Nature Has Lost Its Meaning

To solve climate change, we need to reimagine our 

entire relationship to the nonhuman world.

 

Humans were once a fairly average species of large mammals, living off the land with little effect on it. But in recent millennia, our relationship with the natural world has changed as dramatically as our perception of it.   

 

There are now more than 7 billion people on this planet, drinking its water, eating its plants and animals, and mining its raw materials to build and power our tools. These everyday activities might seem trivial from the perspective of any one individual, but aggregated together they promise to leave lasting imprints on the Earth. Human power is now geological in scope—and if we are to avoid making a mess of this, our only home, our politics must catch up. 

 

Making this shift will require a radical change in how we think about our relationship to the natural world. That may sound like cause for despair. After all, many people refuse to admit that environmental crises like climate change exist at all. But as Jedediah Purdy reminds us in his dazzling new book, After Nature, our relationship with the nonhuman world has proved flexible over time. People have imagined nature in a great many ways across history. 

 

Purdy is a law professor at Duke, and as such, he feels most at home in American history. His book is, among other things, a panoramic tour of what he calls the “American environmental imagination.” In Purdy’s telling, European settlers initially took a providential view of North America, seeing it as a wild land set apart by god for human cultivation. The Romantics that followed saw America’s landscapes as “secular cathedrals,” meant to inspire awe and reflection. In the late 19th century, a new utilitarian cast of mind took hold, and America’s wild lands—especially its forests—became resources to be managed. 

 

In more recent times, Americans have taken an ecological view of the natural world, seeing it as a connected, interdependent whole. “The main premise here is that nothing is isolated,” says Purdy. “The world is a network of inter-permeable systems, so that what comes out of a smokestack can travel through wind, rain, groundwater, and soil, and end up in flesh.” The “Anthropocene” or “age of humans” is, in some ways, a logical extension of this view. 

 

Purdy hopes that climate change might spur yet another change in how we think about the natural world, but he insists that such a shift will be inescapably political. There is no other way to “build the movements and institutions that could match the scale of decisions that now have to be made,” he says. We recently discussed his book over a series of emails. What follows is a condensed, edited transcript of our conversation.

 

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Ross Andersen: For a relatively slim volume, this book distills an incredible amount of scholarship—about Americans’ changing attitudes toward the natural world, and about how those attitudes might change in the future. How long have you been thinking about this?

Jedediah Purdy: I started thinking about this project seven or eight years ago, when I was co-teaching a course at Duke on the law, science, and politics of climate change. What struck me then was how much of the scholarship involved very sophisticated analyses of futility. There were all these studies about why we should expect to do nothing: because climate change overruns our national borders, the timelines of our political decision-making, the scope of our moral concern, and even our cognition.

So I began thinking: This sounds familiar. Many of the ideas we take for granted now, at least as widely shared goals—democracy, gender equality, diversity, economic life without any form of slavery, overcoming the legacy of racism and even overcoming the myth of race itself—would have seemed impossible at many earlier times. In fact, they would have seemed unnatural. Not so long ago, the best minds believed they had seen the limits of human possibility, and those limits did not extend very far. And in a sense they were right. In fighting out these questions, humans became different kinds of people. They came to care about new and different things. The scope and shape of their moral communities changed.

So, I thought, maybe climate change—and, really, the whole global environmental crisis—is like that. Maybe it’s one of these deep problems that, if we engage it in a serious way, changes us. Maybe we need to become different people in relation to the natural world. And maybe that isn’t such a wildly utopian thought: that becoming different people is something that humans do, in wrestling with deep problems.

Please continue this article and interview here:  http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2015/11/nature-has-lost-its-meaning/417918/