests in this tree, and in nature generally, the more we will be motivated to engage one another in efforts to create and sustain communities where these interests thrive.

Pluralizing natures mitigates the polarization and paralysis of environmental fundamentalism because it asks us to respect and critically examine diverse interests. I am not advocating what has been called a flabby pluralism that uncritically accepts all perspectives, paradigms, and vocabularies. Nor am I advocating what has been called a fortress-like pluralism where isolated groups work to build and advance their internally consistent methods and theories, unwilling to communicate across paradigm boundaries and unable to agree on universal standards of truth. Rather, I’m suggesting an engaged pluralism that accepts multiple perspectives on every issue and replaces the quest for certainty and absolutes with the negotiation of truth and objectivity through agreement.8

Engaged pluralism demands respect and responsiveness to the positions and understandings of others. It requires active listening and a critical and self-reflective thinking that acknowledges the uncertainty and limits of knowledge. Applied to environmental negotiations, engaged pluralism seeks ways to understand, value, and illustrate the environmental conditions that describe where we want to live in the future as well as mobilizing the political support needed to get us there. Engaged pluralism is characteristic of a healthy democratic society where we deliberate our ideals and standards of conduct.

U.S. citizens insist on freedom of speech, private property rights, democracy, and related ideals codified in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Ideals such as these have been negotiated over centuries and enforced by wars. We violate our ideals only after serious political debate, no matter how efficient or profitable the violations may be. These ideals create our legacy; we hope and expect that our descendants will know and appreciate them. Among these ideals are the environmental qualities that define us. The claim that America is nature’s nation is well founded.9 American culture has been shaped by the American environment. The environmental qualities we choose to create will decide not just the sustainability of our communities, but also our identities.

The primary hope of this book is that pluralizing nature will help us identify, care about, and sustain a thriving, unifying Leopoldian community. A secondary purpose of this book is to dispel certain myths and misperceptions that pervade public negotiations about environmental quality. My intent, in this regard, is to cut out some of the flabby pluralism and strengthen the descriptions and justifications of our desired future conditions so that they appeal to an ever-widening circle of stakeholders. Public discourse about our future is weakened and cheapened by myths about a balanced nature, a pristine continent, a noble savage, and a purposeful evolution.

So-called environmentalists invoking these holy grails paralyze discussions, waste valuable political capital, and deflect needed public discussion away from widely shared public goals of thriving and sustainable communities. The so-called economic exploiters find fresh meat for their dismissal of environmentalism and understandably look elsewhere for definitions of environmental quality and ideals about future communities. Discounting and dismissing the whole environmental message becomes easier if a few prominent rhetorical points are so easily questioned. Bestsellers such Michael Crichton’s State of Fear effectively throw out environmental babies because of legitimate criticisms about dirt in environmentalism’s bathwater. Infinite Nature advocates pluralizing nature in order to increase the decision space where acceptable environmental conditions may be found, but I do not uncritically accept all natures and intentionally single out some construals to dismiss as myth and misperception.

Some worry that pluralizing nature diminishes the legitimacy of environmental protection and hastens environmental degradation. The relativist argument goes something like this: Because there are many natures, all natures must be equally acceptable. I disagree. That type of thinking is flabby pluralism. Engaged pluralizing encourages responsibility. It forces us to accept our role in determining which natures exist. Pluralizing nature forces us to be explicit and deliberative about our choices among the many natures that have been and might be. Pluralizing nature does not suspend biological realities; rather, it erodes the myth that our knowledge of nature exists independently of our agendas.10

ABOUT THE BOOK

Our understandings of the world are socially constructed. What anyone knows about nature depends as much on human theories, language, and cultural context as it depends upon what is out there to be felt, tasted, viewed, and heard. The social constructivist assumption, as it is applied here, does not question whether reality exists independent of human thought or whether science can describe facts that help us understand that reality. For example, I do not doubt that trees exist or that they grow, die, and fall independently of humans. How the fallen tree is described, however, does depend on humans. We could describe the sound of the falling tree using decibels. We could just as easily describe the increased sunlight now reaching the forest floor, the decreased habitat for canopy-dependent insects, the increased habitat for decomposition fungi, the lost economic value of timber, the increased access to a scenic vista, or the educational opportunity of witnessing ecological disturbances. Any one of these descriptions, and many others, accurately characterizes facts about the fallen tree. How we interpret the fallen tree is shaped by the measurements and definitions we apply to it. We are limited in how we can know the fallen tree, or any other aspect of nature, by the methods and purposes we have to describe it. In this way, nature is socially constructed.

I also believe it is impossible to separate descriptive from evaluative aspects of any discussion of nature, scientific or otherwise. The only reason I am able to discuss the natures in this book is because people have cared enough to create a vocabulary conducive to their description, understanding, and appreciation. Nature is infinitely complex and we ask questions about only a small portion of the infinitude. We invent terms and conceptual models to serve as abstractions to represent the parts that interest us, the parts we value. We know little or nothing about parts of nature’s infinitude that fall outside these realms.

In addition to crossing the fact-value divide, I deliberately wade across disciplinary boundaries. Disciplines deepen our understanding of particular aspects of nature, but they necessarily ignore other aspects. Disciplines are penetrating spotlights that focus and magnify our gazes so that we may see further and finer. By necessity, a single spotlight casts a narrow beam and much falls in its shadows. I have tried to use multiple spotlights, and any other source of insight I could muster, to map the broad terrain of many natures. In some ways, I am now making excuses and asking the experts’ indulgence for glossing over important nuances and understandings available only through prolonged disciplinary analysis. While pluralizing nature is somewhat novel, the content of this book is not. It is drawn from established sources in environmental history, ethics, and philosophy, as well as various natural sciences. I’ve tried to provide endnotes that direct interested readers into the detailed and voluminous literature associated with each nature. In this work, I merely enter the forest and must leave further exploration to you.

Some readers will be frustrated that I do not advocate the natures that should be sustained. Even within a chapter specific to a nature, I intentionally discuss multiple, sometimes conflicting ways of knowing and valuing that nature. Only the affected community can decide through study and deliberation which of these many natures should be created and sustained. This does not mean that I uncritically accept all natures as equally deserving of consideration. The reader will find me critical of many interpretations that I think have been refuted as myths or uncovered as disguises for political power. The purpose of this book is not to advocate a correct nature. Rather, the purpose is to partially map the terrain of possible natures, to legitimize multiple natures and multiple values, and to encourage that these natures and values be welcomed and considered during deliberations that shape our future.

* 2 *

Anthropogenic Nature

Native Americans · Noble Savage Myth · Modern Humanized Biosphere

NATIVE AMERICAN LAND MANAGEMENT

The Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto went to the New World determined to find fortune and fame several decades after Columbus discovered the Americas. Other explorers preceded him, but de Soto’s was among the most ambitious and best documented of the early expeditions. His seven-ship armada set sail from Cuba and arrived in Florida near Tampa in 1539. He commanded an army of over six hundred men provisioned with hundreds of livestock. They wintered in Tennessee, and some reports have them marching as far north as Chicago in search of a northern sea that would provide access to China. De Soto discovered the Mississippi River and traveled as far west as Texas before he died. In their four years of travels, the army encountered a cultured population and a domesticated landscape, but not the gold, gems, and other riches hoped for by the Spanish crown. Traveling along well-worn paths that connected numerous villages and several large cities, they commandeered provisions from thousands of acres of irrigated fields sprouting corn, squash, and other domesticated crops. Willing and unwilling natives served as guides and laborers.1

Estimates are difficult and dangerous, but some suggest between 4 and 7 million people lived in North America at that time, and perhaps 10 percent of them lived in the area de Soto explored (estimates go as high as 100 million if we add Central and South America).2 A small and scattered population by today’s standards, but certainly the continent was neither empty nor pristine. European horses, armor, metal, and military tactics overwhelmed Native American defenses, but more importantly smallpox, influenza, measles, typhoid, mumps, and other European diseases devastated the Native American population within a generation or two. More than 90 percent of Native Americans perished in the century following Columbus. They lacked biological resistance, and they lacked the knowledge, learned in Europe through harsh lessons taught by plagues, that surviving outbreaks of infectious disease requires quarantine of infected communities. Most of Native American culture, economy, language, technology, and agriculture perished as well.

The human population decline left huge voids in the North American ecology and created an appearance for later European explorers of a pristine, abundant, and empty wilderness ripe for the taking. Absent a thriving human culture, Europeans had an easier time claiming land for God and crown. European-based American culture has long preferred a cultural narrative that begins with the myth of discovering and taming pristine wilderness populated by a few heathen savages. But the myth is easily dispelled. The existence of sophisticated cultures and extensive land management prior to European discovery should be incorporated into the stories we tell ourselves about our cultural origins and into our land-management ideals. Several additional illustrations of the cultivated pre-Columbian American landscape should suffice to make this point.3

The Native American city of Cahokia prospered east of current-day St. Louis. Sometime around 1000 AD, when Cahokia civilization was at its peak, the city was larger in size, population, and complexity than London. Enormous earthen mounds strategically located along the flat terrain designated social status, religious symbols, and