5 Humans as Part of Nature
Let us not … flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel out the first…. At every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature—but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly.
—FREDERICK ENGELS1
IN CHAPTERS 3 AND 4, we discussed how systemic environmental and social problems are caused by and are intrinsic to capitalism. Tinkering with the system, passing stand-alone laws or enforcing the odd regulation will not solve the root causes of the crises we face. We must ask ourselves: is there something about humans that poses an insurmountable barrier to a new socioeconomic system? Chapters 5, 6, and 7 examine what history and science tell us about how humans have interacted with and changed their environments, and will help us determine whether innate human traits and characteristics prevent us from creating a society based on equality and justice.
Nature is a hard word to define. Originating in Latin as natura, meaning “birth,” today people give the word a wide variety of meanings. Colloquially, it’s used as a blanket term applied to everything that isn’t human or constructed by humans. In everyday speech, people refer to animals as if humans were in an altogether different category (aside from species), instead of being fellow animals. The Oxford English Dictionary definition of nature makes a differentiation between nature and humans rigidly explicit: “the phenomena of the physical world collectively, including plants, animals, the landscape, and other features and products of the Earth, as opposed to humans or human creations.”2 This setting apart of humans as something so different from other species and nature so as to require our own category creates an artificial and damaging dichotomy.
Nature in Western societies is commonly viewed as a place that we travel to visit rather than inhabit on a daily basis. Under capitalism, the dominant ideology postulates that though some of us might feel remorse for the negative consequences our actions have on other species, we are nevertheless compelled by our innate nature to behave as conquerors, to consider ourselves as outside of nature, a species free to exploit other life-forms and the rest of the world without awareness of a deep and vital connection to the rest of the biosphere. It is not merely scientifically incorrect; it disastrously distorts our self-understanding and in the long run is self-defeating.
A rigidly anthropocentric view stemming from biblical conceptions of the domination of nature and placement of earth at the service of humans holds that humans are not only the center and most important part of life on Earth but sit at the apex of biological development. It is therefore our right to dominate and exploit the rest of nature. This view is a complete misunderstanding of the science of evolution and ecology. However distantly, all living organisms are connected to one another through evolution. We are one of an estimated 8.7 million species living on Earth. Even among mammals, Homo sapiens is only one of more than 5,000 species.
From an evolutionary perspective, Homo sapiens, is one of the four genera in the Hominidae family, which includes chimpanzees, orangutans, and gorillas. We are most closely related to bonobos and chimpanzees, sharing close to 99 percent of our DNA with them. In direct contrast to the popular graphics depicting a single evolutionary line in the form of a ladder, from bipedal hominid to human, archaeological evidence shows a far richer set of multiple pathways by which our species evolved.
Our genus (Homo) had many branches, including us (Homo sapiens) and a number of species now extinct, such as Homo neanderthalensis, Homo erectus, Homo habilis, Homo floresiensis, and the latest member, Homo naledi, whose remains were found in a cave in South Africa in 2013 and first described in 2015. Both Homo neanderthalensis and Homo naledi may have buried their dead, a practice once considered unique to our species. Our lineage branched off from the others in the great ape family about 3 million years ago.
Homo sapiens originated approximately 200,000 years ago in East Africa. Genetic evidence indicates that the population went through a bottleneck approximately 70,000 years ago with greatly reduced numbers, possibly connected to unfavorable climate change. The period coincides with the Mount Toba volcanic eruption in Sumatra—the largest in the last few million years—which sent enough ash into the atmosphere to cause major and prolonged climate change in many parts of the world.3 Although there were earlier dispersals of humans who died out, those that populated Eurasia, Australia, Oceana, and the Americas appear to be descended from a group that left Africa around 50,000 to 70,000 years ago.4 Complicating the popular stories of Homo sapiens relentlessly wiping out our cousins the Neanderthals in acts of genocide, recent research indicates not only that we interbred and mingled our DNA, but that Neanderthals, again contrary to popular mythologizing, were not nearly as limited in cognition as once proposed.
As the human population increased and acclimated to new environments demanding new skills, our ancestors began to make different tools, such as improved points and blades for cutting and spearing, objects for adornment, and cave paintings. Over the past 10,000 years, our species has transitioned from small groups hunting and gathering to more stable settlements practicing agriculture and the domestication of plants and animals to greater concentrations in towns and cities with greater divisions of labor.
Today, for the first time in human history, more people live in cities than in rural areas. Living in giant urban settings, humans are increasingly separated from an intimate and daily relationship with soil, wild animals, crops, and other plant life. We are often unaware of the nature that exists in cities and have lost sensitivity to the smaller-scale changes in weather patterns. Amid the cacophony, frenetic pace, and steel-and-concrete construction of these degraded urban landscapes, it is not at all surprising that many people feel that nature exists somewhere other than where they live.
But whether we are aware of it or not, even as we inhabit large cities, still a part of nature and intimately connected with the biosphere, especially with the plants and animals on which we depend for food and medicines, as well as the species that help maintain them: the grasses that feed cattle and goats, the bees that pollinate many crops, and the wasps that attack insects that eat or otherwise harm food plants. The aesthetic pleasure and spiritual and psychological sustenance that humans derive from seeing plant life in forests, gardens, fields, and city parks is considerable.
Numerous studies have shown that connecting with aspects of nature in urban green spaces enhances physical and psychological health and resiliency.5 The simple appreciation and enjoyment of nature’s beauty is a key part of human well-being and can be found in diverse events and environments: the intricacies of a butterfly’s wing; the color, scent, and form of a flower; the sound of birdsong floating on the summer breeze; the miraculous and seemingly organized swarms of birds and fish; the amazing multitude of beetles; the green of a prairie after rain; the new leaves of spring; the feel of hard bark beneath one’s palm; the long-distance migrations of sea creatures and those with wings.6 Our world is filled with inexhaustible beauty and wonder, an evolutionary masterpiece, begetting and changing life in constant involvement and interaction with its surroundings.
When a beaver uses tree branches and tree trunks to build a dam for water control and a den for protection, everyone would agree that this is part of nature. We would think the same for bird’s nests, beehives, and so on. The Australian male brush turkey covers its eggs with just enough of the right amount and type of material to let the decomposing substances warm the nest; the eggs hatch without being constantly warmed by a parent turkey sitting on them. So why is a house built out of wood by humans not equally a part of nature? And why is a brick made from clay by human hands somehow not natural?
Although humans have brought gigantic and long-term changes to Earth, there still exists an innate human affiliation and bond with nature—a biophilia. One indication of this is that there are strong positive effects from humans seeing and interacting with other living organisms. It should not be much of a surprise that we have an affinity for the forms of life with which we co-evolved. For example, in England researchers at the University of Exeter Medical School analyzed mental health data from over 10,000 city dwellers over a period of eighteen years, using high-resolution mapping to track where the subjects lived. They found that people living near more green space reported less mental distress, even after adjusting for income, education, and employment, which are also correlated with health and well-being. In 2009, a team of Dutch researchers found a lower incidence of fifteen diseases—including depression, anxiety, heart disease, diabetes, asthma, and migraines—in people who lived within a half mile of green space. In 2015, an international team overlaid health questionnaire responses from more than 31,000 Toronto residents onto a map of the city, block by block. Those living on blocks with more trees showed a boost in heart and metabolic health equivalent to what one would experience from a $20,000 gain in income. Lower mortality and fewer stress hormones circulating in the blood have also been connected to living close to green space.7
The quintessentially human-created environment of the city, with acres of asphalt, canyons of steel, brick, and concrete, thousands of car engines, the screaming sirens and honking horns, and millions of humans, is also natural, constructed by a natural species. Cities are also places where wildlife exists, and are ecosystems in their own right.
After fourteen years of tracking the more than 2,000 coyotes that are thriving on the streets of Chicago, ecologist Stanley Gehrt has reversed earlier assumptions about the expected dearth of wildlife: “When we started, we didn’t think there was going to be much of a study there…. We were wrong.”8 In New York City, one can find deer, owls, coyotes, turtles, opossum, egrets, herons, falcons, bats, a number of aquatic animal species, and many different insects and plants. Mountain lions have migrated to Los Angeles. In Moscow, there is a population of feral dogs who know how to use the subway.
The more we find out about urban ecology, and take seriously the premise that urban landscapes can be an opportunity for wildlife as much as a challenge, the more that surprises turn up. A new scientific technique, relying on the variation in abundance of different forms (isotopes) of individual elements, allows a distinction to be made between whether the diets of urban animals have switched from their normal prey to human food waste. Though it varies from location to location, the coyotes of Chicago still primarily eat what they always have: rodents, other small mammals, and wild fruit.
Animals play an important role in cleaning up after humans. Researchers found that on the grassy median areas between major streets in New York City, significant food-waste consumption was being undertaken by insects in a manner unnoticed but beneficial to humans:
When vertebrates also had access to food, more was removed, indicating that arthropods and vertebrates compete for littered food. We estimate that arthropods alone could remove 4–6.5 kg [about 9 to 14 pounds] of food per year in a single street median, reducing its availability to less desirable fauna such as rats…. Even small green spaces such as street medians provide ecosystem services that may complement those of larger habitat patches across the urban landscape.9
There are all sorts of organisms living with us in cities. Vegetation in parks and trees along streets are there by design. On the other hand, without conscious human encouragement, numerous types of animals are attracted to cities and find urban niches in which to live. Some of the influx is a result of the decline of original wildlife habitat, as humans spread out into suburbs and other satellite communities.
Urban ecology is an outcome of how humans live and forms an important potential component toward overcoming rifts and disturbances that arise in the interactions of humans with the rest of the natural world. In a future ecological society, a key objective for urban planners will be to enhance and expand the spaces where humans, other animals, and plants coexist, even in highly urbanized areas where humans predominate. More significantly, a major objective will be to reconnect urban and rural life to eradicate a major component of the ecological rift. Over time, this will require reconfiguring the location, size, and design of cities.
HUMANS, PLANTS, AND MICROORGANISMS
Human existence is intertwined with innumerable other organisms—their presence, activity, and balance impact our health. Although some microorganisms cause human diseases, most are either benign or play a role in keeping us healthy. These include not only those microorganisms that enable our digestive system to function and perform many other roles inside our bodies to keep us healthy but also the billions of organisms that live on our skin. Indeed, the human microbiome contributes about as many cells to our bodies as we have human ones. Perhaps we are better described not as a single organism but as a sentient collection of organisms functioning together for mutual benefit.
We discussed earlier the aesthetic and psychological benefits humans receive from just being near and seeing plants in cities and in rural areas. However, the human-plant interaction is at the very basis of our physical existence. Our entire sustenance is derived either directly from plants or indirectly by consuming organisms that themselves consume plants. The energy and nutrients for our bodies are all derived from plants. And many important medicines are derived from plants, such as quinine, codeine, taxol, and aspirin. Medical researchers originally examined many of these plant-based chemicals because of their use in traditional medicine by people around the world. Plants we use for food also have their own microbiomes, helping plants survive in difficult circumstances and defending themselves from insects in diseases (see pages 226–228).
The oceans provide another example of the complexity of interactions between plants, humans (and other animals), and microorganisms. Seagrass beds surround all the continents except Antarctica. They “play an outsize role in the health of the oceans. They shelter important fish species, filter pollutants from seawater, and lock up huge amounts of atmosphere-warming carbon.”10 These ocean meadows provide habitat for fish that humans consume as well as numerous other animals including species of anemones, lobsters, sea turtles, and mollusks. In addition to being unusually rich in biological diversity, water in seagrass beds contains fewer bacteria that cause diseases in humans and marine organisms and coral adjacent to seagrass is healthier than at some distance.11
HUMANS AND OTHER ANIMALS
We are clearly different from other animals, but then cows are different from horses and worms are different from insects. We are different from other animals not just because we use tools, for some other animals do that as well. Ravens, chimpanzees, elephants, and other animals have been observed to use simple tools such as sticks or rocks to access food and water and for other purposes. Even uniquely human abilities, such as conscious decision making and appreciation of past and future are no longer thought to be as unique as once postulated. Reflecting on recent research findings, Charles Siebert, writing in the New York Times, notes:
Advanced neurological and genetic research … has shown that animals like chimpanzees, orcas and elephants possess self-awareness, self-determination and a sense of both the past and future. They have their own distinct languages, complex social interactions and tool use. They grieve and empathize and pass knowledge from one generation to the next. The very same attributes, in other words, that we once believed distinguished us from other animals.12
The discovery of the fossil remains of Homo naledi, the most recently found extinct member of the genus that includes our species, “is a major paleontological breakthrough,” commented primatologist Frans de Waal. “Why not seize this moment to overcome our anthropocentrism and recognize the fuzziness of the distinctions within our extended family? We are one rich collection of mosaics, not only genetically and anatomically, but also mentally.”13
Humans also share certain behaviors with some other animals—behaviors once thought to be uniquely human, such as grieving over the death of a family member or friend or being upset when treated unfairly. After watching a dolphin mother stay close to her dead calf for two days in the waters of Greece’s Amvrakikos Gulf, biological anthropologist Barbara King notes the newness of the idea that animals other than humans express such emotions:
Was the dolphin mother truly grieving for her dead calf? A decade ago I would have said no. As a biological anthropologist who studies animal cognition and emotion, I would have recognized the poignancy of the mother’s behavior but resisted interpreting it as mourning. Like most animal behaviorists, I was trained to describe such reactions in neutral terms such as “altered behavior in response to another’s death.” … Tradition dictates that it is softhearted and unscientific to project human emotions such as grief onto other animals.14
Having seen similar responses in other species, King concludes that there can be an evolutionary advantage, or trade-off, to the development of behavior that at first glance appears to make an animal more vulnerable to predators. Emotional distress can be an adaptation that promotes better cooperation and support from others, thereby enhancing survival. “What is adaptive, then, may not be grief itself but instead the strong positive emotions experienced before grief comes into the picture, shared between two or more living animals whose level of cooperation in nurturing or resource-acquisition tasks is enhanced by these feelings.”15
While other animals seem capable of expressing grief, we are the only living species that anticipates death (as far as we currently know) and weaves the symbolism of it deeply into our art, poetry, writing, and music, with evidence of ceremonial activities around gravesites being one of the earliest examples of human culture. Humans plan future actions with one another—sometimes far into the future. We cooperate in complex ways that other animals cannot, we record and are aware of the distant past and imagine a future, which allows for the perpetuation and evolution of complex culture.
Although humans share important characteristics with other animals, we are nevertheless unique in significant ways, particularly in the development and use of complex language. This has made it possible to learn and transmit to future generations the knowledge to produce and use increasingly sophisticated tools and machines, allowing humans to shape their local, regional, and global environments in more conscious ways than other animals. Humans are part of the large family of life, and certainly not creatures standing aside from, or above, other species.
IDEOLOGY, ECOLOGY, AND HUMANS
There is no such thing as “pristine wilderness” undisturbed by humans anywhere in the world. For example, so-called virgin forests, even including rain forests that have provided habitat for humans for thousands of years, have been altered. Airborne pollutants such as mercury from coal-fired power plants have changed forest soils even in remote locations. If we humans are a part of nature, then to even talk of a “pristine” environment at all is misrepresentative and ideological.
What we can describe are local ecologies that have been more altered versus those that have been less altered; that is, those appropriated for direct human use versus those that have reverted or evolved toward a new or different state following such disturbance or remote enough to have been subjected to only small effects of human activity. The forest that we might enjoy walking through in the eastern United States is likely second- or third-growth, and very different from the colonial or pre-colonial forest. Years after clear-cut logging, a second-growth forest may contain a large number of species of plants and animals, but usually they are less biologically diverse than the original forest because recovery to something resembling a pre-altered state of biodiversity requires a very long time and in many situations may not even be possible.
The notion that newly “discovered” land was “untouched by man” furnished the colonialists and imperialists of history and today’s proponents of capitalist development with a rationale for the essential rightness of their conquests. If the lands of the New World, Asia, Oceania, and Africa were virgin, primeval, underutilized, or not much “improved” by the humans already living there, then why not put the land to good use through occupation, conquest, and suppression of the native population, along with the exploitation of the “natural” world for profit?
Environmental historian Carolyn Merchant points out that the “recovery” of Eden, the biblical garden planted by God but lost in the Fall, is “a powerful narrative, functioning as ideology and legitimation for settlement of the New World, while capitalism, science, and technology provided the means of transforming the material world.”16
But contrary to the myth that the original colonial invaders of the Americas found only small wandering bands of Neolithic hunter-gatherers and mysteriously collapsed empires, the Western Hemisphere was densely populated. An estimated 100 million people lived in the Americas at the time of the European invasion, existing in a range of sophisticated and highly developed societies, with their own transportation networks and trade routes that connected the two continents, their own legal systems and political decision-making processes. Historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, notes the intimate connection between the cultivation of corn and the growth of complex social systems integrated across space and time:
Unlike most grains, corn cannot grow wild and cannot exist without attentive human care…. Corn, being a summer crop, can tolerate no more than twenty to thirty days without water and even less time in high temperatures. Many of the areas where corn was the staple were arid or semiarid, so its cultivation required the design and construction of complex irrigation systems—in place at least two thousand years before Europeans knew the Americas existed. The proliferation of agriculture … could not have occurred without centuries of cultural and commercial interchange among the peoples of North, Central, and South America, whose traders carried seeds as well as other goods and cultural practices.17
The development of agricultural systems and ways of hunting and living resulted in many changes to the landscape in the Americas well before the arrival of any colonists. Its many millions of inhabitants significantly and consciously altered the land. In Changes in the Land, a work of environmental history studying pre- and postcolonial New England, William Cronon writes: “Indians had lived on the continent for thousands of years and had to a significant extent modified it to their purposes…. The choice is not between two landscapes, one with and one without human influence; it is between two human ways of living, two ways of belonging to an ecosystem.”18 Cronon goes on to argue that American Indians purposefully transformed forests and radically altered the ecology of New England. But when the Puritans arrived, changes became more extreme and “could sometimes go so far as to remove the forest altogether, with deleterious effects for trees and Indians.”19 Humans and the physical, cultural, and economic environment within which they exist are in continual exchanges and feedback with each other, producing new possibilities and contradictions:
An ecological history begins by assuming a dynamic and changing relationship between environment and culture, one as apt to produce contradictions as continuities. Moreover, it assumes that the interactions are dialectical. Environment may initially shape the range of choices available to a people at a given moment, but then culture reshapes the environment in responding to those choices. The reshaped environment presents a new set of possibilities for cultural reproduction, thus setting up a new cycle of mutual determination between people and the environment.20
This mutual shaping is important to note. There are many instances of dramatic changes to the environment and societies, and the causes are complex. It is commonly argued that humans have had only a negative impact on the natural world, even to the point of causing societies to collapse, at least partially because of harm they did to the environment.21 If numerous previous human societies caused such damage as to lead to their collapse, the blame for the incredible ecological damage currently occurring must be a replay of such human shortcomings.
However, a growing body of research takes exception to that approach. It explores historical-cultural-ecological interactions and what happened to societies that appear to have changed drastically, even “collapsed.” In their co-edited book Questioning Collapse: Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability, and the Aftermath of Empire, anthropologists Patricia McAnany and Norman Yoffee summarize much of this work as follows:
When closely examined, the overriding human story is one of survival and regeneration. Certainly crises existed, political forms changed, and landscapes were altered, but rarely did societies collapse in an absolute and apocalyptic sense. Even the examples of societal collapse often touted in the media—Rapa Nui (Easter Island), Norse Greenland, Puebloan U.S. Southwest, and the Maya Lowlands—are also cases of societal resilience when examined carefully.22
Although mistakes were made, people generally learned how to adjust practices to better match their soils, topography, and climate. They developed worldviews that acknowledged the importance and interconnectedness of the natural world and themselves as part of it. Now, faced with pressure from climate change as well as those wanting to exploit resources in their lands, some indigenous peoples have responded by expressing a long held belief in the unity of nature and resistance to further degradation. A Yanomami leader and shaman from Brazil, Davi Kopenawa, offers such a perspective:
When they speak about the forest, white people often use the word “environment.” What they refer to in this way is what remains of everything they have destroyed so far. I don’t like this word. The Earth cannot be split apart as if the forest were just a leftover part. With leftover trees and leftover rivers, leftover game, fish and humans who live there, its breath of life will become too short. That is why we are worried. We shamans simply say we are protecting nature as a whole thing. We defend the forests’ trees, mountains and rivers, its fish, game, spirits and human inhabitants. We even defend the land of the white people beyond it and all who live there.23
There is clearly a lot to learn from this approach to nature. Yet this does not mean that indigenous people are somehow closer to nature. The cultural attitudes of indigenous foragers or agricultural village societies toward the natural world stem from the way in which those societies depend directly on their knowledge of nature in order to stay alive. Historically, their resource use was relatively limited, with low productivity, and people could always move somewhere else if life became too difficult. Long-lasting indigenous cultures evolved over time—through trial and error, by paying attention to lessons learned, and transmitting successful strategies to future generations.
What happened to the giant empires and city-states that left their mark in magnificent architecture, often built by the slave labor of conquered peoples, and the intricate and incredible artifacts, pottery, and jewelry of these many varied cultures? Societies such as the Maya were frequently held together by fragile alliances and subjugation of conquered peoples. When such a society collapses, the upper layers of the hierarchies disappear. After the collapse of the power structure that held together the classical Mayan civilization, people moved to new locations and the cities were abandoned. But the Maya people, their language, and most of their culture continued. What disappeared were the upper classes and their formal alliances across geographic areas.
The consensus among scientists studying changes in ancient societies is that human culture and society have proved remarkably resilient. When problems occurred, such as soil erosion in the Mediterranean, people changed practices and adapted to the new situation in ways that perpetuated their societies (see page 51). Those types of creative responses in antiquity as well as current local indigenous knowledge and ways of thinking about our relationship to nature need to be combined with scientific knowledge that is developed without the perspective of profit making and its consequent deleterious effects on our physical environment and various cultures. This will provide the opportunity for human societies to thoughtfully plan and coordinate our interactions with the world around us, and with one another, in order to be ecological and sustainable stewards of the future on a global scale.
The more we learn about the history of different cultures, the more we undermine the idea that humans are innately destructive as a species. The more we learn about the biology and behavior of other species, the more we overturn the idea that we are separate and completely distinct from them. Our intellectual abilities, combined with our potential for cooperative and conscious planned actions over long time scales, give us a unique opportunity among species: to think through our interactions with the environment in which we live, to experiment to find the most ecologically sound processes and procedures, and to regulate our interactions with the biosphere as we go about providing ourselves with life’s needs. Our human characteristics in no way preclude our ability to do so.