La Nature est morte, vive la nature!

Abstract

In a notorious passage of The Gay Science, Friedrich Nietzsche portrays a madman carrying a lantern in broad daylight and searching for God. Nietzsche's mirthless character then declares that is dead and says that we have murdered Him. Three years ago, Bill McKibben, with dramatic flourish of a contemporary Nietzsche, proclaimed the end of His book by that title was serialized in New Yorker magazine and went on to become a best seller.[1] Once flourishing nature, he argues, has as such come to an end--and we are terminators. The death of God in nineteenth century was death of an idea. The end of nature in twentieth century seems to be a much more literal matter. According to McKibben, one can no longer find any place on earth untrammeled by works of man.[2] The forests, lakes, and streams of Adirondacks, where McKibben lives, famously designated in 1885 by New York state legislature to be forever wild, are ubiquitously affected by acid rain. In addition to such evident works of man as trans-Alaska pipeline, permafrost in erstwhile arctic wilderness is everywhere contaminated with measurable traces of toxic chemicals--everything from DDT to PCBs. There is a hole in ozone over Antarctic created by fugitive chlorofluorocarbons. And once autonomous nature can only become more compromised by human technology as greenhouse effect kicks in, followed by a higher sea level, changed weather patterns, hotter summers, milder winters, desiccated forests, enlarged deserts, irruptions of weedy fauna and flora, and impoverished ecosystems. Nature as Other is over. Everywhere man's works insidiously pervade, if they do not palpably dominate, landscape. Nowhere is earth and its community of life unaffected by man. There are precious few places where man is merely a visitor and not an inhabitant: even South Pole has a permanently occupied research station. The once impenetrable and mysterious Amazon basin is riddled with roads, power plants, gold mines, boom towns, cattle ranches, settlers' swiddens, and coca plantations. Here in United States, man's visitation of designated wilderness areas is so intense that permits are required to limit density, and restrictions on what backpackers can and cannot do make a mockery of Bob Marshall's equation of wilderness with freedom and absence of constraints. Before we all go into mourning, however, let me suggest that what has come to an untimely end is not nature per se, but modern idea of nature. We have no more literally killed nature than we have God. Indeed, we might want to celebrate, rather than mourn, since modern picture of nature is false and its historical tenure has been pernicious. A new dynamic and systemic postmodern concept of nature, which includes rather than excludes human beings, is presently taking shape. From point of view of this new notion of nature, human technologies should be evaluated on their ecological merits, not condemned wholesale. Indeed, there is some hope that a new generation of technology may be not only ecologically benign, but might even help to disseminate broadly an ecological world view and an associated environmental ethics. The Modern Idea of Nature The first and most fundamental feature of modern idea of nature is a sharp dichotomy between man and nature--a dichotomy that is all more radical because it is a feature of both wellsprings of Western intellectual heritage. In first book of Bible, alone among all other creatures, God makes man in His own image, giving him dominion over and charging him to subdue earth and all its denizens. In ancient Greek philosophy, man is set apart from nature because he alone among animals is supposed to be rational. In late medieval and early modern periods, thinkers as different from one another as Thomas Aquinas and Rene Descartes synthesized these two strands of thought, Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman. …