Words of Nature

This page is somewhat redundant since we have already referenced a paper that covers much of the same ground, Alternative Environmental₂ Policy Concepts. However the issue is important enough to summarize here, adding to the topics covered in the paper and excising others.

The 20th century went a long way to confusing what we might mean by the terms "nature" and "natural". The difficulty is that nature is both a scientific and humanistic concept. As a scientific concept it means simply whatever is. This is usually thought of in terms of the organic, but stars and rocks are equally natural. Birth, sexual intercourse, death, these are all a part of nature and thus natural. So are viruses. So are the "laws" by which engineers construct our world and farmers grow our food. It is as natural for a plant fed a chemical fertilizer to grow more rapidly as it is for a plant to react positively to cow manure.

As a humanistic concept, however, nature and natural have come to have more specific and exclusive meanings. What the chemist produces in his laboratory or the genetic engineer creates in his becomes devalued as "not natural" Nature in this sense tends in most 20th century thinking to be generally good, something we want. When we say that a product is "all natural", the implication is that it is necessarily good for this reason. The assumption is that human beings (whose activities — in lab or out — are unavoidably "natural" by the scientific definition of the term) have done relatively little processing of the product. It may simply mean that an older technology is being used.

Analogous dichotomies between what I refer to as humanistic definitions and scientific definitions is found in the way the 20th century used the terms organic, ecology, and environment. Scientifically "organic" either means that certain chemical compounds are to be found in a substance (organic chemistry) or that the thing under consideration has been produced by a organic process, such as mutation or germination. Humanistically, the definition generally starts off from the latter and refines it further. It now means that what is discussed has been produced by more traditional, perhaps less "invasive", procedures. Ecology is scientifically the study of the context in which organisms develop and interact with one another. Ecological change in this sense is neither good nor bad. Humanistically, however, an ecology may be said to be "threatened" or "destroyed". What is meant that the preexisting or "traditional" ecology is in danger of being disrupted or has been disrupted. This change may include loss of species or the replacement of former species by "invasive species". Much the same distinction can be made in speaking of "environment". An environment is descriptively what surrounds a person, a group of people, or any central focus we wish to make. Environments in this sense are neither good nor bad. Judgements of this kind depend on the point of view of the observer, a point of view that can warp the reality of the description of an environment.

At this point, a word needs to be said about the use of "humanistically". This is a shorthand, and not a very good one at that. The web pages you are now reading would be best described as efforts in the "humanities" — and they are clearly tending to take positions rather different than that of the putative 20th century humanist. Therefore, in spite of our shorthand usage above, there should be no assumption that a humanist has any particular set of values. But "values" humanists do have. The humanist is an evaluator. So is a scientist. But the standards evaluated against are rather different. Ideally, the scientist's values in the course of his or her work are objective, based on a search for objective truth (which is not, of course, to say that this standard is always attained). The humanist, on the other hand, often freely admits that his or her values are subjective, not capable of proof. He might, for example, want to see wolves reintroduced into California, or see the preservation of old growth cedars in Alaska. He can adduce scientific arguments for both judgments, but his critical judgment might be that he just likes a world better in which wolves are in California again and the old growth forests remain. (Many humanists will, of course, object that they are ever bit as dedicated to the search for the unvarnished truth as the natural scientist. We can only hope here to give a feeling for the weight of the evidence. For more on this issue see Raymond D. Gastil, Social Humanities: Toward an Integrative Discipline of Science and Values, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1977, pages 1-14.).

"Sustainability" is a related concept, but one that we have to approach differently, for it does not have a clear scientific-humanistic boundary as these terms are used above. Widely used as a criterion for accepting or rejecting (1) a specific development project or (2) a more generalized development process, sustainability has both a physical or biological aspect and a social aspect. The basic concept appears to be that action X in environment Y is too dangerous because it will irretrievably damage or destroy an essential quality of the environment, whether this be a physical or social aspect. Again, in a purely material sense, arguments that X is not sustainable in Y often appear to have more humanistic than scientific content. For a fuller discussion of this issue see Sustainable Development: Definitions and Imponderables.