Leo Marx the Idea of Nature in America

Leo Marx

The idea of nature in America Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/137/2/8/1829473/daed.2008.137.2.8.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021

The idea of nature is–or, rather, was– natural world became a less immediate one of the fundamental American ideas. presence, images of the pristine land- In its time it served–as the ideas of scape–chief icon of American nature– freedom, democracy, or progress did in lost their power to express the nation’s theirs–to de½ne the meaning of Amer- vision of itself. ica. For some three centuries, in fact, Then, in the 1970s, with the onset of from the founding of Jamestown in 1607 the ecological ‘crisis,’ the refurbished, to the closing of the Western frontier matter-of-fact word environment took in 1890, the encounter of white settlers over a large part of the niche in public with what they perceived as wilderness discourse hitherto occupied by the word –unaltered nature–was the de½ning nature. Before the end of the century, the American experience. marked loss of status and currency suf- By the end of that era, however, the fered by the idea of nature had become wilderness had come to seem a thing a hot subject in academic and intellectu- of the past, and the land of farms and al circles. Reputable scholars and jour- villages was rapidly becoming a land nalists published essays and books about of factories and cities. By 1920, half the the ‘death’–or the ‘end’–of nature; the population lived in cities, and as the University of California recruited a doz- en humanities professors to participate in a semester-long research seminar de- Leo Marx, a Fellow of the American Academy signed to “reinvent nature”;1 and the since 1972, is Senior Lecturer and William R. association of European specialists in Kenan Professor of American Cultural History American studies chose, as the aim of Emeritus in the Program in Science, Technology, its turn-of-the-century conference, to and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of reassess the changing role played by the Technology. He is the author of “The Machine idea of nature in America.2 in the Garden” (1964), “The Pilot and the Pas- senger” (1988), and coeditor of “Does Technol- 1 The essays they produced are reprinted in ogy Drive History?” (with Merritt Roe Smith, Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, ed. William Cronon (W. W. Norton: New 1994). York, 1995).

8 Dædalus Spring 2008 What are we to make of the purported quality of something, as for example, The idea of demise of nature? Can it be that the ven- ‘the nature of femininity’ or, for that nature in America erable idea is no longer meaningful? If matter, ‘the nature of nature.’ When that seems improbable on its face, it is this meaning is in play, the word tacit- because nature is our oldest, most nearly ly imputes an idealist or essentialist– universal name for the material world, hence ahistorical–character to the par- and despite the alarming extent of the ticular subject at hand, whether it be transformation–and devastation–we femaleness or nature itself. The word’s humans have visited on it, that world is multiple meanings testify to its age: its still very much with us. But why, then, roots go back (by way of Latin and Old is the general idea of nature–nature in French) to the concept of origination– Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/137/2/8/1829473/daed.2008.137.2.8.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 all its meanings–falling into disuse? of being born. As Raymond Williams What other reasons might there be for famously noted, nature is probably the the seeming end of nature? With these most complex word in the English lan- questions in mind, I want to reconsider guage.3 And when, moreover, the idea the idea’s changing role in American of nature is yoked with the ideologically thought. freighted concept of American nation- But, ½rst, these preliminary caveats. I hood, as in the historian Perry Miller’s do not mean to suggest that the immi- sly allusion to America as Nature’s Na- nent disappearance of nature–if that is tion, the ambiguity is compounded by what we are witnessing–is a peculiarly chauvinism.4 American development. But in view of Contemplating the nature of nature the crucial role played by the idea over in America has led many scholars, of the course of American history, a re- whom the historian Frederick Jackson assessment of critical stages of that his- Turner is the exemplar, to adopt the con- tory may prove to be revealing. I say tested idiom of ‘American exceptional- ‘stages’ because limitations of space– ism.’5 And not without good reason. the subject calls for a long treatise rath- However wary of chauvinism one might er than an essay–make it necessary to be, it would be foolish to deny that when focus on a few signi½cant points along Europeans ½rst encountered American the historical trajectory traced by the nature, it truly was, and to some extent idea of nature in American thought. still is, exceptional–perhaps not unique But it also should be said that the word nature is a notorious semantic and meta- 3 Raymond Williams, Keywords (New York: physical trap. As used in ordinary dis- Oxford University Press, 1983), 219. course nowadays, it is an inherently am- 4 Miller ½rst used the phrase in his 1953 essay, biguous word. We cannot always tell “Nature and the National Ego,” in Errand into whether references to nature are meant the Wilderness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni- to include or exclude people. Besides, versity Press, 1967), 209. Elizabeth W. Miller the word also carries the sense of essence: and Kenneth Murdock later used it as the title of a posthumous collection of Miller’s essays, of the ultimate, irreducible character or Nature’s Nation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967). for American Studies, in Graz, Austria, April 5 In his seminal 1893 essay, “The Signi½cance 14–17, 2000. See Hans Bak and Walter W. of the Frontier in American History,” Turner Holbling, eds., “Nature’s Nation” Revisited: argued that American nature, in the form of American Concepts of Nature from Wonder to Eco- free land, in effect determined the “peculiarity logical Crisis (Amsterdam: vu Press, 2003). of American institutions.”

Dædalus Spring 2008 9 Leo Marx but, like Australia, a continent even less Americans. To Bradford they are more on developed at the time of contact, sure- like wild beasts than white men. nature ly exceptional. It was exceptional in its The concept of satanic nature provid- immensity, its spectacular beauty, its ed a useful foil for the sacred mission of variety of habitats, its promise of wealth, the Puritan colonists.6 In 1645, for exam- its accessibility to settlers from overseas, ple, John Winthrop, lieutenant governor and, above all, in the scarcity of its in- of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, used digenous population. Hence the remark- it as an ideological weapon to defend his able extent of its underdevelopment–its theocratic authority. His enemies had wildness–as depicted in myriad repre- charged him with infringing on their

sentations of the initial landfall of Euro- liberty, and in his uncompromising re- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/137/2/8/1829473/daed.2008.137.2.8.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 pean explorers on the Atlantic seaboard sponse in the General Court he develops of North America. In that stock image, the distinction between two kinds of lib- the newly discovered terrain appears to erty: natural and civil. Natural liberty, be untouched by civilization, a cultural “common to man with beasts and other void populated by godless savages, and creatures,” is the liberty, he argues, we not easy to distinguish from a state of enjoy in a state of nature, namely, to do nature. evil as well as good; civil liberty, on the other hand, is moral, hence available on- In the beginning, then, Europeans ly to the truly regenerate, only to Chris- formed their impressions of American tians redeemed from sin by the recep- nature in a geographical context: it was tion of divine grace.7 According to Cal- a place, a terrain, a landscape. But they vinist doctrine, only those rescued from invariably accommodated their immedi- the state of nature may enjoy the God- ate impressions of American places to given liberty to do what is good, just, their imported–typically religious–pre- and honest. Here, on the coast of a vast, conceptions about the nature of nature unexplored continent, the idea of an and the character of indigenous peoples. ostensibly separate realm of wild nature Thus all of the signi½cant American –a separateness underscored by the con- ideas of nature are hybrids, conceived trast with the tamed state of nature in in Europe and inflected by New World Europe–was a valuable rhetorical asset experience. And each ideology that for the colony’s leaders. Allusions to served as a rationale for one or another wild nature served to reinforce the doc- colonial system of power contained such trinal barrier between themselves, the a hybrid Euro-American conception of elect, and the unregenerate, whom they nature and of the colonists’ relations consigned to the realm of natural law- with it. lessness. A revealing example is the Pilgrim In the lexicon of Protestant Christiani- leader William Bradford’s well-known ty in America, the essential character of description of the forbidding Cape Cod shoreline as seen from the deck of the 6 William Bradford, History of Plimoth Planta- Mayflower in 1620. He depicts it as “a tion, in Perry Miller and Thomas Johnson, eds., hidious and desolate wildernes, full of The Puritans (New York: American Book Com- wild beasts and wild men.” Here the bias pany, 1938), 100–101. inherent in the Christian idea of nature 7 John Winthrop, “Speech to the General as fallen–as Satan’s domain–effective- Court, July 3, 1625,” in Miller and Johnson, eds., ly erases the humanity of the indigenous The Puritans, 206.

10 Dædalus Spring 2008 primal nature was conveyed by epithets To justify the colonists’ acts of treason The idea of like ‘howling desert’ and ‘hideous wil- and armed rebellion, he had merely to nature in America derness,’ and by the malign names–sav- describe them as the means–indeed, age, cannibal, slave–assigned to indige- the only possible means–of claiming nous peoples. In Winthrop’s argument, the independent status to which they accordingly, the unarguable existence of were entitled by “the Laws of Nature a separate (unredeemed) state of nature and of Nature’s God.” Nature, as our helps to justify his a priori condemna- free-thinking president conceived of it, tion of the unregenerate, who constitute was not so much the work of God as a potential threat of lawlessness, anar- God was a constituent feature of Nature. chy, and misrule. Their geographical lo- By invoking a secularized idea of nature Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/137/2/8/1829473/daed.2008.137.2.8.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 cation underscored the theological argu- on behalf of a quintessentially political ment: the only escape from natural un- cause, Jefferson helped to narrow the regeneracy open to them was the recep- gulf separating humanity and nature. tion of divine grace. But for that purpose, the idiom of the natural sublime was even more effective. By the time Thomas Jefferson wrote Nine years later, in Notes on Virginia, Jef- his draft of the Declaration of Indepen- ferson invoked the sublime to account dence, the theological notion of a dual for the unsurpassed beauty of one of nature–part profane, part sacred–was American nature’s most cherished cre- being supplanted by the unitary charac- ations–Virginia’s Natural Bridge. An ter of Newtonian science and Deism. ardent practitioner of the neoclassical Here, the initial identi½cation of Ameri- aesthetic, Jefferson credits the beauty of can nature with the landscape expanded the Bridge to its symmetrical form, or, to embrace the natural processes, or as it were, to the strikingly close approxi- laws, operating behind its visible sur- mation of its form to ostensibly natural face. Because the newly discovered ce- principles of order and proportion. He lestial machinery obeys physical laws begins his description of the bridge with accessible to human reason, Newtoni- a detailed analysis of its exact dimen- an physics had the effect of bringing hu- sions, as if reported by a detached ob- manity and nature closer together. Be- server writing in the third person. But sides, the mathematical clarity and pre- then, partway through, he abruptly puts cision of the new physics made the old himself into the scene, climbs the para- images of a dark, disorderly nature re- pet, and, shifting to the second person, pugnant. Alexander Pope summed up describes how “you” inescapably would the change in the prevailing worldview react if you too found yourself standing in the couplet engraved on Newton’s on the narrow ledge looking “over into tomb in Westminster Abbey: the abyss”: Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night. You involuntarily fall on your hands and God said, “Let Newton be!” and all was feet, creep to the parapet and peep over it light. . . . . If the view from the top be painful and intolerable, that from below is delightful By 1776 it made sense for a rhetorician in an equal extreme. It is impossible for as gifted as Jefferson to extend the hypo- the emotions arising from the sublime thetical reach of nature’s laws–or, to be to be felt beyond what they are here; so more precise, of principles analogous to beautiful an arch, so elevated, so light, and them–to the unruly sphere of politics.

Dædalus Spring 2008 11 Leo Marx springing as it were up to heaven! The orthodox theological assumption that on rapture of the spectator is really indescrib- humanity and nature belong to separate nature able!8 realms of being. To illustrate the potential effect of being in “the presence of As this passionate Wordsworthian nature,” Emerson describes an epipha- apostrophe suggests–it was written ny that is patently irreconcilable with about ½fteen years before the preface the idea of nature’s separateness. One to the Lyrical Ballads–Jefferson already gloomy afternoon, while crossing the was prepared to enlist in the Romantic town common, he was suddenly–unac- movement. But even after the triumph countably–overwhelmed by a sense of of Romanticism, the separateness of

immanence, or, as he puts it, of “being Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/137/2/8/1829473/daed.2008.137.2.8.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 nature remained a largely unchallenged part or parcel of God.” It was a largely if unstated premise of public discourse. secularized variant of the Protestant Since no authoritative biological coun- conversion experience, and it suggests terpart to the Newtonian laws of nature the possibility, as Emerson puts it, of an had yet been formulated, supernatural “occult relation”–or state of oneness– explanations of the origin of life were with nonhuman nature. The balance of not yet vulnerable to the challenge of Nature may be read as an effort to devise scienti½c materialism. By the same to- a reasoned explanation, or justi½cation, ken, pantheism retained its status as a for this transformative experience. Christian heresy, and dutiful commu- Emerson’s account of the epiphany nicants were advised to be wary of the reveals his ambivalence about the rela- feeling of oneness with nature. tive validity of religious and scienti½c conceptions of nature. On the one hand n 1836, four years after resigning his I it expresses his growing skepticism, on pastorate in the Second (Unitarian) both theological and scienti½c grounds, Church of Boston, Ralph Waldo Emer- about the received idea of a separate na- son anonymously published the essay ture. As a Unitarian, to be sure, he al- Nature, which came to be known as the ready had repudiated most supernatural manifesto of Transcendentalism, a New aspects of Christian doctrine, including England variant of European Romanti- the divinity of Jesus. A few years before cism. The essay begins as a lament for writing Nature, he had resigned his pas- the loss of humanity’s direct relations torate on the grounds that he no longer with nature. “Why,” Emerson asks, could in good conscience perform the– “should not we also enjoy an original to him, excessively literal–sacrament of relation to the universe?” the Lord’s Supper. At that time, more- Like his title, the question rests on the over, he was studiously keeping abreast assumption that nature was–and should of the latest advances in geology and once again become–a primary locus of zoology, which provided empirical evi- meaning and value for Americans. What dence in support of various emerging followed was Emerson’s ½rst and only theories of evolution. When Nature was attempt to formulate a systematic theory reissued in 1849, in fact, he appended a of nature, and in it he probably came as new verse epigraph depicting humani- close as he ever would to repudiating the ty’s origin:

8 Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Vir- A subtle chain of countless rings ginia, ed. William Peden (Chapel Hill: Universi- The next unto the farthest brings; ty of North Carolina Press, 1955), 55.

12 Dædalus Spring 2008 The eye reads omens where it goes, a process of natural selection, if our spe- The idea of And speaks all languages the rose; nature in cies is inextricably embedded in a glo- America And, striving to be man, the worm bal web of biophysical processes, then Mounts through all the spires of form.9 there can be no such thing–on the planet Earth at least–as a separate domain But though Emerson, like many of his of nature. contemporaries, was receptive to evolu- But the logic of science is one thing, tionary thinking long before the publica- and ancient habits of mind are another. tion of Darwin’s Origin of Species, he was Despite the passage of some 145 years not prepared–for reasons he never quite since Darwin’s theory ½rst caught the made explicit–to abandon the idea of world’s attention, and despite the con- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/137/2/8/1829473/daed.2008.137.2.8.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 nature’s separateness. That traditional ½rmation it has received, ½rst and last, assumption is built into the conceptual from an international consensus of sci- structure of Nature. In de½ning his key entists, its import has yet to be incorpo- terms, he postulates a universe made up rated in prevailing assumptions about of all that exists except for one thing: the nature of nature. To this day, the the human soul. All being, he asserts, ‘nature’ commonly invoked in our pub- “is composed of Nature and the Soul,” lic and private discourse–even by those and he goes on to specify that “all that of us who claim to ‘believe in’ evolution is separate from us, all which Philosophy –seems to be a discrete, almost wholly distinguishes as the not me, both na- independent entity ‘out there’ some- ture and art, all other men and my own where. In ordinary usage the word rare- body, must be ranked under this name, ly conveys a sense of humanity’s ties nature.”10 Though he tacitly repudi- with other living things. As the historian ated the major tenets of the Christian of science, Lynn White, Jr., noted in his faith, and though he was prepared to influential 1967 essay, “The Historical embrace the theory of evolution, he con- Roots of our Ecological Crisis,” “Despite tinued to de½ne nature as a discrete enti- Darwin, we are not, in our hearts, part of ty, eternally separated from human be- the natural process.”12 ings and their immortal souls. But that is putting it mildly. As everyone knows, the publication of the Origin ut the theory of evolution, as de½ni- B of Species aroused intense public hostili- tively set forth by Darwin in 1859, made ty, especially among churchmen and the age-old belief in nature’s separate- religious believers. There was no way, ness scienti½cally untenable once and after all, to disguise the simple truth: for all.11 On that score the logical import Darwin’s theory flatly contradicts the of evolutionary biology is clear and con- Biblical account of the creation. Besides, clusive. If Homo sapiens evolved through people of all persuasions, many nonbe- lievers among them, were–still are– revolted by the notion that we are kin to 9 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, Addresses, and Lectures (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1884), I, 8. 12 Lynn White, Jr., “The Historical Roots of 10 Ibid., 10–11. Emphasis added. our Ecological Crisis,” in Paul Shepherd, ed., The Subversive Science; Essays Toward an Ecology 11 In Origin of Species, though Darwin’s theory of Man (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), 369. of evolution by natural selection remained in- See also Leo Marx, “American Institutions and complete until the publication of the Descent of Ecological Ideals,” Science 170 (November 27, Man in 1871. 1970): 945–952.

Dædalus Spring 2008 13 Leo Marx the higher primates. It makes them feel, march across these wilds, draining on as the saying goes, ‘tainted by bestiality.’ swamps, turning the course of rivers, nature So does the idea that humanity reached peopling solitudes, and subduing na- the pinnacle of the food chain by win- ture.”15 That westward march, aimed ning a long, murderous struggle, “red”– at transforming the continent’s natural in the poet Tennyson’s phrase–“in resources into marketable wealth as rap- tooth and claw.”13 But the repugnance idly as possible, was executed under the aroused by evolutionary theory did not aegis of such slogans as ‘Manifest Des- surprise its wisest proponents. Years tiny,’ the ‘Conquest of Nature,’ and, before he published the Origin, for ex- above all, ‘Progress.’

ample, Darwin had begun to fear that The belief in ‘progress,’ a shorthand Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/137/2/8/1829473/daed.2008.137.2.8.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 it would raise the specter of atheism. label for a grand narrative of history, was He clearly understood–and empathized post–Civil War America’s most popular with–the widespread impulse to deny, secular creed. It held that our history is, or gloss over, the disturbing implications or is rapidly becoming, a record of the of his theory. But he urged readers of the steady, cumulative, continuous expan- Origin to resist the impulse. “Nothing is sion of knowledge of–and power over– easier,” he warned, nature, a power destined to effect an overall improvement in the conditions than to admit in words the truth of the of life. On this view, nature has a criti- universal struggle for life, or more dif½- cal role in the unfolding of material cult–at least I have found it so–than con- progress–but a role largely de½ned by stantly to bear this conclusion in mind. human purposes. Because it is an indis- Yet unless it be thoroughly engrained in pensable source of our knowledge and the mind, the whole economy of nature our raw materials, nature is most pro- . . . will be dimly seen or quite misunder- ductively conceived as wholly Other– stood.14 an unequivocally independent, separate, But the perceived antireligious import hence exploitable entity. The combined of Darwinism was not the only reason authority of the progressive ethos and for its failure to win acceptance in Amer- the Christian faith accounts for much of ica. Equally if not more important was nineteenth-century America’s aversion the largely unremarked yet fundamen- to the Darwinian view of nature and, by tal conflict between the evolutionary the same token, the popularity of Social view of humanity’s embeddedness in Darwinism. Though seemingly an off- natural processes and the nation’s chief shoot of evolutionary biology, Social geopolitical project: the settlement and Darwinism was in fact a perversion of economic development of the continen- the new science. It turned on the idea tal landmass. As Tocqueville observed, of “the survival of the ½ttest,” a catch- most European settlers were “insensi- phrase given worldwide currency by ble” to the beauty and wonder of the Herbert Spencer, the most influential wilderness. “Their eyes,” he wrote, “are popularizer of evolutionary theory. It ½xed on another sight: [their] . . . own was Spencer who did most to transform the idea of biological evolution into a 13 “In Memoriam” (1850), which he had begun writing in 1833. 15 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in Ameri- 14 Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species ca, ed. Phillips Bradley (New York: Alfred A. (New York: Mentor, 1958), 74. Knopf, 1946), II, 74.

14 Dædalus Spring 2008 full-fledged rationale–Social Darwin- other nations over the ages, one histori- The idea of ism–for the ruthless practices of ‘free an concluded that “the story of . . . [the nature in America market’ capitalism, as exempli½ed by the United States] as regards the use of robber baron generation of American forests, grasslands, wildlife and water businessmen.16 sources is the most violent and most The massive incursion of white set- destructive in the long history of civi- tlers into the Western wilderness enact- lization.”17 ed the American belief in nation-build- It is not surprising that a people busi- ing progress. In the popular culture, ly plundering that Western cornucopia the successive stages of that great migra- had little use for Darwinism. The rav- tion were represented by an imaginary aging of the West was not easily recon- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/137/2/8/1829473/daed.2008.137.2.8.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 boundary–a moving boundary–separat- ciled with the view that human life is ing the built environment of the East inextricably enmeshed in natural pro- from the expanse of undeveloped, os- cesses. What made the conventional tensibly unowned–or, as it was called, idea of a separate nature especially pop- ‘free’–land of the West. Never mind ular, under the circumstances, was its that the land already was inhabited; the hospitality to either of the reigning– westward movement of the boundary and contradictory–conceptions of the represented the serial imposition of a national terrain. Most Americans, it bene½cent Civilization on an unruly Na- would seem, regarded that terrain as a ture, including its ‘savage’ inhabitants. hostile wilderness, a state of nature tol- The boundary’s westward movement erable only insofar as it could be subject- was a gauge of national progress, and ed to human domination. At the same in tacit recognition of its ideological sig- time, however, a vocal minority took the ni½cance, it was given a proper name opposite view. A cohort of gifted artists –the frontier–and accorded iconic status and intellectuals, many of them adher- as an actual line–usually a broken or ents of European Romanticism, regarded dotted line–imprinted on maps and Nature as the embodiment of ultimate documented by demographic data regu- meaning and value. Landscapes em- larly collected, revised, and published in bodying that Romantic conviction were of½cial reports of the United States Cen- represented in the paintings of Thomas sus. Eventually the word and the icon Cole, Frederic Church, and the other were compressed into a single term, ‘the members of the Hudson River School; frontier line,’ visual marker of the ‘con- in the writings of Emerson, Thoreau, quest of nature.’ Conquest was an accu- and a host of other poets, essayists, nov- rate name for it. After comparing Amer- elists, and philosophers; and in the work ica’s treatment of nature with that of of conservation activists like John Muir, Gifford Pinchot, and Teddy Roosevelt. In the press and the popular arts of mid- 16 Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in century America, a sentimental, quasi- American Thought, 1800–1915 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1944); Ron- religious cult of Nature helped to vent ald L. Numbers, Darwinism Comes to America the pathos aroused by the spectacle of (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ravaged forests, slaughtered bison, and 1998); Leo Marx, “The Domination of Nature ‘vanishing Americans.’ and the Rede½nition of Progress,” in Leo Marx and Bruce Mazlish, eds., Progress: Fact or Illu- sion? (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan 17 Fair½eld Osborn, Our Plundered Planet (Bos- Press, 1996), 201–218. ton: Little Brown, 1948), 175.

Dædalus Spring 2008 15 Leo Marx The ambiguity inherent in the idea of beauty is the product of “subtle deceits” on nature is central to the apocalyptic out- of light and color, and that in fact “all nature come of Moby-Dick, Herman Melville’s dei½ed nature paints like a harlot, whose epical account of America’s violent as- allurements cover nothing but the char- sault on the natural world. Melville was nel-house within.” All of which leads so impressed by the irrational ferocity of him to conclude that Ahab’s obsession is the assault, in fact, that he instructs his in large measure attributable to the mad- narrator, Ishmael, to seek out its origin dening blankness–the essential illusori- and its consequences. The inquiry rests ness–of nature, its capacity to provoke on two assumptions: ½rst, that the re- yet endlessly resist his rage for meaning.

lations between American society and In the end, the mad captain’s anger over- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/137/2/8/1829473/daed.2008.137.2.8.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 nonhuman nature are typi½ed by whal- whelms his reason, and the tragic out- ing, a technologically sophisticated, come, as Ishmael interprets it, reveals for-pro½t industry devoted to killing the incalculable cost–and futility–of whales; and, second, that the psychic the human effort to grasp the ultimate roots of the enterprise are exempli½ed meaning of nature. by Captain Ahab’s obsession with wreaking revenge on a particular sperm The year 1970 is when the ecological whale whose distinguishing feature is ‘crisis’ caught up with the idea of nature. his preternatural whiteness. (The sperm Public anxiety about the devastation of whale, not coincidentally, is the largest the natural world had grown steadily in living embodiment of nature on the face the aftermath of Hiroshima and the on- of the earth.) What is it about the white- set of the nuclear arms race. But it was ness of this whale, Ishmael asks, that not until 1970, the year of the ½rst Earth provokes Ahab’s ungovernable hatred? Day, that the threat to the human habitat Melville devotes an entire chapter to the attracted nationwide attention. And it inquiry–a chapter without which, Ish- was in 1970 that the emerging environ- mael insists, the whole story would be mental movement ½rst displayed its po- pointless. litical power. In was then that President After an exhaustive analysis of every Nixon proposed, and Congress enacted, meaning of whiteness he can think of, the National Environmental Policy Act, it occurs to Ishmael that the uncanny the Clean Air Act, and the act establish- effect of the color–or is it the absence ing the Environmental Protection Agen- of color?–is not attributable to any one cy. A large cohort of scientists and engi- of its meanings, but rather to its af½nity, neers was recruited to work on the prob- like that of material nature itself, with lems involved in the accelerating rate of myriad, often antithetical meanings– air and water pollution, climate change, or, in a word, to its ambiguity. At times, and species extinction. At about that he observes, whiteness evokes disease, time, it became evident that the word terror, death; and at others, “the sweet environment was supplanting the word tinges of sunset skies and woods, and nature in American public discourse. the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the This was no coincidence. Natural sci- butterfly cheeks of young girls.” But entists had long recognized the ambigui- then, Ishmael recalls, the beauty of natu- ty and instability inherent in ordinary ral objects is no more inherent in their language, especially in words, like na- physical properties than their color is; ture, used to describe the biophysical actually, he realizes that their seeming world. For centuries, after all, ‘Nature’

16 Dædalus Spring 2008 conceived as a separate entity had served tion between human and other forms of The idea of as an all-purpose metaphysical Other. life; it encompasses all that is built and nature in America It had been depicted as the creation of (so to speak) unbuilt, the arti½cial and God and the habitation of Satan, as har- the natural, within the terrain we inhab- monious and chaotic, bene½cent and it. Besides, as the related verb, to environ, hostile, as something to be revered and indicates, most environments palpably something to be conquered. Over its his- are products of human effort. It is not tory, indeed, the word nature had been dif½cult to understand, then, why this encrusted with a rich deposit of meaning matter-of-fact word proved to be more and metaphor, and practicing scientists acceptable than nature to people coping often found themselves looking for ways with the practical problems created by Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/137/2/8/1829473/daed.2008.137.2.8.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 to avoid, or circumvent, the imprecision the degradation of ‘nature.’ But there and ambiguity. is a troubling irony here. What recently In a revealing passage of the Origin, for has proven to be a serious shortcoming example, Darwin feels compelled to de- of the idea of a separate nature–its fend himself for having alluded to natu- hospitality to a virtually limitless range ral selection as “a ruling power or Dei- of moral, religious, and metaphysical ty.” It is dif½cult, he explains,” to avoid meaning–had for centuries been the personifying the word Nature,” and be- reason for its immense appeal as a sub- sides, “everyone knows what is meant ject of art and literature, theology and and is implied by such metaphoric ex- philosophy, or, indeed, virtually all pressions.” But Darwin is not apologiz- modes of thought and expression. ing. An accomplished writer of English prose, he appreciates the beauty and But to return to the ½nal decades of power of ½gurative language, and he is the twentieth century when, as I noted not about to dispense with it. Nonethe- at the outset, the loss of status and cur- less, as if to prove that he knows what rency suffered by the idea of nature be- the word nature actually means in scien- came obvious. In those years the work of ti½c practice, he grudgingly offers this avant-garde artists and intellectuals was stripped-down, or positivist, de½nition: ½lled with predictions of nature’s immi- “I mean by Nature,” he writes, “only the nent demise. In an influential 1984 essay, aggregate action and product of many Fredric Jameson, a prominent theorist of natural laws, and by laws the sequence postmodernism, argued that the disap- of events as ascertained by us.”18 pearance of nature was a necessary pre- Darwin’s recourse to this bloodless, condition for the emergence of the post- ungraspable, if scienti½cally unobjec- modern mentality. “Postmodernism is tionable de½nition of nature was pro- what you have,” he asserted, “when the phetic. It pre½gured the partial eclipse modernization process is complete and of nature by environment in our time. The nature is gone for good.”19 With char- signal merits of environment, as compared acteristic postmodern tendentiousness, with nature, are its unequivocal material- Jameson assumes that nature is a cultur- ity, and what might be called its ideolog- al construction–a mere product of ‘dis- ical neutrality or objectivity. It refers to course’–and emphatically not an actu- the entire biophysical surround–or environ–we inhabit; it implies no distinc- 19 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cul- tural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: 18 Darwin, Origin of Species, 88. Duke University Press, 1991), ix.

Dædalus Spring 2008 17 Leo Marx al topographical or biophysical entity. resurrecting and re½ning the premod- on From his idealist perspective, the domi- ern, organic idea of nature. Perhaps, she nature nant American idea of nature–nature implies, the desperation induced by the primarily conceived as a terrain or other accelerating ecological crisis will lead biophysical actuality–is meaningless. mankind to repudiate the mechanical In Jameson’s view, that usage, with its view of nature and reaf½rm a humane implicit claim to unmediated knowledge organicism.21 of the material world, is epistemologi- Among the prominent obituaries for cally naive. Nature in that sense, he is the idea of nature, however, the most saying, is gone for good because it epito- pertinent to my argument is Bill McKib-

mizes the age-old illusion that it is possi- ben’s The End of Nature (1989). He con- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/137/2/8/1829473/daed.2008.137.2.8.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 ble to arrive at a direct, wholly reliable tends that nature came to an end, both relation with material reality. as a discrete biophysical entity and as a In The Death of Nature (1989), Caro- meaningful concept, when the Earth’s lyn Merchant laments the demise of a atmospheric envelope was penetrated– widely accepted idea of nature, but in and its ½ltering capacities damaged–by her view it died some four centuries ago. greenhouse gases and other manufac- The authentic, biologically grounded tured chemicals.22 By encompassing all concept of an organic nature actually of Earth’s space, the expanding techno- was supplanted–though perhaps only logical power of modern industrial soci- temporarily–by the mechanistic, male- eties has rid the planet of unaltered na- oriented Newtonian-Cartesian philoso- ture. The last remaining patches of pris- phy that accompanied the seventeenth- tine wilderness are now wrapped in a century Scienti½c Revolution. The basic layer of man-made atmosphere. model for that philosophy was the ma- In McKibben’s view, however, the chine, and it has most serious consequences of the degradation of material nature are concep- permeated and reconstructed human con- tual. They are at once psychological, sciousness so totally that today we scarce- moral, and spiritual. What chiefly con- ly question its validity. Nature, society, cerns him is the impoverishment of hu- and the human body are composed of in- man thought. “We have killed off na- terchangeable atomized parts that can be ture,” he writes, “that world entirely in- repaired or replaced from outside. The dependent of us which was here before ‘technological ½x’ mends an ecological we arrived and which encircles and sup- malfunction . . . . The mechanical view ported our human society.” It is as if the of nature now taught in most Western real meaning and value of the ancient schools is accepted without question as concept of nature only became apparent our everyday, commonsense reality . . . . after technological ‘progress’ had made The removal of animistic, organic as- it obsolete. We “have ended the thing sumptions about the cosmos constituted the death of nature.20 21 Carolyn Merchant, Radical Ecology: The But Merchant, a committed environ- Search for a Livable World (New York: Rout- mentalist, leaves open the possibility of ledge, 1992).

22 Subsequent observations of ‘global warm- 20 Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: ing’ are widely accepted in the scienti½c com- Women, Ecology, and the Scienti½c Revolution munity as evidence of the man-made transfor- (San Francisco: Harper, 1989), 193. mation of Earth’s atmospheric envelope.

18 Dædalus Spring 2008 that has de½ned . . . nature for us,” he fluence of cosmic loneliness or–in a The idea of writes, “–its separation from human word–atheism. nature in America society.”23 The tenability of the idea of wilder- The importance McKibben assigns to ness, the oldest and most popular Amer- the erasure of nature’s separateness dis- ican variant of the idea of nature, also tinguishes The End of Nature from other was called into question at the end of laments about the disappearance of na- the century. In a provocative 1995 essay, ture.24 To my knowledge, he is the only “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Get- writer who attaches vital signi½cance ting Back to the Wrong Nature,” Wil- to this seldom noted, seemingly banal liam Cronon, a prominent environmen- attribute of the received idea of nature. tal historian, precipitated a heated con- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/137/2/8/1829473/daed.2008.137.2.8.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 But exactly why is the independence troversy by asserting that the popular of nature so important? Although Mc- notion of a pristine American wilder- Kibben does not adequately answer this ness, or ‘virgin land,’ embodies a racist hovering question, he provides a telling or colonialist falsi½cation of the histori- clue to its profound signi½cance for him. cal record.26 Cronon had established “We have deprived nature of its inde- the empirical basis for this judgment pendence, and that is fatal to its mean- in Changes in the Land, his seminal 1983 ing,” he writes. And why is that? Be- study of the transformation of the New cause, he asserts, “nature’s indepen- England terrain, long before the arrival dence is its meaning, without it there is of Europeans, by the indigenous peo- nothing but us.”25 It is an astute obser- ples of North America. But now, with vation and a poignant confession: with- his 1995 essay, he shocked many envi- out nature there is nothing but us. For ronmentalists, for whom the idea of the McKibben, like many ardent environ- unsullied American wilderness is sacro- mentalists, nature is at bottom a theo- sanct, with plain talk about its covert logical or metaphysical concept. In his meaning. By the time of the alleged Eu- vocabulary, nature refers to the founda- ropean “discovery” of the “new world,” tional character–the ultimate mean- he argues, there no longer was anything ing–of the cosmos. But if the idea of “natural” about it. Far from “being the nature is to continue serving as an effec- one place on earth that stands apart tive repository of that belief, he is say- from humanity,” he writes, the Ameri- ing, it must not be deprived of its tradi- can wilderness is “entirely the creation tional status as a separate, discrete en- of the culture that holds it dear.” Actu- tity. To compromise its independence, ally, the mythic image of a “virgin, unin- as Darwinism inescapably does, and habited land” was an ideological weap- as McKibben movingly testi½es, is to on in the service of the white European expose its devotees to the skeptical in- conquest of the Americas, and it was “especially cruel when seen from the perspective of the Indians who had once 23 Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (New York: Random House, 1989), 96, 64. called that land home.”

24 Raymond Williams calls attention to the 26 Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground, 69–90. For idea of nature’s separateness in “The Idea of a comprehensive collection of the arguments, Nature,” Problems of Materialism and Culture pro and con, including Cronon’s essay, see J. (London: Verso, 1980), 67–85. Baird Callicott and Michael P. Nelson, eds., The Great New Wilderness Debate (Athens: University 25 McKibben, The End of Nature, 58. of Georgia Press, 1998).

Dædalus Spring 2008 19 Leo Marx And yet Cronon, an ardent environ- ness as a locus of value and meaning, he on mentalist and outdoorsman, cannot notes, is that, unlike wilderness, it “can nature bring himself to repudiate the idea of be found anywhere: in the seemingly wilderness. To be sure, he clearly ex- tame ½elds and woodlots of Massachu- plains what makes it objectionable. setts, in the cracks of a Manhattan side- “Any way of looking at nature that en- walk, even in the cells of our own body.” courages us to believe that we are sepa- Whereas wilderness is a particular kind rate from nature–as wilderness tends of place (one that exhibits no signs of to do–is likely,” he concedes, “to rein- human intervention), wildness is an force environmentally irresponsible be- attribute of living organisms that may

havior.” But he also acknowledges that turn up anywhere; a blue jay or a daisy Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/137/2/8/1829473/daed.2008.137.2.8.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 respect for wilderness entails respect in a Manhattan park, he contends, is for nonhuman forms of life. Like many no less wild than its counterpart in the environmentalists, in fact, he had re- Rocky Mountains. As might be expect- sponded to the prevalence of arrogant ed, Cronon’s critics were quick to note anthropocentrism–especially the un- that there is something tenuous, even feeling disregard for the well-being of quixotic, about his notion that a change animals–by embracing an ecocentric of vocabulary could resolve the debate version of species egalitarianism. Now, about the value of wilderness. Still, his seemingly contradicting himself, he proposal does call attention to the criti- concedes that the idea of the “autono- cal shortcomings that the idea of wilder- my of nonhuman nature . . . [may be] ness shares with the idea of a separate an indispensable corrective to human nature. As he warns, and as the devas- arrogance.” He admits that he is torn tation of the American wilderness at- between his viewpoint as a disinterested tests, the belief that we humans occupy scholar and as an environmental activist, a realm of being separate from the rest or, put differently, between historically of nature encourages what he all-too- informed skepticism about–and rever- politely refers to as “environmentally ence for–the contested idea of wilder- irresponsible behavior.” ness. In the end, Cronon fails to resolve his ambivalence. But his failure strongly In recent years several ecologically ori- suggests that the idea of wilderness, like ented writers, including Cronon, have the pre-Darwinian idea of nature as a endorsed a promising way to salvage the separate, largely independent entity, is venerable idea of nature.27 They propose incoherent and irremediably unstable. to rehabilitate the compelling distinc- In the event, however, Cronon propos- tion, favored by Hegel and Marx, be- es a way to rescue the notion of pristine, tween two fundamentally distinct, his- unaltered nature. He urges American torically grounded states of nature, to be environmentalists to follow the lead of called ½rst nature and second nature. In their patron saints, Henry Thoreau and this usage, ½rst nature is the biophysical John Muir, and replace the idea of wil- world as it existed before the evolution derness with the simpler, less problem- atic idea of wildness. (After founding the Sierra Club in 1892, Muir had chosen 27 William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chica- Thoreau’s famous epigram “In Wildness go and the Great West (New York: W. W. Nor- ton, 1991), xviiff; Janet Biehl, Rethinking Ecofem- is the preservation of the World” as its inist Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1991), of½cial motto.) The chief merit of wild- 117–118.

20 Dædalus Spring 2008 of Homo sapiens, and second nature is the The idea of arti½cial–material and cultural–envi- nature in America ronment that humanity has superim- posed upon ½rst nature. On this view, manifestly, nature is all. Unlike the traditional idea of a separate nature, the ½rst nature/second nature distinction is con- sonant with the received history of nature, and especially with the primacy, in that history, of the process of biological evolution by natural selection and the Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/137/2/8/1829473/daed.2008.137.2.8.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 emergence of life on Earth. During all but the ½nal minutes, as it were, of this historical narrative, ½rst nature was all that existed. But then, beginning with the emergence of life and–eventually–Homo sapiens, second nature took over, and gradually transformed, an increasingly large area of the planet’s surface. Biolo- gists have taught us that every organism modi½es its habitat in some degree, but the extent of humanity’s modi½cation of Earth exceeds that of other species by orders of magnitude. Second nature is in large measure a human artifact, and in recent centuries the rapidly accelerating expansion of humanity’s power–and its territorial reach–has had a devastating impact on global ecosystems. The result is a grave crisis in the relations, or puta- tive ‘balance,’ between ½rst and second nature. One of the singular merits of the ½rst nature/second nature distinction is the clarity it affords us in characterizing the uniqueness–for good and ill–of humanity and its role in the overall history of nature. By dividing the concept of nature along an historical, or evolutionary, fault line, the ½rst nature/second nature concept enables us to do full justice to humanity’s unmatched power to create a unique material and cultural environment. At the same time, however, it has the inestimable merit of validating the idea of a single, subdivided yet fundamentally uni½ed realm of nature.

Dædalus Spring 2008 21