Constructing Sustainability

The trap of environmental fundamentalism gets sprung early and often, whenever environmental issues get framed as either-or debates: economy or environment, humans or nature, government regulation or market economy, preservation or development, growth or steady state. Serious public dialogue about desirable future conditions quickly polarizes and degenerates into name-calling: rapists and temple destroyers versus nature Nazis and watermelons (green on the outside and socialist-red on the inside).

Fundamentalism narrows the decision space where common interests overlap. It promotes a politics of blame and shame when what is needed is deliberation and collaboration. Worse, it encourages allegiance rather than understanding. Fundamentalism blinds us from seeing the many natures that evoke hope, wonder, respect, and political action. So-called environmentalists invoking a fundamentalist faith in balanced nature, a pristine continent, a noble savage, and a purposeful evolution paralyze discussions, waste valuable political capital, and deflect needed public discussion away from widely shared public goals of thriving and sustainable communities. Economic developers find fresh meat for their dismissal of environmentalism and understandably look elsewhere for ideals about future communities. Discounting and dismissing the whole environmental message becomes easier if a few prominent rhetorical points are so easily questioned. Bestsellers such Michael Crichton’s State of Fear effectively throw out environmental babies by criticizing the dirt in environmentalism’s bathwater.

Alternative framing of society’s social-environmental problems is possible. Biocultural visionaries such as Aldo Leopold advocate appropriate technology and social ecology that blend rather than separate environmental and social concerns. They advance solutions that benefit both environment and jobs, human equity and biodiversity, urbanization and ecology, utility and beauty, and thriving and sustainable communities. These attractive visions of the future appeal to people of most political persuasions, broadening and deepening the political will to act.

The environment is so complex and our abilities to understand it so imperfect that our appreciation of nature will always be limited. The best we can do is assemble numerous partial glimpses—partial natures. There are infinite such natures, each one appears to us through a different lens of human culture: science, art, religion, and so on. We must use civil discourse to choose among these many natures the ones we want to sustain, create, and extinguish. A pluralized nature will uncover shared interests, reveal potential political partnerships, and motivate community action. Rather than be polarized into apathy by fighting over whose nature is best, we can instead join forces to create our shared vision. Rather than excluding people from caring about nature, we should be including people. The more people care about nature, the more we are likely to mobilize the political support needed to redirect unsustainable behaviors and create thriving communities.

Human creativity can improve, refine, and enhance many natures. We can create natures that help us feel positive about our roles in the biosphere and thus inspire in us the will to act as stewards and lovers of nature. We can be more than responsible citizens of the biotic community; we can be prudent innovators, inspired visionaries, and loving partners in the odyssey of evolution. We can do this without losing respect and appreciation for the creativity and complexity of natures that are autonomous, wild, and rightful.

Of course, we always must be wary of hubris. We must admit that we can destroy as well as create many natures. We must be cautious of our own creativity. We must acknowledge that our technological prowess and growing population amplify our ability to eliminate natures, while our capacities to envision, value, and sustain natures remain limited. Many natures exist, many more are possible, and many of these natures can have a nurturing, creative role for humans. Thriving and sustainable communities exist on the higher ground where these natures overlap.

Excerpted from Hull 2006 Infinite Nature. Chicago Press

I’m a rebound romantic. I once was blindly in love with nature—romantically and lustfully in love. I immersed myself in the deep waters and penetrating solitude of wilderness lakes at the border between Minnesota and Canada, bushwhacked through dense rhododendron forests up steep Appalachian Mountains in pursuit of sunsets, and lost hours meditating on changing colors deep within the Grand Canyon. I opened windows to let flies escape and did not fish for sport because I found no pleasure in causing fish pain. I followed a vegetarian diet, took short showers, turned off lights, and faithfully recycled all materials my community allowed. I tried to take only memories and leave only footprints. But I was painfully aware that by living my life, I created trails in wilderness, trash in dumps, and carbon in the atmosphere. I felt guilty about being human and destroying the nature I loved.

The guilt grew as I took advantage of life’s opportunities to travel the world and raise a family. I had to ignore or suppress this guilt in order to stay sane while leading a professional, middle-class American lifestyle. I knowingly became a hypocrite. I stocked bathrooms in my old but sturdy wood house with ample supplies of soft, clean toilet paper. I drove a car to work more often than I biked. I drank imported beer in nonreturnable bottles. I started eating steak again, and I liked it. On cold snowy days, I appreciated the warmth and comfort of my oil-fired furnace. I flew to conferences, drove on holidays to visit family members, and surfed the Web.

As I struggled with being a hypocrite, it soon dawned on me that I also was a bigamist. I loved both nature and culture. I’d been captivated by fine music and literature, mesmerized by Michelangelo’s David, and awed by the Great Wall of China. I loved sipping fine wine at Australian vineyards and strolling dreamily through the tended Tuscan landscapes. I eagerly enriched my life with friends and ideas from around the world and marvel at the beauty and integrity humans create.

The first part of my professional career focused on the study, management, and protection of romantic experiences in nature. I taught in landscape architecture and natural resource recreation programs, conducted studies in natural areas, and developed methods to assess and legitimize public preferences for nature. Then, with the pressures of establishing a career and family behind me, and awareness of my hypocrisy and bigamy in front of me, I sought to resolve some contradictions in my life.

As a good romantic, I looked to nature for lessons. Pillars of U.S. environmentalism such as Thoreau, Leopold, and Muir found inspiration and guidance in nature, so I searched for answers in wild places and in the scientific studies of nature. I was disappointed to find no absolutes, only qualifications. Rather than an inspiring nature that knew best and could help me establish priorities and defend values, I learned about a dynamic and capricious nature. I found deep divisions and intense debate among my natural science colleagues over issues I had taken for granted: biodiversity is good, ecosystems have integrity, forests have health, species are entities, and naturalness can be defined. And I confronted the dark side to eco-philosophy that promotes fascism, social Darwinism, and misanthropy. Where Muir found humility and interconnectedness, Hitler found genocide and brutality.

I felt like my lover had abandoned me. If nature really was dynamic, capricious, and arbitrary, then perhaps I could be too. My guilt began to ease and my embrace of things cultural grew; clearly I was on the rebound from a shattered relationship and needed to be careful of new infatuations. I remained uneasy about my inability to judge environmental policies and evaluate alternative development scenarios. In what environment did I want to live? What environmental qualities should I advocate? How could I defend my preferences? I had so many more questions than answers that I soon felt more helpless than guilty. My most troubling realization was that I could not define or defend the nature I had loved. What was my lover? A fantasy? An expectation? A social construction?

My tools and training failed to help me make sense of these questions, so I redirected my professional career and began studying environmental debates and land-use planning efforts. I wanted to learn how others were resolving life’s contradictions. Obviously many people had strong opinions (as evidenced by negotiation train wrecks, endless litigation of land-use plans, and heated scholarly debates about the nature of nature). I interviewed scores of people—some experts, some not—about their environmental preferences and concerns. I found that most people were at least as confused as I, and often became visibly anxious when my questions penetrated through their deep-seated beliefs and assumptions about nature and about humanity’s relationship to nature.

Why is nature so elusive a lover? Why did I struggle defining it, justifying its existence, explaining my values for it, and figuring out how I should relate to it? Why do we as a society have such a hard time finding agreement on essential questions about the environmental conditions we want for ourselves and our descendants? The answer, I now suspect, is because environmental fundamentalism traps us in narrow, self-reinforcing, and polarizing debates. Actively pluralizing nature provided me the means to overcome these fundamentalist traps. Hope of deliberation and discourse replaced the helplessness of polarization and paralysis. Optimism about finding common ground replaced the negativity of pointing out differences. I rebounded back into a relationship with many natures.

Excerpted from Infinite Nature, Chicago Press 2006