Freyfogle - Our oldest task: making sense of our place in nature

This is a book about nature and culture, about our place and plight on earth and the nagging challenges we face in living on it in ways that might endure. It deals with what American conservationist Aldo Leopold once termed the oldest task in human history, the task of living on land without degrading it. By land, Leopold meant not just soils and rocks but the entire interconnected, interdependent community of life, people included. It was an ancient task, Leopold said, an essential one, and we were struggling with it much as civilizations before ours had struggled and quite often failed. Our cleverness, technology, and fecundity: all had advanced well ahead of our collective ability to align our modes of living with natures life-giving ways.

All living creatures change the world around them simply by going about the daily business of staying alive. To change the physical world is thus inevitable and appropriate. Indeed, the community of life that we inhabit is largely the product of such changes, made by countless species going back several billion years. The challenge that Leopold saw was thus not to avoid change to nature or even to minimize it. Instead, it was to use nature in ways that kept it fertile and productive for people then living and for future human generations, if not for other species as well. Our challengeour oldest taskwas to use nature but not to abuse it.

Collectively we have had trouble with this oldest task, particularly as our numbers have risen, new technologies have emerged, and market-driven competition has overwhelmed customary restraints on land use and resource use. Laws have curtailed some of the worst practices in many countries; green technologies are gaining a bit; and green consumerism is on the rise. But overall, our trajectory has not materially changed course. We continue to alter nature in ways that seem to involve abuse rather than use and to do so on ever-larger scalesseem to, that is, but then who can really be sure given the increasingly contentious debates? How do we know when a change weve made to nature goes beyond legitimate use to become abusive?

I entered teaching over three decades ago, in a law school, where Ive led courses on environmental, natural resources, and property law along with graduate readings groups on nature and culture, social justice, and conservation thought. This book arises out of this learning and instruction. It also draws together two core stands of my thinking and writing, going back as far or farther. One strand has been my effort to come to terms with our environmental problems in their full complexity, physically, socially, and morally. Land degradation is a product of human behavior and thus of the messy mix of factors and forces that motivate and shape how we act. My sense from early on was that this degradation arose proximately if not inexorably from business as usual in the modern age more than it did from individual mischief or malfeasance. We were all complicit to varying degrees, even the most well-meaning and conscientious among us. For me this recognition posed tough questions, especially about causes and responsibility. These questions gained complexity when they were examined together with our troubling, too-frequent tendencies to deny the scientific evidence of ecological ills and to resist even proven, cost-effective reforms. Plainly, the root causes of degradation run deep, among and within us.

My musings on our earthly predicament led me to wonder also whether we were being careful and thoughtful enough when we passed judgment on the physical evidence of ecological change. We were altering nature profoundlythat much was clearand some changes seemed manifestly bad. But it didnt appear so easy many times to decide which changes to nature were acceptable or good overall and which ones instead were misguided or immoral; it didnt appear easy, that is, to distinguish between the legitimate use of nature and the abuse of it. A normative evaluation was needed to make that determination, and that evaluation, that line-drawing, required in turn some sort of measuring standard. We didnt possess such a standardnot a sound one, at leastand the work of crafting one, I sensed, was far harder than we recognized. Many factors seemed relevant to such an overall assessment or evaluation, including factors relating to social justice, future generations, and other life forms, and to the vast gaps in our scientific knowledge.

The second strand has been my broader effort simply to make sense of the place and time in which I livemy effort, in Ciceros familiar phrasing, to escape the tyranny of the present. As have many others, I have tried to step back from the modern age and to think critically about it, to identify and come to terms with the ideas, values, and sensibilities that structure how we understand the world and engage with it. This age-old task has never been a simple one. In our time it seems particularly challenging, in part due to the abundant writing flowing out of our specialized and fragmented universities and research centers, so helpful in some ways, so distracting and overwhelming in others.

What I soon recognized was that I couldnt progress far on either of these intellectual projects without make sense of the other as well. However we might assess it, our environmental plight is a central reality of our times. It offers essential evidence of how we see the world, how we understand our place in it, and how we relate to one another, other living creatures, and future generations. Similarly, we cannot grasp why we have such trouble evaluating normatively our changes to nature, or why we bicker so about alleged ills and reform options, without broadening the inquiry greatly. In complex ways our ills have much to do with the culture of our era, with the secular, rational, and liberal values and assumptions that gained dominance in the Enlightenment era of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and that retain such power today. In the case of the United States they are particularly linked to the timing and peculiar political context when our nation was founded and when our collective self-identify coalesced. Adding to our challenge has been the darkening shadow of the capitalist market, now working at the global scale, the market that yields its material bounty by fostering base impulses, fragmentation, and moral and intellectual confusionwhich is to say by making us, in basic ways, lesser creatures.