A ‘State of Nature’ Has Been Lost Forever
[Source for this essay is a Washington Post article by Chris Mooney and Brady Dennis in June 2016: see here.]
“‘Let’s get back to that natural environment with humans out of the picture. . .’—that’s a chimera, a false hope. . . it’s too late for that,” declares Melinda Zeder. co-author of a paper published last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The paper, stuffed with anthropological, paleoecological and archaeological evidence, establishes that humans have been modifying the natural environment for many tens of thousands of years. Well, we knew that. . . and we’ve also been exposed to this line of thinking, if not for tens of thousands of years, for long enough to have drummed into our heads the idea that returning significant portions of the Earth to Nature is a doomed hope.
This study drives the principle home even deeper, because of the sheer wealth of evidence pointing to a very heavy human hand going back to the dawn of our species. The extent, say the authors, is currently not appreciated by “scientists in other disciplines.”
What to Do? The ‘Design Paradigm’ versus the ‘Pipe Dream’
“‘Pristine’ landscapes simply do not exist and, in most cases, have not existed for millennia,” is another provocative though plausible conclusion of the study.
OK, we get it. But what’s not so gettable is the implicit message, that it’s a fool’s errand to keep undisturbed as much “natural” habitat as possible, however much it may have been disturbed in the past. Says the study’s lead author, Nicole Boivin, “we need to move away from a conservation paradigm of protecting the earth from change, to a design paradigm of positively and proactively shaping the types of changes that are taking place.”
On the face of it, this agenda sounds perfectly reasonable—after all, we definitely need to be proactive, and a design paradigm does not rule out the possibility of setting aside preserves where humans are excluded. That is, it does not rule it out, except that implied in its benevolent content is the understanding that we’re the boss, and if a set-aside preserve does not fit with positive shaping, then to hell with it.
Nicole Boivin is also quoted as saying “It is a pipe dream to think that we can go back to some sort of pristine past.” The last statement rings the same tone as Zeder’s “chimera, false hope” language, a tone disdainful of hopes for keeping the Earth as wild as it can be.
This view couldn’t be more diametrically opposed to that of the world’s preeminent environmental pipe-dreamer and Nobel Prize winner, E.O. Wilson. Wilson’s view, laid out in his recently published book, Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life, is that it’s a mistake to believe that we know best how to shape a world hospitable to life and to us. Wilson is well aware of the age-old imprint of human activity throughout the world. But that doesn’t deter him from arguing that it’s imperative that we protect large areas of habitat untouched henceforward, however much we have modified them in the past. The title “Half-Earth” sounds like hyperbole meant to get our attention, but there’s no mistaking Wilson’s zeal to stake out as much of half of the Earth as possible for wilderness. Thoreau’s dictum, In Wildness is the Preservation of the World, resonates as strongly here as in other works by Wilson.
Whose Worldview Gets It Right?
Wilson, now almost 90, has diminished in influence among scientists during the last few decades, partly because he is behind the times, partly for his bold ventures into fields outside his area of expertise, and partly for proposing and vigorously defending controversial theories in particular sociobiology, for which there is no—and may never be—conclusive evidence. Wilson has great zest for speculation and controversy, so that if Half-Earth waves a red flag at Design proponents, he’s ready for battle . Mark Lynas’s book The God Species, consonant with Nicole Boivin’s study recommendations, may be another of Wilson’s publicly visible targets.
It’s not so coincidental that Wilson’s book and the study discussed in the Washington Post both got published just last year. We are approaching a point at which technological development, at the present rate of expansion, may run head-on into the limits of the natural world to support a stable and sustainable human society. A tipping point at which the expansion may slow, halt and reverse—a reversal such as depicted in the movie Elysium, where 99.99% if humanity lives in a state of deprivation, chaos, and violence, and .01% live in a technological paradise in orbit, literally elevated from the planet.
Elysium is hyperbole, and we understand it not as a prediction but as a parable. It’s not so farfetched to think we may be headed for a not-quite-as-extreme dystopian stratification of society, unless we can rein in our exploitation of the living world. Maybe Intelligent (Human) Design is the only way to keep us going without collapse, but Earth will be diminished for it. My personal inclination leans in the Half-Earth direction, but then I’m another pipe-dreamer.
[My apologies for not having read the actual study already, but was just now alerted to Mooney’s and Dennis’s article. I’m confident that, given their credentials, they have captured the essentials.]