Are Humans Part of Nature?

 Are humans a part of nature? Or are we apart from it? Do we remain “of nature” like our nearest relatives, the great apes? Or are we the only species to have gotten “out of nature”? The question is more than academic, because the answer provides a partial rationale for how we interact with nature. It’s also relevant to the issue of the nature of nature.

There is no question that humans have their evolutionary origins in nature. We are related to all other living things through descent from a common ancestor. As a result of that evolutionary history, we share with all other beings parts of our genetic, biochemical, physical and behavioural make-up, depending on the closeness of our relationship to them. We share certain aspects of our genetic structure with all other living things: microbes, plants and animals. But we share our opposable thumb only with other primates. Most of our distinctive physical, behavioural and mental characteristics are probably just elaborations of features evident in more rudimentary form in our near relatives.

There is also no question that humans, at least as individuals, remain bound by basic biological processes common to all living organisms. We must eat, excrete, grow, reproduce and die just like all other living things. And even more deflating, like most other beings, we harbour hundreds of different kinds of symbiotic microbes many of which we could not live without. So, as much as we may like to think of ourselves as rugged individualists or fastidious hygienists, none of us stands alone and “clean”. Like it or not, our individual well-being is inextricably intertwined with other beings, which are manifestly part of nature.

It comes as no surprise, therefore, that when asked in surveys, most Westerners say humans are part of nature. But as with other aspects of our behaviour, what we say may not accord with what we do. And what we do suggests we think of ourselves as being outside nature.

Take the way we talk about nature. We speak of “experiencing nature”, “enjoying nature”, “going into nature”, “battling nature”, “taming nature”, “rehabilitating nature” and “saving nature”. Such expressions would not exist if humans felt truly seamless with nature. And when we speak of “pristine” nature, what could we have in mind other than the absence of all human influence?

Indeed, the word nature might not exist were it not for a feeling of it being something outside ourselves.

We also partition the world between nature and humans. We think in terms of natural disasters, or as they are sometimes also curiously known, acts of God, and human-made disasters, and we distinguish the natural environment from the human environment.

We have a collective personal pronoun (“we”) for all members of our own species, although we personally know only a tiny fraction of its 6.8 billion members. But we have no such collective identifier for ourselves, individually or as a species, and any other part of nature, including our closest relatives, the great apes and our closest companion animals, dogs and cats.

In allocating the Earth’s surface into parcels so they can be owned, we assign some areas to nature and other areas to humans. Nature is, literally, on one side of the fence, and human activity on the other side. The two seem fundamentally incompatible.

Our belief that technology can, or at least soon will be able to, solve any problem based in nature, especially those processes that control the distribution and abundance of all other species, is further evidence that we think of ourselves as being outside nature. We even believe our current dependency on other species for such basic “services” as carbon fixation and oxygen production (photosynthesis) will one day be replaced by technological systems if we so choose. We are taking the first steps to consciously shape our own evolution, and we are looking forward to making death an option.

Not only are we outside nature, we are moving ever further away from it, both physically and mentally. We are urbanising at an increasingly rapid rate, and with each new generation we become more ignorant and fearful of its diminishing remnants.

From our position outside nature, we look back and criticise it. We think rain falls in the “wrong places” (not where people live); water flowing into the sea is “wasted”; birds fly into aircraft (which object is moving faster?); marine predators are eating “our” fish, and some whales are sliding to extinction because “they like to swim in increasingly busy shipping lanes”.

And of course, we project human feelings, meaning, motives and values not only onto animals but also plants and sometimes even inanimate objects. Predators, for example, are “cruel” and “vicious” and their prey is “innocent” and “helpless”. And while we project the full range of human values onto the different parts of nature, the one value that would come closest to the truth for all of nature is: “indifferent”—perhaps the most chilling characterisation of them all.

Lastly, who would not intuitively agree with the simple proposition that all that stands in the way of a complete reversion to the state of nature on planet Earth is the continued existence of just one species?

So when did humans step outside of nature? Of all the major cultural innovations that mark the evolution of the hominids, perhaps none is as important as the mastery of fire by our Homo erectus ancestors, perhaps as early as 1.7 million years ago but certainly by 400,000 years ago. When we mastered fire, and our own fear of it, we gained the ability to control the lives of all other living things. Not for nothing did the affronted Greek gods condemn Prometheus to perpetual torment for giving humans fire and the Christian god expel the first humans from Eden (nature) when the brighter of the two chose knowledge (technology) over ignorance (faith).

Why, then, should we say we are part of nature and yet act as if we are apart from it?

One reason could be that we want to feel in continuity with our origins and take the first easy step by simply asserting we are part of nature. But in practice we find it difficult to know how to go about making a satisfying connection, and we’re often uncomfortable when we try. We may be attempting the impossible.

Another reason may be that it gives us a rationale for treating nature any way we want. If we are part of nature, then whatever we do is also part of nature. This leads to 6.8 billion different views of what nature is or should be. At one extreme, this rationale sanctions the widespread and rapid conversion of nature into human goods and services by saying we are simply doing what any other species would do, only we’re just more efficient at it. At the other extreme, it supports the view that like all other species we are just playing a role in “shaping” nature. After all, beavers build dams, birds construct “homes”, elephants knock over trees and wombats excavate deep burrows.

The pragmatic consequence of this view is that nature becomes, for each of us, “whatever I want it to be”. There is even a new concept of nature compatible with this view. It’s called, with all the subtlety of the rebranding advertiser’s art, the “new nature”.

The view that we are part of nature has also given rise to the fashionable notion of “stewardship”. Many see a capacity for “stewardship” as being part of what we are as a species within nature and think we have an obligation to exercise it. But putting aside the subjectivity of the concept, the notion of stewardship seems as indicative of a belief that humans are apart from nature as that they a part of it. “Stewardship” implies the imposition of some “state” pleasing to the steward in regard to some “other” that is external to the steward. And what is that “other” if it is not nature?

Another reason for wishing to believe that we are part of nature may be that if we consciously accept we are outside nature, we also have to accept that we are totally alone in the universe. We stand apart not only from the physical universe but also from those beings with which we might truly claim an affinity of kinship and existential destiny. No wonder we wish to maintain the charade of being connected.

In contrast to the view that humans are part of nature, which conveniently opens nature to being defined as whatever humans think it is or want it to be, the view that humans are apart from nature supplies an objective definition of nature and creates a logical necessity for humans to justify what they do to it.

Undeniably, nature is what existed for the 3.5 billion years prior to the evolution of humans. Equally, this long period of evolution in the absence of humans is what led to those remnants of nature that some humans still find interesting and inspiring today. Everything we find intriguing about koalas, for example, is owing to their evolution in the absence of human influence. And would any of us, aside from those who might possibly see a commercial benefit, find any koala bearing human influence as interesting as one without? Pocket-sized koalas, anyone? Why, therefore, should nature today not continue to be defined as what exists in the absence of human influence? And in contrast to other views about what nature is or should be, this definition does not look back to some past state, such as pre-Aboriginal or pre-European time, but to a state that would exist today—in the absence of human influence.

It needs to be stated clearly, lest the faint-hearted take fright or the calculatingly rapacious sow fear, that the notion of the absence of human influence is not advocacy for the extinction of humans. It is simply to assert that if we want an objective definition of nature in our own time, we can do no better than that state which would develop in the absence of our influence.

One immediate benefit of such a definition of nature is to give clarity to a number of popular but vague environmental concepts such as “biodiversity”, “healthy” (as in rivers, ecosystems, oceans, the planet) and “sustainable”. These concepts have become so vague in regard to any specific situation they are useless other than to make everyone feel good and allow them to keep talking.

But under the concept of nature proposed here, the natural biodiversity of a site at the present time would be what would exist at that site in the elimination of past human influence and the exclusion of future influence. In most terrestrial locations, biodiversity would plummet, because the exotic species (past human influence) would be removed in theory, if not in practice. For example, exotic species make up about 11 per cent of Australia’s 20,000 or so vascular plant species.

A healthy river would be any condition a river might assume when human influence was removed. Over the short term, it could vary from bone dry to rampant flood, and over a longer term it would meander. If a “healthy” river is anything other than what a river would be in the absence of humans, it must be some condition that humans find “healthy” for their own purposes and not as nature. For most people this would be a river that was always full and gently flowing. But most rivers, especially in arid countries such as Australia, vary quite “healthily” over a wide range of conditions.

Similarly, environmental “sustainability” is usually code for economic sustainability and has little to do with the condition of the ultimate “upstream” source of economic activity, nature. But nature, defined as the absence of human influence, provides a clear baseline against which to measure what is or is not being sustained in nature as a result of economic activity.

Nature as the state that would exist in the absence of human influence might also take the “management of nature” off the list of contemporary oxymorons. The first question a manager would ask ahead of any action would be: What would the situation look like if the effects of past human influence were removed and future human influence withheld? Once we understood this state, we could then talk about the human influences we might want to apply and how we would measure their impact on the natural state. This would be “management of human influences”. In some cases, the natural state could be inferred from historical records and human experience. But in other cases, we might want to create reserves in which natural processes working in the absence of human perturbations could eventually show us what contemporary nature was capable of being.

Consider one of the most common examples of humans trying to “restore nature”: tree planting. People living in areas that once supported extensive forest or woodland often decide to restore some part of the landscape to “what it was like” (before what?) by planting a few trees. Such programs often start with managers removing at least some of the human influences still impinging on the site, such as exotic herbivores. Then they might plant two or three of the larger tree species previously common to the area, often with the help of the public and their departmental photographer. In the following weeks, someone might return to water the trees a few times and check the protective guards placed around them. Then they forget about the site. If all goes well, the trees will indeed grow, and people with long memories will see that there are more trees than in the past. Perhaps they will even call it a forest or woodland again.

Such efforts may go a long way to satisfying human needs, but they have little to do with the re-establishment of nature at the site, other than perhaps to cause humans to finally leave it alone for an extended period. The tree planting creates a comforting illusion of a woodland; but the few species creating this illusion are hardly an ecosystem. The planting provides a quick cosmetic effect, which panders to human impatience; but it can never replace the “slow cooking” of natural regeneration. And the project may provide a few ecological “services” useful to humans such as ameliorating wind velocity, lowering the water table, or increasing local bird species diversity; but it will not provide the integrated suite of ecological interactions that would be the case with natural regeneration. The eventual steady state might or might not be similar to some state in the past. But it would unquestionably represent what nature was capable of in the present.

Perhaps the essential difference is this. A seedling that germinates naturally from a seed from a tree indigenous to the site is nature. But a seedling that germinates from seed gathered from that same tree and sown in a nursery and then planted in the exact same spot as the naturally sown seedling is a human artefact. The former is a product of natural selection; the latter, a product of artificial selection.

Tree planting and most other current approaches to “fixing” nature are riddled with human biases, which would take natural regeneration decades, if not centuries, to efface, if, indeed, it ever had a chance to completely play out. This is increasingly unlikely, however, because the demands of an ever growing human population and increasing per capita consumption will see any naturally regenerating sites perturbed repeatedly long before they reach their full potential. Indeed, the “management of human influences” will eventually be, and perhaps already is, nothing more than the recurrent re-jigging of naturally regenerating sites to meet increasing human needs.

Explicitly defining nature as what exists in the absence of human influence might also have the salutary effect of forcing conservationists to develop a coherent philosophy. At the moment they have none and it shows. (Please don’t say it’s “sustainability”.) Contrast the aimlessness of the conservation movement with the stunning effectiveness of the animal welfare movement, whose simple and uncompromising message is that sentient animals should not suffer unnecessarily at human hands.

But nature as what would exist in the absence of human influence would give conservationists an intellectually rigorous base from which to argue, discuss and negotiate in any forum that professes to have nature conservation as a desirable outcome. Currently, conservationists implicitly accept the popular but largely unarticulated definition of nature as being virtually whatever anyone (expert, vested interest or local community) wants it to be. And as a result they lurch from one ad hoc decision to another and rarely achieve more than lowest- common-denominator outcomes.

Whether humans are a part of or apart from nature is more a question of a state of mind than a set of biological relationships or functions. Currently we tell ourselves we are part of nature. But our actions suggest otherwise. It is unlikely, on present evidence, that we will ever become part of nature, but at least by admitting we are apart from nature, we have a clearer understanding of what nature can be at this time in Earth history, and what our role might be in its perpetuation.

Allen Greer is a biologist who writes about science and nature. He wrote on the quest to clone a thylacine in the July-August 2009 issue.