From Wolves and Human Communities: Biology,
Politics, and Ethics,
Edited by V. A. Sharpe, B. G. Norton, and S. Donnelley
Island Press, 2001
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We need the tonic of wildness... At the same time that
we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require
that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land
and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us
because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature... We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life
pasturing freely where we never wander.
Henry David Thoreau |
Those who oppose the re-introduction of wolves in the
Adirondacks will often argue that
according to the calculations of cost-benefit analysis, a favored
method of policy analysis, the wolf has no place in the park. The wolf, they point out,
is a predator to a profitable game species, the
deer, and thus would adversely affect the economy of a region that
depends heavily upon sport hunting. Moreover, while the danger of
wild wolves to humans has been vastly exaggerated, their introduction
into inhabited areas is not without risk. In short, Richard Sage's
objections in this collection are well-considered and weighty, and if
we were to confine the controversy to economic considerations, they
might well settle the issue: no wolves in the Adirondacks. The case
for wolf reintroduction, which I support, must therefore appeal to
non-economic values, which can be neatly summarized by a single word: wildness. (1)
The Adirondack region, once-logged over, now inhabited, and
surrounded by human settlements, is not a wilderness, and can never
be a wilderness in any time-scale relevant to the concerns or
planning of our generation or its near successors. But the region can
be more or less "wild," and in fact becomes ever more wild as the
time of its exploitation recedes in to the past, and natural
processes are allowed to take over and dominate the landscape.
A region that is "managed" by game laws and private property
owners, is a region that is less "wild." A region that acquires its
qualities through the uninterrupted playing out of natural forces is
more wild. A deer population that is kept "healthy" through careful
monitoring by wardens and researches, and consequently by
fluctuating hunting seasons and quotas, is less wild than a
population that is culled "naturally" by predators.
(2)
Thus a decision to reintroduce wolves into the Adirondacks would
be a deliberate decision to enhance the wildness of the Park. Why would we
wish to do this?
In this essay, I will defend the thesis that by enhancing ,
preserving and enhancing wildness where it exists, and reintroducing
wildness where it is absent, we enrich our personal lives, our
communities, and our culture, now and far into the future. Furthermore, I will argue that the preservation of wildness enhances
both our capacity and our worthiness, as a species and a
civilization, to survive on the earth.
An Adirondack Park with wolves would be wilder place, and that is
why the wolves should be re-introduced.
The
Experience of Wildness
To begin, the value of wildness might be understood through an
analysis of "the natural aesthetic" - the features of the experience
of the wild.
The word "beautiful" is used to describe both fine art and natural
landscapes. But the beauty of art and of nature are radically
different. Natural beauty, unlike artistic beauty, is
uncomposed, unframed, and
inclusive. Each of
these qualities bear important implications regarding the value of
wildness.
Composition:
Art is the product
of the artist, while nature is the product of natural forces
- both abiotic (e.g. erosion and sedimentation) and biotic (e.g.,
evolution). The composition of an art object is a deliberate creative
act of the artist, though the creative act often draws upon
unconscious sources that astonish both artist and spectator. Art,
therefore, addresses our humanity - as a communication from artist to
audience, one person to another.
Encounters with nature address a more fundamental essence: our
naturalness - the sources and sustenance of our biotic
being, including the pre-cultural neural apparatus of our senses and
cognition. The sight of eroded slickrock in the Utah canyonlands, the
sound of cascading water in the Hudson rapids of the Adirondacks, the
fragrance of a rotting log in an eastern deciduous forest, the
fleeting glimpse of the wild wolves, the sound of their howl, and the
still evidence of their work on the forest floor - none of this was
"composed" with the purpose of communicating from one person to
another. Yet all of this "communicates" - but communicates
what?
Most of the remainder of this essay will address that question. But as a beginning, we would suggest that the "uncomposed" message of
wild nature speaks to us of vastness, independence, permanence,
ontological priority. With no creative "artist" in the
landscape, we encounter instead the results of forces, in the past
and still at work, which preceded our personal and cultural
existence, formed us and sustain us, and which will long survive us. In the face of the timeless and infinite, we are thus reminded of our
own finitude. We encounter in undisturbed wildness what Edmund Burke
called "the Sublime" - at once terrifying, invigorating, and morally
instructive.
The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those
causes operate most powerfully, is astonishment; and astonishment is
that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with
some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled
with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by
consequence reason on that object which employs it. Hence arises the
great power of the sublime, that, far from being produced by them, it
anticipates our reasonings, and hurries us on by an irresistible
force. Astonishment, as I have said, is the effect of the sublime in
its highest degree; the inferior effects are admiration, reverence,
and respect. (Burke)
Framing: Artistic works are confined by
boundaries. The dance and the sonata are temporally bounded - they
have a well-defined beginning and an end. The painting is bounded by
the edge which separates it from the gallery wall.
In contrast, wild nature is unbounded. Gazing through the desert
skies of a moonless midnight, we find no borders around the mantle of
stars. The eastern horizon, we well know, hides still more stars that
will soon come into view, and in its fullness, a cosmic sea which
surrounds our insignificant planet and its minor star. Similarly, we
know that beyond the horizon that we view from the mountain top there
is "still more." The uncomposed wild landscape before us is without
"frames" - without well-defined borders that define it as a separable
"object." Likewise, as we hear the howl of a wolf, and watch the
alerted deer bound out of sight, we understand that this episode is a
snapshot in time, emerging from a natural past without defined
beginning and merging into future without defined end.
Thus, in the presence of unbounded wildness, we are drawn into an
awareness of "ever-more" time and space. And in contemplation of time
past, our imagination is cast before the time of our personal origin,
and of the origins of our culture and our species, to the timeless
foundations of all process, of all Being.
Inclusion: The spectator of a work of
art, stands apart from the art object. For it is, in fact, a
separable "object," framed and unified by the creative act. In
contrast, in the presence of unbounded wild nature, one is "drawn
into" the landscape as it surrounds him. This is especially true, as
one becomes physically engaged with the wild - as a kayaker
negotiating the rapids of the Hudson river, as a photographer
stalking the wild wolf, as a hiker along the Appalachian Trail, or as
a skier carving into the virgin Rocky Mountain powder. In such cases, the
subject/object boundary is obscured as one "becomes," Zen-like,
his natural environment. (3)
Thus might an encounter with wild natural beauty - uncomposed,
unframed and inclusive - add to abstract knowledge, the
vital personal dimension of appreciation.
Knowledge
is intellectual, and appreciation is the esthetic, emotional
and moral supplement to the knowledge that leads to action. The heavy
smoker knows that he is taking a risk: appreciation comes too late,
with the diagnosis. We know that the tropical rain forests are
disappearing at the rate of an acre a second, but do we
appreciate it? The National Geographic will teach us that the Grand
Canyon is a mile deep and two-hundred miles long;
appreciation comes from sitting on the south rim, feet
dangling over a thousand feet of sheer drop, looking across to Bright
Angel Canyon. Books will tell us of the eras and periods of
geological history; appreciation comes as we leave the rim of that
canyon and walk down through the strata of frozen time toward the
Phantom Ranch in Granite Gorge.
Aldo Leopold's moment of appreciation came as he saw "a
fierce green fire dying in [the] eyes" of the wolf that he and
his companions had shot.
I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought
that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would
mean hunters' paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I
sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a
view. . . .
We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and
dullness. . . . A measure of success in this is all well enough,
and perhaps is a requisite to objective thinking, but too much
safety seems to yield only danger in the long run. Perhaps this is
behind Thoreau's dictum: In wildness is the salvation of the
world. Perhaps this is the hidden meaning in the howl of the wolf,
long known among mountains, but seldom perceived among men. (Leopold, 1949).
Wildness and Human Nature.
Homo sapiens
is both a natural and an artificial creature. We disregard either aspect
of our "nature" at our peril.
The
Natural Endowment.
I submit that our naturalness is beyond reasonable dispute.
We breath natural air, we are nourished by natural food, we respond
naturally to the rhythms of life, and eventually give back to the
earth the matter which it gave to us.4
Significantly, our
natural endowment long predates our artifice. Ten millennia ago - an
instant in geological time - homo sapiens established the
first permanent agricultural villages, and began its domestication of
plant and animal species thus pushing wild nature back to the
perimeter of the village, then further still until, today, only
scattered remnants remain. These ancestors, who for all time before
owed their survival to their adaptation to wildness, carried
essentially the same genome that each of us possess today. Thus wild
nature, not the artifice that surrounds us today, selected our genes. Accordingly, writes biologist Hugh Iltis, "like
the need for love, the need for [the] diversity and beauty
[of nature] has a genetic basis." He continues:
... the best environment is one in which the human
animal can have maximum contact with the type of natural
environment in which it evolved and for which it is genetically
programmed without sacrificing the major advantages of
civilization... Every basic adaptation of the human body, be it
the ear, the eye, the brain, yes, even our psyche, demands for
proper functioning access to an environment similar, at least, to
the one in which these structures evolved through natural
selection over the past 100 million years. (Iltis 1967).
More recently, the
eminent Harvard biologist, Edward O. Wilson, has given this theory
the name of "biophilia. He writes:
The brain evolved into its present form over a period of
about two million years, from the time of homo habilis to
the late stone age of homo sapiens, during which people
existed in hunter-gatherer bands in intimate contact with the
natural environment. Snakes mattered. The smell of water, the hum
of a bee, the directional bend of a plant stalk mattered. The
naturalist's trance was adaptive: the glimpse of one small animal
hidden in the grass could make the difference between eating and
going hungry in the evening. And a sweet sense of horror, the
shivery fascination with monsters and creeping forms that so
delights us today even in the sterile hearts of the cities, could
see you through to the next morning... Although the evidence is
far from all in, the brain appears to have kept its old
capacities, its channeled quickness. We stay alert and alive in
the vanished forests of the world. (Wilson 1984).
Biophilia
lends depth and credence to the notion that we are natural
creatures, for it adds to the unquestioned biotic requirements
for human life, the intriguing notion that the wild nature which
selected our genes is required to satisfy genetically programmed
emotional and psychological needs as well.
But the "nature" that
effected this selection, is a nature that is fast disappearing due to
our carelessness and greed, so that we may at length find ourselves
in world to which we are ill-adapted. Thus it may be a deadly error
to treat nature solely as a mere resource for our use, for to do so
is to commit the deadly sin of pride -- the hubris of
regarding our artificial needs as of more fundamental value than the
nature which, in fact, is continuous with ourselves. Science tells us
otherwise. We are nature, and nature is us -- "the world is our
body."
If the biophilia
hypothesis is correct, the implications are portentous: destruction
of the final remnants of wildness will cast us into an alien world,
devoid of the landscape that selected us and thus, in a fundamental
sense, is us. Because we are quite unaware of the price of
that alienation, we should pause before we commit ourselves to its
payment. In the meantime, we are best advised to preserve the
wildness that remains, and to nurture its return to regions, such as
the Adirondacks, from which it has been diminished.
Artifice and Agency.
And yet, we are also "artificial," through and through, not
only due to the artifacts which surround us, but more fundamentally
due to that most basic of human institutions, language,
which is the foundation of our mode of perception, of thought, of our
funded knowledge, and of moral responsibility.
Mark Twain once said
that "Man is the only animal that blushes - or needs to." That
observation was more wisdom than wit. Blushing is a response to the
moral sentiments of shame and
guilt. These
sentiments, along with the positive sentiments of
pride and
approbation, issue from our concept of self and from our
knowledge of good and evil - from the bite of Eve's apple.
We blush, and need to,
because we evaluate. We rank things as good or better, as
bad or worse. And when we evaluate morally, we evaluate ourselves and
other selves. Our capacity to evaluate, combined with the knowledge
discovered by our sciences and the capacities gained by our
technology, place upon us the inalienable and portentous burden of
moral responsibility.
Accordingly, to affirm
that we are natural
creatures, and then to say no more, is to utter a pernicious
half-truth. For we are natural creatures with a difference: we are
creatures who have evolved through and past a momentous
transformation -- the transformation into moral agency.
Through our acquisition of articulate syntactic language, and our
accumulation of culture, we have become self-conscious, deliberative,
and thus responsible for our behavior. In this sense we are,
to the best of our knowledge, unique in this regard. Thus, while we
might "retrain" disobedient animals, we do not hold them morally
responsible and put them on trial.
The significance of
moral agency can scarcely be overstated, for on a planet without
moral agents, there are no rights, no duties, no justice, no virtue
or vice, and no responsibility, though on a personless planet with a
flourishing ecosystem and sentient beings, there will be values and
value-potentials.
With our acquisition
of moral agency, we have also acquired the capacity to recognize,
celebrate, enhance nature, and thus the responsibility to protect and
preserve the natural values around us. We should be ever mindful that
with these capacities for recognition, knowledge and celebration
comes the burden of responsibility. For as we come to recognize the
value in nature, we also recognize its vulnerability. We are
responsible for nature because our science has given us some
understanding of the processes at work in nature, and our technology
has given us the capacity and thus the choice either to preserve or
destroy our natural estate. And finally, if the central contention of
this paper is correct, through reflection we recognize the values
within nature. These four conditions, knowledge, capacity, choice and value
significance, entail our moral responsibility toward nature.
Responsibility, let us
remember, is a burden, since, given knowledge and capacity, the
choice to do nothing is a dereliction. Thus, having taken up the
burden of responsibility for nature, we are not morally permitted to
set it down again.
Returning to the case
at hand, we may choose to reintroduce the wolf to the Adirondacks, or
we may not. However, knowing what we know about wolves and the
Adirondack ecosystem, we can not opt out of making a responsible
decision, one way or the other.
To summarize this
brief discourse on "human nature," we
are both natural, along with our brother creatures, and unique in our
possession of the capacities which define our moral agency. I daresay
that the gravest errors in environmental ethics arise from the
failure to acknowledge and incorporate both our naturalness and our
agency into a system of ethics -- to settle for either half of this
full truth. On the one hand, by "denaturalizing" ourselves we give license
to those who would objectify, and thus utilize and exploit, the
nature "out there." On the other hand, by depersonalizing
ourselves, we divest ourselves of moral responsibility for
nature, for we thus come to regard ourselves as "objects"
totally captivated by and helpless in the stream of "natural"
cause and effect.
Morality
and Wildness
If our argument has
been successful, then both human experience and human nature support
our contention that wildness is a condition that enriches personal
and communal life. Encounters with wildness can disabuse us of the
dangerous conceit that we are nature's favorites, and that our time
is the culmination of all natural history. Wildness can enhance our
personal, moral and social health, by reminding us that we are parts
of a larger, pre-existing order, which produced us and now sustains
us. From encounters with the wild we can learn and appreciate that
all the products of our ingenuity function only as they conform to
natural laws, and ultimately fail as they attempt to contravene these
laws.
On the other hand,
despoiling a wild ecosystem diminishes us by reducing our sense of
natural "place," of perspective, of context. With this we lose our
sense of personal transcendence beyond our immediate time, place and
species, turning inward to our species, then to our immediate
community, then to our own generation, then to ourselves. As we thus
become narcissistic and alienated, the advantages of the moral
perspective and the moral life are lost. We lose this moral vision as
we lose our capacity to see ourselves, our species, and our era in
their natural contexts - as we forget that we are actors in a drama
and participants in an adventure too complex for us ever to
comprehend, and yet despite that and even because of that, of
ultimate value to us.5
To
this moral disorder, our scientific knowledge of wild
nature, transformed through personal encounter into a
appreciation thereof, offers a remedy. For from that
perspective, we can once again regard our "world partner" with
dignity and respect. This is a perspective, writes Holmes Rolston
III, which "starkly" rejects
. . . the alienation that characterizes modern
literature, seeing nature as basically rudderless, antipathetical,
in need of monitoring and repair. More typically, modern man, for
all his technological prowess, has found himself distanced from
nature, increasingly competent and decreasingly confident, at once
distinguished and aggrandized, yet afloat on and adrift in an
indifferent, if not a hostile universe. His world is at best a
huge filling station; at worst a prison, or "nothingness." Not so
for ecological man; confronting his world with deference to a
community of value in which he shares, he is at home again. (Rolston 1975).
Wildness, which once
contained our species, now is contained by our civilization and
survives only through our sufferance, leading to the false conceit
that our artifice can endure and thrive in a totally artificialized
world. As wildness becomes ever more rare it becomes more valuable.
All further loss of wildness diminishes us, as all recovery of
wildness enriches us.
The grey wolf will
reinhabit the Adirondacks only with our permission. Yet that
reintroduction may be more valuable to ourselves than to the wolf. For by simply going about their livelihood, quite indifferent to our
needs, the wild wolves of the Adirondacks have much to teach us:
lessons of our origins, of our sustenance, of our limitations, of our
planetary home. From such lessons as these we just might gain the
perspective, the appreciation, and the motivation to preserve our
natural estate, and with it our sustainable place within it.
Thus we conclude, with
Thoreau, that "In Wildness is the Preservation of the world."
