Of (Universal) Nature, (Ethno)Ecology and (the) Environment

Rocher de Boule and Bulkley River, May 1994
I’ve been thinking for some time about three terms: Nature, environment and ecology. My thinking on these words has been focussed of late by my efforts to work on two courses, an undergraduate course in Ecological anthropology and a graduate seminar in Environment, Traditional Cultures and Sustainability, and some of the reading I’ve been undertaking in preparation for that teaching, especially in Sutton and Anderson’s new edition of their text in Cultural Ecology, and in reading Anna Tsing’s Friction, an Ethnography of Global Connection. Last night I was reading a chapter on Nature Lovers in Indonesia which quite stretched my understanding in revealing ways.

This blog is entitled “Reflections on Nature, Culture and Society”. Obviously, I’ve been reflecting on meanings of the term “Nature” for quite a while. When I mention I’ve been for a walk in the ravine, many of my friends and acquaintances in Edmonton, a highly urban environment, talk about approvingly about being out in “Nature”- some undifferentiated, healing, restorative opposite to pavement, malls, the Internet, parking, job frustrations, indoor canned air and fluorescent-lit windowless rooms. This construal of my relationship with the Land and with Place and Season as “being in Nature” feels uncomfortable, not descriptive of how I see or understand the Land, or this land- a place with specificity, history, process, particularity, species composition, impacts, throughputs, human past (and present), subject to the management of the departments of the City of Edmonton. How natural, after all, is it? It does feature seasonal cycles of growth, flowering, fruiting, and quiescence, return and nesting of birds, the quiet twitter of chickadees and the buzzing group aeriobatics of fast moving flocks of Bohemian waxwings. It does allow some respite from urban light pollution, and therefore a chance to feel the phases of the moon, view stars dimmer than the brightest 1st magnitude stars like Sirius. It does facilitate noticing the differences in rising and setting and zenith positions of the sun through the seasonal round, significant differences at 53.5 degrees north latitude. But is it Nature? What is Nature?

When I used to think in terms of Nature rather than the land, I meant unspoiled places, with inspiring prospects, undammed waterways, towering forests, displays of indigenous wild flowers and beautiful flowering shrubs. I thought of Yosemite (minus the people) as perhaps John Muir first encountered it, I thought of the magnificence of the winter Sonoran desert in the Kofa Game Range as I once experienced it, camping among the red wind-sculpted rocks and drinking from tinajas crusted with ice. I thought of sea cliffs and sea stacks and crashing waves, seals and perhaps migrating whales off the shore. I thought of the admonition to visitors to “Wilderness Areas” (a designated wilderness is by definition an oxymoron, but when I was young and lived in California, the irony eluded me): take only pictures, leave only footprints. Take pictures I did, and leave footprints too. And decry trail bike and snowmobile users, dams, cross country power lines, second home developments, luxury lodges, logging cuts and like as desecrators and desecrations. (Somehow the signs and the trails did not strike me as inappropriate). I thought of the splendid images produced by Ansel Adams and Galen Rowell, collected into annual feasts of the visual, aesthetic and between the lines spiritual in the guise of the Sierra Club Calendar (which I still buy and revel in). I admired Aldo Leopold, Bob Marshall, Adolf and Olaus Murie, John Muir and read their books. I read John Wesley Powell, and his more recent and embittered admirer, Edward Abbee. I got wildflower books for new regions I visited, brought the Field Guide to Animal Tracks with me when I travelled in the back country, carried my binoculars and my fieldbook, and wrote poetry and sketched peaks and lakes and shorelines and trees. I remembered my childhood in Japan, when we made annual pilgrimages to the mountains north of Tokyo around Nikko, the precipitous slopes, pink and purple of azaleas in bloom, or scarlet leaves in fall, the ethereal lacy cascades and sheer waterfalls, a shrine on the shores of Lake Chusenji which framed Mt. Nantai-san. Mountains in their natural state as worthy of reverence, as sacred place.

But there was another strand of my Nature loving which derived perhaps from the time I came of age- I wanted to be in nature, to be at home, to belong. I admired the survival skills of Bob Marshall as well as his appreciation of wilderness (his vision inspired the designation of natural areas as Wilderness Areas ). I wanted to know the names and uses of plants. I bought books on edible plants. I tasted things and quickly learned how much you need to know to actually make a living on the land. We (my future husband Allen and I) spent our first summer together living in a lean- to at about 5000’ elevation in the Siskiyou Mountains, in a defacto wilderness, a roadless area with several tall mountain peaks, meadows, alpine areas, and the most diverse coniferous forest in North America- or maybe it was the world. There were I think 17 genera of conifers there, and a number of species. The southernmost locality of Alaska Yellow Cedar was just above our camp, and numerous species of pines, endemic Brewer’s spruce, fir, douglas fir, Port Orford Cedar, red cedar, incense cedar and others were easily accessible from our camp. I set about learning all the vascular plants I could, and recording observations of birds and animals. I tried to find edible plants with Donald Kirk’s Edible Plants of the Western United States. I began to have respect for the amount of knowledge it really takes to survive. Had I known, we were camped in a meadow that was abundant with a food plant used by Native Americans of the region, Peridaridia gardneri or yampa. I think I tasted a root, but had no concept of how to prepare or harvest it. I also tasted the rhizomes of the yellow pond lily Nuphar polysepalum and found them highly unpalatable. They were said to be an important food of the Modoc of northeastern California. If so, they knew something about preparation that I don’t know. More recently I have found that this rhizome is highly regarded as a medicine against tuberculosis and topically for fractures (see Gottesfeld and Anderson 1988 and Johnson 2006) a use that seems more consistent with their strong bitter taste.

I digress. But the point I want to make is that I was coming to have a view of nature which implied taking more than pictures, and to have a sense of the particularity and richness of interacting with land. With a particular area of land and its biota, its affordances. That led me on a long journey from a universal and unpopulated Nature to an appreciation of the local, of emplacement, of homelands. The relationship with the land that Tim Ingold refers to as dwelling. And thence to a long fascination with traditional knowledge and ethnoecological perspectives. Some of the story of that transformation is detailed in other writings, including my recent book Trail of Story, Traveller’s Path (AU Press 2010) so I won’t repeat it here.

Having spent a long time moving away from this impersonal and universal Nature, this arena of beauty and encounter of the Self by removal from society, and direct grappling with the challenges of the non-social world, to an appreciation of the subtlety and skill and particularity of knowledge of homelands and how to live in them, I was unprepared for the phenomenon of Indonesian Nature Lovers as described by Tsing in her 2005 book.

Tsing carefully describes how Indonesian youth are trained in how to regard Nature, and are deliberately trained in cosmopolitan skills like backpacking, rafting, and mountain climbing, enculturated in a peculiarly Indonesian cosmopolitanism in their adoption of values of universal Nature, and love of Nature divorced from particularity of place, skills in making a living or any continuity with local tradition. They wear flannel shirts and hiking boots, and use Western style outdoor equipment as accoutrements of the identity as a Nature Lover. They even bring guitars and sing (European and North American style) folk songs, in English, as part of their camping and Nature Loving activities. Tsing delicately teases out continuities to the Indonesian Youth movement, carefully apolitical but nationalistic during the New Order under President Suharto. She shows how, in contrast to similar seeming movements supporting outdoor recreation in North America with which I am familiar, camping is not a family activity. And unlike North American or European environmentalism, once women marry and have children, they stop being active Nature Lovers. Instead the Nature Lover identity shows continuity with a phase of youth exploration before settling down to serious family life and responsibilities of making a living which characterized pre-existing culture. New waves of Nature Lovers come up through the schools and Universities. They learn to regard the local peoples where they travel as quaint and picturesque as they separate themselves from any conception of connection to the land as homeland or the site of livelihood.

I found this form of Nature Loving a peculiar mix of the familiar and deeply different. How often do similar external forms mask deep, even perhaps incommensurable differences underneath? These thoughts crossed my mind as I walked through one of the branch temples of Nature Loving in Canada: the Edmonton store of Mountain Equipment Coop, MEC. Ethnographic examination of Nature Lovers also calls to mind Kay Milton’s seminal book Loving Nature, which focusses on the concerns and values of British environmentalists.

And what is “environment”? When I went looking for discussions of the term to prepare an introduction for a course…it seemed that everyone took the meaning of the term for granted. It appeared unproblematic. Environment is, well, what is around one. It encompasses the abiotic environment (rocks, water in its various forms, mountains sans the vegetation cover, dirt, sand, soil -leaving out of course the microbiota, the air, and derivative concepts like weather and climate) and the biotic environment (the complex agglomeration of living things of all sorts from microbes and pond scum to elephants to giant sequoias, rainforests and the like). “The environment” is subject to pollution, degradation. Terms like environmental quality come to mind. The environment is not us. It is outside us. Sutton and Anderson write:
The environment consists of the surroundings in which an organism interacts, a pretty broad definition. One of the problems in defining the environment is this breadth; it can be viewed as different things in different places and at different geographic or spatial levels or scales– a pond, a valley, a continent, the earth, the solar system or even the universe.


What of ecology? Although in the speech of many people today, ecology, or “the ecosystem” is used interchangeably with Nature and with “the environment,” for me “ecology” produces a somewhat different focus, a more scientific gaze on the one hand, and a focus on relationships, fluxes, processes. And on biodiversity, species richness.

A point to consider: an environmentalist is not equivalent to an ecologist. One advocates and one studies.

I was an undergraduate at Stanford during the first Earth Day. I had been studying ecology in several different ways, and was full of zeal to save the environment. I learned about “ecosystems” from EN Kormondy, and from Eugene Odum’s classic works. I read Rachel Carson. I was concerned about pesticides, contaminants, the impact of a growing human population. I was concerned about invasive species and conservation of native flora. No one had yet any inkling of global warming, so climate change was not on the agenda. I was groping toward concepts of process such as cycles of fire, but not yet there. I had not yet imagined ethnoecology, examining the traditional environmental knowledge and (arguably) sustainable ecological relations of local human groups. No one had yet coined the term “sustainability”; we were still more than a decade before the Brundtland Report.

Toward locality from the global. Toward cosmopolitan from the regional. North Americans going to Bali to experience the local, wear sarongs, batiks, experience Place. Indonesians in flannel shirts and hiking boots enacting cosmopolitan Nature.


Sources:
Carson, Rachel. 1962. Silent Spring. Boston, Cambridge, Mass. : Houghton Mifflin, Riverside Press.

Gottesfeld, Leslie Main Johnson and Beverley Anderson. 1988. Gitksan traditional medicine: herbs and healing. Journal of Ethnobiology 8(1):13-33.

Ingold, Tim. 2000. The Perception of the Environment, Essays in livelihood, dwelling and skill. New York and London: Routledge.

Kirk, Donald R. 1970. Wild Edible Plants of the Western United States. Healdsburg: Naturegraph Publishers.

Leopold, Aldo. 1949. A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There. London: Oxford University Press.

Johnson, Leslie Main. 2006. Gitksan Medicinal Plants–Cultural Choice and Efficacy. Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine 2:29 doi:10.1186/1 746-4269-2-29 Published 21 June.

Johnson, Leslie Main. 2010. Trail of Story, Traveller’s Path, Reflections on Ethnoecology and Landscape. Edmonton: AU Press.

Kormondy, E.I. 1969. Concepts of Ecology. Englewood Cliffs, N.J: Prentice Hall.

Milton, Kay. 2002. Loving Nature, Towards an Ecology of Emotion. London, New York: Routledge.

Muir, John. 1988 [1914] The Yosemite. Reprinted by Sierra Club Books, San Francisco.

Murie, Olaus J. 1954. A Field Guide to Animal Tracks. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.

Odum, Eugene 1971. Fundamentals of Ecology, 3rd Edition. Philadelphia: Saunders.

Sutton, Mark Q. and E.N. Anderson. 2010. Cultural Ecology. Second Edition. Lanham: AltaMira Press.

Toledo, Victor. 2002. Ethnoecology: A conceptual framework for the study of Indigenous Knowledge of Nature, pp. 511-522 In J. R. Stepp, F. S. Wyndam, and R. K. Zarger (eds.), Ethnobiology and Biocultural Diversity. Athens GA: International Society of Ethnobiology.

Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2005. Friction, an Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton: Princeton University Press.