The environmentA C O N V E R S A T I O N O N C O N S E R V A T I O N
and human consciousnessWhat happens when a prominent cultural historian trades ideas with leading environmentalists? 21stC invited these scholars to discuss what happens in the space between the human mind and the natural world
By DON J. MELNICK, MARY CORLISS PEARL,
and SIMON SCHAMA
21stC: Professor Schama's research suggests that ideologies inevitably shape our idea of the environment. Some of the work done at the Center for Environmental Research and Conservation, on the other hand, might imply the importance of integrating human activity into ecologic systems and away from Western culture's tendency to view our species as exercising dominion over the rest of nature. Would each of you comment on what your research says about the relation between human consciousness and the natural world?
Simon Schama: When I talk about nature, I'm interested in the cultural response to nature. In that sense, the obsession to discover some notionally pure wild place that can be observed independently of cultural agency does seem to be a will-o'-the-wisp. As soon as we apply the kind of framing devices that I've accessed, we are indeed talking about nature as a cultural construction.
Not to deny the gravity of our ecological predicament; I speak as a Green, basically, with great foreboding. The whole record of the West has been represented as something to do with dominion, with control, with treating nature like a machine. While that has happened in important and damaging ways, my brief was to look at the other side of the story: not so much what we've done to nature as what nature has done to us, the way nature has affected the myths, metaphors, and images which run through not just natural history, but often political and art history.
Mary Corliss Pearl: I work with wildlife managers and researchers who often are not aware of their implicit assumptions. Are they conserving for some aesthetic value of a particular point in evolutionary time? Are they supposed to create or maintain the possibility for evolutionary change to be ongoing? If so, at what rate? In many cases, they are in control. I'd like to ask you about that, Simon, in that you talk about nature shaping people. I think we have a value of wilderness that seems to be growing in direct proportion to the degree to which we are, whether we like it or not, in control. There are very few protected areas large enough where we might say that evolution goes forward untouched by human activity. In fact, I would be very surprised if there's anywhere left on the globe.
Schama: I think that you're quite right. Even Antarcticaif you know the work of Steven Pyne, his history of Antarctica really turned me on to environmental historyinvolves Western empires' fantasies of taking possession. So Pyne tells a story of politics and economics, poetry and painting.
A kind of extraordinary twinning goes along as we become more part of cyberspace, a sort of controlled global village. This central electronic space, with all the best graphics in the world, is peculiarly barren of textured location, of organic process. As computer-controlled space becomes more of a relentless master of all our lives, a craving for natural human cultural needs seems to me to be more intense and more important.
"There was the film preaching the wisdom of nature, and the nature in the park was blocked out by 100-foot-high screens. The only bird song you could hear was electronically orchestrated"
But that's not to say that we're in the kind of political position to make sure it's preserved. I mean, I can barely face looking at the morning paper. Every day there is a story which rings environmental alarm bells. There's one about this bill going through the Utah legislature, a threat to reduce the wilderness areas which aren't parks or standard tourist places, like Bryce and Zion National Parkto simply declare them no longer officially protected areas, which is in effect to open them up to intensive and extensive mining and shale oil drilling over the next 20 years. It's a catastrophe in the offing, really.
THE DISNEYFICATION OF WILDLIFE
Schama: I guess you read about Disney's intention to open a wildlife park in Florida.Pearl: What's intriguing is how they're going toI mean, in the past, Disney has presented nature without tooth or claw.
Schama: Safari rides in the Magic Kingdom, which I was forced to take when my children were very young. Plastic hippos.
Pearl: Right. Well, now they're going to have real animals in the exhibit, and people will be able to swoop down, pretending they're going to chase poachers away. So we'll have the ironic scenario of American people using massive amounts of resources to simulate protecting wildlife.
Don J. Melnick: When in fact they're not protecting the real animals against poachers in parks all around the United States. Bears are being poached all the time to feed a Far Eastern medicinal market for their gall bladders.
"If you want to save the rhinoceros, put it on the flag"
Schama: I thought, "Well, wildlife park, terrific. Just what they ought to be doing." But then they're also going to combine it with two other areas: one of mythical creatureswe're likely to get our animatronic unicornand then extinct creatures, a kind of animatronic "Jurassic Park." I wonder what you think about a relentless show-biz approach, where the only way you could actually have a wildlife park with all of Disney's corporate force behind it was to mix it up with this kind of fantasy.
Melnick: An article discussed this venture as a way to involve the public with wildlife; they would therefore be able to line up behind measures to conserve it. But if you introduce these fantastic elements to it, it makes the living wildlife another fantastic element that could eventually be simulated through whatever mechanical or technological advances one makes, and it's just no longer a real experience. And it gets back to what you were saying before: You take the smells and the sounds and the bugs that are biting you out of it, so that it's just a very two-dimensional image.
Schama: Exactly. I was also struck by the irony of the " Pocahontas " premiere in Central Park: There was the film preaching the wisdom of nature, and the nature in the park was blocked out by 100-foot-high screens. The only bird song you could hear was electronically orchestrated through the medium of the Disney movie. Even the park, which is itself a moderate, user-friendly, urban experience in nature, was overlaid by this extraordinary synthetic view of it. I've called the film "eco-kitsch," probably a bit unfairly, but we could indeed end up with synthetic landscapes being the only sort we can afford, if we also want to live in this endlessly draining consumer world.
USE VS. PRESERVATION
Pearl: I'd like to talk about a kind of schizophrenia. I think Americans see nature in two opposite ways. One is the British view of nature: a nice settled rural landscape without wolves or bears or major predators. Then there's the view that the American character is formed by an experience with wilderness. Especially at the turn of the century, when we had a huge wave of immigration from urban areas of Europe, there's a view that real Americans were the ones who settled the frontier or could make it in the wild. Down to this very day, these two sets of values exist side by side, constantly clashing. I think that's reflected in the "use vs. preservation" debates.Schama: I think it's true of most Western cultures, at any rate. The question is how one adjudicates between priorities in terms of choices made in the political economy about which to preserve and which to subsidize. At the moment, this country subsidizes to an overwhelming degree the demands of agribusiness. It's a quis custodiet question: How do you establish criteria for balancing the competing claims for the landscape as a used, productive place and the landscape as a place of preserved wildness? The debate has been going on for an incredibly long time, the debate between Muir and Gifford Pinchot.
Melnick: The perception of wilderness is very different from one culture to the next. This is constantly the problem that one runs up against when the West largely develops the international protocol for these issues and then attempts to impose them on the rest of the world.
Schama: One damaging thing is the notion of a zero-sum game. As long as economic viability and some sentimental view of the environment are seen to be mutually exclusive, we're going to be on the short end of the fiscal process. Whether they're in the Third World or the agribusiness world in the Midwest, people vote with their pocketbook. So it's incumbent on those of us working in the environment field to do two things. One is to explain the importance of preserving ecological resources in appropriate terms for the place, so that it's not written off as a western Anglo fantasy, a rich man's luxury. The second is to demonstrate a causal connection between preserving ecological systems intact and having sustained viability into the future: e.g., the relationship between deforestation and the silting of river systems.
Melnick: I think you are saying that we need a new set of economic models, because in the models we have now the cost side of the equation is not calculated accurately.
Schama: That's right. That equation is calculated in classical economics in terms of bottom-line, short-term measurements of growth and output. For 200 years people have been trying desperately to feed ecological issues into the equation of what sustained economic viability, rather than growth, actually means.
Pearl: There are no policy arrangements which account for ecological consequences separated by space or time. If the forest is cut down in one province and the water table goes crazy in the next province over, who pays?
Melnick: An oft-cited example is the floods in Bangladesh, which are directly attributable to deforestation in the Himalayas outside their national borders. Massive amounts of international aid money come in and in effect subsidize the cutting of forests, because that money goes in to clean up the mess that occurs in Bangladesh, rather than those who have profited from the deforestation covering those costs.
Pearl: At CERC, we are going to hold workshops on ways that ecologists, economists, and policy-makers need to talk to one another. At this point, the gaps are not even apparent. Policy-makers don't think about ecological cause and effect. Economists don't realize that their classical models are not including the whole picture. And ecologists have trouble explaining when compromise is or is not possible and are unwilling to go out on a limb when they don't have the data to support a precise statement.
"What is it about ourselves, as Westerners, that we do not tolerate predatorsaside from ourselves?"
Melnick: It's been our experience in traveling to many developing countries, particularly in Asia, that as economic development proceeds and a large middle class grows, that class is taking on many of the values of the West, not of other people in that country who are not part of that massive economic growth. Given some of the mistakes we've made, this is troubling.
Schama: It is depressing. The challenge is to find a way, without sounding patronizing, condescending, or hectoring, to persuade those cultures that they're cutting their nose to spite their face if they repeat all our mistakes. The great contrary example really ought to be the Soviet Union, where pell-mell, horrendous overdevelopment resulted in not just ecological but economic catastrophes. We have to do some work, without it sounding too laborious and super-intellectualized, on the way we make our case, the language we use, the ways we can appeal to a culture's sense of their shared identities.
21stC: The idea of the nation-state appears throughout Landscape and Memory: Myths of national origin and ideas about wilderness seem to be intimately connected. Do you have comments about future development in the way territoryin both the physical and psychic sensesis organized into nations?
Melnick: Looking at endangered species and ecosystems, there is a terrible problem in this area because plants and animals don't respect national borders, and part of the range for a migratory or widespread species may be damaged by the actions of one country impacting others. Rational management for a species may require cooperation by neighboring countries whose very proximity has led to political conflict. The world is full of examples of this kind of biopolitical antagonism.
Pearl: Then we have the two nations that exist globally, which Raymond Dasmann (1) divided into biosphere people and ecosystem people: those who are part of the world economy, who follow the international movement of capital, vs. indigenous people who consume local products and live their lives within an ecosystem. In my work in developing countries I see a lot of scapegoating of ecosystem people. There's no denying that, as we have huge numbers of people where there weren't before, all practicing slash-and-burn agriculture, the effect is devastating. But I've also seen, in Papua New Guinea, a country where local people, who have values attached to nature for religious reasons as well as practical ones, are being thwarted by countrymen tied into international timber interests.
Schama: The nationalist obsession with territory, with the myth of its own tribal home, certainly is the villain in my accounts of the German obsession with the forest as a place of battle, a place in which other values were violently excluded or defeated, particularly Roman ones. Here, the craving of a national identity and a myth of national origin did indeed have fateful consequences.
That aside, I'm not at all against the stimulation of a sense of landscape as being part of a national or regional or local home. I think it's a natural part of the cultural description of identity, and people have very different views about what identity politics can do. Having a strong, pictured, landscaped sensibility about home doesn't necessarily lead to perpetual tribal war, or some sort of Bosnia. There's the Swiss example. There are very different sorts of Switzerlands: There's alpine Switzerland and lowland Switzerland, and each different region describes radically different local characteristics even each canton. That doesn't mean that Switzerland is destined to fall apart into terrible territorial atavism. It hasn't, at least not since the middle of the 19th century. I think we neglect the natural relationship between national or local identity and landscape home at our peril.
"Americans see nature in two opposite ways: as a nice settled rural landscape without major predators, and through the view that character is formed by an experience with wilderness. Down to this very day, these two sets of values are constantly clashing"
Melnick: Actually, a political scientist from Germany at the Center for Advanced Study at Stanford was talking to me about saving animals and said, "Well, if you want to save the rhinoceros, put it on the flag."
Schama: You have to introduce the sense of poetics into politics, if that's not a pretentious way of saying it: the way in which people like Barry Lopez (2) write about wolves. It has to be part of the nation's sense of the loss to its overall cultural richness, as well as to its ecology, which would be involved in the extinction or exclusion of that species.
LOVING THE WOLF AND KILLING BAMBI
Pearl: What is it about ourselves, as Westerners, that we do not tolerate predatorsaside from ourselves? I was at a conference where a Tanzanian described with great amusement, when he was a visiting scholar in Germany, how some wolves got out of a zoo. Parents kept their children at home, and there was not peace in the Republic of Germany until the wolves were back in captivity. What amused him was that every day his children walked across fields populated by predators of all sorts. What is it about us, and how can we come to love the wolf, as a society or culture?Schama: Well, it's a long traditionit goes back to the Greeks and possibly earlierwhich equated the world of man and the world of the wild animal, particularly wolves and bears, in a state of mutual war. If it's only a zero-sum game, there'd be a new fear of extinction.
Pearl: We've talked about how to politely inoculate some non-Western people with wilderness values, but I think we need a little work done on our cultural psyches on tolerance and appreciation of the diversity of life forms, which seem to fare better in Indian and African cultures.
Schama: There is a basis in Western culture for educating people about the natural place of predators in the system. I live 20 miles north of the city, and we have incredibly rich and flourishing colonies of redtailed hawk. The children go "eeugh" when they see a hawk flying off toward the Hudson River with lunch in its talons, but they can accept that it's entirely for the health of our miniature ecosystem that predators are given their place. It's more disturbing when predators become so dependent on the intrusion of human population that they become, in their own sense, attuned to dysfunctional behavior: when bears basically exist around garbage cans and birds in railway stations.
Pearl: We seem to like our raptors as predators, but what about getting a few more cougars in northern Westchester to consume some deer?
Schama: I would be absolutely in favor of that. The safest animal around here is deer. Lyme disease spreads because the deer population is completely out of control.
Pearl: This is a good example of the Disneyfication of nature appreciation: "Kill Bambi?" Any program to curb deer immediately faces a culturally rooted visceral response. So, we have that side by side with appreciation of the graceful hawk.
DON J. MELNICK, professor of anthropology and biological sciences, and MARY CORLISS PEARL, executive director of the International Wildlife Preservation Trust, are directors of Columbia's Center for Environmental Research and Conservation. SIMON SCHAMA is Old Dominion Foundation Professor of History and professor of art history and archaeology; his most recent book is Landscape and Memory (New York: Knopf, 1995).PHOTO CREDITS (in order of appearance): GONZALEZ/ANIMALS ANIMALS; REMI BENALI/GAMMA LIASON; SUPERSTOCK.