Without Nature (Text of A Future On Waxen Wings Episode)

Reader's note: This is the text version of a podcast episode that I am featured in, which can be found here: https://afutureonwaxenwings.podbean.com/e/e1-without-nature-a-meditation-by-ethan-smith/ . My friend and intellectual, Keith Runyan, is the host of the podcast, called A Future On Waxen Wings, which explores various aspects of the future, from environmental challenges and existential risk to post-future narratives and much more. I had the privilege to write a short essay for the podcast, so please give it a listen or read the transcript of it below. 

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Last week a friend of mine posted a spectacular image of Yosemite Valley on social media with a tagline proclaiming its awesome glory. Without argument, Yosemite Valley is one of the most majestic places on the planet, which is why I spent just under two years living and working in the valley surrounded by massive granite slabs, majestic waterfalls, and Giant Sequoias. However, seeing the image shared this way on social media made me think, and I struggled erasing the humans and the human constructed paths, roads, stores, and shops that I knew were present in the image that hid just beneath the magical veneer of the precisely timed photograph. And this got me thinking about a concept prevalent in our culture. 

By repressing these “uglier” parts of the picture or by literally hiding them within the frame, we construct a version of reality that exists as a double truth. And this image is but one microscopic example of this common phenomenon. One of these truths proclaims pristine nature, devoid of humans, crafted by the hands of God and Mother Nature. The other peels back the wallpaper to reveal a more complex, interesting, realistic, perhaps uncanny story of the world. It is this story that I want to interrogate more closely.

To approach this story, I want to provoke a question: does Yosemite Valley remain pristine nature if we know there are people below the tree line? What about when we learn that a 5-star hotel exists in the background where the likes of Oprah Winfrey and Barack Obama have spent the night beneath Yosemite Falls? If not, why might it suddenly go from “nature” to “not nature?” Furthermore, why would the image be beautiful only if the human is absent and the thing called nature is present? Is there a reason why the addition of human constructed aspects of the environment would change our understanding of that environment, especially the aesthetics? Numerous answers might exist to these questions, but a consistent one relies upon the idea of a separation of humans and nature. 

Putting the medium aside, it is clear that the orientation of this image of Yosemite clearly presents us with a beautiful spectacle, but it is also one laden with value, even if we do not at first notice it. But it is, in a small way, indicative of a larger idea. By demarcating the line between human and everything else in terms of an object that we call nature, we then, perhaps inadvertently, assign a value to each. Of course this story often goes along the lines of humans being are at best ambivalent but more likely prone to sin or a downfall, often tainted, but occasionally redeemable, and sometimes noble. Nature, then, is often, at worst, a little scary, but mostly pure, virgin, innocent and of course full of beauty. This removal of humans from the image and the subsequent uplifting of the sublimity of the natural world has been studied extensively in aesthetics and art history and literature. Despite it being a common, it is indicative of a larger cultural idea of the separation of humans from the natural world. When examined closely, though, the idea begins to dissolve slowly and a new world is discovered beyond it. 

In fact, as we continue, we will begin to call this idea of a separation of humans and nature the myth of nature. Because, as we will discover, the concept of “nature”--at least as it is presented in modern Western Culture since at least the Romantics--never really quite existed as we though it did. Only now in our age of vast information has this become strikingly apparent--and important. Let’s dive a little deeper into the myth of nature.

Perhaps the most significant upheaval of the Anthropocene is the elimination of the concept of nature. Among others, Bill McKibben declared the end of nature in 1989 which he stated was the moment in Earth’s history when nothing could escape the grasp of humanity because we had shaped the world so vastly that we had even put a layer of nuclear material in the fossil record.  Ironically, this position simply restates and repaints the nature and human divide on a different canvas; however, within it lies a truth about the idea of nature and the anthropocene, though different from McKibben’s original intention, and it is one we want to dissect. 

 If humans evolved from a common primate ancestor, it is hard to claim that we were ever separate from the world. The problem for keeping the word nature is deciding at which point humans became distinct enough of an entity that one can draw a line between them and the environments and biomes in which they arose. It wasn’t as if humans simply appeared one day from the material world, completely cut off from the rest of matter. Of course, we can certainly argue that there are certain ways in which humans are separate, especially from other mammals, but this separation is related to degree, composition and style, not a complete severing, unless you follow religious doctrines and interpretations. The ways in which humans are separate from the rest of the world has been discussed throughout time in philosophy and theology and literature and they form the very basis of the humanities.

 We can further complicate the myth by examining discoveries in the last half century in microbiology and chemistry, which have continually shown how humans not only exist within complex systems but are themselves complex systems. In this way, one can imagine a tiny bit of “nature” existing simultaneously inside each of us, at least when nature is viewed as something other. In fact, though, it is not really a tiny bit of “nature” at all but rather something that is simultaneously us and not us. One example is stomach bacteria, our microbiome. Can a human really exist without their complete stomach biome, all of those small bacterium living and reproducing, contributing to the larger stomach and organs? Probably not, at least not well. But is stomach bacteria at all “human?” Kind of, but not exactly; however, it is certainly a piece of a large and complex system that we call human. We could continue this logical thought for many parts of the system that we can human, eventually it might lead us to a profound and challenging question: at what point, then, does our human self “end” and nature “begin?” Putting aside reductionism as a solution for now, let’s examine the separation.

When asked to conjure images of nature, people often state the obvious: trees, animals, mountains. Surely these things do exist in a way that is different from humans, at least in their emergent forms and to our senses. For example, the collection of matter that is me is obviously not the same thing to our eyes, as say,  a palm tree, even if at our most basic level we are collections of atoms. So it certainly makes sense for humans to create words and images that separate us from palm trees and things like toasters and mountain ranges. However, romantic thought has taught us that these entities collectively exist as something called “nature”--and that thing is always over “there” and away from us, while we, the humans, exist “here” in subjectivity. But ontologically speaking, is there something always over “there” that is nature and something “here” that is me? The answer to that question is much more complex than it seems at first. 

Philosopher Timothy Morton, who has written extensively on the topic of ecology without nature, coherently demonstrates part of this point with a thought experiment that I will paraphrase here because it brings to light many of the flaws of our idea of nature. He asks us to think of a meadow. In the meadow exist all of the normal pieces of a meadow: small critters, leaves, dirt, fungi, maybe a few bones lying around, meadow-y things. If we remove one grass blade from the meadow, is the object that we are now staring at still a meadow? It seems logical that we would conclude that it is still very meadow-y.  So, if we continue this thought experiment, what happens if we remove two blades? Seventy? A thousand? Certainly there must exist a point if we continued the experiment where we would be left with one blade of grass or one mouse, which most certainly do not exist as a meadow but rather a blade of grass or a mouse. These are very different from the thing we started with and called a meadow. The puzzle of determining the end of the meadow is replicated closely in the idea of nature. Because we can’t seem to grasp the “end” of the meadow firmly, we are stuck in a double bind within the meaning of the word and concept of meadow. If dissected, we discover that the singular meadow is actually comprised of numerous things that we collectively lump together and call a meadow but only together do they exist as a meadow, not as parts but only as a whole. Our current conception of nature works similarly. Is nature not just a stand-in, catch-all phrase for the myriad deer, mountains, skunks, banana slugs, and forested paths of our lives, a kind of false holism? At what point are those entities--which are usually composed of multiple other entities, or lumps, themselves--no longer nature? What about those things “closer” to us, such as roads, vehicles, dogs, or nuclear waste? Would we call even the aesthetically displeasing--even scary and most certainly ugly, evil stuff--nature? After all, they’re certainly not human...Furthermore, because we assign value to nature, it inherently complicates the idea. It is here when we begin to realize the holes in our concept of nature and that it is, indeed, a slippery slope, one with immense cultural force that we are still struggling to grasp

This inescapable human/nature twist is similar to McKibben’s idea of the end of nature; however, the further we travel, the more we realize that many ideas of nature never really quite existed as we thought they did, nor perhaps, did the separation of humans from it either. Indeed, at a certain point we even can begin to question what is human, as we have already lost grip on nature, but that is for another time. In a truly ecological world, we must confront these strange double-binds by going further with our knowledge, which eventually forces us to toss out old ways of knowing and challenges us to reconsider the very myths that build our foundational relationship with nearly every aspect of the world. I call them myths because, in a sense, they are true, but only partially so. They are also myths because they are collectively believed by people as in this transmission they have an impact on our world. In this way, they are almost self-fulfilling prophecies--that is, until we deconstruct them.

Because, as Historian Yuval Noah Harrari contends, myths and collective stories shape both our internal and external worlds in a variety of means. Internally, they shape our values, morals, and judgements about people, places, and ideas. Externally, they shape the very physical structures that make up our lives. Taken a step further, we can even see how massively large and distributed ideas, such as religion and capitalism, physically affect the world in the very material substances that make them up, such as churches, semi-trucks, canals, and skyscrapers, amongst other things. This effect of the myth on the physical and mental worlds also exists in the idea of nature and effects everything, from how we nurture wildlife, to where we designate wilderness zones, to the places we recreate, to the places we deposit nuclear waste because, as it turns out, “away” doesn’t really exist either. In an ecological age, this is why questioning myths about our thinking is critical. By interrogating these myths--even if they are “true” in a certain sense--we discover a world much more complex--and beautiful--than previously thought. As Timothy Morton warns us, this might be both dark and depressing at first as we fall down the rabbit holes, but it will also be strangely uplifting and liberating. 

Besides, what would a worldview without this concept of nature look like?