From the Archives: Creating Nature, Part II (chapter six of The Future and Its Enemies)

From a scientific point of view, environmental stasis is neither natural nor desirable.

The Waipi’o Valley

This post is the second of a series that originally appeared as chapter six of The Future and Its Enemies, published in 1998. The first installment in this series is here. I had to break the chapter into pieces to get it under Gmail’s length constraints. Order The Future and Its Enemies from Amazon here.

On the oldest part of the newest land in the United States, the ever-expanding Big Island of Hawaii, is a place that looks like Eden: the Waipi'o Valley. It nestles, flat and green, between a slate-gray beach and verdant cliffs up to 2,000 feet high. A stream winds through it, giving the valley its name, “curving water.” The volcanic soil is rich, the rain ample, the temperature warm. For nine centuries, Waipi'o was Hawaii’s breadbasket, its irrigated paddies supplying taro, whose starchy roots are mashed into poi. Fruit trees grow wild here—guava, mango, Java plum, banana—along with ginger, berries, medicinal plants, and edible ferns. The kukui, or candlenut tree, yields nuts that can be eaten or strung together and burned for hours of light. Wild horses and pigs roam the valley, and its water is full of prawn, fish, and escargot-like snails. Waterfalls dangle from the valley’s back wall. Viewed from the plateau above, Waipi'o is a miniature world, small enough to cup in your hands. Except for the mosquitoes and a bit too much humidity, it does seem like paradise.

Yet there are few people here. And the stories Kelly Loo tells are full of hunger: How, as children in the valley, he and his friends used to swipe the food offerings their Chinese neighbors left for ancestral spirits. How he used to find eggs and hide them in the outhouse, hoarding them for himself. “What did I know?” he says. “I was a hungry kid.”

Retired from a job with the water company, Loo now lives in a suburban-style home on the outlook above the valley, where amenities such as electricity and paved roads are available. He takes tourists down to the valley floor in his four-wheel-drive van, telling stories as he negotiates the 45-degree semi-paved one-lane road. He also grows taro, and has the calloused hands and herbicide-loving attitudes of a farmer.

Loo is thoroughly at home among the valley’s plants and animals, happy with a garden to work and keep, full of Hawaiian natural lore. But he does not wax romantic about how “stability” distinguishes “flourishing ecosystems.” It is not human nature to prefer poverty and hunger to the comforts of cold beer and four-wheel drive.

Besides, Loo knows that nature is not stable.

On April 1, 1946, a 50-foot-high wall of water slammed into this tranquil valley, flattening everything before it. The same tsunami killed 96 people in the city of Hilo, 50 miles to the south. The several hundred residents of Waipi'o escaped unharmed, but their homes and other buildings were destroyed. Today’s valley has no sign of the houses, stores, or churches of Loo’s boyhood. He points to a wild and vacant meadow where his hometown once stood.

The Waipi'o Valley’s current “natural” state is the result of that cataclysm—and, just as surely, of the pull of economic opportunity elsewhere. In the valley, and in the rest of the world, nature is more complicated than romantic visions of stability suggest. Waipi'o did not arise spontaneously, created by autonomous nature seeking its proper form. Many of its varied flora and fauna are imports, brought by the Polynesians who first settled the island and the Europeans who followed centuries later. Palm trees, taro, and bananas are not native to bare volcanic rock.

Indeed, contrary to Gray’s confident assertion about “the discipline of ecology in all of its varieties,” ecologists no longer hold a static vision of nature. They no longer portray a balanced world that seeks equilibrium and is undisturbed in any major way by fire or flood, tidal waves or volcanos, drought or disease. The balance of nature “makes nice poetry, but it’s not such great science,” says the plant ecologist Steward T.A. Pickett. Instead, current ecological science emphasizes turmoil and disruption: Constant changes create conditions in which different species thrive. Some of those changes have nothing to do with people, but others are driven by human artifice. Deliberately set, human-controlled fires appear to have shaped the African savannas and American prairies, while the rainforests of Latin America, like the islands of Hawaii, contain many plants imported by pre-European settlers.

“There is almost no circumstance one can find where something isn’t changing the system,” says the paleoecologist George L. Jacobson Jr., who studies changes reflected in sediments and rocks. If nature does tend toward an equilibrium, he notes, “it’s never allowed to get there, so we might as well not expect it to exist.” Nature has no end, no goal, no one best state. Daniel Botkin, one of the leading scholars of the “new ecology,” writes that:

nature, never having been constant, does not provide a simple answer as to what is right, proper, and best for our environment. There is no simple condition that is best for all of life. Some creatures are adapted to disturbed environments, like the Kirtland’s warbler, an endangered bird that nests only in forests that have recently burned. The warbler became endangered because of the Smokey the Bear policy of our century to suppress all fires as unnatural and undesirable. Other species, like sugar maple, are adapted to relatively undisturbed conditions. An environment that is “best” has many different conditions at different locations at the same time. The nature that is best is not a single, idyllic scene from a Hudson River School of painting, but a moving picture show, mosaics on a video screen, many different conditions distributed in complex patterns across the landscape.

From a scientific point of view, stasis is neither natural nor desirable. Interpreting the Endangered Species Act to enforce a hands-off policy has endangered numerous species, from butterflies and songbirds to grizzly bears, that depend on habitat not found in “climax” forests. Different living things require different conditions; the diversity of life is encouraged by the dynamism of nature.

Pygmy Nuthatches in an area of the Angeles National Forest burned by the Bobcat Fire in 2020. Photograph by Sean M. Crockett, taken August 1, 2022. More information at the end of this post.

And assuming that nature will remain constant tends to backfire. Botkin began his career as the caretaker of Hutcheson Memorial Forest, an uncut stand of oak and hickory bought in the 1950s by Rutgers University. The forest’s protectors assumed that leaving the woods alone was the best way to save it for posterity. The Hutcheson Forest was, said a 1954 article, “a cross-section of nature in equilibrium.” Without human interference, the forest was expected to stay pretty much the same forever, each generation of trees providing for the next: “The present oaks and other hardwood trees have succeeded other types of trees that went before them. Now these trees, after reaching old age, die and return their substance to the soil and help their replacements to sturdy growth and ripe old age in turn.” In this patch of New Jersey, the experts believed, nature had found its balance.

But the oaks did not reproduce; maples began to take over. By examining fire scars in the stumps of dead trees, Rutgers researchers discovered the artifice behind their cherished nature: Before Europeans arrived in New Jersey, Indians had burned the underbrush about every decade or so, presumably either to drive game or make travel easier. “These frequent fires cleared the understory, favored oaks over maples, and created the open forest of tall trees believed by naturalists in the early sixties to be original, constant, and unaffected by human influence,” writes Botkin. The Indians weren’t trying to produce a beautiful forest of hickory and oak; that particular mix of trees was a ripple effect, nature created as a consequence of art. Contrary to static assumptions about how ecologies work, Botkin warns, a place that is truly protected from human interference “may become a ‘nature’ nobody has ever seen before and perhaps nobody really wants.” By contrast, the “environment that we like, and that we think of as ‘natural’” is often the creation of earlier human action.

For ecologists like Botkin, a turbulent sense of nature in no way means that whatever humans do is good. It simply demands far more clarity about what human beings want from the environment and more research into how particular natural systems work. In some places, we may want to recreate the experience of nature as European explorers discovered it on the American continent 300 years ago, a nature shaped by Indians’ artifice. In others, we may want to preserve a particular species or maintain fishing grounds. Or we may have more global purposes, planting trees not for their own sakes but to soak up carbon dioxide, for instance. Achieving any of these goals—all of which are “artificial”—requires careful data collection, sophisticated and subtle models, and significant local knowledge: When Botkin’s research team sought to understand the fluctuations in Washington state salmon populations, they got the most useful information not from the traditional theory of “maximum sustainable yield” but from an old-time fisherman, who knew that future supplies of salmon could be predicted by the water levels in the stream when they hatched.

Far from trying to plough up biological systems, Botkin and his fellow ecologists are eager to preserve and extend them—to create the varieties of nature that environmentalists value. Botkin is suspicious of civil engineering to tame rivers and mourns the passing of the prairie; he thrills to the songs of sparrows and the howling of wolves, a symphony in the forest night. But he does not claim that “nature knows best.” Rather, Botkin argues frankly for the human value of saving what he loves, for prairies as a connection to history and species preservation to serve our “aesthetic and moral sense.” He does not disdain as artificial the restoration ecology that applies the mind of a gardener to the recreation of lost natural systems such as midwestern prairies. He believes human desires will and, by implication, should affect the evolution of nature. That belief puts Botkin at odds with green reactionaries, who despise human influence. He bluntly acknowledges, “Nature in the twenty-first century will be a nature that we make; the question is the degree to which this molding will be intentional or unintentional, desirable or undesirable.”

Green-tailed Towhee in an area of the Angeles National Forest burned by the Bobcat Fire in 2020. Photograph by Sean M. Crockett, taken August 1, 2022. More information at the end of this post.

Botkin is a scientist, and he dodges the contentious political issues of whose definition of “desirable or undesirable” will get applied in what situation. In most of the examples he cites, where he himself has done applied research, the affected parties agree on the desirable outcome: The Hutcheson Forest was privately purchased in 1954; its owners want a forest of hickory and oak—the forest the first European settlers would have discovered. Similarly, most people want to protect Northwest salmon, if only to preserve the fishing stocks, and African elephants; the main issue is how to do so most effectively, with the least disruption of other human goals. (In many such cases, political economists using equally dynamic analysis have been independently working to square public goods with private incentives.) At least at their current stage of development, these questions are matters more of knowledge and technology than of power and coercion.

To reactionaries, however, Botkin’s problem-solving approach is deeply political—and deeply offensive. In addressing such problems, Botkin relishes technology and believes it can help us understand and protect nature: “Having altered nature with our technology, we must depend on technology to see us through to solutions.” He sees nature not as something pristine, to be protected from human interference, but as something valuable, to be preserved through human action.

Reactionaries, by contrast, need nature as a moral absolute, exemplified by its perfect balance. “The ecological perspective begins with a view of the whole, an understanding of how the various parts of nature interact in patterns that tend toward balance and persist over time,” writes Al Gore in his best-selling book called, not coincidentally, Earth in the Balance. Botkin’s research topples this entire world view. His work declares that nature has no single goal—that there is no static standard for “the natural.” If nature doesn’t define its own purposes, and if even "natural" states may incorporate human artifice, then nature is no guide even to its own proper destiny, much less to human life.

This idea is deeply troubling to reactionary greens. “On the first Earth Day, it seemed that the great coming struggle would be between what was left of pristine nature, delicately balanced in [climax-ecology pioneer] Eugene Odum’s beautifully rational ecosystems, and a human race bent on mindless, greedy destruction,” the environmental historian Donald Worster writes nostalgically. “Two decades later, however, ecology had lost any clear notion of what pristine meant.”

Pygmy Nuthatch in an area of the Angeles National Forest burned by the Bobcat Fire in 2020. Photograph by Sean M. Crockett, taken August 1, 2022. More information at the end of this post.

Worster is a pioneer in his academic specialty and holds an endowed chair at the University of Kansas; his history of ecological ideas is a standard text. He cannot simply ignore the change that has swept through the science without sacrificing his own scholarly credibility. But Worster clearly prefers the era in which “nature” appeared to back his own social vision. So he treats the new ecologists’ meticulous work as mere invention, backed by a “hidden agenda” of supporting modern life. Real ecology, good ecology, he implies, would come to different conclusions. Dynamic portrayals of nature, he charges, "constitute what I would call a new permissiveness in ecology....This new ecology makes human wants and desires the primary test of what should be done with the earth. It denies that there is to be found in nature, past or present, any standard for, or even much of a limitation on, those desires."

On this point, Worster is more or less correct. Botkin and his new ecologist colleagues do say that nature will be what we make it, that it has no “true” state. Humans do indeed have to choose and, in that choice, human wants and desires will be what matters. That is the way the world is. Of course, those wants and desires include the pleasures of beautiful places and “unspoiled” nature, however defined. But if people like Worster, or Botkin himself, want to preserve “wild” areas, they will have to convince others to share their desire. And to get the nature they want, they will have to do much more than simply keep out humans. They will have to exercise artifice—to set fires, to favor some species over others, to act as active gardeners, not passive guardians.

Nature does, of course, impose some constraints on human actions: We cannot, as far as we know, go faster than the speed of light or be in two places at the same time. Chemicals bond in some ways and not in others. Certain plants require bright sunlight, others shade. Salmon will only spawn under certain, quite complicated, conditions. Any gardener knows, with Sir Francis Bacon, that to be commanded, nature must be obeyed. Nature tells us that if we want X, we must do Y and cannot do Z. It does not tell us whether to want, or not to want, X. It does not dictate that wilderness areas must remain “untrammeled by man,” that logging, automobiles, wheat fields, and Disneyland are inherently evil, or that every species of beetle should be preserved. Turbulent nature does not decree the one best state for each part of the globe. It cannot tell us what to want.

The glamorous peasant life. Photo: Pxhere.com

Worster emphatically knows what he himself wants, and he surely knows that his vision of the good life is unpopular—as a poverty-stricken reality, if not as a romantic fantasy. He recites the litany of peasant virtues, familiar from the writings of other green reactionaries, with its limits on risk-taking, innovation, and imagination: “A stable, enduring rural society in equilibrium with the processes of nature cannot allow much freedom or self-assertiveness to the individual....A farmer acts within a severely constraining network of duties and obligations that allow little personal initiative. That is the best way, people all over the world have understood, to avoid too much risk and preserve the rural community in harmony with the soil.” Worster wants human beings to sacrifice their tool-making instincts, their inquisitiveness, their desire for comfort, and their freedom. If he can convince us that nature is static, then he can claim a moral, natural imperative to maintain static human societies.

But nature does not provide the moral imperatives Worster and other reactionaries would like, the arguments that would silence the claims of freedom, exploration, and material progress. About the proper way for humans to live, nature is silent. Nature is too diverse and too dynamic to offer absolutes.

My Chapman University colleague Sean Crockett, with whom I’ll be teaching a first-year seminar titled “Ambition and the Meanings of Success” this fall, is an economist by profession and a serious wildlife photographer by avocation. Lately, he’s been taking photos in burned areas of California, including the ones he graciously allowed me to share here. He writes:

The shots were taken near a stream, in a mixed conifer forest. The area within 20 feet of the stream is bursting at the seams with flowers, bushes, and birds. The farther you move from the stream, the drier and less full of life.  Basically, the healing process is most rapid from the stream outward, but over time the whole area will heal, unless it burns in rapid succession (some trees are designed to drop seeds when they burn, and when those seedlings are burned before also producing seed themselves, all is lost), or drought conditions persist too long….

Nuthatches (both Pygmy and White-breasted) are super prevalent in this area, the biggest densities I've ever seen. My guess is that the burn helped create abundant nest sites for nuthatches, because they are cavity dwellers but not very strong excavators like woodpeckers; the burn softens the trees and makes them easier to drill into. But the keys to their success in this particular place (I speculate) are (1) only half of the trees burned and died, so there is still plenty of food for the nuthatches in the living trees (they forage in pinecones and pine needle clusters), and (2) the burned trees (new nesting sights) were not salvage-logged and removed. I've seen several clusters of 25 Pygmy Nuthatches in this area (White-breasted are much less social, usually seen singly). [The two photos here] were taken about 40 feet apart from each other as one such cluster descended to near-ground level. They were romping, chattering, and chasing each other. It was in an area of burned trees, but on a dry stream bed that had a lot of grasses, ferns, and bushes growing from it.

[The Green-tailed Towhee] tends to summer in the mountains and winters at lower elevations. These birds require shrubby habitat, they're secretive and stay relatively hidden most of the time in this low tangled growth, so they love the early re-growth after burns (mountain meadows are also a good place to see them).

Thus both of these species are built to take advantage of burn areas, although for the Pygmy Nuthatch, it seems to require the right kind of burn (complete eradication of the canopy would not work for them).

Follow Sean on Instagram here.