Mastery over nature -Issue XII

humans, like all other species, alter their surrounding

environment to meet their basic needs. however, technology has granted so-ciety the power to re-engineer ecosys-tems to an extent that has no equal within the natural world. We have al-most forgotten the requirement for every living organism to fit into its life-support system (rolston, 1988). thus, as our economy and our living pat-terns reveal themselves as increasingly unsustainable, we ought to realise our limitations in controlling nature. tightly interwoven with this theme is the process of cultural glo-balization. this is shrinking the cul-

tural variety accrued in different parts of the world during millennia of par-allel development, by substituting it with a “Westernisation” of lifestyles and worldviews. the Western cultural hegemony over local cultures in every continent is the result of centuries of colonisation. initially, this happened through armies and missions. it contin-ued through philanthropic and finan-cial institutions such as the imF and the World Bank, who grant funds to devel-oping countries provided that they em-brace export-oriented economies and developing projects alike to the West-ern growth paradigm (stiglitz, 2002). in this essay, i maintain that the roots

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mastery over nature

By Riccardo Mastini

VOX - The STudenT JOurnal Of POliTicS, ecOnOmicS and PhilOSOPhy iSSue Xii - Summer 2010

of our current ecological and social crises lie both in our attempt to treat the environment as something ame-nable to our economic purposes, and in the imposition of Western logic of environmental management over all communities and ecosystems of the world. the reason why humanity ap-pears more and more as an element of disturbance inside natural sys-tems - which, without us, would work smoothly - has to be searched for within our “ecological hubris”: every organism adapts and coevolves with the surrounding environment, where-as humanity wants to dominate it. to this purpose, an enlightening example of this kind of dynamic is offered by the way we eat, which “represents our most profound engagement with the natural world” (pollan, 200�). since the dawn of civilization, humanity has reshaped the environment through ag-riculture, in order to make it more con-ducive to his development. thus the process of interacting with nature, and the attempt to mould her according to our needs, is not new at all. however, in the last few decades, the resilience of the ecosystems and the sustainabili-ty of our farming systems have shrunk dramatically, due to the application of an industrial logic to the natural world. From the start of the twen-tieth century, agricultural techniques have been marked by a deep wave of innovation brought on by scientific ad-

vances such as the internal combustion engine. as a result of the introduction of chemical fertilizers, which ensure the fertility of the soil even if all the diversity of animal species and the rotation of different crops have been displaced, the farm can now be treated as a firm pursuing economies of scale and mechanical efficiency. This is what lies behind the practice of monocul-ture. “Fixing nitrogen allowed the food chain to turn from the logic of biol-ogy and embrace the logic of industry. instead of eating exclusively from the sun, humanity now began to sip petro-leum” (pollan, 200�). the drawbacks of this system are evident: the two most serious environmental impacts of this “industrial agriculture” are characterised by biodiversity loss and pollution due to monocultures, chemi-cal pesticides, and fertilizers. however, as these problems become more and more acute, our attitude is still the old “reductivist” one; that is, applying our technology to solve a specific problem, and believing that this will not alter some other natural process connected to that one. In our quest for efficiency, we have oversimplified the complex-ity of natural ecosystems beyond a threshold of safe management (rock-strom, 2009). our Faustian desire for mastery over nature has turned an ancient human activity like agriculture - which was, in carlo petrini’s phrase, “the government of the limit” - into the blind application of technology without any regard for the intrinsically

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complex nature of ecosystems. as a matter of fact, West-ern conventional science is based on newtonian physics (Berkes & Folke, 1998; leiss, 19�2; callicott, 1989) and describes nature as a machine, consti-tuted by discrete building blocks from which any one of them can be extract-ed with predictable effects on the oth-ers. this world view deeply affects the management of natural resources and is conflicting with ecology’s teachings. “Just as in the shift from newtonian to einsteinian physics, where the mean-ing of mass changed from velocity-independent to a velocity-dependent term, in a shift from reductionist for-estry to ecological forestry, all scientific terms are changed from ecosystem-in-dependent to ecosystem-dependent ones” (shiva, 1993). the reductivist approach toward the natural world is not at all surprising if we understand toward which end scientific and tech-nological research has been aimed so far. actually, the watchword of the classical resource management science and of neo-classical economy is ‘effi-ciency’ (Berkes & Folke, 1998; rifkin, 1989). This obsession for efficiency has been pursued at the expense of the resilience of ecosystems (holling, 1995). nevertheless, many of the ecosystems endangered due to extrac-tive practices were dwellings for cultur-al groups long before the influence of the Western civilization and the intro-duction of the management practices

explained above. many of the indig-enous denizens in these areas had been able to establish stable and long-lasting practices of environmental manage-ment, thanks to an ecological knowl-edge accrued over centuries. in fact, biodiversity is the origin of cultural di-versity; every human group settled in a specific natural environment learns to interact with it – in more or less sus-tainable ways – in order to ensure its own survival. the knowledge accrued through a process of trial-and-error is stored in the culture handed down from generation to generation (Berkes, 1999; shiva, 1993). the great challenge we are facing today is represented by the need to abandon our cultural con-tempt for indigenous knowledge and to start learning from their cultural capital, namely the modality through which “societies convert natural capi-tal into human-made capital” (Berkes & Folke, 1998).

an example of the linkage between social and ecological systems is offered by the gangte villages in india. until the British colonised india, the tradi-tional land-use system among these communities had involved leaving uncultivated groves, which were con-

In our quest for efficiency, we have oversimplified the complexity of natural ecosystems often beyond a threshold of safe management.


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sidered sacred. in fact, the larger com-mercial interests had little spur to pre-serve the ecosystems of the area, and influenced the local communities to abandon their conservation practices in order to start marketing the precious forests. the effects of the elimination of these groves were noticeable on the ecosystem services and brought about the deterioration of the environment underpinning the local subsistence economy. as a result, the protection of forests has been reinstituted in the area and enforced with new social in-centives. “While these refugia are no longer considered to be inviolable as abodes of spiritual beings, the system of community-based vigilance and protection is identical to that prevail-ing with the sacred groves”(Berkes & Folke, 1998). the idiom of conserva-tion has changed, but the relevance of local knowledge in preserving the eco-systems is still pivotal to the pursuit of sustainability. the new form of social de-velopment for the twenty-first cen-tury must be represented by a shift of paradigm from the view of a society detached from the environment to one

in which civilization is seen as embed-ded in it. Furthermore, we ought to cease trying to control and homoge-nise cultural diversity on behalf of a new form of syncretism that enriches each human group with the ecological knowledge gained by the others. We ought to substitute our reductivist ap-proach with a holistic one, which ac-cepts the complexity of nature and the uncertainty intrinsic to the outcome of the interaction between humans and the natural world. our need for a new harmony between civilization and nature must be a spur to create a new ethics concerning economic growth, science and technology, because, as the philosopher rolston stated: “great power, unconstrained by ethics, is sub-ject to great abuse” (1988).

Bibliography available online at www.voxjournal.co.uk_____________________________Riccardo Mastini is a first year under- graduate reading Environmental Econom-ics and Environmental Management at the University of York

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Mastery over nature -Issue XII