I recently read an interesting article entitled Top Predator on the Plains: Wolf, Bear or Human, written by Michelle Berry, a Masters student in Environmental Studies at Stanford University. You can read it here, http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2012/09/24/top-predator-on-the-plains-wolf-bear-or-human.
Using historical documents, she examines the role of human depredation on wildlife before and during the European exploration of the New World. This is for a restoration ecology project associated with American Prairie, and she is contributing a series of articles to National Geographic News regarding the subject.
I was particularly interested in her finding that the spaces between overlapping tribal boundary zones may have served as wildlife refugia. It makes me think of the de facto wildlife refuge in the DMZ between North and South Korea.
I was was also struck by how she framed this research in the first paragraph. Here is what she says.
Looking back in time, who was the top predator of the American prairie ecosystem? Wolves, grizzly bears… humans? As I continue my research of historic wildlife populations in northeastern Montana (read my first post here), it is important to consider how changes in human populations were affecting the ecology of this area. There was a tendency among European and American explorers to romanticize the landscapes they encountered as pristine paradises flourishing with wild animals and vegetation. In fact, this land had been inhabited by hundreds of thousands of humans that had shaped the ecosystem in variable ways.
Notice phrases like romanticize the landscapes, pristine paradises and humans that had shaped the ecosystem in variable ways. These signal a brand of environmental interpretation that critiques what is called the pristine myth. It is frequently encountered in the classroom and the field, and impacts the ecological, ethical and policy work of many students and faculty alike.
While I mean absolutely no disrespect to Berrys work, I want to gently say something about the pristine myth and its use. I hope it helps situate Berrys research in a larger moral and policy debate about the meaning and pristine that we should all be aware of.
There are basically three varieties of the pristine myth — historical, materialist, and religious.
The historical variant asserts pre-Columbian North America was not a wilderness devoid of people, but a well settled continent in dynamic relationship to a fecund environment. So it is a myth to think the continent was absent of humans and their influence. I take it that Berry is using the pristine myth with this meaning in mind. In so doing she is helping us develop a better understanding of the human ecology of the time. Humans, other animals and nature are seen as a dynamic, co-evolving system responding to both natural and cultural evolution.
This discourse also tends to be agnostic regarding anthropocentrism — the idea that humans are the moral centre of the cosmos, while animals and the rest of nature are simply means to our ends. Some environmental historians are thoroughly anthropocentric, and see no place for animals and the rest of nature in the moral community. Others are not, and their investigation place humans and our environmental impacts within a wider realm of moral concerns.
The materialist version of the pristine myth is rooted in Karl Marxs interpretation of nature as the inorganic body of mankind. Using his brand of dialectical reasoning and historical materialism, nature is seen as fundamentally social in that we cannot conceive of nature without humans. Indeed, nature is nothing but a social construction — there is no nature, only the nature we create. Humans then are both the creators and managers of nature over space and through time. So it is a myth to think of a natural world without human beings at all.
The materialist variety is strongly anthropocentric, envisioning nature as nothing more than a means to human emancipation. It associates itself with reason, science, and emancipatory politics. Ethical concerns for animals and the natural world are forms of false consciousness rooted in emotion, romantic notions, or superstitious belief. The discourse is widespread in the social sciences and humanities concerned with social theory, and is associated with concepts like social nature, political ecology, Actor Network Theory, and posthumanism.
The religious variety emerges out of Christianity and other belief systems with a natural theology. The basic idea is that animals and the world were created for human use — for food, labour, clothing, conveyance, and the like.
To frame this in Christian language, God undertakes a special act of creation, makes Man in His image — and a woman as a mate — and endowed them with souls. When Adam and Eve eat from the Tree of Knowledge, they fall from grace and are expelled from the Garden of Eden. In these prelapsarian time, humanity is commanded to subdue the earth, and is given dominion over all its creatures. This is vigorously anthropocentric
In its original, prelapsarian condition, the earth was pristine. But it is myth to think anywhere on the earth remains pristine after the fall for two reasons. First, evil entered creation and the natural world is now profane. Second, the planet has been handed over to a sinful Adam, Eve and their progeny to use as they will. The earth will only be redeemed after the end times. Up to then, humans are to use all the resources of the earth to glorify God the Creator.
As someone who has worked in ethics and policy for over a decade, I routinely hear all three varieties of the pristine myth invoked in discussions of biodiversity, conservation, preservation and restoration. How should we evaluate them?
The historical variety is most often used to try to establish baselines of biodiversity by which to measure landscape health or restoration. It does not assume that wild nature was devoid of humans, but looks to a point in historical time where humans thrived in flourishing communities of life.
As long as elicit presuppositions about anthropocentrism are not snuck in through the back door, then the historical variant can usefully inform ethics, science and policy. It does so by helping to establish the facts on the ground, so to speak, as well as tracing the evolution of human ecology. This will give us a sense of whether and what kinds of human interventions in the natural landscape are needed or justified.
Take the issue of feral or wild dogs. Feral dogs in wildlife areas can do a great deal of damage to sensitive wildlife and are sometimes removed. Beach nesting Piping Plovers in Parker River National Wildlife Refuge are a case in point. Dogs are therefore excluded from the refuge. Dingos on the other hand were brought to Australia as domestic animals over 10,000 years ago. Some went feral. Over time, the Dingo and the Australian outback have settled into a comparatively stable and biodiverse ecology. Dingos became native to their place. The challenge now is to protect Dingos from habitat loss and in-breeding with domestic dogs. Here I am not trying to blame dogs for human induced species loss, but acknowledge that the creatures pose a challenge in wildlife management.
The materialist and religious varieties are another kettle of fish. Secure in their anthropocentrism which is justified by either the social construction of nature or divine mandate, they excuse animal abuse, wildlife exploitation, habitat degradation, the loss of biodiversity, opposition to national parks and wildlife refuges, and an uncritical endorsement of control by local elites over common resources.
What then can we do? Ill have more to say about this in a subsequent post, but we can start by learning to distinguish the variants of the pristine myth from one another. The historical, materialist and religious varieties are quite distinct, although we may not know that when someone simply critiques the idea of the pristine. So we must dig deeper into their presuppositions, determine what kind of pristine myth is being asserted, and what role anthropocentrism or some other value paradigm is playing in their views on environmental policy.
Image: James Audubon, Prairie Wolf, lithographic print hand coloured by J.T. Bowen.