“Come forth
into the light of things,” wrote William Wordsworth in 1798: “Let nature be
your teacher.”
The woods in springtime
could teach more about good and evil than all the teachings of all
religions.
“A heart that watches and
receives” would know more than all the “barren leaves” of science and art could
ever reveal.
“Spontaneous wisdom” was
all.
It entered through the eye that
watched a green field, the ear that heard a finch’s song.
“Quit your books,” he urged, “or surely
you’ll grow double”: fat from sitting at a desk, but also divided by too many
doubts, too much confusing learning, too many theories.
Wordsworth
was doubled himself, when, alight with enthusiasm for the French Revolution, he
watched it move into the Terror and then adapt its bright vision of human
freedom to the corrupting old regime of rulers and priests. Surrounded by despair and cynicism, tempted
by abstract ideas of law and duty, he found his way back to wholeness,
“Nature’s self,” and “those sweet counsels between head and heart” that brought
him peace. He wrote in the Prelude that he still believed that
human destiny was to “build social upon personal liberty,” even as France
lurched back to its old ways “like a dog returning to its vomit.”
“Nature
never deceives us,” Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in
Emile, his treatise on education: “it is always we who deceive
ourselves.”
The book was a guide to preserving the
natural goodness and moderation of humanity, to “keep us true to nature”
against the vanity, excess, and anxiety with which social life infected
us.
Though Rousseau did not see the
revolution whose early days Wordsworth called “very heaven,” his phrases made
him a touchstone for many who did.
But for
every pronouncement of revolutionary nature, someone was prepared to testify to
the contrary, that nature was the taproot of order and hierarchy.
A century before Rousseau, John Evelyn, the
English forester and author of the first tract on air pollution, expressed
delight that nature was terrifying.
Even
atheists shuddered when they heard thunder.
Crashing storms were reminders that, no matter how complacent they might
become, people were sinners in the hands of an unrelenting God.
John Ray, a naturalist who studied the motion
of sap in trees, reflected that insect swarms were nature’s scourges, reminders
that divine order would deal harshly with rebels – especially atheists and
democrats.
Where Rousseau and Wordsworth
saw a proto-democratic nature, pregnant with harmonious equality, Evelyn and
Ray portrayed a nature made for piety and monarchy.
The natural order taught discipline,
obedience, and “mutual subserviency.”
Nature
turns out to be flexible like that. It
has been the handmaiden of revolutions and the underwriter of kings, proof of
divine design and of atheist materialism, quite literally from Athens and Rome
down to the age of democracy. It proved
and disproved the justice of slavery.
The most “natural” of peoples, Native Americans (as Europeans imagined
them) stood as a rebuke to decadent civilization – except when the study of
nature revealed, as it did to John Locke, that the world was made to be cleared
and planted, so the tribes must be displaced by “the industrious and rational”
Europeans. No wonder that Edmund Burke,
attacking certain theories of natural rights, announced, “Art is man’s nature”
– that is, as social beings, we are what we make ourselves together, not the
splendid products of any blueprint.
Burke used
the language of natural rights but regarded those rights as seeds that took
different forms in the diverse soils of culture and politics (the art that is
human nature). Others were much harsher
in attacking the idea of nature as a teacher.
John Stuart Mill called all political appeals to nature nasty and
obscuring: they superstitiously projected human values onto a mute and violent
natural world, usually to defend a narrow and reactionary interest like the
subjection of women, the preservation of slavery, or the glory of the
monarchy. For Mill, the human duty was
to struggle against “nature”: to drain swamps, channel rivers, and overcome our
own natural barbarism – the love of power, the cruelty toward the weak and
bowing to the powerful that distorted both personality and society. Our purpose was to replace nature with art.
This glance
at nature’s political, ethical, and cultural uses is a reminder of why
Wordsworth’s invitation – Let Nature be your teacher – can seem so quaint
today. Most of us know, or suspect, what
history bears out, that “Nature” has been a vessel for many inconsistent ideas,
often united by nothing more than their complacent self-confidence. We agree with Mill when we hear opponents of
gay rights talk about the divine plan and oppose natural to unnatural
sexuality; but we also know that Mill’s confident program to master and reform
nature was part of a worldview of high rationalism that has blood on its
hands. That rationalism nourished his
enthusiasm for British empire in India, which he saw as an unregenerate mass of
humanity that must be reformed. Come
forth into the light of things? More
like the cacophony of things, including many shadow-boxing contests over the
meaning of “nature.”
Another
reason Wordsworth’s invitation is hard to take seriously today has nothing to
do with literary and philosophical history and everything to do with “the light
of things.” What things reveal today is
that they are neither natural nor artificial.
And neither are we. The contrast
between what is nature and what is not no longer makes sense.
This merger
of natural and artificial holds at every scale.
Climate change makes the global atmosphere, its chemistry and weather
systems, into Frankenstein’s monster – part natural, part made. The same is true of the seas, as carbon
absorption speeds acidity that threatens the keystones of their food systems,
and so threatens all ocean life. The planet’s
landscapes, its forests and fields, and its species, are a mélange of those we
have created, those we have cultivated, and those we let live because we admire
them – or, in only the deepest jungles, not reached them quite yet. Even wilderness, that emblem of untouched
nature, persists where lawmaking and management create it, artificial testament
to the value of natural things.
The plants
and animals we eat and keep for company are our creations, through selective
breeding (which now seems almost artisanal) and pruning and grafting of the
genome. The human body, seat of
Wordsworth’s mutually counseling head and heart, is no more purely natural than
our grains and cattle. Tuned with
vaccines, kept up with antibiotics, patched with surgery, every function
extended by engines, screens, and data streams, we are cyborgs in artificial
worlds, whether we are the fortunate paralyzed child who acts through his robot
extension or just a bicyclist with black-rimmed glasses and a phone. If Nature were a place, we could not find
it. If Nature were a state of mind, we
could not attain it. We are something
else, and so is the world.
Post-natural
as we are, we have not advanced far toward Mill’s ideal of emancipated mastery
over nature. Instead, the more we
understand and the more our power increases, the more control over nature seems
a precarious fantasy. We brew the
storms, bring the droughts, and raise the seas, but we do not direct our own
genies. Climate change unleashes forces like
those of the ancient pagan imagination, in which nature was filled with
arbitrary, violent gods – one for the thunderbolts, one for the sea – who
warred with one another and made human destinies their playthings. With technological mastery, we have remade
that unmastered world. In our own
bodies, we now learn that there are ecosystems, colonies of bacteria that make
their home in us, and whose health is as important to ours as our lives are to
the future of the planet. Whether we
look to the globe or within our own navels, we are imperfect, destabilizing,
and vulnerable governors, apprentices without a master sorcerer. We are in the shit. We are it.
The vastly
increased human impact over the last 200 years, and especially the last 50, is
the leading reason that earth scientists are discussing whether the planet has
entered a new geological era, the Anthropocene, when humanity is a force, maybe
the force, shaping the world’s
changes. The idea of the Anthropocene is
useful, but it needs to be seen in the right light. It is a way of interpreting our situation and
a platform for responding. The
geological record is stratigraphers’ favored way to mark chapters in the
earth’s history, but rocks do not come out the ground labeled
Anthropocene. The move toward giving our
time a new name is a response to two spurs.
First is the Anthropocene
condition, the massive shaping effect that people now have on the
world. Second is the Anthropocene insight, the recognition
that, however tempted we are by Wordsworth’s invitation, ideas about nature
have always been partly cultural and political things, ways of talking to one
another about use and beauty, monarchy and democracy, women and men, or slaves
and masters.
I take the
Anthropocene as a proposal in politics, ethics, and imagination: a way of
seeing the world in which nature and human activity are inseparable aspects of
a continuum. Most important, the
Anthropocene is a call to take responsibility for what we make as well as what
we destroy. It is the starting place for
a new politics of nature, a politics more encompassing and imaginative than
what we have come to know as environmentalism.
Stratigraphers debate when the Anthropocene began – the Industrial
Revolution, the appearance of agriculture? – but it begins when we learn to see
and act in new ways. Though it is
dressed as a fact about the planet, in fact it describes a human attitude
toward the world.
Three
Crises
The
Anthropocene begins amid a threefold crisis, of ecology, economics, and
politics. These are the three great
modes in which humans make a home. (It
is not just chance that the first two words begin with the Greek for household,
oikos, and the last with polis, city.) The three crises have the same starting point:
the recognition that a system believed, or at least imagined and hoped, to be
stable and self-correcting turns out to be unstable and even prone to total
failure. Ecology first. The urgency of the Anthropocene opens by
recognizing that, after nearly ten thousand years of relatively stable climate
and burgeoning human wealth, ecological systems are intensely stressed, and
their health or collapse, in fact their very form, is substantially down to
human choices. Ideas about natural
ecological equilibrium are gone, along with older convictions that the world’s
bounty inherently supported growing wealth.
As for
economics, its modern form, as a social science and as a way of life in market
societies, also rests on an image of inherent equilibrium: billions of
decisions merge into a spontaneous harmony through the invisible hand of a
price system that puts supply and demand into balance. When all are free to choose, efficiency reigns
and all are better off.
The ecological
crisis has origins in a failure of economic harmony. The first lesson of environmental economics
is that the invisible hand is (to mix metaphors) blind to so-called
externalities, that is, the effects of our choices that carry no market price, and
so which do not appear on any bottom line.
Greenhouse-gas emissions are a perfect global externality: mostly free
for those who release them, they distribute their harms around the planet. The term “externality” suggests an
aberration, the incidental exception to a system that works otherwise, but here
the externality, the outside, is the globe that houses all economic activity,
and the harms that are invisible to the economy may overwhelm the system
itself.
That is one
form of economic crisis. Another starts
from Thomas Piketty’s empirical confirmation that even normally operating
markets, as far as we have been able to observe them over the last two hundred
years, produce accelerating levels of inequality that are quite likely ethically
intolerable and politically destabilizing.
This finding, too, disrupts a familiar picture of the economy as a
self-stabilizing system – in this case, the picture long associated with the
“Kuznets curve,” which showed economic inequality stabilizing at (arguably) moderate
levels in wealthy economies. Ironically,
this influential curve counted among its offspring an “environmental Kuznets
curve,” which showed pollution rising during industrialization, then falling in
wealthy societies. Both versions now
look like unwarranted extensions of the good conditions of the mid-twentieth
century. Today, greenhouse emissions
continue rising with wealth, and so does inequality.
Both
families of crisis, economic and ecological, reflect the same predicament: to
inhabit a stable and tolerable world, both social and natural, we must create
and maintain it intentionally. Nothing
inherent in the physical world or the social practices we call the economy will
produce that stability by itself. What
humans inhabit, house or city, they must build, and what they get will be no
better or worse than what they have built.
The only
way to build a shared living place deliberately is through politics. Common, binding decisions are how people can
give the world a shape that we intend. But
here, too, there is crisis.
Politics was
the first of the three realms – ecology, economy, and politics – to be
recognized as unavoidably artificial.
The authors of the United States Constitution were already, in their own
minds, drafters and framers, inventors, not servants of a natural and shapely
order of authority. More than a century
earlier, Thomas Hobbes argued decisively that political power can only be
artificial, and that in creating it, people take on the responsibility that
theology and superstition assigned to gods: creating a stable and livable
order. The much-contested recognition
that both economy and ecology are also created orders means that both are
political, that at bottom they are the creations of politics.
This is an
uncomfortable truth. Politics suggests
instability, arbitrary power, intrusions on personal liberty and local
harmonies. It is politics that
authorizes strip-mining and produces mass surveillance in the US, takes away
Chinese peasants’ farmland for development, leases African communal lands to
Chinese agribusiness, and sets off war in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Ukraine. Should we not avoid it rather than celebrate,
and find some other, more harmonious order – economy or ecology, say – to lean
on instead? The attraction is potent and
perennial. The problem is that it is
unreal. No order that grows
spontaneously will stabilize and preserve the common world. The alternative to spontaneous order is
deliberate creation, and its source is politics. It is perfectly possible to make a political
embrace of spontaneity, local harmonies, and markets, and in many cases that
may be just what we should do; but the embrace must be political. It may be somewhat comforting that this is
nothing new: every modern market, like any other modern economy, is built out
of law by the deliberate work of politics.
But back to
the crisis of politics: as with economy, part of the problem is that familiar
ways of working do not fit our problems.
All serious responses to global climate change, like all serious
responses to inequality in global capitalism, face the same basic problem. There is no political body that is realistically
able to adopt and enforce them. The
affliction of a global system outruns the reach of any national government. Serious climate policies impose costs on
domestic economies to benefit the world population and future generations. Although national polities in the rich
countries will stand for, even urge, some such policies, they have not come
close to slowing the problem. Even on
its own limited terms, any national policy faces serious questions of
effectiveness when the rest of the world goes its own way, and that is just
what the developing countries – now including the biggest carbon emitter, China
– are set on doing. National
self-interest breeds weak responses at the level of countries and failure to
cooperate at the level of the globe.
The discovery that politics is the necessary source of a solution to
global problems turns into a meditation on the barriers to a political
solution.
This
unhappy situation coincides with a larger crisis of faith in political
order. It was only in the twentieth
century that democracy, long a radical rallying cry and, before that, a term of
abuse and synonym for anarchy, became instead the sole standard of political
legitimacy. Since the start of the
twenty-first century, the supreme confidence of a global democratic tide has
become a nest of doubts. The United
States launched a pair of wasteful and destructive wars on demagogic grounds,
and in both an optimistic version of “exporting democracy” came to ruin. Europe’s democracies seemed to have
themselves into an ungovernable corner in the poorly coordinated, unpopular and
not-very-democratic European Union.
Elite preoccupations turned increasingly to China, where a complicated
and fissiparous oligarchy at least seemed able to pursue some version of
national interest. These fixations,
though, were more compensatory fantasy than real program: the Chinese situation
had plenty of palpable points of instability, and there was no path to that
country’s form of elite rule from any other country’s situation, even if some
wished otherwise. (It hardly needs
saying that, as with all fantasies of political and social elitism, those doing
the wishing picture themselves among the elites, not the dispossessed
peasants.)
All that
being said, there is no alternative to a political engagement with our three
interlinked, politically shaped dwelling places, ecology, economy, and politics
itself. Recognizing this already turns
the idea of nature on its head. The
“nature” that infuses ecological politics has had many political meanings and
alliances, as diverse as democracy and monarchy or hierarchy and equality, but
it has always had one defining characteristic.
Nature has been the thing without politics, the source of facts or
principles that come before political judgment and limit its scope. Whether it embraces the divine right of kings
or the equality of all persons, nature’s special role has been to restrict what
can be said and done in politics, generating claims for one’s own vision while limiting
the claims of others. Nature has been a
source of putatively objective bounds in politics.
A fully
realized politics of nature will have to be something new. The challenge will be to maintain the
generative power of nature while surrendering its limits, for, as a political
question itself, it cannot impose limits on the possible reach of politics.
Nature as
Politics and Anti-Politics
Why talk
about an intensified politics of nature, rather than a politics without
nature? Why not say that “nature,” that
oh-so-flexible argument-stopper that never quite succeeds in ending the
argument, is just an archaic way of talking and thinking, best overcome and
discarded? There are several reasons
that I don’t think this is either possible or desirable. The most telling is that ideas about nature
have been much more than rhetorical flourish or metaphysical gloss. They have deeply shaped the landscapes,
economies, and social practices in which we continue to live. The material world – so-called natural and
so-called artificial – that we inhabit is in many ways a memorial to a
long-running legacy of contested ideas about nature: how it works, how we fit
into it, and what we have at stake in living right by it.
What does
it mean to say that ideas have shaped landscapes? Is this “idealist history,” like thinking
that, once John Locke (and some predecessors) announced that human beings had
inherent rights, it was only a matter of time before the American
Revolutionaries and, eventually, Human Rights Watch showed up on the global
stage to put the theory into action? No,
but it is history that takes ideas seriously, albeit in quite a specific way.
We shape
the world by living. Our lives knit into
a kind of collective landscape architecture.
By the ways we eat, move around, stay warm or cool, and amuse ourselves,
we create the sub-systems of a vast metabolism tying us at every point to our
environment. We call these sub-systems
the energy economy, the food economy, the transportation system, and shelter –
cities and suburbs.
We do not
act blindly, though we often see only a part of the whole system. From the beginning, there has been a link
between how Americans have acted toward the natural world and how they have
imagined it – as a wilderness designed by God to become a garden, as a piece of
symbolic art with the power to bring spiritual insight, as a storehouse of
essential resources for national wealth.
Imagination is less precise,
less worked-out, more inclusive, than ideas,
and it belongs to people in their lives, not to philosophers working out
doctrines. Imagination is a way of
seeing, a pattern of supposing how things must be, in which one choice rather
than another makes sense, or one fact stands forward as essential while others
recede into the background. Imagination
helped early Massachusetts settlers to see their new landscape through biblical
eyes, calling it a “wilderness” in the sense of Exodus, a barren place full of
heathens, a testing-ground for a people’s faith. Imagination was at work, too, when
utilitarian foresters in the early twentieth century looked at the United
States’ new national forests and saw commercial timber and erosion that clogged
downstream irrigation – but not the many other species and interconnections
that a later, ecological eye would bring to the same woods. These examples highlight something the word
“imagination” may miss because it has implications of frivolous speculation and
pretend: imagination is intense practical.
What we see, what we become conscious of, is intensely linked with what
we are trying to do, whether that is to manage forests for Teddy Roosevelt’s
Forest Service, to understand ecological connections as a conservation
biologist, or to survive in a harsh new place while seeking Christian
salvation.
Law is a
circuit between imagination and the material world. Laws choreograph human action in a thousand
ways: laying down the highways and the electricity grid, allowing and
regulating mining and drilling, setting the price of gasoline and the price (if
any) of carbon emissions, guiding and limiting housing development, shaping the
agricultural economy. Just these few
examples, usually invisible, channel our lives, providing the implicit
blueprints of the landscape architecture that we practice on the world.
Laws have
several kinds of sources, among them economic interests and the hurly-burly of
politics. Imagination, too, is part of
what law is. Laws that govern the human
relation to the rest of the world play out the logic of different versions of
environmental imagination. American
environmental laws may be sorted according to four pictures of the natural and
the human place in it, which they help to make real just by channeling human
power as if they were already real.
These are (1) a providential
vision, in which the natural world has a purpose, to serve human needs richly,
but only if people do their part by filling it up with labor and development;
(2) a Romantic vision, in which a key
part of the world’s value is aesthetic and spiritual, and the aesthetic and
spiritual are intertwined in the inspiration of mountain peaks, sheer canyon
walls, and other extreme vistas; (3) a utilitarian
picture, in which nature is a storehouse of resources requiring expert
management, especially by scientists and public officials; and (4) an ecological view of the world as formed
of intensely complex and interpenetrating systems, in which both sustenance and
poison may travel through air, water, and soil, and in and out of flesh, as
each thing becomes something else.
Each image echoes in laws that
channel human energy to shape the world, and so nearly every American landscape
is, in part a meditation on what people have valued in nature and what they
have scorned or ignored. The
agricultural terrain of the Midwest – that patchwork-quilt geometry of crops
that comes into focus from airplane windows – is the artifact of how the
federal government turned public land, which had recently been Indian land,
into private property. The survey system
of squares-within-squares was a model of how a free republic should live on the
land – each family with its own sufficient plot, tied together by schools,
townships, and county seats.
The survey system was just one part
of a legal architecture that channeled human energy into clearing, settling,
and planting the continent – laws granting land in exchange for cultivating the
ground, planting trees or clearing trees, draining wetlands or irrigating
drylands, mining gold or silver, and gathering stone.
For its first 100 years, US law shaped
Americans into forest-clearers and farmers, forests and grasslands into
fields.
Other statutes had the same
logic.
The 1872 Mining Law established a
you-dig-it-you-own-it policy to encourage private mining for minerals on public
lands.
Laws governing irrigation
development (tellingly called “reclamation”) were mainly designed to support
mid-sized farms and independent farmers on what had been desert.
Working the land, once a degraded activity,
gained dignity in American civic culture.
The pioneer and the yeoman who should come after him were model
Americans in the rhetoric and imagination of the time.
Pro-development laws promoted a mode of activity and
experience. Under their aegis, settlers
treated the world as conditionally bountiful, the way providential imagination
drew it. The Jeffersonian surveyors’
grid and the statutes creating private farms produced an American geography where
these providential attitudes formed the dominant human relation to nature, even
to the point of ignoring the facts of weather and geography. The repeating rectangles galloped over
streams and wetlands and mounted the High Plains, where rainfall is too scant
to support farming. After a few
bizarrely wet summers and warm winters, the usual seasons returned and threw
back the settlers, now the first modern ecological refugees in North America. Yet that the land itself threw back settlement
in this case highlights how successful the rest of the continental settlement
was. The ecological transformation and
the cultural developments around it were world-historical, yet Americans often
discussed them as if they were the most natural things in the world, the
expected upshot of a people meeting a continent. Soon another wave of settlers returned to the
Great Plains, armed with technology to extend the grid westward, its lines now
framing the crop-circles of center-pivot irrigation.
A vision suffused this clearing and
settlement, a picture of nature with religious and philosophical sources. The world was a garden in potential. It existed to serve human needs richly, but
on a condition – only if people completed it with labor and settlement. This vision helped to make a national mission
of turning the continent into private property.
It linked economic development to a cosmology and sense of purpose. It helped to underwrite the dignity of labor
in a democratic culture that increasingly embraced the equal dignity of all its
white, male members.
The second great American picture of nature, the Romantic
one, has also relied on law to anchor experience and activity that, in turn,
make a way of encountering nature possible.
Seen in Romantic light, the most extreme and dramatic places inspire
epiphany: flashes of insight into the order of things and one’s place in it.
One encounters divinity and one’s own self on
a mountain peak, in the rainbow-laced spray of a crashing waterfall, or at the
lip of a deep crevasses.
Drawing on
literary sources such as Wordsworth and Ralph Waldo Emerson, early Romantic
social movements, especially the Sierra Club, wove these themes into the
landscapes of California’s Sierra Nevada and other Western high country.
Soon they were working to ensure that
American law dedicated large tracts of ground, such as Yosemite Valley, to visual
delight and inspiration.
Although many
of the national parks were founded on the non-Romantic theory that they would
nurture public health and civic spirit, by the 1920s the Park Service itself
called them shrines to nature’s finest aesthetic qualities.
Parks made the Romantic way of meeting nature into real and
widespread experience. Public wild lands
are dedicated to a picture of nature as a spiritual destination, a place to
make a pilgrimage. In turn, they make
that cultural idea of nature a physical reality for sojourners. Their material landscape brings alive a
cultural practice of aesthetics and spirituality. These landscapes were inspired by ideas; but
the ideas can enter lived experience only because the landscapes exist. So humans spell out their imagination in the
landscapes they shape, and the landscapes write their forms on human experience
and the imagination it fosters.
The protected public lands soon became testing grounds for radical
ideas about nature. Starting in the
1920s, a new movement arose dedicated to “wilderness.” That word had long been used for all sorts of
unproductive land, and in the providential vocabulary it was closely linked to
the derogatory waste. Wilderness advocates made wildness a virtue,
insisting that the solitude of wild places taught one’s own smallness and
dependence on the vast and ancient natural world. Wilderness advocates went into the wild not
so much to find the divine in themselves as to be strangers and learn by that
strangeness.
The 1964 Wilderness Act, the fruit of decades of advocacy, gave
legal operation to the new concept of wilderness, and now protects more than 107
million acres of public land from development.
Crafting their arguments, wilderness
advocates found words for their own experience and made it more fully available
to others.
They did this work on the platform their
Romantic predecessors had built: undeveloped land and a public vocabulary that
gave found moral weight and aesthetic power in wild places.
With this example in mind, we might think of
landscape as both a physical terrain and
a cultural lexicon for encountering it, a way of seeing, feeling, and
describing the big place and the many small places that it contains.
In shaping landscapes, law also shapes modes
of experience, enshrining and amplifying some and shunting aside others.
The land law shapes is a geography of
experience, as much as of landforms and things.
Make no mistake: this is an unequal landscape. The four pictures of the natural world that
have shaped American law, and so American geography, are imperial
conquerors. They have covered the
continent like Jefferson’s grid. Many
other landscapes and experiences remain peripheral in this American geography,
or are foreclosed. Native American
farming practices are gone, now glimpsed only in traces such as the “Indian
corn,” Bloody Butcher, that is still grown in the fold of central Appalachia
where I grew up. Hunting and gathering
as a way of life is gone too, though echoed in country foraging traditions and
their urban revivals. The gardens that
enslaved people kept on plantations and that some of their descendants brought
north generations later in the Great Migration are mostly forgotten now, and there
has been room only on the margins for the plots cultivated by immigrants from
Latin America, East Asia, and elsewhere, and for the new foraging knowledge
some immigrants bring to what had seemed to be weeds.
There are many rich stories to tell
about these experiences, some of them centered on violence and injustice, some
on solidarity and pleasure seized in places that remain mostly invisible to
those who do not live there. I come
myself from a marginal American landscape, one that does not fit the big
pictures and grand stories so well. I
know that there is no equality among American landscapes: some are treated as
sacred, some guided into many generations of habitation and use, and some
sacrificed in just a few years. And so,
there is no equality among Americans as far as they care about their landscapes
and wish to imagine that their children and grandchildren might live there as
they have. If you live in a wooded suburb of Boston and
treasure the preserved lands next door, if you live in the dense neighborhoods
of Boulder, Colorado, and like to climb into the Rocky Mountain National Park
for your summer hikes, your relation to the land is secure, a privilege
enshrined in law. But if you love the
hills of southern West Virginia or eastern Kentucky, if they form your idea of
beauty and rest, your native or chosen image of home, then your love has
prepared your heart for breaking.
The styles of environmental
imagination I am describing are, among other things, ideologies. They organize the world by simplifying it,
highlighting some realities and casting shadow on others. They enable people to see themselves in
convenient ways – as nature’s allies or the servants of divine order. They “justify” people in doing things to one
another, such as clearing Native Americans from the land to press forward
providential settlement. Approaching
North America in providential light figured the continent as a potentially
democratic nature, a terrain where each competent man might have enough land to
live by, a terrain that, unlike the scarce and unequally distributed lands of
Europe, did not impose a hierarchy between lords and commoners. The same view made nature complicit in
genocide by treating clearing and development – European land-use patterns,
which whites tended to assume were uniquely theirs even when Native Americans
such as the Cherokee fully adopted them – as human obligations written into the
world itself. Even as it shut out the
first people to live on the continent, the providential view also shut out
ecological nuance, such as the dry land, swamps, and inconvenient species that
did not fit easily in the agenda of development.
Why give pride of place to these
accounts of nature, with all the crimes they trail behind them? For one, they have contributed to the shape
of the continent. To live in North
America today means inhabiting their legacy.
Overcoming their limitations, redressing their crimes, and improving on
their past into the future, requires understanding the politics of nature that
they inflected at so many points. For
another, the emphasis on their crimes and omissions is as incomplete as it is
essential. Like American democracy
itself, a powerful practice and idea fraught with exclusions, the American
environmental imagination is a multifarious thing that, for me and for many
readers, is part of our us – part if not all, part of us even if not wholly
welcome.
Speaking for myself, I feel all
four versions of American nature alive inside me. The providential view came to me through my
grandfather, a fifth-generation Pennsylvania farmer whose great-great-great
grandfather was deeded a piece of land for service in a revolution that was one
part democratic insurgency, one part an elite land-grab with crumbs for the
soldiers (but what crumbs, compared to what he could have farmed in Ulster or
the Scottish borderlands!). It comes in
the feeling I take from him that there is no better praise than being
recognized for working hard all day outside.
It comes, too, in the political and constitutional legacy of Free Labor,
the idea that American citizenship mean economic dignity, freedom from fear of
bosses or masters, a claim on the good things of the world. Half myth, often used to disingenuous ends,
this idea is the reworked version of the democratic landscape of mobility and
self-reliance that the providential vision celebrated and made real for many of
those it favored.
I carry the Romantic view in some
part of me that has drawn toward mountains, to their highest places and
steepest defiles, as long as I can remember.
It was in my rapt stare when, at seventeen, I saw the foothills of the
Swiss Alps through a train window, and for the first time knew in fact that a
peak can be, not gradual and rounded like the topography I knew, but abrupt,
angular, even jagged. It is racing along
the crest of a volcanic ridge on Kau’ai, my hiking boots thudding on the dirt
and stones of a wooded pasture that is narrowing by the foot into a promontory
perched fatally, commandingly high over an emerald jungle clinging to land the
shape of a mad Bavarian castle, whose every line plummeted into the Pacific
Ocean. It is shouting to no one, as I
run, that I, never a religious person, have come there to talk to God. Each of these is also a moment of tourism, a
visit to a place whose everyday life I had no part in, where I had no thought
of staying.
The ecological view of nature just is what it means to do
what I professionally do: teach the laws that govern strip-mining, farming, and
the treatment of endangered species and their habitat. Thinking about these problems carries me into
an attitude that is both scientific and aesthetic. Complexity and interdependence are the
keystones of practical management – how much of a stream’s biological richness
comes from the rich headwaters streams that mountaintop removal buries, how
much of a chemical spill in the Elk River will reach Louisville, on the Ohio? –
but also the keys to fascination, the love of the world and wish to halfway
understand that motivates all of us who do this work. Its aesthetic speaks in the way I, like so
many readers, can spend an afternoon following Michael Pollan through the
life-cycle of a meal because it carries me into so many interwoven systems.
The utilitarian attitude is the closest of the four to a
purely professional possession. It is on
my tongue when I reflect that, no matter how drawn I am to the idyll of a
neo-traditional farm, agricultural policy is foremost about feeding billions of
people safely, a vast and technical question that we can get hold of only by
weighing calories, units of fertilizer and fossil fuel, the lifespan of
aquifers, and the incentive structures of commodities markets. It is present when I say that, to pivot the
energy economy in an appropriate direction, we need a pricing system that
captures the harms of greenhouse-gas emissions, even if this can only be a
false exactitude that conceals many political and ethical judgments. These are the techniques of social
rationality, developed in the national forestry regimes of Europe and the
United States, and have since extended to all useful things as we have realized
that everything we need is too scarce and fragile for us to use it casually,
without an eye to the needs of others and to the future. They are the stock-in-trade of us who study
law, even those like me, for whom they hold no poetry.
I doubt that any reader comes to these inheritances in quite
the way I do, and some won’t regard them as inheritances at all, or at least
not welcome ones. For some readers, one
or more of them will probably feel lifeless or hostile. Many readers will come from their own
marginal landscapes, places like my beautiful, wasted, half-wrecked Allegheny
Plateau, which no vocabulary of American landscape quite captures. Wherever anyone starts, we are all on this
American landscape, all facing this daunting global future.
Regulating nature has never been a
narrow, specialized task, or at least not for long, and ideas about nature have
never remained just literary and aesthetic conceits. The imaginative and practical dimensions,
vision and action, have been like two spirals in a double helix. The history of law, politics, and power is
also the history of imagination.
Landscapes, natural and human, bear the shape of both.
History reveals the present as the joint creation of power
and imagination, including the power – sometimes but not always democratic
power – that imagination makes possible.
And, once more, understanding these
shaping legacies can be a way of taking their measure to change them. The landscapes that law shapes have
ideological meaning, they resonate – or not – at the level of identity as well
as policy. They also make articulate
what people might rather not admit. They
make priorities explicit. When
mountaintop-removal mining dynamites hills and hollows into a flat, treeless
terrain and buries many hundreds of miles of Appalachian streams, that wrecked
landscape states the values of the energy economy as clearly as anything
could. It is no surprise that coal
companies make it as hard to see a mountaintop-removal mine in action as it is
to look inside a slaughterhouse. The
effort that goes into concealing these places is unintended testament to how
precisely they express what American law treats nature’s worth as being, and
how poorly that fact sits with what some Americans would rather believe of
themselves.
Four
Versions of Anti-Politics
American uses of nature have always
been both political and anti-political, portraying the problem of inhabiting
this continent to generate new claims on other citizens, and to shut down the
claims one can make by setting them outside nature’s bounds. Each form of American environmental imagination has
called on the natural world to underwrite, to “naturalize,” one version of
politics, pressing others outside of serious debate. Each version has in some ways powered
political imagination and mobilization, by enlisting nature in support of
political agendas; at the same time, each version has evaded politics, tried to
shut down imagination and mobilization, by claiming that certain collective
questions must be decided by nature, not by human judgment.
Consider one of the shaping
political narratives of American nature, a pivot between the providential
vision and the managerial one. Frederick
Jackson Turner’s “Frontier Thesis” diagnosed American democracy as the product
of a fast-passing ecological moment and proposed to lay the ground for the
managerial state of the twentieth century.
Turner, a University of Wisconsin
professor who later taught at Harvard, announced his thesis at a meeting of the
American Historical Association in Chicago on July 12, 1893.
He argued that the frontier had created
American democracy and indelibly shaped national culture.
The free land of the frontier was a safety
valve: both malcontents and the ambitious could head west.
Their constant emigration from eastern cities
saved the country from being divided into Europe-like permanent classes of
property-holding elites and low-wage workers.
The practical-minded equality of the frontier was a wind from the West,
blowing east demands for voting rights and democratic constitutions, as well as
resistance to faraway government.
But
that era had ended.
The report of the
1890 Census had found settlement everywhere, erasing the westward line of
settlement, and so “the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the
first period of American history.”
Chicago that year was the season of
the Columbian Exposition, the World’s Fair marking four hundred years of
European presence in the Americas and celebrating the cult of progress. The fair grounds were rife with displays of a
future perfected by technology and planning, all centering on the famous White
City, stucco-coated, lighted by electricity, and meticulously designed. It was both a monument to optimism and
growing human powers and an unintended reminder of the fragility of all designs
for the future, from its ephemeral architecture to its unplanned closing event,
the shocking assassination of the popular mayor by an angry and delusional
patronage-seeker.
Turner’s thesis had a vivd
ascent-of-man linearity that would have suited an exhibition in the White City.
He claimed that the whole outline of human
history displayed itself again and again on the opened continent, as it had in
the longer and more meandering ascent of older societies.
Turner invited his reader to “Stand at
Cumberland Gap and watch the procession of civilization, marching single file –
the buffalo following the trail to the salt springs, the Indian, the fur trader
and hunter, the cattle-raiser, the pioneer farmer – and the frontier has passed
by.
Stand at South Pass in the Rockies a
century later and see the same procession with wider intervals between.”
There was a shadow in Turner’s
account of progress. He described a
country shaped by the frontier at the moment when remaining a frontier people
became impossible. With the end of
abundant land, a nation of individualists faced the interdependence of people
stuck with one another; a culture built on the expectation of effectively
limitless resources confronted scarcity and class conflict; and a democratic
community, accustomed to self-governance, met a world too complicated for ready
shared decisions, a world that only experts and planners could navigate. Americans had lost their original nature, and
they would now have to find a way to take responsibility for a planned nature,
in some ways as artificial as the White City.
So, when Turner wrote that
“American democracy … came out of the American forest, and it gained new
strength each time it touched a new frontier,”
he was also saying that democracy’s time had passed, at least in that version.
The country was now “looking with a shock
upon a changed world.”
The national task was no longer how to cut
and burn the Western forests, but to preserve timber, not to encourage
settlement but to nourish scientific agriculture.
The age of conservation and management had
come.
Just as nature now needed to be
managed collectively and by experts, new social conflicts seemed to demand the
same. Turner’s idea of American
democracy was highly individualist; libertarian equality and the democratic
spirit meant roughly the same thing for him.
Yet, he reflected as he lectured on the frontier, the country was torn
by labor strife – organized workers gathered against massed capital. His beloved West was producing the most
radical, which is to the say the most collectivist, of the American unions,
among the miners of Montana and Colorado.
A new synthesis was needed, preserving a version of the old
individualism in very different circumstances, when its simple form had become
impossible.
So Turner wrote in 1903 that
American politics seemed to divide mainly on “the question of Socialism,” the
question of how far economic life should be subject to collective control, and
for what purposes.
In an address late in 1910, he aligned
himself with Theodore Roosevelt’s “New Nationalism,” a program of strong
government that Roosevelt imagined as preserving the virtues of individualism
and civic spirit through intelligent management.
Like Roosevelt, Turner contrasted this
management-for-individualism with the simple, laissez-faire individualism of
conservatives like the railroad baron E.H. Harriman, whose simple rejection of
government was a throwback to a lost frontier.
This was a middle ground: economic management
that reversed the individualistic techniques of frontier government to keep
alive, as its advocates imagined, some parts of the individualist spirit.
Losing the frontier, then, meant
losing political innocence. Turner wrote
that American democracy had taken shape in historically unique exemption from
the basic problem of most politics, especially modern and democratic
politics. This is the problem of
conflicting interests and values, made acute by relative scarcity. There is not enough of the all the good
things in the world – land, wealth, leisure – and conflict over those things
determines whose wishes come true, and whose lives end up as the compromised
instruments of others’ comfort. Because
one of the easiest ways to live comfortably is to exploit others, one of the
basic political problems is what Turner identified as the political theme of
his time, the relation between capital labor, or, in less stark language, the social
terms of work and cooperation. The
frontier had relaxed the pressure of both these problems, making expansion an
alternative to political conflict, exit an alternative to exploitation. When Americans felt their interests pressed
too hard, they could leave for open land, returning to what Turner imagined as
an early stage of social development. By
reducing the force of social conflict, as much as by cultivating settler
self-reliance, the frontier gave American politics the individualist stamp that
Turner called democratic.
No doubt one reason the Frontier
Thesis caught fire was that Turner’s claims were the opposite of original. He was recasting in the tenets of a civic
religion. Thomas Jefferson had promised
in his first inaugural address that frontier land would enable Americans to
live a rural, egalitarian life for a thousand generations. Two years before the Civil War, Abraham
Lincoln argued that open land created unique social mobility, so that the old-world
division of labor and capital did not apply here as it might in Europe. William Gilpin, Colorado’s first governor and
a great rhetorician of Manifest Destiny, announced that geography formed
America’s destiny – a destiny of a continental empire of liberty. These were only some of the most prominent
expressions of a whole world of American rhetoric.
Turner was more distinctive in
claiming that the frontier had closed and changed the terms of American
life. Not that this idea was new,
either: early in the nineteenth century, the philosopher G.W.F. Hegel had
argued that because the American frontier was an escape-hatch from the conflicts
of politics, the United States would not develop a genuine political life until
it ran out of land and Americans had to turn and face one another. Until then, its politics would be a gloss on
escapist expansion, and would hardly confront such problems as scarcity, exploitation,
and conflicting goals. Nor was the idea
of a closing frontier restricted to speculation in the German
universities. Five years before Turner
announced the Frontier Thesis, Theodore Roosevelt founded the Boone and
Crockett Club, an elite sportsmen’s organization devoted to conserving North
American big game in the face of commercial hunting and development pressure on
wild lands – concerns that would attract Roosevelt, nostalgic western novelist
Owen Wister, and other members of the club to Turner’s thought, as Turner would
later be drawn to Roosevelt’s program.
Turner’s thesis has been subject to
so much academic criticism that it is, itself, more an object of
historiographic interest than a contender in theories of American political
development. It is true, nonetheless,
that American political culture was formed in constant engagement with, and
reflection upon, a rich continent, new to its settlers, which they turned into
wave after wave of advancing frontiers.
In some broad sense Turner can only have been right, even if he was
wrong in many damning particulars.
Turner argued that Americans had
been oblivious to the basic problems of politics, enjoying a long national
adolescence in which energy and individuality seemed enough to organize the world. They had evaded politics until his time, when
Roosevelt and other Progressive reformers squarely faced the problems of social
and political order. Nature had powered
a peculiarly American anti-politics.
What Turner left out of this story
was just as important as what he included.
His own account was an anti-politics, too. Looking backward, he treated the continent’s
clearing and development as a natural process, the pageant of universal
history, when in fact it was rife with political struggles and ethically costly
choices. After all, the continent was
rich and “empty” only after it was cleared of its first peoples in campaign
that Turner concealed when he placed the Indian hunter at the head of a pageant
of progress, first to follow the bison, next to fade away before the dawning
future. The continent had to be created
as a crucible of democracy in other ways, too, some less horrific: the demands
from the West were democratic, not just for ecological reasons, but because
much of the country’s public culture was staked on an idea of egalitarianism
among white men, which helped the liberty of the frontier become an emblem of
the country in a way that it never was, for instance, in more orderly and
persistently colonial Canada. Turner
described the character of the providential republic’s ideal citizen, alert,
practical, and self-reliant citizen, as if it had been molded from prairie soil
and fired in the heat of burning Midwestern forests, rather than taught in
thousands of sermons, campaign speeches, and humbler exercises that tied
democratic culture to the labor of grubbing up roots and planting a continent
in grain.
But the more momentous
anti-politics in Turner’s account was reserved for his present, not his
past. He described the reforms of the
Progressive era as the advent of mature politics; but these reforms contained
their techniques for invoking nature to block the reach of democracy. They purported to show the way the frontier’s
non-politics into political rationality. but what they offered was, like the
settler ideology, really another version of political imagination, founded on
its own version of nature, with its own political and legal agenda, its own
version of the American mind, and its own way of seeing the non-human
world. Each version had its own kind of
rationality, and was rational relative to an ideological image of nature and
the human place in it.
Progressive
reformers like Roosevelt saw nature as existing to serve human purposes,
though, in contrast to their predecessors, not all insisted that it was created to that end. Some did take this providential view, while for
others human interests were the touchstone, and it just made sense to regard
nature as a reserve of resources to serve those. Either way, Progressives insisted that, contrary
to the providential view, nature did not smoothly support the small-scale
clearing and settlement of frontier culture; the American landscape was not
arranged for harmony with the Homestead Act and the Jeffersonian grid. Instead, many natural systems worked on
scales that were too large, and in ways that were too complex, for Jeffersonian
settlers to manage them well. Moreover,
the self-interest of individual settlers would not always lead to good
management of nature, as the providential view tended to suppose. Instead, pioneers had cleared forests too
quickly, exhausted their fields, and sent eroded soil downstream to clog
waterways. The country was using its
natural wealth poorly, and too quickly.
What was needed was management at the scale of the complex and
interdependent resources themselves – forests, rivers – over nature’s
time-scale, and in the interest of the whole political community, not just some
lucky members of the present generation.
Only government could do that, and it had to be a government staffed by
people with scientific training. Where
the providential version of nature called out for clearing and settlement, the
Progressive version demanded management.
Early in the nineteenth century, the continent had seemed to call forth
a homesteading, agrarian empire of liberty; now it invited a strong national
state, the administrative state of the twentieth century. This was the program that Roosevelt advanced,
and Turner praised, as what came after the frontier.
How was
this embrace of governance an evasion of politics? The key lies in a famous remark about
Theodore Roosevelt, that he loved government but did not care for
democracy. It is not, of course, a
matter of Roosevelt’s personal temperament, but his attitude captures something
in the politics of his time. Roosevelt
once said that his whole program of domestic reform was nothing but widespread
application of the principle of conservation.
From antitrust to labor law, from city planning to public-health regulation,
social and economic life was encountering the same problems that Progressives
found in nature: the systems were so large and complex that leaving them up to
individual decisions dis-served the public good. Like rivers and forests, the streams of
commerce and even the lives of citizens had to be managed for the long-term
benefit of the whole population. This
management was a public-minded project, but not a democratic one. It did not take its standards from popular
will, but from expert knowledge. It is
not strange, then, that some of the strongest conservationists, including
Roosevelt and his great supporter, Indiana Senator Albert Beveridge, were
adamant imperialists, confident that the US could govern the Philippines and
other far-off places for the benefit of their people, since the touchstone of
legitimate government was not democracy, but, as Beveridge argued in support of
Roosevelt’s foreign policy, administration.
Nor is it strange that many of Roosevelt’s closest advisers, such as
Gifford Pinchot, who built and led the Forest Service, were committed
eugenicists, to whom the human species was itself a kind of resource for
rational management.
A key to
the evasion of politics was the conviction, which many Progressive reformers
shared, that there was one right definition of the public good, a utilitarian
calculus that would tell the expert manager just where the national interest lay. When Roosevelt and his allies treated
natural-resource conservation as the model of all regulation, they implied that
the social benefit of a policy was an uncontroversial quantity, not a target of
competing values and interests. Managing
a forest for timber and erosion control allowed a straightforward accounting of
public costs and benefits that a manager could use to schedule logging over
decades. Forestry, as a young science of
resource management, had little room for disputes about just what the value of
a tree was, or whether trees, or ecosystems, might have their own interests –
ideas that Romantics like Sierra Club leader John Muir had begun to sound in
public, but which Roosevelt’s circle mostly scorned. Taking forest management as a general model
meant acting as if the competing demands of labor and management, laissez-faire
capitalists and socialists, were open to the same objective accounting. It implied that there was no irresolvable
clash of values between antitrust advocates such as Louis Brandeis, who wanted
to protect an economy of smallholders, and others, like Roosevelt, who wanted
to embrace big business, then regulate it.
There was only the question of coming to the right answer.
Conservation,
then, was pivotal in the rise of cost-benefit analysis, which today is a
touchstone language of American policy and lawmaking. Since the 1980s, when it became central to
environmental policy, critics of cost-benefit analysis have argued that a
technical, would-be objective technique is not enough to judge whether laws are
good, let alone legitimate. Historians
of economic and social policy recognize that those debates crystallize broader
problems that emerged when American policymakers after World War Two began
pursuing overall consumer welfare rather than openly distributive politics or
other traditional concerns of political economy, such as the quality of work
that people do. That policy has its
roots in the Progressives’ technocratic, managerial approach to social policy,
which itself rested on their understanding of nature and the human place in it. In a sense it was the American landscape, the
vast tracts of interdependent forests, waterways, and soil systems, many of
them still under public management and ownership when Roosevelt’s reforms got
underway, that made plausible a managerial, welfare-maximizing approach to
social policy generally. This approach
remains a leading way of making policy non-political, even anti-political, in
the name of an objective and technical conception of the common good.
Roosevelt
and his allies worked at the same time as another politically generative politics
of nature that was also, itself, yet another anti-politics. Romantic activists such as John Muir insisted
that the landscapes they treasured should be preserved as something like
secular cathedrals. Their position was
not exactly that these places should be outside the utilitarian calculus of
public benefit – the Sierra Club made an early peace with cost-benefit analysis
– but that aesthetic, recreational, and emotional satisfaction should be
central to the meaning of public benefit.
“Not by bread alone” was a frequent refrain of Sierra Club arguments
that aesthetics belonged in public decisions.
Romantic
claims might have revealed that what counts as “public benefit” is an
inevitably contested question, so that how it is resolved in a public decision
can only be a political matter, not an impartially scientific judgment. Muir and his allies, who clashed loudly with
more conventional managers over land-use decisions, famously the flooding of
the Hetch-Hetchy Valley for San Francisco’s municipal water supply, did enrich
the politics of nature, but they always avoided saying that they were opening
the horizons of democratic argument.
Instead, they had their own ways of evading politics in nature’s
name. They claimed to call on the real
meaning, value, and purposes of nature, which they had special power to
perceive as devotees of the high country.
The Sierra Club and its allies also
limited the potential of their claims by making a hasty peace with a
consumerist relationship to nature, whose paradigm was the vacation. Their call for a new, spiritualized relation
to nature was always focused on defending high-country sanctums while ignoring
the environmental politics of everyday life, which belonged to the fallen
lowlands. They claimed to rise above
politics when they spoke for the places they valued most, while they otherwise
ignored what might have been the political implications for daily life of their
call for a more consciou and humanly enriching relation to the living
world. This combination of
quasi-religious elitism on one hand and touristic consumerism on the other
meant that the Romantic movement produced no political agenda to open wide the
human relation to nature as a democratic question.
The fourth
major version of American nature, the ecological, has now been at the center of
environmental politics, lawmaking, and imagination for roughly fifty
years.
It took energy from the growing
visibility and sophistication of ecological science; from the massive increase
in the American and Western European resource footprints in the
consumer-industrial economies that grew up after World War Two, which pressed
many natural systems harder than ever before; from a new cultural emphasis on
security and cleanliness in the prosperous suburbs of the era; and from growing
doubts that technological mastery of nature always meant progress, doubts
spurred by, among other things, the atomic threat and the failure of US
technology and planning in Vietnam.
The
heart of ecological nature is interconnection so deep and widespread that
boundaries among organisms, places, and systems are neither stable nor
secure.
Rachel Carson’s
Silent Spring crystallized what this
meant for an industrial society: toxins released into air and water ended up in
soil, flesh, and DNA.
The suburbs were
unsafe; even the body was not secure.
From the beginning, the ecological image of the world brought a threat,
the apocalyptic specter of a “poisoned world.”
It also brought a comforting, pastoral
promise: recognizing oneself as a part of the non-human world, as continuous
with it, could be redress for alienation and discontent.
This promise was a version of the restorative
unity with nature that the Romantics had sought, but with a basis that was more
homely than the “cathedrals” of the high country.
Ecological
nature required new forms of regulation, pitched at the level of systems, such
as the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, or protecting “critical habitat”
wherever it occurs, as the Endangered Species Act authorizes. Most earlier lawmaking around the non-human
world had amounted to zoning on a continental scale, with regions of private
property implicitly dedicated to economic use, public lands explicitly
committed to a mix of managed production, as in the national forests, and
recreation, all the way to the wilderness areas that law protects from all
development. The zoning-style approach grew
palpably inadequate once it became apparent that natural systems respect overrun
jurisdictional boundaries. In a way, the
ecological insight did to the conservationist, zoning-based approach what the
conservationists had done to the providential, property-oriented lawmaking that
came before it: showed that its artificial boundaries were too narrow for a
deeply interconnected natural world.
There is
also no separating human beings from ecological nature. Wilderness was the apex of the Romantic view
– a nature without people, without production or extraction, set aside for
leave-no-trace pilgrims. By contrast,
agriculture would make an apt touchstone for ecological nature. Eating is one of the most basic ties between
the human body and the rest of the world, a relationship of sustenance and
survival. Agriculture shapes landscapes,
soil systems, and human labor, technology, and culture. Its practices, from plant breeding to
pesticide and antibiotics, define the chemistry and bacterial ecosystem of the
human body. Another candidate is energy. The energy economy transforms the chemistry
of the global atmosphere through its emissions and drives change in global
climate. It forms landscapes directly
through mining, drilling, or windmills and solar panels. Energy sources also
shape human habitation: today suburbs and exurbs have grown up around cheap
fuel, as towns and villages once clustered around waterways that could drive
their mills and carry their goods.
In these
ways, ecology has deepened the problems and raised the stakes of environmental
law and politics. In fact, the
intensification may be so great that referring to “environmental” questions is
artificially narrow; in a real sense, we are talking about everything. To shape the human relation to the natural
world, we have to take account of most of what we do and how we live
Yet
ecological nature has inspired its own evasions of politics. Some, to be sure, are not to be taken
seriously. The recent center-left
fantasies of living under Chinese efficiency are second-time-as-farce replays
of 1970s fantasies that a Green authoritarian state might be the answer to the
ecological crisis. Such ideas are
instructive more as symptoms of disaffection from stumbling democracies than as
prescriptions for a cure. Quite apart
from the moral priority of democracy, which is no small thing, the hope for
benign and sustained authoritarianism is absurd in practice and a mark of
intellectual desperation.
Other
evasions are more serious. The most
influential ecological evasion of politics is the idea, everywhere in
environmental politics and policy, that all would be well if only markets were
engineered to reflect the “true costs” of economic decisions. On one level, this is an indisputably
excellent idea. Pollution needs to be
regulated, and raising prices is one kind of regulation – a kind that has some
practical and ethical advantages over more direct control of individual
decisions. (It would be messy and
complicated to tell each individual how much fuel to burn, and intrusive and
potentially oppressive as well; much better to raise the price and let people
decide how much that daily drive is really worth to them.) This approach also has the appeal of
hard-headed objectivity – forget about moral and aesthetic arguments and just
get the numbers right! Perhaps not
surprisingly, environmental advocates and policy types have rushed to put a
price on nearly everything, from swamps to oceans to wild plants. This kind of thinking closely resembles the
traditional cost-benefit analysis of the early twentieth century, but with an
essential difference. Then, the imagined
target was a decision by a public planner, who would schedule a logging
concession or require a certain level of cleanliness in water to maximize
benefit to the public. The economic
bottom line, in that traditional calculation, appeared on an administrator’s
ledger. In the new version, the ideal is
a market, which registers and aggregates the preferences (at least the ones
backed by spending power) of everyone involved.
The image of the reform is this: it brings all environmental goods into
the marketplace, so that we have a market-generated price for the stability of
the global atmosphere and the diversity of the deep seas, as surely as for
phones and shoes. In this way,
market-oriented environmental reform fits the spirit of a time when everyone is
urged to understand themselves as consumers and entrepreneurs, their
conversations as sales pitches, even their personalities as brands. These cultural echoes are not random or
trivial. They express the widespread
assumption that markets are dynamic, intelligent, and effective, while politics
– not least democracy – is static, stupid, and bootless. In this image, whenever we can switch a
problem over from political governance to market governance, we can expect the
market to do the better job.
There are
serious problems here. There is no
objective way of valuing the environmental considerations that reformers want
to bring into markets. Their “price”
must be a function of how much, and in what ways, they matter to people. This is not much of a problem for, say,
shoes: their price reflects how much people want them and how much money they
have to spend. But market-oriented
environmental reforms address externalities, effects that escape ordinary
market processes. This means that
reformers cannot just wait for a price to bubble up from the play of supply and
demand, because they would wait forever – as if you waited patiently for the
world’s gasoline buyers to begin paying a spontaneous surcharge to show their
worry about climate change. (If we could
expect that to happen, we would not have a problem in the first place.) Instead, reformers must put a price on the
good, either directly (as with a carbon tax that would translate into an extra
charge on fuel) or indirectly (for instance, by limiting total carbon emissions
so that the price of releasing carbon would rise with its relative
scarcity). That means the
“market-correcting” price can only take hold when there is a binding political
decision to impose it, which includes deciding, through politics, how and how
much to value the environmental good.
There is no way around politics here.
Environmentalists in the US met a rough reminder of this fact in 2010,
when they tried and failed to pass a market-oriented climate-change law whose
technical details for regulating greenhouse gases had been many years in the
making.
Market
reform is not a way around politics. Imagining
that it could be dampens the very politics that might produce an adequate
response. Widely held, strongly felt
ways of valuing nature are sometimes necessary conditions of new laws that
govern nature in new ways. Such new ways
of valuing nature arise, crystallize, and spread in politics. Running from politics toward a fantasy of an
ecologically appropriate market doesn’t only put the cart before the horse; it
also starves the horse. Our
market-oriented anti-politics saps the political and cultural energy that drive
new kinds of governance. As likely as
not, the effect is to deepen disaffection with politics by increasing its sense
of futility, and amplify the notion that a corrected market would make
everything right – if only we could get there.
This is a double bind that grows tighter as we struggle with it, unless
we can find and undo the knot. Undoing
the knot would mean recognizing that we need a renewed environmental politics –
in elections, but also at the level of personal, local, and movement innovation
– that can generate both the values and the power to engage this generation of
problems.
**
WHAT IS AT
STAKE
Politics
will determine the shape of the Anthropocene.
Consider one dystopia – a modest one, as they go, but bad enough. Earlier versions of nature have concealed
inequality among people, their landscapes, and their forms of life, by
naturalizing it, treating it as a simple aspect of the given world, quite apart
from political judgments. Theories of
race and sex, of the inherent direction of history, or of the purpose for which
the natural world is designed, have all done this work. These are not gone, of course – indeed, their
traces are everywhere; but they are greatly weakened. The more distinctive and potent danger today
is a naturalized version of post-natural human mastery. That is, the danger is in an approach to the
Anthropocene that rhetorically embraces the need for humans to shape the world,
but cuts off all avenues of radical and generative politics about how to do
that, reducing our Anthropocene choices to a convenient minimum.
As economy,
ecology, and politics unite with growing intensity, the natural world itself
will enforce unequal economic and political power with special force. Wealth has always meant the power to resist
natural shocks and carry on with one’s life.
Wealth commands vaccines and antibiotics, upland real estate safe from
floods, reliable flows of food and water when drought strikes, and muscle and
weaponry when the desperate and the opportunistic try to help themselves to
those things. In these ways, natural
stresses can amplify existing inequality.
When sea levels rise, malaria spreads, and storms intensify, low-lying
and poor regions will see their poverty confirmed by disasters for which no one
can quite be blamed, while rich countries, even ones that have started out as
haplessly as the United States, will get proof of their can-do resourcefulness
as they innovate in seawalls and adaptive buildings and cities. The global atmosphere is a great launderer of
historical contributions to, and benefits from, inequality. Everything washes out in the weather. As providence once seemed to give Europeans
technological and immunological advantages over Native Americans and other
peoples, in the neoliberal Anthropocene, the justifications will be misfortune,
happenstance, and the rich countries’ resilience and flexibility in the face of
change.
It is too
anodyne to say that climate change creates hazards for which wealthy countries
are better prepared. It is more accurate
to say that it creates a global landscape of inequality, one in which the
already wealthy peoples who have contributed most to the problem see their relative
advantages multiplied. As the shaping
force of human pressure on the planet grows and global inequality relentlessly
inflects it, other landscape-level inequalities will emerge. Already, many millions of acres of rich
agricultural land in Africa are under leases of a hundred years or longer to
feed burgeoning China as the Middle Kingdom dives into meat-eating and obesity
and builds cities on its farmland. Once,
in a world of scarcity, peasants produced for lords and priests in a landscape
that mapped out hierarchical bonds in differentiated legal positions that came
down to different claims on the land and its products. Those differences broke down, at least within
political societies, as technology and wealth lifted the burden of
scarcity. Intense inequality has never
gone away on the global scale, but it has been concealed and made politically
avoidable by distance – literal geographic distance, but also social and
imaginative distance, the distance of those who do not believe their lives are
entangled. The question now is whether,
as competition for resources gets more severe, a more openly interdependent
world will reproduce by region and continent the landscape of inequality that
feudal society enforced field by field and family by family. It was once hard to imagine that the
landlords would starve, even when crops failed and spring came late. Will it be hard to imagine that China, let
alone the United States, might sacrifice its appetites when other bellies are
tight?
The prospect is much the same for
water, as global demand outstrips total supply.
Rich regions will become, in US terms, the Los Angeles of water,
surviving on the rains of other places, transferred across deserts by
technology and wealth. Some places will
become uninhabitable so that others can remain ecological exemption zones,
places where no cities would be possible without massive
hydro-engineering. Those exemptions will
become increasingly invisible as the engineering becomes more pervasive, just
as we seldom think today of skyscrapers and suburbs in the American South as
“exemptions” because they rely on air conditioning to keep up year-round
business and busyness, or of dense cities in general as exemptions because
vaccination saves their residents from epidemics. But the logic, in a world of scarcity that is
linked across regions and continents, will be a landscape of artificial drought
and plenty. As with the medieval
precursor to a global food economy based on inequality, we might think of this
global water engineering with reference to the West Bank of Israel-Palestine,
where Israeli settlements enjoy running water at all times while Palestinians
in neighboring villages plan their weeks around some ten hours when water is available. The inequality is vivid there, because it
falls out along national (and often ethno-religious) lines and is at a
flashpoint of international politics. We
might expect to see the same logic, however, spread out through canals,
pipelines, and tankers, without the nearness and the political valence that
make it so vivid in a single valley of olive groves, pastures, and militarily
fortified exurbs.
I would
call this dystopia the neoliberal Anthropocene.
It is distinguished by a legal device that launders inequality as neatly
as the global atmosphere: free contract within a global market. The 100-year leases that African governments
are entering into with China may look like the extractive imperialism that marred
world maps for centuries, but its legal basis is an agreement entered with open
eyes by governments that, in theory, are equally sovereign. The question is how much this justifies the
inequalities that result, especially considering that the agreements are
themselves the products of underlying inequalities between an increasingly rich
and hungry country and others that are desperate for capital. This is not the place to try to answer this
enormously complex question, but only to emphasize that, in the neoliberal
Anthropocene, it would hardly be a question at all. This is the version of the Anthropocene that
does not treat it as a source of new political questions at all, but simply
envisions ever-intensified management of the globe, carried forward by market
means, beginning from our vast present inequality. If scarcity and environmental disruption
tighten under these conditions, the planet will become a man-made unequal
landscape, a dispersed and interconnected version of a feudal manor or an
occupied territory, but one constructed out of market materials: free
agreements backed by wealth.
The
alternative would be a democratic Anthropocene.
It would begin by extending a famous and important observation of
Amartya Sen’s: that no democracy has suffered a famine. Sen’s point is that famines are not the
natural products of absolute scarcity, but the political products of
distribution. Famines occur when some,
who have enough or more than enough, can peaceably ignore others who do
not. By tying together the fates of rich
and poor, rulers and ruled, democracies put a limit on such indifference. It is, alas, a broad limit that does not
guarantee anything like equality or even decent treatment, but it is a limit
nonetheless. Extending Sen’s point would
mean accepting that, in the Anthropocene, landscapes of inequality are human
creations, and our decisions whether to create, tolerate, or change them are
all political. The neoliberal
Anthropocene would be a politics of the Anthropocene, but a self-straitened
one, implicitly committed to man-made ecologies that amplify existing
inequality.
A
democratic Anthropocene would mean a few things. First is Sen’s point, that the world of
scarcity and plenty, comfort and desperation, is not just where we live: it is
what we create. Second is a premise of
equality: if Anthropocene ecologies are a political question, then no one can
be left out of the decisions that shape them.
In a world with no political institutions that can grapple meaningfully
with global ecology, this principle is more a demand, a standard of legitimacy
that will call all arrangements into question until it begins to be met, than
it is a scheme of governance. It is a
way of saying that the global ecology is everyone’s: not just because it
affects everyone, not just because everyone has a part in shaping it
materially, but because, for these reasons, it should be everyone’s authorship. As long as it is not, those who are committed
to a democratic Anthropocene should work to imagine it so, and to insist upon
it.
Saying that
the question of global ecology should be answered by everyone’s authorship has
three meanings, each of them tied to one of the things that democratic politics
does. One of these is sovereign: it draws everyone’s vote into
a single decision about what will happen, what the world will be. That the world can pivot on that decision is
the sovereign power of democracy, the most vivid and direct sense in which
people can be, together, the authors of their world. The second is discursive: everyone’s voice is in the often cacophonous scrum as
the argument (too exact and orderly a world) unfolds over What We Should Do
Together, a question that has grown into What the World Should Become. Third is exemplary,
or prophetic. People may display and
prefigure a way of living in and valuing the world that, though it would once
have been impossible or even unimaginable, becomes a living question because
someone has embodies it in her life. The
prophetic strand has been important in the long history of environmental politics,
and one of the reasons to insist on a democratic Anthropocene is the circuit it
maintains between the wildest creations of ecological imagination and the
sovereign decision that makes a world.
The
discursive and exemplary aspects of democracy are especially important because
the Anthropocene is not anthropocentric in the narrow sense of treating the
world as a storehouse of resources for human interests, or even in the somewhat
broader sense of assuming that the only perspectives that should count in politics
are human perspectives. The history of
environmental imagination shows recurrent aliveness to the ways that the world
is full of consciousness, experience, and pattern that are distinct from ours
but, in imperfect ways, available to us.
How to stand toward the vital opacity of other life and of non-human
order is one of the basic questions for a politics of the Anthropocene. The world we make expresses our alertness or
insensibility to these things, and, in turn, shapes us for great sensibility of
blunts us into indifference. Imperfect
as democracy still is as a human thing, part of its challenge now is to make
space, in the imagination and sympathy of people, for the non-human world.
