Restoring Relations

Abstract

place. A coupte of years ago I read a very wellwritten book that tried to convince me that wherever humans touched nature, nature became un-natural, its beauty and wildness spoiled. The book took notice, correctly I think, that human influence on the landscape had become universal. The writer, Bill McKibben, drew the conclusion that because of this, the end of nature was near. The name of the book is, in fact, The End of Nature (McKibben, 1989). Like many environmentalists, McKibben is a passionate man, a man who grieves for injuries to nature. But at the time he wrote this book, he seemed also to be a man who had swallowed most of industry’s argument for the inevitability and (indeed!) naturalness of its destructive behavior in regard to natural systems and human communities. If you accept these arguments~some of which are that economies must grow; that the efficiency of mass production legitimizes its brutalization of human life and and the destruction of natural systems; that mere appetite is the ruling element in human behavior--then McKibben’s conclusions must be correct. If humans are such a sport of nature, if their behavior can only be anti-nature, and if humans are everywhere, then nature must surely be on its way out. It is as if we lived somewhere else altogether than in the ecosystems which provide us with all our needs. But in fact humans have always been immersed in ecosystems. And for most of the time we’ve been on the planet, with the exception of the the last few hundred years, humans have behaved as if they were immersed in ecosystems.1 The paleolithic hunter fails to find his game and returns to council with his people. How has their behavior strayed from the path of ample provision? The pre-industrial neolithic planter bums brush, saves seed, collects dung. Alongside deep frugality in the home exist the exuberant public indulgence in great monuments that were observatories of planetary movement, and the devotion of large amounts of time and energy to ceremonial observances of nonhuman processes and presences in the surrounding landscape. Throughout the industrial age, ecosystem behavior has endured even though its practitioners have been pushed back to the most marginal of land bases. It is important to understand that behavior which rises out of ecosystems--life lived by immersion has never been passive but diligently active: symbiotic, reciprocal, deliberately manipulative, and creative. Dennis Martinez, the pre-historian of the restoration movement, has shown us that the indigenous peoples of North America--and by extension elsewhere-have always been an interactive element of the landscape, effecting their own longterm survival with management practices so extensive that ecosystem function was affected (Martinez, 1993). This is another view altogether of human relationships to nature. Rather than objectifying nature as a resource base functioning only to provide human wealth and comfort, such cultures express themselves as interactive parts of the natural systems around them. In such cultures, individuals are able to perceive themselves as having no greater (or lesser) a function in ecosystem process than algae or deer. Most of us have forgotten how to act