Nature’s Ghosts: The World We Lost and How to Bring it Back

(There might be a counterargument to this; I have not found it in the article)

Some American Indians loathe the patronizing idea that they were/are nobles in-tune with nature. They may not have exploited nature with mechanized efficiency, but at least some tribes took what they needed when they needed without the hippie vision of harmonious balance and they engaged in violence and war when it made sense to do so —kind of like other groups of humans elsewhere.

I think we need to think about management in a graded way, with different areas having different mandates and different policies, with different restrictions on usage, and all working together in a way that repairs what we have damaged, and working together with policies for land that isn't government-managed.

However, we have to be prepared to stand up for restrictions that a lot of people aren't happy with. A lot of people aren't happy that we don't log and mine natural parks. If we give in to the "common sense" of people like that, on the reasoning that "nothing is truly wild," we'll lose the rest of what we have, and very quickly. The moment you use a word like "recreation" in connection with a federally-managed piece of land, people are going to assume it's for partying and drunk-operating noisy vehicles. And they're going to call you elitist and out-of-touch for pushing back. We absolutely need to fight those battles, even without a blind and absolute belief in "wilderness."

I'd love it if things were mostly left up to local decision makers. Some trails aren't appropriate for bikes and that's fine, Wilderness area or no. Some trails within Wilderness areas would be no problem at all for bikes.

And tactically, maybe environmentalists would gain some allies if they weren't trying to push cyclists out.

Pardon my french, but fuck no. I think "Wilderness" is a perfectly appropriate designation for the intended use of these lands-to keep man-made impact on them as little as possible. The fact that it's not "historically accurate" doesn't diminish the value of the label in its intended use.

Also, I did not realize the Wilderness designation had anything to do with indigenous Americans. Is that a thing?

While ants, wasps, and beavers can change a landscape to benefit them in an unsustainable, unhealthy way that will lead to their destruction, I think you have to indulge a bit of wishful thinking to not realize they are less likely and less capable of doing so than humans.

We'll need to set order in our own home before we look to the ants, the wasps, and the beavers.

I live in the UK and the situation is pretty extreme. People love nature passionately. But most of what people view as natural is degraded farmland. The National Parks are all landscapes that only exist directly from human intervention (usually sheep, grouse, mining, forestry). And many of the protected areas have people living in them that get outsized property prices and endless tourism.

I say I'm on the fence because on a longer time scale, that kind of mental adaptation might not be that much different from genetic adaptation and we'll still have to find equilibrium or die out.

As far as the ethics question goes, if we use the most basic model and say that the ethical thing is that which promotes the most "good-life-years per capita" versus "bad-life-years per capita", where capita means one of the sentient residents of the planet, there are a few ways to look at it:

1. Ethics is just a fiction that humans have made up to support the prisoners' dilemma style of cooperation game we play, and there's no real answer.

2. The billon or two twilight years of our planet are better spent in rough equilibrium, where tigers exist, but most animals get some time to stretch in the sun, nuzzle their young, etc.

3. Life in equilibrium is actually cold, brutal, and short for most of the sentient animals involved, so providing a higher level of comfort for a population of ten billion people is better, even if it eventually crashes.

4. The experience of a human counts more than that of an animal, so a high human population with a decent standard of living for a long enough time pushes the needle past what a much longer natural equilibrium would achieve.

We've already poisoned every living thing and every source of water on the planet with toxic "forever" chemicals we created. They're in the rain that falls. The body of every newborn creature is polluted by them before they draw their first breath. That's just so fundamentally different from "But look at this ant hill" that it's hard to imagine why anyone can't see what sets humanity apart or would consider that difference to be an arbitrary distinction.

We're capable of causing more harm. We're capable of understanding the harms that we cause in ways other animals simply aren't. We're also capable of deciding not to cause harm. We're capable of intentionally making different choices that can help protect and preserve the environments we live in. Our deliberate choices and their impacts on the world compared to the actions and outcomes of every other animal on the plant is about as far from an arbitrary distinction as it gets.

Well—the distinction seems perfectly natural, then.

Even that is only theoretical. Let's say that we were to wipe out a great amount of life on earth with a thermonuclear war or something, a lot of life would remain, even if we are talking about bacteria and other microorganisms. But even deep sea life that exists below a certain depth would likely remain largely unaffected.

It's an ideal appreciated by Europeans, but especially by Americans. We don't like people spreading to every single uninhabited nook & cranny and consuming every possible resource. America has a lot of uninhabited places. That's not an invitation for people the world over to consume and devour and combust and mine and destroy these places, as many of them have done to their own homes.

You've seen the headlines plenty of times: declining populations of species, particularly insects, bees. The natural world deserves some refuge and respite from human colonization. We've cultivated crops and powerful technology, let's cultivate some wilderness too. Wild growth is beauty and temperance. It's saying, "I've eaten enough, that I don't need to eat this, let wild beauty flourish here." Do not strive to eat the world, eat just enough.

Wilding and rewilding is an ideal.

In truth, the idea of wilderness is a useful heuristic that simplifies incredibly complex questions about the functioning of ecosystems and their worth to us.

Labeling it a myth is a way of destroying its value as a heuristic without offering any replacement, leaving people unable to explain and defend policies that prevent unchecked commercial exploitation of public lands.

It paints a picture of how rich plant and animal life was before contact with Europeans. It shows how Native Californians depended on and deeply understood every root, leaf, flower, and fruit of every plant in their area. It explains how Native Californians were responsible for preserving and enriching the wildlife around them -- doing controlled burns, pruning, managing animal populations, sowing seeds, etc. These areas weren't "wild" or "pristine" at all, they were carefully managed and densely populated by Native Americans for over 10,000 years.

I think oftentimes we feel hopeless about our relationship to nature. We think if we touch it, we'll destroy it. Learning about how Native Californians lived shows how that's not inevitable at all.

I can to this thread to talk up the book too!