William Cronon - 460 Handout 25 - That Which We Tame

Lecture #25: That Which We Tame

Outline

I. Searching for Lessons

Remember where we began with that opening lecture on Kennecott, Alaska: environmental history integrates 3 broad perspectives on the past:

the ecology of people as organisms sharing universe with other organisms;
the political economy of people as social beings reshaping nature and each other to produce collective life; and
the cultural values of people as self-reflective beings trying to find meaning of lives in world

Can we extract any lessons from environmental history? Possible answers are endless, but here are a few that seem to me reasonable to draw as conclusions from what we've studied this semester:

A landscape is among most profound and complicated of historical documents, reflecting extraordinarily diverse ecological and cultural processes: history is everywhere around us waiting to be read. (This is the grounding premise of my other big lecture course, History/Geography/Environmental 469, "The Making of the American Landscape," which if you're interested you can explore using its 2018 course web page:
http://www.williamcronon.net/courses/469/
When people migrate from one ecosystem to another, other organisms do too (plant, animal, bacterial, viral), with far-reaching effects.
When people exchange things in a market, they link together ecosystems and encourage change, often without fully understanding the effects they are setting in motion. Markets both connect and disconnect us from the other people, beings, and places with which we're in relationship even when we're unaware of those connections.
People often mismanage fish and other common property resources when economics and ecology conflict, often responding to market incentives that may be in some tension with our individual and collective self-interest.
Tools and technologies powerfully reshape natural environments, but their effects are always mediated by the complex cultural systems in which they are embedded.
If you want to understand people's environmental values, watch what they eat and how, and watch what they throw away and how they do the throwing.
Early conservationists were concerned mainly with questions of economically efficient production, while later environmentalists have often been equally concerned with ecologically responsible consumption (or no consumption at all).
Later still has come a growing awareness of things not consumed, defined as waste, things “thrown away” … with toxic consequences for people who are forced to work and live in their proximity. When people throw things away, where exactly do they think they’re throwing them?
This recalls one of the questions I asked in my very first lecture: “Who has power over whom in this place, and how does the land reflect that power?” You will never fail to learn things if you remember to keep asking that question.
The protection of nature raises profound questions about our attitudes toward government and market, regulation and incentives, freedom and constraint. The proper role of state power has become a powerfully contested question in environmental politics.
We can never encounter nature at first hand, but experience it always through the lens of our own cultural preconceptions--which always contain an extraordinary amount of human history.
Nature often expresses not just our ideas about the non-human world, but about humanity and God as well.
Scale matters, and the processes on which environmental history operates are fractal, from the global to the local, entire ecosystems to our own bodies, macrocosm to microcosm, big to small. The great challenge of environmental history—and of living responsibly on the earth with attention to the ways our own lives affect other creatures and peoples and places—is try as best we can to see both the small and the large at the same, recognizing the fractal scale of environmental relationships. This is well expressed in William Blake's familiar refrain from his “Auguries of Innocence”: To see a world in a grain of sand, And a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And eternity in an hour.

II. Unintended Consequences and Antidotes to Despair

Time for me to stop and reflect on relationship between environmental past, present, and future: is there room for hope?

Like environmentalism itself, environmental history has an uncomfortable, anxious, but inescapable relationship to our feelings about the present and our own prophetic vision of where we think (or hope or fear) we might be headed. It's this question of prophecy and our responsibility for the future that I'd like to address in this lecture.

At this point, I explained how this lecture came to be written, and why it's the last lecture in the course. I narrated this story in the presidential address I gave to the American Society for Environmental History back in 1993, so can quote that passage here. I did not quote this passage in the actual lecture:

When I first started teaching a lecture course on American environmental history at Yale over half a decade ago, I came to the end of the semester feeling that despite all the rough spots and gaps, it had gone as well as I could have expected. My ordinary practice on such occasions is to distribute teaching evaluations during the penultimate week of classes so I can read students' comments and report back to them on what they collectively sec as the strengths and weaknesses of the course. When I did this for the new environmental history class, I was taken aback to discover that despite my students' enthusiasm for the course, the vast majority seemed profoundly depressed by what they had learned in it. I was unprepared for this reaction. What my students had apparently concluded from their encounter with my subject was that the American environment had gone from good to bad in an unrelentingly depressing story that left little or no hope for the future. Because my own feelings about the matter were not nearly so bleak, I had not intended to lead students to this dreary conclusion, and the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that I had no right to end the course on such a note. Whether or not my students' sense of despair was justified, I did not think it was a particularly useful emotion, either personally or politically. To conclude that the environmental past teaches the hopelessness of the environmental future struck me as a profoundly disempowering lesson--albeit a potentially self-fulfilling one--and I felt that my responsibility both as a teacher and as someone who cares about the future must be to resist such a conclusion.

I therefore wrote a final lecture that ended the class on a deliberately upbeat note with a very personal set of reflections about lessons I had extracted from my study of environmental history--the morals I drew from its stories--and the reasons why I continue to remain hopeful despite all the apparent reasons for feeling otherwise. Leaving aside my own worries about the appropriateness of temporarily turning my lectern into the secular equivalent of a pulpit, I'm persuaded that it was the right thing to do, for my students seemed genuinely grateful for this unusual bout of sermonizing on my part. I still end my environmental history course with a similar lecture. And yet I also think there's something odd about an academic subject that seems to require such an antidote against despair. Certainly I've never felt the need for a comparable closing lecture in my classes on the history of the American West, where I suspect that a residue of frontier optimism and high spiritedness somehow combines with moral outrage and regional pride to produce more a~1b1gu?us lessons. Because I've also encountered this sense of despair not just among students but among readers as well, I think it's worth asking why environmental history seems regularly to provoke such a response. A more general way of framing the question is to ask how our study of the environmental past affects our sense of the environmental present and future. Perhaps the simplest way to put this is just to ask: what are the uses of environmental history?

There are complicated moral problems associated with historicizing nature. Doing so may demystify relations we might prefer to keep sacred--and yet it may be equally dangerous to believe in myths that ultimately distort our actual relationships with non-human nature.

One has to do with the subtle effects of human power: technology has become for us a kind of Faustian bargain, giving us many wonderful things but also the power to destroy ourselves and modify any ecosystem, raising at least the possibility that nothing wild untouched by us will survive, on scales ranging from the grand to the small, from the atomic bomb to an eggshell shattered by the thinning resulting from DDT.

To quote a remark by Francis Bacon at the dawn of the scientific revolution: "Nature to be commanded must be obeyed."

But never forget: power over nature is not at all the same as controlling nature. Just because we can destroy something doesn't mean we understand it or now how to use it wisely. One of history's deepest and most chastening insights is that we can never know the full consequences of our own actions ahead of time. As one ecologist put it, you can never do just one thing.

Thomas Midgley can be our poster child for this truth: he tried with the best of intentions to solve a major environmental problem—the expense and toxicity and dangers of refrigeration based on compressed ammonia—by inventing a seemingly benign, non-toxic, highly stable compound that was hugely more efficient for mechanical refrigeration…and created a major threat to the Earth’s ozone layer as a result. As my environmental history colleague John McNeill famously quipped, “Midgley, the same research chemist who figured out that lead would enhance engine performance, had more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in earth history.”

To repeat: it’s very difficult—no, impossible—to foresee all the consequences of our actions.

Note that this is generally true of history, and is as much a fact of history as of ecology. Webs of causality extremely complex, so that actions we make with the best of intentions can have bad consequences‑-and vice versa.

One fundamental lesson of history (not just environmental history, but all history): every action yields proliferating effects and unexpected consequences. Even our best efforts can sometimes go wrong. We've seen myriad examples this semester:

energy-saving interventions like insulating houses can produce indoor air pollution;
saving Echo Park in Dinosaur National Monument meant flooding Glen Canyon;
a brilliant solution to the hazards of ammonia in early refrigeration systems -- freon -- led to the ozone hole over Antarctica; and so on.

Unexpected problems like these could provoke us to despair or cynicism...or, more constructively, they could encourage self-critical humility in the face of mysteries of nature and history both. If so, they can offer antidotes to the intellectual arrogance and moral complacency that human beings all too commonly fall into.

III. Small Victories Are All We Have ... and Should Be Enough

One of the things I cherish about studying both history and the environment is the constant reminder they offer of how challenging it is to do the hard work of knowing the world and each other and ourselves.

Although at this particular moment in the political and cultural life of our nation it’s not always a popular thing to declare, but facts really do matter. Furthermore, facts are also never as simple or easy as we’d like them to be. Many of the things we think we “know” aren’t true at all, and people a hundred years from now will be astonished that anyone could be so benighted as to believe such things.

History teaches this lesson to us over and over again. It reminds us always to ask “What are the documents?” What evidence do we have that supports what we think we know? Just as importantly, is there relevant evidence that does NOT support what we think we know? If not, what are we to make of that contrary evidence?

It takes hard work to know whether in fact the things we think we know accurately reflect the world around us. And yet I hope this course has taught you the importance of taking that challenge seriously. To see only what we want to see about ourselves or the world is to see only what our mirrors reflects back at us. Far too much is hidden from us if that’s all we permit ourselves to see.

Humility and constant attentiveness to that which we do not know seem to me to be essential to what we might call honesty in our relationships with each other and with the world around us. We can't not act if we are to remain alive‑-we cannot avoid using nature, we cannot avoid participating in the earthly webs of killing and consumption that sustain every species on the planet‑-but we must act carefully‑-act with care‑-being as attentive as we can to the consequences of what we do.

In this respect, perhaps it's worth noting something else about environmentalist prophecies of doom in their relationship to human power and its unpredictable consequences: since most of us are creatures of hope who do not consciously choose suicide, we prophesy future doom in order to avert it.

Remember: going all the way back to Biblical times, the goal of prophecy is not to predict the future. Its goal is to warn the people of what might happen if they don’t change the way they’re living. The prophet seeks to persuade people to change the way they’re living so that the prophesied future will NOT come to pass.

We aspire to be false prophets in order to convince people to change the behavior we believe is leading them toward disaster.

The success of Rachel Carson's prophetic intervention is surely among the best reasons I know for studying environmental history. Although we've repeatedly hard prophecies of doom in this class, we've also heard stories of people struggling to respond to those prophecies by changing themselves and their ideas to avert disaster. And they have often succeeded in so doing:

The cholera that was so devastating for cities in the first half of the nineteenth century no longer haunts our cities.
Dinosaur National Monument and Grand Canyon remain free of the floodwaters.
Lake Erie has not died.
International cooperation has taken remarkable steps to reduce the threat of CFCs to atmospheric ozone.
Lois Gibbs and Florence Robinson and others have engaged in heroic efforts to defend their families and their neighborhoods from toxic poisons.
Caribou herds still migrate across the coastal plain of the Arctic Refuge.

We can make a difference, and the earth can be remarkably robust in the face of our best (and worst) efforts.

These are small victories, perhaps, in the face of what may sometime seem to be the possibility of global disaster. But I'm inclined to believe that‑-as mortal beings faced with the inevitability of our own deaths‑-this is the only kind of victory any of us can ever expect to have. Small victories can be—and ought to be‑-enough.

We will never solve the "big problem" called "the environment," because there is no one big problem. There is only a near infinity of problems, large and small. We will never solve all of them—history never ends—but we can and should and will commit ourselves to the hard work of solving as many of them as we can. That should be enough.

Accepting this means accepting the particularity of history itself--accepting that we make history individually and collectively by the ways we lead each minute of our day-to-day lives. The brick in the toilet is in fact a political and moral act—a path to another small victory.

IV. Human Marks on Planet Earth

The central lesson of environmental history, at least for me, is the one I tried to embed in the title to my book, Changes in the Land. To live as human beings on this planet is to change the world around us. That much is inescapable.

The lines and shapes we draw on the land reflect the lines and shapes we imagine in our heads. In lecture, I showed a photo that for my symbolizes this beautifully, showing the shadow of Aldo Leopold's hatted head on the stump of the tree on which he based his essay "The Good Oak." Environmental history tries to reconstruct the endless layers of change that we and the earth have traced upon each other.

It is the history recorded in the tree rings of Leopold's good oak;
It is the history recorded by the marks of his saw upon that tree;
It is the history recorded by the memories in that hatteded head with its shadow on that stump;
It is the history recorded in the essay he crafted from all of these, all inextricably bound together in history and nature both.

This leads to a powerful insight of environmental history: to live on earth is to change it. People cannot live outside nature; they can only think themselves outside it. Neither can nature now be separate from us and our lives. We are in this world together, and must find our way forward together.

Tracing patterns on the landscape is something all living organisms do, and we've been watching people do so in their various ways all through course. Key point about this: the lines and shapes we draw on the land reflect lines and shapes we carry inside our own heads, and we cannot understand either without understanding both at the same time. This means that the material history of environmental change is simultaneously a spiritual history of human consciousness and a political-economic history of human society. Whatever you may think of the balance I've struck among these things in this course, I don't believe you can ever finally separate them from each other. For myself, I find a mysterious sort of beauty and wonder in that fact.

Even our most abstract, grid-like shapes upon the land are also statements about our vision of community, both amongst ourselves and other people; amongst ourselves and other living creatures; amongst ourselves and the earth itself.

Never forget the people in these landscapes, no matter how faceless or far away they may seem: part of our task as historians, part of our responsibility to other people living in the world today, is to try to remember that all these people have faces, that they like all other living creatures live at the center of a personal universe that is worthy of respect and honor. The birdseye view can help us see our connections to these other beings, but it is never enough by itself.

That is why the details matter: history without texture, and details, and lived reality, isn't history at all. We live our lives in the details.

Take for example the implications of human population growth, which raise questions not just about environmental harm but also about social justice. To illustrate this point, I showed a series of cartograms in lecture changing the size of different countries in the world according to different economic and environmental variables. It's well worth revisiting:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/cartograms/

V. The Stories We Tell Our Children

My last set of observations brings me back to the question of values: if we acknowledge that all human living leaves its marks upon the earth, the problem we face is not whether or not we should leave marks‑-here I part company with those who imagine that all human uses and alterations of the earth are inherently bad‑-but what kind of marks to leave. Imagining we could live in nature without leaving marks upon it strikes me as inherently self-deluding.

Our thoughts and dreams inevitably leave shadows upon the land‑-like this image of Ansel Adams in a whimsical self-portrait‑- which trace the record of our passage. From that record we struggle to read the meaning of our lives and our relation to the earth.

Often the most benign visions of these relationships are the ones we hold up to our children as ideals, so that Wordsworth's romantic commitment to a child's vision of the world gains special force when we think of how people reproduce their ecological relationships from generation to generation.

The consequences of the lessons we teach our children, like the consequences of the brick in the toilet, can be small acts leading outward toward imponderable outcomes that can ultimately change the world—while remembering that nature is always waiting to respond to our actions, casting doubt on the true limits of what we take to be our power.

Rachel Carson, The Sense of Wonder:

I sincerely believe that for the child, and for the parent seeking to guide hi m, it is not half so important to know as to feel. If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom, then the emotions and the impressions of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow. The years of early childhood are the time to prepare the soil. Once the emotions have been aroused—a sense of the beautiful, the excitement of the new and the unknown, a feeling of sympathy, pity admiration or love—then we wish for knowledge about the object of our emotional response. Once found, it has lasting meaning. It is more important to pave the way for the child to want to know than to put him on a diet of facts he is not ready to assimilate.

Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac:

We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in.

Wendell Berry, Home Economics:

A culture that does not measure itself by nature...becomes destructive of nature and thus of itself. A culture that does not measure itself by its own best work and the best work of other cultures...becomes destructive of itself and thus of nature.

The challenge we face is to live rightly in relation to the Earth and its creatures and its other peoples. This challenge never ends, and the problems it poses are never solved. Its name is history.

In seeking to tame the earth as we have, we have taken upon ourselves the burden of tending and caring for the garden we have sought to make of this planet. We have become responsible for the earth, and must now accept the moral consequences of that fact. In caring for the earth and its creatures we must also learn to care for ourselves, for taming nature with respect and love means taming and caring for ourselves as well.

I ended by recommending the beautiful writing of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry describing his view of the Earth from above in the early days of aviation in his classic book Terre des hommes [Wind, Sand and Stars] (1939), and then closed with an extended passage from Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince. In it, the Little Prince wanders the universe seeking to find a dear friend of his, a rose that he has lost. He asks after her on different planets, and in the passage I read, encounters a fox in the midst of this search. Here is their conversation:

It was then that the fox appeared.

"Good morning," said the fox.

"Good morning," the little prince responded politely, although when he turned around he saw nothing.

"I am right here," the voice said, "under the apple tree." "

Who are you?" asked the little prince, and added, "You are very pretty to look at."

"I am a fox," said the fox.

"Come and play with me," proposed the little prince.

"I am so unhappy." "I cannot play with you," the fox said. "I am not tamed."

"Ah! Please excuse me," said the little prince. But, after some thought, he added: "What does that mean, 'tame'?"

"You do not live here," said the fox. "What is it that you are looking for?"

"I am looking for men," said the little prince. "What does that mean, 'tame'?"

"Men," said the fox. "They have guns, and they hunt. It is very disturbing. They also raise chickens. These are their only interests. Are you looking for chickens?"

"No," said the little prince. "I am looking for friends. What does that mean, 'tame'?"

"It is an act too often neglected," said the fox. It means to establish ties."

"'To establish ties'?"

"Just that," said the fox. "To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you, I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world..."

"I am beginning to understand," said the little prince. "There is a flower... I think that she has tamed me..."

"It is possible," said the fox. "On the Earth one sees all sorts of things."

* * * * * * * * *

And he went back to meet the fox. "Goodbye," he said.

"Goodbye," said the fox. "And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."

"What is essential is invisible to the eye," the little prince repeated, so that he would be sure to remember.

"It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important."

"It is the time I have wasted for my rose..." said the little prince, so that he would be sure to remember.

"Men have forgotten this truth," said the fox. "But you must not forget it. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed. You are responsible for your rose..."

"I am responsible for my rose," the little prince repeated, so that he would be sure to remember.

The last image on the screen was a satellite view of Planet Earth. Beneath it was a paraphrased quotation that has been ascribed to Edmund Burke (though its provenance is in fact unknown):

No one ever made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.