Against nostalgic ecology
We need to manage the ecosystems of the future, not the past.
When we think about the natural environment and how to treat it, we often assume by default that what we’re trying to do is return the nonhuman world to where it was before we started seriously messing with it. That impulse is very understandable. The world’s ecosystems functioned better, in the way that they had evolved to do and a way that was helpful to us, before we started clear-cut logging and making vast pits full of plastic waste and so on. It would be great if we could get the natural world back to where it was in 1800.
The problem is we can’t do that. Extinction is forever, as they say – with a very significant exception that I’ll get to. The garbage dumps are there; we have no way of turning all the plastic in them into something not-plastic. As Alan Weisman vividly reminds us in The World Without Us, if humans were to disappear entirely from the planet tomorrow, our products – from ceramics to radioactive waste – would remain for millions of years. We can certainly take steps to diminish the impact of our future actions, but the effects of our past actions are going to remain with us. The natural world, now and in the future, is the natural world impacted by our actions.
Moreover, the impulse to return to past nature is often directly at odds with another ecological impulse: the conservation of present nature. The etymological connection between conservation and conservative is relevant here: both are about, in some respects, keeping things the way they are now. And just as there is a dramatic contrast between a literal conservatism that aims to maintain the status quo and more radical reactionary views that upend that status quo in the name of an imagined past, so ecologically there is a necessary conflict between conserving the present state of nature and aiming to return it to where it was – since the two are not the same.
We can take steps to reverse our past mistakes and return some aspects of the natural environment to where they used to be. Sometimes that’s probably the right way to go. But when we do that, we are taking active interventions – sometimes ones so drastic that they look like “playing God”. The most notable example of this is de-extinction: it is becoming possible to use genomic tools to create organisms closely similar to those of (previously) extinct species. It’s quite reasonable for de-extinction to raise cautionary alarm bells in our heads; we’ve seen that movie. But something similar to de-extinction, yet less drastic, is also going on when we intentionally restore an ecosystem, like by reintroducing an old predator: we are not letting nature take its course, we are actively intervening. And sometimes to prevent extinction requires a step almost as drastic as de-extinction: the black-footed ferret almost went extinct, with a population down to seven wild individuals, but we have started to get their numbers up again by… cloning them.
I’ve learned a lot about these issues from the work of my Northeastern colleague Ronald Sandler. (Full disclosure: he’s also my boss.) Sandler points out that much conservation practice is still based on historical baselines and reference conditions – the idea being that the closer we can get the environment to where it used to be at some past point, the better. But this approach isn’t working well in an era where, thanks to warming waters and pollution, Caribbean coral species foundational for whole ecosystems are going extinct. Like it or not, what those ecosystems are going to be in the future is very different from what they were, so a historical baseline is unattainable.
The feminist philosopher Sally Haslanger has a very helpful way of thinking about social constructions like race and gender: she says that instead of asking “what are they, really?” we should ask “what do we want them to be?” Ecosystems are not social constructions in the same way or to the same extent; they were there before human sociality was. But Sandler nevertheless adapts Haslanger’s question constructively to ecology: he points out that policymakers now need to be asking the question “what do we want ecosystems to be?” Because nature is no longer answering the question of what they should be, if it ever did: we can choose not to intervene and allow the effect of our previous mistakes to run their course, or we can choose to intervene actively to try and make it more like a previous state, but these two goals are at odds with each other. And as Sartre said, if we do not choose that is still a choice: one way or another, one of these options is going to get taken, and we’re best off being deliberate about it.
Here as elsewhere the Serenity Prayer is wise – this time in its collective version, “change the things we can change”. We can and should work to reduce overall human impact on the environment in the future, but we can’t change the massive impact that has already permanently happened. We have to accept that impacted world is what the nonhuman world is now, landfill sites and all, and look ahead.
Thus in the film Examined Life, the famous philosophical troll Slavoj Žižek insists on being interviewed in a garbage sorting facility, in order to talk about ecology. He closes the talk by gesturing to the garbage around him and proclaiming, “the true ecologist must learn to love – this!”
I will be away next week (July 5). Love of All Wisdom will return July 12.
The core naivete/arrogance (what a combo!) of this whole line of thought is that it presumes that we, humans, are somehow not a part of nature. Any animal who had dominance over the environment like we do would likely behave the same way right up until that lifestyle became unsustainable. At which point, they either evolve or die. The planet doesn't care either way. It will still be here regardless of what happens to us.
Did you ever read about how humans profoundly changed the ecology of the places they settled, right from the time of the first great migrations across the planet. That sure gave me a sense of perspective about ecology... imagine being nostalgic for a time before humans set foot on Australia!