On the Christian and nondual narratives around nature
A few weeks ago, I participated in a conversation with about 15 other people about nature and spirituality, and saw an unusual pattern that I’d previously noticed myself falling into. People would say something like: “of course, humans are animals too, so we’re part of nature,” and then within moments would be talking about how humans are destroying nature. This repeated itself several times in several different people. Does it make sense to talk about nature destroying itself, or losing its relationship to itself? I think this is an instance of two different narratives being subconsciously merged.
The standard (in the US) narrative of human relationship to nature seems to go something like this: long ago, humans lived in harmony with nature. However, our greed and lack of wisdom led us to exploit it. Now, we risk destroying (or at least significantly harming) nature unless that greed and foolishness can be curbed.
What I didn’t realize until a couple of hours after the conversation is how remarkably Christian this first narrative is - it’s about as close as you could imagine to being a secularized version of the Garden of Eden story. As a side note, this is an example of a very entertaining dance where the political left rejects Christian aesthetics while uncritically accepting Christian ideals, while the right does the exact opposite.
The other narrative being combined with the Christian story is the nondual story: that nature/not nature simply isn’t a useful distinction. Humans are animals and cities are biomes. If you completely accept this second story, it doesn’t make sense to talk about things like “conservation,” it makes sense to talk about what kind of environments you want to create.
The nondual narrative of human relationship to nature fits well with my heuristic belief that it’s generally better to accept that you have power and try to use it judiciously rather than try to wish it away - but does that heuristic apply here? First, I think it makes sense to talk about what “using power judiciously” actually means here. Very broadly, I mean it in the sense of deliberate interventions that create the sort of environments you want to see. In cities, for example, it seems pretty clear that people almost universally prefer more plants and walkability and less noise, so using power judiciously might look like having fewer, smaller streets, with the saved space going to community gardens and mixed-use zoning. In forests, judicious use of power might look like stricter regulation outlawing tree farms, while expanding and controlling selective logging. Or something. I’m not an expert in this and you probably shouldn’t pay much attention to my specific policy recommendations - but the idea in this example is that we recognize that logging is practically important and needs to happen to support US industry, while also making sure that it’s done in a way that doesn’t replace good environments (forests) with bad ones (tree farms).
With that said, there are a few reasons I can think of that you’d prefer a policy of “non-interference with nature” (having first decided that some places are nature) over trying to use environmental power judiciously. First is sacredness: if unadultarated nature has some spiritual quality that’s destroyed by human interference, you obviously wouldn’t want to mess with it. Next is epistemic humility: can we be sure that any changes we make to nature are actually wise? Finally, there’s politics: who gets to decide what changes are good? I think the points of sacredness and humility are actually pretty reasonable, but I’d be pretty satisfied on these fronts if we set aside relatively small amounts of land that we’ll try to conserve (basically: national parks). We might eventually determine that we know enough about promoting good environments that we no longer have to hedge against our ability to do so, but this seems like it’s a long way off to me.
The last point, politics, raises the valid concern that incentives may not always be aligned when deliberately modifying the environment. For instance, global warming might turn Siberia into arable farmland while destroying US agriculture, which creates an obvious conflict of interest. You can’t just make a rule like “no global changes without UN consensus” or something, because local changes might have global effects: reforesting the Sahara desert would probably affect the health of the Amazon rainforest. And as anyone who’s tracked any attempt at building infrastructure in the US knows, environmental impact assessments are the work of Moloch and to be avoided when possible, at least in their current form. But the fact that it can be hard to agree on what is good doesn’t seem like a good reason to do nothing, especially when we’re already making global environmental changes.
A final point here is that the nondual narrative integrates better with the fact that even in the most strictly conserved areas, humans make deliberate interventions to manage the ecosystem. We deliberately reintroduced gray wolves to Yellowstone - a true policy of noninterference would not have permitted this. A more cleverly phrased “minimize the effects of human interference” gets you out of this, but raises the obvious question of how to quantify the effects of human interference in a single quantity that we can minimize. There are other examples, too: when Iceland wanted to restore their forests, they discovered that native tree species no longer grew well due to climate change (Iceland was deforested by Vikings about a thousand years ago). So they imported non-native trees from Alaska. This seems like a pretty clear-cut case of ecosystem engineering to me: a habitat that’s existed for a thousand years is replaced by a completely different one composed of species from the other side of the planet. But I don’t find it problematic, either - the new forests will be beautiful and diverse and help stop erosion. The nondual narrative seems to integrate this better than the Christian one.
What I want to advocate in this essay is a relaxation of the boundaries we put around what we care about and how. It’s obviously important to protect the commons from overexploitation, but I think at least as much harm has been done by well-intentioned incompetence as by greed. Take a look at the mistakes being made around you and what’s being done to correct them, and figure out where you can effect the greatest marginal change. Is that by agitating against strip mining? If so, great! But there’s a decent chance it’s by agitating against noise pollution or dumb zoning laws - and that’s also great! The latter items might not seem like they’re as important, but the marginal change you can make there might be greater and more durable than what you can do in “standard” environmental activism.
Anyway, this is mostly just fun stuff to think about - at the end of the day, doing anything is probably better than doing nothing, unless the thing you’re doing is bad and harmful, so I wouldn’t hesitate to try and help with something on the grounds that it’s not the literal most effective thing I could be doing. I’ve found thinking nondually about the environment to be useful because it lets me worry more broadly and less deeply, so I see more opportunities to do good and feel less anxiety about the future. Maybe it will work for you too!