Reading this book by Deane Curtin, I was stuck by a very interesting notion. Why do we, in the US, have protected wilderness?
When I first thought about this, I really thought about two things:
1. We need to protect the earth, and having national wilderness guarantees that the forest, or whatever park it is, will be protected from man’s effects.
2. There is an aesthetic value in going to the wilderness, a place where man doesn’t live.
Why are these two things the first thoughts that popped into my head? Well, for starters, the first point acknowleges that man can gave a negative effect on the environment. Obviously the government thinks this as well. However, I feel like something is missing. Didn’t there used to be people living where these national parks now exist? In fact, they did. Remember the natives that lived on the American continent before European settlers discovered it? These people were moved off the land (forcibly) to create the ‘wilderness.’
This seems odd to me.
It calls into question my view that man is separate from the wilderness, for, in fact, man has been living in the ‘wilderness’ for thousands of years. It wasn’t wilderness then, not in the sense that we think of it today. Hunter gatherer societies would rove from place to place, living off of the land. They would move from place to place, wherever the earth would yield up her bounty. But there were also fishing communities, and even agrarian societies (the Natives loved to grow corn, or maize). It seems to me that the notion of wilderness is, in and of itself, man-made.
When you really think about it, is man separate from nature, or its effects? Not really, even when you look at the advances of modern science. If you take a Darwinist point of view, where natural selection occurs, then, by that very term (‘natural’) mankind was selected by nature. Man is therefore a product of nature. At the same time, if you take a religious point of view, then you admit that a supreme being created mankind, you must also admit that that being created the rest of the earth. If this supreme being created everything together, then mankind is intrinsically connected with the EVERYTHING on the earth.
Even with all of the amazing things that science has discovered, all of them are derived from the earth. All of our electronics, our plastics, they are all mined from the earth. There is really no separation at all. Everything we synthesize, whether it breaks down in 10 minutes, or 3 million years, still breaks down. It is all part a a natural cycle.
Even if all of these things are false, however, one thing, above all else, shows how mankind is a part of nature, and is not separate in the least. We will all die. Our bodies will go to the earth, and become part of the age-old cycle.
