thank you! and yes, i think your point of traversing the current "landscape" (ha!) in a messy wilderness relationship does become a lot more complicated when not in the abstract but instead, literally applied to the nature we have inherited in-part from earth but mainly the decisions of others.
Dylan--
I think everything can be about humans because Pollan believes that nature is indifferent, so conservationist acts of assumed altruism dont fall on deaf ears per say, but also don't necessarily make an impact that anybody else finds "positive" besides us (people.)
also, I made this second post really short due to my first (but i found dylans question fascinating!) so somebody else please feel free/DO also answer it.
Pollan a few times brought up this Hetch Hetchy situation in 1907. I was not sure what it was but I think it is important to know about because it is the only example he gives that he thinks it might be the correct thing to decide between history or nature. “There are times and places when man or nature is the right and necessary choice; back at Hetch Hetchy in 1907 that may well have been the case.” (398) From what I found the Sierra Club in 1907 came up with a policy regarding the Hetch Hetchy reservation that is in Yosemite National Park. The people who wrote this policy thought Hetch Hetchy was "a counterpart to Yosemite [Valley] and a great and wonderful feature of the Park, only next to Yosemite [Valley] in beauty, grandeur, and importance..." Because of it’s great beauty the club did not want anything happening to it and said "no greater damage could be done to the great National Park, excepting the damming of Yosemite [Valley] itself..." The committee put the Sierra Club on record as "opposed to the use of Hetch Hereby Valley as a reservoir site ..." Despite the Sierra Clubs strong resistance the Hetch Hetchy was dammed and therefore flooded the whole valley covering and destroying the plants. After the dam was built the Sierra Club continued to fight to have the dam restored so the valley could return to its former state. Personally I do not think destroying the damn would have returned the valley to its former state because like Collan said “Nobody, in other words, can say what will happen… And the reason is not that forest ecology is a young or imperfect science, but because nature herself doesn’t know what’s going to happen here.” (396)
Why do you think Pollan falls into the trap of refering to nature as a female and giving it human like qualities?
I will try to answer this question but I do not have any facts to back it up. Over the years I have heard people talking about mother nature. It seems to be an ingrained thing in our culture that when referring to nature people seem to refer to nature as a woman. I think this idea of nature being a woman comes from the fact that nature bears fruit and feeds people much like women have children and especially a while ago stayed home to cook and take care of their families. When thinking of nature some people think of it as a safe and peaceful environment much like how children I think associate their mother with safety. Hope that helps.
If nature and history cannot be separated how can people decide what is best for the environment moving forward? Do people just let nature alone after something like a tornado or do you try to undo what people perceive as destruction? I am just confused what people are supposed to do if history and nature are so intertwined moving forward. If someone could help me understand that would be great.
based on isaac and rachel's posts, i feel like we might be using the same evidence but coming to opposite conclusions. not sure which way im convinced yet.
I actually liked this reading a lot, and agree with whoever said it in the beginning of this forum topic that we should have read this a long time ago in the class. I think I would have given us a very interesting and in some ways different perspectives on environmental history. I liked how Pollan questioned the theory “that man and nature [are] irreconcilably opposed, and that the victory of one [doesn’t] necessarily entail[s] the loss of the other, “ as Isaac said, this separation between man and nature. To me there is no clear separation between the to and they are connected in so many ways it cannot be said that they are separate.
Sorry this is alot farther down the road from Dylans post but....
In response to Dylan’s post, I don’t agree that the storm that wiped out Cathedral Pines was unnatural. The storm was very natural in the sense that it was not affected by humans (humans didn’t create the story or control it?). And even if humans in some way affected the storm, the event itself was still simply a part of the environmental history of the area. Events in environmental history don’t necessarily have to be natural or unnatural. (I still decided on a solid definition of natural and unnatural so I’m basing this solely off other people’s definitions I gathered in class.)
Dylan asked, “Why is everything about us, from our (human) perspective, and relating to what we do. Is there any way to go about history from a non human influenced direction? Or have we just been so important and left such an impression that would be impossible?” I like this question a lot because it brings up the superciliousness we have for ourselves. I think we focus on how we relate and effect nature because we can. We have enough cognition to understand what we are doing to the environment, which is almost a bad quality. The main goal of a beaver is to eat, built dams, and have little beaver babies. Its as simple as that. Not to get to much into Animal Behavior, but a beaver doesn’t care (at least I don’t think so, I’ve never asked a beaver) how his or her dam affects the ecosystem down the stream a hundred miles. I think because of these lack of cognitive abilities, beavers and many other animals can live so naturally
Pollan uses the word reductionism to describe the wilderness ethic, and the man-nature opposition is a reduction in a lot of ways. From an abstract standpoint the line between the two doesn't even really exist at all, and Pollan's piece describe the way the line can quickly become blurry and obscuring in practice. But I think that depending on the values of whomever is drawing the line, it can be useful. Very very very few people would want to live in a world that consisted entirely of concrete, even if they buy into the argument that nothing humans make or do is truly natural. So even if we don't all feel that there's something transcendent in "untouched wilderness" (maybe because it's a myth, or maybe because it just doesn't affect emotionally in any significant way), it seems like theres a pretty strong consensus that there's something good in there existing some things that aren't made of metal or plastic. And if we agree, even to varying degrees, on the value in that, then the natural-unnatural scale, even if it's built on a fallacy, seems useful in distinguishing the sort of fundamental difference between a potted plant and a tree in a forest, or a rock and a piece of plastic. We all recognize that difference, even if it's just produced by our faulty perceptions of things and our tendency to draw lines between things where they don't belong. Because even if the distinction between rock and plastic is a matter of perception and not essence, it's deeply ingrained enough in US that it's worth making and trying to articulate. So however objectively accurate is that all human actions and their effects are natural, i think it completely strips a valuable, albeit very blurry, distinction of its meaning. The trouble comes in when the natural-unnatural opposition informs the value set, and not vice-versa.
My question: If we can't do without any line at all, and if the line drawn by the wilderness ethic-ers is misplaced and far too thick, where should it be drawn?
Just a quick preface to my answer to Isaac’s question and then my own question: I completely agree with Olivia, I cannot believe that a reading this significant (and this good) wasn’t given to us until tonight. I also think it’s been the most thought provoking reading thus far, so chock full of ideas that I think we could spend the rest of the year discussing it. Not to mention everyone’s posts have been just as good as the readings. But anyway, down to business.
To answer Isaac’s question, I definitely think that humans create some unnatural things, even if we consider ourselves part of nature. I agree with Isaac’s point about cutting down trees to build houses being just as natural as beavers cutting down trees to make dams. However, outside of necessities like food, water, or shelter, if we humans take raw materials and transform them into goods that aren’t necessary for our survival, I consider that unnatural. It kinda sorta relates back to what Dylan said about a bolt of lightning being a new thing in a system that wasn’t there previously, thus making it unnatural. I would argue that if something has preexisted, it makes it natural, and as new, foreign things enter a system, they become natural. Pollan made a point that I’m not sure I agree with, that I think could potentially lead to a discussion tomorrow (along with everything else in the damn reading): “Set against the foil of nature’s timeless cycles, human history appears linear and unpredictable, buffeted by time and chance as it drives blindly into the future.” (Page 395). I made this exact point in our groups today. I thought of nature as a circle and humanity as a linear line. But upon closer inspection, I feel like there’s a perfectly good counter to that argument. Humans have only existed in the last million years or so. Before that nature did evolve, it wasn’t completely cyclical. If nature were made up of timeless cycles, we wouldn’t BE here. This and all the other points brought up in the reading made my head hurt.
Lastly, I want to offer some food for thought for tomorrow:
-Do we consider nature cyclical?
-Is nature a “she”, as Pollan often referred?
-Do we consider humans to be just as much a part of nature as everything else?
I’m exhausted mentally and physically. I’m going to attempt to get some sleep. Goodnight.
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