It’s Time to Forget the Idea of “Untouched Nature”
By Zeke Shomler
Imagine you are walking through the woods. All around you are living beings: trees towering above you, fungal mycelium snaking between tiny gaps in the dirt beneath your feet, and mosquitoes trying to get a snack from your arms. You are far from the nearest town, unable to hear a single human voice or piece of machinery. There’s no trail, so you’re maneuvering between branches and over rocks as well as you can. The going is slow. Why are you here? What brings you out into the woods? What makes this environment so special?
It’s common to think that the natural world is valuable because it’s outside our grasp. You’ve heard it before: we must return to “untouched nature.” We need to preserve “wilderness” because it hasn’t been corrupted by human hands. We hear it especially frequently about Alaska, the “Last Frontier” state, often referred to with words like “unspoiled” and “untouched wild.”
It seems that “nature” is defined not by what it is but by what has not been done to it. There’s the pervasive idea that we need to hang on to wilderness areas such as natural parks because they are the last thing that remains entirely outside of human influence, that they have always been separate from us and should always stay that way. It’s a separation often born out of a genuine desire to protect and care for the things around us—one that suggests that there are parts of the world that we need to stay away from at all costs, lest our intervention destroy them.
But things are a lot more complicated than that.
Are we separate from nature? Is it possible to cleanly define an “us” versus a “not-us”? Is it even productive to think of ourselves as somehow separate from (or even above) our environment?
We might think about this purely on a literal level: what parts of the world exist that are truly and utterly unaffected by human behavior? Realistically, we have to say none. The woods you were walking through at the beginning of this article might be part of a designated wilderness area or be inaccessible by vehicles. Still, if you look closely enough, human influence will be there.
Perhaps the most obvious one is simply overall climate: as we increase the levels of greenhouse gases like CO2 in the atmosphere by burning carbon that’s been trapped in stores of oil, coal, and natural gas for millions of years, everywhere on Earth is affected by the overall increase in energy within the global system. There’s nowhere on our planet that doesn’t exist within our atmosphere, and we are constantly interacting with the planet on that level, even just by burning wood on the stove. There’s a reason this era of geologic history is often referred to as the “Anthropocene”: “anthropo” meaning human, signifying the way humanity’s actions have a profound, inextricable impact on world systems on a long-term and global scale.
But we could go even further and say that “humanity’s actions on the world” is kind of a misleading way to think about ecology in itself, one that implies that “humanity” and “the world” are neatly separable entities. One way to understand that is by realizing how everything you do is, essentially, moving atoms around—within your body, using your body to manipulate the world, and between you and the world. When you’re in the woods, and a mosquito bites you, your molecules become its molecules. The same happens when you die, sweat, or slough off skin flakes (which we do all the time). The opposite of that is eating, but also purchasing, collecting, using, and discarding things like Stanley water bottles and bread that comes in a plastic bag. There’s no getting around it: if you try to pinpoint the exact point at which you stop and the world begins, you’ll find it hard to do. Now, apply that logic to every single person on earth.
I want to turn to Robin Wall Kimmerer here, who writes beautifully and thoughtfully about science and indigenous knowledge. Her book Braiding Sweetgrass is one you’ve probably at least heard of, if not read yourself, and I want to call attention to one idea in particular, which comes up again and again: “All flourishing is mutual.”
There’s a lot bundled up in that simple sentence. It might be interpreted as a simply pragmatic statement—that we should be worried about all flourishing because we’re connected. But there’s something more profound, more fundamental going on as well.
In “Mishkos Kenomagwen: The Teachings of Grass,” Kimmerer describes a scientific experiment related to sweetgrass, a plant native to the Midwest and Eastern United States. The grass holds profound cultural significance in several indigenous cultures, including the Potawatomi, the nation to which Kimmerer belongs. This project, which she oversaw as a professor, showed that sweetgrass thrives when cultivated with careful and respectful harvesting—taking half at a time—as Native ecologists have done for thousands of years according to the principles of the Honourable Harvest. This was contrary to other scientists’ initial prediction that harvesting was bad for a population. She writes:
“We are all the product of our worldviews—even scientists who claim pure objectivity. Their predictions for sweetgrass were consistent with their Western science worldview, which sets human beings outside of “nature” and judges their interactions with other species as largely negative… But the grassy meadows tell us that for sweetgrass, human beings are part of the system, a vital part.”
It's not just that we exist in a perpetual relationship with a system of “nature” outside of us—we are in the system, inseparable from it.
For a long time, we’ve failed to recognize how we are fundamentally intertwined with what we call “nature” and that history is inherently connected to issues of colonialism and exploitation. Western colonialist ways of thinking about the world often emphasize hierarchy and strict categorization. Even Cartesian dualism, the belief that your mind and body are separate from each other, is implicated here—it’s a way of removing yourself from your environment and envisioning yourself as an isolated, independent entity.
Indigenous knowledge is a great place to realize that we’re inseparable from nature, but other people are doing this work, too. Timothy Morton writes in his book The Ecological Thought:
“Ecology includes all the ways we imagine how we live together. Ecology is profoundly about coexistence. Existence is always coexistence. No man is an island. Human beings need each other as much as they need an environment. Human beings are each others' environment. Thinking ecologically isn't simply about nonhuman things. Ecology has to do with you and me.”
Ecology has to do with you and me – that doesn’t sound very similar to the Us vs. Nature environmentalism we often hear.
Much of this is about realizing how we are always already interacting with the world. If we assume that “wilderness” is entirely unaffected by humans, we’re already doing it a disservice. “No visitors” doesn’t mean the same as “No human influence.” Suppose we are concerned about mitigating humans' adverse effects on our world. That means acknowledging the microplastics in our streams, the coal smoke in the stratosphere, and the deep connections between our actions and the rest of the world.
The answer to protecting the environment isn’t a hands-off approach; there’s no way around affecting our world. Morton writes that “the ‘let it be’ mentality (no human ‘interference’ with the environment, no ‘anthropocentric’ care for animals, and so on) is just the flip side of laissez-faire ideology.” And to return to Kimmerer’s sweetgrass experiment, often the environment actually depends on our interaction to stay vibrant.
Another example of this is the indigenous cultural practice of fire burning. Fire has been utilized for millennia by Native Americans, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians as a way of interacting with the land. During the 20th century, governmental wildlife management agencies prevented these burning practices entirely. Westerners arriving on Turtle Island (North America) tended to see burning as inherently destructive—“an enemy capable of destroying all that had been achieved.” Notice the link between ideas of “achievement” and “progress” to a detachment from the land and a lack of responsibility to it.
It turns out the Indigenous practice of using fire as part of the relationship with the land is incredibly beneficial. Responsible burning increases ecological diversity and reduces the risk of larger, out-of-control wildfires. Governmental agencies now frequently look toward traditional ecological knowledge as a source of necessary insight.
Much of the land that we now call “wilderness” has actually been carefully managed by Indigenous peoples for a long, long time. The difference is that their management was centered around a reciprocal relationship, one that respected the autonomy and vibrant aliveness of the world rather than viewing land as simply a place to extract resources or something to own. Again, it comes down to the difference between viewing human beings as inherently separate from nature versus seeing the whole, integrated system of which we are a fundamental part.
It's not wrong to have an impact on the rest of the world around us. It’s inherent to how we live in the world and necessary for the overall well-being of all of us—human, plant, animal, fungus, and non-living things.
Recognizing our interconnection with “nature” allows us to think honestly about our impacts and what we want them to be. What would it look like if, instead of trying to stay away from nature, you asked what you could do to help it? What if you used your interconnection with the world to do as much good as possible?
Moving beyond “untouched nature” doesn’t mean giving up on protecting it—in fact, it’s precisely the opposite. Realizing our fundamental interconnection helps us see the bigger picture and move forward with intention. The first step to flourishing together is accepting that we can’t ever do it alone.