Mastery over nature -Issue XII

VOX - The Student Journal of Politics, Economics and Philosophy

mastery over nature

By Riccardo Mastini

h

umans, like all other species, alter their surrounding

environment to meet their basic needs.

However, technology has granted society the power to re-engineer ecosystems to an extent that has no equal within the natural world. We have almost forgotten the requirement for every living organism to fit into its lifesupport system (Rolston, 1988). Thus, as our economy and our living patterns reveal themselves as increasingly unsustainable, we ought to realise our limitations in controlling Nature.

Tightly interwoven with this theme is the process of cultural globalization. This is shrinking the cul

tural variety accrued in different parts of the world during millennia of parallel development, by substituting it with a “Westernisation� of lifestyles and worldviews. The Western cultural hegemony over local cultures in every continent is the result of centuries of colonisation. Initially, this happened through armies and missions. It continued through philanthropic and financial institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank, who grant funds to developing countries provided that they embrace export-oriented economies and developing projects alike to the Western growth paradigm (Stiglitz, 2002).

In this essay, I maintain that the roots

Issue XII - Summer 2010

of our current ecological and social crises lie both in our attempt to treat the environment as something amenable to our economic purposes, and in the imposition of Western logic of environmental management over all communities and ecosystems of the world.

The reason why humanity appears more and more as an element of disturbance inside natural systems - which, without us, would work smoothly - has to be searched for within our “ecological hubris”: every organism adapts and coevolves with the surrounding environment, whereas humanity wants to dominate it. To this purpose, an enlightening example of this kind of dynamic is offered by the way we eat, which “represents our most profound engagement with the natural world” (Pollan, 2006). Since the dawn of civilization, humanity has reshaped the environment through agriculture, in order to make it more conducive to his development. Thus the process of interacting with nature, and the attempt to mould her according to our needs, is not new at all. However, in the last few decades, the resilience of the ecosystems and the sustainability of our farming systems have shrunk dramatically, due to the application of an industrial logic to the natural world.

From the start of the Twentieth Century, agricultural techniques have been marked by a deep wave of innovation brought on by scientific ad-

vances such as the internal combustion engine. As a result of the introduction of chemical fertilizers, which ensure the fertility of the soil even if all the diversity of animal species and the rotation of different crops have been displaced, the farm can now be treated as a firm pursuing economies of scale and mechanical efficiency. This is what lies behind the practice of monoculture. “Fixing nitrogen allowed the food chain to turn from the logic of biology and embrace the logic of industry.

Instead of eating exclusively from the sun, humanity now began to sip petroleum” (Pollan, 2006). The drawbacks of this system are evident: the two most serious environmental impacts of this “industrial agriculture” are characterised by biodiversity loss and pollution due to monocultures, chemical pesticides, and fertilizers. However, as these problems become more and more acute, our attitude is still the old “reductivist” one; that is, applying our technology to solve a specific problem, and believing that this will not alter some other natural process connected to that one. In our quest for efficiency, we have oversimplified the complexity of natural ecosystems beyond a threshold of safe management (Rockstrom, 2009). Our Faustian desire for mastery over nature has turned an ancient human activity like agriculture - which was, in Carlo Petrini’s phrase, “the government of the limit” - into the blind application of technology without any regard for the intrinsically

VOX - The Student Journal of Politics, Economics and Philosophy

complex nature of ecosystems.

As a matter of fact, Western conventional science is based on Newtonian physics (Berkes & Folke, 1998; Leiss, 1972; Callicott, 1989) and describes nature as a machine, constituted by discrete building blocks from which any one of them can be extracted with predictable effects on the others. This world view deeply affects the management of natural resources and is conflicting with ecology’s teachings.

“Just as in the shift from Newtonian to Einsteinian physics, where the meaning of mass changed from velocityindependent to a velocity-dependent term, in a shift from reductionist forestry to ecological forestry, all scientific terms are changed from ecosystem-independent to ecosystem-dependent ones” (Shiva, 1993). The reductivist approach toward the natural world is not at all surprising if we understand toward which end scientific and technological research has been aimed so far. Actually, the watchword of the classical resource management science and of neo-classical economy is ‘efficiency’ (Berkes & Folke, 1998; Rifkin, 1989). This obsession for efficiency has been pursued at the expense of the resilience of ecosystems (Holling, 1995).

Nevertheless, many of the ecosystems endangered due to extractive practices were dwellings for cultural groups long before the influence of the Western civilization and the introduction of the management practices

explained above. Many of the indigenous denizens in these areas had been able to establish stable and long-lasting practices of environmental management, thanks to an ecological knowledge accrued over centuries. In fact, biodiversity is the origin of cultural diversity; every human group settled in a specific natural environment learns to interact with it – in more or less sustainable ways – in order to ensure its own survival. The knowledge accrued through a process of trial-and-error is stored in the culture handed down from generation to generation (Berkes, 1999; Shiva, 1993). The great challenge we are facing today is represented by the need to abandon our cultural contempt for indigenous knowledge and to start learning from their cultural capital, namely the modality through which “societies convert natural capital into human-made capital” (Berkes & Folke, 1998).

In our quest for efficiency, we have oversimplified the complexity of natural ecosystems often beyond a threshold of safe management.

An example of the linkage between social and ecological systems is offered by the Gangte villages in India. Until the British colonised India, the traditional land-use system among these communities had involved leaving uncultivated groves, which were con-

Issue XII - Summer 2010

sidered sacred. In fact, the larger commercial interests had little spur to preserve the ecosystems of the area, and influenced the local communities to abandon their conservation practices in order to start marketing the precious forests. The effects of the elimination of these groves were noticeable on the ecosystem services and brought about the deterioration of the environment underpinning the local subsistence economy. As a result, the protection of forests has been reinstituted in the area and enforced with new social incentives. “While these refugia are no longer considered to be inviolable as abodes of spiritual beings, the system of community-based vigilance and protection is identical to that prevailing with the sacred groves”(Berkes & Folke, 1998). The idiom of conservation has changed, but the relevance of local knowledge in preserving the ecosystems is still pivotal to the pursuit of sustainability.

The new form of social development for the twenty-first century must be represented by a shift of paradigm from the view of a society detached from the environment to one

in which civilization is seen as embedded in it. Furthermore, we ought to cease trying to control and homogenise cultural diversity on behalf of a new form of syncretism that enriches each human group with the ecological knowledge gained by the others. We ought to substitute our reductivist approach with a holistic one, which accepts the complexity of nature and the uncertainty intrinsic to the outcome of the interaction between humans and the natural world. Our need for a new harmony between civilization and nature must be a spur to create a new ethics concerning economic growth, science and technology, because, as the philosopher Rolston stated: “great power, unconstrained by ethics, is subject to great abuse” (1988).

Bibliography available online at www.voxjournal.co.uk _____________________________ Riccardo Mastini is a first year undergraduate reading Environmental Economics and Environmental Management at the University of York