to break into my “cabin”—a ninety-year-old homestead shack
that can’t even keep out the rain—in the first light of dawn. If
a god is in charge of the area, he is surely of the mercurial, Old
Testament variety.
The idea that nature is a bittersweet and sometimes forbidding place is not, as they say, currently trending. More prevalent
is the view reflected in a recent caution from the Chicago Manual
of Style editors that capital-N “Nature” is to be used only to denote
“a goddess dressed in a flowing garment and flinging fruit and
flowers everywhere.” The comment is tongue-in-cheek, but the
point is well taken. The natural world is increasingly seen as a
gentle and giving realm of the spirit. In some cases, this view is
actively religious or quasireligious, whether we are speaking of
the biosphere as the provident earth Mother, the being-of-beings
that is James lovelock’s Gaia, or simply the handiwork of one or
another god. But above all else, the actual experience of being in
nature seems to a;rm its essential holiness. The natural world
feels like a spiritual respite: a literal sanctum, where we are safe
to reconnect to what is larger than ourselves. Compared to the
cosmic rhythms of mountain, sea, and sky, it is ordinary daily
life— driving at rush hour, punching security codes, navigating
a shape-shifting digital culture — that seems hostile.
yet there is a serious problem with our idea of sacred nature,
and that is that the idol is a false one. If we experience the natural
world as a place of succor and comfort, it is in large part because
we have made it so. Only 20 percent of the earth’s terrestrial
surface is still home to all the large mammals it held five hundred years ago, and even across those refugia they are drastically
reduced in abundance. The seas have lost an estimated 90 percent
of their biggest fish. For decades there were almost no wolves,
grizzly bears, or even bald eagles in the lower 48, and modern
recovery projects have brought them back to only a small fraction
of their former ranges. scientists speak of an “ecology of fear”
that once guided the movements and behavior of animals that
shared land- and seascapes with toothy predators—an anxiety
that humans once shared. In much of what’s left of the wild, that
dread no longer applies even to deer or rabbits, let alone us. The
sheer abundance and variety of the living world, its endless chaos
of killing and starving and rutting and su=ering, its routine
horrors of mass death and infanticide and parasites and drought
have faded from sight and mind. We have rendered nature an
easy god to worship.
If humankind’s relationship to the wild were to be embodied
by just one of the gods we have invented, I would nominate Janus,
the twin-faced deity of the ancient Romans. Our sense of the divine
can connect us to nature, but it can divide us from it as well.
spirituality can help us see ourselves as kindred to every living
and nonliving thing, all sprung from the same celestial dust.
This primeval understanding remains deep and broad today, re-
vealed everywhere from the Garden of eden story shared in one
form or another by Christians, Jews, and Muslims; to the Tibetan
name for Mount everest, Chomolungma, the Holy Mother; to
$2,995 shamanic journeys of reconnection to Mother earth in
sedona, Arizona, complete with one-night vision quests,
“weather permitting.” On the other hand, spirituality has long
been used to place ourselves on a pedestal above the rest of cre-
ation. The Garden of eden story includes instructions to “fill the
earth and subdue it” and to “have dominion” over every living
thing, among other phrases that amount to a mission statement
for latter-day capitalism; Mount everest is a challenge to be con-
quered; and that same Arizona wilderness retreat promises to
refresh the “natural power that is your birthright.”
Old Janus has been staring in these opposite directions a long
time — the tension between being a part of nature and standing
apart from it is elemental to what it means to be human. “The
archaeological record encodes hundreds of situations in which
societies were able to develop long-term sustainable relationships
with their environments, and thousands of situations in which the
relationships were short-lived and mutually destructive,” wrote
the Arizona state University anthropologist Charles Redman in
his seminal 1999 book Human Impact on Ancient Environments.
The pattern Redman points to is not, as some might suppose,
divided neatly between destructive societies in the lineage of so-
called Western civilization and sustainable societies in the more
earth-toned traditions often associated with, for example, Native
Americans. A recent scientific review of human impacts on the
oceans found “overwhelming” evidence that aboriginal coastal
cultures “often” depleted their local environments; in fact, the
editors speculate that it may have been the struggle to survive in
increasingly degraded surroundings that gave rise to the conser-
vation values that many Native Americans appear to have held
at the time of european contact. If so, then 1492 was a clash of
Janusian timing: european nations reveling in the discovery of
God-given riches just as Native American cultures were formulat-
ing a spiritual understanding of natural limits.
We know which of those two worldviews prevailed in the centuries that followed—a history that astounds us with the extinction or near-extinction of even the most superabundant creatures,
from the great auk to the bu=alo to the Atlantic cod, though these
iconic species are best thought of only as reminders of a wholesale assault on animate life that left no species unscarred. In the
midst of it all, a countercurrent emerged. A small minority of
people still mark the beginnings of that turning with the 1864
book Man and Nature, by George Perkins Marsh, a pioneer of
ecological thought. With the exhausting thoroughness of autodidactic science-geekery, he presented an inventory of “the extent
