Reykjavík Grapevine - 01.06.2007, Page 17

The other day I was in Skaftafell, the most renowned National
Park in Iceland. A series of didactic panels are on display in
the Visitor Centre to celebrate the saga of the area. One in
particular drew my attention. The National Park – it explained
– was instituted in order to allow nature to grow and develop
in accordance “to its own rules”. For this reason, the grazing of
sheep was immediately forbidden. This brought forth as a side
affect, however, an uncontrolled expansion of lupine – a non-
indigenous and rather invasive species – at the expense of the
local vegetation. What followed was a long-term plan – still
not fully realised – to eradicate lupine. After which, nature will
finally be enabled to follow its course.
Make no mistake; I thought it was a commendable ef-
fort. And yet, as I read the panel, there was something that
bothered me. The whole discourse was built upon an inherent
ambiguity. “Nature should be allowed to grow spontaneously,
according to its own laws” was the morale of the whole story.
But that same story highlights how reliant on human interven-
tion the “spontaneity” of nature has been in Skaftafell over
the years. Rather than being a pristine cradle of naturalness
– as is commonly suggested – the National Park appears to
be a place of cultivated naturality. And what is that if not a
contradiction in terms? Is it “natural” when it is nurtured?
I believe my uneasiness had nothing to do with the history
of Skaftafell in particular. Rather, it stems from a dominant cul-
tural model, which at a deeper analysis seems unable to cap-
ture the nuanced reality of human-environmental relations.
Like a knife, Western thought has cut the conceptual bonds
between man and his surroundings, creating a split between
“nature” on the one hand and “culture” on the other: two
separate domains, closed and neatly delimited.
And it is not difficult to notice how this distinction is re-
flected in other similar opposing pairs typical of a Western
dualistic philosophy: culture/nature, mind/body, subject/ob-
ject; they all represent the same pattern of thought, applied
to different levels of analysis. And according to what story one
reads, there is a different villain guilty of slicing a single reality
in two and “objectifying the bodily world of nature.” In turn,
it is Hebraism, Christianity, Socrates, Descartes, Positivism, Al
Qaida… OK, the last one was a joke. But whoever is deemed
responsible, a reunification of our cosmos still appears far from
being realised. Despite a massive speculative effort – especially
in the last part of the 20th Century – our models of thought
are still prisoners of such dualistic conceptions.
Two Conceptions of Nature
This is not the case of claiming the frequently repeated false
myths that other cultures are more “natural” than ours or more
able “to be one with nature”. Distinctions similar to the one
between culture and nature are present among many other
societies as well. But most often the dynamic and reciprocal
character of that relationship is implicitly assessed, in some
cases even portrayed in symbiotic terms. It is this dynamism
and reciprocity that one day Western culture failed to recog-
nise, ultimately estranging itself from what we call “nature”.
Indeed, we always conceive of nature as different, whether
we approach it in terms of exploitation or with uncondition-
al respect: never of belonging and communion. On the one
hand, we have those who claim that “nature” is a world of
objects and physical facts, governed by laws and regularities.
Science can read it like a book; technology can manipulate it
like clay. Man should tame it in order to benefit from its boun-
ty and employ its resources. Quantification and reification are
the trademarks of such a conception, which I call “utilitarian
mechanism.”
On the other hand are those who see “nature” as the ul-
timate Otherness. Feminine and motherly, spontaneous and
uncultivated; their Nature (a “nature” with a capital N) is the
negative to the male and man-made world of the mind and
ideas. Her sublime beauty inspires our awe and devotion. Her
exploitation is comparable to rape and matricide. I call this
view “romantic idealism.”
If we can agree that we have environmental problems to-
day (and I would not express many doubts about it myself),
then I believe that its profound causes have to be sought in
similar conceptions and in the dualistic way of thinking that
underlies them. Either they have justified illusory and fallacious
policies of economic maximisation at expense of ecological
awareness; or fostered an environmental counterculture that
is offspring of the same mindset and as such weakened by its
own premises and stereotypes.
Such binary oppositions as “culture vs. nature” can surely make
speculative life easier. However, it should be enough to take a
glance ‘out there’ to realise how the two domains are far from
being separated by clear-cut boundaries. They blur into each
other and interweave in a problematic unity.
Humanising Nature
A disastrous drought struck the African State of Zimbabwe in
1992, decimating the crops and prostrating the entire country.
Did the international community’s sympathy go to the starving
Zimbabwean population? Absolutely not. It was with twenty
elephants under threat to be shot down in order to have the
meat distributed among the most desperate peasants.
Nature can be nurtured, we said in the beginning. Appar-
ently it can also be humanised. We have human beings objecti-
fied and pushed outside the borders of human solidarity and
elephants that are welcomed into our cultural world, becom-
ing a matter of concern in international summits and direct
beneficiaries of financial aid. And yet, nobody is likely to refuse
to admit that the wealth of human societies largely depends
on the welfare and abundance of nature. Still, the opposite
also happens to be true and the welfare and abundance of
nature is tied to the wealth and well being of society.
Does it sound like a regression to magical thought? Per-
haps. But this ancient wisdom has also begun to be accepted
in highly modernistic circles such as the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund. It is becoming widely recognised
as a fact, indeed, what havoc on the environment is wreaked
by poverty and social disruption.
As cases of savage deforestation in the Amazon, Indonesia
and Nepal have documented, there can be no effective at-
tempt at environmental preservation if it is not preceded by
an increase in social welfare and equality. There is no sharp
disjunction between the realms of “culture” and “nature”.
Rather, a constant interplay and unsolvable entanglement.
The Icelandic Viewpoint
A number of Icelanders I have spoken to, especially in the
countryside, express irritation towards the wave of ecologic
activism recently investing the island on the wake of large-
scale projects for industrialisation. “Can’t we exploit our own
resources and get the most out of them? Just because some
‘romantic idealists’ in Reykjavik or some metropolis in Europe
or in the US are opposed to it? They live far away from the af-
fected areas, how can they know better than us what’s to do?
All they want is to keep on with their comfortable city lives
and still have a place for summer vacations.” That was their
basic argument.
When put in those terms I can agree with the objection, at
least to a certain extent, but simply because the whole issue is
poorly posed. We would gain different kinds of insights if we
started to consider human-environmental relations in all their
entangled character and to recognise their extreme complexity
– an endless string of actions, reactions and retroactions that
grasp “man” and “nature” in one single web of existence. To
start with, for example, we could reframe the whole ecologi-
cal question in purely utilitarian terms, showing that economic
maximisation is a slippery measure of judgement – and we
would have a good chance to make a point.
“Energy in Iceland is both more inexpensive and clean than
elsewhere: exploiting it for industrial production is a way to
oppose global warming and not to contribute to it”. This is
roughly the claim made by spokespersons for Alcoa, the mul-
tinational aluminium giant investing most heavily in the indus-
trialisation of Iceland.
It might even be true: having no means to argue on the sci-
entific grounds of such a statement, I can only raise the doubt
whether the environmental costs for importing the raw mate-
rial and exporting the final products from the country do not
end up levelling out the boasted benefits.
But the real point is another one. Global warming is only
the tip of the iceberg, an instance on planetary scale of hu-
man-environmental relations, which have gone astray. The
scope of the phenomenon has provided it with prominence in
public agendas worldwide – and with some right. But this can-
not become a device to overshadow the fact that the rapport
between man and its surroundings can possibly be problem-
atic in a number of other ways. Any alteration brought onto
an ecosystemic matrix – besides its effects on global warming
– also bears other consequences, often unpredictable and un-
expected, often visible only in a long period, often quantifiable
as negative repercussions even in economic terms.
The Lesson From Reclaiming Wetlands
You want examples? The reclamation of wetlands is an ongo-
ing practice justified on the ground of a myth of “develop-
ment”. For the most parts, it aims at acquiring further culti-
vable land. At first, it would seem to be a wise option, at least
in a utilitarian perspective: after all, it is a matter of turning
apparently fruitless areas into productive ones.
In the United States, however, the collective costs for such
an operation amount to US $11,000 per year for each hectare
of drained wetland. And this figure only takes into consider-
ation the increased gravity of floods (wetlands act like spong-
es, which soak water and limit the impact of floods) and not
other benefits that wetlands notably bring to an ecosystem.
Seen from a long-period perspective, then, is indiscrimi-
nate land reclamation a sound economic strategy? Doubting
that claim seems more than licit. And the whole history of
agriculture is full of episodes of poor management due to en-
vironmental misreading, which resulted in massive economic
losses. Fertilisers and pesticides have contributed to stagger-
ing increases in production – that is undeniable. However, it
has been at the expense of public health and burdens on the
health-care systems.
The radical change in our diet is rapidly leading to similar
outcomes. Growing consumption of meat and proteins may
seem to be the most obvious choice for our famous “eco-
nomic man”: richer foods at ever-lowering prices. The widely
acknowledged epidemic of obesity that has spread across the
Euro-American world over the last decade, however, might
suggest that the “economic man” is mistaken in some of his
calculations.
Are Icelanders ready to trade their fisheries – the source
of the country’s wealth over the last century – for a model of
growth based on heavy industry? It does not have to be the
case, but beware: modifying the course of too many glacial
rivers may well have repercussions on the oceanic population.
Should the eventuality not be carefully pondered?
Our Faustian Enterprise
I am not arguing that any man-induced change brought upon
our environment should be preventively forbidden. Our own
presence, anyways, mutates the nature of “nature”. And it has
been proven that even a hypothetic pristine Earth would not
inherently tend to a self-organised state of equilibrium, but
rather be shaken by periodic cycles of disruption and chaos.
But yes, any large-scale alterations produced on our surround-
ings remain something of Faustian enterprise, whose after-
maths are often clouded in uncertainty.
In a world where man and nature are entangled in a single
and inextricable web, actions undertaken in sight of a short-
term advantage can disastrously backfire over a longer peri-
od. Both successful adaptive strategies and sound economic
management used to be grounded on the common principle
minimisation of risk. As the stockbroker who ventures into
rapacious and rash financial operations, we have apparently
decided to leave that basic wisdom behind and play an increas-
ingly hazardous game with our surroundings and ourselves. In
both cases the stakes are extreme: incredible gains in the im-
mediate moment, but also catastrophic losses just behind the
corner.
In objection to such arguments, some contemporary
prophets of “utilitarian mechanism” may remove the mask
of philanthropy and wear that of freedom instead. “No con-
straint,” they say, “no collective concern should be placed on
the shoulders of the enterprising and ambitious individual. Let
individual health and individual security be individual matters.”
In doing so, they reveal their true minds: a world of human
and environmental relations, where the well being of the few
occurs to the detriment of the most. Not only is nature human-
ised; they implicitly advocate the “naturalisation” of humans.
Making waste paper of ‘the social contract’, forgetting any
previous alliance between man and his surroundings, they sub-
stitute all bonds of solidarity with a nightmarish vision of the
struggle for survival in accordance with the most vulgar read-
ing of Darwinism. And, since everything is entangled, such a
struggle is going to invest the entire planet with all its inhab-
itants, man and nature alike: truly “a struggle of all against
all”.
The Point, At Last
If there is a point to be drawn out of this discussion, then I
believe that we are finally approaching it. Taking an ecological
stance is not about making dramatic choices between man
and environment, seen as two opposite and mutually exclu-
sive poles. It is not a matter of privileging the authenticity and
beauty of a mythical untamed “nature” over the artificial ugli-
ness of man-made industrialism and concrete; nor is it opting
for conservation, simplicity or a return to primitivism versus the
sirens of development and economic growth.
No. As we are part of the same unity and talking about our
environment, I believe, it is like looking in a mirror: it is another
way to talk about ourselves. To ask questions such as: what
foundations of growth and development are truly solid? What
society is actually healthy? What kind of community would
we want to build and live in? Our relationship to “nature”, we
will discover, is already largely inscribed in the very answers to
those questions.
It is my conviction that a conscious environmental move-
ment would have much to gain by appropriating such in-
sights.
Text by Fabrizio Frascaroli Photo by Gulli
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