Discussion Group Report

A passage in The Gay Science by Friedrich Nietzsche portrays a madman carrying a lantern in broad daylight and searching for God. This mirthless character declares that "God is dead," and says that we have murdered him. What the philosopher meant was that the concept of God, the idea of God, was no longer alive and well. Seventeenth-century astronomy and eighteenth-century physics had undermined the belief in God's existence. Nineteenth century geology and evolutionary biology delivered the coup de grace, says J. Baird Callicott in his essay, "The Role of Technology in the Evolving Concept of Nature," in the book, Ethics and Environmental Policy, Frederick Ferre and Peter Hartell, editors.

Not one of the medieval philosophers expresses the least doubt that God exists, and most of them undertook to prove it. The early modern philosophers also took the existence of God for granted but reshaped him to suit their purposes. They transformed him into the designing engineer of a clockwork universe. God receded further and further into the background and finally faded from the scientific and philosophical scene altogether.

Now many contemporary environmentalists fear that nature is dead. One can no longer find any place on earth untrammeled by the works of man. Bodies of water are ubiquitously affected by acid rain, The permafrost in the former Arctic wilderness is everywhere contaminated with traces of toxic chemicals. There is a hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica. And there is the greenhouse effect.

Bill McKibben in The End of Nature claims that it is the idea of nature that has ended, not nature itself. What is this idea? It is of nature as Other, as a world existing apart from us and our artifice. But Callicott says that nature is a distinctly modern notion, deeply rooted in ancient Western intellectual tradition, but that it is false and that its historical tenure has been pernicious. The first book of the Bible makes man in God's image and gives man dominion over and charges him to subdue the earth and all its denizens. In ancient Greek philosophy humans are set apart from nature because we alone among the animals are supposed to be rational. Galileo, Descartes, Isaac Newton, and John Locke developed the idea that a conscious, rational soul is supposed to inhabit a purely mechanistic human body composed of atoms, each one of which is composed of a few simple, mathematically expressible features or properties. Nature became wholly object, and only man was a subject. As subjects, humans exist "in here" in our bodies, dispassively looking out on impassive nature, which is thoroughly alien to the enveloped and isolated essential self.

Today many consider our technological achievements grotesque; man seems to be a tyrant and nature the hapless victim. Yet many of these Jeremiahs still do not challenge the radical man-nature dichotomy. "A wilderness advocate," argues Callicott, "lamenting man's total reduction of nature to possession and a timber industry CEO gloating over it share the same underlying assumption that man is a case apart from the rest of nature." In the self-congratulatory Age of Enlightenment, nature was generally believed to be a perfectly intelligible clockwork, and all nature's moving parts were thought to be automata or mechanisms in miniature, except that a conscious, rational soul is supposed to inhabit the purely mechanistic human body. Also deeply ingrained was an essentially static sense of the "balance of nature," a concept adapted from classical physics. Like a thermostat, ecosystems were represented as having a set point to which they return, through negative feedback mechanisms, if disturbed by drought, flood, fire or similar perturbations. If subjected to too frequent or intense disturbance, they are liable to break down, driven by runaway positive feedback mechanisms. Human activities, particularly industrial mining, agriculture, and logging, are prime examples of "unnatural" impacts on ecosystems that are too great for them to absorb and thus threaten to destroy them.

What is false about this modern picture of self-conscious rational man against an objective, essentially mechanistic nature? The idea that man is spiritually, or intellectually unique and discontinuous, with nature has a nearly three-thousand-year tenure in Western intellectual history, and because it is so self-congratulatory and self-serving, the view has not been readily or gladly surrendered, even by scientists and philosophers. It took more than a century for the philosophical implications of Darwin's works to sink in. Darwin argued that there is a seamless continuity between gradually evolved man and our fellow voyagers in the odyssey of evolution. We are animals ourselves, precocious, but just big primates nevertheless. We are part of nature, not set apart from it. Human works are no less natural than those of termites or elephants. Chicago is no less a phenomenon of nature than the Great Barrier Reef. The transformations we effect in the natural realm are not necessarily destructive. We do not think the garden clearings of the Kayapo Indians in the Amazon Basin violate the naturalness of the forest, but we think the clearings of Euro-Brazilians do. This attitude suggests we regard only "modern man" and our ancient European and Asian antecedents to be truly human. By implication, "primitives" are just another kind of wildlife. Actually the extinctions coinciding with the arrival of the original Siberian immigrants to the Americas were of much greater magnitude than the extirpations by our Euro-American forebears. What happened to the two species of elephants, and to horses, camels, yaks, and other beasts that roamed the Western hemispheres before and after the Siberian big game hunters arrived? Indians in temperate latitudes regularly burned the countryside. North America's Great Plains and most of the world's grasslands are believed to be anthropogenic.

And the nature side of the man-nature dichotomy? We used to believe that, if we wished, we could replace native species with exotics and need fear no adverse systemic effects. But we have learned the hard way that nature functions more like an organism than a mechanism. Deliberately changing one component of an ecosystem often causes unanticipated unwelcome side effects throughout the whole. Also, it has been believed that nature, undisturbed by man, will remain stable, in "steady state."

But nature is inherently dynamic, constantly changing and ultimately evolving. Even designated wilderness areas would not stay the same if they could be protected from all human modifications. What, then, is objectively wrong with urban sprawl, habitat fragmentation, oil slicks, global warming, or abrupt massive anthropogenic species extinction? Most people apparently prefer shopping malls and dog tracks to wetlands and old growth forests.

The key concept that saves environmental ethics from skepticism and cynicism is the concept of "ecosystem health."

"The emerging postmodern model of nature is more organismic than mechanistic," states Callicott. "Organisms proper are integrated wholes with systemic integrity." And they change. Organisms are either objectively well or ill. Physicians and veterinarians can specify indices of organic health. But health is also intrinsically good. Except in unusual circumstances, one never prefers to be sick rather than well. A new theory of ecosystems called "hierarchy theory" may enable ecologists to specify norms of ecosystem health. With such a system we can pronounce changes that we impose on nature to be objectively good or bad. Good changes are those that do not impair ecosystem health. Bad changes cause ecosystem morbidity. The real difference between Kayapo and Euro-Brazilian slash and burn agriculture is not that one is natural and the other is not, but that one is symbiotic and sustainable while the other is not. The concept of ecosystem health enables us to envision ourselves as affecting nature as much to improve as to harm it. And we can benefit rather than harm the health of the whole of which we are a part. Callicott suggests that, if illiterate and unscientific peoples can perceptively and self-consciously reinstitute ways of living in and with nature without impairing ecosystem health, then a technologically sophisticated one can, too.

Nature is not dead, but the modern man/nature dualism and the mechanical concept of nature are dead. The new concept of nature is more organismic than mechanistic and includes man as, in Aldo Leopold's words, "a plain member and citizen of the biotic community."

"It is theoretically conceivable, therefore," concludes Callicott, "that we may become good, law-abiding citizens of the natural world rather than brutal and ultimately self-defeating conquistadors. The new understanding of nature, human nature, and the growing public interest in holistic medicine and sustainable organic agriculture is evidence that a shift in the prevailing cultural worldview is already under way. Solar-electronic technologies have already shown themselves to be seductive. People want them. These technologies may inspire further application of the systemic ideas they embody; and our present unsustainable mechanistic civilization may evolve into a new, more sustainable, systemic confirmation, not only technically but socially, politically, and economically as well."