What's nature but a second-hand construction?

By: Alana Todd-Rodriguez

Walk outside the nearest door and look around. What do you see? Does your front lawn, campus grounds, or nearby cityscape count as a place of nature? Your answer to this question is a product of your upbringing and cultural influences. The Oxford Dictionary defines nature as: "The phenomena of the physical world collectively, including plants, animals, the landscape, and other features and products of the earth, as opposed to humans or human creations1." This definition reflects a growing sentiment that the human species can defy the laws of the universe to exist outside of the natural world. In reality, humans' ability to adapt to nature has ensured our species' survival over millennia, and our connection (or perceived lack thereof) to the environment is a product of cultural constructions from our ancestors and beyond. Just as love played no role in Tina Turner's relationship, the natural world might not be as related to the concept of "nature" as one might think.

Last week, our MEES 620 class discussion opened with a critical look at Irvine, California. Irvine is an example of how humans have imposed their cultural ideals onto a landscape and transformed the natural ecosystems into their very own meticulous version of Eden. Irvine's marketing website describes the city as a place where business and nature were built to coexist in harmony, perfect for those seeking to "get outside and experience nature" through manicured parks and year-round scenic vistas.

Cities such as Irvine are not a unique phenomenon in the United States. As Dr. Paolisso described the intricate planning of Irvine, I couldn't help but think of my own hometown, St. Petersburg, Florida. Following the advent of central air conditioning and the installation of a railroad line, people rushed south in droves to enjoy a piece of their very own subtropical paradise. From 1920 to 1990, Florida's population increased by 1,300 percent as numerous families, mine included, claimed waterfront property throughout the Sunshine State2. What was once vast tracts of mangroves and other tidal marshes are now multi-million-dollar homes that lie at or below sea level. This artificial Eden came at the cost of draining and paving over much of the state's biodiverse coastal ecosystems, which also function as buffers to storms and flooding. When large hurricanes threaten Florida, like Irma, we are sitting ducks- vulnerable and forced to accept the blame for our own demise. Is it worth it? Well, I don't think so, and that is why I chose to go to school in Maryland.

Nevertheless, something very compelling must drive over 600 million people to value beauty over safety and live in low elevation areas near the coast3. This week's articles by Steward, Rappaport, Cronon, and Ellis argue that culture is the culprit.

Our class discussion proceeded to trace the earliest studies of culture, which eventually evolved into the fields of Anthropology, and later Environmental Anthropology. Early "armchair anthropologists," such as Lewis Henry Morgan, paved the way for subsequent anthropologists, like Franz Boas and Roy Rappaport, to understand the value of participant observation and immersive field work. Culture was eventually accepted as something that is learned and shared, including knowledge, values, and traditions, which depends on historical and environmental contexts.

Julian Steward used a systemic approach to study culture and the environment with the Great Basin Shoshonean communities4. He was interested in the ways in which the environment, through natural resource availability, shaped their cultural core. The arid conditions of the Great Basin provided a backdrop of unpredictable food sources that required complex, transient exploitative techniques. Steward's ethnography details the unique cultural-ecological adaptations that the Shoshone groups integrated on the familial level. One student questioned whether the Shoshone would have adapted to the indirect forces of the modern-day Anthropocene era, to which Dr. Paolisso suggested that they might have maintained some of their most central cultural practices, like the northern salmon feasts, but within modern settings.

The Shoshonean and Tsembaga communities' cognized models of the environment demonstrate the capacity of cultural activities as powerful mechanisms of environmental management, and vice versa. William Cronon's interdisciplinary book, "Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the human place in nature," provides a framework for understanding human interactions with the natural world6. To many environmental scientists, nature is an objective place, or a pristine state of being detached from human influences. It was quite unsettling for much of the class to read that our notions about nature and what constitutes the "natural" is inextricably linked to our individual cultural contexts. As Cronon says, "'Nature' is not so natural."

If each person sees the world through their own cultural or moral lens, then what authority do any of us have in deciding the inherent value of things in "nature"? This suggests that the environment is not the unambiguous force that we tend to think of, and such implications challenge seemingly neutral, unequivocal conservation efforts. The class questioned why certain species are preferred over others, like the charismatic panda (logo of the World Wide Fund for Nature) versus the naked mole rat. This discrepancy testifies to our contradictory meanings of nature, leaving animals and plants subjected to cultural whims that guide the temporal and spatial placement of natural areas.

As Cronon pointed out, constructions of nature are not natural, but the class overwhelmingly understood that differing cultural values can be harnessed to better frame a more inclusive environmentalism indicative of real attitudes and therefore more effective solutions. Erle Ellis' article, "Science Alone Won't Save the Earth. People Have to Do That," draws attention to another universal aspiration among humans- that of a better future7. We must drop the technical jargon and endeavor to create interdisciplinary approaches to problem solving with our combined vision of the future at the forefront of such efforts.

As the class concluded, bands of storms from hurricane Florence approached the outer banks of the Carolinas, only a few states away8. This storm, like last year's hurricane Irma, reflects the growing severity of weather events that more and more scientists chalk up to climate change. With a world population of 7.6 billion people and growing, the world's environmental problems are only getting worse. It will be deadly for us to continue divorcing human dimensions from anthropogenic climate change. By doing so we will all inevitably end up like Florida during a hurricane, twiddling our thumbs while the world wreaks havoc around us. Solutions are needed now more than ever, and they might be closer to home than you think, literally.

References
1. 'Nature'. English Oxford Living Dictionaries. Oxford, n.d.
2. Stephenson, R. Bruce. Visions of Eden: Environmentalism, Urban Planning, and City Building in St. Petersburg, Florida, 1900-1995. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1997.
3. Greenfieldboyce, Nell "Study: 634 Million People at Risk from Rising Seas." NPR, March 28, 2007.
4. Steward, Julian Haynes. The Great Basin Shoshonean Indians: An example of a family level of sociocultural integration. California Indian Library Collections, 1955.
5. Rappaport, Roy A. "Ritual regulation of environmental relations among a New Guinea people." Ethnology 6, no. 1 (1967): 254-264.
6. Cronon, William, ed. Uncommon ground: Rethinking the human place in nature. WW Norton & Company, 1996.
7. Ellis, Erle. "Science Alone Won't Save the Earth. People Have to Do That." The New York Times, August 11, 2018.
8. Zucchino, D. et al. "Hurricane Florence Live Updates: Storm 'Has Never Been More Dangerous.'" The New York Times, September 16, 2018.