Why We Wish for Wilderness
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The truth is, there is hardly a place on the earth that hasn't been seen my humans at one or another time. Nature itself is an unconquerable force of which we are a part, not apart. We are connected to the earth, the plants and animals, the mountains and seas.
It is humbling to go outside the walls of civilization, and face the world without all the defenses of technology. Like standing before the ocean or looking up at the stars, it is a reminder of the smallness of my place in it all. A reminder of the limits of power. The wilderness is a place of violent "otherness".
It is also a place of familiar "oneness". The stars, the ocean, mountains, deserts, forests, and plains are places of wonder. I like to stand in a place I have never been, see no works of man anywhere in my view and wonder, who has seen this vista before? Who will see it again after I am gone? Am I standing in a place where ancient men worshiped their gods and loved their children? We are made of the same stuff and we are actors in the same story.
I was counting tree rings on a log the other day. It was 140 years old when it was cut. Not too far away was a living tree of similar diameter. It sprouted before my great-grandfather was born. All around me were saplings that may well outlive my grandchildren. I was standing on a mountain that has stood for millennia and will continue for millennia more. We are part of the earth and it is part of us.
Humility and wonder: these are the gifts of the wilderness. We'd do well to carry those gifts back into civilization.
I wish more people would just cop to that, wanting to "Be an Explorer" to tell stories and experience the edge.
The majority of people doing this stuff now aren't doing it for what the author quotes as: "[finding] new geographical information that adds to humanity’s stock of collective knowledge"
That's what botanists and archeologists and GIS experts do with LIDAR and robots and the like. At a certain point once you realize that you, the human are the limiting factor when it comes to improving knowledge about the world, you start creating tools to learn, probes and planes and radars and things.
I think "nature" people just need to be real with it, that they are trying to live out a naturalistic fantasy or just enjoy the solitude and stop pretending there is something more philosophical about it.
My guess is that in actuality it's just emotional/chemical for you.
Edit: to be less flip, I find it an excellent place to think about ethics, what things are worth doing, the future, etc. I feel more prone to be "philosophical" when I'm in a wild place. I do not put on a backpack and think, "Ah, today I'm really going to sink my teeth into some epistemology".
Just say you enjoy how you feel in that state and it makes you feel possibly more creative and open (though I assume most people haven't measured whether they actually are more creative or thoughtful over other places while alone and occupied eg. Shower, running, yoga etc..).
Non-human animals also, eventually, colonize areas beyond their point of origin, and this is no doubt driven partly by a desire to "explore". But humans, perhaps more than any other animal, are capable of having the idea of "exploring" as something that they can be obsessed by. And humans are less constrained by the need to constantly satisfy the basic necessities of life, which makes it possible for the dedicated explorer to go on extended exploring trips, exploring the world for its own sake.
Also, it is part of human nature that different people in a social group develop different interests, which benefits the tribe via division of labour. So not everyone needs to be a committed explorer - it is enough for one mad explorer to go out exploring, and then come back to the tribe to report if they found something worth reporting.
I read Pollan's essay as part of a discussion about wilderness ethics and it has stuck with me for years. It can be found in his book, Second Nature.
If you are still reading this comment, I would also recommend Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey. It takes a more irascible approach to some of the ideas of wilderness ethics, but is is a damn-good, swashbuckling time.
Which, of course, brings us back around to colonialism, because that's also what colonization does. I'm not sure which is the chicken and which is the egg; the false man/nature distinction could be as much or more a rationalization as a premise, and I don't know the relevant historiography as well as I'd like.
My other point is that "nature" is a meaningless concept, too, and actively harmful in that it gives us an excuse to conceive of ourselves as essentially apart from our environment, and much more able to control the extent of its effects on us than we demonstrably are. Sure, we can keep the rain and cold at bay. But if climate change isn't enough evidence that our power over our environment has hard limits, the current pandemic sure as hell should be - to say nothing of the next one, or the one after that. "Nature" is something that's supposed to be out there, away from us, on the other side of a wall or a window, except when we choose for it not to be. "Nature" is an enemy.
The trouble is that, looked at that way, we inevitably find Horace was right, all those centuries ago: drive her out with a pitchfork all you like, she'll always come running back.
There clearly exist areas that are more and those that are less impacted by human presence. When people talk about nature they often mean just the latter parts while perhaps considering engineered ecosystems part of "the environment" not necessarily part of "[pristine] nature". Having different words for these different things is useful. You can quibble about which words best fit them, but the distinction doesn't go away.
I'd categorize the resulting conceptual error alongside the one that leads people to believe in creationism because camera eyes like ours seem too complicated to have arisen by chance. They aren't, but that's a thought you need the right conceptual tools to build. Without them, you might never get there.
Ultimately, what I'm saying is that "nature" is likewise the wrong tool with which to build thoughts about how humans interact with our environment.
Of course there are other uses of the word, such as "nature finds a way" meaning that biological life will adapt to engineered environments too. But this the usual inadequacy of human language, the same word can have multiple, even conflicting meanings.
Anyway, if you wish to convey some important concept better you should name it so it can be discussed instead of just pointing at other concepts and declaring them inadequate. This is what confuses me about this discussion, the lack of proposed improvements.
We're already talking in terms of a better concept, that of an explicitly understood continuum between totally unmodified environments and totally human-built ones. That is the improvement, because it accurately models reality in a way that an ill-defined concept of "nature" does not, and avoids lending itself to implicit confusions like that between "natural" and "desirable" discussed elsewhere in these comments. There are desirable aspects to built environments, and desirable aspects to unbuilt ones, and undesirable aspects of both as well. A maximally desirable human environment incorporates both, and I don't see how sloppy analysis of the sort encouraged by "nature" makes such an environment easier to attain.
> avoids lending itself to implicit confusions like that between "natural" and "desirable"
See, this "implicit confusion" doesn't seem compulsive to me. I see that there's a romanticized view of nature, sure. But there's that famous adage from Hobbes' Leviathan about man in a state of nature having a nasty, brutish and short life. And really, nature does a lot of undesirable things.
> How much modification equals not "nature" any more, though? It's like trying to define how many grains of sand make a heap. The difference is that nobody imagines a heap of sand is anything but a heap of sand.
Well, heapiness itself is a continuum. That's why we tack on qualifies such as "small heap", just like we tack "pristine" onto nature to mean something at a more extreme end of the spectrum. "tamed nature" indicates something more to the other end.
Anyway, back to the original discussion. What I was trying to say is that humans cannot generally cohabitate with nature. We can't have billions of people live in a forest or on the steppes. At a global scale we can share the planet and have leave some areas largely untouched, but that's not living together. It's living apart and occasionally visiting.
By the same token, "cohabitate" wasn't the best choice of word. What I mean by it is to direct our modification of the environment so that it doesn't benefit us to the active detriment of other life. One example, as mentioned by another commenter here, is to design roads so that they don't block migration routes or access to resources. Granted that that's more expensive, but it's also not without tangible human benefits alongside those of avoiding ecological derangement, like fewer citybound deer eating everybody's gardens and posing a dangerous obstacle to traffic - granted in turn that the mechanism here is higher cull rates through human hunting that doesn't happen in the city because high population density doesn't mix well with .308 rounds flying all over the place, and that's rough on some individual deer, but it also improves population dynamics and quality of life for the deer that don't get shot because they're closer to the carrying capacity of the local environment, and we have to fill that maintenance role anyway because our ancestors extirpated the large predators which previously did so.
That's one example of the larger idea, which is to recognize that an ecosystem is a system, with its own internal logic and feedback loops, and engineer our environment modifications to function as part of that system - instead of kicking the whole thing apart and then trying to figure out after the fact what to do as the pieces of what we've so blithely broken fall hard atop our heads.
Like with climate change. Or kudzu, or starlings, or zebra mussels, bison, banana fungus, novel coronaviruses...
(And anyway - between our effect on the atmosphere, and the arguable mass extinction event we've caused, is there any place on the planet which can accurately be called in your usage "pristine"?)
And when you realize you can say the same thing about ants and termites, you will know what the person you're talking to is talking about.
Making the distinction "Human vs Nature" implies Humans are special, set apart from any other species; even if you say that Humans are bad, being especially bad is still being special, and set apart.
I think the urge to explore the landscape goes much farther back than the colonial period, which is a very recent blip in human history. The author should look back not to 200 years ago for the source of that instinct, but 20,000 years ago or more - and consider what wilderness might have looked like then.
We're violently in agreement, I think, inasmuch as we both find much obnoxious in the effects of human artifice as directed to modifying our environment. Where we differ is in the use of a special category "unnatural" to describe those effects we do not like. I don't argue that only the equation of "natural" with "desirable" is without value; I argue that "natural" is meaningless, as is its converse, and if we want to talk about desirability, we're better served to do so directly instead of confusing the issue with less precise concepts.
Speaking personally as a human, there are few other vertebrate animals on Earth that can remotely pose a serious threat to my freedom, provided I exercise common sense precautions. That's probably why I'm most concerned with the human modifications to the landscape. I am forced to heed them. I'm sure fish would see it differently, although they'd still encounter a lot fewer beaver dams than human obstructions.
See my other comment about how I would feel differently if beavers built dams across highways and shot people crossing them. I might be less inclined to treat beavers as a harmless part of the natural landscape then.
We can make the natural vs unnatural distinction because humans have at least a partial hegemony over all other species now. Not completely; clearly microbes and insects are still out of our control. If there were intelligent alien invaders that started building walls and bridges and cages, I'm sure we'd label those as "unnatural" and "artificial" too, whereas a beaver dam is a natural curiosity. If there were other rival intelligent species sharing the Earth and reshaping it to their own vision, they probably wouldn't fit into the nature category.
It marks a power dynamic, and it's an important distinction. Artificial structures are backed by the power of laws and property rights and other enforcement rules. That gives them a power beyond their material strength. Ants and beavers reshape the earth too, but the only thing stopping you from paving them over are objections by other humans. The other ants would hardly even retaliate.
Edit: I guess the core of my point is that if you want to include a pair of wire cutters in with your bug spray and bear whistle and other hiking gear, so that you can freely pass through chain-link fences, then maybe you will start to view those fences no differently than rocks and fallen logs, just another curious structure erected by another fascinating mammal. I, personally, would never feel so bold.
That aside, I agree with everything you've just said. The only point where we differ, I think, is that of whether the word "nature" and its allies make a useful shorthand for any of these concepts.
I think the points you've raised deserve more focused consideration than that. For example, I agree that it's far too easy and thus too common for people to forget that we do have a unique power over our environment, and to use that power in ways that do harm. I don't think that deserves to sneak past under so fuzzy and easily dismissible a term as "unnatural"; I think it deserves to be called out for exactly what it is.
That's a lot harder to do when we make a habit of glossing over such considerations with a shorthand like "nature". That's undesirable because these are the considerations that inform every decision we make about how we exist and behave in our environment, on scales as large as that of climate change and as small as what we do with our backyards, when we have those. Or, for that matter, whether we have those. None of this stuff is as simple or as abstract as "nature" makes it seem, and that's why I argue that "nature" fails to serve a useful purpose.
I think "nature" is our best way to express these important but nebulous concepts, but you think it hides those exact same concepts. We're probably both right -- it will depend what community we're in, and their understanding and interpretation of the word "nature".
Walls everywhere.
Obviously I don't object to fences being big, I object to them being impermeable. That's not just a problem for me and other humans; migtatory animals get seriously impacted by these long one-dimensional structures parcelling up the landscape as well. There have been proposals for landscaped bridges to link sides of highways to allow moose and other animals to cross, but the cost of doing that extensively is quite prohibitive.
By the way, I agree with your characterization of humans as being just like other animals. But if beavers were constructing hundred-kilometre-long barriers that blocked off our migratory routes (ie, roads and highways), and routinely shot or overran humans that attempted to cross them, then I think we'd consider beavers to be a serious problem too.
When your neighbour says she avoids putting chemicals in her food, do you cross your arms and say "even water is a chemical"? Or do you accept that her usage of the word points to a valid region in concept-space that isn't hard for you to understand, if you aren't hung op on dictionary definitions?
I wrote a cousin comment explaining why, despite the fact that humans are part of nature, there is a qualitative difference between human structures and beaver dams / coral reefs. It's not human bias, but human power and social structures that cause the difference. Or else, as I mentioned there, you're welcome to bring wire cutters with you on your hikes and treat fences the same way you treat other natural barriers.
This is also why, in a post apocalyptic movie, the decaying artifacts and skyscrapers of a lost society feel more like a natural landscape than artificial structures. It's because they lose the power structure that backs them.
Insisting on a useless definition of "natural" that encompasses literally every object in the universe just makes communication a chore.
The exploration described in the article might be better described as drawing more of the "other" into "self". Finding that which was previously uknown to your "self" (perhaps your cultural upbringing, national identity, or collective societal knowledge) and understanding it. In this circumstance the understanding is of nature and environment, but people find this same fire in more modern differentiations as well. For instance, globalization is rapidly developing universally agreeable culture, and there are many people passionate about sharing and adding parts of their culture to that global identity.
Your wish for cohabitation seems to me to be a similar desire of drawing "other" into "self", and will ultimately demand a similar degree of understanding to pull off.
It remains alive and well in the view that anything Man does is unNatural and simply by virtue of being unNatural automatically inferior to Nature.
I can't think of any lone man vs. the wilderness stories from before Ibn Tufail's Autodidactus (12c.), but I'm happy to be corrected.
I’d need to read Horace to get a sense of the context there.
EDIT: Looked up Horace:
> We, who love the country, salute Fuscus that loves the town… If we must live suitably to nature, and a plot of ground is to be first sought to raise a house upon, do you know any place preferable to the blissful country? … You may drive out nature with a fork, yet still she will return, and, insensibly victorious, will break through [men's] improper disgusts.
I believe in context, this is about how country living is better than city living, so it's not really about "man vs. nature" at all. I think the metaphor is that like a farm where you're ploughing the soil, still little plants will do their thing, so too you may like the city, but little bursts of rural enthusiasm will burst through.
Ibn Tufail came up with a thought experiment of "What if a person were born on a desert island? How far could they build a civilization?" The English translated this in the early modern period, and it gave birth to Robinson Crusoe, which in turn gave birth to a million derivates which pit lone individuals against the wilderness. (Robinson Crusoe → Survivor → The Apprentice → Coronavirus disaster!) AFAICT, this is a purely modern phenomenon, but again, I'd be interested in seeing what predecessors there are historically that I'm missing.
The continuing 100+ year old debate around the Forest Service's wildfire policy is one example of how these relationships aren't as natural as we believe on first look.
- it's a subtle force, the scales are somehow in the human range (organic material,... leaving out tsunamis, volcanos, storms and lightning which, probably very few find pleasant)
- it's probably wired in us: the green hues, the tree nest shielding above, the strip of blue. The light dynamics, it's all gentle plays on contrast but it makes leaves shine like gold.
- the pace of wild life, it's a tiny melody at a tiny tempo. The flow of rivers, the wind..
- the freeness.. I go where I want if I can, I stop where I want, I take what I want. Feels like a useless mall and I have a yes-card. Also with a bit of basic engineering knowledge, you can see how to rise your level of comfort from wood, stone, fibers and fire, but that's a sidenote.