What is Wilderness? (Part 7)

"Would these criticisms of man's destructive behaviour…applied to homo sapiens 20,000 years ago?"

No, because humans were not consciously aware 25,000 ybp in the same way that modern humans are. You can't hold a mob of roos responsible for overpopulating an area...Nature is innocence.

"If not...at what point in history, or at what point in man's development did we change from being custodians, or "nature impact neutral" to the present statee of being nature's destroyers?"

We started out in a pre-conscious continuum in a near apex predator relationship to the ecosystem. We were NOT originally custodians of anything. No species is “nature impact neutral.”

Later, when we culturally evolved a conscious awareness of ourselves as separate from nature we became morally responsible for our actions, then we became “custodians of nature.”

That's what the myth of our expulsion from the Garden of Eden is about...remember, we became ashamed of our nudity. Self-awareness dawned. No exact date for this Origin of Consciousness is agreed upon. I like Gilgamesh's Ur, about 6000 ybp?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology)

http://www.ancienttexts.org/library/mesopotamian/gilgamesh/

Saying modern man has now become "nature's destoyer" implies a third paradigm shift in our relationship with nature that has YET to happen (If we master the genome someday, then we rise above mere custodial work to being creators of nature.) We are still in the second phase, "custodians of nature."

Paradoxically, even while being “custodians of nature” humanity is still part of nature, therefore the "destruction" we introduce into nature is, ironically, natural.

Pete,

Inga Clendinnen noted something in her book, Dancing with Strangers: Australia First Contact, that I found extremely moving. Paraphrased poorly: On one occasion, as Captain Cook first sailed up the coast of eastern Australia in 1770, he watched a group of aboriginals who were gathering wood along the beach through a spy glass. Although it was a clear day and their ship was only a kilometre or two off the beach, the men and women on the beach took no notice of HMS Endeavour with her sails in full display. Cook found this nonchalant attitude of the locals rather odd, considering that they had never seen a sailing ship of any kind before. Other first contacts in New Zealand and Hawaii, for example, aroused very strong reactions in the indigenous peoples.

Clendinnen suggests that aboriginals couldn’t “see” the Endeavour, instead they saw only what could be safely contained within their mythological paradigm, probably a hieroglyphic constellation of ancestors who were always hanging about in some form or another, nothing to get chuffed about.

This indicates that pre-contact aboriginals might have existed in a pre-conscious continuum much like Julian Jaynes’ concept of the bicameral mind. If so, then aboriginals shouldn’t be held responsible for their fire stick ecology or extinction of Australia’s megafauna in the same way that rational, self-aware Europeans can be for the introduction of the rabbit and fox to Australia. Aborigines weren’t “custodians of nature,” they were nature. The apex predator of the continent.

It’s an issue of conscious awareness and the moral responsibility that follows on from the ability to make rational decisions based on understanding the cause and effect relationship between one’s actions and the environment.

If we return for a moment to Wes George's alien spacecraft, yet imagine that it arrived 20,000 years ago and observed homo sapiens in the natural environment, where would this position the comments which have followed in this blog?

It seems to me that we regarded the aboriginal people who inhabited Australia at the time of arrival of the first fleet as being in tune with nature, and the custodians of nature.

However, do we also regard the English people in the first fleet as also being in tune with nature?

At what point in time did homo sapiens transition from the natural inhabitant of nature, in tune with nature, to the present inhabitant upon whom we dump so much scorn and criticism, who is trying his hardest to destroy nature?

It is the same species, same characteristics, what has changed?

"Ultimate consumerism"; the stern , patronising ascetic, Clive Hamilton, has much to answer for; for my father the ultimate consumerism was having pickled kumquats with his rabit tail stew; for me when I was young it was sphagetti with cheese; now people are upset about plastic bags and wrappings as though these were evil incarnate; this AGW business is all about a reduced lifestyle and the nature debate is just a red herring. Now I'm grown up this would be my idea of ultimate consumerism:

First course: a pale green broth of swamp produce, accompanied by stalks of deep fried reed, and a sald of celery root, whortle berry and shreds of pungent black bark.

Second course: a ragout of pale meat in coral sauce, heavily seasoned, with side dishes of jellied plantain and crystallised jaoic.

Third course: collops of perfumed paste on disks of chilled melon, accompanied by small mollusks in spiced oil.

Fourth course: a hash of assorted crushed insects and cereal, pickles, plum-coloured conserve and pellets of fried meat.

Fifth course: a wafer of baked pastry garnished with steamed centipede and blue vegetable.

With apologies to a great science-fiction writer, and to other men of vision who seem too few on the ground in this era of moral accountancy and vicarious ethical restraint.

"...I see the guy hosing his cars and garage during the driest May on record. He has a child less than a year old. I wonder this when our fruit and veg is wrapped individually in plastic and then put in a plastic bag, amongst the box of Shrek fruit loops and containers of bottled water. I wonder this too when a mobile phone less than a year old is replaced so that the child can have the latest colour and shine and mind-numbing videos, when the family pet is destroyed because it growled at a child who was pulling its ears and laughing at the 'stupid dog', and when the woman in the spotless champagne-coloured 4WD thinks nothing of spending $48,000 for a Sex in the City tour of New York."

Travis's rant sums up the folly of our times well, Cohenite.

Because we are “the only natural creatures who are not biologically programmed to follow a determined, instinctive path,” we are free to exercise our will in making decisions. Thence, we are the one creature on the planet capable of wilfully making hurtful choices.

Poetically, we are well advised to realise that our most cherished decisions exercised with all the due diligences of free will may be utterly wrong for future generations. This is the spirit of the scientific method.

Our default moral position should be humble as it goes. This applies equally to those who would charge a global technocracy with managing the climate as it does to those who imagine that “without humanity nature is nothing.” In fact both positions part of the same gestalt, don’t you think?

Note that Travis’s observation in no way negates great human achievements. But to doubt that humanity’s special position in nature comes without a heavy burden of responsibility is a philosophically unpersuasive argument.