A New Paradigm

Environmental writers since Thoreau and Marsh have deplored despoliation of nature by humans and enjoined us to find a way of achieving a more harmonious relationship with the natural landscape and with nature generally. In a particularly useful formulation of this idea, Loren Eiseley argued for the necessity of reentering the "sunflower forest," but without abandoning the lessons we have learned on the pathway to the moon. The question is--has always been--exactly what does this mean in practical terms? What does it mean to reenter the sunflower forest by way of our cultural world? It seems to me there are two ways of answering this question, each based on a different conception of the "natural" relationship between humans and nature as expressed in archaic or indigenous cultures. The first is to assume that such peoples really are natural--that is, they live in a gentle, graceful and unselfconscious harmony with the world around them, just like chipmunks or kangaroos. On this assumption reentering the "sunflower forest" means finding a way to live gently in nature, minimizing our "impact" on it. It also means shedding modern knowledge in favor, perhaps, of a deeper wisdom. Out of this comes the kind of environmentalism that urges us to "take nothing but photos, leave nothing but footprints." This view is, of course, incompatible with Eiseley’s injunction. Perhaps ironically, it minimizes the classic role of humans as gatherers, as predators, and as shapers of the landscape. And curiously it denies us real membership in the land community, making us mere visitors at best and at worst trespassers and vandals in the natural landscape. This is the reasoning that leads, for all its idealization of innocence, to the despair of Bill McKibben’s recent book, The End ofNature, with its hopeless and destructive implication that we don’t really belong on this planet. Fortunately, there is an alternative. A second environmental paradigm is built on a radically different conception of the "natural"~or classic--relationship between humans and nature. This is the assumption that humans have always--at least since the invention of language~istinguished nature from culture and have been aware of a deep tension, even a measure of estrangement between themselves and the rest of nature. If they have often managed to achieve a measure of harmony between nature and culture at the ecological and psychological levels, this is not "natural" in the sense of being unselfconscious. Rather it is an achievement--actually a work of art. People have always had to find their way back into the sunflower forest. From this follows an entirely different kind of environmental paradigm, which may be summarized as follows: ̄ That a wholly satisfactory, unambiguous relationship between nature and culture is impossible in purely literal terms, and that human beings have always felt a certain