Nature and Culture in Environmental Ethics

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Klaus Brinkmann, ed. Ethics: The Proceedings of theTwentieth World Congress of Philosophy, Yol. 1 (BowlingGreen, Ohio: Philosophy Documentation Center, 1999) pages151-158. '

NATURE AND The pivotal claim In environmentalethics Is that humans In their culturesCULTURE IN are out of sustainable relationshipsto the natural environments comprisIng th e landscapes on which theseENVIRONMENTALcultures are superimposed. But bringIng such culture Into more IntelligentETHICS relationships with the natural worldrequires not so much -naturalizingculture" as discriminating recognitionof the radical differences betweenHolmes Rolston, III nature and culture, on the basis ofwhich a dialectical ethic of complementarity may be possible. How farnature can an d ought be managedand be transformed Into humanizednature, resulting In "the end of nature," Is a provocative question.Environmental ethics ought also toseek nature as an en d In Itself.

I. NATURE INCLUDING CULTUREIn one sense, "nature" is quite a grand word, referring to everything gen-erated or produced. Natura or physis is the source from which all springsforth. So comprehensive a term becomes troublesome. Is there a contrastclass? If one is a metaphysical naturalist, then nature is all that there is.Used in this universal sense, claiming that "everything is natural" is aboutas informative as insisting that "everything that is, exists." Metaphysicalnaturalists may need the word in this sense for their cosmological pur-poses. Humans and all their activities will be included; humans aregenerated within nature and they break no natural laws. Everything tech-nological will, on this meaning, be completely natural. So will everythingindustrial, or political, or economic, philosophical, or religious.


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152HOLMES ROLSTON, III

Such scope is also problematic, however, because it prevents discrimi-nating analysis of the differences between spontaneous nature anddeliberated culture. A predicate, "natural," that includes all actual andpossible properties, excludes nothing; denoting everything is about likedenoting nothing, at least nothing in particular. Th e most forceful objec-tion to this sense of nature, in the context of doing environmental ethics,is that such definition allows no useful contrast with culture, but we needthat contrast carefully analyzed if humans are going to relate their cul-tures, including their technologies, to nature, asking about sustainabledevelopment or about nature conservation as goals.

II . CULTURE DISTINGUISHED FROM NATUR EA straightforward contrast class is culture. If I am hiking across wild-lands, the rocks an d trees, the birds and even their nests, are natural,but if I come upon an abandoned boot, or a candy wrapper, these areartifacts, unnatural. Expanding such examples into a metaphor, th ewhole of civilization is producing artifacts in contrast to the productsof wild spontaneous nature.

Wild animals do not form cumulative transmissible cultures. In-formation in nature travels intergenerationally on genes; informationin culture travels neurally as persons are educated into transmissiblecultures. The determinants of animal and plant behavior are neveranthropological, political, economic, technological, scientific, philo-sophical, ethical, or religious.

Animals imprint on an d learn the behaviors of their parents, andin this sense acquired information sometimes travels from one genera-tion to the next. One sometimes encounters the term "culture" used ofanimals. Opening an anthology on Chimpanzee Cultures, the authorsdoubt, interestingly, whether there is any such thing: "Cultural trans-mission among chimpanzees is, at best, inefficient, and possiblyabsent." Chimpanzees clearly influence each other's behavior, andintend to do that; they copy the behavior of others, including their tool-using. But there is no clear evidence that they attempt to change th emind, as opposed to the behavior, of another chimpanzee. They seem"restricted to private conceptual worlds."2 Without some concept ofteaching, of ideas moving from mind to mind, from parent to child,from teacher to pupil, a cumulative transmissible culture is impossible.

The critical factor is th e deliberated modification of nature thatseparates humans in their cultures from wild nature. An y transmissibleculture, and especially a high technology culture, does need to bediscriminated from nature. The Boeing 777 jet plane is being built in


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153NATURE AN D CULTURE

th e largest building in the world, assembling three million parts per plane.At th e Everett, Washington, site, Boeing used in its design 2,200 workstations linked to eight of IBM's largest mainframes, linked with othercomputers and databases spread across 17 time zones, bringing thetotal to 7,000 workstations. The information processed was stored on3.5 terabytes. 3 Were it stored on ordinary 3.5 inch disks, this wouldrequire a stack of two and a half million disks nearly five miles high. Inaddition, on th e economic side, Boeing kept an eye on competing withthe A-330 Airbus, subsidized by British, French, German, an d Spanishcompanies, with Boeing more on its own raising capital an d encouraged by United's initial $22 billion order.

Boeings fly, as wild geese fly, using th e laws of aerodynamics. Theflight of wild geese is impressive; scientists can hardly yet be said tounderstand these "bird brains" an d how they migrate. The informationstorage system in th e goose genetics could, in its own way, be th e equalof th e Boeing system. Some of the information in the geese is transmitted nongenetically, as when they learn migration routes by followingother geese. But it is only philosophical confusion to remark that bothprocesses are equally natural, and let it go at that. No interesting philosophical analysis is being done until there is insightful distinctioninto th e differences between th e ways humans fly in their engineered,financedjets an d the ways geese fly with their genetically constructed,metabolically powered wings.

The Boeings are be ing built within a hundred miles of old-growthforest that American environmentalists are concerned about saving.One could argue that saving th e forests is more important than building th e new Boeings. But one is unlikely to be guided in the rationalefo r conserving the forest until on e recognizes that th e processes thatgovern th e forest ar e radically different from the processes by whichthe Boeing 777 is produced.

Environmental philosophers, concerned for sustainable relationships with nature, often insist that culture too is natural, that humansare a part of and not apart from nature. Let me cite three:

J. Baird Callicott desires a new concept of nature that includesculture. "Nature as Other is over . . . . The modern picture of nature isfalse and its historical tenure has been pernicious. A new dynamic andsystemic postmodern concept of nature, which includes rather thanexcludes human beings, is presently taking shape." Callicott hopes tocure us from the "sharp dichotomy between man an d nature," whichha s too long been a feature alike of religion an d philosophy, "bothwellsprings of th e Western intellectual heritage . . . . We are thereforea part of nature, not se t apart from it."4


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Val Plumwood, analyzing th e wilderness idea, worries about my"dualism" and complains that I "cannot recognize th e continuum ofnature and culture," since my dualism "blocks recognition of th eembeddedness of culture in nature....This nature/culture dualismdistorts the way we can think about land, obliging us to view it as eitherpure nature or as a cultural product, not nature at all . . . . Recoveringth e lost ground of continuity that dualistic conception has hidden fromus allows . . . recognizing nature in what has been seen as pure cultureand culture in what has been seen as pure nature."

Plumwood goes on to say, however, that she wants to eliminate not"the distinction" bu t "the dualism." We ought to recognize "the pres-ence of the Other," reaching "a non-oppositional account of th erelationship between humans and the wild Other." Further, it is nottrue that "everything that humans do is natural"; it is critical not "toobscure the basis for understanding the difference between anthropogenic from non-anthropogenic elements in country."5 At this point Ibegin to wonder if my mind is subtle enough to catch the distinctionbetween making a distinction between humans and "the wildernessOther," and distinguishing significant differences between nature andculture, an otherness that indeed sets them apart.

Freya Mathews puts it this way: "I t is no longer controversial tostate that a human individual is essentially a cultural being, and thatculture is an emanation of Nature."6 "Emanation," is a flexible termand in the roo t idea of "flowing forth," I agree that culture has, overevolutionary history, flowed from sources in nature. Still, the Boeing777 is not some sort of emanation from the old-growth forest. We needa stronger term; culture is an "emergent" from nature. Nature evolvedinto culture; culture evolved out of nature, but it di d evolve out of it.Over the millennia, humans make an increasing "exodus" from nature.I agree that we humans are "essentially cultural beings," but that meanswe are not just emanations from nature.

III. NATURE ENVIRONINO CULTUREStill, we must be cautious. Nature is the milieu of culture. Using ametaphor, nature is the womb of culture, but a womb that humans neverentirely leave. Nature can do much without culture- the several bil-lion years of evolutionary history are proof of that. Culture, appearinglate in natural history, can do nothing without nature as its ground. Inthis sense, culture will always have to be constructed out of, superposed on nature.


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No matter what kind of exodus humans make from nature, theyare going to remain male or female, with hearts and livers, an d blood intheir veins, walking on two feet, and eating energies that were originally captured in photosynthesis by chlorophyll. Culture remainstethered to the biosystem an d the options within built environments,however expanded, provide no release from nature. Humans dependon air flow, water cycles, sunshine, nitrogen-fixation, decompo sitionbacteria, fungi, the ozone layer, food chains, insect pollination, soils,earthworms, climates, oceans, and genetic materials. An ecology always lies in th e background of culture, natural givens that underlieeverything else.

Plants and animals modify th e landscapes on which they live. Despite th e changes they introduce, however, plants and animals arelargely adapted to th e environment in which they find themselves.These adaptations are genetic, behavioral, morphological, physiological - fur or horns or teeth, or thorns or deciduous leaves or camouflage.Culture makes possible th e deliberate and cumulative, an d thereforeth e extensive, rebuilding of nature. Humans reshape their environments, including new ones into which they expand, rather than beingthemselves morphologically an d genetically reshaped to fit their changin g environmen ts.

IV. NATURE AT AN END? A NATURE-CULTURE ELLIPSEHas nature ended? The question is one of degree. Certainly, naturenow bears th e marks of human influence more widely than ever before.In one survey, using three categories, researchers find the proportionsof Earth's terrestrial surface altered as follows: 1. Little disturbed byhumans, 51.9%.2. Partially disturbed, 24.2%.3. Human dominated,23.9%. Factoring out th e ice, rock, and barren land, which supportslittle human or other life, the percentages become: 1. Little disturbed,27.0%. 2. Partially disturbed, 36.7%. 3. Human dominated, 36.3%.7Most terrestrial nature is dominated or partially disturbed (73.0%).Still, nature that is little or only partially disturbed remains 63.7% ofthe habitable Earth. Ifnature means absolutely pristine nature, totallyunaffected by human activities, past or present, there is relatively littleremaining on Earth- i f our detection instruments are keen enough.Still, nature on Earth can be relatively pristine.

Nature has not been brought to an end, not yet at least. But we dohave to face that possibility in the future. Daniel Botkin agrees: "Nature in th e twenty-first century will be a nature that we make." "We havethe power to mold nature into what we want it to be." Of course he, like


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everybody else, urges us "to manage nature wisely and prudently," and,to that end, ecology ca n "instrument the cockpit of th e biosphere."8That sounds like high-tech engineering that brings wild nature underour control, remolding it into an airplane that we fly where we please.

Humans have always had to rest their cultures upon a natural lifesupport system. Their technosphere was constructed inside the biosphere. But in the future that could change; the technosphere couldsupercede th e biosphere. Michael Soule faces this prospect:

In 2100, entire biotas will have been assembled from (1) remnant and reintroduced natives, (2) partly or completely engineered species, an d (3)introduced (exotic) species. Th e term natura/will disappear from ourworking vocabulary. Th e term is already meaningless in most parts of the worldbecause anthropogenic [activities] have been changing the physical an dbiological environment for centuries, if no t millennia.9So it does seem possible to end nature by transforming it into

something humanized. This has already been taking place, and thefuture promises more, at an escalating pace. Over great stretches ofEarth, wild nature has been already or likely will be diminished infavor of civilization. In some sense, that ought to be so. This endingmay be always, in its own way, a sad thing; but it is an inevitable thing,and the culture that replaces nature can have compensating values. Itwould be sadder still, if culture had never appeared to grace th e Earth,or if cultures had remained so modest that they ha d never substantiallymodified th e landscape.

Humans too belong on the planet; and the epoch of evolutionarynature, and even of ecological nature is over. That is what is right aboutthe view that with the arrival of humans, their cultures, and their technologies, pristine nature vanishes. Nature does not vanish equally andeverywhere, but there ha s been loosed on the planet such a power thatwild nature will never again be the dominant determinant of what takesplace on the inhabited landscapes.

But this is not the whole truth. Nature neither is, nor ought to becompletely ended. Or everywhere ended. We do not want entirely totransform the natural into the cultural, no r do we want entirely to blendth e cultural into the natural. Neither realm ought to be reduced to, orhomogenized with, the other. Humanizing it all does no t make us apart of it; rather, the dominant species becomes still more dominant bymanaging all. That, ipso facto, sets us apart, the one species that manages the place. Rather, we humans, dominant though we are, want to bea part of something bigger, and this we can only do by sometimes draw-in g back to le t others be. This we do precisely by setting aside places aswilderness where we will no t remain, which we will no t trammel.


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157NATURE AND CULTURE

Environmental ethics seeks a complementarity. Think of an el-lipse with its twin foci. Some events ar e generated under the control ofone focus, culture; such events are in th e political lone, where "polis"(town) marks those arts an d achievements where the contributions ofspontaneous nature ar e no longer evident in the criteria of evaluation,-though they remain among the precursor and sustaining events. Thisis the artifactual, th e technologicaldomain.

At the other end of the ellipse, a wild region of events is generatedunder th e focus of spontaneous nature. These events take place in theabsence of humans; they are what they ar e in themselves-wildflowers,loons calling, or a storm at sea. Although humans come to understandsuch events through th e mediation of their cultures, they are evaluatin g events generated under th e natural focus of th e ellipse. Theconstraint of nature is maximal, the contribution of culture is minimal.

A domain of hybrid or synthetic events is generated under th esimultaneous control of both foci, a resultant of integrated influencesfrom nature and culture, under th e sway variously of more or less nature and culture. Nature is redirected into cultural channels, pulledinto the cultural orbit. This happens when human labor and craft putnatural properties to use in culture, mixing the two to good effect inagricultural, industrial, scientific, medical, and technological applications, or to adverse effect by mistake an d spillover. Bu t always culturehas to answer to what is objectively out there in nature.Each of the foci critiques the other; th e realities of nature test thewisdom of any culture; differing cultures take differing perspectiveson th e natural world within which they are situated and which theyrebuild. "Symbiosis" is a parallel biological word. In the symbiosis zone,we have both and neither, but we do not forget there remain eventzones in which th e principal determinant is culture, and other zonesin which the principal determinant remains spontaneous nature. Wedo not want th e ellipse to collapse into a circle, especially not one thatis anthropocentric.

Nature as it once was, nature as an end in itself, is no longer the wholestory. Nature as contrasted with culture is not th e whole story either.An environmental ethic is no t just about wildlands, but about humansat home on their landscapes, humans in their culture residing also innature. This will involve resource use, sustainable development, managed landscapes, the urban an d rural environments. But environmentalethicists can and ought sometimes wish nature as an end in itself.

We end with a sense in which nature has not ended and never will.Nature bats last. Humans'stave of f natural forces, bu t th e natural forces willreturn, if on e takes away the hlllnans. Nature is forever lingering around.


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Nature and Culture in Environmental Ethics