New Visions of Nature: Complexity and Authenticity

New Visions of Nature

Martin Drenthen · Jozef Keulartz · James Proctor Editors

New Visions of Nature Complexity and Authenticity

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Editors Martin Drenthen Faculty of Science, Department of Philosophy and Science Studies (ISIS) Radboud University of Nijmegen Heyendaalseweg 135 6525 AJ Nijmegen The Netherlands [email protected]

Jozef Keulartz Applied Philosophy Group Wageningen University and Research Centre Hollandseweg 1 6796 KN Wageningen The Netherlands [email protected]

James Proctor Environmental Studies Program Lewis & Clark College 348 John R. Howard Hall 0615 S.W. Palatine Hill Road Portland, OR 97219 USA [email protected]

ISBN 978-90-481-2610-1 e-ISBN 978-90-481-2611-8 DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-2611-8 Springer Dordrecht Heidelberg London New York Library of Congress Control Number: 2009926891 © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. Cover image: photograph by Renate de Backere (www.stormmeeuw.nl) Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com)

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the Templeton Foundation, who made possible the expert seminar on which this book was based. We further wish to thank Hub Zwart for assisting us in editing this book.

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Contents

Part I

Introduction

1 Nature in Motion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Martin Drenthen, Jozef Keulartz, and James Proctor

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Part II Public Visions of Nature 2 Technological Nature – And the Problem When Good Enough Becomes Good . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Peter H. Kahn Jr., Rachel L. Severson, and Jolina H. Ruckert

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3 They Could Have Used a Robot: Technology, Nature Experience and Human Flourishing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Maartje Schermer

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4 The Authenticity of Nature: An Exploration of Lay People’s Interpretations in the Netherlands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Riyan J.G. van den Born andWouter T. de Groot

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5 The Hierarchical and Unconscious Mind: Reflections on the Authenticity of Nature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Maarten H. Jacobs

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6 The Trouble with Plovers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Anita Guerrini 7 About Snowy Plovers, Lapwings and Wolves: How to Include Contrasting Visions of Ecologists and Laymen in Decision-Making . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Henny J. van der Windt

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Part III The Genomics View of Nature 8 Detachment, Genomics and the Nature of Being Human . . . . . . Lenny Moss

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9 The Detached Animal – On the Technical Nature of Being Human Pieter Lemmens

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10

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Contents

Metagenomic Metaphors: New Images of the Human from ‘Translational’ Genomic Research . . . . . . . Eric T. Juengst

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The Metagenomic World-View: A Comment on Eric T. Juengst’s ‘Metagenomic Metaphors’ . . . . . . . . . . . John Dupré and Maureen A. O’Malley

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Genomics Metaphors and Genetic Determinism . . . . . . . . . . . Hub Zwart

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Maps and the Taxonomic Style . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chunglin Kwa

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Part IV Philosophy of Landscape and Place 14

“Thinking Like a Mountain”: Ethics and Place as Travelling Concepts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bruce B. Janz

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Towards an Epistemology of Place . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . J.A.A. Swart

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Developing Nature Along Dutch Rivers: Place or Non-Place . . . . Martin Drenthen

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Restoring Nature in a Mobile Society . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . C.S.A. (Kris) van Koppen

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Between Nativism and Cosmopolitanism: Framing and Reframing in Invasion Biology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jozef Keulartz and Cor van der Weele

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Further Towards a Continuum Between Nativism and Cosmopolitanism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Matthias Gross

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Part V 20

Conclusions

Nature, Technology and the Human Condition . . . . . . . . . . . Catherine L. Newell and Michael A. Osborne

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Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

279

Contributors

Riyan J.G. van den Born works as Assistant Professor at the Department of Philosophy and Science Studies of the Faculty of Science at the Radboud University of Nijmegen. From 1996–2004 she worked as junior teacher Social Environmental Sciences at the Radboud University. Since 2004 she works as assistant professor at the Department of Philosophy and Science, and in 2007 she received her PhD degree at the same university for research on the relationship between humans and nature. Her main research is a combination of Environmental Philosophy and Social Sciences, with a focus on visions of nature; public perceptions of nature and landscape. Her latest research is on public perceptions of technological interventions in nature, [email protected] Martin Drenthen is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy and Science Studies of the Faculty of Science at the Radboud University of Nijmegen. Earlier, he was researcher at the Centre for Ethics of the University of Nijmegen, and assistant professor of Environmental Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy and Arts at the University of Antwerp (Belgium). He received his PhD in 2003, with his dissertation (in Dutch) Grenzen aan wildheid [Bordering Wildness], on the significance of Nietzsche’s critique of morality for environmental ethics. He has previously published in Environmental ethics, Environmental Values, New Nietzsche Studies and Ethical Perspectives. He is international representative (for the Netherlands) of the International Society for Environmental Ethics (ISEE). His current research interests include: environmental philosophy, ethics of place, philosophy of ecological restoration, cultural aspects of river management, and the ethical aspects of ecogenomics, [email protected] John Dupré received his Ph.D at Cambridge in 1981 after spending two years studying in the U.S. as a Harkness Fellow. He was then a Junior Research Fellow at St. John’s College, Oxford, for two years before taking up a post in the Department of Philosophy at Stanford University, where he taught until 1996. He returned to the U.K. to take up posts as Professor of Philosophy in Birkbeck College, University of London, and as a Senior Research Fellow at Exeter. In 2000 he resigned his chair in London and was appointed at Exeter as Professor of Philosophy of Science. In 2002 he assumed the full-time directorship of ESRC Centre for Genomics in Society (Egenis). During the period 1st April to 15th June 2006 he was the Spinoza Visiting Professor at the University of Amsterdam. He has published extensively in the

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Contributors

philosophy of biology. His most recent book, coauthored with the sociologist Barry Barnes, is Genomes and What to Make of Them (Chicago), [email protected] Wouter T. de Groot is Professor of Social Environmental Science at Radboud University and Leiden University. Trained as a civil engineer aeons ago, he worked in Kenya and then moved to the development of interdisciplinary methodology for environmental science, publishing in the meantime on issues of ecology, economics, planning, philosophy and the social sciences. Presently, De Groot is involved mainly in natural resource and river management in the Netherlands and the developing countries, including cultural aspects such as the ‘Visions of nature’ research strand at Radboud University, [email protected] Matthias Gross is Senior Researcher at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ in Leipzig, Germany and lecturer (Privatdozent) in sociology at Bielefeld University. He is author of several books and numerous journal articles in the fields of science and technology studies, environmental sociology and the history of sociology and ecology. His current research focuses on the revitalization of large scale contaminated sites and the changing forms of science in a knowledge society. He is co-founder and editor of the interdisciplinary journal Nature and Culture, [email protected] Anita Guerrini is, from September 2008, Horning Professor of the Humanities and Professor of History at Oregon State University.Previously she was Professor of History and Environmental Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is a historian of science with particular interests in animal studies in both the early modern era and the present. She has also published on the history of medicine, biomedical ethics, the history of food, and environmental history, among other topics.Her most recent book is Experimenting with Humans and Animals: From Galen to Animal Rights (2003) and she is co-editing a volume on the role of history in ecological restoration, [email protected] Maarten H. Jacobs is Assistant Professor at the Socio-spatial Analysis Chair Group of Wageningen University. His academic interests include perceptions of landscape, nature and water, human-animal relations, and leisure and tourist experiences. He is keen to connect these domains of applied research with psychology (emotion and perception theory), neuroscience (the neural constitution of psychological functions) and philosophy of mind (the mind-body problem), as his Ph-thesis, the Production of Mindscapes (2006), demonstrates. Maarten Jacobs is a member of the young scientists’ board of the Dutch Council for Environmental, Nature and Spatial research, and a guest professor at the Human Dimensions of Natural Resources Department of Colorado State University (US) and the Regions and Regionality master program of Bergen University (Norway), [email protected] Bruce B. Janz is Associate Professor of Humanities and chair of the Department of Philosophy (as of fall 2008) at the University of Central Florida. He also directs the Center for Humanities and Digital Research. His areas of research include work on concepts of place and space across multiple disciplines, African philosophy, cultural

Contributors

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philosophy, and 19th century ‘continental’ philosophy. His interest is in the ways in which philosophy can come to recognize its place (that is, the cultural, historical, and geographical source of its central questions and the trajectory of its thought), and how the recognition of place can lead to the creation of new concepts. His work has appeared in Ethics, Place and Environment, City and Community, Philosophy Today, Philosophia Africana, and The Edinburgh Companion to 20th Century Philosophy, among other places, [email protected] Eric T. Juengst is Professor of Bioethics at the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland, Ohio. Previously, he has taught medical ethics and the philosophy of science on the faculties of the medical schools of the University of California, San Francisco and Pennsylvania State University, and from 1990 to 1994 he was the first Chief of the Ethical, Legal and Social Implications Branch of the National Center for Human Genome Research at the U.S. National Institutes of Health. He received his B.S. in Biology from the University of the South in 1978 and his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Georgetown University in 1985. His research interests and publications focus on the conceptual and ethical issues raised by new advances in human genetics and biotechnology: since coming to CWRU in 1994, he has led collaborative research projects on ethical issues in gene transfer technology, the biomedical control of human aging, ‘community engagement’ in genomic research, and human genomic initiatives like the Human Microbiome Project. In 2004, he was awarded a ‘Center of Excellence in Ethics Research’ grant from the U.S. National Institutes of Health to support the creation of new interdisciplinary research program, the CWRU Center for Genetic Research Ethics and Law (CGREAL), which he now directs, [email protected] Peter H. Kahn, Jr. is Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology and Adjunct Associate Professor in the Information School at the University of Washington. He also directs the Human Interaction with Nature and Technological Systems Laboratory. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1988. His publications have appeared in such journals as Child Development, Developmental Psychology, Human-Computer Interaction, and Journal of Systems Software, as well as in such proceedings as CHI, HRI, and Ubicomp. His 1999 award-winning book (MIT Press) is titled The Human Relationship with Nature: Development and Culture. His edited volume (MIT Press, 2002) with Stephen Kellert is titled Children and nature: psychological, sociocultural, and evolutionary investigations. His research projects are currently being funded by the National Science Foundation, [email protected], Website: http://faculty.washington.edu/pkahn/ Jozef Keulartz is Associate Professor of Applied Philosophy at Wageningen University and Research Centre. He has been appointed special chair for Environmental Philosophy at the Faculty of Science of the Radboud University Nijmegen. He has published extensively in different areas of science and technology studies, social and political philosophy, bioethics, environmental ethics and nature policy.

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Contributors

Keulartz was a member of the Scientific Council Large Herbivores (Oostvaardersplassen), set up by the National Forest Service, and of the Scientific Council of The European Centre for Nature Conservation (ECNC). He is a participant in ALTER-net, a ‘network of excellence’ funded by the EU’s 6th Framework Programme. He is also a member of the International Working Group on Sustainability and of the Netherlands Commission on Genetic Modification (GOGEM), [email protected] C.S.A. (Kris) van Koppen is Associate Professor at the Environmental Policy Group ofWageningen University, where he works since 1992. Since 2004 he is also Professor of Environmental Education by special appointment at Utrecht University. His thesis research (2002) was on social theory of nature valuation and protection. Current research and educational interests extend to several areas within policy and management of environment and nature, with a highlight on individual and organizational learning processes. Within these areas of interest, he has published articles in Knowledge in Society, Sociologia Ruralis, Ecological Economics, the International Journal of Environment and Sustainable Development, the Journal of Environmental Education en the Journal of Cleaner Production, and contributed to many scientific edited volumes. Together with William T Markham, he edited ‘Protecting Nature. Organizations and Networks in Europe and the USA’ published last year by Elgar. Kris van Koppen is chair of the Environment and Society Research Network of the European Sociological Association, [email protected] Chunglin Kwa is Lecturer in Science and Technology Studies in the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences of the University of Amsterdam. He is currently working on the history of the visualization of landscapes. One article, on Alexander von Humboldt, appeared in The European Legacy (2005), another article is to appear shortly in Configurations. For his general history of styles in science, Kwa received a translation grant from NWO. The book will appear with . . . in 2009, [email protected] Pieter Lemmens studied philosophy and biology at the Radboud University of Nijmegen. In 2008, he received his PhD in philosophy. His thesis, entitled ‘Driven by technology. The human condition and the biotechnology revolution’, is an examination of the intimate relationship between technology and the human. It argues for a new, non-instrumental, evolutionary and anthropo-ontological view of technology and reflects on the implications of this new view for our understanding of the biotechnology revolution. He is currently appointed as a post-doc researcher at Centre for Methodical Ethics and Technology Assessment at the University of Wageningen (Netherlands), working on a project about genomics and Open Source. His main interests are continental philosophy of technology, philosophical anthropology, continental philosophy of biology, and leftist political thought, [email protected] Lenny Moss is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Exeter. Moss began as a research scientist with doctoral work on cell biology and cancer at the University of California, Berkeley and post-doctoral work on cell biology and human development at the UC San Francisco Medical Center. He then went on to do a second PhD in philosophy at Northwestern University with emphases in Critical

Contributors

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Theory, German Philosophy and the philosophy of science. Moss’s current research interests include (1) a renewal of the enterprise of philosophical anthropology based upon a synthesis and dialectical interpenetration of philosophy and the empirical sciences, (2) a philosophical reconstruction of the history of philosophy from the perspective of an ‘expressivist’ anthropology, (3) the philosophical elucidation of a ‘phenotype-first’ biology and its implications for a general philosophy of nature guided by the idea of ‘natural detachment’ as an immanent teleology. Moss’s book What Genes Can’t Do (MIT, 2003) is scheduled to appear in Japanese sometime this year, [email protected] Catherine L. Newell is a Ph.D. candidate in Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research is an investigation into finding new ways to breach the perceived boundaries between religion and science, as well as explorations into the appropriations of science and religion into popular culture. An instructor in the Writing Department at UCSB, she will complete her dissertation on popular faith and the American Space Program in 2010, [email protected] Maureen A. O’Malley is a Senior Research Fellow at Egenis, University of Exeter. Her current research involves philosophical and historical investigations of microbiology, with a particular focus on metagenomics and microbial systems biology. This project continues and extends her earlier work on evolutionary microbiology and microbial genomics, which she carried out while part of the Doolittle lab at Dalhousie University (Halifax, Nova Scotia). Her other interests include the use of evolutionary theory in the social sciences, as well as the philosophy and sociology of biology in general, m.a.o’[email protected] Michael A. Osborne, formerly Professor of History and Environmental Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has been appointed Professor of History of Science at Oregon State University. His first book, Nature, the Exotic, and the Science of French Colonialism (1994) examined biology and natural history in France and the French Empire. In the past few years he has been the bioethics leader for human embryonic research at his home university, and is currently president of the Sciences et Empires Commission of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science. A new book, The Emergence of Tropical Medicine in France, is forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press, [email protected] James Proctor is Professor and Director of the Environmental Studies Program at Lewis & Clark College, Portland Oregon, and the coordinator for the New Visions of Nature, Science, and Religion program. Prof. Proctor’s research lies in the realm of scientific and religious authority, and in environmental thought. He is the editor of Geography and Ethics: Journeys in a Moral Terrain (Routledge, 1999), and Science, Religion, and the Human Experience (Oxford, 2005), [email protected] Jolina H. Ruckert is a Ph.D. student in Developmental Psychology at the University of Washington. She received her M.A. in Psychology from Pepperdine University (2006) and her BA in Psychology/Biology from the University of Miami (2004). She has been a student member of The Explorers Club since 2004. Her research

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Contributors

interests center on the human relationship with the natural world. She is particularly interested in (a) the development of moral considerations regarding nonhuman animals, (b) children and adolescents’ experiences with and conceptions of nature and technologically mediated nature (e.g., as occurs through robotic animal forms), and (c) building theory of the human-nature relation that integrates ontogenesis, ontology, and culture, [email protected] Rachel L. Severson is a doctoral candidate in Developmental Psychology at the University of Washington. She is interested in children’s animistic and moral conceptions of ‘other’, whether the other is natural (e.g., animate and inanimate nature) or computational (e.g., personified robots). Specifically her research investigates: (a) whether and how children understand natural and computational others as alive, in terms of biological properties, psychological states, and sociality; and (b) whether and how children extend moral regard to natural and computational others, in terms of concern for their physical and psychological wellbeing, rights, and just treatment. Her publications have appeared in such journals as Human-Computer Interaction, Journal of Environmental Psychology, and Interaction Studies: Social Behavior and Communication in Biological and Artificial Systems, [email protected], Website: http://staff.washington.edu/raches/ Maartje Schermer (1969) is Assistant Professor of Medical Ethics at the Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam. She trained as a Medical Doctor at the University of Amsterdam, where she also studied philosophy. She got her PhD in 2001 with a thesis on the concept and practice of patient autonomy. After that she was involved in research projects on care for dementia patients, and on pragmatism as an approach to ethics in a technological culture. Currently she is doing research concerning the ethics of human enhancement, especially neuroenhancement with psychopharmaca. She is also involved in a project on the ethical issues involved in telemonitoring and telecare, which focuses on the influence of these new technologies on conceptions of good care and care relationships. Her fields of interest and expertise include conceptions of autonomy and identity, neuroethics, enhancement, and technology ethics, [email protected] Jac. A.A. Swart is Associate Professor at the Science & Society Group (SSG) of the Faculty of Mathematics & Natural Sciences, University of Groningen, the Netherlands. He studied biology and philosophy. His academic interests include the societal, ethical and dynamic aspects of life sciences. He has contributed to journals in the fields of conservation ecology, knowledge systems, societal and ethical aspects of nature conservation and sustainability, and animal ethics. He is a member of the Dutch Committee for Animal Biotechnology(CBD). His current research topics also include social and ethical aspects of food genomics, biotechnology, and synthetic biology, [email protected] Cor van der Weele is assistant professor in Applied Philosophy at Wageningen University. She studied biology and philosophy. Her PhD thesis in the philosophy of biology (1995) was published as Images of Development; Environmental Causes in Ontogeny (SUNY, 1999). After that, she has been working in the boundary areas

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of biology and philosophy and, in recent years, also art. In her publications, there has been a focus on metaphors in biology and ethics. She is now working on agenda issues in genomics and ethics, [email protected] Henny J. van der Windt is Associate Professor at the Science and Society Group (SSG) of the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, University of Groningen, the Netherlands. He studied biology and gained his PhD in natural sciences. His fields of interest include the dynamics of science, science policy, social movements and environmental history. His main publications concern the development of ecology, the nature conservation movement, environmental policy, ecological expertise and visions on nature. His current research topics include also food genomics, science communication and bionanotechnology, [email protected] Hub Zwart studied philosophy and psychology at the Radboud University Nijmegen. He worked as a research associate at the Institute for Bioethics in Maastricht. He defended his thesis in 1993, was subsequently appointed as research director of the Center for Ethics at the Radboud University Nijmegen. He is now Full Professor of Philosophy at the Faculty of Science of the Radboud University Nijmegen, chair of the Department of Philosophy and Science Studies, director Centre for Society & Genomics and director of the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society. His main field of interest is philosophy and ethics of the life sciences, notably genomics, with a special interest in science and imagination (comparative epistemology). He has published on the epistemology and ethics of animal research, on the past, present and future of scientific publishing and on environmental policy and the philosophy of landscape. He was European Lead of the International Student Exchange Program Coastal Inquiries, [email protected]

List of Figures

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2.3 6.1 6.2 8.1 9.1

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The robot dog, AIBO, positioning itself to kick the ball. Photo from Friedman, Kahn, & Hagman (2003), © 2008 ACM, Inc. Reprinted by permission . . . . . . . . . . . . . ATR’s humanoid robot, Robovie, being introduced to a girl. Photo from Kahn, et al. (2008), © 2008 ACM, Inc. Reprinted by permission . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ATR’s humanoid robot, Robovie, hugging. Photo from Kahn, et al. (2008), © 2008 ACM, Inc. Reprinted by permission . . Snowy plover at coal oil point. Photograph by Anita Guerrini Critical habitat map, 1999 (Federal Register Vol. 64, No. 234 (1999), p. 68532) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bust of Aristotle, now at Palazzo Altaemps, Rome. Photo: Giovanni Dall’Orto, 2005 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Organic and anorganic forms – ‘matter-in-formation’ versus ‘informed matter’. Whereas, in the case of anorganic forms (e.g., snow crystals), it is matter which determines form and is therefore of the essence – form being only an accident of the properties of matter – in the case of organic forms (e.g., corals), it is form, self-sustaining active form, which determines the configuration of matter – matter being only an accident of form (see article). Image source: Plate XIX of ‘Studies among the Snow Crystals’, by Wilson Bentley, from Annual Summary of the Monthly Weather Review 1902 (left) and Plate IX from Kunstformen der Natur (1904), by Ernst Haeckel, depicting corals classified as Hexacoralla (right) . ‘A Map of Lewis and Clark’s Track, Across the Western Portion of North America from the Mississippi to the Pacific Ocean.’ Copied by Samuel Lewis from the original drawing by William Clark. Published in 1814 . . . . . . . . . . . . . Map of sampling sites. From: Rusch, D. B., Halpern, A. L., Sutton, G., Heidelberg, K. B., Williamson, S., et al. (2007). The Sorcerer II global ocean sampling expedition: Northwest

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14.1 15.1

16.1 16.2 16.3 16.4

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List of Figures

Atlantic through Eastern Tropical Pacific. PLoS Biology, 5(3), e77 DOI 10.1371/journal.pbio.0050077 . . . . . . . . . Crystal creek wolf pack in Yellowstone National Park. Photo: US National Park Service . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The model of specific and non-specific care. The type of requested care depends on the actual situation (location, place, etc.) the animals are adapted to or dependent on (after Swart, 2005) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Romeyn de Hooghe: Breaching dyke in Coevorden (Copperplate, 1673) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lower Rhine near Wageningen. Photo: Martin Drenthen . . . Rewilding rivers. Drawing by Jeroen Helmer, ARK Nature . Miniature landscapes at the information center of the Dutch Cultural Landscape Association in Beek, near Nijmegen. Photo by Valentijn te Plate, Nederlands Cultuurlandschap . . Salomon van Ruysdael: River landscape with ferry (1649) . . Albert Bierstadt: Lake Tahoe (1868) . . . . . . . . . . . . . Invasive Old World climbing fern overtaking cypress trees in southern Florida. Photo: Peggy Greb, USDA Agricultural Research Service . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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List of Tables

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Functions of wild species for humans and attitudes toward animals Different relationships between an ecosystem and its species . . . Relationships between visions of nature and ecological, ethical and aesthetic perspectives (after Van der Windt et al., 2007) Multiple vision on exotic species . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Part I

Introduction

Chapter 1

Nature in Motion Martin Drenthen, Jozef Keulartz, and James Proctor

1.1 The New Visions of Nature Program As Raymond Williams (1983) famously declared, nature is one of the most complex words in the English language – and, we may confidently predict, its Germanic relatives including Dutch. The workshop that took place in June 2007 in the Netherlands, from which this volume is derived, was based on an earlier program exploring connections between our concepts of nature and related concepts of science and religion. Though one may not immediately expect these three realms to be interrelated, countless examples suggest otherwise. Consider the journal Nature from December 1999, in which the DNA sequence of human chromosome 22 was published (Dunham et al., 1999). This historic event was visually represented on the cover of the issue by the famous Creation of Adam image painted by Michelangelo in the early 16th century in the Sistine Chapel, in which God’s finger stretches to touch that of Adam. Here, on the cover of one of the top scientific journals in the world, a journal titled simply Nature, is one of the most famous religious images in the world. What is surprising, arguably, is not that we encounter so many instances in which nature, science, and religion are interwoven, but that we often defend these realms as separable – science and religion as diametrically opposed, for instance, or nature as some Romanticist notion far removed from the rigor and precision of scientific discourse. No matter how we tend to conceive of nature, science, and religion as differing realms, our ideas and practices related to nature say a great deal about the historic authorities underlying modern culture, science and religion; thus, one way to shed light on these domains of authority would be to look carefully at our assumptions regarding nature. This was the objective of an academic research program titled New Visions of Nature, Science, and Religion (Proctor, 2004, 2009). The New Visions program M. Drenthen (B) Faculty of Science, Department of Philosophy and Science Studies (ISIS), Radboud University of Nijmegen, Heyendaalseweg 135, 6525 AJ Nijmegen, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected]

M. Drenthen et al. (eds.), New Visions of Nature, C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-2611-8_1, 

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M. Drenthen et al.

drew together fourteen scholars – natural scientists, social scientists, humanists, and theologians – for a period of three years. Meeting at regular intervals in Santa Barbara, California, under the sponsorship of the University of California and with funding provided by the John Templeton Foundation, New Visions scholars each offered insights on nature, science, and religion from their particular academic vantage point. At the close of the program, four regional workshops outside of Santa Barbara continued this exploration with a range of topical foci: the workshop in the Netherlands was one of these. To lend some degree of coherence to our discussions, we focused on five concepts of nature – including both biophysical and human nature, external and internal nature – in particular. These concepts were selected to represent a continuum of disciplinary interest across the sciences and humanities. Arranged in order from the most scientific to the most humanistic, the five included evolutionary nature, emergent nature, malleable nature, nature as sacred, and nature as culture. Evolutionary nature is a sweeping scientific vision of nature as arising from evolutionary processes. It is the dominant theory for the origin and diversity of living systems, and via fields such as evolutionary psychology has been applied to account for the nature of human thought and behaviour – i.e., culture – as well. Implications for science and religion are varied: what some consider to be the ultimate triumph of science over religion à la evolutionary theory, others disparage as scientism, a religion of science. Evolutionary nature has generated a great amount of discussion and debate over the relations between science and religion in societal realms such as education and medicine. Depending on how the continuity of the human species with other species is interpreted, evolutionary nature can be seen as either a challenge to human distinctiveness – a longstanding theological question – or a reminder of our biological, and possibly moral, connections with the rest of the living world. Following the concept of emergent nature, nature is understood as an emergent reality, one in which its parts do not sufficiently explain the whole. This vision has a long history, but more recent scientific work into complex systems has focused on relations between systems at various scales of time and space. In this hierarchy of scales, complex systems theory challenges the reductionist notion that the whole can be understood via analysis of the parts, and attempts to explain the origin and behaviour of a wide range of complex systems – ecosystems, the heart, even consciousness – as emergent phenomena. Emergent nature has been widespread in the natural and even some social sciences, but it has also garnered interest in the humanities and theology. It thus has offered a means of unifying disparate scientific disciplines, and in some cases has been proposed as a means of harmonizing science and religion, given that both attend to emergent, complex phenomena as their principle concern. The third vision, that of malleable nature, stands in the middle of the five, and as such is equally dependent on, and of interest to, scholarship in the sciences and the humanities. The core notion is that of biophysical and human nature as subject to human alteration: this broad interest in malleable nature stems from its many related forms, running from genetic manipulation to virtual worlds. Whereas in evolutionary theory culture can be seen as a function of nature, here at this point in the

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five-vision continuum nature is deliberately fashioned by culture. This approach to nature directly challenges the Aristotelian contrast between physis and techné, that which operates of its own accord (a classical understanding of nature) and that which is deliberately fashioned by the human hand. Depending on how malleable nature is applied to the realm of science and religion, it can serve as either an endorsement or a critique of science qua technology, yet certainly challenges essentialist notions of human nature as viewed from either scientific or theological points of view. The vision of nature as sacred is a departure from the others in that it is primarily a popular, not a scholarly, point of view, but it has garnered considerable recent interest by scholars of historical or contemporary culture and by theologians. In this approach, nature is understood as possessing sacred or spiritual qualities, or perhaps even being fundamentally spiritual in its essence. What this concept challenges is the notion of biophysical and human nature as mere matter; this metaphysical perspective commonly leads to significant moral implications, for instance in how humans should treat biophysical nature, or the value of human life. Yet how should this notion of sacred nature be understood scientifically, other than as one of many possible (subjective) attitudes one can take toward nature? Despite its ambiguities as viewed from most scientific vantage points, nature as sacred has garnered some support within institutional religion, leading to a wide variety of ‘greening’ campaigns, and has also underscored the flourishing of nature-based spirituality outside of organized religion as well. Finally, the vision of nature as culture is an outgrowth of what could be seen as the default epistemological stance of the humanities: here, in stark opposition to evolutionary theory, nature (as in our conception of nature) is seen as the product of culture and not the other way around. Whereas malleable nature challenges the ontological status of nature, i.e., whether certain things understood as natural are ‘really’ natural or bear traces of human influence, nature as culture challenges the epistemological status of nature, i.e., whether our ideas of nature reflect more or less truthfully the natural realm as it really is or bear traces of human construction. The humanities are all about the force of human ideas, whether manifested in literary, artistic, or practical form; given the force of the idea of nature through history – just think, for example, of the power of ‘natural’ as a criterion dividing good from bad in so many moral debates – it is entirely understandable that nature is appropriated in the humanities not simply as a reality but as a human idea of that reality. The implications of this notion for science are fundamental and shaking: is science, to put it simp(listic)ly, a systematic means of unlocking the secrets of reality or is are the truths it reveals about this reality merely a product of the cultural milieu in which science is practiced? Nature as culture thus could be seen to pose a broadside challenge to the objectivity of science. And it does the same to religion, where claims as to for instance the divine origin of sacred texts are similarly understood as cultural constructions. These five visions of nature/science/religion arise from differing scholarly locations; near neighbours (e.g., evolutionary nature and emergent nature) are easier to harmonize than distant neighbours (e.g., evolutionary nature and nature as culture). Yet, ironically, none of these visions purport to be located: all aspire toward

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universalistic claims on nature, science, and religion. Thus the considerable power and comprehensiveness of these visions is also possibly their downfall, as critical ontological and epistemological assumptions travel far from their point of origin. If there is thus anything to be learned in general by investigating visions of nature, is that they are inevitably visions not only of reality but from a particular point of view. Unless one believes in the possibility of a Gods-eye view – and that this is a possibility for mere mortals – the fantastic power of these visions in potentially uniting all of biophysical and human nature, and explaining all about science and religion, fades as so much about them can be understood in terms of their disciplinary origin.

1.2 New Visions of Nature: Complexity and Authenticity All five visions of nature represent a powerful view on nature in its entirety. Their very plurality, however, implies that none can be truly comprehensive. In June 2008, a group of scholars from various fields of expertise met at the Wageningse Berg, along the borders of the Lower Rhine in the Netherlands, for a workshop to investigate means of dialogue and possible synthesis, in which the wisdom of all different visions could somehow be included. Point of departure of the workshop was the idea that contemporary visions of nature and their mutual relations have been deeply affected by the mutual pervasiveness of science, nature, and society.

1.2.1 Science and Nature: Beyond Reductionism We live in a time of remarkable scientific achievements and technological developments in ICT, neuroscience, nanotechnology and especially in the domain of the life sciences. Science and technology have entered into an ever more intimate relationship, to become what is nowadays called the techno-sciences. In many ways, the Human Genome Project exemplifies best what is taking place in those technosciences in general, with similar examples and trends to be found in other disciplines as well. Everywhere, we witness the emergence of large-scale, trans-national and interdisciplinary forms of techno-scientific collaboration. These large-scale research programs raise various important questions of an epistemological, ethical, societal, economic, and cultural nature. These trends emerge within the life sciences, but they are manifest in other areas, such as the ecological sciences, as well. Over the past twenty years, the ecological sciences went through a transition from preservation and conservation to restoration and re-creation. Until recently, the interaction between science and nature was often addressed in terms of two grand narratives. There was, first of all, the ‘positive’ grand narrative of how technological and societal progress – made possible by science – has gradually allowed us to master and improve nature ever more forcefully. The methodological reductionism of modern science together with to sophisticated instruments of modern technology made it possible to control and exploit natural recourses for the sake

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of mankind. This grand narrative was counter-balanced, so to speak, by another, ‘negative’ grand story of how western science- and technology-based societies – unsustainable as they are – are heading towards catastrophe. The reductionism of science was assumed to be deeply problematic because it failed to grasp the richness of nature. In stead of leading to prosperity, modern science would eventually and inevitably provoke a natural response, risking an ecological apocalypse. It is fair to say that both narratives are one-sided at the least. For a better understanding of how science and nature are interconnected and mutually pervasive, it is essential to look at the complex relationships between science and nature in a more analytic and detailed manner, on the basis of empirical research, and beyond stereotypes. Science and nature are intimately interconnected. But the exact direction of this interaction is still somewhat diffuse. According to a more or less optimistic view, we have entered an era in which the sciences may be expected to contribute to our efforts to monitor, analyze and solve problems that emerge from our ‘past performance,’ from such detrimental interactions between science, technology and environmental pollution. Biomaterials, genomics and nanoscience are expected to produce sustainable technologies and contrivances that are more congenial to nature. At the same time, however, new and unknown hazards may be awaiting us once we enter these avenues of sciencebased innovation. The famous tale of the sorcerer’s apprentice may take on a whole new meaning in the future. The implications of the mutual pervasion of science and nature, however, are not that obvious. One thing is clear, however, science and nature can no longer be seen as two separate forces in opposition.

1.2.2 Science and Society: Post-Normal Science The rapid development of the life sciences and technologies not only affects the relation between science and nature but has a profound effect on the relation between science and society as well. The life sciences have developed an ever increasing capacity to affect human life and the environment, whereas at the same time deep uncertainties exist on whether these effects are manageable at all. As a result, societal stakes in the life sciences are becoming higher and higher and with that, the call for a more stakeholder or community-based epistemology. Also within life science itself, researchers become increasingly aware of the irreducible complexities and uncertainties that surround our knowledge of nature. Although the technological knowledge of the life sciences is often highly accurate and effective, it can no longer be seen as the only legitimate and reliable source of knowledge concerning the natural world. A similar development can be seen in other scientific and societal fields, where the autocratic attitude and analytical practices of the traditional science and technology institutions are challenged by voices demanding respect for local knowledge, a plurality of perspectives and epistemologies ‘through which the world comes to presence’ rather than it being dissected and re-assembled. It is clear that the traditional, clear-cut distinction between science and society is no longer viable. What the increased mutual pervasion of science and society will

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entail for our vision of and relation with nature, however, is yet to be seen. Will it result in a real change within the dominant scientific approach? Some believe, it could lead to a coming together of the modern scientific view with older, nondissecting and non-reductive paradigms in both the natural and social sciences and thus give rise to a new, trans-disciplinary, ‘post-normal’ science. Current research suggests, at least, that public visions of nature are in fact already spiritualized and embedded to some extent, e.g., in the contextual and spiritualized understanding of humans, animals, ecosystems and cosmos as whole entities, or the embedded and storied understanding of landscapes as meaningful dwellings. What influence may the inclusion of such post-normal types of knowledge have on scientific and public visions of nature? For instance, will mainstream science ever be able to engage these visions rather than undermine them?

1.2.3 Society and Nature: Reflexive Modernity As Jonas (1979) pointed out, traditional ethics tended to focus on short term obligations, based on the assumption of a basically given, eternal and unchanging human nature as a reliable foundation for the Good and presupposing a limited reach of human action and therefore of human responsibility (towards nature, seen as unchanging and all-powerful). During the last two centuries however, due to the accelerated development of science and technology, the impact of human beings on their natural environment has grown exponentially. Some scientists have even framed this development in terms of a new geological era, the so-called ‘Anthropocene’ (Crutzen & Stoermer, 2000). It could be, of course, that we are overestimating the extent to which we humans are able to control the fate and further evolution of nature. There are reasons to suspect that we are (as yet?) unable to fully appreciate the complexities of natural systems, let alone control them. Nevertheless, with an increased power over nature, one could argue, our responsibilities towards nature grow as well. Jonas, for instance, argues that the growing extension of our technological power implies an equal extension of our ethical responsibilities, ultimately including the earthly ecosystem as a whole. A traditional view of the relationship between society and nature still tends to think in terms of a mono-causal relationship between what we do and what takes place in nature. However, the relationship between society and nature may be less linear and more complicated, and therefore imbued with more uncertainty. Modernity’s technological power trip has been so ‘successful’ that it has become a danger for the (global) natural environment on which it essentially depends. As a consequence, modernity has become thoroughly reflexive, to use an expression of German sociologist Ulrich Beck (1986): we have developed an awareness of the incalculable and negative side-effects that our own actions have on the natural environment, in which we are nevertheless destined to sustain ourselves. One of the implications of reflexive modernity is that the notion of radical uncertainty has to be built into our moral assessments.

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The traditional idea of a clear separation between the human and the natural, or the cultural and the natural, has also been challenged from a different perspective. Donna Haraway (1991), for instance, has shown that nature and the artificial today are intimately linked, questioning the very idea of nature as a realm that can be separated from the human and the cultural. Not only our ideas of nature are deeply mediated by culture, even our own bodies are to an ever increasing degree an inseparable mixture of nature and technology. But if we all are indeed to some degree cyborgs (as Haraway argues), if we are indeed ‘artificial by nature’ (Plessner, 1928) or ‘natural aliens’ (Evernden, 1993), than the idea that nature can somehow provide us with a criterion or moral measure against the arbitrariness of our technological interventions become highly problematic. If nature and society are intimately linked, if nature has become culturalized and culture naturalized, than we can no longer separate the ‘authentic’ and ‘natural’ form the ‘artificial’, ‘unnatural’ and ‘false’. The moral consequences of this have still to be thought through.

1.2.4 New Visions of Nature: Basic Questions Today, we witness the emergence of new visions of nature in different fields of expertise. What these new visions of nature typically have in common, is that they somehow testify that nature is far more complex than previously envisioned. The new complexity of nature can be discerned at two levels. With regard to the object in question, nature itself is seen as more complex than previously acknowledged. New scientific insights stress that many of the old ideas of nature as being malleable, knowable and controllable by technological means have to be reconsidered. The picture also gets more complicated on a different level: there no longer exists one privileged perspective on nature. The autocratic attitude and analytical practices of the traditional science and technology institutions are challenged by a plurality of perspectives and epistemologies that open up the world. Not only are our images of nature ‘itself’ increasing in complexity, but there is also a multitude of relevant perspectives on nature. In this volume, we will focus on the emergence of these new visions of complex nature in three domains. In Part II, we will focus on public visions of nature, which are increasingly difficult to distinguish from views of technology and culture. In Part III, we will go into the modern life sciences, notably in contemporary genomics which stresses the irreducible complexity of the genomic makeup of life forms. In Part IV we will look into contemporary landscape philosophy en environmental ethics, where one can discern a shift of attention from universal ethical principles about nature to the plurality of local narratives of place. In all these fields, the new emerging complex visions of nature raise serious questions about the authenticity of our relation with nature. With regard to the public visions of nature (Part II) one can discern different ‘complexifications’ of our vision of nature. First, people seem to be able to shift their basic attitudes towards nature; their view of their relationship with nature depends largely on the specific contexts in which one relates to nature. Furthermore, the

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images of nature seem to complexify as well, since what is conceived as nature becomes increasingly intertwined with all kinds of cultural and technical ‘mediations’. All this increases the complexity of human-nature relationships. What some people consider to be natural, others perceive as unnatural. In recent surveys about public visions of nature, emphasis is being put on the way in which nature and technology have become intimately intertwined. Our relationships with nature are increasingly influenced by the artificial and the technical. Robotics, artificial reality, broadband internet connections and new ‘artificial landscaping’ all influence our views of nature, and as a result the question of an adequate relation with nature is becoming a complex one. Does this mean that visions of nature are not foundational but merely contextual? And what does this mean for the evaluation of our relationship with nature? Ever since the romantic age, these relationships have been framed in terms of authenticity (Taylor, 1991). If we increasingly experience ‘artificial’ types of nature that are hard to distinguish from ‘real nature’, if technologically mediated nature experiences like robots and plastic trees are becoming ever more common, then what can the term ‘authenticity’ refer to? Can one still find a criterion with which one can distinguish between more and less authentic relations with nature? And what does the questionable authenticity mean for public participation in landscape management? Can ‘real nature’ still provide us with a kind of ‘measure’ for authenticity if nature and culture are getting more and more interrelated? In the life sciences, notably in contemporary genomics research (Part III), researchers become increasingly aware of the irreducible complexities in nature and of the uncertainties that surround our knowledge of nature. On the one hand, the dominant vision of nature in life sciences gradually but irreversibly shifts from mono-genetic determinism towards a more complex, multi-factoral view of nature in contemporary genomics. On the other hand, although the technology-based knowledge of the life sciences is often highly accurate and effective, it can no longer be seen as the only legitimate and reliable source of knowledge concerning the natural world; alternative views and perspectives have to be considered as well. Both developments tend to complexify our views of nature. This shift demands a new attitude towards the malleability of nature. Our increased understanding of the complexities of bodily life is expected to allow us to fine-tune our styles of intervention. But is it true to say, as Peter Sloterdijk (2001) does, that the allo-technologies (against nature) of the past will be replaced by homeo-technologies (attuned to nature) of the future? Have we really transcended the orientation towards mastery of nature that used to inspire biotechnology as a research program? Or are we merely developing more sophisticated tools that eventually will reinforce rather than question a vision of nature as ‘malleable’? What metaphors are best suited to express our new relationship towards this new complexity of the genome? And what are the consequences of this coming end of the era of genetic determinism for our self image? Could it enable us to renew our understanding of the degree to which we ourselves are determined by our genes? Could the newly discovered complexity of the genome offer us a new type of ‘freedom’ or will it rather lead to a more radical view of ‘detachment’ from nature?

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Our views of places and landscapes (Part IV) also seem to have increased in complexity on different levels. Traditionally, environmental ethics evaluates human relationships with the environment starting from ‘objective’ ecological norms – and articulating environmental values in terms of ‘intrinsic values’. However, this approach seems increasingly at odds with today’s scientific insight in the dynamic character both of ecosystems themselves and of human socio-ecological practices within the natural environment. In response, in recent years, some environmental ethicists have even rephrased the age-old idea that nature should provide a model that we should try to mirror in our actions. In water management, for instance, the idea that river management systems should attempt to control water flows as well as water related social processes and conflicts, gradually makes place for a more ‘fluent’ approach that allows rivers to take up space, and allows all kind of social conflicts to submerge and be dealt with in the open. This new approach tries to do more justice to the highly contextualized way in which people ‘read’ meanings in particular places and natural features. In an even more radical attempt to leave behind the traditional universalistic ethical perspective, ‘ethics of place’ (Casey, 1993) aims to emplace ethics itself and to shift our temporal perspective on nature management and preservation towards an ethics of place that careful investigates the ‘moral knowledge’ that is embodied in a place itself. A similar tendency towards complexity of nature can be noticed in the process of ‘glocalization’. Such a shift from a global environmental ethics to a particularistic ethics of place raises some serious questions, though. On the one hand, it seems obvious that particular sites and places require a proper and particular ‘focal length’; on the other hand, many environmental problems seem to demand a global perspective. Does this growing awareness of the complexity and dynamic character of natural systems inevitably lead to an ethic and an ecosystem management approach that is more in tune with the natural processes? Or will it undermine the rational debate about a proper attitude toward nature, and ultimately to ethical relativism that prevents us from dealing with today’s global environmental problems? What could an authentic relation with our place mean in an age, where the links between geographical locations and local culture is loosening and several narratives about any particular place appear to exist next to each other? In all these fields, new emerging visions of nature seem to acknowledge complexity of nature and complexity in our visions of nature. At both levels, this complexity raises questions about authenticity. In this volume we try to investigate some of these questions.

1.2.5 Authenticity? One could argue in a number of ways that the increase of complexity in our visions of nature raises questions regarding the authenticity of our relation with nature. One way would be that old attempts to ground a particular ethical relationship with nature in an understanding of what nature really is, is undermined by the increasing complexity of our new visions of nature. Certain relations to nature can still appear

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to be more ‘natural,’ authentic, or adequate to the object, but as our vision of nature becomes more manifold and fragmented, any ideal of authenticity will become ever more problematic. On the other hand, one could argue that a romantic ideal of an authentic relation with nature suffered from essentialist and oversimplified views of nature – violent reductions of ‘nature itself’. Now that we are increasingly able to recognize the complexity and subtlety of nature, it should at least in principle become possible to find a more authentic stance towards her. However, we should be aware that the concept of authenticity itself is already highly debated and complex. David Lowenthal (2008) has argued that the concept of authenticity has shifted over time and between cultures, and ‘the diverse authenticities we appraise – substance, form, originality, creativity, emulation – are seldom compatible.’ This ever shifting meaning of authenticity has had far-reaching consequences: The very quest for authenticity altered its nature [. . .]. Cultural relativity made authenticity a capricious will-o’-the-wisp, even a contradiction in terms. (p. 7)

But what does authenticity really mean, if, as Lowenthal has it, ‘the criteria of authenticity we choose reflect current views about how yesterday should serve and inform today’ (p. 9)? To answer this question, Lowenthal discusses the history of the concept of authenticity in more detail. In medieval times, Lowenthal shows, the ideal of authenticity was very different from ours for it was normal to rework things outworn and replace them for present purposes. In the middle age Europe ‘renovations, not ruins, were authentic.’ Sacred relics apart, integrity inhered in wholeness. Broken statues and damaged buildings became admirable by being restored to entirety. Few cared if an arm or a leg was original or a torso bore its true head; authenticity meant completion. (p. 13)

In the late 18th century the ideal of authentic wholeness succumbed to the contrary cult of fragments and ruins. ‘To be authentic, an object, a structure, or a landscape must be truncated or fragmented.’ (ibid.) One century later, ‘Authenticity meant replacing defective original remnants with modern realizations of the spirit of antiquity.’ As a result, ‘conservators ‘restored’ venerable structures and traditions to what they ought ideally to have been.’ (ibid.) Finally, in the mid 20th Century, yet another idea of authenticity surfaced as ‘improving the past gave way to archaeological exactitude, a scholarly purism that deplored tampering with what was original. Honest authenticity now came to mean intervening as little as possible and making manifest every unavoidable alteration, even to the sacrifice of visual integrity.’ (ibid.). Finally, according to Lowenthal, ‘recognition now dawns that tampering with the past is inescapable’. ‘That their remade or remaindered past was authentically correct has been the fond faith of each successive conservation policy in turn. [. . .] It would be folly to think that we ourselves are exempt.’ However, according to Lowenthal, ‘most propitious in heritage today is our ready admission that we never get things totally, eternally right. Ours generation openly admits

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fallibility. And humility helps free us from the hubris of arrogant and self-defeating perfectionism.’ (p. 14). This having been said, it should not come as a surprise that the different authors in this volume use the concept of authenticity in different ways. We have not attempted to bring all these uses of the term together. Recognize that there is not one correct concept of authenticity, does not render the term useless. Despite its ambiguous character, the concept of authenticity still remains suited to critically pose all kinds of normative questions regarding our relation to nature.

1.3 Layout of this Volume 1.3.1 Part II: Public Visions of Nature Part II of this book investigates in what way public visions of nature are being affected by the threefold pervasiveness of science, society and nature. In Chapter 2 (‘Technological nature – and the problem when good enough becomes good’), Peter Kahn, Rachel Severson, and Jolina Ruckert wonder if it matters (in terms of the future wellbeing of our species) that we are replacing actual nature with technological nature – technologies that in various ways mediate, augment, or simulate the natural world? They argue it does. They start with an overview of a laboratory’s research project that investigates the psychological effects of children and adults interacting with three instantiations of technological nature. In the first experiment, they provided their test subjects with a technological view of a landscape (a real-time digital plasma window display of nature), in the second with a technological dog (Sony’s robotic dog, AIBO), and in the third with a technological human (ATR’s Robovie). Next, they draw on Buber’s account of an I–You relationship to assess whether these interaction with technological nature can be considered as authentic interaction. Finally, they discuss a peril of technological nature: that it will garner some but not all of the effects of actual nature, come to substitute for actual nature in human lives, and thereby shift the baseline across generations for what counts as a full measure of human experience and human wellbeing. Maartje Schermer will provide them with a comment (Chapter 3). In Chapter 4 (‘The artificial body: an empirical exploration of lay ethics’), Riyan van den Born and Wouter de Groot also ask what the consequences will be of the growing artificialisation of nature for public views of nature. More specifically, they investigate the meaning of technologically mediated nature experiences, such a genetically altered food, bodies and landscapes. In landscapes, people typically see a long gradient from purely artificial cities through a domesticated agricultural middle zone to authentic wilderness. More or less parallel to the way in which human society intervenes in ‘pure’ nature, much of the application of genomics will imply an artificialisation of the human body. What do lay people think of technological interventions that would create the human body as a comparable mixture of the technological and the natural? Based on 30 semi-structured interviews in the Netherlands,

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the authors discuss the ethical principles with which people evaluate human interventions in nature and the body. They have surveyed the public response to four series of exemplars of interventions in nature and the body, with genetic as well as non-genetic interventions, and with different degrees of intervention (e.g., from a plastic tooth to a complete plastic body). Their results reveal the richness of people’s ethical reasoning and show some differences between categories of respondents. Overall, people’s ethical reasoning could be captured in a scheme of three areas. The first area is an ‘area of frivolous purpose’, where interventions are rejected because they do not serve a fundamental aim. In the second area – an area of ‘too deep, too far’ – people reject interventions because humans should not want to interfere with nature on that level. In the third area of ethical reasoning, people follow a reasoning of broad cost-benefit analysis. If considered in that area, our exemplars tended to be positively evaluated. In Chapter 5, Maarten Jacobs will comment on the research. In Chapter 6 (‘The trouble with plovers’), Anita Guerrini addresses a similar question of naturalness and authenticity with regard to landscape perceptions. She focuses on the role that animals play in popular perceptions of the landscape. The Western snowy plover is a diminutive shorebird classified as threatened by the US Endangered Species Act. The bird provides Guerrini with the basis of a case study of the role played by animals in popular perceptions of landscape. She also addresses the questions whether an environment constructed and managed by humans for the sake of conservation ceases to be natural or authentic. Next, she asks if the conservation and restoration of non-human species requires the absence of humans from the scene. Controversies over the protection of the plover along the central California coast give context to these questions. Henny van de Windt provides a comment (Chapter 7).

1.3.2 Part III: The Genomics View of Nature Part III of this book addresses some issues raised by the new developments in contemporary life sciences. In Chapter 8 (‘Detachment, genomics and the nature of being human’), Lenny Moss addresses the relation of our visions of nature and of ourselves. According to Moss, our understanding of nature and our understanding of what it means to be human cannot be treated as independent variables – nor does one provide a privileged point of departure for understanding the other. Rather our understanding of each must reciprocally and dialectically inform the other. From an ‘anthropological’ perspective, he suggests that an idea of ‘detachment’, that scales with an entity’s internal degrees of freedom, can be used to articulate an understanding of nature in which human self-understanding can find its proper place. He then shows how the idea of detachment can provide the means for making sense of the otherwise paradoxical findings of comparative genomics which in turn lends ‘detachment’

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empirical support and guidance. Finally, the human socio-cultural form of life itself is seen as both driven and made possible by its level of detachment and embedded in species-cosmopolitan ecological regimes of compensation. Pieter Lemmens comments (Chapter 9). In Chapter 10 (‘Metagenomic Metaphors: New Images of the Human from “Translational” Genomic Research’), Eric Juengst claims that, as the international genomic research community moves from the tool-making efforts of the Human Genome Project into biomedical applications of those tools, new metaphors are being suggested as useful to understanding how our genes work – and for understanding who we are as biological organisms. The many directions of this new ‘translational’ genomic research are producing many different new metaphors, but in this chapter Juengst focuses on one set that seems to be a departure from the essentialistic metaphors we have heard before: a trio of metaphors emerging from the planning of the Human Micobiome Project (HMP). The HMP is a new ‘metagenomic’ initiative at the U.S. National Institutes of Health to sequence the genomes of human microbiological flora, in order the pursue the interesting hypothesis that our ‘microbiome’ plays a vital and interactive role with our human genome in normal human physiology. Three metaphors are being widely used by the scientists promoting this initiative: (1) that the human genome should be understood as a part of a larger sensory-motor organ, picking up and reacting to cues from its environment much like our nervous or immune systems; (2) that the human body should be understood as a ecosystem with multiple ecological niches and habitats in which a variety of cellular species collaborate and compete; and (3) that human beings should be understood as ‘super-organisms’ that incorporate multiple symbiotic cell species into a single individual with very blurry boundaries. Each of these metaphors carries interesting philosophical messages, which Juengst concludes by pointing to as promising topics for future research. John Dupre and Maureen O’Malley comment (Chapter 11). In Chapter 12 (‘Genomics metaphors and genetic determinism’), Hub Zwart shows how our understanding of scientific developments depends on the metaphors that we use. Initially, in presentations of the Human Genome Project (HGP), the blueprint metaphor was a very prominent vehicle of communication. In 1999, for example, Francis Collins, director of the Human Genome Project (HGP) indicated that mankind was about to see ‘its own blueprint’. Gradually, however, the drawbacks of this metaphor became evident, notably because it seemed to convey a deterministic view on the relationship between genome and the Self. Therefore, a rival metaphor was presented by Collins and others, in which the human genome was presented as a landscape and the human genome project as an expedition, resulting in a map. Notably, the Lewis and Clark expedition was used as a historical template. Yet, while Francis Collins described the HGP in term of terrestrial exploration, Craig Venter rather opted for metaphors associated with open water and with exploring the earth as an aquatic planet. In this contribution, these rival metaphors are described and analysed in terms of the dimensions of human genomics that are disclosed or concealed by them. Chung Lin Kwa will comment (Chapter 13).

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1.3.3 Part IV: Philosophy of Landscape and Place In Part IV, we will look into recent developments in the philosophy of landscape and place. In Chapter 14 (‘Thinking like a mountain: ethics and place as traveling concepts’), Bruce Janz asks what it would mean if an environmental ethics would no longer be based on the idea that nature should be preserved (in time) but rather on place. Janz starts from the observation that environmental ethical theory has generally attempted to extend moral standing (and/or agency) beyond the human world, to argue for a greater duty on humans to preserve the natural world. Aldo Leopold is often taken as a prime example of the extension of ethics. He extends ethical consideration by maintaining that the central line of moral consideration be extended temporally, that we ‘think like a mountain’. Janz argues that, despite the common understanding of Leopold, he is actually offering an ethic of place rather than of time, and one that in fact avoids some problems of temporally based ethics. Drawing from, among others, Deleuze, Mick Smith, and Mieke Bal, he argues for an ethics rooted in place in which concepts ‘travel’ to new contexts and thus create new ethical concepts. When we regard ethics as rooted in the knowledge of place, and see places as themselves knowing (and which therefore can serve as points of resistance to our knowledge, rather than merely as the content of our knowledge), we can engage in a kind of interdisciplinarity, as our forms of knowledge are critiqued and extended through a close understanding of place-knowledge. From such a perspective, it becomes possible to raise new questions and engage in both moral imagination and ‘place-making imagination’, that is, the extension of possible forms of ethics and place-making in new ways. Janz presents Leopold as an excellent example of someone whose close place-knowledge is the source of his ethical thought, and the source of a new model of ethical thought concerning nature. Jacque Swart provides him with a comment (Chapter 15). In Chapter 16 (‘Developing nature along Dutch rivers; place or non-place’), Martin Drenthen addresses the question what an ethics of place could mean in the case of water management in the Netherlands. He addresses the question how to provide ecological restoration projects with an appropriate cultural context that enables humans to have a meaningful relation with the land. The attempt to mitigate the effects of increased water discharges due to climate change from a merely functional perspective imposes a purely abstract vision of nature on the land and would eventually imply a transformation of these new landscapes into strange non-places, devoid of meaning and separated from the habitable world. Drenthen considers three alternative interpretations of these ‘new nature’ projects in terms of place attachment. From the first, restoration is seen as yet another modern attempt to instrumentally rearrange the landscape, that disturbs (or even erases) the different cultural ‘textual layers’ in the landscape and thus reduces the ‘legibility’ of the land that enables people to have a meaningful relation to a habitable place. The second reading interprets these restoration projects as experiments in place-renewal, in which the reintroduction of natural dynamics into the river landscape does not wipe out legibility, but on the contrary, brings out deeper ‘textual’ layers and thus restores historical continuity.

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Ecological restoration then implies a deeper, ecologically sounder understanding of place that can revitalize place-based communities, and deepens their understanding of what it means to dwell along a river. The third perspective (inspired by the work of Marc Augé on ‘super modernity’) puts forward the rather disturbing question whether our longing for a deeply felt, authentic place attachment (of which before mentioned perspectives are merely symptoms) does itself not in fact risks transforming these very places into theme parks, thus even increasing the actual place alienation. Maybe the only way to be authentic is to acknowledge our lack of any deep sense of belonging. If so, then the feeling of detachment itself should guide our interpretation of these new landscapes. Should we not conceive these ‘new wildernesses’ as the most recent ‘inscription’ in the land, both mirroring our fundamental homelessness and enabling us to experience it? Kris van Koppen comments in Chapter 17. In Chapter 16 (‘Framing and reframing in invasion biology’), Jozef Keulartz starts with the observation that ‘place’ is a contested concept in conservation and restoration. In this chapter he focuses on invasion biology to examine some of the topics related to this controversial concept. The recent emergence of this discipline went hand in hand with heated debates on the so-called exotic species issue. Apparently, these debates have ended in stalemate, with only two extreme positions: nativism and cosmopolitanism. To break up this dichotomy and to give the debate new impulses, Keulartz explores the different metaphors that can be found within the scientific discipline of invasion biology in some detail. He argues that these metaphors, like all metaphors, are restricted in range and relevance; a similar thing can be said about the idea that our relation with nature should be ‘authentic’. According to Keulartz, we should, instead, adopt a multiple vision on metaphor. The adoption and development of such a multiple vision will open up new space for communication and cooperation across the borders between people from different disciplines, and between experts and laypeople. Matthias Gross provides a comment (Chapter 19). This volume ends with a concluding chapter by Catherine Newell and Mike Osborn (Chapter 20).

References Beck, U. (1986). Risikogesellschaft. Auf dem Weg in eine andere Moderne. Frankfurt a.M.: Surkamp. Casey, E. (1993). Getting back into place. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press. Crutzen, P., & Stoermer, E. (2000). The ‘Anthropocene’. IGBP Newsletter, 41, 17–18. Dunham, I., Shimizu, N., Roe, B. A., Chissoe, S., Hunt, A. R., Collins, J. E., et al. (1999). The DNA sequence of human chromosome 22. Nature, 402(6761), 489–495. Evernden, N. (1993). The natural alien: Humankind and environment. Toronto: Toronto University Press. Haraway, D. (1991). A cyborg manifesto: Science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century. In: Simians, cyborgs and women: The reinvention of nature (pp. 149–181). New York: Routledge.

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Jonas, H. (1979). Das prinzip verantwortung. Versuch einer ethik der für die technologische zivilisation. Frankfurt a.m.: Surkamp. Lowenthal, D. (2008). Authenticities past and present. CRM: The Journal of Heritage Stewardship, 5(1), 6–17. Plessner, H. (1928). Die stufen des organischen und der mensch. Die stufen des organischen und der mensch. Einleitung in die philosophische anthropologie: Einleitung in die philosophische anthropologie. Berlin: W. de Gruyter. Proctor, J. D. (2004). Resolving multiple visions of nature, science, and religion. Zygon, 39(3), 637–657. Proctor, J. D. (Ed.). (2009). Envisioning nature, science, and religion. West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Foundation Press. Sloterdijk, P. (2001). Nicht gerettet. Versuche nach Heidegger. Frankfurt a.m.: Suhrkamp. Taylor, C. (1991). The ethics of authenticity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Williams, R. (1983). Keywords: A vocabulary of culture and society (Rev. ed.). New York: Oxford University Press.

Part II Public Visions of Nature

Chapter 2

Technological Nature – And the Problem When Good Enough Becomes Good Peter H. Kahn Jr., Rachel L. Severson, and Jolina H. Ruckert

2.1 Introduction In recent years the sophistication and pervasiveness of our technologies have begun to change our species’ long-standing experiences with nature. Now we have technological nature – technologies that in various ways mediate, augment, or simulate the natural world. Entire television networks, such as Discovery Channel and Animal Planet, provide us with mediated digital experiences of nature: the lion’s hunt, the Monarch’s migration, and climbing high into the Himalayan peaks. Video games like Zoo Tycoon engage children with animal life. Zoos themselves are bringing technologies such as webcams into their exhibits so that we can, for example, watch the animals in their captive habitat from the leisure of our home or a cafe. Inexpensive robotic pets – such as the i-Cybie, Tekno, and Poo-Chi – have been big sellers in the Wal-Marts and Targets of the world. Sony’s higher-end robotic dog AIBO sold well and portend the future. A few years ago, you could Telehunt in Texas. You would go online from your computer in New York City or Miami or anywhere on this planet and control a mounted rifle through a web interface and hunt and kill a live animal. The animal would then be gutted and skinned, by the owner of the establishment, and the meat shipped to your doorstep. Texas outlawed Telehunting, but Teleshooting still exists, using targets instead of animals. In terms of the future wellbeing of our species, does it matter that we are replacing actual nature with technological nature? In this chapter, we address this question in three ways. In Section 2.2, we provide an overview of our laboratory’s research that investigates the psychological effects of children and adults interacting with three instantiations of technological nature: (a) a technological view (a real-time digital plasma window display of nature), (b) a technological dog (Sony’s robotic dog, AIBO), and (c) a technological human (ATR’s Robovie). In Section 2.3, we draw on Buber’s account of an I–You relationship to assess whether interaction P.H. Kahn (B) Department of Psychology, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA e-mail: [email protected]

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with technological nature can be considered as authentic interaction. Finally, in Section 2.4, we discuss a peril of technological nature – that it will garner some but not all of the effects of actual nature, come to substitute for actual nature in human lives, and thereby shift the baseline across generations for what counts as a full measure of human experience and human wellbeing.

2.2 Technological Nature Our emerging body of scientific research begins to support the proposition that technological nature can provide some of the experience of interacting with actual nature.

2.2.1 Technological Views: The Real-Time Plasma Display Window Studies Windows have been shown in certain contexts to promote physical and psychological health (Ulrich, 1984; Moore, 1981; Farley & Veitch, 2001). People tend to like windows, too (Kaplan, 2001). Thus we investigated whether it is possible, given current technological capabilities, to ‘reinvent’ the window by means of displaying real-time HDTV views of the immediate outside natural environment on a 50-inch plasma display. In both studies that follow – The Field Study and The Experimental Study – the view was a normal window view from the building overlooking a nature scene that included water in the foreground, as part of a public fountain area, and then extended to include stands of deciduous trees on one side, and a grassy expanse that allowed a visual ‘exit’ on the other. The HDTV camera sat on top of the university building. We ran cabling directly from the camera to participants’ offices. The view was chosen to include features that people usually find aesthetically pleasing and restorative in nature (Kaplan & Kaplan, 1989; Orians & Heerwagen, 1992). The findings have import not only for the design of the built environment, but especially toward understanding the effects of digitally mediating the human experience of nature (Kahn, 1999; Kahn, Friedman, Alexander, Freier, & Collett, 2005). 2.2.1.1 The Field Study Many buildings have inside spaces, such as inside offices and basement facilities, where it is difficult if not impossible to provide people with visual access to the outside environment. Thus we installed in seven offices of faculty and staff of our university the plasma window described above. Utilizing a naturalistic field study methodology, data were collected over a 16-week period: six weeks with the inside office ‘as is,’ six weeks with the large display window and live video feed installation, and four weeks following the removal of the display window with the office returned to its original state. Across the 16-week period, each participant completed seven 30–45 minute semi-structured

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interviews which focused on the participant’s (a) impressions and use of the large display window, (b) perceived effects of the real-time views of the outdoor scene, (c) awareness of people walking through the plaza area (the indirect stakeholders), (d) assessment of the importance of the large display window, (e) intuitions about work performance and health, (f) social interaction related to the large display window, and (g) experiences, reflections, and comments on any other related topics. In total, 30+ hours of interviews were conducted and yielded 652 pages of interview transcripts. In addition, each participant completed 10 work satisfaction surveys, 10 mood surveys, 10 office perception surveys, journal entries, and responses to email queries. The results from this field study are reported elsewhere (Friedman, Freier, Kahn, Lin, & Soderman, 2008). Here we highlight six themes that emerged from the analyses. 1. Acts like a window, could be a window? One key question this research sought to address was the following: Could a large display that showed real-time images of the building’s immediate outside location provide a user in an inside office with a reasonably viable replacement for a window? Our results suggest that in some ways the answer is yes. Participants, for example, made a shift in thinking of the large display from something static to something dynamic, like a window. Participants also often took brief mental breaks and stared out the large display window, and said that they returned to their work a bit more refreshed and refocused. Through looking out the large display window, participants also spoke of feeling connected to the outdoors, and to the wider social community. That said, a few participants also spoke of the limitations of the large display window insofar as they could not change their perspective on outside objects by shifting their position, what is known as the parallax problem (cf. Radikovic, Leggett, Keyser, & Ulrich, 2005). 2. Novelty. Given that large displays can function in some ways like a window to the outside environment, the question arises whether that function persists over time or whether, as the novelty wears off, so do the benefits. This research provides evidence to support their continued value beyond a few hours or days. Notably, after six weeks of using the large display the participants in this field study unanimously recommended the large display window to other co-workers with inside offices, and – four weeks after the installation was removed – were clear that they themselves would choose to have one again in their inside offices. Moreover, several participants developed rituals around their use of the display (e.g., looking at the same outdoor scene each day at the same time of day; anticipating daily events such as the turning on of the fountain) that continued to sustain their interest and engagement. 3. Reconnecting with Organizational Values and Larger Community. Participants in the field study felt less isolated and alienated in their inside offices, and more connected to the people they helped to serve. The window also connected participants to the wider social functioning of their institution, providing meaning to their work.

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4. Integrated into Work Practice. To greater or lesser extents, all the participants integrated the display into their workplace practice. They used it, for example, to display common documents while working with a student or colleague, and as a display for PowerPoint presentations. 5. Connecting to Nature. Research across many disciplines supports the proposition that there exists a fundamental human need and propensity to affiliate with nature (Kahn, 1999; Kahn & Kellert, 2002; Ulrich, 1993; Wilson, 1984). This literature helped us conceive of our installation insofar as we sought not only to ‘bring the outside in’ – by means of the large display window – but to incorporate some natural views in the real-time outside images. Participants in the field study reported benefits in line with our expectations. For example, as noted earlier, participants often took brief mental breaks and stared out the ‘window,’ returning to their work more refreshed and refocused. Participants also appreciated feeling connected to the day’s passing, to the movement of the sun, and to the changing weather. They also adjusted their work schedules to capitalize on the environmental information the window afforded, taking an earlier lunch break outside, for example, while the weather was known to be favorable. 6. Privacy in Public. A good deal of research within the human-computer interaction and computer-supported cooperative work communities has documented tensions between group awareness and individual privacy. Moreover, when cameras are pointed toward the outside, concerns about privacy in public come to the fore (Friedman, Kahn, Hagman, Severson, & Gill, 2006). In our study, participants experienced both concerns, though they primarily articulated uneasiness with the way in which this use of a large display could invade the privacy of individuals who walked through the public fountain area and had their images captured by the camera and displayed. It was not the case that participants had an initial concern about privacy which then subsided as they became more comfortable with the installation. Rather, the concerns here were sustained through the entire time frame. It is important to notice that the camera (and hence view) was fixed without any zoom capability. Thus the installation largely mimicked the visual access afforded by a glass window and did not allow for the sort of monitoring of individual activity when users have control over what the camera points at and at what level of granularity. It is also important to notice that the level of control and granularity provided here was sufficient to provide a meaningful connection to the organization, community, and nature. The larger societal question remains of how best to balance the benefits that accrue from the technology with the costs to individual privacy. 2.2.1.2 The Experimental Study The results from the above field-based analyses showed that participants who worked in inside offices reported that they appreciated and benefited from experiencing the plasma window. However, an important question needs to be addressed. How does such a plasma window compare to a real window?

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Toward addressing this question, we set up a between-subject experiment that involved three conditions (Kahn et al., 2008b). Each condition employed the same office on a university campus. In one condition, the view was the normal window view from the office overlooking a nature scene (the same view described in the above field study). In a second condition, a 50-inch plasma screen was inserted into the office window, entirely covering it. We then used the above mentioned HDTV camera (mounted approximately 15 feet higher on top of the building) and displayed on the plasma screen essentially the same glass-window view one would see from inside the office itself. In the third condition, we sealed off the original glass window with light-blocking material, and covered it with drapes, in effect turning the space into an inside office. Ninety undergraduate participants were randomly assigned to one of the three office conditions. We measured their physiological recovery from low-level stress. We also conducted a second-by-second coding of what people did with their eyes. Our key results were as follows: There was more rapid heart rate recovery in the glass window condition compared to the blank wall condition. In turn, there was no difference in the heart rate recovery between the plasma window condition and the blank wall condition. In terms of eye gaze behavior, both windows just as frequently garnered participants’ attention, and on this measure our results showed equivalent functionality between the two windows. But the glass window view held participants’ attention longer than the plasma window view. Finally, when participants spent more time looking at the glass window, their heart rate tended to decrease more rapidly; that was not the case with the plasma window.

2.2.2 Technological Animals: The Robotic Dog Studies Animals have long been an important part of children’s lives, offering comfort and companionship, and promoting the development of moral reciprocity and responsibility (Beck & Katcher, 1996; Kahn, 1999; Melson, 2001). Yet in recent years there has been a movement to create robotic pets that mimic aspects of their biological counterparts. In turn, researchers have begun to ask important questions. Can robotic pets, compared to biological pets, provide children with similar developmental outcomes (Druin & Hendler, 2000; Turkle, 2007)? How do people conceive of this genre of robots? It is a genre that some researchers have begun to refer to as ‘social robots’ (Bartneck & Forlizzi, 2004; Breazeal, 2003): robots that, to varying degrees, have some constellation of being personified, embodied, adaptive, and autonomous; and that can learn, communicate, use natural cues, and self organize (Fong, Nourbakhsh, & Dautenhahn, 2003). Do children and adults, for example, respond as if such robots were alive, warranting social and moral responsiveness? Or do children and adults simply project onto such robots animistic qualities, and engage with them in imaginative play, as they might a stuffed animal? Toward an investigation of these questions, with colleagues we have conducted studies that involve children’s and adults relationships with AIBO, Sony’s robotic dog. AIBO has a dog-like metallic form, moveable body parts, and sensors that

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Fig. 2.1 The robot dog, AIBO, positioning itself to kick the ball. Photo from Friedman, Kahn, & Hagman (2003), © 2008 ACM, Inc. Reprinted by permission

can detect distance, acceleration, vibration, sound, and pressure. As one of its compelling activities, AIBO can locate a pink ball through its image sensor (Fig. 2.1), and walk toward the pink ball, kick it, and head butt it. As people interact with different AIBOs, each robot learns slightly different sets of behaviors. We discuss two of the studies here.

2.2.2.1 The AIBO Discussion Forum Study In this study, we sought to generate detailed characterizations of social discourse in online AIBO communities that, in turn, would reveal important aspects of the human relationship with robotic others. We expected that in some meaningful ways members of the online AIBO discussion forums would treat AIBO as if it were an animal agent. For example, following Reeves and Nass (1998) we thought it possible that AIBO would provide some measure of social companionship and emotional satisfaction. Yet, based on other research literature, we expected limitations in the human-robotic relationship. Thus, we thought that even if AIBO evoked some of the feelings that people normally attribute to a human-animal relationship, that a moral relationship might often be absent. Data were collected from three well-established online forums that discuss Sony’s robotic dog, AIBO. We collected 6,438 postings over a 3-month period. From this total, 3,119 postings from 182 participants had something directly to say about AIBO. It was this subcategory of postings that we then systematically coded.

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Results showed that AIBO psychologically engaged this group of participants, particularly by drawing forth conceptions of technological essences (75%), life-like essences (49%), mental states (60%), and social rapport (59%). However, participants seldom attributed moral standing to AIBO (e.g., that AIBO deserves respect, has rights, or can be held morally accountable for action). To bring the reader closer to the results, we would like now to explicate many of the subcategories of reasoning (which were hierarchically integrated within the five overarching categories) and to provide qualitative examples of members’ reasoning. In the quotations that follow, we have retained all of the members’ purposeful and inadvertent misspellings in their online writing. 1. Technological essences. This conceptualization focuses on AIBO as an inanimate artifact. Seventy-five percent of the participants made remarks that AIBO was some sort of inanimate technological artifact. In so doing, participants referred to AIBO as an artifact (AIBO is a ‘toy’), as comprised of technological components (AIBO has ‘batteries,’ a ‘microphone,’ a ‘camera,’ or ‘sensors’), or as a piece of computational technology (AIBO is a ‘computer,’ a ‘robot,’ or has ‘artificial intelligence’). 2. Life-like essences. This conceptualization focuses on AIBO’s nature as having at least some life-like essential qualities. As a subcategory of life-like essences, roughly half (47%) of the participants provided language that spoke of AIBO’s biological essences. In its most minimal form, participants spoke of AIBO in terms of biological descriptors (AIBO has ‘eyes,’ ‘ears,’ a ‘tail,’ a ‘head,’ ‘legs,’ or a ‘brain’) or biological processes (AIBO ‘sleeps’). Furthermore, 14% of the members imbued AIBO with some substantial measure of animism, a second category of life-like essences. For example: ‘I know it sounds silly, but you stop seeing AIBO as a piece of hardware and you start seeing him as a unique “lifeform”.’ Or: ‘He seems so ALIVE to me!. . .What a wonderful piece of technology. THEY LIVE!’ Moreover, such conceptions could impact members’ emotions and behavior. For example, one member said: The other day I proved to myself that I do indeed treat him as if he were alive, because I was getting changed to go out, and tba [AIBO] was in the room, but before I got changed I stuck him in a corner so he didn’t see me! Now I’m not some socially introvert guy-in-a-shell, but it just felt funny having him there!

3. Mental states. This conceptualization refers to the presence or absence of a mental life for AIBO such that AIBO meaningfully experiences the world. As a subcategory of mental states, some members (42%) spoke of AIBO having intentions or that AIBO engaged in intentional behavior. For example: ‘He [AIBO] also likes to wander around the apartment and play with in pink ball or entertain or just lay down and hang out.’ Or: ‘He [AIBO] is quite happily praising himself these days. . .so much for needing parents!’ Some members (38%) spoke of AIBO having feelings. For example: ‘My dog [AIBO] would get angry when my boyfriend would talk to him.’ Or: ‘Twice this week I have had to put Leo [AIBO] to bed with his little pink teddy and he was woken in the night very sad

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and distressed.’ Some members (39%) spoke of AIBO as being capable of being raised, developing, and maturing. For example: ‘I want to raise AIBO as best as I possibly can.’ Or: ‘We have had Ah-May (210) [AIBO] since 12/25/2000 and he is still growing and doing new things.’ And some members (20%) spoke of AIBO as having unique mental qualities or personality. For example: ‘Just like Leo [one AIBO] . . . an individuality unlike any other.’ Or: ‘Did you find Horatio’s personality less endearing than Twoflower?’ 4. Social rapport. This conceptualization refers to ways in which AIBO evokes or engages in social interaction. As a subcategory of social rapport, some members (12%) spoke of themselves or others talking to their AIBO (e.g., ‘I insist everyone talks to Salem. . .if he is sad’). Some members (27%) engaged in reciprocal communication with their AIBO, wherein occurs a mutual exchange of information. For example, one member wrote: ‘So this morning I asked him [AIBO] “Do you want a brother?” Happy eyes! I asked him something else, no response. “Should I get you a brother?” Happy song! “He’d be purple.” More happy eyes and wagging tail!’ And some members (26%) spoke of AIBO as a companion, including that they miss AIBO when away from AIBO’s presence, or that they consider AIBO a family member. For example: Oh yeah I love Spaz [the name for this member’s AIBO], I tell him that all the time. . .When I first bought him I was fascinated by the technology. Since then I feel I care about him as a pal, not as a cool piece of technology. I do view him as a companion, among other things he always makes me feel better when things aren’t so great. I dunno about how strong my emotional attachment to him is. . .I find it’s strong enough that I consider him to be part of my family, that he’s not just a ‘toy’, he’s more of a person to me.

Here again this member recognizes that AIBO is a technology (When I first bought him I was fascinated by the technology). Nonetheless, AIBO evokes a form of social relationship that involves companionship (I do view him as a companion), familial connection (I consider him to be part of my family), and friendship (I care about him as a pal). 5. Moral standing. This conceptualization refers to ways in which AIBO is a moral agent. By this we mean that AIBO has rights, merits respect, engenders moral regard, can be a recipient of care, or can be held morally responsible or blameworthy. For example, one member wrote: ‘I am working more and more away from home, and am never at home to play with him any more . . . he deserves more than that.’ Here is the notion that AIBO merits (deserves) certain forms of attention. In another instance, when an AIBO was thrown into the garbage on a live-action TV program, one member responded to that televised event by saying: ‘I can’t believe they’d do something like that?! Thats so awful and mean, that poor puppy . . .’ Another member followed up: WHAT!? They Actualy THREW AWAY AIBO, as in the GARBAGE?!! That is outragious! That is so sick to me! Goes right up there with Putting puppies in a bag and than burying them! OHH I feel sick. . .

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Here AIBO is conceived to have moral standing in the way that a real puppy would (that poor puppy): that one is causing harm to a sentient creature (Goes right up there with Putting puppies in a bag and than burying them!). Collapsing across six subcategories that comprise this category, only 12% of members spoke of AIBO as having moral standing. 2.2.2.2 The AIBO Developmental Study The AIBO Discussion Forum study was limited by not investigating human interactions with AIBO compared directly to a live dog. Thus in another study we did so (Melson et al., 2008). We focused on two major issues. First, in a free play situation, what are the similarities and differences in terms of children’s physical interactions with AIBO and the live dog? Second, how do children conceptualize AIBO and the live dog in terms of their general properties and ‘beingness’? – what in the philosophical literature has been referred to as ontology (MacIntyre, 1972). Two entities were used in this study: AIBO and a live dog (a female Australian Shepherd), referred to as Canis. Each of the 72 children participated in an experimental procedure lasting approximately one hour. With each entity (AIBO or the live dog), the child was first engaged in a five minute unstructured familiarization ‘play’ period. Then the child was allowed to continue to play with each entity while engaged in an interview comprised of 38 questions. The interview sought to assess children’s concepts of the ontology of each entity, focusing on physical features (e.g., ‘Is AIBO/Canis alive or not alive?’), mental states (e.g., ‘Can AIBO/Canis feel happy?’), sociality, the state or quality of being social (e.g., ‘Can you be a friend to AIBO/Canis?’ ‘If you were sad, would you want to spend time with AIBO/Canis?’), and moral standing (e.g., ‘Is it OK or not OK to hit AIBO/Canis?’ ‘If AIBO/Canis is whimpering, is it OK or not OK to ignore AIBO/Canis?’). For coding children’s relative distance and position to AIBO/Canis, each five minute unstructured play period was broken into thirty ten-second intervals. For each interval, a trained coder gave a code for both distance (within or outside arms length of AIBO/Canis) and position (sitting on floor, sitting on chair, lying or leaning on floor, standing, kneeling, or squatting). Movement during the interval was indicated by checking off multiple categories for the same interval. In addition, the number of seconds each child made hand contact with AIBO/Canis during each five minute session was recorded. Physical Distance to AIBO/Canis. Based on the mean number of ten-second intervals, children spent more time within arms distance of Canis. That said, most of the children (80%) were within arms length of both during the majority of the ten-second intervals. Physical Contact with AIBO/Canis. On average, children spent 192.8 seconds (out of 300 seconds) in physical contact with Canis as compared to only 30.7 seconds (out of 300 seconds) in physical contact with AIBO. Conceptions of AIBO’s/Canis’ Ontology. Based on evaluation results across 38 questions, more children said that, compared to AIBO, the live dog had physical features, mental states, sociality, and moral standing. That said, averaging across

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questions by category, the majority of children nonetheless affirmed that AIBO had mental states (56%), sociality (70%), and moral standing (76%). Moreover, a nonnegligible number of children affirmed that AIBO had physical essences (22%). Was it the case that children in this study treated AIBO as if it were a live dog? Based on the results, the answer, in part, is clearly ‘no’. For example, results showed that children stayed within closer proximity to Canis than AIBO, and engaged in a much greater amount of touching behavior with Canis than AIBO. In addition, based on 38 evaluative questions, children more often accorded Canis, in comparison to AIBO, physical essences, mental states, sociality, and moral standing. That said, it was also the case that the majority of children treated AIBO in ways that were dog-like. After all, the majority of children accorded AIBO mental states, sociality, and moral standing. As one child said, when asked how she would play with AIBO, ‘I would like play with him and his ball and just give him lots of attention and let him know he’s a good dog.’ In other words, while the differences in children’s evaluations between AIBO and Canis across categories were statistically significant, a surprising majority of children affirmed that AIBO had mental states (56%), sociality (70%), and moral standing (76%). In addition, while children spent more time within arm’s reach of Canis than AIBO, most children (80%) spent the majority of their time within arm’s reach of both. Thus the children did not simply assimilate AIBO to the computational world.

2.2.3 Technological Humans: The Robovie Study Are humans apart from nature or a part of nature? In our view, the answer is both. It depends on what issues one is trying to highlight. For our purposes in this paper, we think it makes sense to recognize that humans are natural forms as compared to humanoid robots that are technological forms. Thus we now describe briefly our work with a humanoid robot, conducted in collaboration with Advanced Telecommunications (ATR) in Japan, and our colleagues Hiroshi Ishiguro and Takayuki Kanda. In this project, we engaged children in social and moral interactions with ATR’s humanoid robot, Robovie (Figs. 2.2 and 2.3) (Kahn et al., 2008a). From these interactions, we distilled eight possible patterns of interactions that help establish sociality in human robot interaction: initial introduction, didactic communication, in motion together, personal interests and history, recovering from mistakes, reciprocal turn-taking in game context, physical intimacy, and claiming unfair treatment or wrongful harms. As a case in point, we think that an essential aspect of social interaction involves an initial introduction, which can involve some measure of awkwardness or at least lack of knowledge of one another. The Initial Introduction is a design pattern that uses a largely scripted and conventionally-established verbal and behavioral repertoire (a) to recognize the other, (b) to inquire politely about the other, and (c) to engage in some physical acknowledgment, that may involve touching (e.g., a handshake) or some other action (e.g., in some cultures it is a slight bow, or a pronam,

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Fig. 2.2 ATR’s humanoid robot, Robovie, being introduced to a girl. Photo from Kahn, et al. (2008), © 2008 ACM, Inc. Reprinted by permission

Fig. 2.3 ATR’s humanoid robot, Robovie, hugging. Photo from Kahn, et al. (2008), © 2008 ACM, Inc. Reprinted by permission

with hands together). Here is an instantiation of the design pattern (see Fig. 2.2) that we successfully implemented with children and adolescents: Experimenter to participant: ‘I’d like to introduce you to Robovie. Robovie, meet [participant’s name].’ Robovie to participant: ‘Hi [participant’s name]. It is very nice to meet you. Will you shake my hand?’ Robovie approaches participant while reaching its arm out as an

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P.H. Kahn et al. offering to shake hands. Robovie to participant: ‘How are you today?’ If participant asks how Robovie is today, Robovie responds: ‘Very well, thank you for asking.’

This form of an initial introduction – something like it – we play it out hundreds of times in the course of a year. It is never exactly the same each time. But the Introduction is still structured, it’s patterned. Another possible design pattern involves physical intimacy, such as occurs in hugging (Fig. 2.3). It is possible that several hundred such patterns can be characterized in human-robot interaction that in the years ahead will establish social and moral relationships with humanoid robots. Of course, at stake in such interactions with technological humans – as with all of the above instantiations of technological – is whether such interactions are now, or in the future could be, as good as the experience with actual nature. We take up this issue next.

2.3 The Authenticity of Technological Nature? Is experiencing technological nature an authentic experience? Toward answering this question, we draw on Martin Buber’s (1970/1996) account of the I–You relationship to ground our account of authenticity. It is not the only way. But we think it is a good way. Our position is, in effect, ‘show us an I–You relationship, and we’ll show you an authentic relationship.’ According to Buber, in an I–You relationship (also sometimes translated as ‘I–Thou’), an individual relates to another with his or her whole being, freely, fully in the present, unburdened by conceptual knowledge: ‘The form that confronts me I cannot experience nor describe; I can only actualize it. And yet I see it, radiant in the splendor of the confrontation, far more clearly than all clarity of the experienced world’ (p. 61). In contrast, in an I–It relationship an individual treats another individual much like an artifact: to be conceptualized, acted upon, and used. Sometimes Buber’s account of an I–You relationship can be understood in mystical terms, especially in his third and final section of I and Thou where he discusses the individual’s relation to God. Buber writes: ‘In the relation to God, unconditional exclusiveness and unconditional inclusiveness are one’ (p. 127). He says later: ‘But mysticism? It relates how unity within duality feels. . . the soul may become one’ (p. 134). In this sense, for Buber, the individual transcends the biological self to merge with spirit, where there is ‘life with spiritual beings’ (p. 150). Elsewhere Buber writes: ‘By its very nature the eternal You cannot become an It; because by its very nature it cannot be placed within measure and limit, not even within the measure of the immeasurable and the limit of the unlimited. . .’ (p. 160). In this framing of the I–You, the authenticity of a relationship is established solely by virtue of the mystical perceptions of the person doing the perceiving. Through most of I and Thou, however, Buber grounds the I–You relationship not in mysticism but existentialism. He seeks to establish meaning in the reality of daily human experience. For our purposes – insofar as we prefer here not to invoke the human soul and spirit as ontological realities – it is Buber’s existential account that

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is most helpful: an account of the I–You relationship in ‘life with men’ (p. 150). In this framing, Buber grounds full authenticity in the reciprocity of relationship: ‘The You encounters me. But I enter into a direct relationship to it. Thus the relationship is election and electing, passive and active at once. . . I require a You to become; becoming I, I say You’ (p. 62). Thus in a canonical form of an I–You relationship, both parties are fully encountering and reciprocally engaging the other in relation. How does one know if a person is experiencing an I–You relationship with another person? It is a difficult question, and one that, to our knowledge, Buber never addressed directly. We can ask a similar question about love. How does one know if a person is in love? There are sometimes outward signs. Perhaps the lover exhibits sudden confusion and excitement in the loved one’s presence, or listens with rapt attention, makes eye contact, leans inward, and pays no heed to others present. The reader can fill in many other possible behaviors. Then, again, a person in love may show few or even no outward signs. But the person in love knows that he or she is in love. It is an experience. In other words, while there may be third-party corroboration based on behavioral evidence, love is known by means of first-person experience. The same may be said of an I–Thou relation insofar as it relies upon first-person experience to validate. The epistemic problem, however – especially in terms of assessing an I–You relationship – is that people can be mistaken in their first-person assessments. Imagine the case, for example, of a man in psychotherapy. Over many months the man may reveal himself to his therapist more and more deeply, and come to trust the therapist, and come to develop what he believes is a deep friendship with the therapist. The man might tell the therapist: ‘You’re my best friend.’ Likely enough the therapist will say (or think) something along the lines of: ‘No, I’m not your best friend, I’m your therapist.’ In other words, while a therapeutic relationship may be helpful and meaningful to the client, it is not fully authentic in terms of a friendship, for it is not fully reciprocal, even if a client mistakenly believes that it is. We suggest, then, that there is no foolproof way to establish if a person is in an I–Thou relation. Thus, as we make the move to technological nature, the question is not how we would know if a person was in a I–Thou relationship with technological nature. Rather, the best we can ask – though it is still a tremendously substantive question – is whether it is possible to have an I–Thou relationship with technological nature.

2.3.1 An I–Thou Relationship with Technological Humans? We first ask this question of whether it is possible to have an I–Thou relationship with technological nature in terms of a humanoid robot of the future. Part of the answer hinges on whether such a humanoid robot will be conscious (an experiencing subject), for in our reading of Buber consciousness is necessary for both entities involved in an I–You relationship, since the relationship is itself a reciprocal relationship.

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Will humanoid robots of the future be conscious? Those working in the fields of artificial intelligence and philosophy of mind vigorously debate this question (Hofstadter & Dennett, 1981; Searle, 1990). We side with those who say no. Following Searle (1990), we view computation as fundamentally about syntax, not semantics. And given the substrate of computation as it is understood today, we see no means by which semantics – the experience of meaning, consciousness – can emerge from merely increasingly complex and fast computation. Yet, to be clear, if the reader thinks yes, that increasingly advanced computation will lead to conscious robots, then the reader opens up the possibility for authentic I–You relationships with humanoid robots of the future.

2.3.2 An I–Thou Relationship with Technological Animals and Plants? Humanoid robots are only one form of technological nature. In Section 2.1, we described some of our research that involved two other canonical forms: technological animals (robot dogs) and technological plants (by means of the real-time plasma window). We now ask: Can one have an I–You relationship with these other forms of technological nature? The answer here partly hinges on the distinctions Buber makes between humans, (non-human) animals, and plants. Specifically, for Buber only a partial form of an I–You relationship can emerge with animals, wherein the You is latent: ‘In the perspective of our You-saying to animals, we may call this sphere the threshold of mutuality’ (p. 173). An even more limited partial form emerges with plants. Buber writes: It is altogether different with those realms of nature which lack the spontaneity that we share with animals. It is part of our concept of the plant that it cannot react to our actions upon it, that it cannot ‘reply.’ Yet this does not mean that we meet with no reciprocity at all in this sphere. We find here not the deed of posture of an individual being but a reciprocity of being itself – a reciprocity that has nothing except being. . .Our habits of thought make it difficult for us to see that in such cases something is awakened by our attitude and flashes toward us from that which has being. What matters in this sphere is that we should do justice with an open mind to the actuality that opens up before us. This huge sphere that reaches from the stones to the stars I should like to designate as the pre-threshold, meaning the step that comes before the threshold. (p. 173)

Buber’s position here is not so surprising given the importance he places on reciprocity in I–You relationships. Thus, in brief, between people, a full I–You relationship is possible. Between people and animals, one can arrive at the threshold of an I–You relationship. And between people and plants, one can arrive at the prethreshold of an I–You relationship. Regardless of the form that technological nature takes – human, animal, or plant – all three forms run up against another limitation in their authenticity. For, according to Buber, any technology that increases the ability to use the world ‘generally involves a decrease in man’s power to relate’ (p. 92). In some ways, this situation is not so different from the client and therapist scenario mentioned above. At any point in a therapeutic relationship, the client can in effect ‘flip the switch,’

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terminate the relationship, and expect no further unsolicited communications or inquiries or demands from the therapist. That is part of what makes it a one-sided, non-reciprocal ‘friendship.’ Similarly, with all of the technologies that we create to date, we can turn them off. We can shut down the humanoid robot or robot dog. We can turn off the plasma display window. Thus, if Buber’s account has merit here, and we think it does, then the fact that humans create technological nature makes it forever an object, thus limiting the possibility for authenticity of relation. Still, we have two caveats. First, what if in future years technological nature was designed such that humans could not shut it down, or at least not shut it down and then ‘power it back up,’ no more than we can kill an animal or plant and then expect it to live again. It is possible that such technological autonomy would increase our ability to engage in an I–You relationship with the technology. Second, what if technological nature passed a version of the Turing test, such that one could not readily tell the difference between the technological and biological form. In one study, for example, it was found that when looking at a moving android for two seconds, 70% of the participants in the study believed that they were looking at a human (MacDorman & Ishiguro, 2006). Of course, two seconds is not so long. And looking comprises but a small and perhaps not the richest subset of interaction. But the idea – that technological nature may one day be indistinguishable from actual nature, in form and function – is there, and has now moved from the pages of science fiction to the research laboratory.

2.4 The Problem When Good Enough Becomes Good It is neither trivial to ask, nor easy to answer, though we have tried, whether our interactions with technological nature in the decades and centuries ahead will be authentic. With some hedging and various caveats, our answer has been no, that our relation with technological nature is not and will not be fully authentic. But authenticity is but one of many ways by which to assess the psychological effects and value of technological nature. Here is another way. In a short story, The Machine Stops, E. M. Forster (1909) wrote presciently of a future time, when people lived underground, detached from nature, and connected to one another only through The Machine. The Machine is an omnipotent, global technological entity that moderates and provides for all bodily, emotional, and spiritual needs of human beings. People have become dependent on the Machine and have learned to fear and often despise the natural world. In one early scene, Forster has a mother talking with her son by videoconference. The son says that he yearns for the actual experience of his mother and not the technologically mediated encounter. He tells his mother: Men made it [the Machine], do not forget that. Great men, but men. The Machine is much, but it is not everything. I see something like you in this plate, but I do not see you. That is why I want you to come. Pay me a visit, so that we can meet face to face, and talk about the hopes that are in my mind. (pp. 2–3)

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Along similar lines, Forster writes: ‘In the air-ship . . . ’ He [the son] broke off, and she [the mother] fancied that he looked sad. She could not be sure, for the Machine did not transmit nuances of expression. It only gave a general idea of people – an idea that was good enough for all practical purposes, Vashti [the mother] thought. The imponderable bloom, declared by a discredited philosophy to be the actual essence of intercourse, was rightly ignored by the Machine, just as the imponderable bloom of the grape was ignored by the manufacturers of artificial fruit. Something ‘good enough’ had long since been accepted by our race. (p. 3)

Thus, through science fiction, Forster shows how the technological experience could become ‘good’ in the sense of ‘good enough’ for basic functioning rather than good based on deeper capacities for humans to experience and to flourish. Forster’s scenario is different from the future scenario we presented at the end of our previous section on authenticity. There we held out, as a conceptual possibility, that technological nature could become so sophisticated that people could not tell the difference between it and actual nature. But, in reality, that may never happen. Or it may not happen for hundreds or thousands of years. In the meantime, a potentially devastating psychological shift will likely take place. Initial evidence of this shift emerged in earlier research by Kahn and Friedman (1995) interviewing inner-city African American children in Houston, Texas on their environmental views and values (see, also, Kahn, 2002). Their findings were these: Houston is one of the more environmentally polluted cities in the United States. Local oil refineries contribute not only to the city’s air pollution, but also to distinct oil smells during many of the days. Bayous can be thought of more as sewage transportation channels than fresh water rivers. Within the community where the researchers conducted the Houston Child Study, garbage was commonly found alongside the bayou and on the streets and sidewalks. With that said, Kahn and Friedman systematically investigated whether children who understood in general about the idea of air pollution, water pollution, and garbage also understood that they directly encountered such pollution in Houston. The findings showed a consistent statistically supported pattern. About two-thirds of the children understood in general about these three environmental problems. However, contrary to the researchers’ expectations, only one-third of the children believed that these environmental problems affected them directly. How could children who know about pollution in general, and live in a polluted city, be unaware of their own city’s pollution? One answer is that to understand the idea of pollution one needs to compare existing polluted states to those that are less polluted. In other words, if one’s only experience is with a certain amount of pollution, then that amount becomes not pollution, but the norm against which more (or less) polluted states can measured at a later time. As a case in point, most of us accept a measure of polluted air as normal, and become concerned only on days when the pollution is particularly high. But ‘high’ is often compared to what is ‘normally polluted,’ not clean. Living in cities such as Cairo, Delhi, Beijing, and Los Angeles – even on ‘good’ days one’s health is impaired. According to the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology (AAAAI, 2008), in the United States approximately 20 million people have

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asthma, more than four million children have had an asthma attack in the previous year, and direct health care costs for asthma total more than $10 billion annually. Many of us accept asthma as part of the human condition; we might say: it is unfortunate that it occurs, but like many diseases, that is the way life is. But that is not the way life always was. Asthma used to be a rare disease. In Secrets of the Savanna (Owens & Owens, 2006), Delia Owens tells a poignant story of her grandpa. He was a poacher who routinely went way past the legal limits of trout, quail, doves, or whatever his quarry. He also was always able to outsmart the local game warden. For example, one time he and a friend illegally baited a whole field with corn, and the game warden spent the whole day by the field planning to catch them. Meanwhile, her grandpa and friend ‘shot hundreds of doves that flew over an unbaited field a few miles down the road’ (p. 51). Owens then writes: In later years, when he could no longer go hunting, he would shake his head and say, ‘There ain’t as many birds as there used to be, HiDe.’ He would almost whisper, ‘There used to be so many doves they’d darken the sky when they flew over a cornfield. At dusk you could hear the ducks landin’ on the river from half a mile away. You never heard so much squawkin’ and carryin’ on in your life. We didn’t figure our shootin’ would make a dent in ‘em. But I reckon we did.’ He stopped short of saying the game warden was right all those years, but that’s what he was admitting, and he felt bad, real bad. (pp. 52–53)

And now most of us do not know what her grandpa experienced; all the ‘squawkin and carryin’ on in your life’ is gone from the lives of most of us, and we do not miss what we have not experienced. Granted, maybe through personal stories such experiences can carry forward a generation. But then it is usually lost as a lived experience. This psychological phenomenon has been referred to as environmental generational amnesia (Kahn, 1997, 1999, 2002; Kahn & Friedman, 1995). Said differently, due to a shifting baseline, degraded environmental conditions become ‘good enough.’ Over time, especially across generations, ‘good enough’ becomes ‘good.’ The problem of environmental generational amnesia can be cast more positively. Here is one casting: We can be so much happier and more fulfilled as individuals, as a species, if we but reestablish some long-standing patterns of interaction with nature. There are potentially hundreds of such patterns of interaction. For example, the naturalist Robert Michael Pyle (2007) writes the following: ‘I live where I do so I can look out or walk outside at any time and instantly be within “nature.” Of course, one is in nature everywhere, since there is nothing else. But I mean a place where you can actually see all the swallows depart on a certain day in the fall and see the first arrivals in the spring in all their joy and relief and know there is nothing sentimental in saying so’ (p. 6). Pyle is tapping into a profound form of interaction with nature that involves experiencing its periodicity: the seasons changing, the day turning to dusk, birds migrating, waves hitting the shore, and the dew melting with the morning sun. Other enriching patterns of interaction with nature include the following: Sleeping under the night sky. Gardening. Walking on winding and contoured paths. Foraging for food. Being alone in nature. Hunting. Plunging into a lake, river, or ocean. Cooking around a campfire. And being recognized by a nonhuman other – a friendly dog, or a wild bear, moose, or wolf.

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2.5 Conclusion If, as humans, we can reestablish rich and pervasive patterns of interaction with nature, we will find deeper meaning and fulfillment in our lives. We will because these patterns existed for hundreds of thousands of years in our evolutionary history, and are woven into the architecture of the human mind. We think we can jettison them with impunity; but we cannot. And when we try, they often reappear in misguided forms. Many of us have witnessed, for example, a child or adult at a zoo banging on the cage of an animal (such as a chimp or great ape). The person is not only trying to get the animal’s attention, but to be recognized by the animal. It is a distortion of our human need to be recognized by a non-human other. Can technological nature substitute for actual nature? Recall what we learned from the technological view studies. From the field study we learned that when people must work in an inside office (e.g., because of the utilization of inside spaces or basements), that technological views of outside nature through a plasma window may provide workers with important physical, psychological, and socialorganizational benefits. But the experimental study established three other key findings: First, in terms of heart rate recovery from low level stress, working in the office environment with a glass window that looked out on a nature scene was more restorative than working in the same office without the outside view (the blank wall condition). Second, in terms of this same physiological measure, the plasma window was no different from the blank wall. Third, when participants looked longer out the glass window, they had greater physiological recovery; but that was not the case with the plasma window, where increased looking time yielded no greater physiological recovery. Taking both studies together, we should not be fooled into thinking that the digitized view is as effective as the actual view. It was not. We found a similar pattern with technological animals. The robotic dog AIBO readily engaged people (adults and children) in social and even some moral relationships, but appeared to come up short in comparison to interactions with live animals. The same, we suspect, will occur with technological humans (humanoid robots), though the research is only beginning to emerge on that front. The peril is this: Through the loss of experience with actual nature, and the increase in technological nature, the good enough will become the good. It will become so because of the increasing loss in our capacity to experience, and to even know of that loss. Thus it may not be too bold to suggest that this problem of the shifting baseline, and the resulting environmental generational amnesia, will become, if it is not already, one of the central psychological problems of our lifetime. Acknowledgments We thank Bruce Janz for his discussions with us on interpreting Martin Buber’s account of an I–You relationship, and particularly whether, in Buber’s account, it is possible to have an I–You relationship with technological nature. Of course, any problems in this paper are ours, not Janz’s. This paper is based upon research supported by the National Science Foundation under Grants No. IIS-0102558 and IIS-0325035. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

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Chapter 3

They Could Have Used a Robot: Technology, Nature Experience and Human Flourishing Maartje Schermer

3.1 A Realistic Focus The Chapter by Kahn, Severson and Ruckert gives a very interesting overview of a number of empirical studies in which human psychological reactions to technological nature are investigated. The general tenet is that technological nature – be it a landscape seen through a window, a robot dog or a humanoid robot – does have similar effects and evokes similar reactions to real nature. People are happier if they can ‘look out’ an artificial window than if they have no window at all, and children play with a robot dog almost in the same way as if it were a real dog.1 The fascinating and important finding that Kahn et al. draw our attention to, however, is that ‘almost’ like real nature and ‘just as if’ it were a real dog are not the same as indistinguishable from nature and exactly like a real dog. They rightly draw attention to the fact that it is precisely the small differences between real and technological nature that are important and stand in need of attention. The similarities are easy to see and easy to get carried away by. Kahn et al. convincingly show that it is the differences, rather than the similarities, that deserve further reflection. In general, scientists and technologists who develop systems such as the ones described by Kahn, focus on perfecting the similarities. Discussions on new M. Schermer (B) Medical Ethics and Philosophy of Medicine, Erasmus MC, Rotterdam, Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] 1 Neuroscientific

research shows how our brain is wired in such a way as to recognize certain patterns and respond to them. The mere sight of a human face triggers a whole neuronal network that is very different from the network that is triggered if we see things. For example: in an experiment, two sets of animations were presented, both of moving squares, circles and triangles. One set moved around in a ‘social’ manner, e.g., as if dancing together, or chasing one another. The other set moved in mechanical ways, e.g., like billiard balls. Only the first animation triggered the ‘social’ network in the brain of the participant who looked at the animations (Farah & Heberlein, 2007). I mention this to show how easily our brain is fooled by new technology: if a picture of a smiling face or an animation of circles and squares is enough to trigger the social or person networks in the brain, it is not surprising that robot dogs or humanoid robots will do the same, even more forcefully. We could say that the evolution of our brains does not keep up with the technological changes and that our rational judgments are often clouded by our intuitive reactions.

M. Drenthen et al. (eds.), New Visions of Nature, C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-2611-8_3, 

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technologies such as these tend to follow a certain pattern: those who develop the technology often claim that they will be able to perfect their technologies in the future; even if they are not perfect now, this is presented as just a matter of beginners-problems. The future scenario that is sketched is one of technology that does exactly what it was made to do – in the case of technological nature, the claim is that we will one day be able to technologically reproduce or substitute parts of nature in such a way that people will not be able to tell the difference. Those who are concerned about the advances of new technology and who have a critical view often tend to get carried away by the same rhetoric and future expectations. What if we could substitute windows and nature views with perfect full screen replicas? What if we could make robot pets and not tell the difference with real pets anymore? What if humanoid robots would become indistinguishable from real people? Nordmann (2007) calls this type of reflection speculative ethics – it departs from an if-then reasoning that takes the promises of technology developers far too much at face value. It is a merit of Kahn et al. that they do not follow this route, but take a critical and empirically well-informed look at the technologies that are here already and point out that there are still significant differences between real and technological nature. These differences lay both in the appearance of technological nature, and in its effects on humans. The screen window, for example, has the important feature that you cannot change your perspective by changing positions. From whichever angle you look at the screen, you see the same picture; whereas with a real window it matters a lot from which angle you look through it (Kahn et al. call this the parallax problem). This might be one explanation for the different effects the screen window has on physiological parameters (recovery after stress) as compared to the real window. Likewise, the robot dog does not look like a real dog at all. It has no fur and is not soft to the touch – this might explain why it is touched less than the real dog in the experiment with children playing with both. It would be interesting to see how much of the difference in reactions would remain if the AIBO were to look, smell and feel more like a real dog.

3.2 Authentic Relationships Kahn et al. claim that the danger with forms of technological nature is precisely that they are different from real nature because they lack certain features that real nature does have. First, they look for these differences by using the concept of authenticity as used by Buber. The use of the authenticity concept of Buber does not seem to address the question fully, however. With Buber, the authenticity of the I–You relationship already presupposes two conscious (human) beings, as Kahn et al. recognize. This makes the concept less apt to discuss relationships to nature – be it in the form of animals, plants, or inanimate nature – because these are not the types of relations that can be authentic in Buber’s sense. One important characteristic of real nature as opposed

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to artificial nature that Kahn et al. derive from Buber is the difference in reciprocity. Kahn et al. claim that because we create technological nature, it is forever an object. Because we can control it by turning it off or shutting it down, there is no real reciprocity – the relationship is one-sided. This argument goes a bit too fast. First of all, the mere fact that we create something does not necessarily make it an object to which we cannot relate authentically. We can create children, even in laboratories through IVF or ICSI, and still relate to them as human subjects. Second, as Kahn et al. recognize, we could make technological artifacts without a stop-button; we could make robot dogs that we could not control but that would ‘lead a life of their own’. Third, we might be able to make technological nature that could pass a kind of Turing test. If we could, then the reciprocity argument would appear to loose it’s hold. Could we claim that there was something inauthentic about technological nature, if we could in no way distinguish it from real? Actually, I don’t think so. But as said earlier, the chance that we will seems remote: small but significant differences abound and we may not even be aware of them until we have investigated them more fully.

3.3 Nature Experience and Human Well-Being The danger with forms of technological nature, Kahn et al. claim, is not that they can replace nature without us even noticing it, but that they differ from real nature in significant aspects – and we may come to forget the significance of those aspects. By getting used to these impoverished forms of artificial nature, we will shift our baseline for the perception of nature and come to regard these impoverished forms as normal, they claim. There is a danger that we will forget the much richer experiences that real nature can provide. This would constitute an overall decline in human well-being, even if humans would not themselves experience it as such. ‘The technological experience could become “good” in the sense of “good enough” for basic functioning rather than good based on deeper capacities for humans to experience and to flourish’. This fear is perhaps more powerfully expressed in literature than it is in scientific prose. Kahn et al. cite Forster to make this clear. I would like to add a fragment from Brave New World with the same theme, where the characters Lenina and Bernard are flying over the British channel by night. Bernard, who is a bit of an outcast, deeply enjoys the experience, and wants Lenina to join him. “Look,” he commanded. “But it’s horrible,” said Lenina shrinking back from the window. She was appalled by the rushing emptiness of the night, by the black foamed-flecked water heaving beneath them, by the pale face of the moon, so haggard and distracted among the hastening clouds. “Let’s turn on the radio. Quick!” (Huxley, 1994, 80).

Lenina is horrified and frightened by the fact that they are alone in the middle of natural surroundings, without music, lights and distraction. She has been formed

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completely by Brave New World’s absence of nature and abundance of artificial experiences and enjoyment. Nature means nothing to her. This is fiction, but an anecdote from psychologist and Internet sociologist Sherry Turkle illustrates that such a shift in baseline perception may be well underway. Turkle recounts how she goes to see an exhibit on Darwin and the evolution with her teenage daughter. At the entrance to the exhibit is a turtle from the Galapagos Islands, a seminal object in the development of evolutionary theory. The turtle rests in its cage, utterly still. ‘They could have used a robot,’ comments the daughter. ‘It was a shame to bring the turtle all this way and put it in a cage for a performance that draws so little on the turtle’s “aliveness”.’2 Kahn et al. speak of a certain type of experience that may get lost and even speak of environmental generational amnesia. It is clear that they regret this loss because rich and pervasive patterns of interaction with nature provide humans with deep meaning and fulfillment. We will loose our capacity for certain types of experiences – experiences of and in nature – and worse, we will not even realize what we have lost anymore. Most philosophical views on well-being can account for the idea that a human life may be less good than the subject of that life himself beliefs or experiences it to be. A lack of certain capabilities, for example, can make a person worse off, even if he does not know it, or does not realize it. These theories have developed answers to the problem of ‘adaptive preferences, (and the problem that Kahn et al. describe is an instance of this): even if people are satisfied or content or even happy with the circumstances of their lives, they may still be mistaken. Their subjective valuation of the quality of their lives is not the only measure that we should take seriously; there are more objective criteria. The capability approach as developed by Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen is one of the theories that offer a more objective view of the good life. In this sense the capability approach is similar to ‘objective list theories’ (Parfit, 1984). This are theories that claim that what is good for a person is fixed independently of that person’s attitudes or opinions and can be listed objectively. Martha Nussbaum takes the notions of human flourishing and human nature as a key-concept and lists the kind of capabilities that are necessary for having a good life (Nussbaum, 2000). For Nussbaum being part of nature, or interacting with nature, is a human capability. It is something that we need to be able to do, or have, in order to lead a good life – whether we realize it or not.

3.4 Technology’s Double-Edged Sword Although I find the argument of Kahn et al. sympathetic and to a large degree convincing, I also believe their type of reasoning runs the risk of romanticizing the past – it is no coincidence that the recollections of a grandfather are presented as 2

http://www.edge.org/q2006/q06_8.html#turkle accessed 15-12-2008

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examples of what gets lost – and tends to neglect the advantages and novel possibilities of new technologies. While they are realistic with regard to the pretensions of creating technological nature which is indistinguishable from real nature – they do not claim that robot dogs or humanoid robots will ever pass a Turing test – in the final part of the paper they appear to get swept away by the idea that we will completely replace our experiences with real nature by artificial ones. This is an interesting claim that contains an important warning, and definitely something to look into further. But it also seems to take a very specific ideal of the nature experience as a norm and it fails to recognize that technology can create new opportunities to engage in nature, or to create an interest in nature as well. In this respect, Kahn’s view reminds us of Albert Borgmann’s theory of the device paradigm, and especially his description of focal practices (Borgmann, 1984). According to Borgmann, in our contemporary technological culture the presence of things is more and more substituted by the availability of commodities that are produced by devices. While things are inseparable from their context and require human engagement, devices are artifacts that do not involve engagement but simply produce commodities. Borgmann gives the example of the hearth, which is a thing that is central to the household and requires the gathering and chopping of wood, making a fire and maintaining it; all of this requires human engagement. A central heater, on the other hand, is a device that produces heat, but does not require any engagement. According to Borgmann, devices diminish our engagement with the world and substitute it with consumption. It might be argued that the robot dog and the screen window are devices, producing contact or companionship and views respectively, but that they are not ‘the real thing’. While they are instrumental in producing certain commodities, they are not things that engage people in more encompassing ways. What these devices do, in other words, is turning nature into a commodity, something to be consumed, rather than something to experience and engage in. However, chopping wood for the stove is a much more pleasantly engaging activity when it is done just for fun during a camping trip than when your life actually depends on it. So are hunting, or foraging food. Likewise, ‘being in nature’ as an experience has already changed significantly over the centuries through all kinds of technologies. Being alone in the mountains feels less alone if you have a cell phone to connect you to the outside world, and less dangerous if you know there are emergency helicopters to come and rescue you if necessary. Our current experiences of nature cannot be the same as those of our grandparents or of our grandparent’s grandparents, simply because we are not the same and the world we live in is not the same. We may regret that with regard to certain aspects, but there certainly are a lot of good sides to it as well. In many ways, technology has improved our lives over that of our grandparents. As Verbeek (2005) has argued contra Borgmann, technologies may also open up new experiences and create new ways of engaging with the world. In the screen window experiment, for example, people tended to go out to have lunch more often if they could see the weather conditions on their screen window. The screen window

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thus stimulated real contact with nature instead of replacing it. Moreover, technological nature may have some advantages over real nature as well. A robot dog does not defecate so you do not have to take him outside, which can be a huge advantage for frail elderly people. The screen window can be used for PowerPoint presentations and perhaps video conferencing as well and thus create other types of human interaction – which a real window cannot. And with regard to technology and nature experiences in general, I, for one, would never have experienced mountain views if it had not been for planes and automobiles; and I would never have even dreamt of pursuing encounters with wolves or wild bears if it had not been for Discovery Channel.3

3.5 Conclusion The most important lesson I think is that we cannot replace nature by technological artifacts or simulacra. We should not be satisfied too easily with less that the real thing and we should invest in real nature and the possibility to have real nature experiences, even though we will have a hard time defining what those are exactly. As a capability, an option that we are able to realize if we want, experiences with nature are part of the good life. This implies both the availability and accessibility of real nature, as well as the human capacity to actually experience and enjoy it. But there may also be circumstances in which we will have to do with ‘good enough’, or where advantages of new technologies outweigh their disadvantages and risks. There may even be ways in which nature experiences are triggered, stimulated or enhanced through new technologies (Schermer, 2008). As Kahn et al. show us though, it is questionable whether this will be achieved by the type of technologies that try to mimic nature.

References Borgmann, A. (1984). Technology and the character of contemporary life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Farah, M. J., & Heberlein, A. S. (2007). Personahood and neuroscience: Naturalizing or nihilating? American Journal of Bioethics – Neuroscience, 7, 37–48. Huxley, A. (1994). Brave new world. London: Flamingo. Nordmann, A. (2007). If en then. A critique of speculative nano-ethics. Nanoethics, 1, 31–46. Nussbaum, M. (2000). Women and human development. New York: Cambridge University Press. Parfit, D. (1984). Reasons and persons. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schermer, M. (2008). Enhancements, easy shortcuts, and the richness of human activities, Bioethics, 22, 355–363. Verbeek, P. P. (2005). What things do. Philosophical reflections on technology, agency and design. University Park Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press. 3 Actually,

I am quite happy to confine my encounters with wolves and bears to television; the experience of being recognized by this type of non-human other is something I don’t mind missing out on.

Chapter 4

The Authenticity of Nature: An Exploration of Lay People’s Interpretations in the Netherlands Riyan J.G. van den Born and Wouter T. de Groot

4.1 Introduction The human capacity to manipulate nature has increased dramatically over the last decades. The slow development of farming, gardening and breeding has been replaced by a proliferation of techniques in genetic engineering, chemical regulation and ecosystem (re)construction. The resulting blurring of the simple distinction between the human, the interactive and the natural domains has triggered societal debate and philosophical reflection. If the artifacts and topsoils of an agricultural area are removed and natural species colonize the place neatly according to plan, is that real nature? If an overactive child is sedated so as to facilitate the handling of the child, is that still the same child? If we manage a forest or a river so cleverly that the most beautiful trees and the most fishable fish spontaneously dominate the ecosystem, where then do we in fact walk and fish – in nature or in a pseudo zoo? This chapter addresses issues such as the above from an empirical, socioscientific point of view, and focuses on the level of individual lay people rather than on professional discourses or policies. Broadly put, our research aim has been to study how individual people engage in the conceptual and moral dilemmas posed by the blurring of boundaries between the human and the natural. In view of our empirical objective, we have tried to define key concepts such as nature, naturalness and authenticity in ways that lie close enough to both the philosophical and the ‘folk’ notions. As a starting point, we refer to one of the surveys of our research group in which people were asked to indicate the perceived degree of naturalness of certain instances of nature, such as ‘pigeons in the city square’, ‘a maize field’ or ‘the sea’. One of the items on that list was ‘giving birth to children’, and most respondents ranked that event as largely natural (Van den Born, Lenders,

R.J.G. van den Born (B) Department of Philosophy and Science Studies, Faculty of Sciences, Radboud University of Nijmegen, Heyendaalseweg 135, 6525 AJ Nijmegen, Netherlands e-mail: [email protected]

M. Drenthen et al. (eds.), New Visions of Nature, C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-2611-8_4, 

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De Groot, & Huijsman, 2001).1 This shows that respondents have in fact no difficulty with the idea of naturalness in humans; giving birth is a process where ‘nature takes over’ and dominates our conscious deliberations. In other words, respondents’ deep definition of nature refers to self-organization and spontaneity including that of ourselves, even when in daily language the term nature usually refers loosely to the green stuff ‘out there’. Thus we define: • (degree of) naturalness = (degree of) being or happening without human interference; • nature = all patterns in space or events and processes in time that develop(ed) with a certain minimum degree of naturalness. In this scheme, talking about the degree of naturalness of nature is conceptually unproblematic, even though the threshold for something to qualify as nature may vary over persons or cultures, e.g., Europeans apply a lower threshold than Americans tend to do. Things, patterns or events may be called nature or natural even if co-determined by some degree of human decision-making. A maize field may be regarded as non-natural because it is not natural enough, while a 50-year old forest, though planned and planted through human decision-making, may be seen as having developed enough naturalness to be above the threshold and hence be regarded as nature, even acknowledging, as people usually do, that the tropical rainforest is more natural. This set of definitions lies close to those used by philosophers involved in the authenticity debate, such as Elliot (1982) and Katz (1992). Elliot and Katz, for instance, take that ‘natural’ means ‘unmodified by human activity’ and recognize that degrees of naturalness exist along a spectrum. Our definitions also allow for Elliot’s major argument that origin matters in the assessment of degree of naturalness, or if something qualifies as nature or not. Moreover, the definitions follow Brennan’s ‘useful notion’ (Katz, 1992, p. 90) that the natural is the spontaneous, including that of humans, with natural childbirth serving as an example, like in our survey. A point of difference here is that Katz focuses on what does or does not ‘go beyond our biological and evolutionary capacities’, which would appear to call forth all kinds of ambiguities because making artifacts and doing science is obviously within human evolutionary capacities, and would therefore qualify as natural. Our definition focuses on conscious deliberation, thus allowing behaviors such as running away from an explosion or jumping into a lake on a hot day to qualify as natural without the need to refer to evolutionary capacities. Human presence in a landscape therefore does not subtract from a landscape’s naturalness if and insofar as these behaviors and their visible effects are those of humans behaving as ‘just another species’ as De Groot (1992, p. 223) puts it in his assessment system of intrinsic natural value. 1 The Netherlands is one of the few countries where childbirth is still practiced as a non-medicalized

event, preferably (and in most actual cases) taking place under the supervision of a midwife rather than a gynaecologist.

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Nature is organized on the basis of system levels, such as genes, organisms and ecosystems. Degrees of naturalness may vary across system levels. A city park, for instance, has a low degree of naturalness at the system level, but many organisms in it may have settled and developed fully on their own, i.e., be purely natural. As we will see in subsequent sections, respondents make this distinction as well. This distinction is an analytical one, however. It therefore does not preclude substantive interdependence of system levels in naturalness assessment. One example is the child reported in De Groot, Van den Born, and Lenders (2006, p. 9) who asserts that a stone on the mountain is nature, but the same stone on the kitchen sink is not nature. Earlier work of our group focused on visions of nature, viewed as the umbrella concept that encompasses (1) images of nature, (2) values of nature and (3) images of the human-nature relationship. Images of the human-nature relationship are conceptualized in terms of mastership over nature, stewardship of nature, partnership with nature and participation in nature. One of the findings, for instance, is that mainstream people tend to feel part of nature and responsible for nature at the same time (Van den Born, 2007). In order to provide a link with earlier work, images of relationship were included in the interviews. As for the concept of authenticity, a few of our respondents seemed to hint at a difference with naturalness, e.g., when remarking that a forest may look natural but in fact, on some deeper level, it is not. This distinction did not come to fore in the analysis, however, and neither did we find any philosophical reason to differentiate the naturalness of nature from the authenticity of nature. We will use the two terms interchangeably. The paper is structured as follows. The next section will discuss the general research approach, the research question and the research methods. Section 4.3 presents the results, grouped by five different aspects. Section 4.4 provides a brief reflection. Overall, in keeping with the exploratory aim of the paper (see below), we will focus entirely on detailed empirical reporting, refraining from theoretical discussions.

4.2 Approach and Method Because the authenticity of nature has not received empirical attention in earlier studies, this study aimed to be exploratory in both the methodological and the substantive sense. Methodologically, we were sure of a few general principles, one of which was that during previous studies, people appeared to respond much more freely and elaborately to examples expressing the underlying philosophical aspects than to the issue itself: see for instance Van den Born (2008) on the intrinsic value of nature. With respect to the interviews, however, many details needed to be explored, e.g., if the interview questions designed were sufficiently valid, coherent and elicited differentiation between respondents. Our interviews did yield this kind of information, but since they are not of great interest to the outsider, we will not report on them further.

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In the substantive realm, our exploratory aim has had two consequences, related to the complexity of the examples discussed with the respondents and the choice between a qualitative or quantitative emphasis. Subtle and intricately layered dilemmas are philosophically more challenging than simple ones. This may be the reason why the concept of authenticity of nature is discussed by philosophers mainly in the context of nature restoration. We felt that for a first exploration of the issue with lay people, less complex case material was required, so as to keep the cases conceptually manageable for the respondents (and for ourselves in the subsequent analysis). Therefore, the example dilemmas we used as discussion triggers represent relatively straightforward human interventions in nature, e.g., transgenic apples, helping nature with artificial devices, or replacing native with exotic forest species. These cases have not been generated by any sophisticated theory, but by a simple 2 by 3 generative scheme that distinguishes between genetic and non-genetic intervention in nature and three degrees of intervention. The only directly theory-driven question in the interviews was the last one, in which people were asked for their preference regarding consequentionalist versus non-consequentionalist ethics. In defense of this low level of sophistication, we argue that this is the way that grounded theory building proceeds (Strauss & Corbin, 1997). Research could be initiated to pursue qualitative or quantitative questions. Qualitative questions focus primarily on the nature (or: content) of phenomena, e.g., what people think about authenticity or what they regard as nature. Quantitative questions, on the other hand, focus on distributions of phenomena, e.g., the degree to which older respondents differ from younger respondents in terms of an authenticity classification. It is a persistent misunderstanding that qualitative questions have to be answered by ‘qualitative methods’ (whatever that may mean) and quantitative questions by ‘quantitative methods’ (idem). Methods such as interviews may well be used for both pursuits however, provided some minimum number is available. Likewise, methods such as surveys may be used for both purposes too; a factor analysis may, for instance, result in conceptual typologies, which are a qualitative result. Van den Born (2007) gives example. Our exploratory research design aimed to ‘get a bit of both’, that is to say, to allow a first grasp of both the contents of people’s conceptualizations and of the distributions of these contents. This led to a choice for 30 interviews and a semi-structured interview design. Against this background, our research question was: how do lay people, in a semi-structured interview setting and responding to a number of concrete examples of human manipulation of nature, relate to the theme of authenticity (naturalness) of nature? The subclause ‘in a semi-structured interview setting and responding to a number of concrete examples of human manipulation of nature’ is not superfluous. It may be expected that people respond contextually to these kind of issues, and the answers received in this particular research setting should not be taken as fixed in any other setting, e.g., when the issue is mixed with specific backgrounds (as they often are in daily life or in the ballot box), or when people are asked to respond to a written questionnaire or to different types of questions. For this reason, we pay detailed attention to the interview structure and wordings in this section.

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The village of Beek, close to Nijmegen, was selected for the interviews. Beek is a quiet place. Its inhabitants are urban oriented, but it still has a character of its own. The village is situated at the bottom of the steep and sandy slope that forms the transition from the Nijmegen ‘plateau’ (some 40 m above sea level) to the flat, mainly agricultural Rhine floodplain that offers the usual Dutch landscape of grasslands, arable land and great skies. We can assume that when respondents talk about ‘the forest’, they have the sloping area in mind, which is a fine-grained mixture of grassland and forested areas with high historical and biodiversity value, dotted with a few old farm houses and many winding paths used mainly for recreation. Thirty respondents were selected through snowball sampling. Starting with the first respondent, the snowball question was whether he or she knew anybody in Beek who would also like to participate. Care was taken that, overall, men and women were represented sufficiently equally and that sufficiently equal age groups were represented between the ages of 18 and 60 years. The result was a gender division of 15 women and 15 men, and a representation of 14 and 16 in the age brackets of 20–40 and 41–60, respectively. As far educational level was concerned, it turned out that 16 respondents were educated at the higher level (higher vocational schools and university), nine respondents were educated at the medium level (medium vocational schools and secondary education) and five respondents at the lower level. This is slightly higher than the average in the Dutch population. Box 4.1 lists the images of the human-nature relationship as phrased in the interviews. Box 4.2 contains the wording of the examples of intervention in nature, and Box 4.3 summarizes the interview procedure.

Box 4.1 Images of Relationship as Worded in the Interviews The four images of relationship were explained to the respondents in an arbitrary order, starting however with Steward or Partner. The images of relationship were visualized in simple drawings. • Master over nature According to the idea of Mastership, humans stand above nature. Humans are allowed to do with nature whatever they want. Economic growth and technology are expected to provide answers to problems that might crop up (for instance, environmental problems). • Steward of nature The Steward stands above nature and is responsible for the conservation of nature. Nature is not owned by the Steward, but entrusted to him. The steward owes responsibility to God or future generations. • Partner with nature The Partner stands side by side with nature. Humans and nature are considered to be of equal value. Humans should work together with nature in the conviction that this interaction will benefit both.

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• Participant in nature The Participant is part of nature, not just biologically, but also on the spiritual level. Although humans are a (small) part of nature, they are active participants. For the Participant, the bond between self and nature is very important; it co-constitutes the self. After the scenarios of technological interventions in nature were presented to the respondents, the question on images of relationship was asked again but textually adjusted to also capture the role of technology in the human-nature relationship. According to the idea of Mastership, there are no obstacles to technological interventions in nature. After all, humans stand above nature and are allowed to do with nature whatever they want. If people benefit from the intervention, the intervention is a good thing. According to the idea of Stewardship, technological interventions are only permitted within certain boundaries and in a responsible manner. Nature should not suffer extensive or irreversible damage. According to the idea of Partnership, technological interventions are allowed only in case both humans and nature benefit. According to the idea of Participation, extensive technological interventions in nature are not allowed. After all, the bond we feel with nature is a bond with something that is truly different from us, not with something we made ourselves. Box 4.2 The Two Series of Instances of Non-genetic and Genetic Manipulation of Nature in Different Degrees as Worded in the Interviews NON-GENETIC

GENETIC

Exotic trees: We can replace certain elements of nature because they are sick or because we think it is more beautiful. For instance, we may cut all old trees in a forest and replace them by healthy exotic trees.

Genetic apple: We can change the genetic structure of an apple in such a way that it contains more vitamins.

Plastic ponds: We can build synthetic ponds in the forest that can clear the water and are able to better retain the water. Plastic forest: We can make a totally plastic forest that needs no maintenance and is not susceptible to any kind of disease, but it smells just like a real forest and the leaves fall in winter just as usual.

Genetic tree: We can change the genetic structure of a tree in such a way that the leaves will fall twice a year. In that way more light will reach the forest floor and much more varied undergrowth will establish itself. Genetic forest: We can replace an entire forest by trees, plants and animals with genetic adaptations. The trees can open their foliage when the sun shines and close it when it rains, like natural roof. Flowers emanate a soft light during the night. The birds have tropical colors, they sing all day long and they are not shy.

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Box 4.3 The Structure of the Interviews Part 1: Images of Nature and Images of Relationship – What is nature according to you? Or: what would be your definition of nature? – I want to ask you what you think the relationship between humans and nature should be. I will present four different images of relationship between humans and nature and I would like to discuss all four with you. Remember, this is about your opinion. [The images of relationship, see Box 4.1., were discussed.] – What is your opinion on this? [Subsequently different, more specific questions per image of relationship were asked, for instance:] – Do you think humans and nature are of equal value? (partner) – Do you think humans are responsible for nature? (steward) – What do you think about the idea that nature basically is an economic good? (master) – Out of these four images, what image fits your ideas on the human/nature relationship best? [Respondents were left free to express their own preferred relationship if they wished.] And why? Part 2: Technological Interventions in Nature Now, I would like to discuss the role of technology with you. We can hardly imagine our lives without a vacuum cleaner, a television or a mobile phone. Technological developments go beyond this, however, and humans increasingly intervene in nature. I would like to talk about this topic with you. I will present a number of examples in which humans intervene in nature by means of technology. 2A Physical Interventions in Nature (see Box 4.2) [The examples A to C were presented in arbitrary order, and the following questions were discussed for each] – – – –

What is your opinion on this? why? Do you think it is right or not? why? Do you think this is allowable or not? why? Do you think this is natural or not? why?

[Finally, for the examples jointly:] Please order the cards from what you consider the least natural to what you consider the most natural.

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2B: Genetic Interventions in Nature (see Box 4.3) Besides replacing certain elements in nature by others, we can also change certain elements genetically. All these characteristics are hereditary and will therefore be transferred to the next generations. [Examples A to C were presented in arbitrary order, and the following questions were discussed for each] – – – –

What is your opinion on this? why? Do you think it is right or not? why? Do you think this is allowable or not? why? Do you think this is natural or not? why?

[Finally, for all examples:] Please order the cards from what you consider the least natural to what you consider the most natural. 2C. Images of Technology Technology plays a role in all the examples above. How do you see the role of technology? I will present three possible visions on technology: • Technology as liberator: this is an optimistic vision: science and technology have brought us prosperity and will continue to do that. When problems arise, we can solve them by further improving technology. • Technology as threat: this is a pessimistic vision: the increasing application of technology is a self-reinforcing process, out of human control. According to this idea, humans and nature are victims of technological development. • Technology as neutral: According to this image, technology itself is neutral; technology itself does not lead to something good or something bad; it is the way in which humans use technology and the objects they strive for. Which image appeals to you most? Why? 2D. Images of Nature Now, I would like to know what, in this context, is your opinion on the response of nature to human interventions. [The following images were shown as drawings and worded as follows:] –

Nature indifferent Nature is basically indifferent towards the influences of humans. Although human influences will have a major effect on nature, the ecosystem will always find a new balance.

–

Nature buffered

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Humans take influence on nature within certain boundaries; however, this will not bring nature out of balance. Nature will lose its balance, however, if these boundaries are crossed, and the ecosystem will be lost. –

Nature unstable Nature is very vulnerable and will be substantially harmed by any human intervention.

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Nature stable Nature is very strong en will always be able to stay healthy, whatever humans do.

Which image appeals to you most? Why? 2E. Images of Relationship - Repeated When we look again at the four images of relationship at this point, we can try to give the role of technology a place in them. [explanation of technology in the four images, see Box 4.1] – Which image appeals to you most? Why? – Or would you describe the role of technology in the human/nature relationship in a different way? Part 3: Technological Interventions in the Human Body Not reported here Part 4: Ethics I would like to know how you think society should deal with technology. I will present two positions and ask you to give a reaction on both. Let’s assume that technology is always serving an objective. For instance, better health, or more better comfort or happiness for more people. The two positions are: 1. What is allowed or not allowed fully depends on that objective. 2. What is allowed or not allowed is not dependent on human wishes. When something is bad, it is always bad, independent of the outcome. – What is your reaction to these positions? – How do you think society should deal with technology? Part 5: Socio-Demographic Information Gender, level of education, occupation, age, marital status, children, religion.

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4.3 Results 4.3.1 Images of Relationship In the interviews, respondents were asked to give a first reaction to each image. Then, they could choose which image best fitted their idea of how humans should relate to nature. In line with previous research (Van den Born, 2007), respondents had strongly ecocentric inclinations. Mastership over nature was rejected by all respondents. Stewardship of nature was regarded as positive because of the idea that humans have a responsibility to take care of nature and that humans should be accountable to future generations. The idea of humans and nature being of equal value was endorsed by some of the respondents. However, the majority of the respondents thought that a partnership with nature is unattainable, for instance because humans cannot help but to dominate nature. Most people were convinced that humans are part of nature, but in a biological rather than a spiritual sense (as the Participant image was originally intended). In their final choice (but before discussing the interventions in nature), seven respondents preferred this image of biological participation in nature. Five respondents preferred steward of nature, and four respondents chose partnership with nature as the image most representative of their feelings. A combination of biological participant and steward was preferred by six respondents. The others preferred other combinations. After discussing the example interventions in nature, the interview returned to the images of relationship. Technology was given a place in the different images, and the respondents were requested to state what image of relationship fitted best with their ideas at this point. Twelve respondents stuck to the image they chose originally. Most others moved from an emphasis of being (biologically) part of nature to images of stewardship of nature (ten respondents), partnership with nature (ten respondents) or a combination thereof (six respondents). Respondents explained this shift by the importance of maintaining a balance between humans and nature and a feeling that stewardship and partnership express this idea best. We are allowed to use technology, but without damaging nature. This was worded, for instance, as: ‘Let’s try to keep it within certain boundaries’. ‘In the stewardship model, you can interfere in nature, but there are certain limits’. ‘The steward should take care of nature, and I think that this is the present situation’.

The dynamics of this reasoning becomes visible in the following quotes: The respondent chooses the combination of steward and partner Q: At first you chose partner and participant, why did you change your opinion? A: ‘Because we are talking about technology now, then you have to make a choice about the level of interference [in nature]. I think that this makes quite a difference’. Q: And you choose this because of the boundaries? A: ‘Yes, here we have to take nature into account. When we were not talking about technology, like before [in the interview], the image is that nature is

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quite powerful and humans are just a small part. But with technology included in the picture, we see ourselves as much more powerful and then we have to consider limits. I think nature is vulnerable in that context.’ And: ‘Yes, I find it a bit difficult. . . At first I endorsed the participant image, in which humans are part of nature. In that case, however, technological interventions are not allowed, and that is a consequence that I would not accept. I wouldn’t agree to that. No, humans [are allowed to intervene but] should be aware of the impacts thereof. So, I tend to the partner image. We should realise what the consequences are, and that there may be disadvantages.’

Overall, it appears that many respondents first choose the image of humans as (biological) part of nature, but then begin to realize that this notion does not offer much guidance for the intervention-in-nature issues, contrary to the stewardship and partner images, where setting boundaries, ensuring protection, preserving the harmony and suchlike responses are easier to conceptualize.

4.3.2 Responses to the Example Series 4.3.2.1 The Example Series of Physical Interventions in Nature People were asked to respond to examples of planting exotic trees in the forest, constructing artificial ponds in the forest and replacing trees with plastic ones that look and behave ‘just as usual’ (see Box 4.2). Responses to the artificial ponds issue were quite nuanced. Approximately half of the respondents thought this was a good idea, the other half not. Those positive about the artificial pond were so primarily because the intervention appeared to be meant to support forest ecology. Some respondents expressly asked if this was indeed the objective. A typical response then was: ‘OK, you help the forest with this. We do too much to the forest already, such as acid rain. (. . .) But I would not agree to this if it would be needed everywhere [for all trees]’.

The latter remark suggests that the intervention would be acceptable only as a measure limited in space and time. Irrespective of their final response, most respondents hesitate at first, weigh the pros and cons, and wonder whether this intervention is really necessary: ‘If it is necessary for the conservation of the forest, I would say yes, but on the other hand, we should ask ourselves how this all came about’.

Responses also depended on the degree to which the artificial ponds would be integrated in the ecosystem. Some respondents associated this explicitly to the visibility of the pond bottom and walls; if these would be completely underground, it would be less unnatural.

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Reasons for being against the construction of artificial ponds were that this intervention was too intrusive, was unnatural, and above all that nature could do this on its own: ‘I have faith in the purification process of nature itself, we do not have to interfere’.

The same nuances appeared when respondents were asked whether this intervention was allowable. Three different groups could be distinguished. Two equisized minorities were either in favor of allowing this intervention or they were opposed to it. But the largest group thought that the artificial ponds were allowable only in case of an emergency or some other urgent reason. One respondent asserts: ‘I will not shout for joy, but I can imagine some conditions under which we say, well, let’s do it as a temporary measure.’

As regards the replacement of all old trees by healthy exotic ones, virtually all respondents found this to be a bad idea and unnatural, but this opposition did not appear to run very deep. The resistance was mainly associated with the idea that the replacement does not serve any serious objective. It might possibly, as a few respondents remarked, add some attractive elements to the forest, but it does not ‘help the forest’ in any way. More than half of the respondents opined that the replacement of old indigenous trees by healthy exotic ones constitutes an interference with basic ecological processes, saying, for instance, that ‘a dead tree that falls triggers a biological process that is good [for the forest]’ and ‘dead trees belong to the ecosystem; (. . .) if you make everything healthy, you disturb the system’. Unnaturalness was the major reason to reject the replacement by exotic species: ‘[These trees] just don’t belong here. Leave them in the countries where they come from’. ‘There is a reason why these [Indigenous trees] grow here’. ‘If you talk about nature, you talk about something that should go its own way. Planting exotics causes a certain disharmony in nature.’

This disharmony could, as some respondents remarked, also bring other risks, especially of pests. And finally, some respondents point to globalization trends, saying that if you plant exotic trees, ‘the whole world would become the same’, and ‘what would be for the use of going on a holiday?’ The global level is also invoked when people reflect about major ecological changes that could occur due to global warming, with one respondent adding ‘So, why bother [about exotic species] if in due course they will arrive anyway?’ Discussing the naturalness aspect of the replacement of old trees by exotic ones, some respondents focused on the consequences for the forest, while others looked more at the act of replacement itself. Most respondents were of the opinion that both the forest and the intervention were unnatural. Some respondents, however, found the intervention to be artificial but added that the forest would still be natural. The image of a forest with totally plastic trees was met with unanimous and fierce resistance. It was considered ‘a scary idea’, ‘horrible’, and something that ‘does not have anything to do with nature’, something ‘fake’. For some, this would be a place that would have lost all its spiritual connections, where nothing unexpected would happen and no animals would find a home. Some people had associations with an

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amusement park: ‘This may be nice in an amusement park, but not in nature’, and one respondent said ‘I don’t see the point of it. Do this in Second Life’. One conversation started out by the respondent first inventing a purely functionalist rejection and then revealing the underlying emotions: A: ‘[I reject this because] I think the most important function of a tree is that it produces oxygen, and plastic cannot do that’. Q: Let’s imagine that that the plastic leaves would be able to produce oxygen too. A: ‘No, that’s no good at all; it is not nature anymore’. Q: Could it yet be acceptable? A: ‘No, it is just a feeling. Nature must be real’. The same unanimous rejection was found with respect to the permissibility and naturalness of this intervention. Overall, respondents stated that a plastic forest is not permissible and it would be absolutely unnatural: ‘Nature must be real’ ‘It is not alive, so it is not natural’ ‘It is completely artificial and made by humans, there is nothing organic about it, there is nothing alive in it (. . .), so no, it is not natural’.

4.3.2.2 The Example Series of Genetic Interventions in Nature As regards the example of the genetically modified apple that would contain more vitamins, many respondents rejected this outright because no serious purpose would be served by such an intervention. Some of these respondents also pointed to unforeseen consequences, e.g. ‘[This may] endanger the whole ecosystem. In my view, we often do not oversee these kind of things’. ‘You start out with a few vitamins but where . . . I mean, do you put some diseases in it too? This could have all kinds of unforeseen implications, and our food would be come a lot less reliable’.

Some respondents (mostly men) saw no real problem with a genetically modified apple, especially if normal apples would remain on the market, so that consumers would have a choice. These respondents did not discuss the purpose of the intervention and saw no real disadvantages, e.g., because ‘nature does not suffer’ or because apples still grow naturally (spontaneously) on trees. Despite the overall rejection of genetically modified apples, not all respondents followed the same line of reasoning when it came to the question of allowability. More than half of the respondents thought that it was unnecessary to prohibit this kind of intervention. ‘I think that [modifying apples] is unnecessary, but saying it would be ‘unallowable’ is too much’. ‘Yes, for me it is allowable, because there will not be much damage to non-modified apples’.

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The responses to the genetically modified trees that shed their leaves twice a year so that the forest will have more abundant undergrowth (see Box 4.3) were more negative, overall. Several respondents rejected the idea without reference to objectives or effects. This non-consequentialist focus on the act itself was often worded in terms of ‘too deep’ or ‘too far’. For instance: ‘I think that people should not interfere so deeply into nature. No, just leave nature in peace this time, its OK as it is. (. . .) Just don’t start doing this kind of thing’. ‘You are changing things too much. It goes too far.’

Some respondents connected this stance to their position on modified apples. What is permissible for production-oriented systems such as apple orchards may not be permissible for a forest that is supposed to be more natural. Within the group that did refer to goals and effects, many respondents found the goals to be too frivolous to justify the intervention: ‘Why would we do this? To make the forest yet more beautiful?’ ‘This is only for human pleasure’.

With respect to the effects, unintended risks were mentioned several times, e.g., that the whole ecosystem would change in many unpredictable ways, or even ‘destroy itself’. Of the few respondents that were not opposed, one said: ‘I have no problem with this, if it does no harm anywhere and has only positive effects’.

The majority of the respondents think that the modified trees are no longer natural. One respondent made a remark on the cultural dynamics of evaluations, saying that: ‘I think this [rejection] will be shared by all in the beginning. But if it had been like this for fifty years, people would regard it as natural’.

As regards the example of the totally manipulated forest with the colorful birds and light-emitting flowers (see Box 4.3), radical rejections prevailed. ‘Welcome to Disney World!’ ‘Absurd’. ‘Humans have too much influence on life and nature. [Such a forest] has nothing to do with nature’. ‘It is totally fake’.

Yet for many, this rejection remained intermingled with objectives and effects. It will all be very ‘dull and boring’, ‘giving no pleasure’, and: ‘This has nothing to do with health or something [essential] like that. It is purely human [pleasure]’. ‘This serves no purpose. I do not mind getting wet from time to time.’

Respondents here mentioned all sorts of experiences in nature they did not want to have to do without, for instance: ‘When it storms, when it is very windy or when it snows, it is attractive to go for walks in the forest, and you would miss that kind of thing immediately’. ‘Nature is beautiful enough, I don’t need luminous flowers’.

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‘If I walk through the forest I need to smell the forest (. . .) I need to feel it, I want to stumble over dead wood’.

Finally, some respondents did not mind if such manipulated forests would exist in some places, like in Disneyland or in office buildings. They simply would not go there. ‘It would not feel good.’

4.3.3 Images of Nature and Technology After discussing the scenarios of physical and genetic intervention in nature, respondents were asked about their view on nature and on technology. 4.3.3.1 Balances of Nature Out of the four categories of responses of nature to human interventions, only one was actually endorsed. No one adhered to the image in which nature is unstable and harmed by any human intervention; only one respondent supported the idea that nature is stable and will always stay healthy, whatever humans do; and again one respondent thought nature to be indifferent, that nature will probably change by human influences, but ecosystems will always find a new balance. All other respondents choose the image that nature is buffered. They believe that humans influence nature within certain boundaries. This will, however, not bring nature out of balance. Nature will lose its balance if these boundaries are crossed, and the ecosystem will be lost. The respondents expressed two versions of this image. Approximately half of this group of respondents adhere to the image of nature buffered as explained above. These respondents feel that nature is flexible and rather strong, but once we cross a line it may be too late. ‘Nature will always adapt and recover itself, but I think that there could be a moment when we cross a limit, for instance in the case of the global warming’.

The other half constructs a new image in which nature is buffered, but indifferent in the long term. Because they are convinced that when humans cross certain boundaries and an ecosystem is destroyed, nature will find a new balance in time. ‘We can change [nature], but it has millions of years to recover and that is what would happen in my opinion.’ ‘On the one hand, we can assume that nature can handle a lot and that it is normal that ecosystems change, that species diminish and increase etcetera. But on the other hand, I observe that in the short term, we could have such a big influence on nature that it will not be flexible enough to cope’.

4.3.3.2 Images of Technology When confronted with the question whether technology is a threat, a liberator or neutral, the majority of the respondents (n= 22) initially chose the ‘neutral’ option.

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They believed that technology itself does not lead to something good or something bad. Whether it is good or bad is determined by the way in which humans use technology. Respondents say, for instance: ‘Technology as such is not bad or good. What matters is the kind of technology we develop and how we use it’. ‘You can use it for good things and also for bad things.’ ‘Humans are the ones who are always behind it. Humans are the ones who deal with it, who develop it, so humans are the ones who do it. That is a clear story, technology itself cannot do it.’

Five respondents, mostly men, initially thought technology to be a liberator. Three of them, however, use arguments in which technology is actually neutral, saying, for instance, ‘I see [technology] as a liberator, if only used in the right way.’ Another respondent asserted that technology has brought us very far, but continued by saying that it becomes harmful on the scale that people use it, without thinking about the consequences. The other two respondents opted for technology as liberator because that would be the ideal situation: ‘We have to make the step from technology being neutral to technology as being a liberator’. What characterizes these responses is the underlying idea that technology itself has to be distinguished from human design and the use of technology. This also holds for the few respondents that see nature as a threat in their first response: ‘It is not a liberator, but rather a threat, and this is just how people use it’. This idea also underlies people’s examples of technology going awry, e.g., when they say that: ‘Well, Chernobyl is a good example of how technology can go totally awry. That is a real threat. But genetically modifying an apple can be liberating.’ ‘If we look back in history, it is easy to see how technology can cause prosperity as well as disasters (. . .) so, there are enough examples to see technology both as a liberator and as a threat.’

Some respondents started to have doubts about this basic scheme. They typically did so during further reflection after their first response. Here is an example: ‘Indeed, humans make the choice for more, bigger and higher. This is not an inherent aspect of technology itself. You can also say ‘I won’t have any part in it’. So, I tend to . . . So, I am somewhere between ‘neutral’ and ‘threat’, because technology overwhelms us a bit sometimes, I think.’

Other examples are: ‘Technology should not begin to take control over humans. I am afraid that that is what is happening to some extent.’ ‘It may happen, at a certain moment, that most people on the planet actually have no idea how far technology has progressed, and what consequences this will have.’ ‘[Technological development] has gone much too far already, and we cannot change that anymore’.

We surmise that the dominant conceptualization of technology as an intrinsically neutral thing that can be used for good and bad, is deeply rooted in the responses because this is what technology has long been in human history and still largely is in people’s daily lives. It is like the hammer that may be used either to hit a nail or hit

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somebody on the head, or like the gun that one may or may not decide to buy. It is only after considerable reflection that respondents come to glimpse something of the much more abstract and larger-scale notion of the economic/technology system that drives human development as a largely blind force that society has great difficulties controlling at all.

4.3.4 Ethics The final question of the interview explored the distinction between a consequentialist, functionalistic approach to the issue (phrased in the interview as ‘What is acceptable depends on the goals’) versus a non-consequentialist, deontic stance (‘Some things are good or bad irrespective of the outcome’). This question was included to allow what is sometimes called the ‘yuk!’ response to genetic manipulation (Midgley, 2004), expressing that some of those manipulations are inherently wrong even if they may serve a good purpose. The non-consequentionalist point of view was not supported by any of the respondents. Virtually all expressed adherence to the idea that objectives and outcomes in terms of those objectives are the keys to ethical decisions on technology application. This is not to say, however, that non-consequentionalist reasoning was absent in the interviews as a whole. Often, as we saw, respondents tended to focus on the (un)naturalness of interventions themselves rather than on their effects, e.g., on the forest. In some rarer cases, respondents started out explicitly by reasoning from a non-consequentialist standpoint and then rationalizing their ideas in a consequentionalist direction. Responding to the example of the genetically manipulated apple, one respondent expressed this line of thought as follows: ‘This is a difficult question. It requires real thinking. In principle, I am against all genetic manipulation. One should leave nature as it is. But if you could genetically change things once so that nature does not suffer and it has certain advantages, then I can imagine [that it could be acceptable]. But where the boundaries are is very difficult to determine. In the case of the apple and the vitamins, if there would be no disadvantages . . . (. . .). I would not be interested in it, but I don’t think I would have a real problem with it.’

In other words, even though respondents often displayed elements of deontic reasoning, they declared themselves thoroughly consequentialist if forced to make an explicit choice. This does not lead to narrow utilitarianism, however, as the interviews show in abundance. Consequences are considered for society as a whole, for natural elements such as forest animals and for the authenticity of the natural systems, just to mention some salient examples. Two major concepts appear to stand out in the responses, one hinging on the notion of (broad) utility and one on authenticity as the key idea. Utility is expressed in terms of cost, benefits and risks, either separately (e.g., ‘harm to other organisms’, ‘maintaining a healthy forest’, ‘dangerous for the ecosystem’, ‘long-term consequences’, ‘unforeseeable effects’ or ‘risk assessment’) or in combination, e.g., ‘what it costs and what it delivers’, or ‘no harm and good benefits’. This concept allows for

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a rejection of discussed cases due to a negative balance of cost and benefits, but also due to what may be called frivolousness of purpose, such as when respondents say that something is ‘merely for human pleasure’, ‘just for fun’, ‘superfluous’, ‘unnecessary’, ‘not serving any serious purpose’ and so on. The concept of authenticity is expressed in wordings such as that things should be ‘natural’, that nature should be ‘real nature’ and that ecosystem elements should ‘belong together’. This concept allows for a rejection of discussed cases due to what could be called overly intrusive human intervention in nature, e.g., when respondents talk about ‘too deep human intervention’ or that something ‘goes too far’ or is ‘forced upon nature’. Note that both the rejection because of frivolous purpose and because of overly intrusive intervention represent essentially non-consequentialist ethics. Utility and authenticity may be combined to form a scheme of three ethical domains: one domain where intervention tends to be rejected for reasons of frivolous purpose, another domain where interventions tend to be rejected because of unacceptable loss of authenticity (‘overly intrusive’, ‘too far’), and a third domain or middle ground that allows for trade-offs and balance-seeking.

4.3.5 Dimensions of Authenticity In the responses, authenticity was sometimes conceptualized as a purely subjective notion, as if naturalness were only a mental construct. This was especially manifest in the case of the plastic pond, which respondents could often imagine as fully hidden in the ground. The respondents sometimes remarked: ‘[Whether or not this is natural] depends on whether or not you see it as such [?]’. Likewise, the genetically engineered apple was sometimes considered natural because it still looked like an apple. Another hint at subjectivist interpretations was when people sometimes noted that what may be seen as unnatural at any given time may not be seen as such in fifty years or so, when everybody has gotten used to it. Another and very different minority stance on authenticity could be referred to as pure conservatism. Nature is natural if it is what it has always been, e.g., when respondents asserted that natural something if it is the same ‘as it has been all those years’ or that certain species are unnatural because ‘they have never been here’, or that ‘it has always been this way, and that’s how it should stay’. The mainstream interpretation of authenticity, however, appeared to unfold along two major dimensions. (1) The first dimension is authenticity as spontaneity, the self-organization of nature independent of human deliberations (management, interventions). This dimension of authenticity is expressed by respondents in wordings such as ‘what goes its own way’ or ‘what develops by itself’ and the reverse in wordings such as ‘exists for a [human] purpose’, or ‘has been designed’, or is the result of human planting, digging, chemical engineering, genetic manipulation and so on. (2) The second dimension is authenticity as belonging, i.e., as the fitting of a thing (a species, a forest, a water flow, a rhythm) in a greater context such as the

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greater landscape, the climate or long-term processes of change. This dimension is expressed by respondents in terms of apples fitting the tree, of tree species fitting the local combination of soil and climate, of plastic not belonging in nature, of leaves falling out of season, and so on. In terms of these dimensions, straightforwardly authentic is anything that is both spontaneous and fitting in the larger whole. Ambiguities creep in when the dimensions lead to contradictory evaluations, for instance when trees are planted (low spontaneity) and are indigenous species (high belonging) at the same time. The same pattern is visible in discussions about the reintroduction of species such as the beaver or the sea eagle in the Netherlands. Both belong to our ecosystems and both could probably maintain themselves well once settled, now that hunting and toxic pressures have been reduced. Should we now wait until they arrive spontaneously, or help them by flying in a ‘seed population’? A reverse ambiguity presents itself with respect to invasive species. They may arrive spontaneously, but do not belong to the system – or do they, if they manage to maintain themselves?

4.4 Reflection The interviews reported here have been designed in a ‘grounded theory’ manner, i.e., on the basis of philosophical intuitions rather than an extensive analysis of the philosophical literature. The freedom thus created for respondents to express their views in their own way, has obvious advantages, e.g., in terms of validity of the answers and the richness of concepts. It is quite possible, for instance, that the ‘belonging’ dimension of the authenticity of nature would not have come up without this freedom. System levels in time (processes) and space (ecosystems) are a central element in this dimension, and system level thinking is, by and large, not a philosopher’s thing, tending as philosophy does to talk in more fundamental concepts such as ‘nature’ as a whole or ‘domination’ as an outright bad. The results reported in the preceding section will, we hope, link up with the philosophical literature in a large variety of ways. We have not begun to explore these avenues here, however, because we feel that at this moment in time, this would only create a heavy-handed analysis and critique that would obfuscate the empirical findings. We will therefore only put our results in a more general policy context here. The naturalness of nature is only one of the criteria by which effects on the intrinsic value of nature are evaluated. In fact, conservation policies are predominantly focused on (bio)diversity rather than naturalness. The naturalness criterion is essential in order to avoid ‘fake’, ‘zoo’ and many other unnatural ways to preserve genetic resources, species and ecosystems, but not the only one. In the policy-oriented assessment system of effects on intrinsic natural value proposed in De Groot (1992, p. 223), naturalness is evaluated alongside with diversity. The diversity element is made operational through generic criteria such as species and ecosystem richness, endangeredness and encounterability. The naturalness element includes natural human

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action, an abiotic/biotic system level distinction and a contextual (place-dependent) assessment through a dynamic reference image, defined as ‘the story of the place’s natural development’. Much of what we have heard respondents say in this paper, as well as some of the postmodern ‘bioregional narrative’ (Cheney, 1989) may find a place here. Acknowledgments The authors wish to thank Eva Kollee for conducting the interviews, and Sjoerd Reutelingsperger for the transcription of the interviews.

References Cheney, J. (1989). Postmodern environmental ethics. Ethics as bioregional narrative. Environmental Ethics, 11(2), 117–134. Elliot, R. (1982). Faking nature. Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy and the Social Sciences, 28 (10), 81–93. De Groot, W. T. (1992). Environmental science theory: Concepts and methods in a problemoriented, one-world paradigm. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Elsevier Science Publishing. De Groot, W. T., Van den Born, R. J. G., & Lenders, R. H. J. (2006). Visions of nature. An introduction. In: R. J. G. Van den Born, R. H. J. Lenders, & W. T. De Groot (Eds.), Visions of nature. A scientific exploration of people’s implicit philosophies regarding nature in Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom (pp. 7–18). Berlin: LIT-Verlag. Katz, E. (1992). The big lie: The human restoration of nature. Research in Philosophy and Technology, 12, 231–241. Midgley, M. (2004). The myths we live by. London, New York: Routledge. Strauss, A., & Corbin, J. (Eds.). (1997). Grounded theory in practice(p. 280). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Van den Born, R. J. G., Lenders, R. H. J., De Groot, W. T., & Huijsman, E. (2001). The New Biophilia: An exploration of visions of nature in Western countries. Environmental Conservation, 28(1), 65–75. Van den Born, R. J. G. (2007). Thinking nature. Everyday philosophy of nature in the Netherlands. Dissertation, Radboud University Nijmegen. Van den Born, R. J. G. (2008). Rethinking nature: Public visions in the Netherlands. Environmental Values, 17 (1), 83–109.

Chapter 5

The Hierarchical and Unconscious Mind: Reflections on the Authenticity of Nature Maarten H. Jacobs

5.1 Introduction The aim of the study reported by Van den Born and De Groot (Chapter 4) was to measure responses to concrete examples of human interventions in nature and to elicit the concepts that are relevant in the minds of the respondents. In addition, they measured the respondents’ images of relationships with nature. After discussing the examples of human interventions in nature, the respondents’ reactions to refined images of relationships with nature were recorded, with an emphasis on technological interventions. The reported results are interesting, and a good occasion to reflect on three issues (two substantial and one procedural): (1) which beliefs do people associate with human interventions in nature, (2) how are these beliefs constituted, and (3) how can we measure these beliefs? In order to appreciate this discussion, two key features of the human mind which are very relevant for most studies within the social sciences will be mentioned: the hierarchy of the human mind and the unconscious mind. A brief explanation of these concepts can shed light on the subject studied by Van den Born and De Groot.

5.2 The Hierarchy of the Human Mind Living in this world, we find ourselves confronted with new events or situations on a daily basis. Still, new situations have some sense of familiarity for us (Searle, 2000). On most occasions, and seemingly without serious efforts, we are able to give meaning and develop a stance towards a new situation almost instantly. We are equipped with concepts acquired during previous experiences in the course of our lives, which enable us to assign values and beliefs to new situations, and thus to judge these situations. This human trait is a manifestation of the hierarchical structure of the human M.H. Jacobs (B) Socio-spatial Analysis Group, Wageningen University, Droevendaalsesteeg 3, 6708 PB Wageningen, Netherlands e-mail: [email protected]

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mind. On the top end we have general values (e.g., respect) and general beliefs (e.g., the belief that material objects exist ‘in reality’), which form a basic world view that applies to virtually everything. People can differ with respect to these basic values and beliefs. See Schwartz (1992) and Schwartz and Bilsky (1987), for example, for a typology of personalities that is based on differences in basic value priorities. On the other end of the hierarchy, the human mind is equipped with highly contextualized values and beliefs, which apply to only a small category of situations or events. A person may have developed specific values and beliefs that pertain only to a particular tree growing in the person’s backyard. Between these extremes, intermediate levels of values and beliefs exist that do not apply to every event or situation, but are more general than the most contextualized values and beliefs. The more general a value or belief, the less it guides behavior or attitudes towards a specific event or situation (Manfredo & Dayer, 2004). This is why specific behavior can scarcely be predicted on the basis of measuring general values and beliefs (Ajzen, 2005). Specific values and beliefs are, however, to some extent rooted in more general ones. For example, persons x and y may each consider respect for life to be an important value. When it comes to hunting, x may disapprove of this practice, while y may approve under certain conditions, such as shooting only old and weak animals and never shooting a mother with her young. Thus, the same value is manifested differently in different persons in the specific context of hunting. The application of general values and beliefs to specific domains is a source of variance, and gives rise to specific values and beliefs which guide behavior and attitude. While I do not argue that the hierarchy is perfect, and I do not intend to propose that the relationships between more general and more specific values and beliefs are always strictly logical, I consider the hierarchy of the mind to be a powerful and justified metaphor that sheds light on the human psyche. Within this theoretical perspective, the strategy of Van den Born and De Groot of measuring responses to concrete, well-described scenarios to be used as a starting point for eliciting salient values and beliefs pertaining to interventions in nature can be judged as appropriate when it comes to an explorative study. Although Van den Born and De Groot did not explicitly employ the concept of attitude, they basically measured the respondents’ attitudes, that is, their internal states or mental dispositions to evaluate a phenomenon with some degree of favor or disfavor (Ajzen, 2005, p. 5; Eagly & Chaiken, 1993, p. 155; Haddock & Mayo, 2004). By offering stories that expressed various instances of interventions in nature as prompts, and asking for opinions, they tapped into the lower parts of the hierarchy where the highly-contextualized attitudes are to be found. Specific arguments are revealed by asking the respondents ‘why’ they have their opinions. These arguments can be seen as the salient beliefs that constitute the attitudes towards the interventions. Probably including the two subsequent questions, ‘what do your see as the advantages of [scenario]’ and ‘what do you see as the disadvantages of [scenario]’ could have contributed to a slightly more systematic exploration of the relevant beliefs. Van den Born and De Groot concluded that their study revealed two major concepts that formed the respondents’ judgments of the scenarios: utility (what is the purpose of the intervention) and authenticity (to what degree does the intervention

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affect naturalness). These concepts are formulated on the basis of various categories of beliefs that pertain to the respondents’ attitudes towards the scenarios. Although I did not read the transcripts of the interviews, I wonder if whether reading the results sections would not have identified another relevant category: that of risk. In three of the six cases, risk (for example the emergence of new diseases) was revealed as a salient belief playing a role in respondents’ judgments. Across the six cases, the study also suggested clear relationships between the three categories of beliefs and attitudes: the more frivolous the purpose of the intervention was judged, the more risky the intervention was perceived, and the more drastic the intervention was considered, the more people tended to have a negative attitude towards it. Interestingly, by measuring responses to four predefined images of human relationships with nature (master over nature, steward of nature, partner with nature, and participant in nature), van den Born and de Groot also tapped into a higher level in the psychological hierarchy of values and beliefs. In other words, these images pertain to a much broader set of situations than the scenarios do. Unfortunately, however, their chapter does not expound on the relationship between the images which people hold and their attitudes towards the six proposed interventions. Do the images that respondents tended to favor co-vary with the attitudes towards the scenarios? Especially in the two scenarios that expressed weak interventions in nature (exotic trees and modified apple), the respondents’ attitudes varied. The four images of nature are loosely ordered on a range from man standing above nature (man as master) towards nature standing above man (man as participant). One would expect that the more a person’s image leans towards the master end of the range, the more the person would tend to agree with certain interventions in nature. But based on the idea of the hierarchical mind, the co-variation will be far from perfect. The data obtained by this study could be used to reveal such a relationship, which would inform us of whether the predefined images of nature are appropriate concepts that can explain and predict specific attitudes. Of course, this would be within all the limitations of a small sample of respondents, from which only suggestions could be derived about relationships between variables. After discussing the scenarios, the respondents were asked to discuss specifics of the various images of relationships with nature, with an emphasis on technological interventions. Van den Born and De Groot reported a shift in some respondents from a participant image in the first part of the interviews (based on the general description of the images) towards a steward or partner image by the end (based on the specified descriptions). If the descriptions of the more specified images are not true extensions of the descriptions of the more general images (in the eyes of the respondents), then the difference in outcomes could simply be an expression of a different measurement. In that case, the respondents could have been constant, and the change in measurements could have produced the change in responses. The difference could also result from the lack of guidance that the participant image has to offer for technological interventions, thus causing a shift towards another image, as the authors suggested. Finally, the difference could have been a manifestation of priming: before the discussion of the scenarios, the respondents could have taken a more idealistic stance in discussing the images, but the scenarios evoked a greater

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focus on human interventions, and therefore moved respondents away from the idealistic to a more pragmatic stance. In that case, another image could have appeared as more appropriate. Whatever the cause, speaking of a shift is premature when two measurements are not equal.

5.3 The Unconscious Mind Freud has often been justifiably criticized for not being scientific, since he tended to generalize from single cases, and his accounts of the unconscious causes of traumas were highly speculative. But for at least some of his core ideas he deserves and still receives great merits, such as the idea that there are many psychological dispositions and processes which dwell in the unconscious mind, but which can nevertheless influence our conscious thoughts, feelings and judgments to a great extent. Many experiments, keeping up with contemporary scientific standards, demonstrate the working of unconscious mental processes in guiding conscious experiences and behavior. For example, Jacobs (2006, pp. 171–174) offered a brief review of unconscious processing of emotions and Harvard University (2008) published studies revealing unconscious mental dispositions. It follows that many of the causes of our thoughts and behavior cannot be revealed by introspection. Commonly employed social science methods, such as questionnaires or semistructured interview studies as conducted by Van den Born and De Groot, rely on introspection by the respondents. Semi-structured interviews or questionnaires are generally good instruments in revealing attitudes and conscious beliefs that people associate with attitudes. They can, however, be seriously limited in discovering the underlying processes and mechanisms that constitute these attitudes in instances where unconsciously processed information plays an inferential role. Studies that measure statements are useful in their own way, but are definitely not exhaustive in explaining people’s thoughts and behavior. Asking people to explain their attitudes or behavior does not necessarily reveal the causes of these attitudes and behavior. People will report the reasons they assign to attitudes and behavior. At best, the reasons correspond with the actual causes. On many occasions, however, the reasons will not correspond with these causes, as human beings are notorious in assigning reasons to (or in other words rationalizing) everything they think and do. For example, some people might enjoy seeing cows grazing peacefully in meadows because they have an unconsciously processed inherited predisposition to interpret relaxed herbivores as a sign that indicates the absence of immediate threat (e.g., predators), which in turn contributes to a good feeling. People might be aware of the good feeling, but not of the underlying psychological mechanism. If asked why they like seeing cows in the landscape, most people will come up with explanations and refer, for example, to the vividness cows add to the landscape, or say that cows historically belong in agricultural landscapes. These explanations might be reasons which are assigned to feelings that have other causes.

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A basic principle for social scientists who are predominantly interested in the human mind and behavior is to never confuse reasons with causes – a principle that seems often forgotten. This argument is not stated to criticize Van den Born and De Groot: they do not violate the principle at all, since they consistently report on the ideas, opinions and concepts their study revealed without talking about causes. Rather, the argument is stated in order to point out a serious difficulty faced in revealing the backgrounds of people’s attitudes in general, a difficulty that probably extends to attitudes towards non-genetic and genetic interventions in nature. Do attitudes towards interventions in nature belong to the domain of mental phenomena that might be highly influenced by unconscious processes and dispositions? Attitudes towards genetic interventions probably do belong to this domain, since genetic intervention techniques, and therefore thinking and debating genetic interventions, are relatively new phenomena. The conceptual frameworks that apply to thinking about genetic interventions in nature are therefore probably not so welldeveloped, subtle and fine-grained as the conceptual frameworks that apply to other forms of intervention in nature which have a long history in human culture. The attitude towards genetic interventions could then result from more general values and beliefs (higher in the hierarchy in the human mind), and be relatively unspecific. For example, a relatively undirected fear of the new might come into play. Or genetic intervention might challenge very basic distinctions that form a part of a person’s basic world view, such as the distinction between humans and nature, between culture and nature, or between agency and fate. People might not, however, be aware of this constitution or of their attitudes towards genetic interventions. The beliefs they express to explain their attitudes might then be rationalizations that do not reflect the psychological causes of these attitudes. A profound result found in the study of Van den Born and De Groot is that there seems to be no fundamental difference in the attitudes and beliefs that pertain to non-genetic interventions and genetic interventions. The attitudes predominantly seem to co-vary with the degree of intervention: the stronger the intervention, the stronger the negative attitude in both the non-genetic and genetic interventions scenarios. Moreover, the purpose of the intervention, the degree of intervention, and risks as predominant beliefs are elicited in both series of scenarios. In other words, the attitudes towards genetic interventions do not seem to be new kinds of attitudes relative to the attitudes towards non-genetic intervention in nature. Although I am not an expert in public perceptions of genetic manipulation, I find this rather surprising given the impression I have of public debates regarding genetic interventions in which specific arguments are used that do not pertain to non-genetic interventions in nature. What could be an explanation of the similarities in beliefs and attitudes across the genetic/non-genetic condition? Perhaps my impression is simply incorrect. Perhaps people do not regard genetic interventions as a special kind of intervention in nature to which new beliefs apply, and thus the responses as measured in the scenarios are quite similar. However, it may be that people tend to oppose genetic manipulation on the basis of unconsciously processed and therefore introspectively unknown mental dispositions, and borrow existing and consciously accessible arguments from non-genetic interventions in nature discourses

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to explain their attitudes. Or, since all proposed interventions are very uncommon interventions, it may be that in both series of interventions the same mechanism of an unconsciously processed negative attitude that is rationalized with a very standard repertoire of arguments plays a role. From this perspective, it would be interesting to measure people’s thoughts about relatively common examples of nongenetic and genetic interventions in nature: for example crossing tomatoes to get more resistant tomatoes, and modifying the genes of soya to produce more resistant genes. Would people’s attitudes and associated beliefs differ between these two cases?

5.4 Conclusion At some point in most qualitative studies, codes denoting either predefined concepts or concepts that emerge during the interpretation process are assigned to quotes (discrete phrases in the transcripts of the interviews). The assignment of codes involves the risk of creating a subjective interpretation. In an inter-rater reliability test, two coders assign codes to quotes independently. Comparing their results offers insights into the reliability of this interpretation process (in the sense of its subjectivity), and might provide ideas for improving the coding procedures. The study reported by Van den Born and De Groot could be methodologically improved by conducting an inter-rater reliability test. This suggestion notwithstanding, the study offers some interesting results. In my view, three categories of beliefs seem to dominate in people’s attitudes towards interventions in nature: beliefs about the purpose of the intervention, beliefs about the depth of the intervention, and beliefs about the risks pertaining to the intervention. Moreover, the commonalities in the ways people judge non-genetic interventions and genetic interventions in nature are striking: the study suggests no systematic differences in attitudes and relevant conscious beliefs. Whether these findings apply to a broader context (e.g., different interventions in nature, different sample of respondents) remains to be seen based on further empirical investigation.

References Ajzen, I. (2005). Attitudes, personality and behavior. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Eagly, A., & Chaiken, S. (1993). The psychology of attitudes. Forth Worth: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich College Publishers. Haddock, F., & Mayo, G. (2004). Introduction and overview. In F. Haddock & G. Mayo (Eds.), Contemporary perspectives on the psychology of attitudes (pp. 1–5). New York: Psychology Press. Harvard University. (2008). Project implicit. https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/ Jacobs, M. H. (2006). The production of mindscapes: A comprehensive theory of landscape experience. Wageningen: Dissertation, Wageningen University. Manfredo, M. J., & Dayer A. A. (2004). Concepts for exploring the social aspects of humanwildlife conflict in a global context. Human Dimensions of Wildlife, 9(4), 1–20.

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Schwartz, S. (1992). Universals in the content and structure of values: Theoretical advances and empirical tests in 20 countries. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 25, 1–65. Schwartz, S., & Bilsky, W. (1987). Toward a universal psychological structure of human values. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53, 550–562. Searle, J. R. (2000). Consciousness. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 23, 557–578.

Chapter 6

The Trouble with Plovers Anita Guerrini

6.1 Introduction This chapter concerns a little bird, the western snowy plover, and the impact it has had on the public perception of the environment along the central coast of California, from Monterey in the north to Ventura in the south (Fig. 6.1). I will talk about the value of animals and how they contribute to the value and meaning of a landscape. The relationships between the snowy plovers and the humans who share California beaches with them are not simple or straightforward, although both conservationists and their opponents portray them in this way. This essay will address two questions in particular: does an environment constructed and managed by humans for the sake of conservation cease to be natural or authentic? Does conservation and restoration of non-human species require that humans be absent from the scene? I will focus on one area, known by the unlovely name of Coal Oil Point, but use other parts of the coast for illustration. This chapter springs from a larger collaborative project on the ecological history of this coastal area, which will assemble the ecological and cultural history with the goal of developing a model approach for informing restoration efforts. The coastline offers a wide variety of habitats including sandy beaches, dunes, rocky tidepools, cliffs, a saltwater slough, coastal mesas, and freshwater marshes and pools. The setting is on the edge of a highly urbanized and quickly developing area, a liminal space that is a borderland both literally and symbolically. The human history of Coal Oil Point dates back at least 8500 years, and the ecology of this dynamic coastal landscape has undergone many changes over time. The history of the area includes early human occupation, ranching by Spanish and American settlers and, in the twentieth century, a large estate and a private school. This area is part of a major land-use agreement that is being drawn up between Santa Barbara County, the University of California at Santa Barbara, the young city of Goleta, and private developers. Known as the Ellwood-Devereux plan,

A. Guerrini (B) Department of History, 305A Milam Hall, Corvallis, OR 97331, USA e-mail: [email protected]

M. Drenthen et al. (eds.), New Visions of Nature, C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-2611-8_6, 

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Fig. 6.1 Snowy plover at coal oil point. Photograph by Anita Guerrini

this agreement would leave much of the coastal area free of new development in exchange for development rights farther inland. Ecological restoration of the coastal area is part of this plan and is also a major objective of the Coal Oil Point Natural Reserve, part of the University of California’s Natural Reserve System (EllwoodDevereux Plan, 2004; Dugan & Guerrini, in press).

6.2 The Snowy Plover The diminutive snowy plover is an integral character in this restoration process. The management plan for the Coal Oil Point Natural Reserve, completed in 2004, includes a detailed management plan for the plovers. This plan and the public response to it is representative of the debates on the status of the plover up and down the Pacific coast. These debates in turn contribute to larger issues surrounding animals and their environment. These include the meaning of animals in ecological restoration, the value of particular animals as symbols and as umbrella species for ecosystem conservation and restoration, and the role humans play in the landscape: are humans a part of nature? (Lang, Sober, & Strier, 2002; Hanssen, 2001; Myllyntaus, 2000) What is the relationship between the goals of conservation – that is, preservation of a landscape – and restoration, one of many tools to achieve this goal? In this context, what animals represent is as important as the animals themselves. The western snowy plover is a small bird, about the size of a sparrow. It isgenerally quite difficult to see in its natural setting, which has had its advantages and disadvantages. The nests, like the birds, are difficult to spot and consist of a shallow depression lined with small pebbles, containing two to three small eggs marked to blend with the background. Snowy plover nesting sites are generally

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located 15–200 m from the shoreline on open sandy beaches. Plovers also nest on salt flats, lagoon shores, gravel riverbeds, and even unpaved parking lots. Studies have shown that they are particularly vulnerable to disturbance during the breeding period, which stretches from mid-March to the end of September. During the incubation period of 28 days, males and females alternately protect the eggs. But disturbance on the beach from humans or other animals can cause an adult to leave the nest unsupervised, opening it to predation. Predators are numerous, including other birds such as crows and gulls, mammals such as skunks and foxes, and domestic cats and dogs. Because the nests are inconspicuous, off-road vehicles (ORVs) can crush them unknowingly. The newborn chicks are equally vulnerable to predation and other disturbance during their first month of life. Wind and weather can also disturb plovers (Alsop, 2001; Page, Warriner, & Paton, 1995). The species was first described in 1758 and several subspecies exist on different continents. Two subspecies of the snowy plover have been recognized in North America: the western snowy plover (Charadrius alexandrinus nivosus), the subject of this essay, and the Cuban snowy plover (C. a. tenuirostris). The western snowy plover breeds on the Pacific coast from southern Washington state to southern Baja California, Mexico, and in the interior areas of several western states. The US Fish and Wildlife Service designated the Pacific coast population of the western snowy plover as threatened in 1993 (Fed. Reg. 3/5/1993). This population of the snowy plover is defined as those individuals that nest on the mainland coast, peninsulas, offshore islands, bays, estuaries, or rivers within fifty miles of the United States Pacific coast. The Federal ruling did not list the inland population of this subspecies, which it described as ‘genetically isolated,’ citing only two instances where the coastal and inland populations mingled. Under the terms of the Endangered Species Act, the coastal plovers form a ‘distinct population segment.’ Little current information on the status of the inland populations is available, but these populations seem to be much larger than those on the coast (Fed. Reg. 3/5/1993; ESA). It is estimated that, at most, about 2,300 snowy plovers may breed along the entire US Pacific coast. The largest number of breeding birds is in California, from San Francisco Bay southward. The designation of ‘threatened’ is defined by the US Endangered Species Act (ESA) of 1973, which established a distinction between threatened and endangered: endangered species are defined as those ‘in danger of extinction throughout all or a significant portion of its range,’ while threatened species include ‘any species which is likely to become an endangered species within the foreseeable future throughout all or a significant portion of its range’ (ESA, 3–4). Thus, despite considerable populations of snowy plovers inland, their lesser numbers on the California coast nonetheless qualify them for threatened status. This fine distinction among populations is often misunderstood by the public.

6.3 Habitat and the Endangered Species Act The most common cause of endangerment is habitat loss or destruction. As long ago as 1939, a front-page article in the Los Angeles Times pointed to the development of the California coast as the greatest threat to its shorebirds, and recommended setting

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up ‘special sanctuaries’ to replace lost natural habitat (‘Library exhibit of birds opens,’ 1939). More recently, conservation and sometimes restoration of habitat have become important aspects of enforcement of the Endangered Species Act. The ESA defined critical habitat quite broadly, to include not only the specific geographical area occupied by a species but other areas that the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the agency charged with enforcing the ESA, finds to be essential to species conservation. The ESA described a lengthy procedure that could lead to formal designation of an area as critical habitat for an endangered or threatened species. But designation of critical habitat for the snowy plover as well as for other endangered species turned out to be a complex and contested issue, driven largely by lawsuits, and one that Federal agencies are increasingly unwilling to implement (Baldwin, 1999; Fed. Reg. 6/14/1999; Sidle, 1987). The US Fish and Wildlife Service, following a lawsuit filed by the Santa Barbara-based Environmental Defense Center, designated critical habitat for the plovers in December 1999, but the ruling was immediately subjected to a barrage of criticism and additional lawsuits. A successful lawsuit by a county in Oregon led to a revision of the critical habitat designation in 2005. The original plan included several beaches in Santa Barbara County: Guadalupe/Nipomo Dunes (now known as Oceano Dunes), Surf Beach, including Minuteman, San Antonio Creek and Purisima Point (a total of 18 km of beach), which are all part of Vandenberg Air Force Base, as well as Ocean Beach and Jalama Beach near Point Conception, Sands Beach at Coal Oil Point, and beaches in Santa Barbara and Carpinteria (Fed. Reg. 12/7/1999) (Fig. 6.2). The revised plan in 2005 reduced the protected areas by 40%, omitting the contested areas in Oregon and all of Oceano Dunes, which is the only state park in California devoted to ORVs. The beaches at Vandenberg Air Force base were also excluded, but the US Force continued to manage the site as critical habitat. Sands Beach remained as the only critical habitat site in Santa Barbara County, and its critical habitat area was reduced from 57 acres (23 hectares) to 36 acres (14.5 hectares) (Fed. Reg. 9/29/2005; ‘Government reduces protected plover habitat,’ 2005). The Federal management plan for the plovers, announced as nearly complete in 1999, finally appeared, after many lawsuit-related delays, in September 2007. The plan estimates that recovery of the species to specified standards will take 40 years and cost around US$150 million (Recovery plan, 2007). These Federal actions form the backdrop for local actions and reactions. The area around Coal Oil Point, totaling 170 acres or 68 hectares, is managed as a natural reserve by the University of California’s Natural Reserve System, which includes 35 sites across the state (http://nrs.ucop.edu/Coal-Oil-Point.htm). But this reserve is an island in the midst of a highly populated area: Isla Vista, a town just to the east of the site, has about 20,000 people – most of them students at the adjacent University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) campus – crammed into just over two square miles, or about 570 hectares (Regional Adventures Reference Guide, 2000). Isla Vista’s narrow streets, laid out in the 1920s, mainly hold apartment houses, creating an urban environment consisting largely of students and immigrant workers. In this context, restoration both of the plover and of its habitat takes on a new meaning.

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Fig. 6.2 Critical habitat map, 1999 (Federal Register Vol. 64, No. 234 (1999), p. 68532)

Snowy plovers appear to have a long history at Coal Oil Point, but records are sparse. Reports from the 1930s to the 1960s indicate that breeding took place at Sands Beach, the west-facing dune-backed beach near the coastal slough known as Devereux Slough (Lafferty, 2000). However, after UCSB purchased the area in 1967, human use of the beaches preferred by plovers greatly increased because the university, unlike previous private owners, allowed public access to the beach. As

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the student population of the university grew in the 1970s and 1980s to its present size of 20,000 students, the use of the beach increased. Even the designation of the area as a reserve in the early 1970s had little impact on beach use. Although plovers continued to winter at Coal Oil Point, they no longer remained to breed. Surveys taken during breeding season in the late 1970s found ‘suitable habitat but no plovers,’ noting that local beaches were ‘100% covered by human footprints’ (Page & Stenzel, 1981, p. 7). Sands Beach is a popular spot for undergraduates, and a well-known surf break. As many as 160 plovers continued to spend the winters at Sands Beach, clustered near the mouth of Devereux slough, but they bred elsewhere, probably to the north, near Vandenberg Air Force Base, where the surveyors in the late 1970s found several breeding clusters (Page & Stenzel, 1981; Lafferty, 2000). The 1999 critical habitat designation, which covered 2.85 km of coastline east and west of Coal Oil Point, led to the development of a management plan for the local plovers, long before the Federal plan appeared. The Coal Oil Point Snowy Plover Management Plan (SPMP) was based on the premise that plovers did not like humans – that human disturbance (including that of human companion animals, such as dogs) kept the plovers from pursuing breeding behavior. The spotty historical evidence indicated that plovers stopped breeding at Coal Oil Point sometime after 1965. The evidence was certainly suggestive that increased use of the beach after UCSB’s 1967 purchase led the plovers to stop breeding there, but there was no definitive link between human use of the beach (and presumably disturbance) and the decline in breeding. Apparently, snowy plover populations had been in decline throughout southern California since the early 1960s. Although scientists surmised that this decline was due mainly to human disturbance, there was no data to substantiate this; on the other hand, the Santa Barbara Channel Islands lost most of their breeding plovers in the 1990s on beaches with no human disturbance. For example, San Miguel Island lost all of its breeding plovers between 1978 and 2000, most likely because of an increase in the population of elephant seals (Lafferty, 2000; Page et al., 1986, 1991). But human presence could have effects apart from direct disturbance. Habitat loss is the other reason cited for population decline. The very designation of critical habitat itself told a story: although plovers and other shorebirds had once enjoyed unbroken expanses of coast, human population pressure had fragmented this habitat into smaller and smaller islands largely surrounded by development. Field observations of wintering plovers in the late 1990s had shown that even at a distance of 15–20 m, human presence caused changes in plover behavior. Biologists from the Fish and Wildlife Service who visited Coal Oil Point Reserve in 1999 estimated 150,000 incidents of disturbance of wintering plovers per year. A study from 2000 concluded that ‘it seems plausible that snowy plover fitness decreases with human activity’ (Lafferty, 2000, p. 6). According to the terms of the Endangered Species Act, the reserve was required to take action to reduce this disturbance, what the FWS called ‘take,’ defined by the Endangered Species Act as any harm or harassment of an endangered or threatened species (Lafferty, 2001; ESA). In addition, human use of the beach led to an accumulation of trash that attracted predators, including crows, skunks, and raccoons as well as the red fox, all of whom could prey

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on plover eggs and chicks and even on the adult birds. A draft of the Federal plan for plover recovery provided quantitative goals: an average of four breeding adults per year, and protection for winter plovers (SPMP). The underlying assumption of all these studies was that what is natural therefore cannot be human. Even before there was any evidence of the impact of humans on plover populations, scientists assumed that humans, particularly direct human disturbance, were the problem. A byword of American restoration is that wild nature precludes human presence (or at least European human presence). In the United States, the ideal of a pristine nature still resonates (Cronon, 1996). Even though there had been human presence at Coal Oil Point for thousands of years, the goal of the reserve’s management plan was to restore an original, undisturbed landscape. By the terms of this goal, humans and plovers could not coexist. But would restricting human activity actually bring back breeding behaviors? Was this landscape even possible to restore? The only way to find out, researchers believed, was to restrict human disturbance at Coal Oil Point and other sites and see what happened. However, this strategy had some unforeseen consequences.

6.4 Conflicts Over Plover Management The Coal Oil Point Snowy Plover Management Plan was conceived as a more palatable alternative to closing the beach altogether, which had happened elsewhere on the coast. In the absence of a Federal management plan, early in 2000 the Fish and Wildlife Service, following the 1999 critical habit designation, negotiated an agreement with Vandenberg Air Force Base which led to the closure of almost five miles (11 km) of beach to public access during the breeding season. Ocean Beach was completely off-limits, while only 1/2 mile (1 km) of Surf Beach remained open to the public. Fencing of sensitive areas had been tried there in the early 1990s, but plover populations during breeding season continued to decline throughout the 1990s (Recovery plan, 2007, pp. 28, 31; Lafferty, 2000). These beach closures, which coincided with the period of heaviest public beach use in the summer, engendered considerable public opposition, particularly because they came at the same time as the tiger salamander, a local species which lived mainly in agricultural areas, was placed on the endangered species list. Local farmers joined beachgoers in loudly protesting Federal encroachment on their rights. ‘Today it’s the salamander, tomorrow it’s who knows what,’ said a local farmer (‘Lompoc Beach Closures,’ 2000). Bumper stickers appeared proclaiming ‘Save the beaches, fry the plovers,’ ‘Free Surf Beach,’ and ‘Got Plover?’(‘Plover to retain threatened status,’ 2006). A blogger from the nearby community of Lompoc criticized the numbers that the Fish and Wildlife service used, noting that plover numbers rose between 1993 and 1997, and that they appeared to ebb and flow according to weather patterns, not human disturbance (‘Beach closure,’ 2001). Of course, both factors, among others, could, and probably did, play a role. But an opinion piece in the Santa Barbara NewsPress stated, ‘Heavy-handed and ill-conceived government agency actions have

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undermined public sympathy for the plover and eroded public confidence in government’s ability to effectively manage natural resources’ (‘Voice from Lompoc,’ 2000). The FWS issued a news release early in 2001 which asserted the need to restrict beach access even more, citing a population decline of more than 50% between 1991 and 2000 (FWS, 2001). Within this time span, plover populations fluctuated widely, during identical management regimes, and El Niño weather patterns in the late 1990s probably also played a role in declining populations (Recovery plan, 2007, p. 31). In the face of continued public opposition and defiance of the beach closures, the beach closures remained. Even the half-mile of open beach can be closed when fifty violations of plover territory are reached. The 2005 Critical Habitat revision, which took most of the Vandenberg beaches off the critical habitat list, did not change these beach closure policies (which remained under Air Force supervision), and the Fish and Wildlife Service rejected attempts to delist the plover in 2006 (‘Surf Beach Reopens,’ 2005; ‘Vandenberg Beach Violations Rise,’ 2005; ‘Government reduces protected plover habitat,’ 2005). Vandenberg beaches support the largest number of breeding plovers on the coast. At Oceano Dunes, authorities followed a quite different policy but did not avoid controversy. The California State Parks website describes the dunes as: ‘among the most popular and unique of California State Parks. The 51/2 miles of beach open for vehicle use and the sand dunes available for off highway motor vehicle recreation are attractions for visitors from throughout the United States’ (http:/ohv.parks.ca.gov). Oceano Dunes attracts over 1 million visitors a year, making it a major source of revenue for the surrounding communities, and it is one of the few parks in the entire US that allows ORVs to drive on the beach. But, as one of the most extensive dune systems in the state, it is also prime snowy plover territory. The 1999 critical habitat listing included Oceano Dunes, but not the 2005 one, mainly owing to a petition of local residents that indicated a severe economic impact to the surrounding region if the park was closed to ORVs (Fed. Reg. 9/29/2005). About 1500 of the 3500 acres comprising the park are open to ORVs. According to the California State Parks service, ‘During the March 1–September 30 breeding season, small fenced enclosures are constructed around the nests to protect these birds and their offspring from the surrounding recreational use. With ongoing support from OHVers, this nesting program has been a huge success’ (http//ohv.parks.ca.gov). The Parks service advised visitors: Protect These Birds and Your Recreational Opportunities The endangered California Least tern and the threatened Western Snowy Plover nest on the sands of Oceano Dunes State Vehicular Recreation Area. You can help protect these species and YOUR RECREATIONAL OPPORTUNITIES. Your future access to this park is dependent, now more than ever, on your responsible behavior and strict adherence to the following laws and park policies: -Obey posted 15 mph speed limit; give all birds right of way -Do not enter posted nest exclosures, hang clothes, towels or items on fences, or drive next to protective exclosures (http://ohv.parks.ca.gov)

As such advice indicates, enforcing responsible behavior has been an ongoing battle, one which, according to the environmental group the Sierra Club, the plovers

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have been losing. For the past several years, the Sierra Club has campaigned to regulate ORVs at Oceano Dunes. Questioning the ‘huge success’ of fencing and voluntary restriction, the club noted (with equal hyperbole) that in 2006, ‘66 of 68 snowy plover hatchlings born within this chaotic atmosphere died within weeks of being born. At that rate, the snowy plover will be extinct, perhaps within a decade’ (http://sierraclub.org). Recreationists in turn reacted strongly to this threat to their use of ORVs. The ‘Friends of the Oceano Dunes’ argue that environmentalists are simply opposed to all ORV use, and employ the ESA ‘as a weapon to accomplish closure’ of the Dunes. Predation, they say, is the problem, not human presence, claiming that only one plover was lost in the area devoted to camping and ORVs over 7 years. ORV use, moreover, ‘helps build family foundations’ through shared recreation (Friends of Oceano Dunes). With environmentalists and recreationists at such opposite poles, and exaggerated claims on both sides, it seems unlikely that the controversy over Oceano Dunes will be resolved soon. The group of UCSB faculty and researchers who drew up the overall management plan for the Coal Oil Point Reserve, which included the SPMP, wished to avoid the kind of confrontation with beach users that had occurred at Vandenberg and Oceano and attempted to find a middle ground between beach closure and unregulated use. The SPMP, designed to protect wintering plovers, proposed to erect a fence along part of the beach and close a trail that led to the plover area. It presented its rationale at the outset: ‘Snowy Plovers . . . commonly bred at this site until the area was opened to public recreation in the late sixties,’ although, as we have seen, the causal relationship between human use and plover breeding was assumed rather than established. A single female plover had in fact bred on Sands Beach in the summer of 2001, before the SPMP was implemented, the first recorded breeding in over thirty years. After discovering the nest, the reserve manager erected a temporary fence around the breeding area, and of the two chicks that hatched, one survived to fledge; the other was taken by a crow soon after hatching (Cox, 2001). The nesting female plover may have responded to restoration efforts on the reserve (SPMP). The stated purpose of the SPMP, however, was not to restore habitat but to keep humans away from the plovers; the management plan specifically aimed ‘to reduce disturbance.’ It foresaw the reduction of disturbance from 30 incidents per plover per week to five, implying a heavily interventionist management regime (SPMP). When the Coal Oil Point SPMP was presented for public comment in the summer of 2001 – shortly after the temporary fence protecting the lone plover chick had been erected – local beach users, which included university faculty, students, and other local residents, voiced strong objections to any restriction on their use of the area, echoing comments at other sites. Local editorial pages bristled with letters for and against the plovers, revealing a widely held mistrust of the university’s motives. Leashing of dogs was viewed as especially objectionable. At the public hearing, one local resident announced, ‘I’ve walked my dog on this beach for thirty years without a leash, and I’m not going to change that now’ (Guerrini, 2001; ‘Plover chick killed by dog,’ 2003). The public hearing took place when few students remained in Isla Vista, but students quickly learned of plans to close off part of the beach when they returned in September, by which time the SPMP was already before the California Coastal Commission, a state agency whose approval was required. An

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editorial in the student newspaper at UCSB facetiously complained that students’ use of the beach was being curbed ‘for some frigid and callow birds with performance anxiety.’ The proposed solution was ‘to kill two plovers with one shotgun shell,’ a solution also heard, less facetiously, at the public hearing. More soberly, another editorial requested that the plan be tested on a temporary basis before the beach was closed permanently, noting the lack of opportunity for public comment (Daily Nexus, 2001b, 2001a). A ‘voice from Isla Vista’ in the Santa Barbara newspaper expressed what many had said at the public hearing: On Friday, the California Coastal Commission is set to consider doing that which it has rarely done – close a local public beach and coastal trail. With virtually no notice to the affected public, UCSB is quietly seeking approval to fence off a substantial portion of Sands Beach and permanently close a trail that has been used by the public for over 30 years. (‘Voice from Isla Vista,’ 2001)

The California Coastal Commission approved the plan on 16 November 2001, and the following month (several years before the management plan for the entire reserve was completed) the manager of the reserve erected a 400-m-long fence on the beach above the mean high tide line. The fence enclosed much of the available sand on the beach above the tide line. In addition, educational and regulatory signs were posted, and the trail that ended at the plovers’ roosting area was closed. Perhaps the most innovative aspect of the plan enlisted a number of volunteers to monitor the plovers and act as docents, educating the public and policing the plovers’ area by reminding beach users to leash their dogs and keep to the wet sand (SPMP; a similar docent program had been successful at Monterey Bay). Proponents of the plan recognized that education of the public that used the beach was critical, and an ongoing project. Most of the users of the beach – university students who lived in Isla Vista – lived in the area for only four years, so new users constantly appeared. The SPMP also advised that alcohol should be banned on the beach, that it should be closed at night, and that another trail be rerouted. These recommendations were not acted upon; although the university occasionally issued tickets to owners of unleashed dogs, it was not willing to patrol the beach at night. Since the end of 2001, the fence has remained in place, and has expanded hundreds of meters west to accommodate bird nesting; it is now nearly 1 km long. Following the single pair of plovers who had decided to stay and breed at Coal Oil Point in the summer of 2001, 14 plovers successfully fledged in the following year. In 2006, 41 nests resulted in 59 fledglings, the most successful season yet. Over 300 birds were counted during the winter season, twice the number counted five years earlier (http://coaloilpoint.ucnrs.org; ‘Hello Birdy,’ 2006). The plover had returned, and Coal Oil Point’s management strategy appeared to be vindicated. In all of these cases, the arguments on both sides were entirely framed in terms of the individual animals: humans against birds. Predators were generally linked to human presence, and also individualized: a News-Press article described docents throwing rocks at the crows (‘Plover chick killed by dog,’ 2003). More recently, the reserve manager has replaced eggs in plover nests with wooden eggs to reduce predation of eggs by skunks. The real plover eggs are incubated and brought back

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to the nests when they are about to hatch (http://calliebowdish.com). But both sides seemed to lack a sense of the bigger ecological picture, even though the proponents of the plover management plans were certainly aware of this. The Federal recovery plan for the plovers identified four main factors in its decline: ‘Habitat degradation caused by human disturbance, urban development, introduced beachgrass (Ammophila spp.), and expanding predator populations have resulted in a decline in active nesting areas and in the size of the breeding and wintering populations’ (Recovery plan, 2007, vi). The Federal plan devoted equal discussion to the impacts of habitat destruction and human disturbance, unlike the local management plans (Recovery plan, 2007).

6.5 Values and Meanings The remainder of this chapter will address some of the underlying reasoning behind both the SPMP and the opposition to it. Why are the plovers important? What is the value of an animal, and how does it obtain meaning to humans? Why is public perception of the environment so often focused on a single species rather than on an ecosystem? Is there a way for humans and animals to share the beach, or must this relationship always be antithetical? Over twenty-five years ago, the environmental philosopher Baird Callicott raised some of these questions in his famous, even infamous, essay, ‘Animal Liberation: A Triangular Affair,’ which argued that ultimate value lay in the ‘biotic community’ and that individual animals, and even individual species, held varying levels of value. The notion of animal liberation, from whatever philosophical persuasion, was to Callicott antithetical to the preservation of biota. Individuals were far less important than the system as a whole (Callicott, 1980). In the face of a lot of criticism, Callicott backed off from his more extreme claims but I think he had a point. While environmentalists and animal activists have some common interests, their motivations and goals, as Callicott recognized, are quite different. The focus of animal activists on the individual animal and on pain, he argued, is largely a matter of indifference to those who look at the larger scale of an ecosystem (Callicott, 1980). While neither side in the plover debate makes an argument from an animal liberation perspective – the utilitarian recognition that each individual has a right to maximize its pleasure and minimize its pain – the public arguments made for the SPMP argued on the basis of the preservation of a particular species, not for the place of that species in the larger ecological picture. Conservation – the larger picture of the landscape as a whole – somehow became conflated with the restoration of a single species, without the additional argument that the species in question might be an ‘umbrella species’ whose restoration might have broader benefits. The Federal recovery plan, in contrast, pointed out that a focus on management of a single species can lead to conflict with the restoration or management of other species, and acknowledged that science cannot always offer the straightforward solutions that policy requires (Recovery plan, 2007). This acknowledgement of complexity and the difference between conservation and restoration never entered the public discourse, which both sides framed

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simply as a conflict between human needs and uses and the need to protect the birds. Both sides, and the press, anthropomorphized the plovers as ‘needing space to raise their families.’ The Santa Barbara Independent, for example, talked about‘feathered couples bedding down in the heavily protected dunes.’ Such anthropomorphism often occurs in debates about endangered species (‘Hello Birdy,’ 2006; see Daston & Mitman, 2005). While it may be effective in terms of public persuasion, it also obscures the larger issues at stake having to do with conservation of habitat. The plover management plan at Coal Oil Point is part of a larger restoration plan for the reserve that has broad significance outside its immediate area of influence. The restoration project at Coal Oil Point is designed, among other things, to remove as many traces of human presence as possible. This accords with the definition of restoration declared by the US Natural Resource Council in 1992: ‘The return of an ecosystem to a close approximation of its condition prior to disturbance.’ ‘Disturbance,’ in the American context, is taken to mean European incursion. However, subsequent definitions have been more sophisticated; the Society for Ecological Restoration stated in 2004 that ‘Ecological restoration is the process of assisting the recovery of an ecosystem that has been degraded, damaged, or destroyed,’ with ‘recovery’ implying a sustainable system (Wyant, Meganck, & Ham, 1995; SER, 2004). Although restoration is a stated management goal of the Coal Oil Point Reserve, the plover plan is not conceptually linked to the larger management plan. Perhaps, as a management document, this is outside its purview; but by prescribing specific management practices it assumes a definition of restoration that is closer to the National Resource Council’s than to the Society for Ecological Restoration’s: it assumes there is a clear baseline which is the objective of the restoration process, and it assumes that we know what (and who) is natural and what is not. Both of these assumptions, I would argue, are highly debatable, and they contribute to the lack of understanding on the part of the public which engendered such strong opposition to this and other plover plans. As the plovers’ environment becomes increasingly managed, has it also become less natural? The fence lengthens along the beach; docents shoo away, and sometimes kill, crows; nests are placed in cage-like enclosures to ensure their success, wooden eggs substitute for real ones. If the goal of restoration is to create a sustainable landscape, when is that goal reached, and does it assume the permanent absence of humans? Will the fence ever come down? Is restoration of the plovers even compatible with a broader conservation agenda? The public knows little about how the plovers might contribute to ecological integrity, or how they might function as an ‘umbrella species’ for conservation, and the maintenance of habitat. Coal Oil Point Reserve’s website gives the following reasons why the public should protect the plovers: 1. They are interesting birds to watch 2. They feed on beach flies and other insects and are an integral part of the beach ecosystem 3. They took thousands of years to become what they are 4. Extinction is forever

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5. Our lives can be more interesting with than without them 6. We have much to learn from observing them 7. Protecting the Snowy Plover habitat contributes to the protection of many more species that receive less attention such as the Globose Dune beetle, the Dune Spider, and the Beach Tiger Beetle (http://coaloilpoint.ucnrs.org) These reasons only briefly mention the plovers’ role in the ecosystem, and enforce a discourse about the birds that has little to do with ecology and much to do with aesthetics and symbolism. On the aesthetic side, all parties are agreed: the plovers are ‘cute’ and even ‘adorable,’ while their chicks are ‘fuzzy’ and ‘cuddly.’ Letters to the editor and op-ed pieces in opposition to the plover plans noted this characteristic quality and noted that the authors had no problem with the plovers in themselves. Rather, the authors opposed the symbolic meaning of the birds, as examples of misguided environmentalism which placed animals before humans and valued ugly, ungroomed beaches over smooth clean sand. Thus, to the public, the broader significance of the plover is not its ecological role, but its role as a symbol of an environmentalism that is seen by much of the public as arbitrary and out of control. In particular, it has become a symbol of the Endangered Species Act, which has been demonized across the country as opposed to humans and to private property.

6.6 Conclusion This, it seems to me, is a lot of symbolic weight to put on the back of a small bird. While the plover has intrinsic value, it also has value (and indeed can only survive) as part of an ecosystem that contains many living things, including humans, and many non-living things as well. Snowy plovers are symptoms of a much larger ecological problem, which is the destruction of much of the coastal landscape, mainly through development and expanding human populations, but also through climate change. Little of the historic plover breeding ground remains, and what is there is fragmented and sometimes marginal for plovers, who must in addition compete with other coastal inhabitants for diminishing space. Conserving the plover alone may indeed require the types of intensive management we have described, which, as the FWS management plan noted, may not be compatible with preserving other species or even with a broader restoration plan. This paradoxical and complex problem is poorly understood by the public, and ‘humans vs. plovers’ rhetoric does not acknowledge this complexity. Maintaining plover populations in drastically altered and very dynamic coastal ecosystems is a new challenge for both scientists and the public, one that is not met by current notions of habitat restoration or of single species management (Schlacher et al., 2007). New approaches are needed for coastal species and habitats more generally as well as for plovers in particular. Is the public capable of understanding this level of complexity? Plovers may provide us an opportunity to promote that understanding.

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Acknowledgments This research is funded in part by a Collaborative Programs grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (US). I am grateful to several researchers in the Santa Barbara Coastal Long Term Ecological Research program, National Science Foundation (US), for assistance.

References Beach Closure. (2001, ca. March). Retrieved on January 7, 2008, from http://lompoconline.com/ beach closure.html Government reduces protected plover habitat. (2005, September 29). Santa Maria Sun. Hello Birdy. (2006, February 9). Santa Barbara Independent. Library Exhibit of Birds Opens. (1939, March 7). Los Angeles Times. Lompoc Beach Closures to Save Animals Spark Battle. (2000, March 20). Los Angeles Times. Plover chick killed by dog. (2003, May 22). Santa Barbara News Press. Plover to retain threatened status. (2006, April 23). Lompoc Record. Snowy Plover Management Plan. (2004). http://coaloilpoint.ucnrs.org. Cited as SPMP. Surf Beach Reopens with New Barriers. (2006, April 6). Santa Maria Sun. Vandenberg Beach Violations Rise. (2005, April 14). Santa Maria Sun. Voice from Isla Vista. (2001, November 15). Santa Barbara News-Press. Voice from Lompoc. (2000, March 5). Santa Barbara News-Press. Alsop, F. J. (2001). Birds of North America: Western region. New York: DK Publishing. Baldwin, P. (1999). RS20263. The Role of Designation of Critical Habitat under the Endangered Species Act, CRS Report for Congress, July 16, 1999. Retrieved on January 3, 2008, from http://www.cnie.org/NLE/CRSreports/biodiversity/biodv-36.cfm Callicott, J. B. (1980). Animal liberation: A triangular affair (Reprinted from Defense of the land ethic, pp. 15–38, by J. B. Callicott, 1989, Albany: State University of New York Press). Cox, V. (2001, September 24). Plover plan launched for coal oil point natural reserve. Santa Barbara: University of California. Cronon, W. (1996). The trouble with wilderness; or, getting back to the wrong nature. In W. Cronon (Ed.), Uncommon ground. Rethinking the human place in nature (pp. 69–90). New York: W.W. Norton. Daston, L., & Mitman, G. (Eds.). (2005). Thinking with animals. New York: Columbia University Press. Dugan, J. E., & Guerrini, A. (in press). Coastal dynamics. In M. Hall (Ed.), Restoria, The present and the past in environmental restoration. Ellwood-Devereux Coast Open Space and Management Plan. (2004, March). Draft. Goleta, CA: URS Corporation. Federal Register, Vol. 58, No. 42 (1993, March 5). 50 CFR Part 17. Endangered and Threatened Wildlife and Plants: Determination of Threatened Status for the Pacific Coast Population of the Western Snowy Plover, pp. 12864–12874. Cited as Fed. Reg. 3/5/1993. Federal Register, Vol. 64, No. 113 (1999, June 14). Endangered and Threatened Wildlife and Plants; Notice of Intent To Clarify the Role of Habitat in Endangered Species Conservation, pp. 31871–31874. Cited as Fed. Reg. 6/14/1999. Federal Register, Vol. 64, No. 234 (1999, December 7). 50 CFR Part 17. Endangered and Threatened Wildlife and Plants; Designation of Critical Habitat for the Pacific Coast Population of the Western Snowy Plover, pp. 68508–68544. Cited as Fed. Reg. 12/7/1999. Federal Register, Vol. 70, No. 188 (2005, September 29). 50 CFR Part 17. Endangered and Threatened Wildlife and Plants; Designation of Critical Habitat for the Pacific Coast Population of the Western Snowy Plover, pp. 56970–57119. Cited as Fed. Reg. 9/29/2005. Friends of Oceano Dunes. (2008). 2007–2008 ODSVRA Fact Sheet. Retrieved on January 7, 2008, from http://www/oceanodunes.org Guerrini, A. (2001, June). Notes from Public Hearing on Snowy Plover Management Plan, MS.

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Hanssen, B. L. (2001). Ethics and landscape: values and choices. Ethics, Place, and Environment, 4, 246–252. http://www.coaloilpoint.ucnrs.org, accessed January 8, 2008 http://www.nrs.ucop.edu/Coal-Oil-Point.htm, accessed January 8, 2008 http://www.ohv.parks.ca.gov, accessed January 2, 2008 http://www.calliebowdish.com/SnowyPlover.htm, blog entry dated 28 June 2007, accessed April 19, 2008 http://www.sierraclub.org/ca/coasts/hotbox/dunes.asp, accessed July 30, 2007 Lafferty, K. D. (2001). Disturbance to wintering western snowy plovers. Biological Conservation, 101, 315–325. Lafferty, K. D. (2000). Status, trends, and conservation of the Western Snowy Plover with a focus on the Devereux Slough population at coal oil point reserve, Santa Barbara County, CA Museum of Systematics and Ecology Environmental Report No. 18. Santa Barbara: University of California, Santa Barbara. Lang, C., Sober, E., & Strier, K. (2002). Are human beings part of the rest of nature? Biology and Philosophy, 17, 661–671. Myllyntaus, T. (2000). Environment in explaining history: Restoring humans as part of nature. In T. Myllyntaus & M. Saikku (Eds.), Encountering the past in nature: Essays in environmental history (pp. 141–160). Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press. Op-ed, Daily Nexus. (2001a, November 16) (University of California, Santa Barbara). Op-ed, Daily Nexus. (2001b, November 28) (University of California, Santa Barbara). Page, G. W., & Stenzel, L. E. (1981). The breeding status of the snowy plovers in California. Western Birds, 12(1), 1–40. Page, G. W., Stenzel, L. E., Schuford, W. D., & Bruce, C. R. (1991). Distribution and abundance of the snowy plover on its Western North American breeding grounds, Journal of Field Ornithology, 62, 245–255. Page, G. W., Bidstrup, F. C., Ramer, R. J., & Stenzel, L. E. (1986). Distribution of wintering snowy plovers in California and adjacent states, Western Birds, 17(4), 145–170. Page, G. W., Warriner, J. C., & Paton, P. W. C. (1995). Snowy plover. In A. Poole & F. Gill (Eds.),The birds of North America, No. 154, Philadelphia: Academy of Natural Sciences; Washington, DC: American Ornithologists’ Union. Regional adventures reference guide: A brief guide to the history, diversity, people, and place of UCSB, Isla Vista, and the surrounding conception coast region. (2000). Santa Barbara, CA: University of California, Santa Barbara. Schlacher, T. A., Dugan, J., Schoeman, D. S., Lastra, M., Jones, A., Scapini, F., et al. (2007). Sandy Beaches at the Brink. Diversity and Distributions: 1–5. Sidle, J. G. (1987). Critical habitat designation: Is it prudent? Environmental Management, 11(4), 429–437. Society for Ecological Restoration International Science & Policy Working Group. (2004). The SER International Primer on Ecological Restoration. www.ser.org & Tucson: Society for Ecological Restoration International. Cited as SER. US Fish and Wildlife Service. (2005). Endangered Species Act of 1973 as amended through the 108th Congress. Washington, DC: Department of the Interior, US Fish and Wildlife Service. Cited as ESA. US Fish and Wildlife Service. (2007). Recovery plan for the pacific coast population of the Western Snowy Plover (Charadrius alexandrinus nivosus) (2 Vol). Sacramento, CA: USFWS. Cited as Recovery plan 2007. US Fish and Wildlife Service. (2001, January 22), US Fish and Wildlife Service Releases Draft Biological Opinion for Threatened Western Snowy Plover. Retrieved on January 7, 2008, from http://www.fws.gov/pacific/news/2001/2001-24.htm Wyant, J. G., Meganck, R. A., & Ham, S. H. (1995). A planning and decision-making framework for ecological restoration. Environmental Management, 19, 789–796.

Chapter 7

About Snowy Plovers, Lapwings and Wolves: How to Include Contrasting Visions of Ecologists and Laymen in Decision-Making Henny J. van der Windt

7.1 Introduction The story of the snowy plover (Charadrius alexandrinus) in California as presented by Anita Guerrini (Chapter 6) is an interesting example of nature conservation in practice. The study reveals the problems that arise when different values and interests are involved in decision-making processes concerned with the protection of wild animals and landscapes. It is certainly not the first and only story about the relationship between humans, wild animals and their habitats or ecosystems. For instance, serious problems with the implementation of EU regulations regarding wildlife and nature reserves have been reported in several European countries. During the last decade, this rather strict European nature-conservation legislation has repeatedly caused delays and changes of plans in the construction of roads, harbors and industrial areas. In all these cases, conservationists made use of the new, tough legislation because they were afraid that a unique landscape or a threatened species would be affected by proposed measures such as the building of infrastructure. Sometimes little-known species were involved, such as the rare and tiny Desmoulin’s whorl snail (Vertigo moulinsiana). As a consequence, various other stakeholders strongly opposed this kind of nature conservation. Even major nature conservation organizations feel uncomfortable about the impact of the European legislation. Ironically, the strict legislation has also hindered the sometimes necessary adaptations of nature conservation regimes. Further problems concerning the protection of wild animals have arisen in situations where human communities are threatened by certain endangered but dangerous large mammals such as tigers and bears, as has occurred in various parts of the world. We can recognize some of the central questions of the plover story in many studies concerning these types of cases: what is the relationship between humans and these animals? And what is the precise meaning of the animals in relationship to the H.J. van der Windt (B) Science & Society Group, Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, University of Groningen, Kerklaan 30, 9751 NN Haren, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected]

M. Drenthen et al. (eds.), New Visions of Nature, C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-2611-8_7, 

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landscape in which they live? More generally, the main question is how decisionmaking about these kinds of conflicts should be analyzed and evaluated, and may be improved. In addition, the dynamics of these relationships can be questioned. These are the central questions I would like to reflect on. Although the legitimacy, the nature and dynamics of the related decision-making processes are also important issues, I will leave out these questions because they play only an implicit role in Anita Guerrini’s paper (but see Keulartz & Leistra, 2008). Firstly, I will briefly discuss several observations and underlying premises expounded in Anita Guerrini’s paper, and then suggest an alternative approach, founded on a number of empirical studies and theoretical considerations. Although a kind of interpretative scheme is needed to connect values, species, ecosystems and decision-making, I will only present some elements of such a scheme.

7.2 The Story of the Snowy Plover Anita Guerrini’s story of the snowy plover describes how this little bird became the central focus of a debate between tourists, conservationists, authorities and other users of a coastal area in California. This study reveals that after its legal protection and several alternative management plans, the controversy between several stakeholders did not come to an end but became even more acrimonious. This was enhanced by uncertainties about the causes of the decline of the snowy plover population, and the fact that the conservationists had an unclear focus. Was their main aim to save the snowy plover – or was it the restoration of parts of the coastal area? In addition, the authorities proposed several strategies for protection, varying from fencing of the nests to prohibiting access to large areas, at least for some vehicles. Somehow, the snowy plover became a symbol of the problematic aspects of natureconservation legislation. According to the author, the deadlock in the discussions is a result of the strong focus on aesthetics and symbolism instead of the snowy plovers’ role in the ecosystem. The story of the snowy plover throws light on three relationships: that between humans or human groups and species, that between species and ecosystems, and that between humans or human groups and ecosystems. In the next section, I will consider these three relationships.

7.3 Human/Nature Relationships Firstly, the issue of human/animal relationships will be discussed, and more specifically the historical valuation of the snowy plover. Apparently, the status of this species changed dramatically the moment it was formally recognized as threatened. From that moment on, the discussion focused on issues such as how and why this

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Table 7.1 Functions of wild species for humans and attitudes toward animals Attitude

Negative or not responsible

Positive

Neutral

Wise use or sustainable yield Sustainable development and sustainable yield

Use, regulation, optimal yield Exploitation

Control, destruction Over-exploitation, destruction

Adoration and affection, conservation

Agnostic

Fear, aversion, avoidance

Functions of wild species Provision (food, fuel, clothing, construction, health, etc.) Regulation and life support (photosynthesis, nutrient cycling, regulation of air and water quality, regulation of pests and diseases, etc.) Cultural meaning (ethical, spiritual, religious, symbolic, aesthetic, etc.)

plover species should be protected. An interesting question would be, however, what meaning and value had the bird species before the first calls for protection arose. Studies of these valuations or attitudes reveal that they vary from very negative to very positive (Kellert, 1981; Serpel, 2004). Other studies present a large number of so-called functions or services that species can fulfill for humans (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005). Table 7.1 presents these various attitudes and functions. Studies of human/animal relationships also reveal that the value of animals may change over the course of time (Kellert, 1981; Knegtering, van der Windt, & Schoot Uiterkamp, 2000). For instance, the meaning and value of bears and seals has developed from negative to ambivalent or even positive, depending on their location. Other examples are birds of prey, which have been appreciated negatively in the recent past, but are now so popular in the Western world that there are individual protection programs for some species. Complete taxonomic groups such as reptiles and amphibians are also now seen as so important that special legislation has been introduced in many European countries. From the paper on the snowy plover it is not clear what the dynamics are with respect to the meaning of this species. Better insight into this could explain why the debate developed in the manner it did and probably provide us with a clearer idea of the chances of the snowy plover being generally accepted as an attractive animal in the future. Another central issue in Anita Guerrini’s paper is the species/ecosystem relationship. The paper highlights the fact that the relationship between the snowy plover and the ecosystem it represents is the main problem. In fact, the message goes a step further: the valuation of the species is not linked strongly enough to the valuation of the ecosystem, causing social tensions. Obviously, social tensions often occur when ecosystems are evaluated in decision-making processes, even without attention being paid to any specific

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species. Still it is interesting to look at the relationship between species and ecosystems. Studies from applied ecology, conservation biology and conservation policy show that this relationship is neither clear nor straightforward. At least four types of relationships can be defined, based on the level of public appreciation of a species and how clear the ecological role and meaning of a certain species in an ecosystem is. Well known and appreciated by the general public are the so-called Umbrella and Flagship species (Simberloff, 1998). A species is called an Umbrella species if it has a high appeal to non-specialists and if its presence – or absence – leads to the presence – or absence – of many other species. This means that the ecological relationship between this species and other species is well understood. An example is the otter (Lutra lutra), which is sometimes called the ambassador of clean surface water. Flagship species also appeal to the general public but do not have close and necessary relationships with other species. The giant panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca) is often presented as an example. So-called Indicator and Keystone species have high ecological relevance, but do not appeal to non-specialists. Indicator species point to the presence of certain abiotic conditions, for example the bogloving plant the marsh marigold (Caltha palustris). Keystone species play a very important role in an ecosystem, maintaining the fundamental structure of the habitat or certain essential connections in a food chain, just as keystones provide the essential support in an arch. For example, the African elephant (Loxodonta Africana) is seen as a Keystone species in the grassland ecosystem. Finally, there is a large group of species that are called Cryptobiota or Redundant species. Cryptobiota are small and not visible species. Sometimes very little is known about them, as is the case with many insects and worms in soils. Redundant species can be replaced by other species in an ecosystem without serious effects on the functioning of the ecosystem, for example, certain insect and worm species. Although there is some overlap of these four categories, this categorization makes clear that the relationship between species and ecosystems may have many different aspects, both scientific and social (Table 7.2). Anita Guerrini’s paper reveals that the use of a certain animal, in this case the snowy plover, as a symbol for nature conservation is wrong as it leads to a strong focus on and opposition to one single species and pays too little attention to issues related to the ecosystem. The paper does not clarify the relationship between the snowy plover and the ecosystem, however. Can the snowy plover be seen as an Umbrella species or as an Indicator or Redundant species? Once this is made clear, one can decide whether and how the snowy plover should be presented in the public Table 7.2 Different relationships between an ecosystem and its species Ecological meaning

High significance

Low significance

Umbrella: Otter Indicator: Marsh marigold Keystone: African elephant

Flagship: Giant panda Redundant cryptobiota: Many insects and worms

Meaning for public High significance Low significance

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arena. In general, many examples show that the symbolic use of a species is not wrong and sometimes even useful. In practice, species are quite often used as symbols of threatened areas, either as Flagship or Umbrella species. The actions of Greenpeace to save the oceans would probably be less successful without the use of whales and seals to draw attention to the situation. The WWF also uses tiger and monkey species for publicity to save tropical rain forests, and in the Netherlands, several ecological restoration plans have been named after an animal, foe example, the Stork Plan and the Golden Plover Plan (Van der Windt, 1995). The last relationship discussed in the paper on the snowy plover on which I would like to focus concerns the valuation of ecosystems by human beings. One of the messages of the paper is that ecological discussions should be separated from discussions about ethics and aesthetics. However, as has been shown by several authors, these issues are often interwoven. For instance, in our study of nature-conservation conflicts in ecological restoration projects in the Netherlands, we found three basic perspectives or visions of nature, each of them connected to ethics, aesthetics and ecology, the so-called functional, arcadian and wilderness visions (see Table 7.3). In our historical and empirical sociological studies of conservationists, farmers and bureaucrats these relationships appear to show some dynamics but also are rather stable (Van der Windt, Swart, & Keulartz, 2007). Consequently, discussions about nature conservation and analyses of these discussions should take into account different visions of nature, all linked to ecological, ethical and aesthetic aspects. Anita Guerrini’s paper states that the snowy plover controversy can be interpreted as a controversy between two value systems, ecocentrism versus biocentrism. It is certainly true that biocentric and ecocentric arguments play a role in these kinds of debates about nature conservation. However, as I have mentioned before, ecocentric arguments are just one set of ecology-centered arguments. Unfortunately, the paper does not show precisely how these values are related to the social actors, their behavior and their preferences. An analysis of the underlying visions of nature and the related perspectives on nature would be helpful here.

Table 7.3 Relationships between visions of nature and ecological, ethical and aesthetic perspectives (after Van der Windt et al., 2007) Perspectives

Ecological perspectives

Ethical perspectives

Aesthetic perspectives

Strong anthropocentric

Formal & functional aesthetics

Weak anthropocentric, stewardship Ecocentric

Historical-cultural aesthetics

Visions of nature Functional

Arcadian

Wilderness

Production and population ecology Community and population ecology Ecosystem ecology

Science-based aesthetics

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7.4 The Stories of the Lapwing and the Wolf Following these observations and comments on the snowy plover paper, what can be said about an alternative analytical, normative and strategic approach? Or, as the plover paper formulates it, is there a way for humans and animals to share the beach, or must this relationship always be antithetical? To illustrate my reasoning, I will present two cases, one from the province of Friesland in the Netherlands concerning the lapwing (Vanellus vanellus) and one from Norway concerning the wolf (Canis lupus). Just as in the case of the Californian snowy plover, in the Frisian and Norwegian cases stakeholders – including conservationists, hunters, farmers, tourists, scientists and authorities – have different opinions about the protection of one species, and here too, many more aspects are at stake. The interesting thing here is, however, that Frisian and Norwegian stakeholders have reached agreements which took both ecological and non-ecological arguments into account. In the Frisian case, there was a strong movement among farmers and citizens who were used to collecting the eggs of the lapwing for human consumption (Steenkamp & Rip, 1984; Van der Windt, 1995). This was and still is an integral part of the socio-cultural tradition of the Frisian countryside. For instance, every year the first-found egg of a lapwing is offered to the highest authorities of the province. For most Frisians, the lapwing is a symbol of spring, the country life, the beauty of the countryside and a harmonious relationship between human beings and nature. However, some decades ago it became clear that the lapwing population had decreased. Conservationists, especially those from the Dutch provinces of North and South Holland, pleaded for an end to the egg-collecting tradition and for the creation of lapwing reserves. As in the case of the plover, this request resulted in a time-consuming and heated controversy. Dutch bird-protection legislation and the nature-reserve approach were heavily criticized by the egg collectors. And just as in the plover case, there were uncertainties about the cause of the decline of the lapwing population. Farmers and hunters, for instance, were convinced that it was not egg-collecting but predation by crows and foxes that was the main cause of the decrease in the lapwing population. The solution was also not simple. For instance, strict reserves were impossible for several reasons and often not desirable because of the mobility of the birds. After some time, each of the stakeholders involved took initiatives to come to an agreement. One of these was a study into the cause of the decline of the species, while the others included an intensive protection program, consisting of a system of nest protection by egg collectors, the restriction of egg collection to specific periods and a flexible system of so-called agricultural nature conservation by farmers. At that time, instead of becoming a divisive factor, the lapwing turned into a ‘boundary object’ (Star & Griesemer, 1989), that is, an object that is strong enough to bring together different social groups, and flexible enough to respect the differences between these groups. A minimum of agreement or consensus is required. In the case of the lapwing, all of the social groups agreed that the lapwing should survive, that nature reserves could not be the only solution for protection, and that the lapwing is a symbol of the Frisian countryside.

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In the Norwegian case, the issue was probably even more controversial than in the cases of the snowy plover and the lapwing (Linnell et al., 2005). Here conservationists and authorities had planned to reintroduce wolves in certain areas. These animals were seen as damaging and even dangerous to human beings and livestock (sheep, reindeer) by the local communities in these areas. Consequently, deep emotions were involved and here, just as in the case of the lapwing, wolf-hunting was an integral part of local culture and history. As a result, social conflicts played out between different social groups. Local people in these rural areas opposed the introduction of this large carnivore and were sometimes much angrier with their human adversaries than with the actual animals, as we have seen was also the case with the snowy plover. In this case, too, the conflicts reached beyond controversies over management practices: they were about wider processes of social change that were perceived as threatening (Linnell et al., 2005). For that reason, and to be able to find an acceptable solution, both ecological and sociological aspects had to be considered. Although zoning is often chosen in cases of competing interests or values within a limited space, it is questionable whether zoning, in connection with protected areas, was the best solution here. Firstly, large carnivores such as the wolf are so mobile that their conservation cannot be achieved by confining them to protected areas, even if these are very large. Furthermore, local people do not like zoning regimes and as such zoning usually enforces an ‘us versus them’ mentality. In addition, zoning does not stimulate the involvement of locals in the hunter-harvest – an activity that in many cultures would greatly help reduce social conflicts. In Norway, it appeared that the only way to achieve some degree of compromise was by adopting a system that created areas of graded difference with respect to their management regulations. According to Linnell et al. (2005), this required political debate among all parties involved, and insight into the different attitudes. Thus, here again, the challenge was to find a boundary object and thereby make wolf management and the survival of the local communities the common aims of all stakeholders.

7.5 Concluding Remarks Comparing the stories of the Frisian lapwing, the Norwegian wolf and the Californian snowy plover, what can be learned so as to encourage further analysis, framing and the development of strategies suitable when making decisions about wild animals and ecosystems, and the snowy plover in particular? Firstly, it would be wise to make a vision assessment. What are the visions of nature, animals and the ethical, aesthetic and ecological perspectives of the different stakeholders? Furthermore, as all three cases show, we should also know how these visions are linked to perceptions of the role and intentions of other parties, including the state. In other words, the appreciation of measures is not only dependent on the vision of the species and the ecosystems, but also on the visions of the authorities and the relationships between the authorities and other stakeholders.

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If an animal such as the snowy plover plays such an important role in the debate, the different functions of this animal, in an ecological and in a non-ecological sense, now and in the past should be considered. After such an analysis, it is then possible to look for common ground, especially if the aim is to reach some agreement. Thus, here normative and strategic questions arise. For instance, with respect to procedures, any type of decision-making should be legitimized (see Keulartz & Leistra, 2008). With respect to content, in the case of the lapwing it was relatively easy to find common ground: the appreciation of the rural landscape and the birds it supported as a symbol of natural harmony. It seems that it was even possible to find a common framework in the case of the wolves, which included the recognition of the rights of wolves, sheep and human beings to survive. In the case of the snowy plover all parties have agreed that the species is cute and their chicks cuddly. It is probably also true that all parties accept the necessity of the human use of the coastal areas, and acknowledge that there is at least some symbolic and ecological significance of the snowy plover. Perhaps it will be possible to reach agreement on a flexible management regime with a monitoring system that would be able to adapt the regime if this was desirable from an ecological or a social perspective. As the studies of the wolf and the lapwing illustrate, it demands the involvement of all parties in the founding stage and in the implementation of a management plan, and requires flexibility from the authorities. New approaches are probably needed for the protection of species and habitats more generally, as well as for plovers in particular. This will require rather complex analyses by researchers and policymakers. Hopefully, they will be capable of understanding and handling this level of complexity. Plovers may indeed provide them with an opportunity to test their skills.

References Kellert, S. (1981). Trends in animal use and perception in 20th century America. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of the Interior, Fish and Wildlife Service. Knegtering, E., van der, Windt, H. J., & Schoot Uiterkamp, A. J. M. (2000). Trends in the legal status of indigenous species. Environmental Conservation, 27(4), 404–413. Keulartz, J., & Leistra, G. R. (Eds.). (2008). Legitimacy in European nature conservation policy: case studies in multilevel governance. (The International Library of Environmental, Agricultural and Food Ethics 14). Dordrecht: Springer Linnell, J. D. C., Nilsen, E. B., Lande, U. S., Herfindal, I., Odden, J., Skogen, K., et al. (2005). Zoning as a means of mitigating conflicts with large carnivores: principles and reality. In R. Woodroffe, S. Thirgood, & A. Rabinowitz (Eds.), People & wildlife: Conflict or co-existence (pp. 163–174). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. (2005). Ecosystems and human well-being: Biodiversity synthesis. Washington, DC: World Resources Institute. Simberloff, D. (1998). Flagships, umbrella’s, and keystones, is a single species management passé in the landscape era? Biological Conservation, 83(3), 247–257. Serpel, J. A. (2004). Factors influencing human attitudes to animals and their welfare. Animal Welfare, 13, 145–151. Star, S. L., & Griesemer, J. R. (1989). Institutional ecology, ‘translations’ and boundary objects: Amateurs and professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–1939. Social Studies of Science, 19(3), 387–420.

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Steenkamp, F., & Rip, A. (1984). The meadow birds organize a symposium. In W. Callebaut, S. E. Cozzens, B. -P. Lecuyer, A. Rip, & J. -P. Van Bendegem (Eds.), George sarton centennial proceedings (pp. 204–207). Ghent: Communication and Cognition, University of Ghent. Windt, H. J. van der (1995). En dan: Wat is natuur nog in dit land? Meppel: Boom. Windt, H. J. van der, Swart J. A. A., & Keulartz, F. W. J. (2007). Nature and landscape planning: Exploring the dynamics of valuation, the case of the Netherlands. Landscape and Urban Planning, 79(3–4), 218–228.

Part III The Genomics View of Nature

Chapter 8

Detachment, Genomics and the Nature of Being Human Lenny Moss

8.1 Introduction Human self-understanding and our presuppositions about nature are surely mutually implicative and inseparable, even if the reciprocal lines of influence can be complex and subtle. While we’ve come to fret quite a bit about the ethical poverty, and arguably catastrophic consequences, of our modern Western (but increasingly global) technologically-driven ‘vision of nature’, we may have lost sight of the extent to which our human self-understanding is an inextricable part of that ‘loop’. While there are many who feel sickened (on behalf of nature?) by even the suggestion of a need for any further anthropological self-reflection (haven’t we obsessed about ourselves enough?), it could well be that such sickness is itself a symptom of the same disease. Our understandings, tacit or otherwise, of nature and of ourselves, will influence and implicate each other whether we choose to become conscious of such influences or not, so surely better that we make this more explicit as opposed to less. If my intuitions (and the strategy of this chapter) are correct then any ‘high road’ to a new and better (and in any sense more ethical) vision of nature can only be gotten through an interplay of ‘nature’ and ‘human nature’ concepts and considerations. Many contemporary ‘naturalists’ celebrate the idea that Darwin brought us closer to the animal world, i.e., to ‘nature’, but they ignore (at our peril) the concomitant dialectical implication, brought to our attention by Hans Jonas— that Darwin equally brought animal nature closer to us. But to reap that bounty of potential naturalistic insight we have to also be getting it right about us. Dialectics, of course, can well resemble the logic of a ping-pong match. Following an introductory (and hopefully contextualizing) excursus on Aristotle, the strategy of this chapter will be to borrow a concept—that of ‘detachment’—from the lexicon of ‘philosophical anthropology,’ put it to use as a basic organizing concept for rethinking the ostensible ‘purposiveness of nature’ in modern terms, re-situating ourselves,

L. Moss (B) Department of Sociology and Philosophy, University of Exeter, Devon EX4 4RJ, UK e-mail: [email protected]

M. Drenthen et al. (eds.), New Visions of Nature, C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-2611-8_8, 

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anthropologically, in such a reconfigured nature and finally reflecting on that vision of a nature which has (once again) become ‘closer to us.’

8.2 Aristotle’s Nature and Immanent Teleology My story, if you will, begins with a reconsideration of Aristotle’s four causes. Aristotle was the founding father of biology, if anybody was, and arguably Aristotle’s point of entry into systematic philosophy was biological. Biologically speaking, Aristotle got something entirely right. Living beings exists as ends-untothemselves—as self-sustaining entities that respond to challenges with spontaneous adaptive abilities. The very possibility of a science of physiology is predicated on the idea of an organism’s life as a telos (final cause) to which functions are only functions in relation to and for the sake-of. An organism constitutes a functional and developmental unity—indeed this is what we mean by the concept of an ‘organism’—which was also why the atomistic reductionism (material and/or efficient cause) of the likes of a Democritus appeared to be inadequate and unconvincing for Aristotle. What is it in ‘atoms’ that would cause them to coalesce and perform as a higher unity? Likewise, in arguing against the formalistic reductionism (formal cause) of Empedocles, Aristotle appealed to the dynamism of final cause. All of the outward appearances, all of the right colors, shapes and textures of a synthetic arm, as Aristotle argued, is not tantamount to a living arm that dynamically incorporates nutrients, grows, heals, adjusts, and adapts. Indeed we now know that even the simplest living cell in culture can be trained to adjust to extremes of temperature, of ionic concentration of exposure to toxins, etc., to which it would have had no prior, or even let’s say, evolutionary, exposure. The scope of the potential adaptive capacities of even a single cell is for all intents and purposes beyond surveyability and indeed it is precisely this that accounts for why cancer continues to be a perennial, unpredictable, and often tragically intractable menace to our (metacellular) individual survival. In the 19th century Darwin had to wean himself from a teleology of perfectionism but this was not the naturalistic teleology of Aristotle but rather the teleology of a Christian creator, not the teleology of Aristotelian immanence but one of a manner of neo-Platonic, albeit Christian, transcendence. Nor is it any small irony that our most media-friendly, self-stylized naturalists and religion bashers, Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, have taken on board their putatively neo-Darwinian battleship, not the rich immanent teleology of Aristotle but rather the likeness of a transcendent designer-teleology, i.e., that of an ‘invisible hand’ of natural selection (Fig. 8.1). What Aristotle’s ‘nature’ gets right is that living beings are not merely well ‘designed’ for a habitat or a style of life but are actively and dynamically in the business of sustaining themselves in flexible and even unpredictable ways. For modern science, it is precisely this that renders the living organism anomalous, stepchildren of an otherwise inert nature, whose ostensible self-purposiveness needs to be explained or even better—explained away. Within a pre-modern metaphysical horizon, Aristotle could query the place of the living organism as an open question.

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Fig. 8.1 Bust of Aristotle, now at Palazzo Altaemps, Rome. Photo: Giovanni Dall’Orto, 2005

In the logico-semantic analysis of his Categories he surmised that that which could entertain any number of predicates and even retain its identity despite giving rise over time to even contrary predicates (e.g., blush and pale, sick and healthy, etc.,) was more substantial, and thus more exemplary of the nature of nature, than that which couldn’t. But can such substantial beings, such as Socrates or Bucephelus (Alexander’s horse), i.e., living beings, be derived from more elemental matter? Aristotle’s studied answer to this question of physical reductionism was negative. Might it be the case that the entire problem-space of what we call biology is structured by exactly this dilemma? To understand life is to recognize its ineluctable finality as Aristotle intended it and to recognize its thoroughgoing materiality—but how to relate the two? For Aristotle the best solution was to understand the primacy of ‘substantial forms’, that is, the fusion of formal and final cause, within nature as that which captures and shapes and animates materiality from within. Form and finality are inextricably linked in the living organism, and immanent in nature. The finality of substantial form is what accounts for flexibility in the face of contingent challenge. That substantive form is also subject to material constraint attests to the sense in which it has little to do with transcendent perfection.

8.3 The Problem Space of Modern Biology Whatever one may or may not think about the contemporary relevance of Aristotle’s philosophy/science of nature, it offers a concise and perhaps seminal point of departure for thinking about the large-scale problematics faced by post-Copernican Revolution science and how this may have structured our vision or visions of nature. Two points are most salient. First, by fusing ‘formal’ and ‘final’ cause Aristotle was able to detranscendentalize ‘Form’, bring it down to earth and enable it to be pliable in the service of natural concrete ends. Organisms don’t do what they do for the sake of a Form. The ostensible normativity that is realized in the generation and regeneration of organismic form, the ‘good’ that is realized, is not abstracted away from the natural, living beings that are the realizations/instantiations of such form. For this

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very reason, the dynamics of form cannot be easily theorized. Aristotelean ‘substantial’ form cannot become ‘distinterested’ and abstractly lawful. The separation of final from formal cause, as we’ll see, opened up new explanatory possibilities, but at a cost. Second, the inability of ‘pure materiality’ to account for the form and finality of the organism was not a problem for Aristotle’s non-reductionistic conception of nature but has constituted a (and perhaps ‘the’) unfinished desideratum for modern science. Key to that metaphysical shift which conditioned the new horizon of thought was the relocation of final cause from within nature to the mind of god. What this meant for biology was that the relationship of formal to final cause became contingent. Logics of biological form could thus be developed and elaborated on their own terms. Linnaean taxonomy for example completely brackets finality, and simply looks to make salient formal properties of organisms useful for the purpose of classification. Are one set of features more salient for purposes of classification or another set of features? By simply focusing on formal features of an organism a new theoretical possibility space emerged. From Linnaeus’s extrapolation of aspects of organismic form for use in classification emerged the comparative study of organismic form as such, i.e., the science of comparative morphology (Amundson, 2005). But the adequacy of either classifying or morphologically analyzing an organism on the basis of a purely formal approach was not uncontested, far from it. Final cause reemerged in the name of function. If classification was a purely formal pursuit for Linnaeus this was an absurdity for his French adversary Buffon for whom classification had to capture something of the functional or final essence of a lifeform (Grene & Depew, 2004). For Buffon, a species was not merely about formal resemblance but also must be about functional status as a generative unit—that which has the wherewithal to reproduce and thus sustain an organismic form. We continue to follow Buffon in favoring a conception of species predicated upon the capacity of members to interbreed. What I want to suggest is that all or most of the principle antinomies, conflicts and controversies that have coursed through modern biology up to the present—preformationism versus epigenesis, Geoffroy’s ‘unity of form’ versus Cuvier’s ‘conditions of existence’, mechanism versus vitalism, classical genetics versus embryology, genomics versus systems biology—are all about different ways of relating formal to final cause—all about the exploration of a conceptual state space that opened up when formal and final cause became pulled apart and their possible relationship made variable and contingent. But it has also been about our inability, thus far, to put the pieces back together, to have it both ways, to derive from the logics of formal and or material cause the property (or properties) of finality.

8.4 Nature Explores Greater Levels of Detachment If what we really want is a scientific understanding of nature in which we can ultimately locate ourselves as both immanent possibilities and contingent actualities (and just what would be the warrant for doing otherwise?) then our own experience

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of being of the nature we wish to understand surely must at least in principle be a germane source for naturalistic insight. Although Frans de Waal for one, speaking as perhaps our leading contemporary expert in primate ethology, has persuasively exposed the foolishness of blanket injunctions against drawing on human self-insight in the name of combating ‘anthropomorphism’, old injunctions still die hard. The real problem of ‘anthropomorphism’, it turns out, is that it’s usually not ‘anthro’ enough. Here is the dark side of that dialectical ping-pong game referred to earlier. When phenomenologically deficient, ‘intellectualist’ misconceptions about how we are as humans, are projected ‘down into’ nature (as ‘preformed-information’ for example) they come back to us in a ‘vision of nature’ that reinforces the misconception of human nature that we started with. The problem is not with that of drawing a concept from out of human experience, the problem is getting the concept right. The idea of ‘natural detachment’ arose first of all from Enlightenment thinkers who, for the first time, began to follow a naturalistic inclination to wonder about the relationship of the organic human body to human language, reason, morality and so forth. Their insight was a good one but rather than leaving it at the level of human particularity, let’s take it to be an insight into nature in general that can be treated, not as all-or-nothing, but rather with nuance along a continuum and, as it were, all the way down. Detachment, so conceived, is a measure of the relative independence of an entity from a larger milieu—its ability to resist the forces of thermal or other kinds of winds. Where all aspects of a field are in smooth and undifferentiated causal continuity we would say there is little or no detachment. Detachment arises, first of all, as little vortices in a homogeneous field. The more detachment in a field, the less smooth and silky, the more granular. The idea of detachment maps and scales closely to that of ‘internal degrees of freedom’. The internal degrees of freedom are the number of parameters that have to be accounted for in order to determine the state of a system. Consider the case of a single atom. If an atom is hit by a photon it may respond to this packet of energy by translating in space, rotating, or having an electron jump into a higher energy state. So far as we know, what in fact it will do is entirely stochastic and the prior history of the electron has no bearing on its future responses to such perturbations. If we go from a single atom to even just a biatomic molecule like O2 another degree of freedom is added. Hit with a photon, the biatomic molecule can do all of the above plus it can vibrate along its molecular axis. A larger molecule, such as the four-carbon butane, can do all of the above and also mutate or isomerize to isobutane. Again, like an honest slot machine, the gambler’s fallacy not withstanding, its prior history of interactions should have no bearing on the likelihood of subsequent behavior. A greater level of detachment, indeed a significant transition in the ontogenesis of detachment, is achieved when the history of the unit or entity in question does bias its response to subsequent perturbations. Even a protein is already an historical entity inasmuch as it conformational history is both a function of its past interactions and a major factor in how it will respond to future perturbations, such as a collision with a photon or another protein. To have a history requires the ability of an entity to buffer itself against random perturbations, or perhaps even to set its own agenda as to how it will receive and respond to stimuli

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from without. With the transition from small molecules to that of macromolecules, such as proteins and nucleic acids, nature begins to explore just such new levels of detachment. A protein or RNA molecule adds conformational modes to its portfolio of degrees of freedom. As we’ve said its prior conformational history matters. But so too can its conformational flexibility allow it to absorb perturbing forces and sustain its conformational disposition. It is just this property that allows proteins and RNA to act as enzyme catalysts. These capacities for detachment enjoyed by single macromolecules also provide the basis for further leaps in internal degrees of freedom through the transition to a kind of sociality of detachment. Detachment proceeds further when macromolecules affiliate and enter into a collective enterprise in which local attachments, i.e., between molecules, allow for a greater level of collective detachment. With organizational closure a grand-leap in buffering against the global winds is achieved. Organizational closure entails the emergence of a self-sustaining enterprise through circular causality and dynamic boundary formation. What we are attempting to depict at the level of a macro-molecular soup is the shearing off of little ensembles of higher-level detachment, little vortices, fledgling enterprises that through circular stabilization provide themselves some modicum of dispensation from the thermal and chemical winds of the global soup. A vortex of relative detachment—a quasi-system that sustains its own organizational closure—performs as an end-unto-itself. It becomes a locus of protonormativity. It performatively chooses coherence over incoherence, enacting a criterion, and in so doing, in distinguishing between what performatively emerges as itself, versus other, in sustaining its own embodiment, it embodies the first cognitive act. With the somewhat hypothetical example of a proto-cell, that is a self-sustaining boundary maintaining affiliation of macromolecules, a basic pattern comes into view. Higher levels of detachment from the global milieu are obtained through increases in complexity and flexibility within a local domain. Nature explores new possibilities for detachment wherever such can be found. New levels of detachment constitute hierarchical transitions that bootstrap on the prior level. Heterogeneous cells enter into de novo symbioses. Single celled bacteria enter into consortia such as those that form bacterial films. Single-celled eukaryotes transition into colonies and then into integrated multi-cellular organisms. Sociality and ‘eusociality’ emerge as transitions into coherent groups of organisms (or even ‘superorganisms’) (Wilson & Hölldobler, 2005; Wilson & Wilson, 2007). In all such transitions the properties we’ve already discussed—greater internal degrees of freedom, the ability of a system to better buffer itself in relation to possible perturbations, to have a history which is a factor in its subsequent trajectory, and indeed to dispose itself in some way toward its ‘world’ and its future possibilities, are all accentuated at a higher hierarchical level. If we can at least provisionally entertain the image of greater macro-detachment being achieved hierarchically by subunits of some kind that have entered into a cooperative affiliation—whether it be bacteria in a microbial film or differentiated cell lineages in a multi-cellular organism, and we will also want to say humans in a

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normatively structured socio-cultural life-world, we can ask the question as to what has to be the case for such higher levels unities to exist. While I won’t rule out in advance the possibility of any number of fanciful hypothetical alternatives, I would suggest that the more complex and highly integrated, and thus highly detached the higher level entity is, the more permeable the components must be to each other such as to be able to become integrated contingently and developmentally. Is it really possible for the concept of detachment to have scope and relevance all the way from the sub-atomic through human experience (and for it to even mean the same thing throughout)? To say that humans are the most detached entities in nature is to suggest that humans are less at the beck and call of any particular natural stimulus or frequency. Enlightenment thinkers such as Hume and Herder, and many since, had already observed that the human body is underprovided for when it comes to natural strengths or attunements to nature as compared with that of many other species. That the underspecialization of the human body, beginning with the anomalous immaturity of the human neonate, may bear a direct relationship to the human capacity for language, reason and sociality marked the origins of those kinds of synthetic reflections aptly described as ‘philosophical anthropology’. The basic intuition is not hard to fathom and it’s essentially about human attention. If human senses and organs were instinctually fixed upon and responsive to aspects of the surround it would be a mark of attachment not detachment. The lack of such fine attunement through specialization and fixed attention allows human attention to be made available for other things, it allows human attention to be turned toward the comparative inwardness of normatively mediated socio-cultural practices including language and the acquisition of skills. Now again we can ask what has to be true about the human organism for humans to be as they are and this brings us to a fortuitous confrontation. Evolutionary psychologists (Tooby & Cosmides, 1992; Pinker, 1994) have taken their own stand on this issue and have done so in way that is diametrically opposed to that which follows from the principle of detachment. I see this as fortuitous because both views can’t be correct and it provides an opportunity to sharpen the issues at stake. For evolutionary psychologists the answer is to be found in the domain-specific functional modules that fix the capacity for certain skills and the putative genes that code for the pre-scripted developmental production of such cognitive modules. The evolutionary psychologists thus advocate a model not of detachment and flexibility but rather of attachment—of fixed programs and hardwires. The view from detachment by contrast predicts more internal complexity more, not less, developmental degrees of freedom, and rather than domain specific modules an enhanced, multi-modal, domain general executive-level capacity, as described by the cognitive psychologist Merlin Donald (2001), necessary for an organism to lead her own process of self-formation through socially structured participation in processes of shared attention. More simply and generally put we may ask: is the human organism characterized by the addition of some new positive adaptations, added to the putative hard-wires of ape brains and ape genes, or is the human organism characterized by an increasing flexibility, and indeterminacy of internal resources that are less fixed and more susceptible of social-developmental interpenetration? Are humans more detached? Is the concept of detachment one

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which we can ground empirically and having done so elicit its services in allowing us to sort through and make further sense of the empirical ‘manifold’ presented by the contemporary human and life sciences?

8.5 Comparative Genomics and Detachment How can we adjudicate these differences? Surely a worthy place to look would be to the evidence derived from comparative genomics. Much has been publicized about the promises of genomics—much less has been publicized about the actual findings. Might this be because the findings have not fit easily into the gene-pundit’s idiom? Two of the quantitative relationships that the human genome might have displayed in relation to other genomes that would have been in accord with traditional expectations failed to materialize. The human genome has neither more overall DNA than other organisms nor does it have a greater number of genes than other mammals nor even a significantly greater number of genes overall than some very simple invertebrates. This is to say that neither the gross amount of DNA nor the number of specific genes appears to scale with the complexity of organisms. Well if neither of these do than what does? Surely there must be something about the human genome that has something to do with the characteristics of humans. The lack of interesting correlations with the amount of overall DNA was called the ‘CValue paradox’ (Cavalier-Smith, 1985) and the lack of interesting correlation with the number of genes was called the ‘N-Value paradox’ (Claverie, 2001). But it turns out that if we divide the number of genes by the overall amount of DNA in order to calculate gene density then we do finally see a relationship that appears to scale with complexity—but it is an inverse relationship (Patthy, 2003). Genes are packed in bacterial genomes 100 fold more densely than are that of humans. Invertebrate genomes are packed 10 fold more densely than that of humans and ten fold less densely than bacteria. As we now know, the genes of multicellular organisms are not contiguous but rather are broken up into discontinuous chunks known as exons that are separated by intervening sequences known as introns. A single gene will be composed of tens or even hundreds of exons. Human genomes are again distinguished by the quantity and long length of their intervening sequences (introns). The genes of the human genome are thus literally, and exceptionally, detached. What significance might this have? The most straight-forward inference could be that the detachment of coding regions allows for more flexible and more complex deployment of these resources. Where humans are distinguished with respect to specific gene content it is seldom about unique single copy genes, as these tend to be highly conserved going back to the one-celled stage, but rather it is about the expansion of families of closely related genes that appear to be generated by segmental duplication and the shuffling of exon units. Many of the genes that are involved in forming receptors at the surface of a cell are variants on a theme, evidently derived from exon shuffling and known as member of the so-called immunoglobulin superfamily. Where an invertebrate may have 50 or 150 of these genes, humans have close to 1000—quite a lot when you consider that the whole human genome has only about

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23,000 genes. Differences in the expansion of gene families is also that which in terms of the comparative genomics, distinguishes humans from other mammals such as mice (Barclay, 2003). But what significance might this have for the nature of an organism? Let’s consider the following model of two ideal cell types. Cell A is more primitive and has a much smaller repertoire of cell surface receptors coded for by its immunoglobulin gene superfamily. Cell B is of human, or perhaps higher primate origins, with a significantly more expanded repertoire of immunogloblulin superfamily cell-surface receptors. Cell A, we can thus imagine, has but a single cell surface receptor with a wide binding specificity. It is receptive to red, blue and green features of its world, but all in the same way, and in response sends a uniform white signal back to the interior of its cell. Cell B on the other hand, with its expanded repertoire of cell surface receptors can express six different receptors for the sensing and responding to the same aspects of the world. The first three of these receptors are each specific for red, blue, and green features of the world respectively in response to which they transmit red, blue or green signals into the interior of cell B, respectively. In addition it has three more receptor variants all of which bind and recognize equally all three features of the world, the red, blue and green, but each of these receptors transmits only one signal, either red, blue or green respectively into the interior of the cell regardless of which feature, red, blue or green, of the world was observed. Now taken as a whole Cell B has gained an enormous amount of detachment from the world relative to Cell A. Where cell A is bound to respond to red, blue or green features of the world in a predicable white way, Cell B can either act so as to discriminate between the red, blue and green features of the world, or it may act so as to prefigure based upon its own history, how it will be poised to respond to any of these three features of the world, it can, as it were, choose to respond in a red way, or in a blue way, or in a green way, to whichever of the features it encounters in its world (Moss, 2006). This model of the two cells is meant to represent the trend toward higher levels of detachment generally. The claim would be that the lack of a fixed way of receiving and responding to signals and entering into relationships with other cells corresponds, on the one hand, with the loss of fixed specializations but also, on the other hand, with the opening up of vastly wider possibilities spaces for context sensitivity, for higher level buffering capacity, and for the possibility of a vastly expanded array of developmentally contingent specializations. Hierarchically, higher levels of detachment such as human cultures are, it would seem, predicated not on the addition of new fixed capacities so much as on the increasingly plastic and flexible, and thereby more intensive, use of the same basic resources that were already present in less detached organisms. But simply expanding the internal degrees of freedom is not a solution in itself, indeed it is the source of a potential problem and crisis. If everything is always up for grabs where does order come from? Excessive openness is a vulnerability, indeed a danger to life. The German philosophical anthropologists even referred to this as a sickness of mankind they referred to as Mängelwesen. I will suggest that much of what the theory of detachment has to offer philosophy comes by way of what I call the ‘pain of detachment’ and its dire need for compensation.

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8.6 Detachment, Materiality and Final Cause What is matter and what is its relationship to final cause? Matter is congealed energy. When energy congeals into matter it has rest mass. As an entity with rest mass, matter already constitutes a well of detachment in space. Nature explores greater levels of detachment—and it does so as matter. Is matter anything other than the realization of different levels of detachment, of the unlimited potential for exploring ever new levels and manifestations of detachment? We formalize matter in the state of detachment that we find it, we abstract properties, generalize and make inferences but I think it’s a mistake to think that we could ever exhaustively anticipate, through formalization, all of the potential possibilities of nature to materially explore new levels of detachment. So conceived, Nature becomes an open space in which the complexities of culture are no longer anomalous but rather are exemplary. New higher order regimes of detachment bring with them new regularities, new economies and ecologies and thus new higher order laws. And what of final cause? Detachment comes at a price and generally the deeper the well of detachment the higher the price. Might it be the case that final cause is just another angle on what becomes an immanent drive toward sustaining some level of detachment? From within a regime, its regularities take on the character of norms, which are enacted, felt and sometimes further mobilized in reflective symbolic self-presentation. Might it be the case that life is itself a fuzzy concept that we intuitively associate with certain regions on the continuum of detachment—say above a certain threshold? Perhaps all manifestations of detachment—all manifestation of matter—are as ends in themselves that burst into being. Where, as we said before, higher levels of detachment exist as regimes of selfenclosure that constitute local histories, the regime constitutes itself as its own final cause. Bigger molecules have more degrees of freedom than smaller molecules but require the expenditure of energy to produce, and nature pays that price. Regimes of organizational closure require an on-going source of energy and thus metabolism is born. Metabolism is metabolism for something—there is no free-standing metabolism. That which metabolism is for is an end-unto-itself. Functions in general are that which serve to sustain levels of detachment. As there is always a price to pay, detachment does not, and cannot, exist in vacuo. Detachment must be compensated. Is final cause anything other than this drive for compensation? The more detached an entity is the greater its need for compensation. As internal degrees of freedom expand the explosion of possibilities can be paralyzing. The more detached from the world an entity is the more desperate it is for an anchor with which to settle and stabilize itself into an orderly regime. I call the perennial crisis that comes with higher levels of attachment the pain of detachment and I don’t mean this in merely metaphorical terms. With the progressive achievement of freedom from the tyranny of unmitigated continuity with ‘the all’ comes an increasing desperation for some kind of compensatory engagement with a larger reality.

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8.7 Sociality, Culture and Compensation If there is one thing that all (empirical) anthropologists appear to agree on it is that the biggest challenge to a theory of human evolution (or anthropogenesis) it is that of accounting for the expanding capacity for social bonding. Hominid survival on the savannah required a far greater capacity for sociality than had existed amongst primates in their arboreal habitat but explaining where it came from has been a problem. The theory of detachment may help to provide an answer. The idea that more detached cognitive capacities evolved in humans is hardly new. I suggest however that it is the dialectical correlate of detachment, i.e, the increasing pain of detachment, that may offer the missing piece of the puzzle—the enabling insight for doing the explanatory work. Robin Dunbar’s studies on brain size resulted in the then surprising result that the only trait that consistently correlates with brain size is the size of a social group, resulting in the now-widespread ‘social brain’ hypothesis (Dunbar, 2003). But what is it about larger brains that provides for expanded sociality? The biggest transition in anthropogenesis took place, not between Homo sapiens and their immediate predecessors but rather between the small-brained Australopithecines species and Homo erectus whose brain reached over 80% of the size of that of modern humans (Donald, 1993). And it was Homo erectus that attained that level of detachment requisite to becoming the first hominid species to leave Africa and become geographically and ecologically cosmopolitan. Durkheimian sociology envisions human solidarity built as the effervescening emotions of a gathered group crystalize into shared meanings, norms and collective identities. There is no mistaking the power and force of cohesion that people feel when dancing to their music, or cheering for the same team, or simply sharing the same somatic style. Why should we feel solidarity with others who dance to the same beat, whose bodies move in similar ways, and who feel the same norms we feel and conduct themselves accordingly? The unacknowledged elephant in the room is the very motive force that drives all of this—the depth of our need for compensation, our desperation for grounding, for immersion into a normative world that enables us to quell the crisis of our excessive and indeed life-threatening indeterminacy. The cognitive scientist Merlin Donald (1993) posed the enigma of Homo erectus and offered a brilliant solution. The enigma is that Homo erectus, during a reign of over a million years, managed to leave Africa and inhabit regions throughout the contiguous Eurasian land masses, domestic fire, establish permanent encampments, produce a hand axe tool that required skill and pedagogy and organize sophisticated hunts of giant mammoths and such, that would have required social coordination and some differentiation of labor and accomplished all this without, as best we can tell, any spoken language. The explanatory challenge that Donald took upon himself was not just that of accounting for what the cognitive basis of these accomplishments could have been but also that of accounting for what could possibly have become the pre-conditions for the eventual evolution of spoken language. From what kind of socio-cultural state of affairs could arbitrary signifiers, sounds in particular, come to have gained the power of reference? His solution was to propose the idea of a mimetic culture and manner of cognition. The cognitive breakthrough

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was prefigured by the capacity for highly coordinated motor skills that would have been a legacy of the arboreal past. Other primates such as great apes display impressive degrees of social knowledge and even savvy but their knowledge is confined to within an active ‘episode’. Donald’s mimetic breakthrough begins when a hominid can voluntarily detach a segment of somatically enacted social drama, rehearse it, possibly refine it, and redeploy it with communicative intent. The ability to ‘autocue’ series of motor sequences that already had a meaning in the social episode, and which could now be mobilized for use in communicative acts, would have provided the wherewithal for a culture of mimetic communication expanded and solidified through the invention and elaboration of ritual. Donald’s theory of mimesis provides the cognitive tools, but the motive force of social cohesion was the heightened and increasingly dire need of compensation for the pain of detachment. Ultimately language evolved, Donald claims, within and upon the socio-cognitive space of the mimetic world, but not, as many have assumed, for its instrumental utility, but rather for its ability to provide for myth. It was language as myth that transformed hominid existence and ushered in the age of the modern Homo sapiens. And what is the good of myth if not that of a more powerfully articulate and flexible form of compensation by way of a now symbolically mediated, normatively structured world? The word ‘detachment’ may tempt traditional ‘modernist’ notions of humans as a species apart, humans as detached from nature, but that wouldn’t be quite right. Resituated and contextualized in a philosophy of nature, in nature as understood as an on-going exploration of greater levels of attachment, humans are no longer to be understood as detached from nature but rather detached by nature. Nature explores higher levels of detachment and human socio-cultural life-forms are the most detached formations of nature yet (at least that we are aware of).

8.8 From Philosophical Anthropology to a New Vision of Nature Human beings seek and secure compensation for their primordial pain of detachment on many levels; indeed all human activity can be said to entail and be shaped at least in part by its compensatory function. In developing a skill the human body gains an attunement with the world and a form of specialization that compensates, by constraint, for its overwhelming openness to all such skillful possibilities. Parallel things can be said about the acquisition of a ‘somatic style’ by which I mean the full complement of expressive and embodied habits, inclinations, tastes, styles of adornment, postures, manners of movement both mundane and ceremonial that characterize an ‘ethnos’. The early Marx understood even labor also in anthropological terms, as the expressivist centerpiece of our species-being. For the early Marx the ‘alienation’ of labor was not only a matter of economistic exploitation but much more saliently a calamitous frustration of the human essence, of the human telos, which for Marx was the autonomous (expressivist) self-production and self-transformation of human nature through self-governing productive activity, i.e., through human praxis. Where a renewed expressivist anthropology, checked

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and informed by way of an on-going interactive conversation with the empirical human and biological sciences can refresh and renew an even richer understanding of praxis as the socially self-conscious species-constitutive self-production of the human socio-cultural ‘life-world’, it need not, and should not, do so over and above ‘nature’ understood as object or some sort of raw material for only our own purposes. Guided by a philosophy of natural detachment, nature brought ‘closer to us’ is nature filled with detached others who likewise suffer and seek compensation at their own measure, with whom we affiliate as co-symbionts, ecological cohorts, companion species and domestic partners within normative regimes that are enacted as well as, and often perhaps better than, they have come to be narratively and reflectively construed. Guided by an anthropology of detachment, an empirically accountable re-vivification of nature reemerges as the dialectical implication of rediscovering ourselves as always already embedded in such multilayered, normatively co-constituted, species-cosmopolitan (Haraway, 2007) regimes of compensation.

References Amundson, R. (2005). The changing role of the embryo in evolutionary thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barclay, A. (2003). Membrane proteins with immunoglobulin-like domains—a master superfamily of interaction molecules. Seminars in Immunology, 15, 215–223. Cavalier-Smith, T. (1985). The evolution of genome size. New York: Wiley. Claverie, J. (2001). Gene number: What if there are only 30,000 human genes? Science, 291, 1255–1257. Donald, M. (1993). Origins of the modern mind: Three stages of culture and cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Donald, M. (2001). A mind so rare. New York: W.W. Norton. Dunbar, R. I. M. (2003). The social brain: mind, language and society in evolutionary perspective. Annual Review of Anthropology, 32, 163–181. Grene, M., & Depew, D. (2004). The philosophy of biology: An episodic history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haraway, D. (2007). When species meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Moss, L. (2006). Redundancy, plasticity, and detachment: The implications of comparative genomics for evolutionary thinking. Philosophy of Science, 73, 930–946. Patthy, L. (2003). Molecular assembly of genes and the evolution of new functions. Genetica, 118, 217–231. Pinker, S. (1994). The language instinct. New York: Morrow. Tooby, L., & Cosmides, J. (1992). The psychological foundations of culture. In J. Barkow, L. Cosmides, & J. Tooby (Eds.), The adapted mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture (pp. 137–159). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Wilson, D. S., & Wilson, E. O. (2007). Rethinking the theoretical foundations of sociobiology. Quarterly Review of Biology, 82, 327–348. Wilson, E. O., & Hölldobler, B. (2005). Eusociality: Origin and consequences. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 102, 13367–13371.

Chapter 9

The Detached Animal – On the Technical Nature of Being Human Pieter Lemmens

9.1 Introduction The problem of the goal-directedness of life, of matter acting purposefully, the problem of the existence of self-organizing, self-sustaining and purposively behaving entities made of matter, the problem of finality in a material universe, in short: the mystery of the living organism, might very well be the all-time Überproblem of the science of biology indeed, as Lenny Moss suggests in his extremely interesting, delightfully speculative paper on the phenomenon of detachment. Living organisms, Moss agrees with Aristotle, are goal-directed beings; they exist as ends-untothemselves. They cannot be understood without an appeal to some notion of what Aristotle called teleology or final causality and which he conceived of as immanent to the organism itself, not as something assigned to it from the outside, imprinted so to speak in accordance with the will of a transcendent creator, as in Christian thought, or an idealistic Gestaltung by a demiurge working from eternal forms, as in Platonic and neo-Platonic thinking (or, as today’s Darwinists and especially ultraDarwinists have it, according to the whimsical wisdom of natural selection operating from the outside). Living organisms exhibit an internal, not an external teleology. But how to understand this internal final causality as an intrinsic feature of material beings, how to understand the unmistakable existence of internal teleology in entities that just as unmistakably consist of matter (and nothing besides), how to explain the mysterious union of finality and materiality that life represents? This is indeed the question of biology. As Moss puts it: ‘to understand life is to recognize its ineluctable finality as Aristotle intended it and to recognize its thoroughgoing materiality and yet how to relate these two is the big challenge’ (Moss, 2008).

P. Lemmens (B) Centre for Methodical Ethics and Technology Assessment (META), Wageningen University, De Leeuwenborch, Hollandseweg 1, 6706 KN Wageningen, Netherlands e-mail: [email protected]

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9.2 The Principle of Detachment The ‘solution’ proposed here to this Überproblem of biology is the principle of detachment. This principle should allow us, eventually, to understand the beingtogether as well as the coming-together in organisms of finality and materiality. Moss defines detachment as ‘a measure of the relative independence of an entity from a larger milieu, its ability to resist the force of thermal or other kinds of winds’ (Moss, 2008). That is to say, detachment is a measure of the extent to which an entity is able to ‘stay itself’, by resisting the influence of external forces, the ability of an entity to ‘persist in being’ (as Spinoza might have said), the ability – therefore – to withstand the disintegrating and homogenizing forces of the outside world that would dissolve it and, consequently, make it relapse into the global flow of nature. Detachment is the extent to which an entity maintains independence from the larger fabric of reality, from ‘physical nature’, the extent to which it is isolated from the rest of the world and the ability to persist as such, i.e., to persevere in this state of ‘autonomy’. Detachment comes in degrees and, as Moss notes, those degrees map closely with what he calls ‘internal degrees of freedom’ (a notion originally coming from the domain of chemistry and thermodynamics, if I’m correct). The more detached an entity is, the more freedom it has with respect to environmental perturbations, the greater its range of possibilities in responding to external influences. Moss associates greater levels of detachment with the extent to which an entity is able to retain ‘information’ from the environment, i.e., to somehow ‘remember’ its past dealings with the outside world and to bias its responses towards it accordingly. The richer an entity’s capacity to memorize its ‘experiences’, i.e., the more ‘historical’ an entity is, the more it can ‘filter’ or ‘buffer’ external perturbations and the more detached it becomes, the more degrees of freedom it features. An elementary particle, say, has a very low, possibly minimal capacity for registering information, whereas a protein (e.g., an enzyme) already represents a historical entity whose actual conformation partly reflects its past interactions and significantly determines its future behavior. So, one might conclude, detachment has to do with retention, with the ability of an entity to ‘remember’ its interactions with the world, its ability to ‘have a history’.

9.3 Detachment and Finality Increased ability of retention and of environmental input filtering capacity comes with local increases in complexity, integration and flexibility. Nature entertains growing levels of complexity: elementary particles forming atoms, atoms fusing to form simple molecules, simple molecules combining to form macromolecules, macromolecules gathering to form molecular assemblies, etc. A threshold in this upward scale is crossed once ‘organizational closure’ is reached and a centre of selfsustaining and boundary-maintaining activity (i.e., a living organism or biosystem) emerges that, as such, isolates its ‘self’ from the world as ‘other’ and starts to display finality, starts to behave as an end-unto-itself. As a general rule, it can be argued

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that the more detached an entity is, the more ‘attached’ or interrelated and integrated its internal components must be. Moss maintains that ‘nature’ explores new possibilities for detachment wherever possible and he puts forward the quite speculative hypothesis that the principle of detachment be understood as the one principle in nature allowing us to understand all phenomena of complexification, from the sub-atomic realm to the phenomenon of human consciousness. And nature explores levels of detachment as matter, matter being nothing but the realization of different levels, different ‘wells’, of detachment (emerging quasi-spontaneously from the undifferentiated continuum of energy). He further hypothesizes that the final causality characteristic of living organisms is to be understood as the inevitable price to be paid for a high degree of detachment (i.e., the one exhibiting self-sustainability). Final cause, therefore, is co-extensive with levels of detachment. It is the inner drive to compensate for the detached state.

9.4 Metabolism, Freedom and Finality Now, Moss proposes that the levels of detachment in nature form a continuum and he suggests that what we call ‘life’ does in fact refer to a specific region on this continuum, apparently that region of entities that have reached a state of organizational closure. But all manifestations of detachment might in principle be teleological in nature. It is interesting to note that the state of organizational closure is explicitly related, by Moss, to the phenomenon of metabolism. It is here that I would like to start my critical comments by introducing some thoughts of the German philosopher Hans Jonas, who, in 1966, wrote an interesting treatise on the ontology of life called The Phenomenon of Life. Toward a Philosophical Biology (Jonas, 1966), in which he argued for the concept of freedom as the basic concept of any philosophy of biology. In fact, much of Moss’s reasoning in this paper reminds one of Jonas’s phenomenological analyses of the organism (another important reference seems to be Helmuth Plessner). Criticizing the blind mechanism of Darwinist explanations of the origin of life, Jonas states that the potentiality of self-organization exhibited by living organisms must be thought of as somehow, ‘secretly’, residing in physical matter itself and that, therefore, teleology should be included in our concept of physical causality from the start. Although he admits that this can only be stated speculatively, his phenomenological analysis of life strongly suggests it. If we look at the living world, we can observe an ascending scale of increasingly complex organisms. This scale correlates with an increasing freedom, freedom from the physical world and freedom of action. Life is the adventure of entities attaining more and more freedom with respect to their material environment, freedom that comes – dialectically – with an ever-growing burden of necessities. For Jonas, the principle of freedom is the basic principle of life, it is the key to understanding life’s progression to ever-more complex and, yes, ever-more detached entities. Freedom is characteristic of organic existence per se, the fundamental feat of life’s mode of being, and it can already be perceived at its most elementary level: metabolism. Metabolism, according to Jonas,

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is the first form of freedom, the foundational freedom of life. Higher up in the scale appear – successively – sentience, motility, emotion, perception, imagination, and mind. For Moss, manifestations of detachment are manifestations of matter and when such manifestations have reached a state of organizational closure, a process called metabolism comes into being in order to supply the energy necessary to maintain this state. He remarks that there exists no free-standing metabolism but that all metabolism is ‘metabolism for something’ (Moss, 2008). This way of speaking about metabolism suggests that it is somehow a process additional to and separable from the process of maintaining organizational closure, a separate function serving the entity as a whole, like all other functions do. In fact, however, as Jonas stresses, metabolism as the organism’s exchange of matter and energy with the environment is all-pervasive, it concerns the organism in its totality. Or to put it slightly more hyperbolically: it is the organism. It constitutes its very mode of being. As Jonas writes: The exchange of matter with the environment is not a peripheral activity engaged in by a persistent core; it is the total mode of continuity (self-continuation) of the subject of life itself. [. . .] the system itself is wholly and continuously a result of its metabolizing activity. (Jonas, 1966, 76n13)

So, I would suggest, metabolism is not just a means of energy supply, it is the process of being of an organism as such. It not only ‘provides’ energy but is the continuous self-creation – through assimilation and dissimilation of matter – of the organism itself, its very autopoiesis.

9.5 Is It Matter that Matters? Detachment and Form What is metabolism? For Jonas, it is exactly that which distinguishes, as its most basic characteristic, life from non-life. Metabolism as the continuous exchange of matter (German: Stoffwechsel) is the basic mode of being of life, it’s most basic freedom. Due to metabolism, living things differ fundamentally from non-living things in the fact that their identity is not constituted by matter but by form, self-sustaining form. Living things maintain their identity – their living form – through time by continuously exchanging matter with the environment. In living organisms, matter is in a continuous flux, it is permanently assimilated and dissimilated (made similar and dissimilar to the body) and the organic form maintains itself through – or better yet: as – this flux. What remains the same throughout the process is form, not matter. Living form persists thanks to the continuous flow of matter: ‘It is never the same materially and yet persists as its same self, by not remaining the same matter’ (Jonas, 1966, p. 76). The succession of material contents flowing through the living form at each moment are the phases of transit for the process of the selffounding being of the form. At the exact moment in which matter and form become identical, the living form stops being alive and death ensues. In contrast to the form of a crystal (also a well of detachment according to Moss), which is inseparably

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allied to the persistence of the material, the form of a living organism stays identical precisely by not staying the same materially. Living form, moreover, exists not as a result of material assembly, like all inorganic forms do, but as its cause (the cause of permanent self-assembly). Living forms are forms not in virtue of external formative forces, but ‘in virtue of themselves, for the sake of themselves, and continually sustained by themselves’ (Jonas, 1966, p. 79). As Jonas argues, it is only with the appearance of life that the difference between matter and form, which is only an abstraction in the case of lifeless things, emerges as a realdistinction, i.e., as a concrete reality. And the ontological relationship is reversed as well: it is form that becomes essential – the ‘substance’ – while matter becomes accidental – just the ‘substrate’ (Fig. 9.1). So is it, in the case of life, matter that gets detached, as Moss seems to argue, or shouldn’t we rather state that living wells of detachment are self-sustaining forms, forms ‘emancipating’ themselves from matter (or their immediate identification with matter)? And does life, i.e., organic being, not represent, then, a discontinuity – an ‘ontological revolution in the history of “matter”’ to quote Jonas – within

Fig. 9.1 Organic and anorganic forms – ‘matter-in-formation’ versus ‘informed matter’. Whereas, in the case of anorganic forms (e.g., snow crystals), it is matter which determines form and is therefore of the essence – form being only an accident of the properties of matter – in the case of organic forms (e.g., corals), it is form, self-sustaining active form, which determines the configuration of matter – matter being only an accident of form (see article). Image source: Plate XIX of ‘Studies among the Snow Crystals’, by Wilson Bentley, from Annual Summary of the Monthly Weather Review 1902 (left) and Plate IX from Kunstformen der Natur (1904), by Ernst Haeckel, depicting corals classified as Hexacoralla (right)

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the continuum of detachment as proposed by Moss, a continuum he believes to be stretching all the way from elementary particles up to human cultures? Does the transition to life obey ‘the same kind of logic’ as the transition, say, from molecules to macromolecules or from macromolecules to consortia of macromolecules? Isn’t life a qualitatively different form of detachment, then, compared to the detachment operative in the inorganic realm? Atoms, molecules, macromolecules, etc. (and maybe even viruses?) – as instances of ‘lifeless matter’ – do not have to maintain their own being, but organisms do, they have to struggle actively for their being, and as such they are true ‘selves’, selves that are essentially their own function, their own concern and their own continuous achievement. Beings that are selves in this regard are beings that ‘have to be’ in an emphatic sense. And with ‘selfness’, interiority makes its entry, the polarity of ‘internal’ and ‘external’ or of ‘self’ and ‘world’. Nothing of the kind is to be found in the lifeless realm. What could explain this ontological leap called metabolism that is made by living things? And how does it relate to the ‘historical’ nature of detachment discussed by Moss? More so: how to consider his claim of detachment as ‘the basis of materiality or material cause’ with respect to living organisms as self-sustaining forms? Naturally, organic form emerges only with the process of metabolism, the active process of metabolism. It is generated by process, a process of morphogenesis. Organic form is essentially processual form or, to use a term coined by Nicolai Hartmann, Prozeßgestalt. Process is ontologically prior to form. The higher the level of detachment a being achieves, the higher its degree of freedom, the greater its need to compensate for it in its dealings with the world at large (this being, according to Moss, the true nature of final causality). At a certain point, detachment has to be actively defended and the higher a level of detachment, the more precarious it becomes and the more effort it needs to be upheld. Highly detached beings such as living organisms therefore exist in a perennial crisis, which Moss not unpoetically terms the ‘pain of detachment’ (Moss, 2008). As Jonas writes: ‘The privilege of freedom carries the burden of need and means precarious being’ (Jonas, 1966, p. 4). Being alive is being in danger. Organic freedom is, dialectically, balanced by a correlative necessity. On the most basic level of freedom, metabolism, this shows in the fact that the capacity of organic form to continually change its matter equally means – i.e., implies – the absolute necessity to do so. Its freedom is its necessity, what it can do, it must do. Jonas: ‘The organic form stands in a dialectical relation of needful freedom to matter’ (Jonas, 1966, p. 80). The sovereignty of the living form with respect to its matter is at the same time its subjection to the need of matter.

9.6 The Most Detached Animal Now, to make the transition to my second set of remarks, in line with his suggestion that the principle of detachment might be of crucial importance all the way up to the human being, Moss states that ‘humans are the most detached entities in nature’ and, moreover, that ‘human cultures are the most detached formations to have come

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into being, so far as we know’ (Moss, 2008). It is the human being in which the independence from nature at large has reached its temporary apotheosis. Man’s dramatic state of independence, however, is accompanied by an equally dramatic pain of detachment without precedence, and the need to compensate for that pain. Moss asks early on in his paper what it is that best characterizes us humans as humans and what has to be the case about our nature or biology that makes us that way (Moss, 2008). His answer of course is our extreme detachment. I will not go into his highly interesting observations on man as a Mängelwesen or his striking and – in my opinion – absolutely devastating critique of evolutionary psychology (invoking the work of Merlin Donald) here, nor on his interesting remarks on the detachedness of the human gene set. What I would like to argue, however, is that the extreme detachment of the human species can be understood as the result of a unique evolutionary trajectory in which man has become both the subject and the object of a process of technogenesis. A trajectory that started some 3.5 million years ago with the ‘invention’ of the first stone tools by our earliest ancestors. Man’s extreme detachment is not the result of a biological evolution, it is the outcome of a techno-evolution, or more exactly: of a co-evolution of technology and man’s biology. Man’s detachment is a technological affair through and through. It is this fundamentally technogenetic origin of the human condition that is still almost totally neglected by most Darwinists (in particular by ultra-Darwinists such as Dawkins, Wilson, Williams and Dennett), blind as they habitually are to the role of culture and technology in human evolution. In what follows, I will try to give a brief sketch of this co-evolution as it has been conceived by the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, who shows how the artificial niches in which man has come to live more and more – and by which he has transformed his surround into ‘an oasis of detachment’ (Moss, 2008) – are not only to be understood as man’s constructions but also as those things in which man himself was constructed (and became progressively detached from nature) by being transformed, not so much into a Mängelwesen, as described by the conservativemiserabilist anthropology of Arnold Gehlen, but into a Luxuswesen, i.e., a constitutively pampered being overflowing with possibilities but also constitutively in need of luxury (all luxury comes with a price, of course).

9.7 Detachment and Isolation Man, according to Sloterdijk, is a spheropoietic being that lives in self-made and self-enclosed ‘spheres’. The concept of ‘sphere’ (derived from the Greek word sphaira: globe or sphere), the central concept of Sloterdijk’s spherology cum historical onto-anthropology, refers to all the protecting and pampering ‘inner spaces’ (Innenräume) or ‘coverings’ in which man’s existence takes place and which are created by himself to a large extent. The first and most original and crucial sphere is the uterus (our initial ‘being-in-the-world’ is a ‘being-in-the-womb’), but after his birth – his premature birth – every human being comes to live (or ‘lead its life’) in increasingly inclusive spheres, starting with the loving and caring embrace of the mother (the ‘mother-child-inner-space’), functioning as the first ‘exo-uterus’, then

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the family, the home, the house, the apartment, the group, the tribe, the school, the stadium, the village, the city, the symbolic order, the law, the cultural norms, the country, the nation, the political system, the (welfare) state, the ideology, the religion, the metaphysics, the cosmology, the grand metanarratives (Lyotard), all kinds of technospheres from incubators to space stations, etc. Globally, Sloterdijk distinguishes microspheres and macrospheres, or bubbles and globes, and he claims that macrospheres are all modeled ultimately – through a process of spatial transference – after the first microsphere, the Urszene of human being: the ‘being-in-the-uterus’. To put it bluntly: all spheres are uteromimetic, recreations of the uterus-state in the outside world. Spheres protect and foster the human beings living inside them and their fundamental functionality is immunological. Spheres are immune systems, immunizing their inhabitants from external dangers. They institute a boundary between inside and outside, between a safe and known interior and a dangerous and unknown exterior (Sloterdijk & Heinrichs, 2001).

9.8 Becoming Detached: Anthropotechnologies and the Evolution of Man Here I will only emphasize the anthropogenetic effectiveness of the anthropospheres as understood by Sloterdijk. It is thanks to his chronic intra-spheric existence, i.e., thanks to his intra-spheric evolution and the multiple feedback effects of all kinds of spheres (as well as all kinds of technologies subsequently developed inside them) on his biology, that man could become the most detached entity in nature. The human species has evolved within spheres that have acted, during this evolution, as – to use the terminology Sloterdijk has adopted from the German socio-anthropologist Dieter Claessens – ‘breeding cases’ (Brutkasten) or ‘greenhouses’ (Treibhäuser) in which the human animal has progressively been de-animalized due to the existence of specific, unusually mild, internal selection regimes that have had a strong ‘pampering’, ‘luxuriant’ (luxurierend) and domesticating effect on man’s physiology, morphology and psychology. Man is the effect of an incubation (Treibhauseffekt). Homo sapiens is the product of an intra-spherical process of self-domestication of our proto-hominid ancestors, a biocultural selection process under the influence of operative and symbolic ‘anthropotechnologies’ (Anthropotechniken). Through isolation in anthropospheres and through the use of anthropotechnologies, man has bred ‘himself’ and the secret of anthropogenesis is a topological as well as a technological secret (Sloterdijk, 2004, p. 357). During this techno-evolutionary process, man’s mode of being – i.e., his very ontological structure, his way of ‘being-in-the-world’ – has been transformed from the instinct-driven vitality characteristic of living beings to what the German philosopher Martin Heidegger has called ‘existence’ (Existenz), a way of being that is open to the world and receptive of being itself, an ek-static way of being. It has turned the human animal as a being living in a species-specific and closed Umwelt (Von Uexküll) into the ‘open animal’ (offenes Tier) confronting the openness of a world (Welt), a ‘failed’ animal indeed that is lacking in instincts and natural

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capabilities but that, on the other hand, as the exquisitely privileged being it is, is enriched with a wealth of sophisticated and refined capacities that have evolved only thanks to the luxurious environment of the sphere. Constitutively pampered and fostered by his intra-spheric existence and permanent social care, man has become a ‘being of abundance’ (Reichtumswesen), characterized by excessiveness, by a structural ‘too much’. Man’s basic embarrassment lies not in his supposed ‘faultiness’ (Mängelhaftigkeit), but in his constitutive richness. His is an embarrassment of riches. As Sloterdijk remarks, man is burdened by his openness and plasticity in the same sense as millionaires are faced with the burden of administering their fortunes (Sloterdijk, 2004, p. 708). The pain of our detachment is the distress caused by our constitutive ‘too-much-ness’. Existentially, this works out as our openness to the world, our ek-static openness to being. Moss writes in his paper that the human organism is characterized by an increasing underprovidedness, underspecialization and immaturity, by an increasing flexibility and plasticity, by a loss of fixed specializations, an excessive openness and an excessive and life-threatening indeterminacy, characteristics that have turned the life cycle of human beings into a ‘perennial crisis’ (the pain of detachment). Sloterdijk shows that these characteristics result from a long-term evolutionary process of domestication and ‘luxuriation’ of the human animal within spheres acting as breeding cases, a process that started at the moment human animals began to shelter themselves from external selection pressures by isolating themselves in social groups (an evolutionary strategy not unique to humans but employed by many other animals (and even plants) as well, as American biologist Hugh Miller, the author of the theory of ‘isolated evolution’, has shown). Sloterdijk distinguishes four evolutionary mechanisms that have synergetically produced that improbable and uncanny creature called ‘man’: the already mentioned mechanism of isolation (or hyper-isolation), the mechanism of body relief (first described by German biologist Paul Alsberg, who contrasted the evolutionary principle of body liberation, characteristic of man, with the animal’s evolutionary principle of body compulsion (Alsberg, 1970)), the mechanism of neoteny or pedomorphosis (the juvenilization or infantilization of the human phenotype), and the mechanism of transference (the projection of familiar and trusted inner worlds upon the unknown and uncanny outside world, principally through language (especially metaphorical language) as the general organon of transference). A fifth mechanism, corticalization, consists of the synthetization of the effects of the other four mechanisms in a rapidly expanding organ, the human brain (Sloterdijk, 2001, p. 175). It is only the combined effects of those mechanisms that could have given rise to the phenomenon of the human. Body relief, for instance, is mainly achieved through the employment of what Sloterdijk calls (with Claessens) ‘distancing technologies’ (Abstand-Techniken). In the use of primitive stone tools – in acts of throwing, hitting, beating and cutting – the distance principle of technology as the liberation of the human body from contact with external objects was already operative. Homo sapiens is the ‘distance animal’ (Distanz-Tier), the ‘outsider’ of nature, the animal thoroughly implicated in an ongoing secession from nature. Along this paranatural path, man has progressively distanced or detached himself from his ‘internal’ nature as well, i.e., from his

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genetic instinctual programs, increasingly replacing them with cultural programs, which have become possible only thanks to the fact that his technical artifacts began to function as an external (extra-biological) memory system, stone tools acting as the first implicit artificial memory supports, the first implicit mnemotechnology, as the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler has shown (Stiegler, 1998).

9.9 The Burden of Detachment and the Danger of Technology The fact that human beings are future-oriented as well as the fact that they have come to live in an ontologically pre-structured world guided by (social, cultural, juridical, ethical, etc.) norms, as Moss notes, has its origin in man’s precarious breeding case condition, in which he leads his chronically immature life. Enjoying an increasingly extravagant state of luxury, being increasingly dependent on the highly improbable – naturally almost impossible – condition of the breeding case, the human animal is condemned to continuously take care of its artificial environment and protect it against an outside world that is always potentially frustrating. Its dependence on the breeding case is vital, its ‘pamperedness’ (Verwöhnung) is constitutive and so needs to be maintained at all cost. Man is compelled to take care for that which conditions his unlikely existence. This need to take care of the breeding case (later to be called ‘culture’) has turned man into a futural being. Man’s futurity, his anticipatory mode of being, his Vorläufigkeit (Heidegger), is a consequence of his intra-spheric and luxurious way of being. It is only because man is condemned to take precautions with respect to his luxurious state, that he ‘lives towards the future’ and understands being as time. The future, as Sloterdijk writes, is in the first instance nothing but the dimension in which the unlikeliness of a biologically almost impossible state wants to be stabilized by technological strategies (Sloterdijk, 2001, p. 192). Man’s onto-logical nature, his understanding of being and his capacity for world formation (Weltbildung) has its origins in man’s biological prematurity, itself the result of his extreme detachment (developed technogenetically, as we know now). This is pointed out by Moss as well, when he speaks of the ‘biology of our detachment and the detachment of our biology’ as driving us towards the construction of normatively structured worlds (and to each other). The loss of instinctual fixity and chronic immaturity have ‘thrown’ man into the uncanny openness of the world. This world is always a technological world, technology being both ‘closing’ (‘immunizing’) and ‘opening’. Detached from the natural Umwelt, man is ‘re-attached’ to an increasingly technologized lifeworld. Is it perhaps possible that technology, as it is developing nowadays, as a global system of control in service of the economy, could accomplish something like a tendential closure of man’s openness toward being, a kind of falling back, a regression that is, into a state of being indistinguishable from that of the animal (i.e., life reduced to subsistence, deprived of the dimension of existence and of what Stiegler has called consistence, a life oriented by ideas and ideals)? This is one of the crucial questions raised by Heidegger when he posed the question of the essence and the danger of technology in the early fifties of the twentieth century.

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References Alsberg, P. (1970). In quest of man. A biological approach to the problem of man’s place in nature. Oxford-New York: Pergamon Press. Jonas, H. (1966). The phenomenon of life. Toward a philosophical biology. New York: Harper & Row. Moss, L. (2008). Detachment, genomics and the nature of being human. In M. Drenthen, J. Keulartz, & J. Proctor (Eds.), New visions of nature, (pp. xx–xx). Netherlands: Springer. Sloterdijk, P. (2001). Nicht gerettet. Versuche nach Heidegger. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Sloterdijk, P. (2004). Sphären III. Schäume. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Sloterdijk, P., & Heinrichs, H.-J. (2001). Die Sonne und der Tod. Dialogische Untersuchungen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Stiegler, B. (1998). Technics and time 1. The fault of epimetheus. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Chapter 10

Metagenomic Metaphors: New Images of the Human from ‘Translational’ Genomic Research Eric T. Juengst

10.1 Introduction: The Context of the Human Microbiome Project (HMP) In an article written in 1990 at the dawn of the US Human Genome Project, James Watson and Robert Cook-Deegan wrote something guaranteed to catch the eye of anyone interested in public engagement with biomedical science. They said that ‘The major impact of the genome project will be a slow but steady conceptual evolution – a change in the way that we think about disease and normal physiology’ (Watson & Cook-Deegan, 1990, p. 3322). Since the way we think about disease and normal physiology are fundamental to the public’s interests in (and feelings about!) biomedical science, significant changes in how we think about these topics will be important to understand for any attempt to follow or facilitate democratic deliberations about genome science. In their 1990 essay, Watson and Cook-Deegan go on to suggest the direction in which they think the Human Genome Project will take our thinking about disease: A century ago, a revolution in medicine was in full stride following the discovery of infectious organisms and the dawn of bacteriology. Over the course of the century, the conceptual base of medicine has broadened from gross anatomy of organs to cellular biology to dissection of biochemical pathways. The next step is to study the most fundamental elements in biology – Mendel’s hereditary factors, now known as ‘genes’. This will not replace population biology, organismal biology, cellular physiology, or biochemistry, but will supplement them with a new and powerful foundation of knowledge. [. . .] Once this foundation is solid, the next stage will be to use the masses of information and new analytical techniques to understand disease and normal biology. (Watson & Cooke-Deegan, 1990, pp. 3322, 3324)

This is, in fact, a reasonable thumbnail sketch of how many genome scientists have seen their place in history: as laying the groundwork for the final phase of the reductionistic search for ‘specific causes’ of disease that revolutionized medicine a century ago, by focusing our understanding of human biology on dynamics of E.T. Juengst (B) Department of Bioethics, Center for Genetic Research Ethics and Law, School of Medicine, TA-214, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH 44106-4976, USA e-mail: [email protected]

M. Drenthen et al. (eds.), New Visions of Nature, C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-2611-8_10, 

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its ‘most fundamental elements.’1 With this vision comes the essentialistic suite of metaphors for genes and the genome that we have become familiar with in connection with the Human Genome Project, as the ‘Holy Grail’ and the ‘Code of Codes’ for human biology and as individual human beings’ ‘blueprints,’ ‘recipes,’ ‘templates,’ and ‘souls.’ (cf. Van der Weele, 2005; Nelkin, 2001). Now that the Human Genome Project has been completed, however, the genomic research enterprise has entered a new phase, and a new language is emerging to help interpret it. In this paper I will focus on one trio of metaphors from this new phase of genomic research, which are emerging from the planning of the Human Microbiome Project (HMP) at the US National Institutes of Health. The HMP is a ‘metagenomic’ initiative to sequence the genomes of all the microbiological flora collected from a variety of body sites from a variety of human volunteers, in order the pursue the interesting hypothesis that our indigenous microbial genome, or ‘microbiome,’ plays a vital and interactive role with our human genome in normal physiology and disease. Three metaphors are being widely used by the scientists promoting this initiative: (1) that the human genome should be understood as part of a larger sensorymotor organ, the human ‘meta-genome’, picking up and reacting to cues from its environment much like our nervous or immune systems; (2) that the human body should be understood as a ecosystem with multiple ecological niches and habitats in which a variety of cellular species collaborate and compete; and (3) that human beings should be understood as ‘super-organisms’ that incorporate multiple symbiotic cell species into a single individual with very blurry boundaries, like a colony of blue–green algae on a massive scale of complexity. Each of these metaphors carries interesting philosophical messages, which I shall conclude by pointing to as promising topics for future research. To they extent that they mark a departure from the essentialistic and reductionistic language that characterized the promotion of the Human Genome Project, they may contribute to a very different kind of scientific paradigm shift than the one Watson and Cook-Deegan described in 1990, and perhaps even one more conducive to democratic public engagement in science policy.

1 There

is no shortage of evidence that genome scientists have seen themselves as poised at the beginning of the ‘end of history’ for medical science. For example, Walter Gilbert writes that: The genome project is not just an isolated effort on the part of molecular biologists. it is a natural development of the current themes of biology as a whole. [. . .] The information carried on the DNA, that genetic information passed down from our parents, is the most fundamental property of the body. To work out our DNA sequence is to achieve a historic step forward in knowledge. Even after we have made that step we will still need to refer back to the sequence, to try to unravel its secrets more and more completely. But there is no more basic or more fundamental information that could be available. (Gilbert, 1992, p. 83)

See also Guyer and Collins (1993) and Hood (1988) for similarly eschatological claims for genome research.

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10.2 The Context of the Human Microbiome Project (HMP) Before we get to the HMP and its metaphors, there are two more generic pieces of the new genomic language that are important to notice: the metaphor of ‘translation’ and the concept of ‘metagenomic’ research. Together, these provide the rationale and conceptual context for the HMP, and for its own interesting suggestions for what genomics teaches us about ourselves.

10.2.1 Translational Genomic Research After floundering a bit with the infelicity (and inaccuracy) of entering a ‘postgenomic era,’ the genome research community in the US now universally calls its new phase that of ‘translational genomic research,’ to capture its goal of using genomic science to develop specific interventions that can be used in clinical and public health settings to benefit human health.2 ‘Translation’ itself is open to interpretation here, of course. Some still seem to see it as a relatively mechanistic process of moving through a ‘pipeline’ or ‘translational pathway’ ‘from the bench to the bedside,’ more or less like the stepwise translation of RNA molecules into functional proteins within a cell’s ribosomes. The trans-NIH ‘Roadmap’ initiatives of the last several years, aimed at accelerating the process through which laboratory research leads to beneficial health outcomes, subscribes to this rather linear interpretation of translation. This interpretation still echoes the older metaphors of blueprints and codebooks, as if best route to health benefits need only be ‘read off’ the information genomics provides. But it at least suggests that genomics still has some distance to travel before it revolutionizes medicine, even after achieving the Holy Grail of a complete human DNA sequence. This in itself opens an opportunity for the public to line the roads and watch the genomic parade – or, more ominously, to ‘constrict the translational pipeline’ with undue regulatory governance. Equally common, however, (and more interesting for our purposes) is to interpret ‘translation’ in this context linguistically, as if basic genomic research findings and medical diagnoses, prognoses and prescriptions described the same things in different languages and merely required a translator – or at most, ‘translational research’ – to be usefully interpreted in either direction. This interpretation has the heuristic advantage of signaling that there are human challenges in doing translational research: it involves communication across multiple disciplinary and professional boundaries (and the subcultures they define), and the process is not mechanical. Linguistic translations are capable of being better or worse, more or less useful, depending on the skill and discernment of the translator. This interpretation also opens up the notion to the idea that, in part, translational research should involve translating the insights of science into language that the public can appreciate as

2 Thirty

years ago, this would have been called ‘applied’ as opposed to ‘basic’ genomic research, and it would be interesting to study why that formulation no longer works.

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well. In order for that to be true, of course, those doing the translating will need to know the public’s languages, providing a role for public voices (and those who study them) in the translational research process itself, as critical insiders rather than external critics.3 The HMP is an example of ‘translational genomic research’ because it attempts to use genomic tools to address a problem of medical interest, by improving our understanding of the role of bacteria in human physiology and disease. Ultimately, the proponents hope to be able to provide both diagnostic tools, using DNA screening to assess a patient’s bacterial needs, and more effective and ‘individualized’ pro-biotic therapies to address microbial imbalances. Genetically engineering the bacteria we include in these therapies could provide a useful new avenue for delivering pharmaceuticals as well, or even for replicating, in a reversible and safer way, what we might attempt to achieve through somatic cell gene therapy. The HMP will also be ‘translational’ in that it will involve a number of disparate scientific fields – microbial evolution, infectious disease epidemiology, human somatic cell genetics, DNA sequencing, dermatology, gastroenterology, gynecology and dentistry, for example – in collaborative efforts on a large scale. This, of course, makes the need for useful ordinary language metaphors critical to the effort simply to improve communication amongst those involved, even before the public is engaged.

10.2.2 ‘Metagenomic’ DNA Sequencing Research The second generic concept framing the HMP is the notion of ‘metagenomic’ research.4 Unlike ‘epigenomic’ research, this does not refer to the study of cellular environmental forces above and beyond the genome itself in the regulation and expression of genes. Rather, metagenomic research involves projects in which mixed samples of DNA from multiple species are sequenced, in order to identify all the organisms involved and study their molecular interactions (cf. Riesenfeld, Schloss, & Handelsman, 2004). For example, Coque, Oliver, Perez-Diaz, Baquero, and Canton (2002) studied the metagenome of an entire hospital in Madrid over an 11-year period, and found that bacterial resistance to several antimicrobial agents persisted despite the ephemeral nature of the bacterial species responsible for producing these enzymes. They concluded that genes coding for ESBLs were housed

3 Just

behind these molecular and linguistic readings lurks another old theological definition of ‘translation’ that also sometimes seems reflected in the way the term is used by promoters of translational genomic research: the miraculous ascension of some special saints directly to heaven before they have actually died. If only we could translate the findings of genomic research directly into medicine without the need for their death as basic science discoveries and their tedious epidemiological and clinical research interrogation before the gates of the clinical setting! Unfortunately, even most saints have had to die (often under torture) to get beyond this world, and in the real world research results face similar thresholds and challenges. 4 For a very useful summary and conceptual analysis of metagenomics science, see Dupré and O’ Malley (2007).

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in transposable genetic elements as a minority gene population in the hospital metagenome. Residing in the hospital metagenome, these ‘jumping genes’ persist in a variety of bacterial species that themselves are not persistent. The HMP is metagenomic because it seeks to do bulk DNA sequencing of multiple bacterial species, like other metagenomic research projects. Unlike its predecessors, however, the HMP aspires to go further to support studies that include human somatic cell genomes in the metagenomic mix, in order to understand our inter-species interactions at the molecular level. As the US National Research Council explains in its ringing endorsement of the Human Microbiome Project, The human ‘metagenome’ might be considered an amalgamation of the genes contained in the Homo sapiens genome and in the microbial communities that colonize the body inside and out. The organisms within these communities are collectively known as the human ‘microbiome.’ The metagenome of these communities encodes physiological traits that humans have not had to evolve, including the ability to harvest nutrients and energy from food that would otherwise be lost because we lack the necessary digestive enzymes .Without understanding the inhabitants of the human microbiome and the mutualistic humanmicrobial interactions that it supports, our portrait of human biology will remain incomplete. (National Research Council, 2007, p. 38)

10.3 Metagenomic Metaphors If the architects of the Human Genome Project hoped to achieve a ‘slow but steady conceptual evolution’ in biomedicine, the proponents of the Human Microbiome Project have much grander ambitions: they to seek to spark nothing short of Kuhnian scientific revolution in our understanding of human biology. They argue that as the ‘new science’ of metagenomics emerges, Basic ideas that organize biologists understanding of the living world may need refinement in the fact of greater understanding of [microbial] community function. New concepts of genomes, species, evolution, and ecosystem robustness will have effects beyond the specific field of microbiology. The questions that must be asked are ‘deep’ ones [. . .]. (National Research Council, 2007, p. 33)

The basis for these ambitious claims lies in the radical way in which metagenomics reconceives biological individuality. Traditionally, the individual mammalian organism – the horse or the human – has been the paradigm for both folk and scientific concepts of biological individuality (Wilson, 1999). In spite of the fact that we mammals are rather atypical of living beings generally, this vision of individuality has structured both our biomedical science and our social practices. Health and disease are paradigmatically conditions of individual patients, and only by extension their parts or the larger wholes to which they belong. Similarly, our society’s ethics and political systems are famously built around the agency and needs of the human individual. In both spheres bodily boundaries make up critical demarcations, and as a result carry significant psychological weight, giving tangible meanings to our notions of ‘purity,’ ‘integrity,’ and ‘wholeness,’ on one hand, and ‘infection,’ ‘contagion’ and ‘corruption’ on the other. By using metagenomics to

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study human physiology, the HMP challenges these boundaries methodologically, and, by extension, the ontological categories we use to ‘carve nature at its joints.’ Far from helping genomics realize the modern scientific project of reducing the ills of human individuals to their specific causes, metagenomics and the HMP seem poised to bring genomics to a post-modern understanding of the individual itself, as pragmatic construction that we project upon on a much more complex system (cf. Hauskeller, 2004). To explain the implications of this conceptual shift – and to promote their project – the architects of the HMP have resorted to three metaphors I previewed in the introduction. First, they describe the human genome as only one contributing part of a larger functional genetic system, the human metagenome that interacts with its environment like a sensory-motor organ in maintaining a human individual’s health. Second, they describe the individual human body as itself an ecosystem, casting ‘health’ in ecological terms as a homeostatic harmony between different interacting species and ‘disease’ as its imbalance. Third, they almost universally declare human beings to be ‘super-organisms’ rather than discrete biological individuals, rendering our personal boundaries fluid and flexible. Each of these metaphors has interesting philosophical implications, which I will suggest as I take them up in turn below.

10.4 The Human Metagenome as a Sensory-Motor Organ In its report promoting the HMP, the National Research Council argues that Metagenomics will enable us to address a number of fundamental questions about ourselves. Is there an identifiable core microbiome shared by all humans? How is each individual’s microbiome selected? What is the role of host genotype? Should differences in each individual’s microbiome be viewed, with the immune and nervous systems, as features of our biology that are profoundly affected by individual environmental exposures? (National Research Council, 2007)

These questions point to the key aspirations of the HMP, which are ultimately to offer a positive (and biomedically useful) answer to each of them. The last question is of particular ‘translational’ interest, since if the human metagenome can be influenced by environmental exposures, it offers a window for medical manipulation that the ‘primate-lineage component of the human genome’ (Ley et al., 2007, p. 3) seems to resist. As the architects of the NIH HMP write in a background paper, As twenty-first century medicine evolves its focus towards disease prevention, new and better ways of defining our health status are needed. The gut micro biota is an effector and a reporter of many aspects of our normal physiology. Comparisons of germ-free and colonized animals have shown that the micro biota helps regulate energy balance, both by extracting calories from otherwise inaccessible components of our diet and by controlling host genes that promote storage of the extracted energy in adipocytes (2–4). The micro biota directs myriad biotransformations, ranging from synthesis of essential vitamins to the metabolism of the xenobiotics that we ingest and the lipids that we produce. (Gordon et al., 2007, p. 1)

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Moreover, as this list indicates, among these interesting microbiotic contributions to our physiology are interactions with our ‘primate lineage’ genes. Microbiota help regulate differential gene expression in different tissues and in response to environmental stimuli, effectively extending the capacity of our cells to differentiate and adapt. As humans and their bacteria have co-evolved, this has meant a role for the microbiome even in the ‘internally programmed’ process of normal growth and development. As Dupré and O’ Malley point out in their review, Particularly striking is the growing understanding that symbiotic bacteria are required for the proper development of many vertebrates. It was recently reported, for example, that environmentally acquired digestive tract bacteria in zebrafish regulate the expression of 212 genes (Rawls et al., 2004; Bates et al., 2006). In fact, for the majority of mammalian organism systems that interact with the external world – the integumentary (roughly speaking, the skin), respiratory, excretory, reproductive, immune, endocrine, and circulatory systems – there is strong evidence for the coevolution of microbial consortia in varying levels of functional association (McFall-Ngai, 2002). (Dupré & O’ Malley, 2007, p. 840)

The key to the success of this shared system of genetic regulation is the wide variation that bacterial genomic plasticity provides, which allows the microbial lineages in our metagenome to evolve quickly in the face of selective pressures. As the National Research Council report explains, ‘The mechanisms for rearranging coding elements within a genome serve as mutational switches, ensuring that as the environment changes due to shifts in chemical, physical or biological conditions, there will be variants in the cell population that can flourish’ (National Research Council, 2007, p. 34). As our microbial genome evolves under environmental pressure, so do the messages that it conveys to the human genome, affecting the regulation and replication of our primate genes. At the level of the human organism, this rapid evolutionary change looks virtually mechanical, inspiring comparisons to other cybernetic organ systems. As one team writes, ‘like an organ, a healthy micro biota consumes, stores and redistributes energy and mediates important chemical transformations that benefit the host. Communication among the cells that make up the micro biota enable replication and repair, and a set of feedback loops link host and micro biota’ (Foxman, Goldberg, Murdock, Xi, & Gilsdorf, 2008).

10.5 Discussion: Implications for Genetic Determinism One of the problems with the essentialistic genetic metaphors that animated the promotion of the Human Genome Project is that they were already outdated by the science they attempted to illustrate. In fact, casting genes in the role of specific causes for traits requires holding onto a strikingly old-fashioned form of genetic thinking which today was disparaged by Ernst Mayr in the mid-20th century as ‘bean bag genetics.’ Early Mendelians assumed that particular genes (or ‘unit characters’) were necessary and sufficient causes for their trademark traits: ‘specific causes,’ in medicine’s terms. Mayr pointed out, however, that unlike colored beans drawn from a bag, genes rarely have only one phenotypic effect, and are never entirely disconnected from each other (Mayr, 1963, p. 263). Since then, the phenomena to

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which he referred – pleiotropy, heterogeneity, and linkage – have become foundational for much of modern genetics, and were crucial to the basic ‘positional cloning’ strategy for the Human Genome Project’s first round of genome mapping efforts. If it was rhetorically possible to hang onto old models of genetic causation during the purely descriptive mapping and sequencing of the human genome, it has become no longer possible in genomics ‘translational’ phase and the functional analysis of genes to which so much of genomics has turned. Even before the emergence of metagenomics, the Human Genome Project itself undermined the status of DNA as the ‘master molecule’ in human biology. For example, one of the interesting findings of genome research is that human beings only have about 25,000 genes, like mice, not the 100,000 that scientists previously predicted. What distinguishes humans is that genes we do have are often capable of ‘multi-tasking’ to help human cells produce a much greater variety of proteins than other organisms. In part, this ability is a function of the fact that our genome contains regions of non-coding DNA that break up our genes and allow their specific coding regions to be rearranged to describe different proteins. This dynamic is controlled by regulatory DNA elements, but only when activated by cues from the proteomic flux of the cellular environment. If there is anything that really distinguishes us from other species – or from one another – at the cellular level, it must lie in the forces that animate the cytoplasm, or even the extra-cellular influences that produce those forces. This means that, far from being a constant and consistent signature, across different tissues even our bodies’ human cells will be operating different functional nuclear genomes simultaneously. The reconceptualization of the human genome as one component of a dynamic human metagenome obviously deals a blow to the old genetic determinism that is even more vivid than revelations about the internal plasticity of its ‘primate-lineage component.’ Far from being the ‘master molecule’ in our physiology, our nuclear DNA is demoted to simply another set of cellular genomes jostling for influence within us, reacting to and being regulated by, a set of microbial genomes that outnumber them 10 to 1. As Dupré and O’ Malley point out, ‘The original human genome sequencing projects were, from this perspective, about only a tiny and unrepresentative complement of our genes’ (Dupré & O’ Malley, 2007, p. 840). This new level of indeterminacy has two important implications. First, it has the potential to undermine the social risks that a deterministic view exacerbates. If our insurers and employers appreciate the causal complexity and power of the metagenome, they may less likely to penalize us for the potential health risks lying dormant in any of its parts. More importantly to metagenomics status as a ‘translational’ science, however, the new causal complexity opens up possibilities for preventing and manipulating those health risks. In one interesting picture of the utopia waiting beyond the HMP, the project’s proponents manage to capture both these virtues Our medical insurance cards will contain one chip for our primate genome, and one for our microbiome. As part of the annual physical exam, physicians will take a stool sample to update the microbiome profile. Just as today a rise in blood pressure from one visit to the next signals a risk of developing heart disease, tomorrow changes in the microbiome

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profile will herald a predisposition to diseases such as obesity. Therapeutic intervention will follow, likely a combination of individualized nutrition, deliberate ‘reprogramming’. Of the micro biota with addition/removal or stimulation of particular lineages or genetic complements within the microbiome, or use of microbial gene products themselves (or their revealed human gene product targets) as part of our 21st century pharmacopoeia. (Ley et al., 2007, p. 4)

It has been popular amongst genome scientists to cast the ethical, legal, and social issues in genome research as time-limited problems caused by the ‘therapeutic gap’ between our ability to read people’s genomes and our abilities to offer effective remedies to any deficits we find there. As genomic medicine catches up with genome science, the argument goes, the issues caused by this awkward interim should evaporate, because it will no longer be in anyone’s interests to discriminate on the basis of genotype (cf. Hood & Rowen, 1997). The relatively slow growth of human gene therapy, pharmacogenomic interventions, and other forms of ‘personalized genomic medicine’ over the last decade has been discouraging for this line of argument – until now. If interventions as easy and efficient as ‘probiotic’ inoculations of genetically modified bacteria can be counted amongst the armamentarium of personalized genomic medicine, then the closing of the therapeutic gap may well be at hand. This would achieve genomics’ translational ambitions and perhaps relieve the ‘ethical, legal and social’ constrictions of its pipeline in the process.5

10.6 The Human Body as an Ecosystem At the same time that the microbiomists are conceptualizing the human metagenome from a human point of view as simply another (vital) organ system within the body, they are also interpreting the body, from the microbial point of view, as an ecosystem hosting multiple interacting species. As they point out ‘The GI tract can be regarded as a very complex ecosystem, because it does not involve solely eukaryotic tissues like in other organs, but involves interplay between food, host cells and microbes’ (Zoetendal, Vaughan, & de Vos, 2006, p. 1639). On this construction, the body’s bacteria are not simply absorbed into its boundaries as another human organ, but are allowed their own identity as participating species in an ecosystem that can benefit both them and their human ‘host’. Thus, ‘the microbial ecosystem of the mammalian gastrointestinal tract is in a homeostatic relationship with the host’s immune system. As expected for co-evolving systems, both microbe and mammal benefit from this symbiotic partnership’ (Saier & Mansour, 2005, p. 23). To some extent, describing the human body as an ecosystem is meant literally: it is possible to discern and study ‘microbial ecology’ in ways that use the term ecosystem much as it is used in environmental sciences. It is evident that there also

5 Although there remain good reasons to believe this hope would be vain: I’ve argued that the ‘ther-

apeutic gap’ is not genomics’ most important source of ethical and social challenges, compared to what it can imply about psychosocially potent dimensions of our identities (Juengst, 2004).

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metaphorical ecosystems in play, however, when the literature begins describing the body in geographical terms, as a landscape. For example, As one scientist writes: When a new human being emerges from its mother, a new island pops up in microbial space. Although a human lifespan is a blink in evolutionary time, the human island chain has existed for several million years, and our ancestors stretch back over the millennia in a continuous archipelago. (Ley et al., 2007, p. 3)

Like geographical island ecosystems, the human body contains many microclimates and ecological niches across three major zones: its inner lining (the gut), its exterior covering (the skin) and its multiple and very different orifices. Microbiomists speak of the microbial ‘tide pools’ of the teeth, and the ‘rain forest’ of the gut, using the strikingly 19th century language of mapping ‘largely unexplored’ terrain, populated by ‘indigenous’ species of bacteria (Blaser, 2006). As the proponents of the HMP say, ‘Microbes thrive on us: we provide wonderfully rich and varied habitats, from our UV-exposed, oxic and desiccating skin to our dark, wet, anoxic and energy rich gut that serves as a home to the vast majority of our 100 trillion microbial (bacterial and archaeal) partners’ (Ley et al., 2007, p. 3). One useful consequence of reframing the human body and its places as ecosystems is that it provokes a line of thought about how to achieve the therapeutic manipulations of the metagenomic ‘organ system’ that seem so attractive under that metaphor. Any ecosystem needs to be in a state of balance in order to function effectively. Disturb one component, and dire consequences to the entire system can follow. In nature, ecosystem disruption often results in massive death of the constituent species. The ecosystem we will focus on in this mini-review is the human gut with its extensive and complex flora of microorganisms. The human intestine is part of a truly amazing ecosystem that is essential for the successful and efficient absorption of nutrients. (Saier & Mansour, 2005, p. 22)

10.7 Discussion: Implications for Concepts of Health and Disease One of the major conceptual effects of the doctrine of specific causation in 19th century medicine was the ontological reification of diseases in terms of their causal pathogenic agents. Both in Pasteur’s germ theory and in Virchow’s cellular pathology diseases were understood to be reducible to real things in the world: the pathogens or lesions which could provide necessary and sufficient targets for intervention. Under this view, diseases are separable from the patients that suffer them; they are understood best as predators attacking the patient, either as invading germs or as devouring wounds. Diseases like schistosomiasis and herpes fit clearly into this scheme: they are diseases identified with the invading entities that cause their clinical signs and symptoms. Explaining a set of clinical problems as a ‘cancer’ – an abnormal body part, consuming other normal body parts – is also to use this model, as is a diagnosis of ‘spina bifida’ – a localizable lesion in the body. On this model, the proper target for therapeutics is not the epiphenomenal clinical symptoms of the disease, but whatever the disease ‘agent’ does to cause those symptoms: the infection, the metastasis, or the break. The great successes of the public health movement

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in combating infectious disease in the early 20th century, and the reorientation of psychiatry to look for the ‘organic’ bases of mental illness during the same period owe much to this interpretation of disease, as does the common correlative view that health is largely a matter of being ‘clean’ and ‘whole’. One of the important corollaries of this ontologically robust view of disease is that it becomes possible for diseases to be ‘carried’ by organisms who, while unaffected themselves, serve to transmit disease to potential hosts. As historians note: The simplistic interpretation of the germ theory, one which many physicians embraced at first, was that pathogenic bacteria in a human host equaled a disease. Before long it became clear that some individuals could harbor large numbers of dangerous bacteria and suffer no effects. The most famous of these was Mary Mallon, whose gallbladder teemed with typhoid bacilli, while she enjoyed perfect health. . . . The carrier state is now recognized as extremely common in many diseases. (Hudson, 1987, p. 164)

Moreover, the lesson of Typhoid Mary was that the ‘carrier state’ is also a crucial target for intervention in any attempt to forestall the spread of a disease of this sort. From the point of view of preventive medicine, carriers do not enjoy perfect health at all: they are infected with disease which could either eventually blossom to harm them or spread to those around them. This made possible the concept of screening otherwise healthy people to detect their hidden diseases, both for the purposes of providing them with ‘pre-emptive therapy’ and providing others with protection from the danger they represented (Brandt, 1987). Viewing the human body as an ecosystem of co-existing cellular species poses a major challenge to the doctrine of specific causation and the models of health and disease it supports. If the human body is essentially an ecosystem, the notions of ‘purity,’ ‘integrity,’ and ‘wholeness,’ on one hand, and ‘infection,’ ‘contagion’ and ‘corruption’ on the other make little sense, since ecosystems are understood to have fluid boundaries and to support multiple species in cycle of growth, predation and decay. Moreover, there are no ‘bad guys’ in ecosystems, so, as the microbiomists point out, the metaphors of war no long apply so well to our understanding of health and disease In the face of these challenges, the metaphor of ‘war’ on infectious diseases – characterized by the systematic search for the microbial ‘cause’ of each disease, followed by the development of antimicrobial therapies – can no longer guide biomedical science or clinical medicine. A new paradigm is needed that incorporates a more realistic and detailed picture of the dynamic interactions among and between host organisms and their diverse populations of microbes, only a fraction of which act as pathogens. (Forum on Microbial Threats, 2006)

Of course, ecosystems can have problems, if they are forced into crises by changing contextual conditions. Species can overpopulate, resources evaporate, and interdependent processes collapse. This kind of problem provides another ready model for human health and disease. In fact, it leads immediately to the metaphors of ‘balance’ and ‘harmony’ that frame the traditional philosophical competition for the doctrine of specific causation: the old ideas of Galenic humoural pathology and the ‘constitutional pathology’ that followed it at the end of the 19th century. On this model, which the microbiomists adopt in ecological form, human health is a matter

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of having ones physiological processes and predispositions (or dyscrasias) aligned correctly to promote homeostasis, so that the body runs as much like a self-regulated and self-sustaining system as possible. As Dupré and O’ Malley suggest, ‘Indeed, it may turn out that diseases caused by microbial pathogens are best seen not so much as an invasion by a hostile organism, but rather as a kind of holistic dysfunction of the microbiome’ (Dupré & O’ Malley, 2007, p. 840). On this model, there are no diseases in an ontological sense; only sick patients whose bodily processes have gone awry in one direction or another. Thus, while infecting patients with new germs seems a counter-intuitive form of treatment against the doctrine of Specific Causation which gave us antibiotics, repopulating a depleted stock of commensal organisms through ‘pro-biotic’ infusions is entirely plausible under this reframing, in just the same way that restocking a habitat with keystone species makes sense for environmental preservation. Thus: Individualized medicine will only become truly individualized when all aspects of an individual, human and bacterial alike, can be considered. A potential model is emerging, in which a disruption in the microbiome results in a functional imbalance, contributing to a pathological state (Fig. 1b). Treatments such as drugs, changes in diet or re-seeding efforts could facilitate a return to the steady state between the human body and resident micro biota, thereby restoring the functions of supermetabolism. (Sekirov & Finley, 2006, p. 737)

Of course, constitutional pathology also has its constitutional weaknesses from a psychosocial point of view, as history has shown us (cf. Juengst, 1999). First, if sustaining and recovering my health is a matter of controlling the contextual forces that influence my inner homeostasis, this means that much more of my ‘health care’ becomes my own responsibility. My physicians (and insurers) cannot and should not be expected to police and redress my complete lifestyle. Instead, it is up to me to improve my diet, avoid toxic environments, and insure that my habits are conducive to sustaining a health microbiosphere. This reallocation of responsibility is both ‘empowering’ for the individual, and potentially exculpatory for the social actors who might ordinarily bear responsibility for health care (Foster & Sharp, 2008). Moreover, an extension of this shift of responsibility is the form of stigmatization that typically accompanies ‘balance’ models of health and disease: the social perception of an individual as intrinsically inclined to go awry in specific ways. We already know the alcoholic, the ‘presymptomatic’ victim of Huntington’s Disease, and those put in the ‘at risk’ role by probabilistic genetic testing (Novas & Rose, 2000): now it is possible to be vulnerable to disease by sustaining a maladaptive microbiome as well, like the habitual ‘abusers’ of antibacterial products who encourage the selection of drug resistance within their indigenous flora. Finally, as this discussion of health suggests, the metagenomic model also raises questions about who is the beneficiary of health or the victim of disease. As the microbiomists point out, ‘In addition to being numerous, our microbes also are enormously varied – more than 1,000 bacterial species abound in a variety of niches in our bodies. This immediately raises the question of who we are’ (Blaser, 2006, p. 957).

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10.8 The Human Being as a Super-Organism There is a strikingly universal answer to Baird’s question in the literature promoting human metagenomics: biologically, at least, we are not intrinsically individuals, but collective super-organisms, assimilating multiple species and millions of individual organisms. As almost every article in this literature argues, both understanding our metagenome as a sensory-motor organ and seeing our bodies as ecosystems encourages us to find a way to incorporate our microbiome into our sense of self. ‘Thus, it seems appropriate to consider ourselves as a composite of many species – human, bacterial, and archaeal – and our genome as an amalgam of human genes and the genes of our microbial “selves”’ (Gordon et al., 2007, p. 1). In order to explain this amalgam, the microbiomists borrow from zoology the concept of the ‘super-organism’ and invite us to ‘Step forward into the world of metagenomics and we start to see ourselves as supra-organisms whose genome evolved with associated microbial genomes (the microbiome)’ (Ley et al., 2007). The microbiomists themselves cannot get enough of this vision: A metagenomic analysis of the microbes in the human gut reveals their diversity and just how interdependent we are on them. Together with our microbes we are a human-bacterial superorganism with immense metabolic diversity and capacity. [. . .] This study supports the theory that we are in fact ‘superorganisms’ whose metabolism integrates microbial and human features. (Sekirov & Finlay, 2006, pp. 736–737)

Of course, on this line of reasoning humans are far from unique in having this status: All plants and animals, including humans, can be considered superorganisms composed of many species, animal, bacterial, archaeal, and viral. Historically, the study of physiology as not focused on these host-associated microbial communities: metagenomics offers an opportunity to understand their physiological role. [. . .] The metagenome of these communities encodes physiological traits that humans have not had to evolve, including the ability to harvest nutrients and energy from food that would otherwise be lost because we lack the necessary digestive enzymes. (National Research Council, 2007)

This is an important point to establish for the proponents of the Human Microbiome Project, because it allows them to point out that ‘although the primate lineage component of the human genome is decoded, sequencing of the microbiome is just beginning (Ley et al., 2007, p. 3) and argue in favor of a concerted effort to complete it, since: ‘without understanding the inhabitants of the human microbiome and the mutualistic human-microbial interactions that it supports, our portrait of human biology will remain incomplete’ (Gordon et al., 2007, p. 2).

10.9 Discussion: Implications for Human Identity As the microbiomists acknowledge, ‘We are just beginning to realize the implications of being a superorganism, and the benefits of better knowing our intestinal inhabitants’ (Sekirov & Finlay, 2006, p. 737). Indeed, one of the most tantalizing

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features of the promotional literature on human metagenomics is the suggestion by the heralds of the HMP that this research has revolutionary implications for our ordinary understanding of human nature and what it means to be a human being. In particular, two issues with significant ethical and social implications seem to be made more challenging by the superorganism conception. First, a superorganismic anthropology recalls the debates inspired by the philosopher Derek Parfit over the stability of the human individual over time, and the ethical implications of a transient conception of the self (Parfit, 1984). Our conventional moral commitments to respect for personal autonomy, promise-keeping, truth-telling, and the rights and responsibilities that come with moral agency all assume that human individuals display a continuity of identity over time. Parfit’s critique of that continuity has created a philosophical industry in efforts to either rebut his views on behalf of ethics or show how ethics can still apply across serial selves. If metagenomics suggests that our symbiotic microbial populations are integral to our identities as individual organisms and that they change over environments and time, this will bring Parfit’s view to the public in tangible ways, by suggesting that even the most ‘personalized medicine’ possible will face continuously shifting patients. As Dupré and O’ Malley point out, A final crucial point about metaorganisms is that they are paradigmatically dynamic entities and therefore very clear illustrations of the ultimate necessity of a process-oriented approach to biological investigation. None of the entities that constitute organisms, or which organisms constitute, are static. Genomes, cells, and ecosystems are in constant interactive flux: subtly different in every iteration, but similar enough to constitute a distinctive process. (Dupré & O’ Malley, 2007, p. 841)

Mining the literature on the ethical implications of the loss of the ‘enduring self’ may be an important first step in preparing for the public reception of this paradigm shift. Second, the super-organism concept has dramatic implications for our notions of the integrity of the human species. The normative importance of ‘species integrity’ has been posited before within bioethics, to critique biomedical practices as varied as the fertilization of hamster ova with human spermatozoa, the transplantation of porcine organs into humans, and the propagation of human stem cell lines in mice and the transfer of human genes into bacteria. ‘Crossing species barriers’ sounds like trespassing, and the qualms it provokes have been explained in a variety of ways, from invocations of essentialistic or theological visions of human (and animal!) nature to fears about risks of creating new forms of disease or ecological disruptions. Common across these claims, however, is the worry that biomedicine will undermine a given stability in the world by violating the categories that order it. Drawing in equal measure from Aristotelean essentialism and 19th Romantic sensibilities, this concern gives high normative weight to the biological kinds produced by the ‘Wisdom of Evolution,’ and their relative ranking in a hierarchical ‘great chain of being’. On this view, ‘splicing life’ in the creation of transgenic organisms, or interspecies tissue chimeras, or hybridized embryos – like importing alien species into an established ecosystem – is always dangerous enough to justify the use of the

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‘precautionary principle’. For some, as Jeffrey Stout has pointed out, the creation of such ‘abominations’ is also morally suspect, simply in its willful disregard for the natural order it crosses. Anthropologists suggest that these concerns are often animated by the tacit roles that concepts of ‘purity’ and ‘pollution’ play in our cultural definitions of human bodily boundaries, health and disease (Douglas, 1966). In situations that involve the integrity of the human species, like xenotransplantation, or the creation of manmachine ‘cyborgs,’ this moral hazard can be explained as the danger of dehumanization: that polluting the constellation of traits that humans’ have inherited from our ancestors – our given ‘human nature’ – with nonhuman attributes we will inevitably degrade the elements of human identity we find morally important, like human dignity, autonomy, and vulnerability. As Jurgen Habermas puts it, What is at stake is a dedifferentiation, through biotechnology, of deep rooted categorical distinctions which we have as yet, the description we give of ourselves, assumed to be invariant. This dedifferentiation might change our ethical self-understanding as a species in a way that could also affect our moral consciousness. (Habermas, 2003)

But meanwhile, we know that on and in the healthy human body microbial cells outnumber human cells ten to one, and play an active role in maintaining our normal physiology (Clarke & Bauchop, 1977). Now the HMP is underlining the significance of that role by suggesting that it may involve interactions at the genetic level as well, between human and bacterial cells. Our commensal bacteria, in essence, serve as crucial genomic extenders, much as they do in termites (whom they allow to digest wood). If so, the microbiologists argue, our basic concept of the human organism should be expanded to include our normal symbionts. Moreover, since our metagenomic profiles will vary between individuals and wax and wane over time, this science suggests that a canonical set of ‘human genes’ will never be available as a ground for human rights, or for determining when humans’ ‘species integrity’ has been breached. No one seems much concerned that we are all mixtures of many indigenous bacterial species and human cell lines. It neither undermines our fundamental rights, nor confers special moral status on bacteria. But it does seem as if concerns about the moral implications of blurring boundaries between the human species and nonhuman organisms are animating those who are striving to protect our species’ ‘dignity and integrity.’ If we are already super-organisms, proponents of that concern are going to have to look further for an explanation for their anxieties.

10.10 Conclusion In the glare of medicine’s 19th century paradigms, it is hard to see what the metagenomic revolution might produce. It is clear, however, that better approaches to the understanding of complex systems will be required to translate both its science into practical benefits and its message into public discourse. As the microbiomists say,

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The level of complexity required to take a dynamic ecological view of human microbiota is daunting, and will require collaborations among many disciplines including molecular biology, ecology, medicine, epidemiology and mathematics. To fully understand the mechanisms that drive community structure and function, microbiota must be examined over time to determine the dynamics of its processes, and over space to determine the interconnectedness of microbiota within an individual host and the range of microbiota among individuals. (National Research Council, 2007)

Attempting to translate that complexity to the public will be equally daunting, and not merely because of the multiple causal factors involved in the story. To the extent that the metaphors of metagenomics accurately capture the philosophical implications of the science, translating the message of microbiomics will require tools for talking about issues of human identity, health and disease, and genetic causation in ways that run counter to the messages that genomics has taught us in the past. For this form of ‘translational genomic research,’ it may be more important than ever for the many collaborators involved to include not just the list above, but also those disciplines that specialize in catching what can be ‘lost in translation’ in public discourse: the social sciences, the humanities, and the arts. Acknowledgments The research for this paper was supported the Center for Genetic Research Ethics and Law at Case Western Reserve University, under grant #P50 HG03390 from the US National Human Genome Research Institute. I am grateful to valuable discussions of its themes with my colleagues John Huss, Nicholas King, and Aaron Goldenberg, and to invaluable research assistance from Roselle Ponsaran, all to whom the credit for some of its content, but none of its mistakes, must belong.

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Chapter 11

The Metagenomic World-View: A Comment on Eric T. Juengst’s ‘Metagenomic Metaphors’ John Dupré and Maureen A. O’Malley

11.1 The Nature of Metagenomic Knowledge Being ourselves convinced that genomic insights into microbiology are among the very most philosophically important findings of genomics more generally (O’Malley & Dupré, 2007), we are delighted to see Eric Juengst addressing some of this work in his paper. Microbes, a category traditionally incorporating singlecelled organisms and viruses, have been the only forms of life on Earth for 80% of its history, and remain today by far the commonest living things. Even their biomass still exceeds that of multicellular organisms if structural plant material is excluded (Whitman, Coleman, & Wiebe, 1998). Since the activities of microbes are fundamentally molecular and biochemical, it is not surprising that real understanding of their nature and behaviour had to await the development of molecular insights into biochemical function. And given the dominant place of these organisms in terrestrial life, it is not surprising that the development of such knowledge should have a fundamental impact on our wider view of life. Indeed, in places Juengst strikes us as unduly cautious in his assessment of this impact, as when he describes as an ‘interesting hypothesis’ the view that our microbiome ‘plays a vital and interactive role with our human genome in normal human physiology’. Unless this just reflects a Popperian view that all science is hypothesis, it seems to us that it understates the extent to which this ‘hypothesis’ is firmly established by a variety of consilient lines of evidence. But this quibble apart, we are very much in sympathy with the general tendency of Juengst’s paper. Juengst is surely right in seeing the metagenome as a fundamental concept in our growing understanding of microbes. We also see metagenomics as a guiding theoretical and philosophical programme, as we shall briefly explain below. The collapse of traditional assumptions about the integrity and isolation of genomes is both a premise and a conclusion of metagenomic research. The prevalence of lateral gene transfer (Doolittle, 2005), as illustrated by Juengst’s example of antibiotic J. Dupr´e (B) Egenis, University of Exeter, Exeter, Devon EX4 4PJ, UK e-mail: [email protected]

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resistance in a hospital microbial ‘metagenome’,1 and the massive cooperation discovered within microbial communities comprising highly diverse cell types and mediated by complex chemical communication (Allen & Banfield, 2005; Dinsdale et al., 2008), all point to the importance of analysing higher level entities that use genomic resources from a number of distinct cell-types and viruses. Metagenomics, while it could once have been seen as merely a technique for cataloguing genes without having to distinguish the organisms in which they were contained, increasingly forces us to see its objects as the metagenomes of communal metaorganisms (Dupré & O’Malley, 2007; Committee on Metagenomics, 2007). It is curious that Juengst sees metagenomics as specifically ‘translational’ research. But since he also suggests that ‘translational genomic research’ has become, in the US, a universal replacement expression for the admittedly unfortunate ‘postgenomics’ (sometimes used merely to refer to genomic science after the completion of the first great sequencing projects), perhaps not too much should be read into his terminology. At any rate, we do not see anything especially translational about metagenomics, though we certainly agree that a very wide range of beneficial applications is entirely possible. Our discomfort derives from a feeling that specifically translational research is likely to be seen as contrasted with something more basic or ‘pure’, despite Juengst’s footnote to the effect that these distinctions have been abandoned. Of course if ‘translational’ is just a meaningless prefix, like ‘post’ in ‘post-genomics’, it is relatively harmless. This may well be all that is going on. In the UK it is currently necessary, in seeking support for research, to explain the wider social impact of research on anything from Egyptology to dentistry. And while there may be good reasons for this in terms of public policy, it inevitably tends to produce a degradation of any distinction between fundamental and ‘merely’ applied research. But for many research scientists not working in clinical settings, much of metagenomics lies firmly on the fundamental side (e.g., Committee on Metagenomics, 2007) and it is perhaps because of his focus on specifically human metagenomics that Juengst misses out on a bigger picture of metagenomic practice. We will have more to say on that below.

11.2 Metagenomic ‘Metaphors’ Let us now turn to the three metaphors Juengst distinguishes as central to the dissemination of the application of metagenomics to the human embodied in the human microbiome project (HMP). The first of these is the representation of the human metagenome as a sensory-motor organ. We should first note that this is surely a synecdoche. It is the microbiota, not just its metagenome, that functions as a sensory-motor organ if anything does. However, the synecdoche may

1

It is unfortunate for Juengst’s argument that this study was not, in fact, done metagenomically, but its mention perhaps serves as an indication of metagenomics’ success that conventional studies with broad implications are discussed in the language of metagenomes.

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have a particular virtue for public understanding, in that it draws attention to the responsiveness of the genome (or metagenome) itself to its environment. Juengst emphasises the deployment of this metaphor in opposition to genetic determinism. Genomes seen as responding to the environment in functional, adaptive ways are clearly impossible to reconcile with genomes seen as the repository of a map or a blueprint, which is expressed in the course of development by the organism. A blueprint, of course, is supposed to produce a final output independent of any inputs it may encounter during its implementation. We certainly agree that opposition to genetic determinism is a good thing, both in terms of a proper understanding of science, and in terms of likely social applications of genetic insights. Our only reservation is that here it seems to us that the role of metagenomics is overstated, especially if the metagenomic perspective on the human is indeed no more than ‘an interesting hypothesis’. The central message on genetic determinism, we think, is quite sufficiently established by epigenomics, the rapidly growing understanding of the ways in which factors external to the genome itself modify more or less transient features of the genome chemistry and, thereby, affect its behaviour and in particular the level of expression of sequence elements (Callinan & Feinberg, 2006; Kiefer, 2007). Though it is no doubt highly probable that the microbiota is itself one of the environmental factors capable of affecting the epigenomic state of the human genome, metagenomics does seem somewhat peripheral to the general case against genetic determinism. Juengst’s remaining metaphors, however, do take us to the heart of the philosophical impact of metagenomics. Juengst’s second and third metaphors reflect increasingly radical interpretations of human metagenomics. One might usefully start with a more traditional picture, which sees the human body as providing a number of niches – the skin, the oral cavity, the gastro-intestinal tract, etc. – that are then colonized by various microbes. In this picture there are various microbial ecosystems, but the human is merely their environment. Juengst’s second metaphor announces a departure from this picture by including the human as an integral part of the ecosystem. This is a very important move, because it recognises the two-way interaction, or in fact interdependence, between human and microbial cells. Although this is an area of research still in its infancy, there is no doubt that the functioning of the human body depends in many ways on the microbial systems with which they are in constant interaction (Xu & Gordon, 2003; Gill et al., 2006). It has long been known that gut microbes play a role in digestion, and we are familiar with organisms ranging from cows to termites in which symbiotic microbes are well known to play a central role in metabolism – sometimes the primary role, as in the case of mouthless, gutless non-excreting worms in hydrothermal vents (Woyke et al., 2006). Increasingly it is also clear that microbial symbionts play a crucial role in the immune system (Kitano & Oda, 2006), and even that they are involved in normal human development (McFall-Ngai, 2002), though this observation more properly belongs under the heading of Juengst’s third metaphor. Juengst is at any rate surely right that the ecological view of the human/microbe relation is sufficient to suggest some radical reconceptions of heath and disease. The still common view of disease as a violation of the integrity or purity of the individual

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organism by agents whose basic function is to cause illness becomes increasingly problematic. But Juengst overstates the point when he says that ‘ there are no “bad guys” in ecosystems’ – Japanese knotweed in one’s garden or rhododendrons in an English wood are bad for the survival of anything like the ecosystem in which they were introduced, and something similar could be said for the addition of bubonic plague or smallpox to the human ecosystem. The fact that some ecosystem will survive, for example a mass of putrefying flesh containing many of the same entities that were in the antecedent living human, is small compensation for the sick or dead human. But this is a quibble. Many or most kinds of micro-organism will very probably turn out not to be good guys or bad guys, as the traditional model had it, but to be capable of playing many different roles, both harmful and beneficial, in different ecological contexts. The preceding point can be deepened by reflecting a bit further on what is meant by a kind of micro-organism. Because microbes frequently exchange genetic materials, often with apparently very different and distantly related microbes, it seems that they cannot be classified in relation to an always divergent phylogenetic tree as is still generally supposed to be possible at least for multicellular eukaryotes (Doolittle & Bapteste, 2007; Keeling et al., 2005). But this makes it doubtful whether there is any natural classification of microbes at all. So the impossibility of classifying microbes into good guys and bad guys may be said to stem from the impossibility of classifying microbes tout court. The difference between a beneficial and a harmful strain of bacteria may be no more than the addition to the genome of the latter of a virulence cassette, a small piece of genetic material assimilated from the chemical environment. Of course, there are localised classifications for particular purposes, and these may identify bacterial lineages that are currently harmful. But there may be no way of identifying kinds of bacteria that are reliably good or bad for us anywhere and at any time; and this may be because there is no way of classifying bacteria at all that can allow such predictions of consistent properties. It may well prove, for example, that the important task is to identify the metabolic pathways that are taking place in a properly functioning human ecosystem, while recognising that the elements of these pathways may be located in a wide variety of cellular contexts. But however it is best to characterise the elements of the human ecosystem, we agree that the concept has fundamental implications for thinking about human health, and also that a move from metaphors of warfare to metaphors of balance is strongly suggested (e.g., Board of Global Health, 2006). An ecological perspective on the human still treats the human cell lineage as constituting an individual with which microbial constituents of the ecosystem are in some kind of parasitic, symbiotic or mutualistic relation. The third metaphor Juengst considers goes beyond this and sees the various kinds of cells in the human ecosystem as actually constituting a coherent individual, or superorganism (Sonea & Mathieu, 2001). We think there are very good reasons for taking this final step (Dupré & O’Malley, 2007). Most especially, evidence that the expression of genes in human and bacterial cells can be modulated by chemical signals from cells of the other kind, and even that genome fragments are transferred between cell types, makes the move

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from metagenomics to metagenome, and from metagenome to meta-organism2 difficult to resist. We do, however, have some reservations about the particular conclusions from this important conceptual innovation that Juengst chooses to stress. The question of identity over time strikes us as something of a red herring. The fact that whatever a human is, it is an entity in constant flux is hardly news. Both our properties and our material constitution change cyclically and secularly throughout our life. If this is a problem, it is no more nor less of one when we recognise a different feature of ourselves that is also subject to constant change. The question of essentialism and the integrity of organisms is much more interestingly connected with the current topic, though even here we would question its centrality. A great deal of contemporary resistance to biomedical technologies that threaten boundaries between organisms is ultimately grounded in an uncritical genocentrism (Barnes & Dupré, 2008) and, as noted above, while we agree that the phenomenon of microbial symbiosis contributes to the dismantling of genocentrism, it is as a final critical flourish rather than as the core of the argument. We do think that insights from microbiology are fundamental in undermining the essentialist ideas in question here, but we don’t believe that the relevant insights are those to do with symbiosis. Rather, the greatest current threat to biological essentialism is the perception of the prevalence of lateral gene transfer throughout the history of life. As briefly mentioned above, this is increasingly seen as constituting a very probably insurmountable objection to the traditional idea of a tree of life. The monotonic branching characteristic of this traditional tree image, and the genetic isolation that is supposedly achieved once branches are fully separated, nicely represents a genocentric basis for the idea of species integrity. Replacing the image of a tree by the image of a web, in which genetic exchange is possible even at great evolutionary distance, shows no place in nature for the importance of species integrity (Doolittle & Bapteste, 2007). It is at best an idea we might wish to impose on nature, and the reasons we might want to do so are far from clear. The idea of the superorganism, it is true, is partly consequential on the awareness of interorganismic genetic flux, but it is the latter that is fundamental in the present context. We think that the importance of the superorganism concept may in the end be more theoretical than immediately practical, an observation that may raise further questions about the appropriateness of describing metagenomics as a translational science. If, as seems increasingly plausible, complex multispecies symbioses are the typical way in which biological systems are functionally organised, then these must be central, perhaps indeed the central, units of selection in evolution. The importance of this, in turn, is that it highlights something that has too often been marginalised by an almost obsessive attention to competition, the importance in biology generally and in evolutionary theory in particular, of cooperation. These symbiotic functional wholes are, after all, complex systems of extremely diverse cooperating entities. 2

Or ‘superorganism’ – although this is not exclusively ‘borrowed from zoology’ as Juengst claims, but arose in different ways in geology, botany and microbiology.

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An even more fundamental way of approaching essentially the same issue is the following. If symbiotic wholes are the basic functional units and, therefore, the units of selection then, in contradiction to a fundamental premise of traditional evolutionary theory, the functional biological units are not elements of lineages. The superorganism is a bundle of lineage elements. If this is right, the concept of an organism may end up migrating either to lineage elements or to functional wholes. But living things, at any rate, should be identified with the latter. Elsewhere we have proposed that we should actually define life as the intersection of lineage and metabolism (Dupré & O’Malley, 2009). In the limiting case of an isolated single cell this may coincide with the traditional organism, but in general it will not do so.

11.3 The Wider Scope of Metagenomics The discussion has drifted rather far from the specifically human, and should therefore be brought to an end but not before noting the limitations of Juengst’s metagenomic perspective. Juengst’s definition of metagenomics neglects a fundamental methodological point, that of its culture-independence, and the departure from the norms of culture-dependent microbiology as specified by Koch and Pasteur (Handelsman, 2004). More importantly, however, human metagenomics is only a tiny proportion of existing metagenomics, much of which is concerned with revelations about biogeochemistry and the interplay of living organisms with geology and chemistry, from tiny niches to the entire biosphere (Allen & Banfield, 2005; DeLong et al., 2006). And where are the viruses in Juengst’s account of metagenomics? Viral metagenomics has generated remarkable insight into viral diversity and function (Edwards & Rohwer, 2005). Viruses are major players in every ecosystem, including the human body, and in every evolutionary story, including that of the human lineage. Human genomes are full of viral vestiges, and major transitions in the evolution of all life are often attributed to these tiny but prolific entities (Forterre, 2006; Villarreal, 2004). What effect major rethinking of evolution, with or without viruses, will have on our conception of ourselves is hard to predict although there is a long history of attempts by symbiosis theorists to undermine political individualism with a critique of biological competition (Kropotkin, 1902; Sapp, 1994). But there is no doubt that the reconceptualisation of the human as a multispecies symbiosis is indicative not only of immediate important changes in how we think about ourselves, but also of even larger changes in the wider scientific context in which such thought is ultimately embedded.

References Allen, E. E., & Banfield, J. F. (2005). Community genomics in microbial ecology and evolution. Nature Reviews Microbiology, 3, 489–498. Barnes, S. B., & Dupré, J. (2008). Genomes and what to make of them. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

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Board on Global Health, National Academy of Sciences. (2006). Ending the war metaphor: The changing agenda for unravelling the host-microbe relationship – workshop summary. Washington, DC: National Academies Press. http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?isbn=0309096014 Callinan, P. A., & Feinberg, A. P. (2006). The emerging science of epigenomics. Human Molecular Genetics, 15, R95–R101. Committee on Metagenomics: Challenges and Functional Applications, National Research Council. (2007). The new science of metagenomics: Revealing the secrets of our microbial planet. Washington, DC: National Academies Press. DeLong, E. F., Preston, C. M., Mincer, T., Rich, V., Hallam, S. J., Frigaard, N.-J., et al. (2006) Community genomics among stratified microbial assemblages in the ocean’s interior. Science, 311, 496–503. Dinsdale, E. A., Edwards, R. A., Hall, D., Angly, F., Breitbart, M., Brulc, J. M., et al. (2008) Functional metagenomic profiling of nine biomes. Nature, 452, 629–633. Doolittle, W. F. (2005) If the tree of life fell, would we recognize the sound? In J. Sapp (Ed.), Microbial phylogeny and evolution: Concepts and controversies (pp. 119–133). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Doolittle, W. F., & Bapteste, E. (2007) Pattern pluralism and the tree of life hypothesis. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA,104, 2043–2049. Dupré, J., & O’Malley, M. A. (2007). Metagenomics and biological ontology. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 38, 834–846. Dupré, J., & O’Malley, M. A. (2009, forthcoming). Varieties of living things: life at the intersection of lineage and metabolism. Synthese. Edwards, R. A., & Rohwer, F. (2005) Viral metagenomics. Nature Reviews Microbiology, 3, 504–510. Forterre, P. (2006). The origin of viruses and their possible roles in major evolutionary transitions. Virus Research, 117, 5–16. Gill, S. R., Pop, M., DeBoy, R. T., Eckburg, P. B., Turnbaugh, P. J., Samuel, B. S., et al. (2006) Metagenomic analysis of the human distal gut microbiome. Science, 312, 1355–1359. Handelsman, J. (2004). Metagenomics: Application of genomics to uncultured microorganisms. Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews, 68, 669–685. Keeling, P. J., Burger, G., Durnford, D. G., Lang, B. F., Lee, R. W., Pearlman, R. E., et al. (2005). The tree of eukaryotes. Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 20, 670–676. Kiefer, J. C. (2007) Epigenetics in development. Developmental Dynamics, 236, 1144–1156. Kitano, H., & Oda, K. (2006) Self-extending symbiosis: A mechanism for increasing robustness through evolution. Biological Theory, 1, 61–66. Kropotkin, P. ([1902] 1939). Mutual aid: A factor of evolution. Harmondsworth: Penguin. McFall-Ngai, M. J. (2002) Unseen forces: The influence of bacteria on animal development. Developmental Biology, 242, 1–14. O’Malley, M. A., & Dupré, J. (2007) Size doesn’t matter: towards an inclusive philosophy of biology. Biology and Philosophy, 22, 155–191. Sapp, J. (1994). Evolution by association: A history of symbiosis. New York: Oxford University Press. Sonea, S., & Mathieu, L. G. (2001) Evolution of the genomic systems of prokaryotes and its momentous consequences. International Microbiology, 4, 67–71. Villarreal, L. P. (2004) Can viruses make us human? Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 148, 296–323. Whitman, W. B., Coleman, D. C., & Wiebe, W. J. (1998) Prokaryotes: the unseen majority. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 95, 6578–6583. Woyke, T., Teeling, H., Ivanova, N. N., Huntemann, M., Richter, M., Gloeckner, F. O., et al. (2006) Symbiosis insights through metagenomic analysis of a microbial consortium. Nature, 443, 950–955. Xu, J., & Gordon, J. I. (2003) Honor thy symbionts. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 100, 10452–10459.

Chapter 12

Genomics Metaphors and Genetic Determinism Hub Zwart

The complexities and wonder of how the inanimate chemicals that are our genetic code give rise to the imponderables of the human spirit should keep poets and philosophers inspired for millennia (Craig J. Venter)

12.1 The Human Genome Project: From Blueprint to Map The 20th century has been called the century of the gene (Fox Keller,2000), beginning with the rediscovery of the work of Mendel (in the spring of 1900), coming halfway with the discovery of the structure of DNA (1953) and reaching its ‘telos’ with the high profile announcement (during the famous White House press conference) that the large scale effort to sequence the human genome was rapidly reaching its conclusion (June 26, 2000). One of the most tenacious images used to express ideas and expectations related to the human genome has been the ‘blueprint’ metaphor. In 1999, for example, Francis Collins, director of the Human Genome Project (HGP) indicated that mankind was about to see ‘its own blueprint’, somewhat earlier than had been originally scheduled (Collins, 1999, p. 28). During the White House press conference in 2000, the sequenced genome was referred to as ‘the working blueprint of the human race’.1 The blueprint metaphor became widely used in public debate, moreover, and it was here that it most clearly conveyed its deterministic message. Once we know our blueprint, the metaphor suggests, we will know ourselves. Moreover, others (such as insurance companies or employers) may come to know our blueprints H. Zwart (B) ISIS, Faculty of Science, Radboud University of Nijmegen, Heyendaalseweg 135, 6525 AJ Nijmegen, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] 1 This

article is part of the research program of the centre for Society & Genomics, funded by the Netherlands Genomics Initiative. http://www.genome.gov/10001356.

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(our destinies) as well, and may want to use it to their own advantage. Finally, the idea of a blueprint suggests the possibility of a future mastery over our own nature, over our own destiny as an individual or a species. Through genetic manipulation, a blueprint may be altered in certain directions, by intentionally adding or deleting genes. Blueprint is also the title of a movie (based on a novel by Charlotte Kerner) featuring Franka Potente as the world-famous pianist and composer Iris Sellin, but also as her daughter Siri. Unwilling to accept her premature decline and death, Iris decides to produce a clone of herself with the help of a genomics expert. In the course of the film, however, the idea of the genome as a blueprint, notably its deterministic connotation, is undermined rather than reinforced, as Siri develops a personality and biography of her own, quite different from that of her mother (as well as from the latter’s expectations). In other words, the basic message of both novel and movie is that we cannot meaningfully say that we ‘are’ our genes or that we are a copy of our genome, or that parents can determine the personalities of their off-spring by means of genomes-as-blueprints. Interestingly, most of the scientific genomics literature (notably the more recent strain of publications, from 2000 onwards) carries the same message. Quite often, the blueprint metaphor is used to indicate what the human genome is not: the human genome is ‘not our blueprint’.2 Even authors like Collins (1999), who have used the metaphor every now and then, as convenient shorthand so to speak, emphasize that, as such, it is a rather misleading image. Much more adequate, much more in vogue among genomics researchers is the comparison of the human genome with a landscape,3 of the HGP with a grand expedition – like the one led by Lewis and Clark in the beginning of the nineteenth century (Collins, 1999, p. 28) – and of the sequenced genome as a map.4 Indeed, the map metaphor is multi-dimensional, it involves multiple layers. It defines the HGP as a large-scale mapping endeavour, funded and coordinated by governmental bodies, supported by heads of state, and directed towards charting (and, as a more or less inevitable consequence, claiming and annexing) unknown territory (Fig. 12.1). Interestingly, notwithstanding their apparent incompatibility, both metaphors (the blueprint metaphor and the map metaphor) are often used simultaneously, as complementary images as it were. I already referred to Collins’ paper where both images are used on one and the same page. This also occurred in the formal addresses during the White House press conference in 2000: while Blair (via satellite) referred to the

2

Sulston, 2002/2003, p. 24.

3 The human genome was officially declared complete (at least in draft form) in February 2001 with

the publication of two special issues of Nature and Science, in which the two rival armies of scientists deigned to summarize the breathtaking landscape of the human genome (Davies, 2001/2002, p. xv); Cf. the comparison of seeing the ‘genome landscape’ of human chromosome 22 to ‘seeing the surface or the landscape of a new planet for the first time’ (p. 194). 4 Robert Cook-Deegan (1994/1995) also compares the HGP to officially ordained and coordinated efforts to survey land and coastal regions, thereby opening up the West. Yet, his favourite comparison is John Wesley Powell’s survey of the American West (p. 176).

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Fig. 12.1 ‘A Map of Lewis and Clark’s Track, Across the Western Portion of North America from the Mississippi to the Pacific Ocean.’ Copied by Samuel Lewis from the original drawing by William Clark. Published in 1814

sequenced genome as ‘the working blueprint of the human race’, Clinton (perhaps on Collins’ instigation) preferred to compare it to the Lewis and Clark map. They seem to constitute complimentary images in various ways: the one a simpler and more accessible, but also more or less misleading image, the other a more sophisticated visualisation. Maybe they are even intended to address two different kinds of audiences: the genomics literate and the genomics illiterate. One of the drawbacks of the blueprint metaphor is that it tends to consolidate this demarcation between the masses and the scientifically enlightened elite.

12.2 The Map Metaphor Before the launch of the HGP, the human genome was regarded as virtually unknown territory in which only a limited number of markers (‘genes’ involved in a number of mono-genetic health problems) had been identified. The ‘wars’ (CookDeegan, 1994/1995) that marked the preparatory and early phases of the project notably concerned the question what kind of map had to be drawn. Should mapmaking focus on arable, habitable, usable land (the ‘genes’) or should the map cover all of the genome instead, irrespective of the amount of genes that particular parts of the genome were likely to contain? The latter would involve a comprehensive view of the entire genome, including vast tracks of incomprehensible DNA. On the basis of automated sequencing, the project leadership eventually opted for the latter.For such an endeavour, the Lewis and Clark map offered a historical model. Meriwether Lewis (1774–1809) was a captain in the U.S. army who became private secretary to US President Thomas Jefferson in 1801. Under the latter’s direction, he planned an expedition (sponsored by the U.S. Government) to explore a route through the Western wilderness all the way to the Pacific coast, invit-

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ing William Clark to join him.5 They travelled up the Missouri River through what is now North Dakota and across the Rocky Mountains until they reached the Pacific coast in what is now Oregon, returning home in 1806, after having travelled a total of 8,000 miles (12,800 km). Apparently, both President Clinton and Francis Collins could readily identify themselves, to some extent at least, with President Jefferson and his ‘trusted aid’ who was asked to lead such a watershed endeavour, culminating in a ‘map’ of pivotal importance, uncovering (and, by implication, annexing) huge expanses of more or less unknown landscapes. Huge areas were represented systematically on this map, regardless of their potential for future use. The map image has obvious benefits in comparison to the blueprint image. It is a metaphor that conveys a much less deterministic vision. The physical or geographical characteristics of a particular area or site do not completely determine its future uses or functions, at least not in a truly deterministic fashion. Rather, map-drawing is an activity that makes a whole range of subsequent activities of exploration and exploitation possible. Although it indicates the raw features of a landscape as given, there are various ways to inhabit, cultivate and relate to it. Practices of exploitation and cultivation are not determinalistically determined by the map. Moreover, large portions of a landscape are apparently ‘useless’ (junk), barren remainders of former geological epochs, as is the case with human DNA. At first, habitable areas seem like islands amid a sea of uninhabitable wilderness. Also, map-making marks both the end of an era (exploration) and the beginning of a new one (colonisation) – and this roughly corresponds with the shift from structural genomics (sequencing the genomes of model organisms) to functional genomics (understanding the meaning of this plethora of information). These characteristics of maps like the one drawn by Lewis and Clark can readily be associated with the HGP as well. The latter also constituted a state sponsored expedition, using established institutes and infrastructures to support it (although in the case of the HGP the role of the U.S. army was played by the N.I.H.). By getting involved, such institutes expanded their realm of action. Once the map is completed, researcher may try to explore the function of genes, like settlers who are drawn to certain areas on the map, but they are bound to discover that a large number of factors are involved in determining the basic features of a particular section of the landscape. Instead of finding mono-causal relationships between single genes and single traits, they will be confronted with multi-factorial and complex relationships between genes and environmental factors. Finally, maps like the one by Lewis and Clark will invite governments to further invest in coordinated research activities as well as in the development of infrastructure. Map-making is the beginning of a process of annexation, colonisation and exploitation. In other words, map-making is not at all an innocent endeavour devoid of risks. Maps are not innocent tools. They may, for instance, encourage or at least facilitate

5 See

appendix to the Lewis and Clark map.

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a gold rush (either a real one or a metaphorical ‘gold rush’ for genes). Thus, a map may urge policy-makers to take preventive actions in terms of legislation, regulation and surveillance. In other words, genome sequencing as map-making has to be accompanied by programs addressing the Ethical, Societal and Legal Aspects involved – or ELSA genomics – as an endeavour that produces its own kind of map, indicating potentials and risks of future uses in terms of possible societal impact.6 Furthermore, it seems as if, as the HGP was making progress, uneasiness with the blueprint metaphor has tended to increase. Initially, programmatic papers describing the HGP and its objectives quite often conveyed a more or less deterministic philosophy. Once the human sequence would be in our hands, it was expected that researchers would have powerful tools at their disposal for discovering genes that were seen as causing a broad range of health problems. Gradually, however, this ‘epistemological optimism’ became subdued. Apparently, one of the reasons for questioning and eventually dropping the blueprint metaphor has been the remarkably small number of protein-coding genes that have been located on the human genome (Zwart, 2007). Initially, estimates of the number of genes on the human genome tended to vary greatly, ranging from ~ 80,000 to ~ 200,000 genes. Walter Gilbert (1992) suggested that the human genome contained something like 100,000 genes. In 2001, the official estimate of the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium (IHGSC) was reduced to ~ 31,000 genes and in 2004, in the paper that described and discussed the finished version (build 35), covering 99% of the human genome, a more or less final estimate was given. Apparently, the human genome contains only ~ 22,500 genes (IHGSC, 2004). In 2000, Craig Venter had already concluded that we do not have enough genes for the idea of genetic determinism to be right and Stephen J. Gould (2001) likewise stated that the ‘humbling’ number of genes implies the death of genetic determinism. The HGP, he argued, had undermined rather than reinforced the ‘view of life’ from which it started, embodied in what geneticists literally called (admittedly with a sense of whimsy) their ‘central dogma’: one direction of causal flow from code to message to assembly of substance. According to Gould, ’biomedical research over the past decade has been dominated by a genetic determinist understanding of disease and the discredited doctrine of “one gene, one protein”. One thing the human gene map does tell us is that there are ten times as many proteins as genes. Genetic determinism is dead. In terms of biomedical applications, Huntington’s disease, as a mono-genetic health problem, no longer constitutes the model, but rather the exception. The vast majority of human diseases (notably the more common ones) have come to be seen as multi-factorial (involving various genes in interaction with lifestyle and environmental factors). And indeed, even the aetiology of health problems that were formerly seen as ‘mono-genetic’ prove increasingly complex in comparison to what was initially suggested.

6 The map-making metaphor also applies to the so-called ‘second’ Human Genome Project, namely the Human Diversity Project, led by Luigi Luca Cavalli Sforza and resulting in a ‘genetic’ geography of mankind. Cf. The history and geography of human genes (Cavalli-Sforza, 1994).

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12.3 The Blueprint Metaphor and Its Discontents The shift in terms of basic metaphors from blueprint to map not only has major implications for various issues regarding determinism and reductionism of the type that have been addressed by philosophers of biology for decades, it also affects the agenda for the debate over the societal impact of the HGP and of genomics more generally. Initially, societal issues involved in the HGP tended to be framed in terms of a ‘deterministic’, single-gene perspective. In their book Dangerous Diagnostics: Social Power of Biological Information Dorothy Nelkin and Laurence Tancredi (1989) emphatically highlighted the possible adverse effects of genomics information. They described a rather bleak prospect concerning the societal consequences of the availability of new forms of genetics information. According to these authors, genetic testing was likely to influence life insurance policies and job prospects in such a way that they predicted the emergence of a class of genetic pariahs. Similar concerns are voiced by Paul Billings (1988). But the point of departure of their arguments tends to be a deterministic understanding of genomics. Some individuals apparently carry faulty genes on their genomes and may fall victim to discrimination. Francis Collins himself (like several other prominent genomics researchers) expressed similar concern over ‘genetic discrimination’, notably in the context of health insurance and employment (Collins, 1999, p. 34; Collins et al., 2003, p. 843). Indeed, even during the 2000 Press Conference, the issue of ‘genetic discrimination’ was explicitly addressed as a major issue of concern.7 Yet, as genomics research continued to evolve, the framing of the societal issues had to be changed significantly. This is reflected in the vicissitudes of the blueprint metaphor as well. Increasingly, it came to be used in order to describe the kind of misunderstandings that still prevailed in the public realm concerning genomics. Genetic determinism, symbolised by the blueprint concept, had become a misconception that threatened to affect the quality and adequacy of public understandings of genomics. According to Venter, those who ‘base social decisions on genetic reductionism will be ultimately defeated by science’, and it was precisely for this reason that he regarded new legislation to forego genetic discrimination of critical importance.8 In other words, genetic discrimination would not be a consequence 7 Craig

Venter for instance stated that: ‘I know from personal discussions with the President over the past several years, and his comments here this morning, that genetic discrimination has been one of his major concerns about the impact of the genomic revolution. While those who will base social decisions on genetic reductionism will be ultimately defeated by science, new laws to protect us from genetic discrimination are critical in order to maximize the medical benefits from genome discoveries’. (http://www.genome.gov/10001356) 8 I am concerned, as many of you are, that there are some who will want to use this new knowledge as a basis of discrimination. A CNN-Time poll this morning reported that 46% of Americans polled believe that the impact of the Human Genome Project will be negative. We must work together toward higher science literacy and the wise use of our common heritage. I know from personal discussions with the President over the past several years, and his comments here this morning, that genetic discrimination has been one of his major concerns about the impact of the genomic revolution. While those who will base social decisions on genetic reductionism will be ultimately

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of genomics research as such, but rather of the lingering influence of the blueprint metaphor, that is: of the fact that employers, insurance companies and others might continue (for some time to come) to adhere to a blueprint-understanding of the genome, although it had become obsolete in scientific circles. According to Robert Cook-Deegan (1994/1995) it should be the basic objective of societal research on genomics to ‘recast the debate about genetic determinism’ (p. 351). In the early decades of the 20th century, genetics as a science got caught in ‘simplistic [i.e. deterministic] interpretations’. Will the same deterministic interpretations continue to dominate public discourse? According to Cook-Deegan, one of the most daunting tasks of the ELSA genomics program will be to change the social framework in which genetics is cast and to take the public debate ‘beyond ideologies’ towards a richer understanding of the relationship between genome and life (p. 351). The public debate should not repeat historical mistakes premised on genetic determinism. Rather, the extreme complexity of genomics should be its point of departure. ‘Caricature’ should be replaced with nuance and societal research should provide a richer vocabulary for understanding genetics. This also has consequences for ideas about genetic enhancement and trans-humanism. It no longer seems realistic to believe that we can ‘improve’ ourselves by adding genes. Whereas traditional biotechnology relied on a deterministic conception (manipulating mono-causal relationships by adding or deleting single genes), genomics urges us to opt for a systemic approach. According to Cook-Deegan, the basic outcome of the HGP is that science has only just begun to understand the complexities of the genome ‘landscape’. Once again, the map metaphor seems more adequate than the blueprint metaphor, as a map is something than can be continuously refined and amended through further research. So far, we have focussed on the map metaphor as it functioned in the context of the public programme. However, the effort to sequence the human genome was actually a competition between two different teams, two different strategies, headed by two highly visible leaders, namely the NIH-based effort under de leadership of Francis Collins and the privately-funded effort under the leadership of Craig Venter. How did the map metaphor function in Venter’s case?

12.4 Craig Venter as a Geographer of Life In the writings of Craig Venter the blueprint metaphor experienced roughly the same vicissitudes as was already indicated above: it was used as well as rejected and as the sequencing efforts progressed, the inadequacies of the blueprint metaphor became more obvious. Interestingly, however, in Venter’s case the map metaphor became increasingly important after his impressive contribution to the human genome sequencing effort had been concluded. Sequencing the human genome was merely a chapter in a biography that encompassed genome sequencing of many other species as well. defeated by science, new laws to protect us from genetic discrimination are critical in order to maximize the medical benefits from genome discoveries.

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Venter’s model expedition, resulting in a different kind of map, was not the Lewis and Clark expedition that served the role of founding narrative for Collins, but rather the expedition that was launched a quarter of a century later (namely in 1831) and that enlisted Charles Darwin as a naturalist: the journey of H.M.S. Beagle around the world. The primary objective of this journey was to conduct a series of hydrographical surveys, a kind of map-making effort in its own right. Due to Darwin’s work, however, the significance of the journey shifted from the spatial to the temporal dimension. Its major impact shifted from map-making in the context of oceanography to Darwin’s contribution to our understanding of the history and future of life on earth. Venter’s Sorcerer II expedition is a global sampling expedition directed towards sequencing the metagenomes of the oceans, i.e. sequencing the genomes of aquatic microbial organisms present in samples of sea water. According to Venter, this effort is bound to have a tremendous impact on our views on evolution as well as on our understanding of global warming. The picture below is taken from an article by Venter’s team (Rusch et al., 2007) describing part of the Sorcerer II global ocean sampling expedition as a systematic effort to map microbial life worldwide, a geography of life, an effort to ‘explore the incredible diversity of the sea’ (Venter, 2007, p. 332) (Fig. 12.2).

Fig. 12.2 Map of sampling sites. From: Rusch, D. B., Halpern, A. L., Sutton, G., Heidelberg, K. B., Williamson, S., et al. (2007). The Sorcerer II global ocean sampling expedition: Northwest Atlantic through Eastern Tropical Pacific. PLoS Biology, 5(3), e77 DOI 10.1371/journal.pbio.0050077

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The latter quote is taken from Craig Venter’s recently published autobiography A life decoded (2007). Its final chapter is devoted to metagenomics: sequencing life on our ‘blue [i.e. aquatic] planet’. It invokes a plethora of images connected with exploring and map-making. After the human genome, Venter now became immersed in a geography of life as such. Because we live on land, a terrestrial and even anthropocentric view has dominated our view of life, but the earth is the ‘blue planet’, aquatic rather than terrestrial. His voyage of exploration amounts to taking snapshots of ocean life. The basic idea is simple: obtain seawater from the ocean’s surface at regular distances and capture all the micro-organisms present in it. The focus shifted from genomics (directed towards sequencing the genomes of model organisms) to meta-genomics. ‘Rather than focussing on the hunt for one particular type of life’, Venter explains to his readers,’ we would obtain a snapshot of the microbial diversity of a single drop of seawater – a genome of the ocean itself’ (p. 343). This meant opening up previously unknown realms for human exploration and understanding: ‘We had opened to doors to a world that has been mostly unknown to modern science. From the sunlit surface to the darkest submarine canyons stretches an ocean of life that is beyond human imagination’ (p. 344). Thus, the team discovered tens of thousands of new species and something like 1.3 million new genes in about 200 litres of surface seawater. Although sequencing in Venter’s case still amounts to a map-making effort, mapping the earth is a different kind of venture, involving a different set of images and metaphors, than mapping aquatic regions, let alone the wide expanses of the ocean. Images of mapping the earth are connected with claiming and annexing unknown territories on behalf of governments and administrations. Map-making is a technique involved in practices of power, directed towards establishing legitimate forms of governance over novel areas, notably at a time when political hegemony is far from stable. In other words, mapping the earth is a practice that is part of strategies of colonisation and annexation, establishing firm governance on terra firma. It is an effort to transform the diffuse and unknown into something discrete and accessible, and therefore governable. Aquatic metaphors are different. The sea has always been associated with freedom of movement, with migrating beyond the spheres of action of established rulers. In Venter’s biography, science and sailing are intimately connected. Whereas Collins identified himself as a ‘trusted aid’ in service of a governmental programme, Venter’s work has always had a rather different moral profile, that of embarking and setting sail to places where one is left to one’s own devices and ‘where there is still an ocean of great science left . . . to explore’ (p. 357), discovering new worlds, breaking away from entrenched positions. In Venter’s view, science is an endeavour that takes us ‘far from shore into unknown waters’ (idem). It defies, rather than reinforces, political authority.9

9 This difference is also indicated by the icons Collins and Venter preferably used in selfpresentations: Collins seated on his motorbike or playing country music on his acoustic guitar, and Venter on his sailing yacht – icons that symbolise terrestrial and aquatic forms of mobility.

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On further reflection, Venter choice of Darwin’s voyage as a model for his own endeavour seems less than optimal. A far better candidate to serve as a paradigm or archetype for the Sorcerer II expedition would have been Captain Nemo’s journey on board the Nautilus, to which Jules Verne devoted his masterwork Twentythousand leagues under the sea. Nemo’s venture was a privately funded endeavour, far beyond the sway of nation states, to chart the oceans, notably oceanic life, of which virtually nothing was known to established academics at that time. Like the Sorcerer II, the Nautilus was basically a floating research station, a selfsufficient observatory that placed oceanography (notably the survey of oceanic life forms) on a radically new scientific footing. Moreover, as in Venter’s case, it was a voyage that defied political authority and took place far outside the reach of official science funding and science administration, although, unlike the secluded Nemo, Venter continued to communicate with terrestrial public and academic life through his scientific papers in established peer-reviewed journals and his autobiography.

12.5 Genres of Imagination: Novels as Research Tools Midway between academic scientific writing and societal debate there is an intermediate level of discourse, a migratory zone so to speak, where the cultural impact of the sciences in general, but also more specifically of genomics and the HGP in particular, is being discussed, and where images and metaphors are being adapted and refined, altered and reinforced, namely the genres of imagination (novels, plays, movies and the like). These sources explicitly reflect on, or even anticipate, major scientific breakthroughs while considering their meaning for society. They tend to have a significant impact on societal debate, notably on the metaphoric level. To a considerable extent, the images that are used to frame public debate over biotechnology and the life sciences are coming from novels (Frankenstein, Brave New World, etc.). Therefore, Gregory Benford (2001) argued in Nature that scientists should try to learn something from the ‘what if’ mentality of these literary science authors, notably when it comes to assessing the public and societal impact of their work. They should pay more attention to laboratory literature and science fiction. Public ideas concerning science ‘usually begin in literature and migrate to the visual media’ from there. In order to understand or even influence the ways in which research is perceived, scientists ‘would do well to pay attention to the storytellers and dreamers’. Science fiction is our biggest mirror, reflecting the literary imagery of science. Since Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the prospects that science opens have played a significant role in our culture’ (p. 399). Indeed, these writers work out the possible societal consequences of innovations long before they arrive in common culture:’ When Dolly the sheep made cloning a media event, the scientists involved did not notice that science fiction had discussed the issue extensively decades before’ (idem).

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Of particular interest in this respect is a specific sub-genre called ‘laboratory literature’ or simply lab lit (Rohn,2006).10 Strictly speaking, lab lit is not ‘science fiction’, although the distinction may often be a fluid one. Rather, laboratory literature depicts scientists in more or less realistic settings and portrays fairly realistic scientific practices or concepts, typically taking place in a contemporary – as opposed to a distant, speculative or future – world. Its basic aim is to capture and assess in a literary manner various research practices currently emerging in laboratories. Moreover, through extrapolation, this type of literature sets out to explore what the consequences of certain developments may be for culture and society. To the extent that it manages to do so, it must be regarded as a valuable source of information and inspiration for science research. It can be helpful when it comes to addressing questions such as the general profile of genomics, the view of nature it conveys and the societal consequences it entails. In short, novels belonging to this genre may be regarded as scenario studies, as research tools. The idea of the novel as research tool is not new. The French novelist Emile Zola (1880/1923) regarded the novel as a ‘literary experiment’ (in the literal, i.e. scientific sense of the term). Zola was an enthusiastic reader of Claude Bernard’s famous textbook Introduction to the study of experimental medicine (1865/1966). Bernard is generally regarded not only as one of the heroes of biomedicine, but also as one of the ‘champions’ of vivisection, subjecting large numbers of animals (notably rabbits and dogs) to painful and usually fatal experiments. Although as a youth he had tried his hand at playwriting, he decided to abstain from writing belles-lettres completely and to devote himself to science instead. He called his method ‘experimentation by destruction’ (p. 37). According to Bernard, the logic of experimentation basically consists in destroying or removing a particular part of the animal’s body (such as an organ, a tube, a nerve, etc.), in order to observe the effects of this destruction in the organism. In this manner he was able, for example, to discover the function of the liver. For centuries anatomists had been unable to understand the role of this large mysterious organ, but Bernard showed that an experimental approach could solve the riddle. According to Bernard, the experimental scientists deliberately act upon nature, damage nature, in order to observe the effects of their own doing. They artificially produce the phenomenon they want to study. As he states in his Introduction, the hand of the experimenter must actively intervene in order to allow the phenomenon under study to appear (p. 27). Indeed, the success of experimental work greatly depends on the technical skills and technical devices scientists have at their disposal to manipulate the organism. In one of his essays, Emile Zola argues that the above applies to novel-writing as well, to such an extent that, if one simply replaces the word ‘researcher’ by ‘novelist’, one will end up with a perfect description of what novel-writing basically amounts to. The author drastically intervenes in the lives of his characters, exposes them to a variety of carefully selected ‘conditions’, in order to study and record the effects of these conditions as acutely as possible. ‘Naturalistic’ or

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‘experimental’11 novels constitute a complimentary discourse to laboratory research, testing and extrapolating laboratory findings under real life conditions. In Zola’s view, novels represent a test bed where physiological and psychological views borrowed from scientific accounts can be further elaborated. The concept of the experimental novel, he claims, puts the art of novel-writing on a scientific footing, more or less as Bernard had done with the art of medicine. Rather than describing the world as it presents itself to us, the experimental novelist actively alters the conditions in order to expose his characters to specific circumstances and events. Subsequently, like a real experimenter, he carefully studies their responses. As Zola sees it, the naturalistic novel really is an experiment, in a genuinely scientific (Bernardian) sense of the term.The novel is a laboratory, where social phenomena may be analysed systematically. Naturalistic novels must display the same measure of detachment and precision as scientific research reports.

12.6 Genomics Novels A prominent example of contemporary laboratory literature, but at the same time of experimental novels, is the work of Michael Crichton (1942–2008). In his novels Crichton explicitly claims to address important dimensions and dynamics of contemporary cutting-edge research, including the impact of ICT, the role of public pressure groups or the influence of commercialisation, notably in the field of genomics. Novels such as Jurassic Park (1991) or Next (2006) explicitly try to explore how genomics as a research field is evolving and what its possible societal and cultural impacts may be. These novels claim to analyse and critically assess the transformations in knowledge production that are taking place. Moreover, they are structured as literary experiments. They stage a series of extrapolations of laboratory developments by introducing genomics into various real-life practices. In other words, his novels may be regarded as literary scenario-studies, literary counterparts to ongoing research efforts in genomics. They try to flesh out, by way of literary experimentation, the epistemological and societal consequences of genomics as cutting-edge science. Therefore, besides revivifying the dormant archetypical images that structure public imagination (such as the monster archetype), his novels also have the explicit aim to contribute to our understanding of how science works, and how particular research practices may interact with their cultural and societal environments. Genomics research inspired other examples of laboratory literature as well, such as, for example, Michel Houellebecq’s Elementary Particles, published in 1998.

11 In

the context of literary writing, the term ‘experimental novel’ may be confusing. Usually, it refers to texts that try to go beyond established or standardized patterns of literary discourse – something like ‘beyond method’ or anything goes. Zola, of course, had something completely different in mind. He was rather thinking of a very methodical type of novel.

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This novel was based on the idea that the human genetic code can be represented in the form of a mathematical algorithm, thus opening up avenues for artificial reproduction and genetic enhancement, culminating in the production of a new type of human being. What the revolutions of the 1960s (in terms of sexuality, drugs and politics) failed to achieve (namely allowing mankind to take a dramatic leap into a brave new world of human freedom and happiness) will be made possible by genomics. There is some irony in this line of reasoning, of course. What Houellebecq actually seems to be suggesting is that, apparently, the genomics revolution is hailed with the same amount of naïveté as the sexual, political and psychedelic revolutions have been in the course of the 20th century. Eventually, the genetic deterministic presuppositions of the scenario depicted will prove difficult to sustain. Human genetics will be too complex for transhumanism to become reality, at least for the coming decades. Initially, like Elementary particles, Michael Crichton’s novel Jurassic Park (1990/1991) also seems to presuppose and reinforce a genetic deterministic understanding of life. Eventually, however, the novel rather criticizes a deterministic way of viewing living beings – albeit with the help of literary techniques. Thus, it reflects the same dynamics that is recognisable in the HGP as well. HGP and Jurassic Park stand out as complimentary phenomena. The storyline is well-known: a company called InGen develops a genetic engineering facility on an island in a remote and obscure Central American area with no regulations. A team of prominent researchers is hired to set up a theme park in a resort – a private Jurassic zoo of huge dimensions. They achieve this by remaking Jurassic dinosaurs with the help of supercomputers using paleo-DNA (extracted from blood preserved within mosquitoes entombed in fossil amber). Thus, a number of flagship species of Jurassic palaeontology (whose ecosystems have vanished) are revivified and re-introduced into an environment as ‘Jurassic’ as possible: an uninhabited tropical forest area. Computational biology is called in to fill in the gaps in the animals’ reconstructed genomes. Dinosaurs become experimental animals and palaeontology itself, the study of extinct life, is transformed overnight into an experimental discipline. Excavations are no longer needed. When Alan Grant, an outstanding palaeontologist, is confronted with the revivified versions of his favourite organisms, he immediately realises the epistemological significance of this event. Palaeontological quandaries that had occupied his research community for years, such as the issue of whether dinosaurs had been warm-blooded or cold-blooded animals, whether they cared for their young and whether they were fast or slow moving, were now easily resolved by merely looking at these ‘surprisingly active’ organisms: ‘Grant’s field of study was going to change instantly. The palaeontological study of dinosaurs was finished. The whole enterprise – the museum halls with their giant skeletons and flocks of echoing school children, the university laboratories with their bone trays, the research papers, the journals – all of it was going to end’ (Crichton, 1990/1991, p. 84). Meanwhile, the revivification of vanished life forms, based on a reconstruction of their genomes, is

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less absurd than it may appear at first glance. The idea has inspired a number of serious research efforts.12 The project’s fatal flaw, from the very outset, is genetic determinism and reductionism: the idea that organisms can be genetically manipulated effectively by adding or deleting single genes and that in such a way the trial can become predictable, controllable and manageable. Notably, a gene has been inserted so that the animals will be unable to manufacture the amino acid lysine themselves. It has to be administered to them and for that reason they are supposed to be unable to survive in the outside world. Thus, they cannot escape from the sway of genomics science. Yet, in Crichton’s narrative, the animals quickly develop other means to satisfy their desire for lysine. The dinosaurs manage to escape from the resort. Life will find a way, as one of the main characters, complexity theorist Ian Malcolm formulates it, in order to survive, to disseminate, to spread. Life will continuously evolve new strategies to take care of itself (p. 369). It will defy containment. The Jurassic animals were supposed never to mix with the ecosystems of the contemporary world, but such isolation proved impossible: ‘What we call “nature” is in fact a complex system of far greater subtlety than we are willing to accept’ (p. 91). Thus, notwithstanding its apparent determinism, the novel’s basic message is that the complexities of life cannot be adequately addressed within the confines of this outdated research philosophy. Jurassic Park not only coincides with, but also mirrors the vicissitudes of the HGP. The morale is that a deterministic understanding of life fails to appreciate the flexibilities of living beings, notably their capacity to develop ‘emergent behaviour’, in interaction with their natural and technological environments. Jurassic Park is an entertaining novel, but at the same time it intends to contribute to on-going debates on the profile and impact of genomics science. In 2006, Crichton published his latest novel Next, once again devoted to genomics. Yet, whereas Jurassic Park (as well as its sequel The lost world) are devoted to sequencing, reconstructing and revivifying the genomes of (extinct) animals, Next analyses the impact of genomics in the biomedical sphere, i.e. its consequences for human life (health, labour, sexuality, family life). Therefore, the final section of this paper will be devoted to the question to what extent his latest novel allows us to address the societal implications of genomics research in a post-reductionistic fashion.

12 Although

the bringing back to life of dinosaurs may seem rather improbable and farfetched, the improbability of such an endeavour decreases as the species is closer (geologically speaking) to the present. Mammoth DNA, excavated in Siberian permafrost, or the genome of the Siberian tiger may (from a purely technical point of view at least) prove less difficult to reproduce and clone. In other words, while Jurassic Park may seem somewhat too ambitious, Pleistocene Park may prove less futuristic. The idea that in the near future revivified mammoths once again will roam the sub-Arctic tundras and ice fields cannot be discarded as completely absurd.

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12.7 Next At first sight, Next is a somewhat confusing novel.13 Like a genome, it picks up bits and pieces of information as it evolves.14 Apparently, it is set at various levels. On the surface, it seems to take the logic of genetic determinism to its very extreme, to the point where it becomes utterly absurd.Stories about gene hunting (sociability gene, novelty-seeking gene, infidelity gene, etc.), about transgenic chimpanzees and parrots who can reason and talk, about an ambulance chasing the daughter and grandson of a man from whose tissue UCLA developed a profitable cell line, must be regarded as caricature or persiflage on the basis of exaggeration. Apparently, Crichton seems to argue, this is the way in which the illiterate (and this notably includes lawyers, patent attorneys and judges) tend to view genomics.15 Bizarre and at times soap-like stories are intersected, however, with reflections on what genomics (notably the HGP) really amounts to. In this manner, Next apparently has the intention of making visible the enormous tension between the kinds of insights genomics research is actually producing and the way they are represented in the public realm. A rather important element in Crichton’s novel is gene hunting. A number of ‘genes for’ play a crucial role in the novel, genes that supposedly determine behavioural characteristics, not only the obvious ones (such as genes for intelligence, alcoholism or sexual orientation) but also the sociability gene, the noveltyseeking gene, the maturity gene and the infidelity gene. The most prominent gene hunter in the book is Dr. Robert Bellarmino, head of the National Institute of Health (NIH), top scientist but also devout Christian, politically skilled and media savvy16 who, as a referee, systematically rejects applications for funding by rival teams, who deprives his favourite post-doc of the latter’s first-authorship, and whose research on the novelty seeking gene incites him to visit amusement parks in order to collect genetic materials. As a consequence of Bellarmino’s publications (fifty papers a year), lawyers are considering the option to use screening for the novelty-seeking gene as a mitigating circumstance on behalf of clients who happen to engage in risky lifestyles, or to subject former partners to genetic screening in the context of custody cases. Treatment of drug addicts with sprays containing an experimental virus that carries the maturity gene will solve their drug problem, but also causes premature ageing. In most of these cases, there is some connection with serious research. In 1996, for example, a research group led by Dean Hamer confirmed that variation in the 13 Cf.

‘Crichton tries to address every aspect of the biotechnology craze at once, giving the book too many simultaneous plotlines to follow’ (Goldman,2007, p. 819). 14 ‘I wanted [the book] to be in a way analogous to the genome. The genome accumulates bits and pieces of genetic material over time. It gets viruses. They get incorporated. So I started incorporating a fair number of things . . . true stories that I just stick in the book.’ [http://www.michaelcrichton.net/charlierose-021907.pdf] 15 ‘The courts are incompetent . . . because they are technically illiterate’ (p. 56). 16 My impression is that Bellarmino represents a mixture of Craig Venter and Francis Collins.

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length of the gene for the dopamine D4 receptor correlated with ‘novelty seeking’, i.e. extravert and thrill-seeking behaviour (Benjamin et al.,1996; Cf. Hamer and Copeland,1998). Yet, the small print in Hamer’s Nature Genetics study was overlooked: ‘this was far from the gene for bungee jumping, as some newspapers reported’ (Davies 2001/2002, p. 233; Cf. Paterson, Sunohara, & Kennedy,1999). Likewise, research has been published on the sociability gene, but it concerns solitary versus group feeding in C. elegans17 and it is far from evident how such a finding, if at all valid, could be extrapolated to the intricacies of human behaviour. In Crichton’s book, prominent researchers like Bellarmino are portrayed as people who, in a rather cynical manner, ‘take advantage of the public’s lack of knowledge about how genes actually operate. No single gene controls any behavioural trait’ (p. 158). He represents a new generation of highly visible and highly influential scientists, people who ‘sit on the boards of private companies, and are in a race to identify genes they can patent for their own profit’ (idem). As is the case in Jurassic Park, these gene hunters, as well as the simplifying view on genomics they convey, are counterpointed by a number of (usually much less visible and affluent) critics, such as professor William Garfield of the University of Minnesota who, lecturing before a group of congressmen, claims that ‘despite what you hear, nobody has ever proven a single gene causes a single human behavioural trait. . . The interaction of genes and environment is just too complex’ (p. 211). Garfield argues that publications on new ‘genes for’ are often misrepresented: they refer to statistical association, not at all to causal relationships. There is, for instance, no single gene that accounts for alcoholism. The public readily believes that genes cause behaviour, but the actual relationship between genes and environment is very complicated. Scientists do not have a good understanding of how genes work. In fact, ‘there is no general agreement on what a gene is. . . [Among scientists] there is no single agreed-upon definition of what a gene is’ (p. 212).18 In his briefing, Garfield also mentions how startled scientists initially were to find such a small number of protein-coding genes on the human genome. ‘After all, a lowly earthworm has 20,000 genes. How, then, could you explain the huge difference in complexity between the two? That problem vanished as scientists began to study the interactions among genes [and began to move into] “epigenic studies”, which look at exactly how genes interact with the environment to produce the individual that we see’ (p. 213). Yet, this briefing more or less stands out as an intellectual intermezzo, comparable to the monologues of Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park and The Lost World. As a rule, Crichton prefers to rely on his strategy of extrapolation ad absurdum, fleshing out what genetic determinism may lead to (if it is really taken seriously) in various real-life settings involving love, family life and divorce. A number of other normative issues are addressed as well, for example issues having to do with scientific authorship and the various threats commercialisation represents to the ethos of science through gene patenting. Because of these

17 On 18 Cf.

the ‘sociability gene’ see for instance. Nature, 395 (24 September 1998), p. 327. for example Dupré (2004) for a philosophical version of this debate.

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developments, research findings are increasingly disseminated through press conferences and press releases, rather than through academic journals.19 According to Crichton, university groups are increasingly reluctant to publish their work in the conventional manner. Moreover, even prominent academic journals can no longer be trusted: ‘Remember that the journal Scienceis a big enterprise – 115 people work on that magazine. Yet, gross instances of fraud, including photographs altered with Adobe Photoshop, often go undetected’ (p. 62). Indeed, ‘even Francis Collins, the head of NIH’s Human Genome Project, was listed as co-author on five faked papers that had to be withdrawn’ (p. 62), which, in fact, is true. According to Crichton, three million researchers are working in this field and this implies that the stakes are high. Traditional scholarly mechanisms can no longer be trusted to effectively cope with the consequences of commercialisation. And indeed, in prominent journals such as Science, embarrassing retractions (because of fraud or premature and unconfirmed results) have become part of daily practice. Commercialisation not only affects the research community, but the outside world as well. Patients are asked to sign informed consent forms to sell their tissue, and if successful pharmaceuticals are developed on the basis of the resulting celllines, this may lead to more or less absurd disputes over property rights. Or body materials are obtained illegally from deceased persons. Young women (including Bellarmino’s daughter) are enticed to inject drugs and hormones into their bodies in order to stimulate their ovaries and sell their eggs – perhaps a reference to the case of Woo-Suk Hwang, who is actually mentioned several times in Crichton’s novel – although, in this case, the young women involved receive money which they use to buy breast implants. Although in principle some of these issues are real enough, they clearly suffer from Crichton’s strategy of exaggeration (Goldman, 2007). Crichton’s ultimate target, however, is gene patenting, the heart of the matter, and a practice he considers to be absurd. Moreover, it is here that normative concerns over commercialisation most clearly converge with epistemological issues (the reductionism-versus-complexity debate). According to Crichton, our growing awareness of the complex relationships between genes and disease, and between genes and behaviour, renders the very idea of patenting genes absurd. Not only because genes are facts of nature rather than inventions, but also because one-toone relationships between genes and function are the exception rather than the rule. Therefore, genomics research has made ideas about owning genes and manipulating genomes (notably in the context of behavioural transformation) quite implausible. Gene patenting, and the philosophy of genetic determinism that inspired and legitimised this practice, is at the root of most of the soap-like absurdities Crichton stages in his novel. Mastery over (human) nature has – at least – two meanings: ownership (of genes) and manipulation (by adding or deleting single genes). Both are undermined by our growing awareness of the human genome’s complexities. Yet, in

19 The

2000 press conference, rather premature and hastily contrived (Davies, 2001/2002, p. xv) was, in fact, an example of this policy.

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order to really bring this to the fore, Crichton should perhaps have written a novel containing a somewhat smaller amount of farce. In that respect, Next does not compare favourably with Jurassic Park. Yet, it serves its purpose as a first literary effort to map and chart the complex and emerging societal landscape of genomics.

References Benford, G. (2001, November 22). Where might it lead? Scientists’ professional aims should benefit from embracing the ‘what if’ mentality of science fiction. Nature, 414, 399. Benjamin, J., Li, L., Patterson, C., Greenberg, B., Murphy, D. L., & Hamer, D. (1996). Population and familial association between the D4 dopamine receptor gene and measures of novelty seeking. Nature Genetics, 12, 81–84. Bernard, C. (1865/1966). Introduction à l’étude de la médecine expérimentale. Paris: GarnierFlammarion. Billings, P. (1988). Research in genetic discrimination. The American Journal of Human Genetics, 43, 225. Cavalli-Sforza, L. L. (1994). The history and geography of human genes. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Collins, F. (1999). Medical and societal consequences of the human genome project. New England Journal of Medicine, 341, 28–37. Collins, F., Green, E., Guttmacher, A., & Guyer, M. (2003). A vision for the future of genomics research, A blueprint for the genomics era. Nature, 422, 835–847. Cook-Deegan, R. (1994/1995). The gene wars. Science, politics and the human genome. New York/London: Norton. Crichton, M. (1990/1991). Jurassic park. London: Arrow/Random House. Crichton, M. (1995/2002). The lost world. New York: Knopf. Crichton, M. (2006). Next. New York: Harper Collins. Davies, K. (2001/2002). Cracking the genome. Inside the race to unlock human DNA. Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press. Dupré, D. (2004). Understanding contemporary genomics. Perspectives on Science, 12 (3), 320–338. Fox Keller, E. (2000). The century of the gene. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gilbert, W. (1992). A vision of the grail. In D. Kevles & L. Hood (Eds.), The code of codes. Scientific and social issues in the human genome project (pp. 83–97). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Goldman, M. (2007). Calamity gene. Nature, 445, 819–820. Gould, S. (2001, February 19). Humbled by the genome’s mysteries. New York: New York Times. Hamer, D., & Copeland, P. (1998). Living with our genes. New York: Doubleday. Houellebecq, M. (1998). Les Particules Élémentaires. Paris: Flammarion. Nelkin, D., & Tancredi, L. (1989). Dangerous diagnostics: The social power of biological information. New York: Basic Books. Paterson, A., Sunohara, G., & Kennedy, J. (1999). Dopamine D4 receptor gene: Novelty or nonsense? Neuropsychopharmacology, 2, 3–16. Rohn, J. (2006). Experimental fiction. Nature, 439, 269. Rusch, D. B., Halpern, A. L., Sutton, G., Heidelberg, K. B., Williamson, S., Yooseph, S. (2007). The Sorcerer II global ocean sampling expedition: Northwest Atlantic through Eastern tropical Pacific. PLoS Biology, 5(3), 0398–0431. Venter, J. C. (2007). A life decoded. My genome: My life. New York: Viking Penguin. Zola, E. (1880/1923). Le roman expérimental. Paris: Charpentier. Zwart, H. (2007). Genomics and self-knowledge. Implications for societal research and debate. New Genetics and Society, 26 (2), 181–202.

Chapter 13

Maps and the Taxonomic Style Chunglin Kwa

13.1 Introduction The race toward completing the human genome has become the new classic case of competition in science. We have several older classic cases, such as the one in the 1960s between Guillemin and Schally to elucidate the chemical composition of Thyroxin Releasing Hormone (TRH) (Latour & Woolgar, 1986). Contests like these have a number of shared characteristics. First, competition may devolve into personal antagonism, as in the Human Genome Project (HGP), which was characterized by competition between Craig Venter and the public consortium. Second, the criteria to be met are changed along the way. In the Guillemin-Schally case, for instance, this concerned gas chromatography, which was enforced by one of the parties as the new quality standard for separating chemical fractions. In the HGP it was the shift from hunting individual genes to sequencing the entire human genome. And third, there are often demonstrations of brute force approaches, as in the processing of the huge quantities of sheep brain tissue needed for extracting a tiny amount of TRH, which required searching entire slaughterhouses. Venter used a brute force approach from beginning to end. But the differences are also very important. The HGP attracted a great deal of attention because never before had there been a contest between a public consortium of science and a private group; this occurred after Venter resigned from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 1992 to work in the private sector. And never before had patent applications cast such long shadows over scientific research; once again Venter was involved here, even while he still worked at the NIH. But one important difference concerning the HGP is that the decision to go for sequencing the entire human genome involved an important shift, not only in the goal of the project and the criteria for its success, but also a shift in the style of research, as Brian Balmer 1996 has argued. It was a shift from theory-led questions

C. Kwa (B) Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, University of Amsterdam, OZ Achterburgwal 237, 1012 DL Amsterdam, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected]

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concerning the functions of genes, involving focused experimenting, to mapping for mapping’s sake, described by protagonists in the field as extended natural history. Essentially it was the transition from a ‘Popperian’ experimental testing of hypotheses to taxonomy. There was not a specific decision which caused the shift, but it was nevertheless dramatic. In 1994, extrapolating from sequencing technologies that were not yet available, technicians in the HGP estimated that it would take about a century to map the full 3 billion bases of the human genome (Kitcher, 1995). However, by 2000 the job was done, or nearly so. Why was the job done so quickly? Why bother to sequence the ‘mysterious stretches of who-knows-what’ (Venter’s own words) that comprise 97% of the human genome? One answer is because it could be done, or rather, because it was such a formidable technological challenge. It was the same logic that led to climbing Mount Everest and putting a man on the moon (Shapin, 2008). But whatever it was, it was not the logic of peer-reviewed ‘little science’, as both Balmer and Shapin suggest. The criteria for large projects like the HGP are formed within statefunded bureaucracies and/or entrepreneurial cultures, and in the case of the HGP and Venter’s rival project, it was both. Shifts to taxonomic approaches are in no small part necessitated by the apparent priority of data-gathering, which occurs in many large interdisciplinary projects. Cases in point are the Arabidopsis Information Resource, a plant genomics coordination project (Leonelli, 2007), the Human Brain Project (Beaulieu, 2001) and climate research (Kwa, 2005). ‘Drowning in data’ is a danger faced by a wide array of sciences, a danger which can be averted only thanks to the development of information technology and computing facilities (Conway, 2006). In turn, the priority of data gathering is brought about by the availability of technologies producing data. If a technology is present, then there will be a drive to use it well, to not leave the machines idle. In the early part of his career, Venter had been an ‘old fashioned’ experimentalist. He devoted ten years to determining the sequence of just one gene, the adrenaline neurotransmitter receptor gene. He published his findings in 1987, and in the same year read about a newly developed machine which combined automated gene sequencing with automated computer recording. It cost $110,000. At the time, Venter was still at the NIH and he bought one at his own expense with funds from a personal grant. This machine’s successor cost $300,000, and in 1999 at Celera Genomics, Venter had several hundreds of these machines working day and night.

13.2 Mapping ‘Mapping’ was the stated goal of all the human genome initiatives which originated in many countries from the mid-1980s onward. In the UK, the word showed up in the title of the program ‘Human Genome Mapping Project’. ‘Mapping’ is by far the most popular metaphor used to describe genome identification, though other metaphors are used as well. Sydney Brenner, the originator of the program, also

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used the image of ‘the human genome library’ (Balmer, 1996, p. 535). Also in use is ‘genetic landscape’, a three-dimensional map, as it were, where the landscape in turn might contain a ‘mosaic’ of ‘regions’ (De Chadarevian, 2004; Bostanci, 2004). ‘Fingerprinting’ and other metaphors can be found in more specialist uses of genome mapping. Hub Zwart is correct in pointing out that maps may serve appropriatory or even military functions. We may note in passing that the Venter group used the metaphor of the ‘double barreled whole genome shotgun’, with ‘shotgun sequencing’ meaning establishing DNA sequences without placing (i.e. mapping) the functional genes on the DNA threads. The approach was deemed ‘monolithic’ by public sector scientists (Bostanci, 2004, p. 168). The community of worm researchers around Brenner, however, had more peaceful uses in mind when they insisted on the idea of map making as a collective Endeavour. It was their organizational model which had been transposed from their previous large project on C. elegans, to the human genome. At the same time, the cooperative work model of the public consortium has not thwarted the continuing appropriation of genes: according to a rough estimate, 35,000 gene patents are applied for each month. We may also ask epistemological and ‘ontological’ questions about maps. What kind of knowledge do they represent? How do maps affect our stance in the world? Sergio Sismondo discusses several well-known epistemological stances toward maps: realism (i.e. correspondence theory), instrumentalism and constructivism. He argues that which stance seems most appropriate depends on the context of mapping practice (Sismondo, 2004). However, we can ask more specifically what kind of scientific practice produces maps. Here I concur with Balmer’s observations on the shift from theory-cumexperiments to taxonomy engendered by the direction of the British Human Genome Mapping Project. I believe these observations can be extended to the other projects (Balmer, 1996). In a similar vein, Robert Kohler has drawn attention to the classifying nature of the work of Thomas Hunt Morgan and his group on the genes of Drosophila which took place long before the discovery of the chemical structure of DNA. Morgan was faced with a similar problem as the HGP people: how to handle the flood of data in his laboratory. The genetic map was the answer to the problem of finding a system for classifying data (Kohler, 1994, p. 56). Maps are spatially organized collections of data, spatial data classifications. They can be drawn on many levels of detail and with many foci in mind. In human genome research before 1989, genomic data existed as linkage maps, restriction maps, radiation hybrid maps, contig maps and in situ hybridization maps. These were more or less incompatible. After 1989, a specific way of drawing maps (maps of ‘sequence tagged sites’) was agreed upon as the standard, and after this the various kinds of maps could be merged (Hilgartner, 2004). The argument that maps are a representation of the world is a truism, yet only partially correct. From the vantage point of taxonomical practice, however, the world is like a map. When the taxonomists of the 18th Century classified plants, they laid them out according to tables (or maps) of identities and differences (Foucault, 1966). The one-, two- or three-dimensional ordering which was used in

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their classification conferred on them a spatiality in the absence of time as an internal principle, which Foucault took as the prevalent 18th Century view (episteme) of the world. We are no longer part of the episteme of the 18th Century, but taxonomies continue to be important. However, within biology, the field with which taxonomy is most associated, it has had its ups and downs as a scientific style. After 1850, it was gradually pushed to the margins of biology by experimental physiology. What remained of it seemed to be swallowed up whole by evolutionary theory. By 1980, taxonomy might have vanished from biological research at the universities altogether had it not been saved more recently by the new interest in biodiversity. Yet, in different guises, taxonomies have been resurfacing continuously, as we have seen in the case of Morgan and his fruit flies. Since 1990 or so, the mapping urge has taken possession of many sciences at an increasing rate (see also Daston & Galison, 2007). One example is the Human Brain Project (HBP). It was launched to find a solution to the informational crisis that was perceived as threatening the development of neuroscience (Beaulieu, 2001). In the course of the HBP, atlases of the brain were developed which collapsed the distinction between paper atlases, models of the brain and databases of brain scans. Automated data handling and data analysis enabled doctors and researchers to produce maps of the average, young–adult, schizophrenic brain, or the average, uneducated, left-handed brain or any other type of patient encountered in the clinic. Similarities between the HBP and the HGP are hard to overlook. We can expect the production of maps in science in any situation where there is an overload of data, where theory is eclipsed by facts. But there is more to maps than merely ascribing to them the ability to contain as much data as possible. We evaluate maps on other grounds. A road map which suggests several alternative journeys leading to a certain destination is more useful than a map which indicates only one possible travel route. Is not the ‘blueprint’, as mentioned by Zwart, dangerously close to the latter? Rich maps are rich not only because they are rich in data, but because they suggest links to a number of theories. This requires us to look at maps as more than abstract taxonomies. Most taxonomies that are used for practical purposes, like maps, embody Gestalt-like features.

References Balmer, B. (1996). Managing mapping in the human genome project. Social Studies of Science, 26, 531–573. Beaulieu, A. (2001). Voxels in the brain: Neuroscience, informatics and changing notions of objectivity. Social Studies of Science, 31, 635–680. Bostanci, A. (2004). Sequencing human genomes. In J.-P. Gaudillière & H.-J. Rheinberger (Eds.), From molecular genetics to genomics: The mapping cultures of twentieth century genetics(pp. 158–179). London: Routledge. Conway, E. M. (2006). Drowning in data: Satellite oceanography and information overload in the earth sciences. Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences, 37, 127–151.

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Daston, L. J., & Galison, P. (2007). Objectivity. New York: Zone Books. De Chadarevian, S. (2004). Mapping the worm’s genome. In J.-P. Gaudillière & H.-J. Rheinberger (Eds.), From molecular genetics to genomics: The mapping cultures of twentieth century genetics (pp. 95–110). London: Routledge. Foucault, M. (1966). Les mots et les choses. Paris: Gallimard. Hilgartner, S. (2004). Making maps and making social order. In J.-P. Gaudillière & H.-J. Rheinberger (Eds.), From molecular genetics to genomics: The mapping cultures of twentieth century genetics (pp. 113–128). London: Routledge. Kitcher, Ph. (1995). Who’s afraid of the Human Genome Project? PSA 1994, 2, 313–321. Kohler, R. (1994). Lords of the fly: Drosophila genetics and the experimental life. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Kwa, C. (2005). Interdisciplinarity and postmodernity in the environmental sciences. History and Technology, 21, 331–344. Latour, B., & Woolgar, S. (1986). Laboratory life: The construction of scientific facts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Leonelli, S. (2007). Weed for thought: Using Arabidopsis thaliana to understand plant biology. Dissertation, Free University, Amsterdam. Shapin, S. (2008). I’am a Surfer. London Review of Books, 30(6), 20 March, 5–8. Sismondo, S. (2004). Maps and mapping practices. In J.-P. Gaudillière & H.-J. Rheinberger (Eds.), From molecular genetics to genomics: The mapping cultures of twentieth century genetics (pp. 203–209). London: Routledge.

Part IV Philosophy of Landscape and Place

Chapter 14

“Thinking Like a Mountain”: Ethics and Place as Travelling Concepts Bruce B. Janz

14.1 Placing the Ethics of Place The phrase ‘ethics of place’ comes with a host of ambiguities. It is not simply ethics derived from specific locations, much less ethics applied to specific places. It is not ethics that is situational, or relativist, or historicized, or subjective. It is not ‘applied’ ethics, as opposed to meta-ethics. Then what is it? Whatever else it is, ‘ethics of place’ is, in its recent uses, a term of resistance and opposition, much like the word ‘place’ itself. It has been used as a response to modernist forms of ethics, and even some classical ones. Modernist forms of ethics, some have argued, have too limited and restrictive a definition of both agency and standing, and an appeal to place can serve to extend both the range of who is seen as a moral actor and who can be the recipient of moral action. More significantly, modernist ethics has tended to lead to an arid moral landscape, as moral actors and options become reduced to their most basic level in an effort to establish universality. The problem, though, is that as a term of resistance, this version of the ethics of place can tend to take on the characteristics of that which it resists. Agency may be expanded, and the range of moral action may encompass more and different beings, but the nature of ethics itself may still remain unquestioned. We still draw a line between those who bear moral responsibility and those who do not, between those to whom we have duties and those to whom we don’t. We may even follow Rousseau in investing nature rather than humanity with the central good, but if we do, we have not necessarily rooted ethics in place, but have just changed the location or source of the universal foundation of ethics. In this paper, I wish to explore ethics that is rooted in place, but which does not merely redraw ethical lines for greater inclusiveness. As a preliminary note, it is worth noting that ethics is rooted in ethos: the ways of a place, the characteristic spirit of a people or community, or, as the Oxford English B.B. Janz (B) Department of Philosophy, University of Central Florida, 4000 Central Florida Blvd., Orlando, FL 32816, USA e-mail: [email protected]

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Dictionary terms it, the ‘genius’ of an institution or system. Note the tension, at least with modernist senses of ethics. If ethics are supposed to be about systems of action, or the ‘principles of human morals’, as we currently think of them, we forget the rootedness of ethics in ethos, a particularized spirit or tone. Classically, the particularization in ethics usually comes in the application of general or universal principles; it is ‘applied’ philosophy. But ethos suggests that particularization may also be the source of those principles, and not merely the recipient. This does not mean that we can afford to rid ourselves of reflection or forget that reason extends particularities to new situations, but rather that we have to start from the fact that there is a tension between a major note, the universalist one, and a minor note, the particularist one, in ethics itself. The relationship has always been recognized, but the tension has generally been resolved by moving from the universal to the particular, from rules, laws, or principles to applications. But the root of ethics in ethos suggests that the move may not merely be a linear one. At any rate, the ethics of place is not so much an oxymoron, as a recovery, a placing in tension of elements that have always been present, and a way to re-think the all too easy move from universal to particular. The same set of tensions, I would argue, is true for place. As long as we think of place solely as location (which is a universal, in that all particulars participate in it), we diminish it. We make it into something apart from human subjectivity, apart from us. But in fact, we are always rooted in place, and a long list of philosophers (Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Edward Casey, Jeffrey Malpas, Andrew Light) have argued that it is our very human nature to exist and act within place. We are essentially platial beings. The recovery of the platial nature of ethics becomes possible in the context of interdisciplinarity, in the specific sense of communication and creation across regimes of knowledge. Merely noting the dependence of ethics on place does not give current discourse on ethics its due, across several disciplines. The term ‘ethics’ has come to stand for a myriad of things, just as the term ‘place’ has. Philosophy has sometimes tried to claim the right to define the discourse on the nature of ethics, but just as with anthropology’s putative claim on ‘culture’, or literature’s claim on ‘text’, these claims to entitlement are rarely universally recognized, and almost always fail to reflect the variations of discourse even within those disciplines. Multiple discourses must necessarily be taken into account. Those coalesce into disciplinary models, sometimes exploring the boundaries with other disciplines, but more often moving centripetally toward the production of methods and theories adequate to internally defined questions. Indeed, disciplinarity may be defined as a reciprocal relationship between questions and methods of inquiry that has coalesced from its provenance. Objects of investigation are not the guarantee of the disciplinarity of disciplines, nor are a particular set of concepts abstracted from their production, or a canonical set of texts or figures. ‘Provenance’ is just the recognition that every disciplinary concept and method is the result of a history of inquiry that has shaped it, and that we cannot abstract or withdraw those concepts or methods without either recognizing that they are the answers to a set of questions that have a platial history, or rejecting that platiality and thus doing violence to the concepts and methods.

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Mieke Bal has advanced a theory of interdisciplinarity known as ‘travelling concepts’ (Bal, 2001) that I believe is useful in addressing this problem of insularity. This can also lead us toward assessing recent moves toward ‘ethics of place’, which for many has been the move away from ethics that begin from the establishment of rules or meta-rules, toward versions of ethics that begin with particulars. But an ethics of place cannot simply take bald particulars as a starting point, because this just disguises a commitment to some version of a universalist ethics (often romantic in nature), and misunderstands the nature of place itself. However, it does make sense to speak of an ethics of place, if we recognize that place itself is the site for ethical reasoning, rather than either the object or the origin of ethical reasoning. The question is reversed – we are no longer simply asking about the ethics of place, but now we want to know about the place of ethics, that is, the ways in which ethics is necessarily emplaced, always related to place, always imagined in place rather than in some methodologically deterministic, utopian or abstract place.

14.2 Aldo Leopold and the Ethics of Place This reversal, from an ethics of place to the place of ethics, a place where ethics can be imagined, can be understood (surprisingly, perhaps) by considering Aldo Leopold’s understanding of place and ethics, particularly his injunction that we should ‘think like a mountain.’ While this meta-rule seems to be a temporal one, that we must think on the time-scale of the mountain so as to properly order our moral universe, it is noteworthy and surprising that his focus in the section on thinking like a mountain in A sand county almanac deals not with time but space, in particular, the space of travel of the wolf and the wolf-pack, the ways in which wolves (and other creatures) recognized the order of the place, its ethos, as the hunter failed to do when he arrogated to himself the role of ‘managing’ nature. The ethos became possible both because of a temporal/historical axis, but also because of the ability on the part of the wolf to simultaneously read and create place. Most readers of Leopold jump to the back of A sand county almanac for his land ethic, and find what could be called his central rule or maxim: ‘A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.’ (Leopold, 1966: p. 262) The temporal/historical axis again seems to determine the platial axis, in the commonly accepted reading. Place matters because of time (‘preservation’ being understood as continuity over time), for Leopold, and the disregard of place by modern Western society is seen as the attempt to make place eternal by making it the subject of modern science and economics, a move which merely renders place a-historical. Ethics, then, exists on the temporal axis, and value is determined because some things have greater weight on that axis. When we think like a mountain, on the standard reading of Leopold, we recognize the ethic of time in its ‘true’ sense. Indeed, while Leopold calls his ethic a ‘land ethic’, suggesting that it will privilege place, an initial reading of A sand county almanac suggests rather a temporalized ethic. The book is organized by the months of the year, and does not even proceed along any obviously natural temporality, but uses a conventional calendar

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(January–December, rather than, for instance, seasons or other natural rhythms, despite the fact that Leopold in the introduction tells us that ‘These shack sketches are arranged seasonally’ (Leopold, 1966: p. xviii)). In his account of February, he works his way back through the events of history as a saw cuts through an oak, a move which establishes the compression of time within the material world. He speaks of the development of ethics in historical terms (Leopold, 1966: p. 238ff), as what will later be thought as the ‘expanding circle’ of ethics (a term often associated with the utilitarianism of Peter Singer). There is a good reason for Leopold to make this move – modernist philosophical ethics had been thought to rise above temporality, to establish atemporal central principles which resisted revision and tended to be conservative in the worst sense, that is, tended to privilege those who were already seen to have moral standing and agency. Historicizing ethics by showing that there was a development over time meant that the circle might be broadened again; temporalizing ethics by making place dependent on time (‘thinking like a mountain’) meant that the conservative impulse toward anthropomorphization could be resisted. This represented progress over universalist forms of ethics rooted in the Enlightenment, but this is not yet an ethics of place. Indeed, the land ethic itself stands as a universal maxim, arrived at through historical process and dependent on the alteration of our temporal frame, but as applicable equally to all places as any categorical imperative or a principle of utility. It is not likely to be refuted, but only further broadened, and as such resembles Enlightenment forms of ethics.

14.3 Places Know Despite the fact that Leopold explicitly argues for a temporalized ethic, though, he constantly implicitly brings us back to an ethic of place. Indeed, time and place are not mutually exclusive; place routinely compresses, extends, distends, and summarizes time. He makes ethics platial not by attempting to isolate a central feature of the ethical system (even a universal maxim), but by presenting us with a kind of phenomenology of place, a way of attending to the other which simultaneously constructs the other as place, and de-centers us from that place, so that it is not merely our concerns which govern the ethic of the place. Leopold travels with us, throughout the book (and through his other writings as well), and that travel is more than anecdotal evidence for a temporalized ethic. It is the construction of places, and the uncovering of ethos in those places, that gives us successive models for living as if place mattered. Leopold is, in a sense, forcing us to engage nature as if it were its own discipline, or regime of knowledge, posing its own questions and finding its own methods in response. The natural, at the platial level, is not merely known, but knowing. At best we are disciplined by it (although in modernity we have done all we can to rid ourselves of that discipline and impose our own upon it), but at the same time, we do not give up being human, that is, we do not lose ourselves in nature. Leopold argues that we are part of the bios, but that means that we act and interact with the

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disciplines around us, rather than dominating them or imposing a new instrumentalist disciplinarity. Gilles Deleuze speaks of ‘intensities’, that is, the sites in which tension is productive (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988). He also draws our attention to our nomadic existence, not just in the sense that we restlessly move about the earth, but also in the sense that our thought itself works itself out in its encounters with its others, as it traverses territory. Leopold is no Deleuzian, but I believe that the travel that forms the backbone of A sand county almanac at least recognizes that our ethics are worked out when ethos comes in contact with its other, and has to creatively negotiate those borders. The ethics of place is not about specificity, much less relativism, but rather about the ongoing task of working out an ethic in the encounter between forms of ethos. Ethics in this sense does not rise above the bios, but exists within it. It makes no sense to find some Kantian principle, or engage in a consequentialist calculation, as if that could provide a sufficient guide to action, without recognizing the intricate level of self-discipline that places within the natural world exhibit. But how can ethics proceed, if we do not begin from an abstract principle, either one found in modernist ethical systems or even in the expanding circle? What does it mean for ethics to be based in place? It means that disciplined nature interrogates us. Recall that Leopold presents nature as a set of localized, self-sustaining processes that function the way a discipline does, by embodying knowledge. Places know – this is, without question, the most controversial claim of my argument. But I mean that places know in the same way that the body knows (while recognizing that the metaphor of the body only partially applies to places). Overcoming Cartesian dualism has meant, in part, recognizing that the body itself has a body of knowledge, that it navigates the world, sustains itself, responds to things, without our conscious self intervening. This is the message of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, and many who have followed him (including recent work in phenomenological cognitive science) have come to the same conclusion. I would like to extend that insight to natural places, and argue that they too know in the same sense of being self-organizing, responsive, and disciplined. Natural places engage in both positive and negative feedback, they have memory (in the sense of temporal encoding and feedback within place), and they act on that memory. We do not require the metaphysical imputation of agency or veiled consciousness that is found in the Gaia hypothesis or some other inheritance of Rousseauian Romanticism, nor is it necessary to see nature as governed by social ecology, as does Murray Bookchin. What is needed, rather, is to recognize that the logic of phenomenological embodiment can, at least in part, be extended to the natural world. The claim is not that places think, or believe, but that they know. What changes when we move from the phenomenology of the body to the phenomenology of nature is that we need to recognize that the impetus for much study about the body following Merleau-Ponty has been to unravel the problem of the nature of consciousness. That is not the driving question here. Nor is the issue to try to imagine that there is something metaphysical in nature that could be the container of knowledge – a mind or mind-analogue. This is the move many have tried in environmental thought, to place nature on an equal footing with humans, and to

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thus ensure its ethical standing. To say that nature knows as the body knows has to do with how we might allow ourselves to be questioned by an other at the same time as we draw on that other for our own knowledge. Under universalist forms of ethics, even well intentioned ones (and that includes the land ethic, as it is classically understood), the other becomes obscured, since it is always a different form of the self in the end. Differences collapse into the self, since even universalist forms of ethics that reject anthropocentrism start from abstract principles, which do not exist in place. The content of the principles may focus on the other, but the form of the principles begins from human epistemology, which renders difference into sameness in the interests of human knowledge. This is so whether we see Leopold as having instituted ecocentric (or, as Kenneth Maly prefers, ‘ecogenic’) perspectives or is still mired in anthropocentric (or anthropogenic) ethics (Maly, 2004). What is needed in an ethics of place is to maintain the difference, and make it productive. Responding to the disciplined nature of the natural world makes possible a form of ethics in which human action does not proceed from abstract reason alone, but from the rational processes of nature as they both interrogate and provide the foundation for human action. Leopold continually shows us this sort of ethics of place. Almost every description of a natural process comes with some self-reflection on his part. Sometimes it is not so much reflection on his own self as it is reflection on the processes of the modern West (and so, an interrogation of the collective or social self). One might wish for more reflection by Leopold on his own individual self, on his own ethical assumptions, at times. And, Baird Callicott and others have argued that Leopold’s metaphors are anthropocentric (he suggests human motivations and scenarios for natural occurrences – the ‘rabbit as epicure has “preference” and “insistence”.’ (Maly, 2004, p. 292)), but in fact this just means that he has not yet allowed the disciplinarity of the place to sufficiently interrogate him. He has, though, set up the means for such an interrogation to occur. And in admitting that ethics has developed over time, he admits that it will develop further, in particular, further than he himself can see. True interdisciplinarity occurs when disciplines make the space for new questions to be asked for themselves, in the context of the interrogation of the other. For example, as philosophy cedes its entitlement to the term ‘ethics’, and recognizes that there are useful things to be found in other disciplines’ approach to ethics, it will be able to ask new questions of itself. It will find ways to not reduce ethics to either universal abstract principles or situational, subjective impulses. Those binary oppositions rooted in Cartesian thought may not exist in the same way in ethics in other disciplinary contexts. Furthermore, following Bal, as a term moves across disciplinary boundaries and is appropriated into a new place, it bears the traces of its past, but must exist in the context of a new set of questions. Concepts travel, and in doing so enable new forms of knowledge, and open new worlds. In our example here, we have multiple travels: that of place, ethics, and knowledge. In each case, the use of a term in a new context is jarring, but in each case, the violence inherent in travel forces a re-examination of the questions that produced the concept in the original discipline.

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Is there a fourth travelling concept, that of disciplinarity? Disciplinarity in the traditional sense requires conscious reflection, while the idea that ‘nature knows’ does not. The value of using disciplinarity of nature is that it allows ethics itself to be disciplined by natural processes. This requires close attention to those processes. Large-scale claims about nature are insufficient for this task, just as largescale claims about humans within traditional disciplines will do little but establish that we are driven by instinct or are at the mercy of determinist forces. The ‘focal length’ of our examination of both humans and the natural world determines the kind of account that is possible. Leopold is a master of focus – he notices the small forms of rationality inherent in and inscribed upon nature. Sometimes these small forms of rationality become apparent in the breach, and he often turns to the consequences of paying insufficient attention to the discipline of nature. This is not taken as evidence of God, or a higher intelligence, or even some romantic Weltgeist, but is taken in its own right. The idea that place has knowledge suggests that place also has reason, just as the body has reason – ways of coping with conditions, ways of creating stable adaptations, ways of interacting for mutual benefit, ways of encoding and accessing the past (that is, compressing and interpreting time). Reason here is simply the ability to use knowledge to advantage. There is no need to suppose that the reason of nature yields, contains, or is caused by a higher consciousness to take the discipline of nature seriously, and to recognize that the difference that occurs when divergent forms of reason come into contact can be a constructive one without being teleological. Leopold recognized that the discipline of nature was not merely a negative, restrictive idea. His teaching began to highlight perception – as opposed to manipulation – as the first priority. Ironically, ecology had wrought a revolution in the old conservation debate: keen perception had survival value; aesthetic sensitivity, as enhanced by the new science, was useful; development that left land ugly, oversimplified, and dysfunctional was fundamentally flawed from an economic standpoint. (Meine, 2004, pp. 101–102)

In other words, there is creative potential in allowing nature to discipline us, that is, to question us. As an environmentalist who was also a hunter, a preservationist who believed that there was a place for tourism in the wild, he sometimes holds a vexed place in environmental thought. But it is exactly this set of seeming contradictions that makes him most interesting. His wilderness was not the wild, untamed, desolate Romantic image. He had, as Curt Meine puts it, a ‘contrast value of wilderness.’ (Meine, p. 104) It was a ‘matter of scale and balance: roads were not inherently good or bad; their utility, or lack thereof, was a function of time, place, and density. Viewed on a national scale, and in historical context, the rise of the automobile culture demanded a parallel commitment to wilderness preservation.’ (Meine, 2004, p. 105). Claims like this might almost seem to disqualify Leopold from the pantheon of environmental heroes, but in fact, he is saying that the human impulse to follow the logic of technology must be met with another kind of reason, one which can face technological reason in extent and scope. Leopold is, in effect, recognizing that

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just as technology is a discipline, with its own set of questions and resulting methods (which serve to legitimate its questions), that epistemological positive feedback loop needs to be met with another, equally significant form of reason, with its own questions and its own methods. Leopold is a realist. He is not hoping for a utopian world in which technological reason is abandoned. Not only would that be a fool’s dream, it would merely put into place another dominant, self contained, disciplined form of reason, which would also turn to excess. The ethics of place, then, exists on the edges of encounter between forms of reason. Mieke Bal is useful in understanding what this means – clearly both ‘reason’ and ‘knowledge’ have become travelling concepts along with ethics and place (and, perhaps also disciplinarity). Violence occurs when concepts travel – their historical references cannot be transported intact, and more importantly, their formative questions change from one place to the next. It may well be jarring to see the word ‘reason’ used of nature, and that sense of dislocation is the violence inherent in allowing concepts to travel. We have a choice – we could simply reject the travel, and claim that reason must remain tethered to its original questions. Or, we could allow this travel to question us, to force us to ask whether our sense of reason within the human context has been too narrowly imagined, and whether our conception of knowledge might be challenged, not by the knowledge inherent in another individual, but within the bios. I would argue that the predicament of ethics within the modernist context is a result of too narrow an imagination of reason and too individualist a conception of knowledge. Instrumentalism is what happens when we do not allow reason to be interrogated and when we come to think of knowledge as requiring consciousness. We come to think that reason is ours alone, to do with as we wish, and that knowledge inheres only in individuals. What does it mean, to be disciplined by place, that is, to have an ethics of place? I have already argued that it cannot mean that we simply extend traditional ethics to a new agent or object. That includes ethical theories which attempt to imagine a genius loci, a spirit of the place. Deep ecology, the Gaia hypothesis, and other quasi-romantic ethical positions fall into this pattern, and in doing so, simply posit a metaphysical entity that can have agency or standing. In doing so, they merely follow traditional abstract ethics. Leopold’s concept of the biotic might seem, to some, as another genius loci. It is crucial to realize that he is not suggesting that there is some metaphysical presence to an ecosystem that gives it moral standing. It is, rather, that there are a set of relations within the biotic which form a coherent whole, what I have been comparing to the knowledge that a body has. Those connections contain within them the memory, the provenance, the questions that a place has asked and the answers it has come to. This is a totally material set of relations, but that materiality, and its stable functioning, makes it a form of knowledge. The biotic, then, is the key to Leopold’s ethic of place. It contains (compresses, elongates, summarizes) time, but is not primarily temporal (we are not asked to extend our imagination to a longer or shorter scale). But the biotic also does not treat time as if we could suspend it – there are no snapshots of place, images that tend to make us think that nature is frozen and does not constantly change in countless

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ways. This micro-temporality of place, the countless minor orderings and sequences that make up the biotic mean that (as Mick Smith, following Bourdieu, suggests) activity follows implicit strategies rather than explicit rules. (Smith, 2001, p. 198) Bourdieu makes this distinction about human activity, but it seems equally applicable to the place as well. Activity, both human and natural, are not mechanistic, following rules or striving for a teleological purpose. They rather continually adapt to conditions, and leave traces of those adaptations as they go, either in the material record around them, or in their effect on surrounding actions. These are the creative moments within the ‘discipline’, the encounter with difference at a local level. How is it possible for humans to be interrogated by nature-knowledge? The key is focal length. If we suppose that collective human knowledge – ‘Science’ – is being interrogated by ‘Nature’, we simply pit two grand systems against each other. The longer the focal length, the more likely that we will see these knowledge systems as totalizing, encompassing the other, and placeless. Even if the objects of science are specific, the modes of knowledge in science will remain as universal, and hence not available for critique or inquiry. Knowledge is not a database, and reason is not a calculus, but at a long focal length, both human knowledge and natural organization can tend to look that way. Hume was correct, in the end, to see reason as a ‘slave to the passions’, if by that we recognize that place-based concerns govern and undergird universal processes.

14.4 Questions About the Ethics of Place If considered from the model of ethics that currently predominates, that of rights/duty based ethics or consequentialist ethics, many questions arise: 1. Can an ethics of place exist in a world in which modernist, human-centered, totalizing ethics predominate? 2. Can an ethics of place offer any guidance? Can it tell us what we should do, or will it merely tell us what we do do? Is this a form of naturalized ethics? 3. How, specifically, can human knowledge be critiqued by the knowledge inherent in the bios? How can this be a creative, rather than a restrictive possibility? 4. Do places really know, or do they come to know as they come in contact with other regimes of knowledge? That is, does knowledge emerge as places are put to the test, or stressed? 5. What happens if platial knowledge differs at different topemic levels? 6. Is this ethics, or a model for the production of ethics? That is, does this enable any normative judgments, or does it describe pragmatic production in a complex system, in which the sustenance of the system becomes the ethical standard? 7. Is this an ethics of natural place only? If not, what would it look like to consider other kinds of place as being the sites of knowledge as well? 8. If place knows the way a body knows, does that mean that place (or in Leopold’s case, an ecosystem) is a pseudo-body? Doesn’t that make it into too bounded an entity, too discrete in its knowledge?

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Leopold clearly has a meta-ethical standard (the land ethic), which at least on the surface does not seem to be derived from the land itself. And yet, if we take the land ethic to be a generalized statement on the common features of encountering place, rather than an a priori principle designed to direct future judgments, it is possible to see the land ethic as the result of the encounter with place. This account of ethics assumes that the central (but not only) problem of ethics is the problem of knowledge, that is, making knowledge about the other available in such a way that it retains the otherness of the other, and allows the self to use that knowledge in its own self-construction. This problem of knowledge is two-fold, in that the ethical problems we are faced with are in part the result of both a lack of knowledge and a misunderstanding, and secondly the basis of ethics itself is the recognition that the knowledge of/by the other (that is, the knowledge that is in places) is necessary for a true ethical framework to emerge. But one might think that knowledge-in-place means that places are bounded like bodies, and that they are essentially rural. This is not necessarily the case, though. The inscription of place that the wolf engages in is both bounded and creative, as the wolf de-territorializes and re-territorializes its space. Thus, place should not be thought as the equivalent of home, region, or territory. The model of the ecosystem is apt – no ecosystem is a discrete entity, unrelated to adjacent or even distant ecosystems (think of migratory birds or wind-borne seeds as engaged in multiple ecosystems). And, we might see these ecosystems as moving into urban areas as well, despite the disruptive nature of human urban industrial society. And finally, urban places also know, in the sense of having closely inscribed sets of practices, both among humans and other fauna and flora (Fig. 14.1). The point is, this is not merely a romantic appeal to some primary site of knowledge, but a recognition that knowledge always owes its debt to the place from which it comes, and therefore, any ethical action must also proceed from there, inasmuch as ethics is based at least in part on knowledge. There is another possible misunderstanding that should be addressed about this version of the ethics of place that I am advancing here. That is, it might seem like we just have naturalized ethics here, or a description of how action actually does occur, rather than a plan for judging, justifying, directing or prescribing action. That is what we expect from ethical systems after the Enlightenment – either prescriptions or justifications of moral intuitions. The ethics of place is not an Enlightenment ethic, though, and so we should not expect a calculus or a set of duties (or their analogues) that will enable us to identify the right. But the assumption here is that better ethical actions occur in the context of better knowledge (although that is a necessary, not a sufficient condition), and that they take the form of negotiations of one sort or another. This is where the much-discussed idea of moral imagination meets what I will call ‘place-making imagination’. Moral imagination is the recognition that better moral decisions are made when we both have better knowledge and also when we are able to see a set of possibilities of reconfiguring that knowledge. So, the moral stance which insists that there are only two options (you’re either with us or against us) is not evidence of a better moral calculus or higher ideals, but of a lack of moral imagination. It may play to moral intuitions, which themselves may

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Fig. 14.1 Crystal creek wolf pack in Yellowstone National Park. Photo: US National Park Service

be rooted in any number of places (divine revelation, evolutionary development, natural law), but a greater moral imagination recognizes the conflicted nature of some of our intuitions, and the role that adequate knowledge, and reasoning about that knowledge, can play in forming action. If we can imagine moral options outside of the yes/no dichotomy, we have a more adequate moral system, and one better able to preserve and enhance highly differentiated forms of life. Place-making imagination recognizes that our constructed and understood places sometimes can have the same oversimplified character to them. We can make urban spaces which fulfill only a single function. Their vocabulary is limited, and as such, their ability to thrive as places is limited. Just as with moral imagination, places too require a rich vocabulary to thrive. What we do not realize is that this is a problem of knowledge, not of place itself. That is, the places usually are already rich, but we are just unable to recognize them as such. Our knowledge is superficial, driven by insufficiently examined questions. We see natural land as ‘resource’, and thus simplify it, limiting its vocabulary and as well its ability to challenge our

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own systems of knowledge. We construct strip malls and chain stores, rendering the urban landscape’s vocabulary superficial, single-purposed, and minimally legible, while simultaneously training ourselves to only see a limited range of platial signifiers, thus missing any complex natural or social ecosystem that might in fact exist there. Our moral imagination is limited, and so our imagination of places is also limited, and as such, we fall into the illusion that places can just be regarded instrumentally. A rich moral imagination, and place-making imagination, takes tradition into account. Tradition, in this case, is that which we are willing to let remain in our peripheral vision, as we direct our rational gaze at objects of inquiry. Places always have those peripheral regions, all the more so as we use a close focal length in understanding them. Peripherality does not mean that elements of a place cannot be rationally considered, but that they are considered at the cost of letting other elements become part of that peripherality. The Enlightenment dream of total rational mastery is an illusion – there is always something in our peripheral range, and the more deliberately we try to rationally comprehend the world, the more that slips into peripherality. But the poorer the imagination, the less peripherality we imagine there is, and the more we tend to suppose that an element exists independent from the meaningful place in which it exists. This account of tradition as peripherality is also about knowledge, and as such, veers away from the uses of tradition in place studies which serve as a backstop for ethics, or as a guarantee of the legitimacy of some ethical impulses over others. That form of tradition does allow the longevity of a place (e.g., the sustainability of an ecosystem, or the continued existence of a community) to serve as a moral guide, but at the same time it tends to undermine individuality, as well as the dynamic nature of place. In fact, even those places are always shifting at their borders, and there are always negotiations (or, in Deleuzian terms, reterritorialization). Peripherality simply recognizes that all systems of knowledge are enacted by the actions of those within them, those who act based on particular ends while being competent in knowing what can reasonably be left as peripheral. The stress points of these systems of knowledge come not when they are presented with the potential for change, but when their form of knowledge is overwhelmed, and their inherently rich vocabulary is forced into an oversimplified form. This is what Lyotard means when he speaks of ‘terrorism’ in The postmodern condition (Lyotard, 1984: p. 63–64), and what I mean when I equate moral imagination with place-making imagination. If, on the other hand, knowledge of place is respected, and understood at a close focal length, that knowledge can serve to challenge the knowledge borne within the inquirer. It is the moment of interdisciplinarity I spoke about earlier. And it is also the moment of ethics, as one’s assumptions about action are challenged by a renewed place-making, and moral, imagination. This model of ethics collapses the site of the production of ethics with the site of its application, description with normativity, and moral imagination with place-making imagination. For those rooted in modernist forms of ethics that demand prescriptions, this still may not be an adequate account of ethics. There is no new meta-ethical formula here, no new expansion of the ethical circle. This ethical approach resists the

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assumption of temporalized ethics, which is that greater value is associated with greater longevity. Leopold’s principle that we should ‘think like a mountain’ is seen not temporally, but platially, as the thinking of the mountain becomes the site on which the knowledge inherent in different places works itself out, and allows humans to come to greater moral and place-making imagination. Ethics does not start, then, from the assumption that all is permitted, and then the task of ethics is to restrict those freedoms based on some principle such as ensuring autonomy for all, or maximizing utility. Ethics is rather about creating options where there were none before, in the face of competing or alternate systems of knowledge. Leopold’s ethics of place answers Kenneth Maly’s question in the affirmative: ‘Is Leopold’s land “ethic” an overturning of “ethics”?’ (Maly, 2004, p. 298) And while Maly does not argue specifically for an ethics of place, he recognizes what I have also argued for – that the re-casting of ethics takes place precisely because of Leopold’s recognition of the interconnections (what I am calling the disciplinarity of the place, or the recognition that places know) of the natural. The question, perhaps, is what difference this makes. The pull of temporalized Enlightenment ethics is strong. And yet, that has also been its weakness. In expanding the circle of ethics, we have also made it more abstract and rarified. It is one thing to argue for the rights of an autonomous human individual, and quite another to argue for the rights of an animal, or a tree, or an ecosystem. At best, ethics justifies the wider circle by showing that nature in its various forms is useful (an anthropocentric perspective, linking value back to human value); at worst, it justifies it by rendering a metaphysical ‘other’ to which rights are accorded, but which requires humans to speak for it and defend it. In the first case, the anthropocentrism is overt, in the second, covert. But if we work from this Leopoldian/Deleuzian perspective, the problem becomes a different one. It becomes the problem of the knowledge of the place, and how it is acquired, justified, and made creative. Places know, and that knowledge is both useful to its inhabitants (the ones equipped to read and interact with the place), and serves as the context and creative force for other disciplinary systems they come in contact with (particularly human ones). We do not simply instrumentally use a place (or its elements), nor do we speak on its behalf; rather we allow our form of knowledge to be interrogated by the knowledge of the place.

14.5 Olfactory Poems In part one of A sand county almanac, Leopold takes us through the year in nature. His ‘year’, as already noted, is the calendar year, not the year of seasons or natural cycles (it is, after all, an ‘almanac’). And, his descriptions of nature are filled with anthropomorphic images and analogies, suggesting that more might be done to truly allow place-knowledge to interrogate Leopold’s own knowledge. And yet, despite the framing within human time-ordering and human social relations, this almanac hearkens back to part of the original sense of the word. While there are few tables (a feature which is all but necessary; almanacs had tables ‘containing a calendar of

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months and days, with astronomical data and calculations, ecclesiastical and other anniversaries, besides other useful information, and, in former days, astrological and astrometeorological forecasts.’1 ), ordering is certainly evident. That ordering does not lie solely in the literal temporal structure, the month-by-month account. It lies also in the platial structure. Consider, for instance, Leopold’s account of July. It is an account of daybreak, before the world shrinks ‘to those mean dimensions known to county clerks’ (Leopold, 1966: p. 47), that is, before place is ordered and organized according to human purposes. Before daybreak, there is a different ordering, and a different form of land ownership and stewardship. It is, in some sense, his land, but not in the Lockean sense of property ownership. Leopold frames the early morning world as one of competing territorial claims on the part of the birds, whose calls establish boundaries and creates a text of sound which is understood by other birds, and the contrasting literacy experienced by his dog, for whom ‘the evidence of tenantry is not song, but scent.’ (Leopold, 1966: p. 46) Indeed, the dog’s literacy is quite elaborate: Now he is going to translate for me the olfactory poems that who-knows-what silent creatures have written in the summer night. At the end of each poem sits the author – if we can find him. (Leopold, 1966: p. 46–47)

As the day unfolds, the plants are the ones inscribing upon the land, imprinting knowledge there. This inscription is one we are only dimly aware of (‘Tell me of what plant-birthday a man takes notice, and I shall tell you a good deal about his vocation, his hobbies, his hay fever, and the general level of his ecological education.’ (Leopold, 1966: p. 48)), but which nevertheless affects us. Leopold speaks of the ‘compass plant’, or the cutleaf Silphium, as legible (‘How could a weed be a book?’ (Leopold, 1966: p. 50)), recording in its shifting growing season, patterns of growth, local erasures, and deterritorialiation its history, and the knowledge of the place. The whole picture is one of subtle interrelations, not of a static equilibrium but a dynamic creation, made possible through the close knowledge of the place that the daybreak inhabitants possess. We might suppose that we have come a long way in our environmental knowledge since 1948, when Leopold drafted A sand county almanac shortly before his death. And we have – we are far more adept at reading place-knowledge than we were at his time. And yet, our hermeneutic of place is still in its infancy. As we come to see that our moral universe is made richer when we interrogate, and are interrogated by, place-knowledge, we will also be able to create new concepts, new forms and ways of life. Our concepts will travel between forms of knowledge, and become newly integrated, enabling a richer vocabulary of both place and ethics, a new appreciation of ethos and peripherality, and a richer life. We will, in short, develop an ethics of place.

1 Almanac

(Oxford English Dictionary)

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References Bal, M. (2001). Travelling concepts in the humanities: A rough guide. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1988). A thousand plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Leopold, A. (1966). Sand county almanac. New York: Ballantine Books. Lyotard, J.-F. (1984). The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge (G. Bennington & B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Maly, K. (2004). A sand county almanac: Through anthropogenic to ecogenic thinking. In B. Foltz & R. Frodeman (Eds.), Rethinking nature: Essays in environmental philosophy (pp. 289–301). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Meine, C. (2004). Correction lines: Essays on land, Leopold and conservation. Washington: Island Press. Smith, M. (2001). An ethics of place: Radical ecology, postmodernity, and social theory. New York: SUNY Press.

Chapter 15

Towards an Epistemology of Place J.A.A. Swart

15.1 Introduction Bruce Janz (2008) has worked out a challenging kind of ‘ethics of place’, which has triggered a lot of ideas and questions in my mind. In this commentary I will first outline how I have understood his contribution, second, I will have some critical remarks to make about it and, finally, I will describe how Janz’s work touches on some of my own research findings. Janz introduces his line of ethical reasoning by telling us what an ethics of place is not: it is not an ethics derived from specific locations or an ethics applied to specific places. It is not situational, relativistic or subjectivist. Janz characterizes the ethics of place rather through its function as an element of resistance against modernist ethics, that is, consequentialist and deontological traditions that are rooted in the Enlightenment. These latter approaches have, according to Janz, led to an arid moral landscape in that moral actors and options have been reduced to their most basic levels as a result of the pursuit of universality. However, Janz immediately warns us that an ethics of place as a term of resistance may face the same pitfall as the modernist approach that draws lines between who bears moral responsibility and who does not, that is, the traditional distinction between mortal agents and moral patients. It seems to be Janz’s main quest to overcome this modernist separation. Janz uses two basic notions: ethos and knowledge. Ethos refers to the spirit of a people or community, the genius loci, which in Janz’s vision also includes the biotic community. He argues that ethics should primarily be rooted in the ethos and thus in locality. This is the opposite position when compared to universalistic ethics, which assumes that universalistic principles can be and should be applied to local situations. The ethics of place implies the recovery of the role of locality, not as a particularization of the universal notion of location, but in the sense of giving back to the ethos its role as a source of ethics. Thus, it is not that an ethics of place sees place J.A.A. Swart (B) Science and Society Group, Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, University of Groningen, Kerklaan 30, 9751 NN Haren, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected]

M. Drenthen et al. (eds.), New Visions of Nature, C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-2611-8_15, 

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as the object of ethical reasoning but rather as a provenance of ethical reasoning. In short, an ethics of place implies a place of ethics. According to Janz the recovery of the role of ethos requires an interdisciplinary approach, that is, communication, interaction and mutual recognition of different knowledge regimes. Now we come to the second term, ‘knowledge,’ which is the pivotal term in Janz’s approach. However, this term doesn’t just indicate human knowledge but also the knowledge that can be found in places themselves: ‘Places know.’ Knowing should thus not be seen as conscious knowledge alone. Most of us, however, are already familiar with such kinds of knowledge when we talk about ‘body knowledge’. As an example, your body ‘knows’ how to swim or how to ride a bike. Similarly, natural places ‘know’ how to react to conditions and constraints. Janz does not attribute a romantic or metaphysical form of consciousness to nature but, instead, the recognition that natural places are engaged in both positive and negative feedback, and that they exhibit forms of memory by encoding this feedback. An ethics of place recognizes the knowledge of natural places and gives space for an ethics that doesn’t just take into account human reasoning but also nature’s ‘wisdom.’ This vision allows nature to interrogate us, and to affect our dominant knowledge systems, that is, science. Its recognition attributes not only a sort of agency to nature, but also presumes a human willingness to listen to the phenomena of nature. In some way Janz’s approach resembles insights from actor-network theory (Callon, 1986; Latour, 1987) that attributes a kind of agency towards non-human objects (so-called ‘actants’). However, whereas actor-network theory focuses on the position of the researcher in a heterogeneous network of people, laboratories, and living and non-living objects, Janz aims to establish a sort of partner relationship between humans and place. Janz illustrates this normative position using the writings of Leopold. Janz considers Leopold’s land ethics not as an ethics of place, but as a forerunner of it because of Leopold’s detailed descriptions of and reflections on concrete natural places and the accompanying ethos in those places (Leopold, 1949). These writings have paved the way for an ethics of place that may overcome the current Cartesian dualism. According to Janz an ethics of place should not be seen as calculus or a set of duties designed to identify what is right or wrong. Sensitivity and a focal length adjusted to platial and natural phenomena are its main characteristics. They may contribute to better ethical moral decisions through the recognition of nature’s voice and the willingness to take into account the different configurations of knowledge around us.

15.2 An Epistemology of Place As mentioned above, the pivotal element in Janz’s ethics of place is the claim that nature knows. Janz does not give a definition of what is meant by knowing. However, his reference to positive and negative feedback indicates that he has in mind an approach to knowledge that is already applied in evolutionary epistemology, a discipline that studies knowledge from an evolutionary point of view. Konrad Lorenz (1982) was one of the first authors who recognized that, in its broadest sense,

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cognition can be considered as a biological trait and that it should not only be seen as conscious, linguistically expressed human knowledge. Although evolutionary epistemology encompasses multiple versions, the unifying theme is that organisms have knowledge of their environment one way or another. Knowledge is a relationship between an organism and its environment, which enables it to evolve and to survive in its environment. It is argued in evolutionary epistemology that through adaptations there is a correspondence between an organism and the environment, although it may not be a one-to-one correspondence and different organisms may have different cognitions or representations of the environment. Anatomical, physiological, genetic and behavioral traits can thus be seen as a sort of cognitive representation of reality, that is, of the environment in which the organism lives. For example, Peter Munz (2001) writes: The shape of a fish and its neutral reflexes represents water. They do so not by making a picture, a portrait or a double of water. Nor do they do so by describing water. It is indeed quite difficult to say what the term ‘represent’ precisely indicates. And yet, the behavior of a fish and the functioning of a theory of water are exactly identical. The fish represents water by its structure and its functioning. Both features define an initial condition (for example, the degree of viscosity of water) which, when spotted or sensed, trigger off a prognosis or behavioral response which, in case of a fish, fails to be falsified. By contrast, a bird does not represent water. (p. 155)

An organism is, according to Munz, ‘embodied knowledge’ and theoretical human knowledge can be considered as ‘disembodied knowledge.’ Janz’s account of platial knowledge resembles this line of reasoning, although he seems to extend it by including natural places and ecosystems. Indeed, ecosystems and landscapes, whether they are natural, semi-natural or cultural, often evolve in a particular and characteristic process of evolution and ecological succession, and demonstrate a certain kind of memory by bearing some of the characteristics of previous periods (see, e.g., Schama, 1995). However, I believe that the distinction between organisms, on the one hand, and the environment, place or ecosystem, on the other, is not very clear and is often blurred. Organisms not only become adapted to the often changing environment in the course of evolution, they may also adapt the environment itself. As an example, peat plants build up peat layers, termites construct hills, beavers build dams and cyanobacteria have, to a large extent, produced the earth’s atmosphere. Therefore, animals or organisms in their environmental context may indeed be considered as the unit of an ‘epistemology of place’, which considers natural areas and ecological systems as complex and multilayered bodies of knowledge that have come into being via a long-term learning process, that is, through evolutionary and ecological succession trajectories.

15.3 An Ethics of Place or Pragmatic Ethics? In my view, however, an epistemology of place does not automatically imply an ethics of place. Taking into account knowledge, whether it is human or platial knowledge, may indeed contribute to better moral decisions. However, this does not

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exclude universalistic claims about what is right or wrong, since an epistemology of place does not provide information on this beforehand. For example, Janz claims that an ethics of place leads to ‘better’ moral decisions, but he does not explain what ‘better’ actually means. Better may indeed mean that it is good to take into account platial knowledge (and I think this is often the case), but such a starting point may even function as a universalistic principle. It is not clear whether we should accept or reject such a universalistic principle, unless we follow one or another ethical theory, including one of the modernist theories. I believe that Janz’s ethics of place, which is in my view much more an epistemology of place, can function in combination with modernist theories. Nevertheless, I agree with Janz that modernist theories often have a limited applicative scope, and often disregard local and temporary constraints and dilemmas. I sympathize with his plea for taking the particularities of the local situation into account by choosing the right focal length. This does not, however, imply an ethics of place but rather a pragmatic ethics in which different ethical perspectives (including so-called modernist theories), different visions and the interests of stakeholders (including places and organisms), and different practices (which in the case of nature conservation may also imply human practices) are considered (Keulartz, Schermer, Korthals, & Swierstra, 2004a; Keulartz, van der Windt, & Swart, 2004b). A pragmatic stance is, however, not an easy way of ethical decision-making and many conflicting ethical perspectives may come into being as a result. Nature conservation and ecological restoration are fields where ethical conflicts may easily arise (Swart, van der Windt, & Keulartz, 2001). For example, in the Netherlands semi-domesticated animals have been introduced into natural areas to enhance the naturalness and state of wilderness of these areas (Klaver, Keulartz, van der Belt, & Gremmen, 2002; ICMO, 2005). Conflicts that arise and have arisen with respect to this practice encompass animal ethics (because of the possible starvation of the introduced animals), eco-ethics (because of the need to account for wild nature) and research ethics (because of the credibility of scientific claims). Minteer and Collins (2005) have proposed a so-called ‘ecological ethics framework’ as a tool for ecological researchers and conservationists to deal with such ethical conflicts in research and conservation practices. It implies a pluralistic and pragmatic way of moral reasoning by distinguishing and confronting four ethical domains: normative ethical theory, research ethics, animal ethics and environmental ethics. The ecological ethics framework emphasizes the contextual and situational dimensions of ethical reflection in research and management situations, and stresses the process of moral reasoning and deliberation by both experts and stakeholders.

15.4 Moral Allocation Principles in Nature Conservation The weighting of different, sometimes contrasting, principles and ethical domains is important in pragmatic ethics. One main issue is thus how to deal with these different perspectives when, at the same time, an appeal to unifying principles is not possible. Don’t we run the risk that decision-making in practical affairs will become just

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an arbitrary process? I don’t think so. For example, in practical matters we may, at the very least, expect that the choice of the leading ethical approach can be explained and defended rationally (rational does not necessarily imply universal) and that similar cases will be treated similarly. In practice, we need guidelines, rules of thumb, criteria, etc., in order to choose between competing perspectives. Because contextual and situational circumstances are important in pragmatic ethics, such guidelines should indicate what kind of principles or ethical domains should be given the leading role in a given situation. Thus, in a pragmatic context we need such guidelines, not to unify but rather to distribute different ethical perspectives in relation to given circumstances and the knowledge we have. Elsewhere, I have labeled such guidelines as ‘moral allocation principles’ (Swart, 2008). An example of such a moral allocation principle is the precautionary principle, which functions as a guideline in situations with much scientific uncertainty and possibly irreversible consequences as a result of human interventions. The precautionary principle guides us in such a situation by stressing the importance of not following a utilitarian weighting process but, instead, abstaining from the intended action. Indeed, spatial circumstances and consideration of the state of knowledge from different sources constitute the input for this decision. Another example of a moral allocation principle is the model of specific and non-specific care for animals (Swart, 2005). This model is based on the insight that animals are dependent on their environment, whether that be natural or artificial. In short, domesticated animals depend on the non-natural or human environment and this implies individual or specific caretaking in line with individual animal ethics. We therefore should pay individual attention to, for example, pets or farm animals. The situation is quite different for wild animals which depend on the natural environment. Many people reason from an eco-ethical point of view that we should not interfere in a wild animal’s existence and that we should let it live its own natural life as much as possible. The latter situation implies care for the conservation of the natural environment instead of care for the animal itself. We protect natural areas to supply wild animals with a place to live, we restrict hunting to avoid a reduction in population size, and we connect natural areas via ecological corridors to enhance the genetic quality of animal populations or to give animals the opportunity to migrate (ICMO, 2005). This type of care is called non-specific, because it is not adjusted to the specific needs and characteristics of the individual animal, but rather to the animal as a member of its species or as a part of the ecosystem. However, this division of care is not total. Sometimes we may have good reasons to give specific or individual care to wild animals, for example, when we encounter a wild animal in an emergency situation (Petulla, 1989). The practices of bird shelters or seal stations are illustrative of this aspect. Similarly, we may provide non-specific care to domesticated animals as members of their species. This kind of care is often enforced by regulations in the agricultural industry, for example. However, to make it even more complicated, many animals do not fit into this dualistic scheme of wild and domesticated animals, because they have features of both groups. Examples of such ‘in between’ or semi-wild animals are, for example, bred animals that are introduced in natural areas or wild animals that are housed

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for one or the other reason in a human environment (see, e.g., Reed, 2008; Klaver et al., 2002). These animals blur the proposed distinction between specific and nonspecific care, and we may expect intermediate forms of care. See Fig. 15.1. Thus, to supply the proper type of care we need to understand the animal in its context, that is, we must be able to read or to understand – using Janz’s terms – the appropriate platial knowledge, whether it is related to wilderness, the human environment, or somewhere between. Figure 15.1 can therefore be seen as an example in which an epistemology of place is operationalized within a care ethics. This model of specific and non-specific care functions as a moral allocation principle, since it guides us in applying the requested type of care based on the platial circumstances of the animals involved. It may guide us through the ethical labyrinth of dealing with wild, semi-wild or domesticated animals. It is, however, not really an ethics of place, since it depends on multiple modernist approaches to ethics (both animal ethics and eco-ethics). On the other hand, it is not a universalistic approach either, since it does not consider these modernist theories as universalistic accounts but rather as inspiring sources for dealing with the moral challenges posed by concrete practices.

15.5 Conclusion I believe that Bruce Janz has given us an inspiring view of nature by stressing its cognitive content and through his subsequent plea to listen carefully to nature. However, his approach is much more an epistemology of place than an ethics of place since it focuses primarily on the knowledge of places. His approach resembles recent insights from the field of evolutionary epistemology, and it makes clear that natural areas and ecological systems are complex and multilayered bodies of knowledge that have come into being via a long-term learning process, that is, through evolutionary and ecological succession processes. This insight may help us to distinguish

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particular circumstances that should be taken into account in pragmatic ethics. It is argued, however, that even in pragmatic ethics there is a need for rules of thumb in order to make justifiable decisions. So, an epistemology of place may well contribute to this.

References Callon, M. (1986). Some elements of a sociology of translation: Domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of St Brieuc Bay. In J. Law (Ed.), Power, action and belief: A new sociology of knowledge? (pp. 196–223). London: Routledge. ICMO (2005). Reconciling nature and human interest. Advice of the International Committee on the Management of large herbivores in the Oostvaardersplassen (IMCO). Den Haag/ Wageningen: Wageningen UR. Janz, B. B. (2008). ‘Thinking like a mountain’: Ethics and place as travelling concepts. In M. Drenthen, J. Keulartz, & J. Proctor (Eds.), New visions of nature (pp. XX–XX). Springer: Springer Netherlands. Keulartz, J., Schermer, M., Korthals, M., & Swierstra, T. (2004a). Ethics in technological culture: A programmatic proposal for a pragmatist approach. Science Technology & Human Values, 29, 3–29. Keulartz, J., Windt, H. van der, & Swart, J. (2004b). The case of Dutch nature policy. Concepts of nature as communicative devices. Environmental Values, 13, 81–99; Human Values, 29, 3–29. Klaver, I., Keulartz, J., Belt, H. van der, & Gremmen, B. (2002). Born to be wild: A pluralistic ethics concerning introduced large herbivores in the Netherland. Environmental Ethics, 24, 3–21. Latour, B. (1987). Science in action. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Leopold, A. (1949). A sand county almanac and sketches here and there. New York: Oxford University Press. Lorenz, K. (1982). Kant’s doctrine of the a priori in the light of contemporary biology. In H. C. Plotkin (Ed.), Learning, development and culture (pp. 121–143). Chichester, England: John Wiley. Minteer, B. A., & Collins, J. P. (2005). Ecological ethics: Building a new tool kit for ecologists and biodiversity managers. Conservation Biology, 19(6), 1803–1812. Munz, P. (2001). Philosophical Darwinism: On the origin of knowledge by means of natural selection. London: Routledge. Petulla, J. M. (1989). The object of environmental ethics. Environmental Management, 13(3), 273–278. Reed, C. M. (2008). Wild horse protection politics: Environmental and animal ethics in transition. International Journal of Public Administration, 31, 277–286. Schama, S. (1995). Landscape and memory. London: HarperCollins Publ. Swart, J. A. A. (2005). Care for the wild. Dealing with a pluralistic practice. Environmental Values, 14(2), 251–263. Swart, J. A. A. (2008). The ecological ethics framework. Finding our way in the ethical labyrinth of nature conservation. Science and Engineering Ethics, 14(4), 523–526. Swart, J. A. A., Windt, H. J. van der, & Keulartz, J. (2001). Valuation of nature in conservation and restoration. Restoration Ecology, 9(2), 230–238.

Chapter 16

Developing Nature Along Dutch Rivers: Place or Non-Place Martin Drenthen

16.1 Introduction In ecological restoration projects in the Netherlands, agricultural landscapes in floodplains are being transformed into wetland reserves (so-called ‘new nature’). Besides the fact that the support for these projects among local residents is often suboptimal, some more fundamental issues can be raised with regard to these projects. They tend to disturb (or even wipe out) the different ‘textual’ layers in the landscape (historical anthropogenic landforms and human artifacts), reduce the ‘readability’ of the land, the sense of place, thereby transforming genuine places into ‘non-places’. In contrast, some restorationists claim that they bring out deeper ‘textual’ layers, implying that humans should widen the context in which they understand themselves and deepen their sense of place. Are ecological restoration areas places or non-places, do these projects endanger or rather enhance our sense of place, or do they escape this typology?

16.2 Ethics of Place as a Countermovement Somewhat paradoxically perhaps, in a world that is rapidly changing under influence of globalization, we witness a growing interest worldwide in the regional and local. Partly, this tendency can be interpreted as a sentimental withdrawal from the globalizing world into the relative safety of our own regional backgrounds. There is, however, more to this ‘new regionalism’ than meets the eye. In contemporary environmental philosophy we witness a similar movement towards the particular, the particularity of place, for instance with the emergence of new journals such as Ethics, Place & Environment. The introduction to this volume states that the new approach to environmental ethics ‘tries to do more justice to the M. Drenthen (B) Faculty of Science, Department of Philosophy and Science Studies (ISIS), Radboud University of Nijmegen, Heyendaalseweg 135, 6525 AJ Nijmegen, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected]

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highly contextualized way in which people ‘read’ meanings in particular places and natural features’ and attempts ‘to leave behind the traditional, universalistic perspective’, thus shifting ‘from a global environmental ethics to a particularistic ethics of place’. As Bruce Janz makes clear (in Chapter 14 of this volume), ethics of place is not just interested in extending the definition of ‘both the range of who is seen as a moral actor and who can be the recipient of moral action’. It also has a far more radical commitment: to change the nature of ethics itself, to ground and ‘place’ ethics spatially, as it were. It is hard to overestimate the radicalness of the endeavor of ethics of place. It can be understood as a countermovement to modernist tendencies in environmental ethics to seek moral guidelines for dealing with our surroundings in abstract notions such as ‘intrinsic value of nature’ or ‘ecocentric egalitarianism’. Modernist environmental ethics demands that humans distance themselves as much as possible from their own partiality in order to transcend their ‘speciesist rationality’ and ‘human chauvinism’; they should become ‘abstract’, so to speak, and adopt an ‘objective’ outlook on life. Modern environmental ethics implies a type of intellectual reflection that transforms people into displaced, abstract, disembodied persons. The drawback of such an approach is that it neglects the way in which morality is intimately linked to the way humans interact with their surroundings. Being moved by a particular place, or being subject to the moral appeal of certain ecosystems or landscapes, ultimately rests on bodily interactions with these surroundings, and the active involvement with them. It is from this perspective, that ‘place’ becomes an important topic for environmental philosophy. Starting point of a philosophy of place is the observation that for humans to be involved with nature the world has to be culturally and materially appropriated, has to become part of a symbolic order, a world of meaning. Place-based ethics underlines that, in order to have a morally meaningful relationship with the world, mere space has to be transformed into a meaningful place. Moral involvement with our surroundings implies that we conceive of the world as ηθoς , a place of living and being, that is: a morally structured, significant place for the moral beings living in it. According to Ingrid Stephanovic, ‘ethical discernment is less a matter of intellectual construction than it is one of attunement to a particular way of being-in-place. Rather than simply consisting of a project of internalizing an inventory of rules and principles, ethical awareness also unfolds prethematically and is informed by virtue of the ontological phenomenon of emplacement’ (Stephanovic, 2000, p. 128). Ethics of place is a term denoting resistance against the equalizing forces of abstract ethical reasoning that not only loses sight of specific places by regarding each of them as merely a particular case of some universal feature of nature, but implicitly contributes to the loss of these places. In contrast, ethics of place tries to address the particular ways in which the world can appear as ethos for bodily world-open beings in a ‘placial’ context. Ethics of place is looking for a way of knowing what it means to live in this place, what the appropriation of this site as a dwelling place would mean. At the same time, it underlines the importance of places in which such an engagement with the world is possible. In this paper, I want to look

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into a concrete example of how an ‘ethics of place’ can come into play in a conflict involving nature development projects along the major rivers in the Netherlands.

16.3 Dike Reinforcements Endangering the Landscape of Memory In the late 1980 s and early 1990 s, the Dutch river landscape was the locus of a clash between different visions of nature. The immediate cause of the conflict was the intention of the Dutch Directorate-General for Public Works and Water Management to heighten old embankments along the major rivers (Rhine, Waal and Meuse). River discharges were expected to rise due to both climate change and established water management policies. Consequently, the old river dikes would be too weak for adequate flood protection in the near future. For this reason, the dikes had to be reinforced. Because of budgetary reasons, however, the above-mentioned Directorate-General decided that the plan should be as cost-effective as possible: instead of strengthening the old dikes, the plan was to get rid of the often centuryold, small-scaled, rather winding dikes altogether, and replace them with higher, more robust and straighter ones (Fig. 16.1).

Fig. 16.1 Romeyn de Hooghe: Breaching dyke in Coevorden (Copperplate, 1673)

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The plan provoked much opposition. Landscape activists and many local inhabitants considered these plans disastrous for the traditional typical Dutch river landscape, made famous by the works of 17th century landscape painters such as Jacob and Salomon Ruysdael. The Dutch riverine landscape is many centuries old. Remains of former human inhabitation are abundantly present and in plain sight for those who know where to look for them: wooded banks, terraces, dikes and large artificial mounds all testify of a long history of human habitation. Some features of these landscapes, such as some ancient hedges along the river Meuse, even date back to Roman and Germanic times. Remnants of other past events are still visible as well, such as the traces of previous floods (deep pools that remained after dike bursts). In this ancient, small-scale landscape, culture and nature more or less organically merged into a meaningful whole. Winding dikes and ponds provide a habitat for many species of animals and plants, while at the same time the clay depositions in the water meadows make fertile soil for local farmers. Indeed, in the traditional Dutch water landscape, there is more biodiversity than there would have been in a purely natural wilderness of marshes. Landscape activists sent warnings that if the plans of the Directorate-General for Public Works and Water Management were to be implemented, many of these old ‘signs’ and memory traces in the landscape as mnemoscape would be destroyed. The ‘habitable, meaningful world’ would be drastically changing into a uniform, merely functional landscape dominated by straight lines; a ‘systematized’ or even ‘medicalized’ landscape (with artificial veins, bypasses and heart valves) devoid of meaning. The Save the River Landscape Organization was established to speak on behalf of the protesters. Poet and novelist Willem van Toorn was one of its spokespersons.1 As a child, van Toorn spent many a holiday with family in the Betuwe, a rural area in the heart of the Netherlands. As a result, he became familiar with the vast river landscape, which features prominently in his work. For example, in his novel Een leeg landschap (‘An Empty Landscape’, 1988), he expresses his concern about the distortion of the river landscape. He also wrote several essays on the subject (van Toorn, 1998). According to van Toorn, the Dutch river landscape is unique, as it is a ‘pictorial book of our memory’. In a sense, of course, all landscapes are memory landscapes, but the Dutch landscape is perhaps even more so, when compared to landscapes elsewhere. The reason for this is that, according to van Toorn, the Dutch landscape is an idea. It would not have existed if people had not had the idea that it could be made form all this water. Nearly everywhere you stand in this Dutch landscape, you stand within the thoughts of people, neatly disguised as nature, and everyone is pretending it has to be like this. (van Toorn, 1998, p. 9)

The Dutch river landscape can be read as an archive containing the history of the Netherlands and of its inhabitants. The ‘legible landscape’ tells a story about 1 The

other spokesperson was the landscape painter Willem den Ouden, who lives in a house on a dike, and who tried to capture the magic of the old river landscape in his work.

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this area. It reflects the way that humans have dwelled in these places and how they related to each other in this landscape. The riverine landscape also reflects the past and present socioeconomic efforts of people trying to survive in an area where river floods are a threat on the one hand, and create fertile soil on the other. More than elsewhere, this Dutch landscape contains traces of early inhabitants; it tells us who they were, how they thought and how their successors became what they are now. van Toorn: These landscapes remind us along complicated and sometimes unconscious lines that there is a past, that people who lived in that past had to deal with the world just as we have to, that they had to protect themselves against nature and at the same time use its resources (van Toorn, 1998, p. 66).

According to van Toorn, we should protect this landscape. We have to stay in touch with this past – not because the past is better than the present, but simply because we owe our existence, our identity, our vision of the world to it, and because we can only think about the future by making use of our past experiences. A landscape that does not contain enough ‘signs’, or where too much of these signs have disappeared, cannot tell us much. [. . .] It is telling that dictatorships that deny and despise the past often destroy landscapes in a bewildering fashion, as if they want to rob the people from their memories. (ditto)

According to van Toorn, we have a responsibility to take care of the old ‘signs’ in the landscape, out of gratitude towards our predecessors who, by living in it and with it, made the landscape what it is now. We should also prevent a collective memory loss and a loss of identity, as we otherwise will not be able to learn from the past. The old cultural landscape is loaded with meanings that, once destroyed, cannot be restored. For van Toorn, the reason we should protect these old landscapes is not because of an ‘intrinsic’ feature of these landscapes themselves, but because of the fact that the legible features in it are prerequisites for humans to have a meaningful relation with the land. These signs make the world into a habitable place; they enable us to dwell in this place. Moreover, the legibility is also enhanced because this landscape plays a role in novels, poems, films and other ‘genres of imagination’.2 In other words, the landscape is legible not solely by virtue of the material signs in the landscape, but also because people tell stories about it and invest it with meaning. The signs in the landscape make up a narrative that reflects the history of the place and the relations people have and have had with it. Moreover, because these histories and relations differ from region to region, these signs in the landscape add to a specific regional character of a place. Many old signs in the landscape follow a specific structure that is often repeated over again in a certain region, but differently in other regions. In The Landscape as Memory, a collection of essays against dike

2 The

collective experience of the Dutch landscape has been influenced to a large extent by the works of writers such as Hendrik Marsman and Nescio, or more recently Willem van Toorn and Koos van Zomeren.

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reinforcement, an archaeologist is cited, who explains what this means in terms of identity and feeling connected with the landscape: As a Drenth [someone from the Dutch province of Drenthe, MD], I feel at home in the old, historical province of Drenthe, because of the structure that repeats itself there wherever I am. There is the village with the village green, encircled by the common fields, and beyond them the pastures in the brook valleys and the heathland. Whatever village I visit, whether it is for the first time or not, I immediately feel at home because of these regional characteristics. Likewise, someone living in the village of Moordrecht in the province of South Holland will not feel a stranger in Gouderak [another village in South Holland] (Goudriaan, 1993, p. 95).

More or less the same can be said about the river landscape. The river landscape is not a uniform entity but differs from region to region. Careful attention to the specific details of local places reveals that there are subtle regional differences in dike construction, fencing, farmhouse architecture, and land use, which all help to distinguish one regional place from another.3 Replacing the old dikes with new, modern, high-tech ones, would erase these regional differences, and would result in alienating local inhabitants from their geographical environment (Fig. 16.2).

Fig. 16.2 Lower Rhine near Wageningen. Photo: Martin Drenthen

3 Furthermore,

some regional differences in style come from geological differences. The Rhine is a glacier river, flowing broadly, steadily and impressively through the landscape. In contrast, the Meuse – a precipitation river – is far more fickle: what normally appears to be a small tranquil stream can become a fearsome wild river in early springtime. These differences are also reflected in the landscape along these rivers: in the height and shape of the dikes, the character of land use in the flood plain, et cetera.

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In sum, the protesters pointed out that the plans of the Directorate-General for Public Works and Water Management to reorganize the river landscape were based on a purely functional view of the river landscape that neglects important aspects of what it means to live in such an area. It would lead to the destruction of those signs in the land that are significant to the people who live and feel at home there. It would destroy the regional diversity of the landscape, and would leave us with an anonymous, monotonous, empty and altogether mute landscape. Eventually, the landscape activists succeeded in their struggle against the eradication of the old river landscape. The Dutch public broadly recognized the importance of safeguarding the traditional river landscape. It led to a change in the political atmosphere concerning spatial planning. A governmental commission dismissed the original plans and decided that future structures should be integrated into the existing landscape more carefully. The whole project was delayed for a few years, but eventually the DirectorateGeneral for Public Works and Water Management managed to modify the original plans and came up with plans for dike reinforcements that took into account the properties of the landscape far more.4 The dikes were eventually strengthened in a manner that was more in tune with the pace and rhythm of the area. When in 1993 and 1995 major flooding threatened houses along the rivers, some local inhabitants blamed the landscape activists for having slowed down the necessary dike improvements. However, in the end, most people agreed that the outcome was aesthetically much more pleasing than the original plans. The new dikes did not leave the landscapes unchanged – some of the old dike houses, for instance, were no longer overlooking the dikes. The latter had in effect become huge walls – but somehow, the new dikes still fitted in the old structure of the land, and at least most of the old ‘signs’ were preserved. Since then, the Dutch government has been paying more attention to cultural-historical considerations. It issued a program called the Belvedère Project to ensure that cultural history is taken into account in spatial planning in future. Still, not all were satisfied with the outcome. Painter Willem den Ouden complained about the ‘systematization of the landscape’. He decided never to paint this landscape again, because it had lost its soul forever. He now only paints the skies above the landscape; it is the only thing that humans have not been able to ruin yet.5 The commitment to the preservation of the river landscape, at least as expressed by Den Ouden and van Toorn, clearly has an ethical side to it. The opposition against the straight dikes originated from a concern for the identity of the people living on the land, and with a sense of place and a sense of history that somehow enabled people to live better lives. We could say that the landscape activists represented an ethics of place, in which the ability of inhabitants to ‘read’ the signs in the landscape 4 The new plans even met the original budget, thus proving the point of the protesters that the flaws

in the original policy were due to negligence. course, this is in contrast with Joseph Beuys’s statement that the land reclamations of the Zuyder Zee have changed the color of the Dutch light significantly. See the documentary Dutch Light: www.dutchlight.nl.

5 Of

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connected them to the place and somehow provided them with a ‘moral measure’. The narrative of the landscape emplaced them in a broader context, the land was an ethos in the sense of ηθoς , if you will, that provided its inhabitants with a sense of what it meant to live in this place appropriately.

16.4 Wetlands and the Erosion of Meaning In the years following the above-mentioned debate, river managers more and more realized that reinforced dikes would not provide an adequate protection against floods forever. Behind the dikes, the land had been subsiding for centuries, whereas between the dikes, water levels had been rising and would probably continue to rise in the future. Building ever-higher dikes will eventually cease to be an option. This insight gradually led to a paradigm shift in water management: instead of putting rivers in straightjackets by constricting them between dikes, we should give them more room; the rivers should again be able to flood the floodplains in times of high water. This paradigm shift resulted in a large-scale national water management plan called ‘Room for the River’. In order to give the rivers more room, human activities in the floodplains such as agriculture would have to be discontinued and the riverside meadows should be transformed into wetland nature reserves. Once again, human intervention will lead to drastic changes in the traditional river landscape. Many of the traditional water meadows will be transformed into swamps and marches, summer dikes will be breached, old clay depositions will be removed from the floodplain and old river branches will be uncovered, all this in order to reinstall natural water dynamics. The reasons for giving the river more room were both ecocentric and anthropocentric. Due to the change in climate, precipitation is expected to rise, causing an increased risk of flooding. ‘Room for the River’ can help reduce that risk. Furthermore, as a heavily populated country, the Netherlands has a great need for recreational sites. These new nature areas may satisfy this need, particularly when there is no high water so that people can hike and cycle in these ‘new nature’ areas. Following the Belvedere principles, ‘Room for the River’ also acknowledges that certain sites and features have cultural-historical importance and should be excluded from nature development (known as ‘keep-off areas’). There were also less anthropocentric motives for ‘Room for the River’. The Dutch government has committed itself to the preservation of biodiversity. One of the most significant threats to biodiversity in the Netherlands is the fragmentation of natural areas. Reintroduction of natural dynamics in floodplains could lead to new habitats for several indigenous species. Wetlands in the floodplains also constitute an ecological network that again enables animals and plants to migrate and spread out. The wetlands form corridors that link different nature reserves together. Many people are concerned that this new large-scale transformation of the river landscape – turning the floodplains into wetlands – will destroy the regional diversity, the legibility of the land and the sense of place that relies on those legible

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layers. Even though a recognition of the value of historical sites is built into the new policy, many believe that only a select number of legible features in the landscape will be regarded spectacular enough to be considered sites of historical importance. The rest is bound to fall victim to the new policy. Thus, these new large-scale interventions endanger the old legible cultural landscape, and consequently, the experience of being connected to the land and being at home in the landscape. In short, this nature development forms another threat to the old river landscape that was saved from destruction by the construction of straight dikes not so long ago. In the eyes of those concerned with the cultural landscape, nature development consists of the effort to go back to a landscape that predates human habitation. It will wipe out as far as possible all traces of human history in the landscape, removing the human signs and imprints in the landscape, transforming a legible landscape that testifies of the past into an a-historical, mute landscape. Natural processes are the same everywhere and the net result of the ‘Room for the River’ project will be a monotonous mute landscape that does not have any readable signs. For this reason, Willem van Toorn is highly skeptical about nature development in the river landscape. The type of nature that nature builders aspire does not tell us anything [. . .]; humans as strangers, as visitors in their own landscape. (van Toorn, 1998, p. 77)

Note that van Toorn refuses to use the common Dutch word for nature development (‘natuurontwikkeling’) but instead speaks of nature construction (‘natuurbouw’), referring to a technological form of thinking about the landscape. To van Toorn, the idea of creating wetlands in the floodplains comes from a similar state of mind as the idea to replace old winding dikes with new straight ones: The one danger to the Dutch landscape is that it will be crushed between two ways of technological thinking: that of large-scale dike reinforcements and that of “constructing nature”. [. . .] I fear that journalists, artists and writers will have to keep explaining that you can create something like nature, but that you can never restore a cultural landscape that has been built up over many centuries, once it is destroyed. (van Toorn, 1998, pp. 77–78)

16.5 New Nature and the Loss of Connectedness The new debate now taking place is slightly more complicated. In the previous one, i.e. the debate on dike reinforcements, the conflict was between those who were concerned with the landscape and those who were primarily concerned with other issues such as safety. In contrast, the current opposition is different: most people consider the new development to be an improvement of ‘spatial quality’, only some of the local stakeholders appear to be skeptical. In 2003, the Dutch research institute Alterra conducted a survey into the changing public perceptions and appreciations of riverine landscapes in response to ecological reconstruction projects in the floodplains. They interviewed local residents, holyday-makers and people who did not have a specific relationship with a particular place, and asked them how the recent changes had affected their appreciation of the landscape.

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Almost all respondents reported that they considered the new areas to be an improvement. All believed that the visual attractiveness of the wetlands was higher than that of the old water meadows and all felt that the accessibility of the areas (for recreation and the like) had improved. Most people also believed that the ‘nature value’ of the new areas was higher, although some of the local respondents did not agree with that: they considered the traditional landscape just as ‘natural’ as the new one. However, the most important difference between the local respondents and nonlocal respondents had to do with the sense of connection with the landscape. It is understandable that the non-local respondents did not value this aspect very highly, as they had no consistent connection with the landscape as occasional visitors. For the local population, however, the new landscape really caused them to lose this sense of connection with the land. It is easy to understand why: as a landscape of memory, the old cultural landscape was legible as a narrative, and this narrative intertwined with the personal narratives of people inhabiting this landscape. As nature development involves the destruction of some of the old signs of habitation in the landscape, it also implies a loss of memory that causes a feeling of homelessness. According to van Toorn, people need these signs, this readability of the land, to feel connected and committed to particular places. The constructors of the new areas artificially create new signs because the old signs are lost: The type of nature that nature builders aspire does not tell to us anything – that is why these newly created nature areas have to be provided with information pavilions and signposting, and treasure hunts are organized along routes with special tree species and ponds with halfdomesticated otters; humans as strangers, as visitors in their own landscape. (van Toorn, 1998, p. 77)

Seen from the perspective of people who feel connected with the old landscape, the new nature reserves can at best lead to an impoverished (and probably perverted) sense of place attachment. The new feeling of attachment with the landscape is to a large degree dependent on experts, historians and ecologists, who provide people with a narrative that makes particular places legible again. However, this new landscape narrative does not really come from the place itself; it is attributed to it. The new stories are made up by experts (who are often strangers to the land themselves) and passed on to other ‘visitors to the landscape’. The traditional landscape somehow provided its inhabitants – those who knew how to read the signs of the land – with a ‘moral measure’. Implied in the traditional sense of place and sense of belonging was a knowledge of what was appropriate, what was ‘in place’. Because of this loss of a moral measure coming from outside ourselves, from the place itself, van Toorn considers it dangerous that people aspire to create landscapes, in which human are only present as tourists – and no longer as residents for whom the signs and the narratives of the land are food for their spirit. (van Toorn, 1998, pp. 76–77)

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16.6 Ethics of Place or Defending Your Back Yard? This difference between the landscape experience of locals and that of the rest of the population with regard to the Room for the River project could lead to the conclusion that the protest against room for rivers is in its essence a political conflict, a conflict between different interests. That in turn could lead to the suspicion that the opposition against Room for the River could be a form of Not-In-My-Back-Yard activism. However, as I would like to show, this is missing the point. Some scholars frame these types of conflict between the different views on how to deal with the landscape as a classical political conflict. Different interests regarding the use of the land lead to competing views on how to deal with the landscape. The conflict can then be summarized as that between those who feel at home in the landscape and demand that their feelings are taking into account, and those who do not have such a special connection, but who have their own demands and expectations concerning spatial planning, such as ‘nature conservation’ or ‘flood safety’. If interpreted in this way, the landscape itself does not play a significant role in the conflict at hand. However, we lose something essential once we translate the debate about the landscape into political terms. That is because the motives of the landscape activists are not personal preferences in the ordinary sense. They care about the landscape because it is connected with their particular way of life. Some speak in the name of the old landscape, signifying it as a meaningful place that deserves protection in its own right. The river landscape plays a role in the stories that these people tell about themselves, but also, the self-stories in the end all add up to a narrative of the land. The old river landscape does have all kinds of functions – whether it is ecological, economical, recreational or otherwise – but it is also a meaningful place. This latter argument can be framed in political terms – ‘the old landscape is being valued by certain groups of people, and should therefore be taken into account in the political process’ – but something is lost in this translation. The struggle against the destruction of the river landscape harbors a different, more radical conflict. At this point, it can be helpful to look at the work of the British philosopher Mick Smith. In his book An Ethics of Place, Smith discusses the road protests in the UK in the late 1990 s. In more than some respects, these protests resemble those against the new dikes and nature development in the Netherlands. The British protests were directed against the cutting down of forests for the construction of roads. Protesters occupied the forests; they built tree houses and stayed there for a couple of weeks, to complicate the road construction. Just as in the Netherlands, these conflicts seem to revolve around different spatial experiences. According to Smith, the motives of these road protesters reveal a new kind of ethic that implies a fundamental breach with the common view of the landscape. Where in the dominant view, space appears as abstract, exchangeable extended space to be used, occupied by humans at will, the protesters initiated a different conception ‘space’, in which each particular place has its own specific meaning,

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history, ecology, narrative and intertwinement with community and personal lives. In the British road protest, a new kind of ethic emerged, that leaves behind the universal, rational ethics and politics of ‘reasonable decisions’, and looks to replace it with a new, barely articulated place-based ethos. Because the new ethics has difficulty expressing itself, many activist use traditional ethical terms such as ‘the right of trees to exist’, but in reality, the new ethics is still searching for adequate expression. Besides being a political instrument to hinder the cutting down of trees, trees houses are, in a sense, a new expression of this new ethics. By inhabiting the forest and building tree houses, this ethics of place occupies the forests that, on the one hand, respects that place itself, but on the other, makes it part of the human world – filling it with signs and meanings; intertwining its story with that of its inhabitants. The abstract ‘intrinsic value’ of the forest gets a concrete embodiment. The British road protesters contrast their ethos with the ethics of the car driver. For the motorist, a road is a line between two points in space, a means of getting from A to B as efficient as possible. The tree house builders demand a change of perspective. To them, the points half way are places in their own right. To them, places are not just points of departure or destinations. Their meaning cannot be understood solely in terms relative to movement. The places, that to motorist are only places of transition, have their own meaning and structure, their own ‘measure’ as it were. The conflict cannot be understood in terms of conflicting interests of citizens within a liberal-political arena. In the Dutch resistance against the distortion of the river landscape, something similar is at stake. The resistance against dike reinforcements and nature development is the resistance against an equalization of space, against the proliferations of place. Its central aim is to show how each landscape is its specific quality, has its own specific ethos. Therefore, the conflict should not be interpreted solely as a conflict of interest between those with and those without a special connection with the land. Seen from this perspective, the conflict between different views on the landscape is far more radical. On one side, we see the local inhabitants who represent an ethics of place. Their ideal is a harmonious intersection of nature and culture; a land saturated with meanings and signs and populated by those who can and who care to read these signs. They define themselves in terms of a sense of belonging to a landscape whose message they can understand. In this view, the land is a place where one can belong, and the sense of place can add to one’s feeling of identity. On the other side, there are those who do not see these local signs. They regard the landscape as something that can be transformed at will. To them, the land is a blank slate that can be rewritten at will. From this position, ethics is what people decide on. It is up to people to decide if they want to organize a landscape with purely functional considerations in mind, or if they want to take into account cultural history and aesthetics. Either way, seen from this perspective, ethics and place do not have anything to do with each other. The conflict between these two views on the landscape is one between those who consider the landscape just mute material that one can use at will, and those for

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whom the landscape is a place filled with meaningful signs that reveal an internal structure to those inhabiting the land. At stake is a radical, almost metaphysical question about the status of place in human life: is it interchangeable, manageable and can it be reorganized by humans? Or does it have an internal structure that humans have to adapt to?

16.7 Putting New Nature in Place However, the depiction of nature development has been very one-sided up until now. In the perspective of the defenders of the cultural river landscape, signs are always human signs, and meanings in the landscape always derive from human habitation. One could criticize the proponents of the old cultural landscape for their conservatism and anthropocentrism. By deifying all that already exists in the landscape, they turn a living landscape into a museum. Humans have continually changed aspects of the landscape, not just now but also in the 17th century (Cf. Zwart, 2003). If we value signs in the landscape, then somehow, we ourselves should also be allowed to leave signs in the landscape as well.6 Maybe it is possible to reinterpret the new nature development as being just that: writing new signs in the landscape. Moreover, nature development could also be interpreted as a correction of the human-centeredness of the traditional cultural landscape, in which nature does not really have an own voice in the narrative of the land. The ‘legible’ signs in the landscapes are not just those inscribed by humans. Other beings left their traces as well. All kinds of natural processes, from ecology to geology, made these places into what they are now. Humans are merely co-authors of the landscape, the overall narrative of each place was written by nature itself. Starting from this, many restoration biologists agree with the critics that ‘nature construction’ is not desirable at all. Nature construction would transform the effort of nature development into what its critics say it is: a purely technological approach to the landscape, terra forming without respect for that which is already present on the ground. In the eyes of many ecological restorationists, such an approach to nature management would be difficult to reconcile with the more sensitive approach to nature and landscape that most restoration ecologists feel is at the heart of nature conservation. This natural narrative of the place could be interpreted as the complement of the anthropocentric narrative that the cultural landscapists refer to. In his defense of the cultural landscape, van Toorn mentioned that the value of a landscape also lies in the testimony of the struggle that people had with nature in their effort to survive along the rivers. One could say that nature development comes down to

6 Willem

van Toorn admits that we should not turn our landscapes into museums. He praises the Italian landscape of Tuscany, where even the modern highways somehow follow the ancient pathways of the Romans. The new should take the old into account, not by deifying the old, but by respecting the old legibility while writing new layers on the land.

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the effort to – literally – dig up the older layers that precede human population. By revealing how the landscape must have been like at the time that humans did not yet dominate the landscape, we show with what forces the early inhabitants had to deal with, what the place was like at the beginning of its habitation. It can provide human place-history with a broader context again. In that sense, developing wetlands along the rivers could be understood of as a deepening of the ethics of place, rather than a destruction of it. Dutch ecologist Frans Vera, who is one of the major proponents of the Room for the River project, defends the idea of nature development with reference to the so-called ‘shifting baseline syndrome’ (Vera, 2006). Vera argues that, in the process of human habitation, cultivation and domestication of the landscape, there has always been an awareness of the difference between cultural landscapes and ‘pure’ nature. Alongside the cultural landscape that was determined to a large degree by humans, there always existed a more natural landscape. The contrast between these two types of landscape enabled humans to compare the human-centered landscape with its non-human-centered original. This way, humans had a baseline – the original nature – that could help them ‘place’ the human-centered landscape within the broader context of the surrounding nature. What is relatively new to our present historical situation is, according to Vera, that this pristine, original nature no longer exists in most places. For that reason, we do no longer posses a clear baseline. As a result, people have all kinds of unfounded ideas about how ‘real’ nature looks like – ideas that are not only unfounded, but also constantly changing. This socalled ‘shifting baseline syndrome’ is one of the reasons why many people do not perceive the decline of nature nowadays: their ideas about what real nature looks like change together with the deterioration of nature. Apparently, Vera’s argument in favor of nature development depends to a large degree on the need that he feels for a new baseline. In its core, this is a moral argument. The natural baseline should provide us humans with a non-anthropocentric moral measure with which to look at ourselves critically. According to Vera, nature development is necessary, because it can help humans to regain a sense of what the baseline is. With nature development, we get a sense of how the natural world looked like, where we humans originated. In a sense, one could say that Vera wants to morally deepen our sense of place into a ‘sense of place v.2.0’ if you will. He wants to provide our human world with a context. Seen from this perspective, nature development could be a correction, or even a deepening of the sense of place, by confronting it with a ‘measure’ that can limit our cultural appropriations of place. Other restoration biologists and nature developers are concerned with issues of place themselves. Wouter Helmer, restoration ecologist and director of a major Dutch nature development organization (‘Stichting Ark’), is also a strong defender of the ideas behind Room for the River. However, together with landscape architect Willem Overmars he, too, criticizes the idea of ‘nature construction’. Helmer and Overmars argue that the idea that one can ‘build’ nature (with a certain ‘goal type nature’ in mind) ultimately leads to the creation ‘a fake landscape, a fake geomorphology and a fake history’ (Helmer & Overmars, 1998, p. 3). Instead, nature developers should be concerned with place as well.

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The place-based approach to nature development can be strengthened by actively involving communities of local inhabitants. Some nature developers – such as Wouter Helmer – promote the idea that the new nature reserves should be as accessible to humans as possible: away with barbed-wire fences and prohibition signs. Furthermore, one can even try to combine the development of wetlands with a community-based approach, as is happening in the Waalweelde project (www.waalweelde.nl). Here, the effort is to actively involve the inhabitants in river management by giving them a role to play in the design process. Local inhabitants have to work together to actively commit themselves to the landscape design process; this activates their sense of place but revitalizes their place-based community as well. In this sense, one could see the development of nature in the floodplains as a chance to revitalize place: strengthening the sense of place, reviving place-based communities and opening up the possibility of developing a ‘sense of place v.2.0’ (Fig. 16.3). Helmer and Overmars caution us that we should not be led into believing that purely cultural landscapes and pure natural non-human landscapes are the only alternatives. Instead, we should interpret the new nature areas as cultural landscapes too.

Fig. 16.3 Rewilding rivers. Drawing by Jeroen Helmer, ARK Nature

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From this point of departure, they argue for a middle position that acknowledges that what is already present, but at the same time aims at ‘revitalizing’ the landscape by allowing new developments. According to Helmer and Overmars, nature development projects should start with a meticulous examination of those structural features in the landscape that are already present. This ‘genius of place’ consists of the (non-anthropogenic) natural processes that are characteristic of a certain area, the (anthropogenic) historical developments of a certain landscape as far as these contributed to the specific character of that area, and the societal functions that enable people to interact with these natural processes in ways that are both physically and economically sustainable. Taking into account this genius of place implies, for instance, that nature developers not only have to take into account the anthropogenic signs in the landscape, but also the geological structures in the landscape. Respecting the geomorphology in a floodplain area implies that one tries to reveal the original river branches that have disappeared due to sedimentation after the embankments were made, instead of digging new ones at will. By removing the clay depositions following the relief of the soil, one could say that nature development projects that start from this ‘genius of place’, reveal older structural layers of the landscape, even though this is sometimes possible only by disrupting layers that are more recent.

16.8 Towards a Palimpsest Landscape? Starting from this ‘emplaced’ view of nature development, it may even prove to be possible to reconcile new nature with a view that is concerned with the legibility of the landscape. Developing nature is then not the eradication of human history, but – on the contrary – the placing of human history within a deeper, broader framework of earth history. Each inhabited place has a narrative that predates that of habitation. Retrieving the older layers in the landscape may thus deepen the sense of place. Confronted again with the way in which a river has changed its course during the past millennia, people begin to realize what it means to be an inhabitant of a river landscape. It can help them gain a sense of place that is more in line with that of the first inhabitants of the land, who had to deal with nature when it was a powerful opponent that still had to be dealt with. Maybe the ideal should be a layered landscape which shows how different legible layers lie on top of each other. Archaeologists call these types of multi-layered landscapes ‘palimpsests’. The term palimpsest originally refers to recycled parchment documents. In the Middle Ages, parchment paper was expensive to such an extent that people took older documents (often from Antiquity) and bleached the old ink in order to re-use the parchment for writing new texts over the old ones.7 Archaeologists use the term too, for they are concerned with reading different 7 Nowadays,

historians use new imaging technologies to decipher old texts without destroying the new texts. A few years ago, a hitherto unknown text by Archimedes was discovered, hidden under the text of a medieval prayer book.

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legible layers in the soil, and are trying to find ways to read the older layers without destroying the more recent ‘signs’ on top.

16.9 Non-place in Supermodernity However, maybe we should not try to reconcile the different perspectives on the landscape too easily. Behind the struggle for the arrangements of public space lies a conflict between different ways of dealing with our relation with place and history. According to van Toorn, there is more at stake than just the aesthetic quality of the landscape or the local inhabitants’ sentiments. van Toorn rejects the ideal of nature development, because it cuts off the roots of those who feel connected to ‘their’ landscape. He rejects the new view on the landscape, because it represents a view of life and of history that he despises: The cultural landscape does not have a lobby. It is, at least in the Netherlands, protected by a small group of artists and intellectuals. They protect it against a light-hearted kind of postmodern form of thinking in which history is just a grab bag, from which one can carelessly throw away anything that is not fashionable. [. . .] I consider it a dangerous development that, with nature construction, people aspire to create landscapes in which humans are present only as tourists – and no longer as residents for whom the signs and narratives of the land are food for their spirit. (pp. 76–77)

van Toorn contrasts the local inhabitant – capable and willing to read the signs of the land – with the postmodern visitor to the landscape, who is not connected to place in anyway, neither to the landscape itself nor to history.8 Where the placedweller derives the meaning of his life from the place and its history, the postmodern visitor – notably the city dweller who visits the river landscape for leisure – conceives of himself as a self-invented, autonomous being. The real worry for those opposing the distortion the river landscape is not so much that a landscape dominated by culture is transforming into a landscape where natural processes have more room, but that all these developments represent an erosion of place. At this point, it can be helpful to look at the work of the French anthropologist Marc Augé. Augé uses three characteristics that define an (anthropological) ‘place’, which resemble Willem van Toorn’s remarks on the old river landscapes. Following the definition of Maus, Augé starts with the idea that place is culture localized in time and space. Next, he distinguishes different aspects of place: each place is a place of history (the inhabitant of an anthropological place does not make history, but lives in it), of identity (it constitutes the identity of people living there), and of relations (the order that links one person to that place, also links the others living there) (Augé, 1995, p. 52). According to Augé, in our age, more and more locations do no longer possess these features of anthropological place; he calls these locations ‘non-places’. 8 It

must be said, however, that this postmodern visitor will probably in some sense feel connected to the city he lives in – a type of place attachment Van Toorn does not seem to consider.

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Non-places are the product of our historical era that he calls ‘supermodernity’. Supermodernity is the historical era in which our relation to history, to place and to each other is drastically different from that in premodern and modern societies. According to Augé, supermodernity is determined by three forms of excess: overabundance of events, spatial overabundance and the individualization of references. The term ‘overabundance of events’ refers to the acceleration of history that we are witnessing today. According to Augé, it leads to an ever-more fleeting notion of history. History ceases to be a stable point of reference; as a result, the feeling of being successors of our predecessors is more and more alien to us. The notion of spatial overabundance refers to the increased mobility of people, who are now able to visit more places than ever before in history. Augé points out that, paradoxically, this spatial overabundance leads to a ‘shrinking’ of the planet, as different places in the world are becoming more and more alike. In this era in which we are becoming increasingly mobile, we are decreasingly able to really connect to places (Fig. 16.4). Finally, the form of excess in the relation to place refers to the rise of individualism. According to Augé, we do no longer collectively share places as shared frames of reference, but instead, all of us have our own ‘trajectory’ in space.9

Fig. 16.4 Miniature landscapes at the information center of the Dutch Cultural Landscape Association in Beek, near Nijmegen. Photo by Valentijn te Plate, Nederlands Cultuurlandschap

9 Some

will argue, in contrast, that many people are actively involved with the place in which they live, today more than ever. However, a conscious effort to collectively invest meaning in place – to which many local communities indeed seem to commit themselves these days – could be interpreted as being actually a symptom of the erosion of place as it apparently is no longer a spontaneous process.

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The net result of this development of supermodernism is that more and more places in the world lack the aspects of place that enable people to integrate place in their lives in a meaningful way. According to Augé, an airport is an outstanding example of a non-place.10 It has been specially designed to optimize the throughput of passengers: no one is at home there; everyone is just passing through. Furthermore, most airports did not grow organically, but were designed and redesigned solely for purposes such as efficiency, prestige, et cetera. In no way do these non-places contribute to a sense of identity. According to Bruno Bosteels, individuals in non-places are typically ‘passengers or customers or both’, who ‘immerse themselves in the chance anonymity of an empty space without history, as if trapped and immobilized in a time without events. What people usually do in such places [. . .] would seem to involve little more than waiting, remembering, or shopping while passing through’ (Bosteels, 2003).11 Naturally, non-places such as airports can be filled with meanings. The difference, however, is that non-places, ‘do not integrate the earlier places: instead, these are listed, classified, promoted to the status of “places of memory,” and assigned a circumscribed and specific position.’ Because all people occupying these locations are either at work or just passing through, the meaningful signs in non-places will probably be the result of advertising campaigns and corporate identity projects and the like. No one is really at home there; only a very narrow part of people’s lives takes place in these non-places. Non-places do not reflect a genuine history nor do they define a person’s identity; they do not genuinely help to define the relationships that people have with each other.12 Non-places make up a purely functional, sanitized landscape. Such an arrangement of space misses the specifics of a regional place that enable people to feel connected with it. The concept of non-place should give us serious reason to reconsider the idealizations of the old cultural river landscape, and the place-attachment of its inhabitants. According to Augé’, as soon as we see certain places as ‘places of memory’, we already start transforming them into non-places. Should that not make us a bit more suspicious about the simple opposition between emplaced old cultural landscapes and the new landscapes as non-places? 10 Other

examples of non-places are service stations, supermarkets, malls, hotel chains, and so on. could also give a more positive description of the relation between passengers and nonplaces. Some people even appreciate non-places such as airports precisely because being stuck there enables them, for instance, to read a book without being called away for all kinds of societal demands. 12 Although, of course, we should add, that all non-places tend to be filled with meaning by people using them. Augé, too, acknowledges that there are hardly any ‘pure’ non-places – people are investing meaning in new places constantly. In the 2004 movie Terminal, Viktor Navorski, an eastern immigrant finds himself stranded in JFK airport, and must take up temporary residence there. He is forced to make his home in the airport terminal – the pivotal non-place. As Viktor is trying to find his way around, however, we gradually come to know the terminal as somehow a place in its own right. Both perspectives collide in a brilliantly funny scene. Viktor is shaving in a public restroom, when a worn out business man comes in and asks: ‘Ever feel like you’re living in an airport?’ 11 One

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Behind the pleas for preserving the cultural landscapes along the rivers is the assumption that the inhabitants all share a certain sense of place and know how to read the signs in the landscape. Maybe we should allow ourselves to question seriously whether this assumption is actually justified. Should we not admit that, today, hardly anyone really feels connected with a location in the sense that van Toorn is expressing? Of course, we all feel connected with a particular place every now and then. Moreover, most of us feel connected with more than one place. I feel connected with the village of my childhood, with the nature reserve where I spent most of my holidays in my youth, with the neighborhood that I lived in for the last 20 years, with the forest and hills close to my hometown. However, I also feel connected with the breathtakingly beautiful Tavignanu Valley in the heart of Corsica, and with the Eiffel mountains in Germany, where I like to go hiking every now and then, and with St. John’s, Newfoundland, where I attended some environmental philosophy meetings. However, the reasons that I value the Tavignanu Valley have more to do with me and with the shortcomings of modern-life in the Netherlands than with the actual place itself. Although as a visitor I can somehow ‘sense’ the old signs in the landscape, I dare not pretend to be able to read these signs as someone actually living there can. Furthermore, the places that I have a special connection with are very different from those of my neighbors and those of my colleagues. Although, of course, to some extent some places are still shared reference points that partly determine people’s relations to each other,13 places are no longer the taken-for-granted background shared by all people. The point is that we are far more supermodern than van Toorn thinks we are.

16.10 Are We Strangers on the Land? If Augé’s diagnosis of our age as supermodernity makes any sense – if we are indeed to a large degree determined by the overabundance of place and history, and highly individualized – than most people are already distanced from their roots to a degree that is far beyond repair. If so, this means, in a sense, that non-places are everywhere, albeit not in a pure form. In that case, whatever new senses of place we will be able to come up with, they will always be ‘provisional’ and, in a certain way, far more superficial than we would like them to be. Our sense of connectedness with the land will then always be accompanied by a profound sense of estrangement. Perhaps we supermodern humans are indeed to a large degree destined to be ‘present only as tourists’. If this is the case, the place ideal expressed by van Toorn cannot be more than nostalgia. Of course, we all would like to feel connected with

13 When

my colleagues and I recently moved to a new building for the science faculty, we shared that experience of being simultaneously forced to re-invent some of our daily routines, thus sharing a certain place as a common point of reference.

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a place in the deepest sense, but it is very well possible that our desire for these places is just a means of suppressing our real identity. In that case, we can still conceive ourselves ‘as residents for whom the signs and the narratives of the land are food for their spirit’, but we should no longer pretend to have a primordial bond with the land. ‘Information pavilions, signposting, treasure hunts along routes with special tree species and ponds with half-domesticated otters’ can provide us with a temporary sense of meaning, but in the end, and to some degree, we will remain strangers, visitors to the landscape. Furthermore, if Augé’s diagnosis of supermodernity has some credibility, clinging to the ideal of ‘good old’ place attachment will somehow seduce us to turn our surroundings into artificial ‘landscapes of memory’, that is: museum pieces, ironical look-alikes of landscapes that once were places. Instead of connecting our identity with place, we would actually draw back into a would-be identity and as a result create non-places ourselves – landscapes that solely reflect our inability to come to terms with our time. By neglecting the reality of supermodernity, we would end up creating fake places ever more. If Augé is right, non-places are not just the accidental result of local erosion of place. Instead, they are the result of what has become of us; a symptom of how supermodernity has changed our whole mode of existence. Opposition against the erosion of place would then turn out to be a symptom of the crisis of place rather than salvation from it. The calls for restoring place attachment neglect the causes behind changes in our experience of place, they lead to people masquerading in an artificial landscape.

16.11 New Wilderness as an Effort to Emplace Our Homelessness If Augé’s diagnosis of supermodernity makes any sense, we should not only reinterpret the desire for place, but also try a different interpretation of the ideas behind nature development. Would it not be possible to come up with a more positive interpretation of what new-nature reserves mean for our relation to place? Instead of blaming nature developers for a ‘light-hearted kind of post-modern form of thinking in which history is just a grab bag, from which one can carelessly throw away anything that isn’t fashionable’, as Willem van Toorn puts it, we should keep an open mind for new and more positive interpretations. Maybe we can interpret the new nature development movement as a new, postmodern attempt to invest meaning in the landscape in a way that mirrors our contemporary position in time and space. We could try to interpret nature development as an attempt to mirror our new identity in the landscape again, in an attempt to leave behind supermodernity with its meaningless non-places. Following Augé, we could say that today, in supermodernity, we do not witness a shortage, but, on the contrary, an overabundance of ascribed meanings in the landscape (the signposts and information pavilions, treasure hunts and cycling trails). The post-modern way of dealing with such a landscape would then not be recalling

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and longing back to some premodern forms of connectedness with one particular place, but, on the contrary, would further radicalize the different relations we nowadays have with the land. Maybe the ‘new wildernesses’ should be interpreted as sites where we ‘emplace’ our identity once again, but now, paradoxically, by acknowledging our ‘placelessness’, as it were (cf. Drenthen, 2005). Some restorationists seem to have something like this in mind. Wouter Helmer once used the phrase ‘insane oasis’ (Helmer, 1996) to designate meaning to these ‘new wildernesses’: places of freedom, where one can put into perspective the ‘sanity’ of our everyday moral conventions and regulations. In this interpretation, the new ‘wildernesses’ are places where we can escape from the overabundance of societal orders and regulations and, one might add, symbolizations of place, which help us focus again on the not-yet-symbolized place. If we may take these interpretations seriously, the new nature development projects along the rivers should be interpreted as an effort to ‘emplace’ supermodern humans again. To put it paradoxically: here we try to ‘place’ ourselves as beings that are, in some sense at least, rootless; here we can really be the ‘natural aliens’ that we are (Cf. Evernden, 1993). However, if we take this interpretation seriously, we should stop trying to make people feel at home there by means of information pavilions and treasure hunts. Instead, we should invest in a credible interpretation of what it means to be a stranger on earth.

16.12 Closing Remark So where does all this leave us with regard to our evaluation of the meaning of place in environmental restoration? Seen from the dominant river management perspective, the creation of nature in the floodplains appears merely as a powerful management tool to reduce flood risks while increasing landscape quality. Place attachment is considered a subjective extra but does not play a decisive role. In the end, this perspective is mostly a technical one, in which moral or cultural meanings are almost impossible to articulate. Should we accept this view as the dominant one? We have discussed three different views on what nature development could mean for place. All of them imply a vision of what places along a river are and reflect a certain ethical stance towards these places. They raise different questions and open different interpretational alleys on what is at stake in the future management of river. Let me briefly recount a few of them. The perspective of the legible landscape argues that our river management efforts should be strictly confined, so as to prevent the destruction of old legible signs that enable humans to live meaningful ‘placed’ lives. We should enable people to grow a morally deep, and culturally rich connection to the river and let the meanings and traces that make up the land play a part in the way we occupy our places. The past

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should not prevent us from making new traces, but guide our efforts to find new appropriate ways to embrace the river. The second perspective of ‘regrounding’ place interprets the development of new nature as a chance to revitalize and deepen our sense of place into a ‘sense of place v.2.0’ as it were. In this approach, the interpretational power of science is used by experts to disclose a deeper story of the river that can be understood by other people as well. The river presents a moral baseline, urging us to put in perspective our anthropocentric fixation on human needs and meanings, and to acknowledge that the river as a basis for what is valuable. From the third point of view, the new nature practices can be seen as alternative forms of place-making that attempt to emplace our new postmodern cosmopolitan identity in which a feeling of estrangement from nature is a key feature. In stead of appropriating the meaning of a river, we let the wildness of the river enrich our lives again, as a mysterious place where we can be alone and encounter the unruly. Apparently, these new practices allow for multiple interpretations, multiple visions of what places have to say to us in our time. Different views on the meaning of the new places along the rivers also imply different views on who we are ourselves. But not all modes of reasoning will be equally appropriate at all times and on all places. The question is not just what these places are, but also who we are in these places. The question of place is urgent, now more than ever. It is up to the philosophy of place to help modern society understand what is at stake here.

References Augé, M. (1995). Non-places. Introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity (J. Howe, Trans.). London, New York: Verso. Bosteels, B. (2003). Nonplaces. An anecdoted topography of contemporary French theory. Diacritics, 33(3/4), 117–139. Drenthen, M. (2005). Wildness as critical border concept; Nietzsche and the debate on wilderness restoration. Environmental Values, 14(3), 317–33. Evernden, N. (1993). The natural alien. Humankind and the environment. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Goudriaan, H. (1993). Sluipmoord op het cultuurlandschap. In J. Bervaes, et al. (Eds.), Landschap als geheugen. Opstellen tegen de dijkverzwaring (pp. 85–97). Amsterdam: Cadans. Helmer, W. (1996). Waanzinnige oases. In A. Barendregt, M. Amesz, & J. van Middelaar (Eds.), Natuurontwikkeling: zin of waanzin? (pp. 81–90). Utrecht: Faculteit Ruimtelijke Wetenschappen, University Utrecht. Helmer, W. & Overmars, W. (1998). Genius of place. Aarde & Mens, 2(2), 3–10. Janz, B. (2009). ‘Thinking like a mountain.’ Ethics and place as traveling concepts. In M. Drenthen, J. Keulartz, & J. Proctor (Eds.), New visions of nature (pp. XX–XX). Springer: Springer Netherlands. Smith, M. (2001). An ethics of place. Radical ecology, postmodernity, and social theory. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Stephanovic, I. (2000). Safeguarding our common future. Rethinking sustainable development, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

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Toorn, W. van (1998). Leesbaar landschap. Amsterdam: Querido. Vera, F. (2006, July 10). The shifting baseline syndrome: The pitfall of language in restoration ecology. Paper presented at the conference Restoring or renaturing? The presence of the past in ecological restoration, Zurich. Zwart, H. (2003). Aquaphobia, tulipmania, biophilia: A moral geography of the Dutch landscape. Environmental Values, 12(1), 107–128.

Chapter 17

Restoring Nature in a Mobile Society C.S.A. (Kris) van Koppen

My eye a scene familiar sees And Home is whispered by the breeze (James Russell Lowell, 1880, quoted in Worster, 1985,p. 14)

17.1 Introduction Drenthen explores interesting lines of argument within debates on nature restoration in the Netherlands. For this purpose he applies dichotomies such as locals versus visitors, ecocentrism versus anthropocentrism and nature-centered landscapes versus human-centered landscapes – dichotomies that are characteristic of nature conservation debates to date. In this commentary I will critique these dichotomies from a socio-cultural history perspective. Just as the activists in Drenthen’s text emphasize the different layers of cultural history in our landscapes, I will highlight some of the socio-cultural layers in our visions of nature. After discussing these dichotomies, I will return to the issue of nature conservation to date, and present some thoughts on another key notion in Drenthen’s argument: alienation from nature. Given the scope of this contribution, my comments are brief and written in an essayist style. For those who want to further explore the socio-cultural backgrounds presented, I recommend three excellent books that will be quoted below: Nature’s Economy by Donald Worster (1985), Man and the Natural World by Keith Thomas (1984) and Simon Schama’s Landscape and Memory (1995). They all deserve a prominent place in the canon of Western thinking on nature. Readers searching for a more elaborate underpinning of my criticism, might have a look at my thesis research and related publications (Van Koppen, 2000, 2002, 2006).

C.S.A. (Kris) van Koppen (B) Environmental Policy Group, Wageningen University and Research Center, Hollandseweg 1, 6706 KN Wageningen, Netherlands e-mail: [email protected]

M. Drenthen et al. (eds.), New Visions of Nature, C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-2611-8_17, 

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17.2 Locals and Visitors The dichotomy of locals and visitors is prominent in many studies of nature conservation conflicts. Drenthen gives an eloquent account of it. On one side we see the local inhabitants who represent the ethics of place. Their ideal is a harmonious intersection of nature and culture; a land saturated with meanings and signs and populated by those who can and who care to read these signs. . . .On the other side, there are those who do not hear these local signs. To them, the land is a blank slate that can be rewritten at will.

When we think about nature and landscapes, however, such a way of framing may easily obscure our understanding. Without doubt, local residents have specific attachments to the place where they live. Many elements in their environment host personal and collective memories, which endow this environment with special meanings. This is equally the case for natural elements – trees, fields, lanes, animals, skies – as for cultural elements. All these elements only reveal themselves in their full sensual meaning in situations of physical presence; that is, in local and place-bound encounters. However, the concrete sensual presence of the landscape, and its memory traces in persons and collectives, cannot be equated to the landscape visions and images that guide our appreciation of the aesthetic and moral values of landscapes. These visions, to a great extent, are not local. They are part of a cultural tradition that is firmly rooted in history and is shared by broad categories of citizens in many countries. Following Worster (1985), I have characterized this tradition as the ‘arcadian’ tradition of nature appreciation and protection (Van Koppen, 2000). To provide a glimpse of this tradition, let me borrow a few words from Worster (1985) to recount the story of Gilbert White, one of the first writers to depict the natural richness of the cultural landscape. White was an 18th Century parson living in Selborne, a village to the southwest of London, who published his inquiries as an amateur naturalist in A Natural History of Selborne. Initially largely ignored, the book became the focus of a cult in the mid-19th Century, and Selborne became a target of pilgrimage, not only for English admirers – such as Charles Darwin – but also for a great number of American tourists, among them the American ambassador James Russell Lowell. He is the author of the quote at the beginning of my text, and in this quote he described the mood of the visitors. White himself could well be characterized as a local, although his view of nature was clearly influenced by the naturalist studies of the time and by the pastoral idylls of classical Greek and Roman writers. Transforming his images and beliefs into a vision about an English cultural landscape was definitely the work of non-locals. The admirers of White’s book cherished and propagated its images of natural beauty and harmony of nature and culture in an age of industrialization. Guided by this vision, they visited Selborne and other romantic sites in the English countryside. The familiarity of the scene that unfolded before their eyes when they arrived – epitomized in the words of

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Fig. 17.1 Salomon van Ruysdael: River landscape with ferry (1649)

Lowell – was not caused by the resemblance to previous local experiences, but rather by the recognition of an idealized image within the concrete, sensual appearance of the place (Fig. 17.1). It would be easy to complement this story with many similar ones. For instance, I could recount the tale of an Amsterdam primary school teacher who, as a naturalist and writer, visited many of the Dutch landscapes and made them accessible to a wider public in a series of popular books. It would also be interesting to trace the origins of the activists who spearheaded the protests against the deterioration of cultural landscapes. Often, we would discover that such protests are strongly supported, if not championed, by non-locals, who fight the loss of the local landscape within a much wider-reaching perspective on nature degradation. What these stories boil down to is that the rural landscapes of modern countries are landscapes of visitors as much as locals. The more they are admired because of their naturalness and beauty, the more they are molded on the ideals of an urban and industrial society that longs for a place were nature and culture are in peaceful harmony. In the 19th Century, it was only a small elite that could spend the time and money to visit or even settle in such a place. Now, large groups of citizens can. In fact, mobilities have increased to such a degree that the line between local resident and visitor has become blurred. As Drenthen aptly observed, we are attached to different places in different ways. In a mobile society, visitor roles and local roles largely overlap.

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17.3 Domination and Partnership There is still another dichotomy suggested by the above quoted distinction between those who see nature as a place filled with meaning, and those who consider the landscape as material to be used at will. This is the often-used dichotomy between participation with nature and domination over nature. In the Netherlands, this distinction has been elaborated as a set of fundamental attitudes towards nature, ranging from technocratic ruler, via steward and partner, to participant in nature (Zweers, 1995). The dichotomy that underlies this range is that between anthropocentric and non-anthropocentric (or ecocentric) relationships with nature (Van den Born, 2007). This dichotomy can also easily confuse our understanding of nature in modernity. Obviously, there are many situations and practices in which actors take a ruler, stewardship or partnership stance toward nature. But when speaking of ‘those’ with ecocentric versus ‘those’ with anthropocentric attitudes, we may easily forget that Western attitudes to nature are characterized precisely by the joining of both extremes. Virtually every Dutch citizen will often deal with nature as material to be used at will, in working, travelling, housing and eating. Most Dutch citizens will also frequently relate to nature as a partner, in caring for pets and plants, and visiting nature for leisure. Both kinds of attitudes are in many ways complementary. As Thomas (1984) described in Man and the Natural World, the development of modern sensibilities towards nature runs parallel to the processes of urbanization and industrialization that make people more and more independent from nature in their daily subsistence. Ironically, the entanglement of attitudes is illustrated by all those who burn tanks of petrol to visit the nature areas they admire so much; or by those who love residing in the countryside and thus need new highways for commuting to their city offices. With regard to the nature of our landscapes, we are both ruler and participant, just as we are both visitor and local. Obviously, there are conflicts over the objectives for places: should they be highly productive landscapes, cultural landscapes or landscapes where the dynamics of nature are maximally restored? But these are hardly conflicts between ecocentrists and anthropocentrists. In an abstract sense, we may interpret them as the inner tensions between two complementary stances to nature in modernity, and as a struggle for finding a proper balance between the two. More concretely, most of these conflicts are hardly fuelled by diverging fundamental attitudes, but rather by diverging practical interests and priorities for specific places (cf. Keulartz, Swart, & Windt, 2000).

17.4 The Cultivated and the Wild Taking the argument one step further, there are also good reasons for not overemphasizing the differences in visions on cultural and wild landscapes, i.e. landscapes where the interplay of nature and human cultivation is apparent, and landscapes where natural dynamics are predominant, at least to the eye. Certainly, such differences can be observed in the history of nature appreciation where the English

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landscape paintings of Constable are typical examples of the rural idyll of the cultural landscape, and Bierstadt’s paintings of sequoia trees and Yosemite Valley are icons of the wilderness. Both traditions, however, are closely intertwined. Among the American elite, who in nature protection were oriented towards wilderness, the English countryside vision of White was popular as well. Conversely, Bierstadt’s paintings were well received in England. In Landscape and Memory Schama analyzed the dichotomy of the cultivated and the wild landscape. ‘Arguably,’ he wrote, ‘both kinds of arcadia, the idyllic as well as the wild, are landscapes of urban imagination . . . It’s tempting to see the two arcadias perennially defined against each others . . . But . . . as irreconcilable as the two ideas of arcadia appear to be, their long history suggests that they are, in fact, mutually sustaining’ (Schama, 1995, p. 525) (Fig. 17.2). In Dutch studies on nature perception and nature policy, cultivated nature and wild nature are often identified as different clusters of landscape preferences. In interpreting these different clusters, cultivated nature is usually characterized as ‘arcadian nature’, in contrast to wilderness. This should not make us forget, however, that the modern sensibilities for wild nature are just as much mediated by culture as are the sensibilities for cultural landscapes. From a socio-cultural point of view these two visions of nature are closely akin, and are both articulations of what I have labeled ‘the arcadian tradition’. Even if we forego the question of whether any Dutch landscape can be said to be ‘wild’ or ‘pure’, it is still misleading to characterize cultured landscapes as ‘human-centered’ and the more wild and rugged

Fig. 17.2 Albert Bierstadt: Lake Tahoe (1868)

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landscapes as ‘nature-centered’. In both landscapes, space is reserved for spontaneous natural dynamics to occur. In both landscapes, human interventions have a role to play: in wild landscapes, while there are no obvious patterns of continual intervention, conditions still have to be created and maintained for protecting and guiding the natural dynamics. Moreover, our sensibilities for the aesthetic and moral meanings of nature in both types of landscape have been articulated in the same arcadian tradition of idealizing nature. Acknowledging the close affiliation between the two can help us understand how it is possible that public appreciation for the restored river landscapes has grown so rapidly: this appreciation taps into very similar sensibilities. It is also in line with recent findings from a public survey showing that people who are engaged with nature are not so much characterized by a narrow preference for wild nature, but rather by a broad preference which embraces both cultivated and wild images (De Bakker, Van Koppen, & Vader, 2007).

17.5 Strangers in the Land? When I argue that our efforts for preserving nature are based on an urban vision of nature as a place to visit and enjoy, some readers may perhaps take it as a rather cynical note on the alienation of modern citizens from nature, echoing the comments in Drenthen’s text on super-modern humans as strangers in the land. This is not what I mean to say. True, we are alienated from nature in the sense that we can no longer experience what it is to be wholly immersed in and dependent on the natural dynamics of our immediate environment. We will never know what it is to be part of a culture that is inseparable from nature in all respects. But there is not much reason to deplore that. With the help of industry and science we have built a safer, healthier, and happier home – though unfortunately, for only a limited part of humanity. If, from the safety of this urban-industrial home, we have created an idealized symbolic image of rural nature, then this does not prevent us from visiting that nature and turning ideals and sensibilities into practice. Even though the idealized images of the arcadian tradition are disseminated as symbolic, de-localized images, once visitors arrive, they are applied to and blended with the actual, sensory qualities of place, and vested with concrete meanings. The longer the visitors stay, the more their images are substantiated in traces of concrete experiences. Visions of nature thus become intertwined with collective experiences and personal biographies. Other ways of blending are possible as well. Locals may learn to appreciate their place in new ways through the new perspectives brought from elsewhere by visitors and media. What matters is that the images prove compatible with practices of dealing with local nature, and that the visitors stay long enough for the process of blending to occur. We will remain strangers to the land only as far as we cherish the virtual images of nature without engaging in concrete social practices of enjoying and caring for nature. It is in these practices of human interaction that nature becomes a meaningful place or, as it were, an actual and viable second home.

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17.6 Mobile Nature I have tried to put some of the dichotomies that characterize current nature debates into historical perspective. This is not to suggest that there are no new problems or urgent disputes in nature conservation to date. At the end of this contribution, I will briefly touch on one that I consider to be of special importance for nature conservation in the Netherlands. It is the issue of what we might call ‘mobile nature’. The nature of our landscapes, as I have argued, may not have been defined by locals, but it was certainly defined as local. Its meaning was closely linked to a specific place and its local characteristics. Local species were thought of as residents living as a community or association in a specific place. Protected areas were considered monuments; cultural landscapes were intrinsically linked to the cultural characteristics of the place. It seems that these notions are now shifting. From the viewpoint of ecological networks, nature is supposed to move in flows from one node to another, propelled by climate change (Van Koppen, 2006). Nature is also mobilized with the emergence of the concept of biodiversity, at least when biodiversity is used as a uniform, global currency for expressing nature’s value. Application of this currency makes it possible to assess the value of landscapes from a global point of view, by calculating numbers of endemic species and identifying the biodiversity hotspots of the planet. In addition, nature is mobilized when it is mainly considered as a global resource for production and consumption, e.g. as a depot for genetic information, or an oxygen provider. In stressing such global instrumental functions of landscapes, these landscapes become in principle substitutable by other landscapes, and their values become detached from a particular place. It is difficult to tell, but it seems that the increased pressures on nature from the expanding production and consumption volumes in current society are tending to accelerate these processes of mobilizing nature. Not only in the physical sense of climate change causing migration of plant and animal populations, but also at the level of discourse. When project developers claim places of nature for transport, housing, production, recreation, food production and industrial zones, the idea that it is possible to compensate nature by creating it elsewhere is attractive. When nature conservation advocates try to defend these places and seek for strong arguments, they are tempted to refer to global life support functions and international regulations rather than to local meanings of nature. If these mobile concepts of nature become predominant in our thinking about landscapes, we may come to a point where we no longer consider locals and visitors engaging in the landscape and making it a meaningful home through practices of enjoying and caring for nature as relevant. Then, indeed, nature might become a nonplace, devoid of the moral and aesthetic meanings that nature conservation pioneers once set out to preserve. Then perhaps, we might end up as cosmopolitans in a mobile society, but strangers in the land. To prevent this from happening, we should probably slow down the pace of expansion in today’s mobile society in order to reserve space for both cultural and

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wild landscapes to remain or become places. And, we should allow nature and ourselves the time to settle into these places as our second – and natural – home.

References De Bakker, H. C. M., Van Koppen, C. S. A., & Vader, J. (2007). Het groene hart van burgers. Het maatschappelijke draagvlak voor natuur en natuurbeleid. Wageningen: Wettelijke Onderzoekstaken Natuur & Milieu. Keulartz, J., Swart, S., & Windt, H. van der (2000). Natuurbeelden en natuurbeleid. Theoretische en empirische verkenningen. Den Haag: NWO. Schama, S. (1995). Landscape and memory. London: HarperCollins. Thomas, K. (1984). Man and the natural world: Changing attitudes in England 1500–1800. London: Penguin Books. Van den Born, R. J. G. (2007). Thinking nature. Everyday philosophy of nature in the Netherlands. Dissertation, Radboud University, Nijmegen. Van Koppen, C. S. A. (2000). Resource, Arcadia, lifeworld. Nature concepts in environmental sociology. Sociologia Ruralis, 40(3), 300–318. Van Koppen, C. S. A. (2002). Echte natuur. Een sociaatheoretisch onderzoek naar natuurwaardering en natuurbescherming in de moderne samenleving. Dissertatie Wageningen University. Van Koppen, C. S. A. (2006). Governing nature? On the global complexity of biodiversity conservation. In G. Spaargaren, A. P. J. Mol, & F. H. Buttel (Eds.), Governing environmental flows: Global challenges to social theory (pp. 187–219). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Worster, D. (1985). Nature’s Economy: A history of ecological ideas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zweers, W. (1995). Participeren aan de natuur. Ontwerp voor een ecologisering van het wereldbeeld. Utrecht: Jan van Arkel.

Chapter 18

Between Nativism and Cosmopolitanism: Framing and Reframing in Invasion Biology Jozef Keulartz and Cor van der Weele

18.1 Introduction ‘Place’ is a contested concept in conservation and restoration. In this chapter we will focus on invasion biology to examine some of the topics related to this controversial concept. The recent emergence of this discipline has gone hand-in-hand with heated debates on the so-called exotic species issue. Apparently, these debates have ended in stalemate, with only two extreme positions: nativism and cosmopolitanism. To break up this dichotomy and to give the debate a new impulse, we will explore the different metaphors that can be found within the scientific discipline of invasion biology in some detail. In recent literature there has been growing attention for the role of metaphors in environmentalism and nature conservation. Our ordinary conceptual system is fundamentally metaphorical in nature. With the help of metaphors we can understand the abstract and unfamiliar in terms of the concrete and familiar. Metaphors not only structure how we perceive and think, but also how we should act (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). The metaphor of nature as a book will provoke a different attitude and kind of nature management than the metaphor of nature as a machine, an organism, a network and so on (Mills, 1982; Ebenreck, 1996; Harré, Brockmeier & Mühlhäusler, 1999). This chapter examines the metaphors that are frequently used in framing invasion biology. We will argue that these metaphors, like all metaphors, are restricted in range and relevance, and that we should adopt a multiple vision of metaphors. The adoption and development of such a multiple vision will open up new space for communication and cooperation across the borders between people from different disciplines, and between experts and laypeople.

J. Keulartz (B) Applied Philosophy Group, Wageningen University and Research Centre, Wageningen University, Hollandseweg 1, 6706 KN Wageningen, Netherlands e-mail: [email protected]

M. Drenthen et al. (eds.), New Visions of Nature, C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-2611-8_18, 

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18.2 Bioinvaders: The Next Plague Recently, invasive species have made headlines. In Newsweek, Marc Margolis (2007) sounded the alarm under the heading Bioinvaders: The Next Plague. ‘An increasing number of scientists now agree that bioinvasion is the most immediate and surely the fastest-growing threat to plant and animal life on the planet after deforestation and breakneck development.’ Margolis quotes Mark Spencer, an expert on invasive species at the Natural History Museum in London: ‘We are at an ecological tipping point.’ Half a century ago, the famous zoologist Charles Elton was one of the first to draw attention to the dangers of invasive species. ‘We must make no mistake,’ he warned in The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants (1958), a book which signaled the birth of invasion biology, ‘we are seeing one of the greatest convolutions of the world’s flora and fauna.’ Elton framed the challenge confronting us as a ‘battle’ to ‘determine the fate of the world,’ the latter a quote from Conan Doyle’s book, The Lost World (cf. Davis, 2006, p. 55). To illustrate the menace of invasive species, Margolis mentions how Achatina fulica, ‘a fat and ugly mollusc,’ better known as the giant African land snail, extensively invaded Brazil after it was imported in 1988 as a cheap substitute for escargot. Growing to the size of a man’s fist and weighing one kilogram or more, it lays up to 2,000 eggs a year and eats a tenth of its body weight a day, devouring everything from lettuce to mouse droppings to its own dead comrades. Worse, it can also carry rat lungworm, a nasty parasite that burrows into the human brain and causes meningitis, and another that can rupture the intestines.

Other frightening examples of invasive species are the zebra mussels (Dreissena polymorpha) from the Caspian and Black Sea region that affect fisheries, mollusc diversity, and electric-power generation in Canada and the United States, the water hyacinth (Eichornia crassipes) from the Amazon that chokes African and Asian waterways, and the melaleuca tree (Melaleuca quinquenervia) that was imported from Australia to drain the swamps of south Florida in the 1930s, but that today has invaded more than 600,000 ha of wetland and threatens to destroy the Everglades.1 Although Charles Elton warned of the threats posed by invasive species as early as 1958, it took several decades for invasion biology to develop as a recognized research area in its own right. By the end of the 1990s, the new discipline was becoming increasingly institutionalized with the establishment of two journals, Diversity and Distributions, founded in 1998, and Biological Invasions, founded in 1 ‘Its

impenetrable stands displace virtually all other vegetation, and its dense root mat oozes substances poisonous to other plants. Its airborne secretions are poisonous to humans and cause severe respiratory and skin irritation. Conservationists have tried to burn it out, but it is fire-adapted and spreads by burning. Its inner bark is a wet, insulating sponge, while its outer bark is dry, and its leaves are laced with a flammable oil. Although it sucks up water four times as fast as the native sawgrass, it burns with explosive force. Several days after a devastating fire, the tree sprouts new growth and rains millions of seeds onto burnt land. They germinate in only three days, and seedlings may reach six feet in their first year’ (Shrader-Frechette, 2001, p. 508).

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1999. In 1997 the United Nations launched the Global Invasive Species Programme (GISP). In 1998, the European Environment Agency called invasive species one of the principal threats to Europe’s biodiversity. In 1999, President Clinton of the USA signed Executive Order 13112, which authorized federal agencies to prevent the introduction of alien invasive species, control the spread of alien invasive species in the United States, and restore native species and habitats that had been invaded (Davis, 2006). Where does this overwhelming attention for invasive species come from? In fact, there is nothing new about wandering wildlife. However, since globalization took off, more plants and animals have become globetrotters than ever before. As trade, travel, transport and tourism boom, the world is becoming more and more borderless and, by the same token, it is becoming increasingly vulnerable to invasive species. Bioinvasion has an enormous impact on the economy and the environment. Globally, bioinvasion’s toll is estimated at approximately $1.4 trillion a year (Margolis, 2007). Bioinvasion goes hand-in-hand with substantial decreases in biodiversity. According to a 1998 study, bioinvasion is the second largest cause of biodiversity loss in the USA, after habitat destruction (Enserink, 1999). Worldwide, about 80% of endangered species could suffer losses due to competition with, or predation by, invasive species. Economic losses occur due to production loss in agriculture and forestry, and to loss from recreational and tourist revenues. Because invasive species can serve as vectors for human disease such as malaria or mad-cow disease, bioinvasion also contributes substantially to health care costs.2 Although invasive species create complex and costly problems, getting rid of them can often prove equally problematic. Eradication programs for invasive species are often highly controversial. This is true for mechanical, chemical as well as biological methods. Mechanical control involves removal of invasive species by hand or with machines. Mechanical methods for plant control include hand pulling, mowing and burning. Animals are removed by techniques such as hunting and trapping. Mechanical treatment is very labor intensive and must often be repeated several times to be effective. Chemical methods that make use of biocides such as herbicides, insecticides and piscicides, can be very effective but also counterproductive due to possible contamination of land and water resources and the unintended but unavoidable killing of native species. Margolis mentions the dilemma of the chemical control of the mosquitofish that was imported from the Philippines to the marshlands of southern China to eat mosquitoes, and that lately has become a menace to the existence of several native aquatic species. ‘The only way to kill the mosquitofish is by dousing the water with rotenone – a poison so potent it also kills almost everything else that swims. Still, doing nothing may threaten China’s most important species.’ 2 Margolis points out that the burden of bioinvasion falls unevenly across the world. ‘The human toll is often devastating to the poorest nations, where a failed crop can start a famine. Implacable exotic pests like the cassava mealybug, gray leaf spot and witchweed claim up to half the harvests in the poorest countries.’

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Biological control programs involve the release of natural enemies (predators and parasites) to eliminate invasive species or at least restrict their spread. These programs are considered to be the cheapest, most efficient and least damaging to the environment, but they can also have disastrous effects if the released species do not prey upon the invasive species, but cause havoc to native species and ecosystems instead. Of course, ‘prevention is better than cure’. Many governments try to control and curb the entry of invasive species into their territory through customs controls and quarantine regulations. These practices, however, are inadequate safeguards against the flood of invasive species in a globalizing and increasingly borderless world. At present, 165 million sealed containers are being shipped around the world, a number that is far too large for detailed inspection by customs officers. In the USA, for instance, some 1,300 officers are responsible for inspecting 410,000 planes and 50,000 ships (McNeely, 2004). Finally, in light of the aforementioned remedies, which often turned out to be more problematic than the disease they were supposed to cure or prevent, some are convinced that we have no choice but to learn to live with the enemy, and put bioinvaders to work. As an example, Margolis refers to a team of researchers who help rural families in India turn lantana camara, a weed that overruns native woodlands, to good use as a surrogate for bamboo.

18.3 Conflicts Over Welfare and Words Chemical control programs are often counterproductive and can give rise to severe conflicts with local residents. A typical example is the controversy about the northern pike in Lake Davis in California, USA (Braxton Little, 1997). In 1994, authorities planned to spray Lake Davis with 26,000 gallons of poison to kill all the fish. This was to prevent the rapacious, non-native pike from migrating down the Feather River, where it could destroy the state’s commercial sport-fishing industry. However, this plan faced opposition from Portola’s 2,500 residents, whose domestic water supply came from the lake. While officials claimed that the chemicals used to kill fish would pose no threat to human health, critics of the state project feared that the poison would also affect the health of people who drank water from Lake Davis because it would contain confirmed animal carcinogens. Portola residents petitioned, protested, marched on the state capital and sued the Fish and Game Department. However, the controversial chemical treatment was still administered in October of 1997.3

3 The plan failed. Some of the pike probably survived in tributary streams above the lake. The voracious invaders were rediscovered in 1999 and now again threaten California’s multimilliondollar Chinook salmon and steelhead fisheries. Late in the summer of 2007, ten years after the first effort, government biologists will deploy lethal doses of fish poison once more. Only this time, most residents of Portola have accepted the plan (Bland, 2006).

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In addition to health issues, animal welfare issues are another bone of contention in the resistance to eradication programs for invasive species. As Michael E. Soulé remarked in his presidential address on alien species at the third annual meeting of the Society for Conservation Biology in 1989, ‘Conflicts between animal rights groups and management agencies are increasing in frequency and cost – the cost being borne by endangered species and ecosystems as well as by the public that pays for expensive rescue operations and time-consuming court battles’ (Soulé, 1990, p. 235). A famous example is the controversy about feral pigs in Hawaii between the Nature Conservancy and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). While conservation biologists argued that the pigs should be killed and removed because they threaten Hawaii’s biodiversity, animal activists argued that it is wrong to harm and kill the pigs because they are sentient animals (Woods, 2001). Human welfare is yet another contested area. In 1995 the government of South Africa introduced a Working for Water Programme that had to meet two objectives: biodiversity conservation and poverty alleviation. Local communities were given temporary employment using poverty relief funding to clear alien vegetation all over the country. However, two controversies arose. The first is that many of the alien species serve as fuelwood or food for some of the poorest communities. In such cases the benefits brought by employment in the project are outweighed by the loss of such vegetation for local livelihoods. The second controversy is that commercial forestry, one of the enterprises seen as potentially making a contribution to poverty alleviation, notably through the transfer of state forests to community ownership, is largely dependent on alien species (Kepe, Saruchera, & Whande, 2004).

That these conflicts are often so contentious and difficult to solve is at least partially due to the language used to frame the problem of invasive species. Terms like ‘alien’, ‘exotic’ and ‘non-native’ have a racist or xenophobic ring to many people. As philosopher Mark Sagoff has noted, those who want to eradicate non-native species often attribute to them the same infamous qualities that xenophobes have attributed to immigrant groups. ‘These undesirable characteristics include sexual robustness, uncontrolled fecundity, low parental involvement with the young, tolerance for ‘degraded’ or squalid conditions, aggressiveness, predatory behavior, and so on’ (Sagoff, 1999).4 The use of such powerful language for purposes of persuasion in nature conservation and restoration projects often has a contradictory effect on those to whom it is addressed. This ‘boomerang effect’ occurred when the Fish and Wildlife Service in the USA launched a recovery plan for the San Francisco lessingia that included the removal of some Australian eucalyptus trees. San Francisco Chronicle columnist Ken Garcia bemoaned the plan for ‘killing trees in the name of some sort of ecological purity’ and took offence at the way the trees were described. In her coverage of this controversy, Kim Todd (2002) recorded a typical comment from a city official: ‘How many of us are ‘invasive exotics’ who have taken root in the San Francisco

4 Daniel

Simberloff (2003) believes that critics such as Sagoff have introduced a red herring and tend to ignore the ecological and economic impacts of bioinvasion.

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soil, have thrived and flourished here, and now contribute to the wonderful mix that constitutes present-day San Francisco?’ She goes on to cite some similar comments: A woman who runs a garden project in New York City says community members adamantly oppose creating a patch of native plants. They want to grow flowers from all over the world, reflecting their neighbourhood’s diversity. In Chicago, citizens rally behind the Argentinean monk parakeets that roost in city parks, adopting them as representatives of Chicago’s multiculturalism.

People not only take offence at metaphors with a racist and xenophobic resonance, they also feel annoyed at the frequent use of militaristic and combative metaphors within invasion biology (Chew and Laubichler, 2003). Comparing plant and animal species to ‘natural enemies’ and declaring ‘war’ on these species not only contributes to ‘a semantic field of war’ – which, as several authors pointed out, is especially irresponsible in the explosive political climate following the September 11th terrorist attacks (Larson, 2005; Larson, Nerlich & Wallis, 2005) – but it could also have a boomerang effect. This could lead to the alienation of the very communities the nature conservation and restoration movements need most. Herbert Schroeder has described how the use of warlike metaphors by volunteers has made it more difficult to resolve the Chicago restoration controversy. Whereas it had a positive effect on the volunteer’s commitment and dedication, the use of bellicose metaphors had an adverse effect on communication with local residents. Because volunteers saw themselves as combatants in a war to save nature, it was easy to view people who raised objections to restoration projects as enemies of nature. ‘The immediate impulse was to fight and try to defeat these enemies, rather than to try to understand their objections and look for ways to negotiate and compromise’ (Schroeder, 2000, p. 262).

Fig. 18.1 Invasive Old World climbing fern overtaking cypress trees in southern Florida. Photo: Peggy Greb, USDA Agricultural Research Service

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18.4 Nativism Versus Cosmopolitanism Some people came to the conclusion that invasion biology, by invoking xenophobic, racist and belligerent images and impressions, was telling the wrong story to gain acceptance and support from local communities. To reframe this story in a less counterproductive and more constructive manner, they suggested that bioinvasion should not be compared to immigration, i.e. the arrival of aggressive and sexually prolific intruders who threaten to degrade and destroy once stable native communities, but to cultural ‘imperialism’. Exotic species should not be controlled and combated as unwanted aliens, nor should they be welcomed in the name of cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism, but they should be opposed and resisted in order to protect local diversity from the homogenizing forces of globalization. William Jordan put this inversed storyline forward in his 1994 article The Nazi Connection. According to Jordan, preference for native species should not be compared to Nazism, but instead should be seen as a positive act designed to ‘protect the oppressed and threatened group from extinction’ (Jordan, 1994, p. 113), an example of which would be the creation of modern Israel. More recently, this storyline was further developed by Ned Hettinger. Hettinger has accepted the claim made by some critics of racist and xenophobic antiexotics rhetoric that invasions can add to the richness of species diversity. But this increase of biodiversity within local assemblages inevitably goes hand-in-hand with a decrease of biodiversity between the planet’s ecological assemblages. If we shift the focus from intra-assemblage biodiversity to inter-assemblage biodiversity, it will become clear, Hettinger contends, that on a global scale bioinvasion will ultimately create ‘biosimilarity’ instead of biodiversity. ‘In addition to this tragic loss in biodiversity, the spread of exotics also helps to undermine an important feature of human community. Globalisation of flora and fauna contributes to the loss of a human sense of place’ (Hettinger, 2001, p. 217). Jordan and Hettinger’s reframing of bioinvasion from a reactionary rejection of disruptive immigration toward an argument for protecting local communities from cultural imperialism has met with criticism from William O’Brien. O’Brien admits that Jordan and Hettinger’s reframing will be more acceptable and convincing among critics of anti-exotics rhetoric. Concern about ‘cultural survival’ and protection of economic diversity in the face of corporate juggernauts like Wal-Mart reframes what might otherwise appear to be a reactionary anti-exotics argument, and presents it as an argument for justice. The anti-imperialism approach to the argument thus provides a potentially effective analogy that compares, for instance, European near-exterminations of the indigenous populations of North America with the ecological devastation wrought by exotic feral pigs in Florida and Hawaii. (O’Brien, 2006, p. 73)

At the same time, O’Brien is afraid that this new framework will only reproduce many of the more troubling aspects of the reactionary framework. The antiimperialism approach corroborates rather than contradicts the rigid dichotomy between the purity of local ‘authentic’ cultures and the corrupting and contaminating influence of outside forces. However, the idea that globalization is equivalent

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to homogenization has been challenged by postcolonial and cultural studies. These studies stress that globalization processes do not necessarily produce homogenization, but instead can create opportunities for hybridization, i.e. the mixing and blending of cultural identities that lead to new forms of diversity. According to O’Brien, this shift of emphasis from homogenization to hybridization, and from nativism or provincialism to cosmopolitanism, should also affect our view of the exotic species issue. Here he refers to Michael Soulé’s conception of a new area of ecological science – ‘mixoecology’ or ‘recombinant ecology’ – which rejects the premise that exotic species are a detriment (see also Peretti, 1998). We will come back to this concept at the end of the next section, which discusses the reframing of the exotic species issue within the scientific context. Apparently the debate on the exotic species issue has ended in stalemate, with only two mutually exclusive positions: nativism, whether xenophobic or nonxenophobic, and cosmopolitanism. This is a typical example of dichotomistic reasoning where one is always forced to choose between no more than two options: tertium non datur! This black-and-white thinking inevitably brings conflicts to a head and leads to debate reaching a total deadlock. To prevent such black-and-white thinking, we should first of all realize that every metaphor is restricted in range and relevance (Keulartz, 2007). Metaphors are like searchlights that highlight certain aspects and features, while obscuring others. According to Lakoff and Johnson, each metaphor ‘is true for certain purposes, in certain respects, in certain contexts’ (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, p. 165). As Sara Ebenreck has written: Rather than proceed as if any one metaphor is the finally correct metaphor, ethicists conscious of the constructive imagination at work in these basic metaphors might be more aware of the limits of any metaphorical construction and more open to the experiences and values embodied in alternate metaphoric constructions of the Earth. (Ebenreck, 1996, p. 14)

Moreover, the search for the single best metaphor is not without pitfalls and can lead to what Mark Meisner has called ‘a sort of perceptual hegemony’ (Meisner, 1995). This is the case if a metaphor ceases to be perceived as a metaphor and is taken literally, so that we are no longer able to recognize that it represents only a singular perspective. In order to escape such one-sidedness, we should adopt what Donald Schön and Martin Rein used to call a ‘double vision’: ‘the ability to act from a frame while cultivating awareness of alternative frames’ (Schön & Rein, 1994, p. 207). We should learn to ‘squint’ so to speak, in order to see things from different angles simultaneously, or we should develop what philosopher of technology Don Idhe (1993) has called a ‘compound eye’.

18.5 The Continuum from Restoration to Recombination In the remainder of this chapter, we will try to break up the dichotomy of nativism versus cosmopolitanism and open up space for renewed debate by exploring the different frames that can be found within invasion biology. We argue for a double

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vision, or more accurately, a multiple vision of the exotic species issue: nativism and cosmopolitanism should be considered as extremes of a broad continuum of options to frame this issue. We will start at the nativism pole, where invasive species are an anathema and gradually proceed from this pole to the cosmopolitanism pole, where invasive and native species are believed to coexist peacefully and with some degree of harmony.

18.5.1 The Impact of Restoration Ecology on Invasion Biology Invasion biology is intimately connected to restoration ecology, a field of ecological inquiry that is close to the nativism pole. According to Davis, invasion biology and restoration ecology emerged at about the same time and developed as ‘sister disciplines’ during the late 1980s. They developed an increasingly strong synergy, with the objectives of each reinforcing those of the other. Restoration ecology’s emphasis on restoring environments with native species affirmed the importance of invasion ecology, and invasion ecology’s emphasis on the harm caused by a small proportion of introduced species provided important justification for restoration ecology’s preference for native species. (Davis, 2006, p. 49)

From the outset, ecological restoration’s attempt to return degraded ecosystems to their original state has been interpreted in terms of the restoration of artwork. This metaphor was put forward specifically by environmental philosophers (see Gobster & Hull, 2000; Throop, 2000). At first, the comparison of nature to art was made in order to discredit ecological restoration. In his famous paper Faking Nature (1982), Australian philosopher Robert Elliot argued that ecological restoration is akin to art forgery. Just as a reproduction or a replicate cannot reproduce the value of an original piece of art, restored nature cannot reproduce the value of original nature. ‘What the environmental engineers are proposing is that we accept a fake or forgery instead of the real thing’ (Elliot, 2003, p. 383). A copy by Van Meegeren, will of course, always be inferior to a real Vermeer! In his paper ‘The Big Lie: Human Restoration of Nature’ (1992), environmental philosopher Eric Katz further argued that whatever is produced in a restored landscape certainly cannot count as having the original value of nature, particularly wild nature, and that restored nature necessarily represents a form of disvalue and domination of nature. ‘Once we dominate nature, once we restore and redesign nature for our own purposes, then we have destroyed nature – we have created an artifactual reality, in a sense, a false reality, which merely provides us the pleasant illusory appearance of the natural environment’ (Katz, 2003, p. 396). Other environmental philosophers are less harsh in their judgment of restored nature. Andrew Light (2003), for instance, thinks that the criticisms of Elliot and Katz are only valid with respect to a particularly malicious kind of restoration – restoration that is used to justify the disturbance or destruction of nature. This could take place, for instance, for the benefit of some industrial activity, with the argument that it is now possible to create a piece of nature with the same value as the original at a later date or in a different place. But, Light insists, this kind of restoration is

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relatively rare. Most restoration efforts are undertaken to correct past harm. In these cases, ecological restoration is more akin to art restoration than to art reproduction or art forgery.5 This art-nature analogy, however, is not unproblematic. A work of art is the creation of a specific artist working at a particular place and time. But, even if we allow for the existence of a master craftsman to whom we might attribute the authorship of nature, his or her creations could never be traced back to a particular place and time. Among ecologists and conservationists there is an ongoing discussion about the question of which historical reference one should choose. Should one go back to the last interglacial era when humankind did not yet even have projectile weapons such as the bow and arrow and was therefore not yet capable of defeating his natural enemies? Should one go back to the time before the emergence of agriculture, or should one only have to go back to pre-industrial times and resort to traditional agrarian techniques such as reed and brushwood cultivation, tree planting and felling, and mowing and turf cutting? Moreover, nature, unlike art, is never solely the object of experiences of beauty or the sublime, but has many other functions. Water, for instance, is important to traffic, transportation, food supply, irrigation, recreation and domestic use. Yet another major difference between art and nature, as Holmes Rolston (2000) has argued, is that works of art are entirely passive and, left to themselves, inevitably decay. We restore them; they do not restore themselves. In contrast, left to itself, nature flourishes and can restore itself.

18.5.2 Restoration as a Performing Art There is, however, another way to frame ecological restoration that can also redirect the way the exotic species issue is viewed. If we shift the focus from the visual arts to performing arts like theatre, dance or music, the restoration metaphor acquires a different meaning. A ballet, symphony or play is anything but static; it derives its very life from being recreated time and again. Such an artwork obtains its identity only through the multitude of its successive performances. The equation of ecological restorations with artistic performances was made by Jordan in numerous writings (see e.g. Jordan, 1987, 2006). He denounces ‘environmentalism’s blindness to the performative or expressive aspect of restoration – to what might be called its ritual value’ (Jordan, 2000, p. 215). The performing arts cannot thrive without an audience. Because artistic performances are public rituals, this version of the art restoration metaphor is akin to the community metaphor, which has a long tradition in ecology, especially in the land ethic of Aldo Leopold. According to Leopold’s famous statement, ‘a land ethic 5 Light

mentions cleanups as the most obvious cases of benevolent restoration. Cleanups include the bio-activation of existing micro-organisms in soils to allow the land to essentially clean itself up, and cleaning out exotic plants that were introduced at some time into a site, allowing the native plants to reestablish themselves.

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changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land community to plain member and citizen of it’ (Leopold, 1949, p. 240). Restorationists who have adopted the community metaphor perceive themselves as participants rather than curators of museum pieces. Participation is supposed to strengthen the ties between humans and between the human community and the larger ecological community. The analogy between ecological restoration and artistic recreation does more justice to the dynamic interplay of nature and culture that follows from our multifunctional use of natural resources than does the analogy between ecological restoration and the restoration of parts or pieces of a museum collection. Moreover, the recreation metaphor allows for a less rigid framing of the exotic species issue than the restoration metaphor, which implies a sharp distinction between native (and desirable) and non-native (and undesirable) species. After all, the recreation metaphor does not put the emphasis on the original composition and the specific patterns of flora and fauna but rather on the performance of the system and the dynamic (biotic and abiotic) processes of succession, dispersion, migration, predation, grazing, sedimentation, erosion, fire and so on. The main similarity between the restoration and recreation metaphors concerns the ‘historic authenticity’ to which both metaphors refer as the most important standard to evaluate ecological restorations. An artistic performance should be true to the original score, script or scenario. Although the players, props, scenery and costumes constantly change, the performance has to remain Hamlet.

18.5.3 Two Roads Within Invasion Biology There is, yet another way to frame the exotic species issue. In his historical review of invasion biology since 1958, the publication date of Charles Elton’s invasion classic The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants, Davis distinguishes two different paths within this young discipline. The first path is the ‘conservation approach’ advanced by Elton and strongly influenced by restoration ecology (see previous section). David describes this approach as a top-down, deductive approach, in which an effort is made to apply general ecological theory and principles to biological invasions in order to help develop control management programs for specific invasions. The alternative path is the ‘scientific approach’. This could be considered more of a bottom-up, inductive approach, in which individual invasions are examined in an effort to better inform general ecological theory and understanding of communities and populations. ‘The conservation and environmental emphasis in invasion ecology has been motivated by the conviction that ecological knowledge and theory can be used to better understand and predict biological invasions. The alternative approach was motivated by the opposite conviction – that biological colonizations/invasions can be viewed as natural experiments and used to inform more general ecological theory and understanding’ (Davis, 2006, p. 53).6 6 Davis

contrasts the two paths as Platonic and Aristotelian approaches, respectively.

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The second path – the scientific – is less well travelled than the other. During the past decades, invasion biology has become increasingly more allied with the conservation approach, particularly in the United States. ‘No doubt part of the explanation for this difference is that a large number of ecologists are employed by conservation groups and governmental agencies where they work primarily on applied problems’ (ibid., p. 52). Davis points to the difference in language used within the two approaches. The vocabulary of the conservation approach, which includes expressions such as ‘alien’, ‘exotic’, ‘invader’, ‘invasion’ and other explicit militaristic terms, is strongly value-laden, whereas the other vocabulary has a more value-neutral character, preferring phrases like ‘colonizer’, ‘introduced’, ‘new arrivals’ and ‘migration’. This language is typical for the dominant theory used to understand bioinvasion: island biogeography (see Shrader-Frechett, 2001).

18.5.4 Engineering the Ecosystem: The Reparation Metaphor This theory goes back to the New Ecology, a new approach within the field of conservation biology that can be traced back to cybernetics, which flourished in the United States in the early post-World War II years in a climate of technocratic optimism.7 The politicians, having proved unable to cope with the problems of a complex industrial society, were urged to make way for social engineers who would then manage society as a self-regulating machine. One of these technocrats, Evelyn Hutchinson, was to leave an indelible mark on post-war ecology (Taylor, 1988). In Circular Causal Systems in Ecology, a pioneering paper published in 1946, Hutchinson distinguished between two closely related approaches: the biogeochemical and the biodemographic approach. Seen from a biogeochemical perspective, the entire biosphere appears as a giant cyclical system of energy, matter and information, which is able to maintain a dynamic equilibrium thanks to a series of feedback mechanisms. This perspective was elaborated on, in particular, by Hutchinson’s student Howard Odum and his brother Eugene, who repeatedly compared the biosphere, including mankind and society, to a complex clockwork. The metaphor of nature as a clockwork reinforces our confidence in our ability to repair damaged ecosystems like we repair ‘the radio or the family car’, as Hutchinson once put it (Kwa, 1987, p. 427).

7 When

he first coined the word ‘cybernetics’ in 1945, Norbert Wiener defined it as ‘control and communication in the animal and the machine’. Wiener brought together two fields of research. On the one hand, he elaborated on the engineering-oriented research into the ‘servomechanical’ nature of control and communication in machines, using the ideas of information flow, noise, feedback and stability. On the other hand, he built on what physiologists like Walter Canon had developed under the headings of ‘homeostasis’: a variety of mechanisms in the organism to maintain fixed levels of blood sugar, blood proteins, fat, calcium as well as an adequate supply of oxygen, a constant body temperature and so on.

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The biodemographic approach on the other hand, deals with groups or communities of organisms, the so-called ‘populations’. In conformity with the cybernetic principle shared by both approaches, these populations are also perceived as systems attempting to maintain their stability under ever-changing conditions by means of feedback mechanisms. This approach was further elaborated on by Robert MacArthur, another of Hutchinson’s students. In the 1960s, MacArthur, in collaboration with Edward Wilson, developed the ‘island theory’, a theory on the biogeography of islands.8 The theory predicts the number of species on a given island, using the size of the island and the distance to the mainland as its main parameters. MacArthur and Wilson also assumed a dynamic equilibrium: although the taxonomic composition on the island is subject to continuous change, the number of species, which is determined by the rates of extinction and colonization, remains constant. The island theory takes no interest in the question of whether components of the ecosystem are identical in a material sense, but only whether they perform the same function within the ecosystem, for example, that of producers, consumers or decomposers (bacteria and fungi) (Keulartz, 1998, p. 149). The island theory definitely puts invasive species in a different light than restoration ecology. Whether a species ‘belongs’ in an environment is not determined by its origin but by its function. Species are, so to speak, entitled to a green card as long as they do their job. In this respect there appears to be some overlap with the recreation metaphor that judges the importance of a species from the role it plays within a certain script or scenario. But the island theory lacks all the associations with artistic performances and public rituals that are typical of the recreation metaphor. Instead, its terminology of ‘producers’ and ‘consumers’ reveals the influence of modern economy. As Donald Worster has shown, exponents of the New Ecology view nature as a set of resources with cash value; they have transformed nature into a reflection of the modern corporate state, a chain of factories and an assembly line (Worster, 1992). So, in contrast to Davis, the scientific approach is in fact far from value-neutral; it only invokes other values than the conservation approach within invasion biology.

18.5.5 Health and Integrity: The Rehabilitation Metaphor Recently, a third road can be identified within invasion biology, originating not from cybernetics but from medicine. The concept of health has had an amazing career within environmentalism and ecology since about 1990.9 Its domain of application has been extended from the level of the individual (clinical and veterinary medicine)

8 Their

book The Theory of Island Biogeography (1967) is one of the most frequently cited books in ecology and popular biology. 9 The concept is mentioned more than once in The SER International Primer on Ecological Restoration (SER Science & Policy Working Group, 2004) (available from: http:/www.ser.org).

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and the population (epidemiology and public health) to the level of ecosystems. An interdisciplinary field of research has developed, in which the relationships between human activities, natural systems and health are being systematically explored. At present, the notion of health is a focal point for the integration of three strongly overlapping areas of research activity: ecosystem medicine, geographical medicine and conservation medicine. ‘Ecosystem medicine’ emerged in the early 1990s and gained momentum in 1994 with the establishment of the International Society for Ecosystem Health (ISEH). Since 1995, the ISEH has published the journal Ecosystem Health. The society is dedicated to the idea that a healthy ecosystem is one that provides services supportive of the human community, such as food, potable water, clean air, and the capacity for assimilating and recycling wastes. Ecosystem medicine aims at developing ‘a systemic approach to the preventive, diagnostic, and prognostic aspects of ecosystem management, and . . . [at] understanding . . . [the] relationships between ecosystem health and human health’ (Rapport et al., 1999, p. 84). This approach is not entirely new, since Aldo Leopold had already referred to ‘the art of land doctoring’ and ‘the science of land health’. Ecosystems are regarded as healthy as long as they have the capacity to maintain structure and function in the face of stress. Proponents of this approach talk about the Ecosystem Distress Syndrome (EDS). Some indicators of this syndrome are changes in primary productivity and nutrient cycling, loss of species diversity and a return to early stages of succession. The second area of research activity that uses a broad concept of health is ‘geographical medicine’ or ‘geomedicine’. Geographical medicine is a subdiscipline of epidemiology that studies the impact of the environment on the geographical distribution of health and illness. There has recently been a growing concern about the influence on the health of human populations by global economic, technological and environmental changes, including climate change, ozone depletion, loss of biodiversity, land degradation, desertification, deforestation, worldwide urbanization and mass migration due to war or natural disasters. From 2000 to 2004, the journal Global Change and Human Health provided a platform for scientific research into the health impact of these globalization processes (Martens, McMichael, & Patz, 2000). The last area of research focusing on a broad health concept is called ‘conservation medicine’. This new discipline combines techniques, facts and concepts from public health, veterinary medicine, conservation biology and plant pathology. Conservation medicine evolved out of a crisis: unprecedented levels of disease in many species as a result of the worldwide transformations of the host-parasite relationships caused by climate change, chemical pollution, animal trade, encroachment into wildlife areas and habitat fragmentation. With the launch of the first issue of the journal EcoHealth in January 2004, the collaboration between these three areas of research activity took more definite shape. This journal aims to build on the legacy of both Ecosystem Health and Global Change and Human Health and also intends to cover the area of conservation medicine that has not yet been represented by a scholarly journal.

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The health metaphor is akin to the reparation metaphor. The cybernetic approach of ecological restoration can be compared to clinical medicine in a hospital setting where the professionals take on the role of physicians or surgeons. However, the concepts of health and healing are much broader and encompass other approaches such as ‘rehabilitation’, the treatment of severely diseased or disabled people with the purpose of re-socialization and re-integration into community life. The emphasis on community renders the rehabilitation metaphor more akin to the recreation metaphor than to the reparation metaphor. In fact, the health metaphor can be situated somewhere between the recreation metaphor and the reparation metaphor. On the one hand, the condition of health is not dependent on some historically authentic state because one can be quite healthy with a hearing aid, a bypass, an artificial kidney and other functional equivalents. On the other hand, the criterion of biological integrity, which is key to the health concept, sets a limit to a purely functional approach to remediation and rehabilitation.

18.5.6 The Other End of the Continuum: The Recombination Metaphor The most radical reframing of the exotic species issue comes from Michael Soulé. In his presidential address on alien species at the third annual meeting of the Society for Conservation Biology in 1989, Soulé claimed that ‘the inexorable invasion of alien species from distant land masses and between heretofore isolated regions within continents may be the most revolutionary’ among the many environmental challenges of the coming decades (Soulé, 1990, p. 233). The flood of exotic species will homogenize and impoverish the world’s ecological communities, a process which Soulé refers to as ‘cosmopolitanization’. He is convinced that the flood of exotic species cannot be stopped and that we simply have to accept cosmopolitanization. According to Soulé, the concept of natural versus artificial, already outdated due to the pervasive influence of humans, is further undermined by the universal and irresistible force of bioinvasion. It will therefore become nearly impossible to defend the ecological status quo ante. ‘A policy of blanket opposition to exotics will become more expensive, more irrational, and finally counterproductive as the trickle becomes a flood’ (ibid., p. 235). Although the psychological adaptation to biogeographically recombined communities will be tough, Soulé believes that shifts in scientific fashion will facilitate the transition ‘from the traditional view of biogeographic integrity to the postmodern acceptance of cosmopolitanization’ (ibid., p. 234). The first shift is the decline in status of the so-called ‘niche paradigm’. ‘Niche’ is a key concept in biogeography that is based on a holistic view of biological communities as being highly integrated by competitive interactions.10 A niche is the role or function of an organism in a 10 MacArthur’s

‘dissertation work, a study of community structure and niche partitioning among different species of warbler, also yielded a paper for Ecology, which appeared in 1958 and became recognized as a minor classic’ (Quammen, 1996, p. 410).

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community of plants and animals. Each community, especially an island, has a limited number of niches, and therefore can hold only a limited number of species. In a certain area, no two species can occupy the same niche for long. The one that is better adapted for the niche will win the competition for food and habitat and will cause the other to leave or become extinct. The second shift, which is perfectly in line with the first one, concerns the replacement of the holistic community concept by an individualistic community concept. The individualistic concept was developed as early as 1917 by Henry Allan Gleason who opposed the organicist views of his countryman Clements. According to Gleason, an association of plants or animals cannot possibly be likened to an organism. The development of associations cannot be explained or predicted with the help of a limited number of physical laws, but has a non-deterministic (stochastic) and distinctly historic character. Every association is the entirely unique outcome of a combination of migration patterns and environmental factors. Between the different associations there are only fluid transitions, not the fixed, clear-cut boundaries that would justify a comparison with organisms. Among his colleagues, Gleason was seen, in his own words, as a ‘good man gone wrong’ and his arguments were ignored or even ‘pulverized’ (McIntosh, 1991, pp. 137, 265). This changed in the 1990s, when systems ecology (and the notion of ‘Nature in Balance’) increasingly had to compete with evolutionary ecology (‘Nature in Flux’). Taking their cue from Gleason, the evolutionary ecologists gave up the ‘top down’ approach, in which the parts are viewed from the whole, and replaced it with a ‘bottom up’ approach, starting from the individual populations and ending up at the associations which they jointly form. Soulé not only refers to Gleason but also to Hengeveld, who applied the individualistic community concept to the exotic species issue in his 1989 book Dynamics of Biological Invasions (see also Hengeveld, 1988). According to Hengeveld, species have no fixed roles in static communities, but move about, responding individualistically to options and opportunities in a basically dynamic environment. The following quotation eloquently captures the individualistic community paradigm: Niches conceived as biotic community functions like a hole in the market, neither exist as independent entities, nor are they filled deterministically by one particular species. They are ephemeral, non-specific opportunities potentially to be occupied by more than one single, predetermined species, their selection depending partly on constraints put by the biotic and abiotic environment and partly by chance. Communities as sets of niches of opportunity are ephemeral, kaleidoscopic images, easily vanishing by the slightest movement of the outside world, thus being replaced by a next, unique image. (Hengeveld, 1994, p. 350)

After his discussion of the shift to the individualistic community paradigm, Soulé suggested that a new ecological discipline will develop to deal with the interactions within new, biogeographically complex assemblages that result from deliberate or accidental species introductions. He suggested calling this ecological discipline ‘recombinant ecology’ or ‘mixoecology’. This field can be defined as ‘the ecology of communities of plants and animals, the constituent members of which are drawn from a wide range of global biogeographic zones’ (Barker, 2000; Gilbert, 2005). Although some might feel that Soulé’s suggestion was not meant seriously

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(Enserink, 1999), the new field has slowly begun to be recognized with work in Eastern Europe, and more recently in the UK (Rotherham, 2005, p. 53; see also Crifasi, 2005).

18.6 Towards a Multiple Vision on Invasive Species We have shown in some detail that nativism and cosmopolitanism are in fact extreme positions within a broad continuum, ranging from restoration, recreation and rehabilitation to reparation and recombination. In this way we can bridge the gap between nativism and cosmopolitanism and open up space for a renewed debate that allows for a multiple vision on the exotic species issue. Taking our cue from environmental philosopher Baird Callicott and his colleagues Larry Crowder and Karen Mumford, we want to develop such a multiple vision by arranging the different frames on a scale from the least to the most severely invaded areas (Callicott, Crowder, & Mumford, 1999; see also Keulartz, 2007) (Table 18.1). Callicott cum suis distinguish two contemporary schools of conservation philosophy, ‘compositionalism’ and ‘functionalism’. The compositionalist emphasis is on the process of returning a biotic community to its original condition of biological diversity and integrity, whereas the functionalist emphasis is more on the process of returning an ecosystem to a state of health. Callicott and his associates consider compositionalism and functionalism to be two ends of a continuum: the compositionalist emphasis on the ecological restoration of biological integrity and diversity is appropriate for the management of the less severely degraded areas such as wilderness areas, national parks and state parks. The functionalist emphasis on the ecological rehabilitation of ecosystem health is more suited for the much greater part of the world that is inhabited and economically exploited by humans. Although our spectrum is somewhat broader than the compositionalism/functionalism spectrum of Callicott cum suis, their notion of a continuum between the least and the most severely degraded areas can certainly be helpful in the context of the invasive species issue. After all, ecological degradation is at

Table 18.1 Multiple vision on exotic species Restoration Least Severely Invaded

Most

Recreation

Severely

Rehabilitation Reparation Recombination

Invaded

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once the cause and effect of bioinvasion. So, in general, the degree of degradation will correspond to the degree of invasion by exotic species. This ordering has some prima facie plausibility. The restoration and recreation metaphors seem more appropriate for the management of the least severely invaded areas such as wilderness areas, national parks and state parks, whereas the reparation and recombination metaphors are more suited for the most severely invaded areas, including urban and industrial areas. It is significant in this respect that it was the Urban Forum which took the lead in setting up the first important workshop on recombinant ecology on 13 July 2000, because ‘although “recombinant” communities are found in rural as well as in urban areas in the UK, the most obvious, striking and easiest to study are those of large urban areas’ (Barker, 2000). Of course, our proposal to arrange the various frames according to the degree of invasion by exotic species represents only one way to develop a multiple vision of invasive species. Moreover, whether or not it will hold water under closer scrutiny is an open question.

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Chapter 19

Further Towards a Continuum Between Nativism and Cosmopolitanism Matthias Gross

19.1 Introduction Jozef Keulartz and others have pointed out for quite some time that metaphors are not only important cognitive tools for making sense during the intervention into the ecological world around us, but are also important discursive tools that enable communication and negotiation with other ecological practitioners. For Keulartz (2007, p. 27), metaphors are indeed ‘diplomatic devices that facilitate interaction between different disciplines and discourses.’ Keulartz and Van der Weele’s chapter yet again perfectly summarizes various debates within invasion biology and suggests more of a continuum between the two extremes the authors call nativism and cosmopolitanism. It is especially the science and practice of ecological restoration which has shaken our traditional understanding about the differences between the natural and the human-made, and between the native plant tradition and the ‘mixed community’ type during the last twenty years. It is no wonder, therefore, that Keulartz and van der Weele emphasize this movement in ecology and related fields closely in their chapter ‘Between Nativims and Cosmopolitanism: Framing and Reframing in Invasion Biology.’ To be sure, the authors’ outline of the impact of restoration ecology on invasion biology, with the notion of restoration being a correction to past harm, is certainly a case in point. However, if we follow Keulartz and Van der Weele’s chapter, this appears be to be very one-sided, since the state of the debate in ecological restoration is pointing to a ‘widening’ and especially a ‘densification’ of the continuum between what Keulartz and Van der Weele call nativism and cosmopolitanism.

M. Gross (B) Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, Umweltforschungszentrum (UFZ), Permoserstr. 15, 04318 Leipzig, Germany e-mail: [email protected]

M. Drenthen et al. (eds.), New Visions of Nature, C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-2611-8_19, 

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19.2 Humans and Nature: Unexpected Interactions To many restorationists’ way of thinking about their craft, the idea of the natural includes the expectation that nature will respond to human effort in surprising and unpredictable ways as an inherent part of restoration activities. Some authors even believe that the deliberate inclusion of ‘unwanted’ elements, such as dangerous and perhaps sometimes even invasive species is one of the distinguishing marks of restoration in comparison to other forms of ecological management (cf. Allison, 2007; Gross, 2003, 2008; Jordan, 2006). To be sure, some attempts at restoring parcels of land have led to what Paul Gobster has termed a ‘museumification’ of nature (Gobster, 2007). Although many important early efforts at restoring ecosystems since the 1920s were (and still are) located and controlled within arboretums and botanical gardens, today most restoration projects try instead to unleash natural wildness, and to foster natural (and in this sense, unexpected) processes outside the borders of small parcels of land. This view also disagrees with the parallel between restoration and art forgery set forth most prominently by the two philosophers Eric Katz and Robert Elliot since the early 1980s. Indeed, Katz (2007) still argues today that whatever is produced in a restored landscape cannot count as having the original value of wild or ‘real’ nature. He portrayed restored nature as an artifactual reality, a false reality in a sense, because ‘when human intentionality (and technology) is imposed on natural entities and systems they become artifacts: ecological integrity no longer exists’ (Katz, 2007, p. 216). Elliot (1997) has referred to restored parcels of land as ‘fake nature.’ It is certainly important to point out problems of restoration including the term ‘restoration’ itself. But it should be remembered that ecological restoration practices came into being specifically in order to move beyond the passive ideas of nature protection and conservation that are at least implicit in musings such as those of Elliot and Katz. The restoration projects in North America and Europe I have studied not only have nothing in common with the straw man that Katz and Elliot try to keep alive, but have always tried to find a suitable manner of outlining ways for humans to behave as fully-valued members of an ecosystem but avoiding a one-sided idea of humans as lords of nature. Thus, many restorationists report very different results regarding their notion of nature, as compared to the results inherent when authors speak of the end of nature (McKibben, 1989); this is because there is allegedly no longer any nature, since humans have touched every bit of it, and nature touched by humans is no longer natural. This attitude – that nature is only natural or ‘real’ when it is untouched by humans – appears to point to the genuine arrogance of humans. When only nature untouched by humans is defined as real nature, then human contact with the natural world is regarded as so important that as soon as humans have touched ‘nature’ it is no longer natural. Perhaps it is time to consider that humans might not be that important. To think along this line - to think of an ideal nature existing only at the exclusion of humans is nothing more than a continuation of the rhetoric of the pessimistic environmental movement of the 1970s and 1980s with its general ‘humans-are-bad-for-the-environment’ perspective. To be sure, use of this type of metaphor was important in its time in order to create awareness of an important issue. But it no longer seems to be helpful since it leads to a standstill: if

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there is no nature left ‘out there,’ then there is nothing left to protect as ‘real’ nature. So what remains? Restoration! This appears to be even more important, since the same pessimistic rhetoric has criticized the human detachment from nature and has called for a new relationship with nature – even a new communion – but has not delivered any practical suggestions on how to accomplish this, save staying away from nature. Thus, restoration, with all its pitfalls and shortcomings, has so far been the most consistent attempt at reversing the negative relationship of humans with the natural world. Indeed, ecological restoration reverses the traditional approach to nature protection and in many ways represents a step beyond the fatalism implicit in much of the environmentalism of the 20th century. Restoration activists are not content to simply put fences around preserves regarded as remnants of ‘real’ nature.

19.3 Welcoming the Unexpected A major insight into ecology and other environmental sciences in the last few decades has been that nature is seldom predictable or linear in any way. Areas of study as dissimilar as those of ecology, economics or sociology are today dominated by nonlinearity and thus inherent uncertainty. If we therefore accept that nature changes in unpredictable ways, even pieces of nature that haves been invented by humans or restored with human help, then the idea of restored nature being an artifactual reality or the metaphor of restoration as art forgery appears even more antiquated. If we also accept that restoration is understood to be a practice that, as Allison (2007, p. 603) summarized, needs ‘to leave room for species that are not beneficial or desirable to humans and to allow the environment to develop along pathways that are not controlled by humans,’ then the comparison to static idea of the ecological restoration being like a piece of art restoration (not to mention forgery) appears to be beside the point. Thinking in this line of tradition, nature can be treated as static whereas society was the dynamic factor. If we, however, like most twenty-first century ecologists, give up the idea of any balance of nature, there is no simple standard against which to judge social actions and its reciprocal interaction with the natural world. For Jordan (2006), who coined the term ‘restoration ecology’ in the early 1980s, the practice of restoration means to cultivate a studied indifference to socio-economic or aesthetic interests in order to allow the natural world to unfold not purely based on human ideas and interests. Indeed, practitioners in ecological restoration have long accepted the fact of an ever-changing nature that interacts – often violently – with human endeavors. These practitioners are, for instance, restoring landscapes that often develop independently and do not follow the initiatives made by humans; natural action simply differs from human plans. Thus there can be no master plan of action since ecologists today know that the view of a balance of nature is wrong at local, regional, and global levels. All of the interference and intrusion of ecological field practitioners is based on some type of adaptive management. In adaptive management, as in ecological restoration practice, nature is seen as a constantly moving target. Practitioners go out, try something, observe the results and modify what they do next, always based on the natural action that ensues. Compared to the ideal type notion of a balance of nature, the

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practitioners’ knowledge of nature in this type of restoration activities is admittedly minuscule, since there is not only one ideal type. To further illustrate this point and thus deliver new evidence to strengthen the continuum between nativism and cosmopolitanism, let us consider an example from the German philosopher and sociologist Georg Simmel (1858–1918). Simmel’s reflections show that long before new ideas about non-linear systems in ecology and the notion of complexity in other academic fields developed, knowledgeable people had not accepted the idea of a static nature – perhaps in the same way that Henry Gleason saw that plant and animal associations could best be understood with the help of non-deterministic models. What I believe makes Simmel’s ideas relevant for an understanding of ecological restoration and a tightening of the continuum between nativism and cosmopolitanism is the self-evident inclusion of unexpected changes in the natural and his reflections and theoretical fragments on the dynamics and quasi-intrinsic value that human-made nature can develop with and without human interference (cf. Gross, 2001, 2003). Simmel often speaks of the ‘surprise,’ ‘amazement,’ ‘admiration,’ or even the ‘fanatical fascination’ felt about a certain natural change in a landscape, or a building that is about to turn into a ruin and hence is being taken over by nature again while representing a natural-social entity. The crucial point in Simmel’s ideas seems to be that a human-made thing can develop naturally, i.e. with an independent existence, extricating and dissociating itself from human planning. The cultural performances of human morphing of nature then become an independent natural power which leads to a natural-cultural interaction process.

19.4 Ruins and Restorations Turning to the example of a ruin, Simmel points out that although a ruin was originally a work of architecture (Simmel, 1998, 118 ff.), both forms of material environment – a cultivated tree as well as a cultural building – can develop a ‘natural’ life of their own and hence can turn into something that transmutes into a product of nature, indistinguishable to humans from ‘untouched’ nature. For Simmel the ruin shows that ‘in the vanished and the destroyed elements of a work of art, other forces and forms, those of nature, have grown back again. Thus out of what still lives as art in the ruin and what of nature already lives in it, has merged into a new whole, a characteristic unity’ (Simmel, 1998, p. 118). The fascination of nature originally invented by humans as art is that after a certain amount of time ‘a work made by humans appears entirely as a product of nature’ (Simmel, 1998, p. 120). When it seems necessary, the positive aspect of human-made nature can be gained through human passivity which allows the natural dynamics to flow, because as soon as the human-made work is completed (dasteht), it not only has an objective being and an individual existence (Eigenleben) independent of humans, but it also holds in its being (Selbstsein) . . . strength and weaknesses, components and significances (Bedeutsamkeiten), that we are completely innocent of and which often take us by surprise. (Simmel, 1998, p. 213)

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In Simmel’s metaphorical language: ‘Humans can make themselves accomplices (Mitschuldige) of nature and of her inherent tendencies (Wirkungsrichtung), which may be opposed to their own interests’ (Simmel, 1998, p. 119). But although a natural process can start off on the surface of human-made nature and can completely take it over against humans’ own interests, it follows that what is made by human skill can also become ‘unintentionally and unenforceably something obviously new, that is often even more beautiful and more consistent than what has been intended’ (Simmel, 1998, p. 121). Here Simmel points to the possibility of positive side effects from human interference with nature. It is as if one would suggest that because of the careful and skillful work in nature it is therefore autonomous, real, and independent. In his sociological concept of human life in nature, Simmel outlines an understanding and a possibility of human-made nature fully evolving. When reflecting on the development of a building falling into ruin, he even speaks up for nature and tries to take the perspective of nature: ‘A new form arises that is, from the standpoint of nature, entirely meaningful, comprehensible, and differentiated’ (Simmel, 1998, p. 120). Here Simmel uses a sociological language that is normally only applied to human individuals: meaningful action. In sociological language, action is distinguished from behavior in that it involves meaning and intention. Simmel seems to suggest a different definition. Departing from the Aristotelian example of the duality between nature and technology, Simmel instead shifted the notion of nature towards the possibility of human-made nature. In contrast to Aristotle, Simmel clarified the degrees, and suggested a distinction with the term cultivated. Simmel distinguished between humanmade things such as buildings or a ship’s mast from human-made nature, such as a cultivated tree (Simmel, 1998, p. 197). Human-made nature is still natural when it is able to fulfill potentialities which do not work against its natural tendencies. Although nature has given way to culture in this example, the final product is completely natural. Speaking from a contemporary perspective, in this model the natural ecological dynamics are initiated by humans, but thereafter, so to speak, nature designs itself. This ‘self-design’ can generate numerous potential outcomes owing to the complexity and unpredictability of ecological dynamics. Thus, although Simmel makes a clear distinction between nature and culture/society, he nevertheless arrives at a very different distinction than we are used to – or that is inherent when authors speak of the end of nature, because allegedly there is no longer any nature, since every bit of it has been touched by humans.

19.5 The Dynamics of Nature and Alternative Visions for Non-native Species For Simmel, it is precisely because it is in part unplanned and independent of human involvement that an achievement of human intervention into the natural world can be so amazing and delightful. In this regard, nature is also perceived as a meaningful actor: ‘Nature has transformed the work of art into material for her own expression (Formung), as she had previously served as material for art’ (ibid., p. 120). The

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cultural achievements of human societies can, so to speak, turn into something natural with their own – so far latent – natural powers. ‘Cultivated’ nature for Simmel is still something natural, although it has been invented by humans. If humans give nature the room to unfold according to its own rules – as with the grafted apple tree – Simmel still regards it as natural. For Simmel ‘the work of the gardener really only develops potentialities inherent in a tree, but unawakened in its inner core’ (1993, p. 85). The gardener completes nature and brings it ‘to a fulfillment determined by the essential and fundamental tendencies’ (ibid.). One could therefore say that the gardener also ‘awakens’ nature. Concurrently with the gardener’s intervention, nature also invents its own natural culture. When nature is culturalized, as in his example of the mast made out of the same apple tree, Simmel does not immediately speak of the rights of nature being maintained. The form of a mast made out of a tree ‘is given to nature purely from the outside, under the impact of a purposive system that is foreign to her own fundamental tendencies’ (Simmel, 1998, p. 120). Here Simmel implicitly differentiates between other forms of modeling, farming, and manipulation where a predetermined endpoint is the desired stage, such as a native plant garden – perhaps something that critics of restoration still believe in. With the example of the ruin, Simmel makes clear how ‘the equation between nature and spirit, which represented the building, shifts in favor of nature’ (ibid.). A ruin for Simmel is the meeting point or the interface of human action and the action of nature. He called it ‘the special attraction (Reiz) of the ruin that an object invented by human skill is finally felt like a natural product’ (ibid., p. 120). In short, in Simmel one can find an emphasis on the dynamism of the natural world. His theoretical reflections make it possible to emphasize how human activities modify nature and nature’s responses provide cause for subsequent individual action and social organization. It is the opposite of the idea that everything humans have touched has become unnatural. Overall, Simmel’s ideas of the natural world appear to be very fitting for developing many more points on the important continuum between nativism and cosmopolitanism in the future in order to move towards a broader vision on the importance of invasive species.

References Allison, S. K. (2007). You can’t not choose: Embracing the role of choice in ecological restoration. Restoration Ecology, 15(4), 601–605. Elliot, R. (1997). Faking nature: The ethics of environmental restoration. London: Routledge. Gobster, P. H. (2007). Urban Park restoration and the ‘Museumification’ of nature. Nature and Culture, 2(2), 95–114. Gross, M. (2001). Unexpected interactions: Georg Simmel and the observation of nature. Journal of Classical Sociology, 1(3), 395–414. Gross, M. (2003). Inventing nature: Ecological restoration by public experiments. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Gross, M. (2008). Return of the wolf: Ecological restoration and the deliberate inclusion of the unexpected. Environmental Politics, 17(1), 115–120. Jordan, W. R., III (2006). Ecological restoration: Carving a Niche for humans in the classic landscape. Nature and Culture, 1(1), 22–35.

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Katz, E. (2007). Book review of Eric Higgs’ Nature by Design. Environmental Ethics, 29(2), 213–216. Keulartz, J. (2007). Using metaphors in restoring nature. Nature and Culture, 2(1), 27–48. McKibben, B. (1989). The end of nature. New York: Random House. Simmel, G. (1993). Das Individuum und die Freiheit. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Simmel, G. (1998). Philosophische Kultur: Gesammelte Essais. Berlin: Wagenbach.

Part V

Conclusions

Chapter 20

Nature, Technology and the Human Condition Catherine L. Newell and Michael A. Osborne

20.1 Introduction The publication of the journalist Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature (1989) sounded an alarm of global proportions and brought focus to numerous issues faced by this generation of scholars and activists. Generations of humanity, acting carelessly but largely without intentional malice, had polluted and altered our planet and its atmosphere. It now seemed no longer possible, if it ever had been, to encounter nature in a ‘pure’ and thereby authentic form, after the fashion of the dry and expansive American Southwest celebrated in Edward Abbey’s writings where the authenticity of a landscape resided in its absence of humans. Pristine nature, or nature as something untouched by humans and separated from them, had passed from existence and McKibben documented this fundamental change with examples from a nascent climate science. The book appeared during a time when science studies scholars and environmental historians were increasingly uneasy with the idea that nature was something absolute and essentially separate from humans. McKibben later reflected on The End of Nature’s emotional core and asserted that humanity had now crossed another significant threshold as it could now alter its own genome. He felt that the altering of macro nature and the mapping and impending manipulation of our micro nature constituted irreversible passages to modernity and mandated a new humility of precautionary principles and altered lifestyles (McKibben, 2005). These two events bracket the ‘middle ground’ of topics examined in this volume. The papers in this volume hold fast to the idea that humans are part of the material world. Yet what is this nature which embeds us within itself? Indeed, many Americans now use the term environment in place of nature, or reference biology as a metonym for the natural. This lends imprecision and instability to all three terms (Marx, 2008). Our authors have largely retained the terminology of nature though they clearly recognize how culture and language mediate our descriptions and understanding of nature. Is it possible to know a thing in itself, we ask,

C.L. Newell (B) Religious Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-3130, USA e-mail: [email protected]

M. Drenthen et al. (eds.), New Visions of Nature, C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-2611-8_20, 

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especially when the object of study is nature and we are part of that object? What legitimates action if natural objects have these reflexive and exceedingly complex ties to us? Our very powers to demarcate between nature writ large, and humanness, are conditioned by our history and serial understandings of nature and what is natural. Are their advantages to a philosophical detachment toward nature, or should we try to think like a mountain? Why are some species seen as invasive and others as native or cosmopolitan? How does the restoration of marsh land and the re-wilding of rivers and lakes detract from or add to our historical and ecological heritage? These questions and others constitute our common research program. The paper of Peter Kahn, Rachel Severson and Jolina Ruckert, and that of Anita Guerrini, instruct us that what appears to be natural is often something substantially altered or managed by humans. We assign value to robotic dogs, plasma screens displaying scenes of the great outdoors, and colonies of fragile plover birds. The idea of nature as a curative force that moderates the ills of civilization continues in Kahn’s empirical scholarship. This tradition has many roots but is clearly discerned in the ideas of the nineteenth century landscape designer Frederick Law Olmsted, who designed New York City’s Central Park, Mount Royal Park in Montréal, Centennial Park in Sydney, and planned Yosemite Park in California. Olmsted consciously constructed hybrid landscapes with a message and did so to promote the physical and mental health of those who visited these places. In this he engaged in the artistic practice of concealing his design and infrastructure technology. Olmsted’s design principles, aptly summarized by the American historian Charles E. Beveridge, provided visitors with experiential messages meant to alter the human organism. A walk through his creations conferred: an enhanced sense of space: indefinite boundaries, constant opening up of new views. Avoidance of hard-edge or specimen planting, creating instead designs that have either ‘considerable complexity of light and shadow near the eye’ or ‘obscurity of detail further away.’ (Beveridge, 1986)

In other words, the apparent vestiges of nature encountered in Olmsted’s monumental creations were themselves altered, sculpted, and refashioned after his own aesthetic principles and were intended to identify a place and reveal its special genius. As Olmsted argued in his 1865 plan for Yosemite Park, contemplation of nature affected human psychology for the better. Nature’s transformative power on the human mind only increased over time and expanded as humanity progressed from savagery to more complex and loftier levels (Olmsted, 1865). But are such landscapes really authentic, or are they, as Robert Elliot (1997) suggests, a kind of artistic forgery that is never as authentic as real nature? The End of Nature also energized environmental historians to rethink their relationships to nature and reframe notions of its authenticity. By the 1990s some environmental historians were asserting that nature, or its near proxy ‘wilderness,’ could not be clearly demarcated from humanity. Mountains, it seemed, were no longer sublime cathedrals and nature was no longer an absolute and defining ‘other.’ Demarcation between a larger nature and humanity was not a wilderness of animality on one side and the progress of civilization on the other, as it had been in the

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rather bipolar world of Henry David Thoreau, the philosopher-hermit. For all the talk of the curative properties of nature and its benefits, and even a series of New Age environmentalisms, honest historians had to admit that generations of humans had valued nature in different fashions. Ancient Mediterranean and Mesopotamian peoples had displayed a fear of the wilds and their dangers, while moderns praised nature and forests for their healing powers and aesthetic value. Wilderness has also featured prominently in narrations of United States history. In the 1890s Frederick Jackson Turner’s ‘frontier thesis’ had argued that the westward movement of pioneers and the subduing of wilderness had formed the unique American character. Roderick Frazier Nash (2001), writing at the end of the next century, charted changing American representations of wilderness from the untouched and desolate, to the diversely-valued and semi-domesticated. Perhaps the paths to modernity reside largely in our relationships with nature? Western environmentalists may urge bolder and immediate action, but most certainly the nation states of America and Europe have begun to protect nature from human development rather than protecting people from nature.1 These efforts to restore environmental damage are bound to political, cultural, and scientific issues, yet what works in the West may not work in India, where establishing a nature preserve or park may actually deprive people of the sustenance gathered in the commons. To reiterate problematics taken up by Martin Drenthen, Jozef Keulartz, and Anita Guerrini, how can a new nature be put in place and how does memory condition that new nature? What is to be done with ecosystems overrun by recent immigrants? Does restoration ecology imply an integration or adaptation of nature to human needs, or is it mainly an extension of classical ecology and meant to cordon off human impacts and provide a de-landscaping of sorts? If the last dozen years have brought a continued re-thinking of our relationship to wilderness, they have also seen publication of a complete draft of the human genome. Genes, of course, particularly since the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA in 1953, enjoy special ontological status. Many see them as the essence of our being, objects meriting a kind of reverence appropriate to the most fundamental part of our materiality and the informational keys to what is phenotypically human. Thus, as with the sometimes reverential language and imagery we use to describe wilderness, so too do we often portray the double-helical structure of DNA and the human embryo in spiritual and religious terms (Cronon, 1996, 1995; Gilbert & Howes-Mischel, 2004). Culture, it seems, provides a repository of values for concepts and metaphors which allow us to talk about science and express scientific claims. Hub Zwart’s contribution to our volume shows just how fundamentally powerful metaphors are to science, as the blueprint and map metaphors have defined knowledge of genomics for the public sphere. Similarly, Eric Juengst’s contribution on the Human Microbiome Project reveals the multiple metaphors at play in this project’s highly-medicalized ecosystem approach to map the flora and fauna residing within us. And as if this were not enough, Lenny Moss reminds us

1 See

for example the essay review by Deborah R. Coen (2008).

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that the therapeutic promise of the new genomics – no less than its deterministic connotations – have run afoul in a sea of complexity and metaphysical assumptions. The various problems of macro and micro nature, and the semi-domestication of both, have inspired hard thinking by contributors to this volume. If clear paths of action are still emergent, the flow of scholarship urges more ecumenical views of properties labeled as essences, authentic or natural. Human history, natural history, and modern genomics interact in diverse ways and we need to remember that what seems so natural (both external to the organism and in its genome) may in fact be an artifact of human action (Cronon, 1996). Are there lessons for humanity in nature, as evolutionary psychologists assert, and does this help us to get from what is to what ought to be? Essentializing either the micro world of genes or the macro world of nature places us at risk and could constrain our actions. It is the search for this warrant for action from essentials which bothers the historian William Cronon who portrays the central problem of wilderness as a paradoxical quest for an ‘other.’ Only after objects are located and discerned can human logic establish the kinds of philosophical demarcations held dear by generations of critical realists and other philosophers of science. Wilderness, Cronon argues, embodies a dualistic vision in which the human is entirely outside the natural. To the extent that we celebrate wilderness as the measure with which we judge civilization, we reproduce the dualism that sets humanity and nature at opposite poles. We thereby leave ourselves little hope of discovering what an ethical, sustainable, honorable human place in nature might actually look like. (Cronon, 1996, 17, ital. in original)

Our hope then is that these papers have enabled glimpses of an emergent ethic toward humans and nature for our complex world. If we accept the proposition that we can no longer demarcate between ourselves and something more pure and fundamental, we also need to rethink terms like ‘honorable,’ which often describe actions between humans rather than a more expansive and inclusive notion of the actions of humans toward flora, fauna, and even inanimate nature (Nash, 1989). If metaphors provide a powerful motif for thinking through these issues, perhaps in stead of thinking like a mountain we should learn to think like a mountain within an expansive landscape of ideas?

20.2 Public Visions of Nature The first selection of essays reflects on public visions of nature. That is, nature as it is seen, encountered, and instrumentalized by diverse publics. As Peter Kahn points out in his essay, the future of nature doesn’t solely depend upon our ability to define an ‘I/You’ relationship, a relationship between ourselves in here as humans and the natural world out there, where the natural world is ‘other.’ The contribution of Kahn, Severson and Ruckert, ‘Technological nature – And the Problem When Good Enough Becomes Good,’ probes the limits of authenticity. The question of whether human productions are inferior to those of nature troubled Aristotle and

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many medieval philosophers. The seventeenth century philosopher, politician and writer Francis Bacon – whose utopian novel New Atlantis (1626) imagined a new organization for scientific advance – argued that both science and art imitated nature and were therefore equivalent. That which was artificial, he argued, such as the rain, snow, and other wonders produced by scientists in his college-like Salomon’s House, did not differ ‘from the natural in form or essence’ but only in authorship, or as Aristotle would have put it, the ‘efficient’ cause (Zetterberg, 1982, 180, n. 5). Kahn and collaborators, as well as commentator Maartje Schermer, focus on the small differences we find between authentic nature and its various technological simulacra. When technology can appropriate and approximate nature – to the point that human emotions become muddled at contemplating robotic dogs – serious concerns arise about the existence of any natural baseline of authenticity. Looking into our future, Kahn and co-authors envision a blurring of what they see as an ‘I/You’ relationship between ourselves (‘I’) and what is natural (‘You’), a softening of lines driven by what is plausibly becoming humankind’s inability to delineate between technology and the naturally authentic. This recalls the philosopher Martin Buber’s old problematic of ‘I–it’ and ‘I–Thou’ relationships. It is not clear, however, how such a shift might reconfigure our relationships with nature from an ‘I–it’ configuration, with the ‘it’ meaning nature, to a more mutualistic and respectful relationship of, as Buber would have it, ‘I–thou.’ What will happen when we no longer have the ability to identify the mediated aspects of what we call nature? Will we truly suffer an environmental amnesia or, as Hub Zwart suggests in his essay, will our ‘public vision’ of nature become normalized to our invisibly mediated concept of authenticity? A more optimistic view, posited by Schermer, is that new forms of technology like television’s Discovery Channel bring something of nature nearer to us. In so doing they offer opportunities to engage nature, possibly by visiting some of the sites seen on television, and they also bring views of nature to diverse publics. A related set of issues is explored by the essay by Riyan van den Born and Wouter de Groot who examine the moral dilemmas posed in delimiting the human and natural as separate spheres. Are there degrees of naturalness within nature itself? Through surveys they problematize the picture of humans as ‘just another species’ in a ‘semi-domesticated, typical Dutch landscape.’ Images of nature, no less than linguistic metaphors, condition our visions of the human-nature relationship. Values and other non-explicit judgments abound when one speaks of nature or the environment, and Van den Born and De Groot’s survey has mapped out two motifs of our relationships with nature, one consequestialist/functionalist in approach, another non-consequentialist/deontic in stance. They warn that we often see ‘nature’ in reference to utility, with the central ethical issue focused on intervention, not the question of what is natural. Thus conservation policies designed in support ecosystem stability, biodiversity and sustainability displace concern over the ‘naturalness of nature.’ In this first section we also encounter the ‘naturalness’ of nature perched in a precarious policy and cultural borderland. Anita Guerrini examines a symbolic and material ‘liminal space’ inhabited by the snowy plover birds of the Coal Oil Point

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Reserve in Santa Barbara, California. The larger Reserve where the plovers fly and nest is itself a university creation intended to preserve a sustainable landscape and function as a laboratory for environmental restoration and provide for multiple needs and uses. At Coal Oil Point preservation strategies include erecting fences to segregate humans, dogs, and egg-eating skunks from nesting grounds. Commentator Henny van der Windt urges a solution based on flexibility and commitment which gives due consideration to the several species (for example other birds and wolves) likely to interact with humans in a given landscape. A further question also arises here, as it does in Jozef Keulartz and Cor van der Weele’s essay; what role does a given species play in a perturbed ecosystem? Do plovers contribute to the ecological integrity of the area, or are they themselves an invasive species? Of perhaps more immediate consequence within this volume and to the larger questions of nature and authenticity is the question: who decides? In this vision of nature as mediated, as a construction of public policies and delineated spaces, the problem of authenticity is paramount. In the continually negotiated boundaries between ‘I/You,’ landscape/nature, and humanity/nature, the perceived baseline of authenticity changes. Ecological baselines are often a negotiated and possibly imagined starting points on the arrow of time. Yet public visions of nature and our policies toward nature preservation, conservation and restoration depend on starting somewhere. In terms of the practical effort and mobilization of resources needed to restore an ecosystem, it is likely impossible to define an authentic baseline upon which to found restoration activities.

20.3 The Genomics View of Nature The internal landscape of genes and chromosomes, the idea of degrees of detachment and what it means to be human, provoke the contributions of Lenny Moss and Pieter Lemmens. Moss, like Cronon, is concerned about humans projecting intellectual misconceptions onto nature. For Moss, a crucial problem is that we are detached by nature as well as from nature, and this has resulted in a pain of detachment which troubles the human condition. Like all good philosophers of biology Moss begins with Aristotle’s doctrine of causes, and focuses particularly on the difficulties of relating material, formal and final causes. The chapter evokes many historical concepts of life, not all of which can be credited within the scope of this volume. One claim is that compared to simple organisms humans are characterized by higher degrees of detachment. This recalls the physiology of Marie-FrançoisXavier Bichat, who before his death in 1802 had defined life as the sum of forces which resist death. For Moss, detachment, though not life, is the ability to ‘resist the force of thermal or other kinds of winds.’ Bichat’s ideas were popular, at least until Claude Bernard’s physiology held sway and a generation of researchers redefined disease as another kind of life rather than its polar opposite. We can also appreciate Moss’s resurrection of the vital whirlpool image of life popular with the mid-twentieth century biochemist Erwin Chargaff and others who challenged the

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reductionist pretensions of a molecular biology emboldened by materialism and the techniques of x-ray crystallography. Commentator Lemmens proposes metabolism as an alternative model for conceptualizing our relationship with nature. Following Hans Jonas, he writes of degrees of freedom rather than of detachment. The contributions of both Lemmens and Moss push the envelope on thinking about what it means to be human, and perhaps a new vision of nature is emergent in their contributions. Most certainly they both find fault with genetic determinism and evolutionary psychology. As plenary commentators, unconstrained by the necessity to respond at length to these important issues, we close with the thought that perhaps Moss’s proposition that the evolution of life has enabled a progressive detachment between organism and external environment, could be re-viewed as a history of greater ‘embeddedness.’ That is, as organisms become more complex their history is one of ever greater power over their environment and a progressive enmeshment with the environment. Complicating this teleology is the emergence of multiple and new social and technoscientific environments. In this way, we become more embedded in our environment after the fashion of a boxer who strikes a doll made of tar only to become enmeshed in it. Perhaps the human condition resides in this image? That is, rather than a progressive detachment from their environment, humans as complex and self-reflective organisms learn to manipulate it in ever more subtle ways. There is also the property of connectivity, for we are linked to the environment not only by cell walls but also by the tools and technology we have created to mediate our relationships with our physical, biological and spiritual surroundings. For better or worse, we are enmeshed and connected to spaceship earth even if as we are simultaneously distanced from portions of it by dyadic stimuli and response systems. Eric Juengst and commentators John Dupré and Maureen O’Malley consider an additional level of connectivity, the complex network of links between humans and the micro flora and fauna inhabiting our bodies. For Juengst, the reality of highly permeable boundaries between our body and the residents of our internal ecology problematize the discreteness of the body as an individual. His analysis of metagenomics and its metaphors casts doubt on human individuality, and if we agree we cannot demarcate the human genome as a species of Platonic form, something absolutely separated from the chaotic heterogeneity of nature. We find ourselves as hosts of internal landscapes and ephemeral keepers of microbial ecosystems. Such thinking reverses the usual order of operations, challenges the essential nature of humanness, and effectively turns the metaphor of landscape inside out to re-conceptualize humans as sites of multi-species symbiosis. In this vision of our being we glimpse yet another breakdown in the popular notion of genomic research culminating in a Holy Grail of health and understanding. We are not only the sum total of our human genome, but as Dupré and O’Malley signal we are a confederacy of cells, bacteria, and viruses living and working and existing together in a mostly harmonious but sometimes contentious landscape. Our microbiome – and the metaphors surrounding it – may well provide new ways of thinking about our genetic heritage and as these three authors clearly hope, addressing human disease.

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All three authors allude to the concept of a ‘super-organism’ while pondering its utility in the new field of metagenomics. It’s well to recall the contributions of the American ecologist and botanist Frederic E. Clements, who, among other things, walked the sand dunes where Guerrini’s plover birds now nest and planted exotic plants there to alter landscapes and test his rather heterodox theories of evolution and heritance.2 He was also a government consultant for the environmental restoration of America’s Dust Bowl of the 1920s. Clements’s popularized the notion of viewing plant communities as super-organisms with teleological paths of growth to maturity. His ideas were themselves influenced by the afore-mentioned ‘frontier thesis’ of Frederick Jackson Turner, and early members of the influential Chicago School of Sociology drew on Clementsian concepts of ecology and community. We must not forget, however, that as science became more specialized and ecology became more quantitative and rooted in study of energy flows, Clements’s ideas lost favor in large part due to the perceived idealism of the superorganism concept. If this concept is to be resurrected and deployed anew toward issues of the micro-world and bodily integrity, the philosophy of science which informs this move requires elaboration on several fronts. We hope the collective scholarship of this volume provides additional instances of how seminal metaphors and tools of understanding travel across disciplinary lines to frame complex pan-disciplinary concepts. Literature and novels, when contrasted with ‘real’ scientific activity such as molecular biology, are often thought to exist in separate registers. Yet our final contributors on genomics, Hub Zwart and Chunglin Kwa, discern several connections between the socio-cultural and scientific spheres. Their world is vastly different from that of C. P. Snow’s two separate cultures (termed the scientific and the humane). Zwart and Kwa, although they are not in entire agreement, reveal the messy methodological world of contemporary science, a place bearing little semblance to the tidy world of Steven J. Gould’s nonoverlapping magesteria, who, like Snow, placed the findings of science and those of religion in clearly demarcated and separate boxes. The social and corporate worlds of the life sciences, and the products of those worlds, frame the papers of Zwart and Kwa. Like Moss, Lemmens, Juengst, Dupré and O’Malley who assess the social meanings of genomics, they too reach beyond facile determinism. On balance, Zwart and Kwa are grounded in cultural analysis and the historical sociology of science and less concerned with epistemology than with the social sphere of genomics research. While few would say now, as Paul Feyerabend once claimed, that in science anything goes, cutting edge science and activities at the research front of emergent disciplines like nanoscience and genomics pose weighty problems for science studies scholars. For example, new fields of science often display a proliferation of methods and technologies and, as Kwa signals, new taxonomies. The first draft of the human genome was accomplished by extremely expensive computers. It was also the product of fierce

2 Donald

R. Burnette, ‘Imperfect Succession: The Impact and Legacy of Frederic E. Clements,’ dissertation in progress at Department of History, University of California, Santa Barbara.

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competition between the public and private sectors. This sets it apart from the Manhattan Project and other large-scale US government-funded research projects. Zwart’s contribution to this discussion traces the use of metaphors in the presentation of modern genomic research. The public has come to understand the human genome as a blueprint or map of the human race. Zwart and some genomics researchers, however, are humbled by the complexity of the achievement and find greater explanatory value in a landscape metaphor, or, more expansively, in understanding the current state of genomics research as a kind of voyage of discovery, an exploration akin to Charles Darwin’s travels on the H. M. S. Beagle. Zwart is not content to examine only the uses of metaphors in genomics. He is also interested in the scientific imaginary and investigates how novels – from those of Émile Zola who tried to reproduce Claude Bernard’s determinism of the ghastly kitchen of laboratory science, to those of Michael Crichton – inform societal understandings of science. In so doing Zwart’s concerns loom over other public sphere issues considered throughout this volume. Many conference attendees were critical of the traditional configurations of reductive philosophical principles and received realism. We might also signal, for example, a common reserved toward a style of model-building and thinking grounded in the structural chemistry popularized in James D. Watson’s novelistic portrayal of the competitive race of science, The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA. This style productive of science (not to mention Watson’s injunction to avoid boring people) has worked well for determining biological structures and their architectures. But science has moved on conference participants were mainly interested in the social roles and places of science. As regards genomics and the philosophy of demarcation and exclusion, Kwa is skeptical that Popperian falsification and the larger Popperian philosophical heritage can elucidate the essential achievements of the human genome project. Kwa attends to the baldly entrepreneurial aspects of this erstwhile race to sequence the human genome and the tensions between Craig Venter’s Celera Genomics Corporation and research teams at the US National Institutes of Health. We are left then with a scientific achievement of great promise and an even greater landscape of complexity with regard to the human future.

20.4 Philosophy of Landscape and Place Our final section returns to the macro world where Bruce B. Janz, Sjaak Swart, Martin Drenthen and Kris van Koppen tackle questions of ethics and place. How can we elaborate an ethics of action that recognizes how ethics itself is rooted in a place and time, and how is it linked to the ethos of a community? At first glance ethics, conceived of as a universalistic mode of philosophical reasoning, may seem diametrically opposed to particularist and localistic reasoning. Western ethics too often appears as something which has emerged in a kind of timeless vacuum, effacing its origins in the discourses of Socrates and the leisured males of Athens. Janz, however, connects ethics with the bios and its temporal cycles. His contribution challenges us to reconfigure ethics and to develop a rich moral imagination. This

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accommodation of ethics and ideas of place constitutes a bold attempt at interdisciplinarity and re-values the writings of Aldo Leopold on the nature of nature. Commentator Swart locates Janz’s intervention within the genealogy of embodied knowledge but asks whether Janz has made a more compelling argument for an epistemology of place or an emboldened ethics of place. Also considering ethics, place and space is Martin Drenthen, who like Janz regards the ethics of place as a countermovement to the claimed universality of traditional ethics. Drenthen, like Zwart, employs literary and scientific concepts to analyze environmental aspects of the human condition in this era of supermodernity. Conference participants found his evocation of palimpsest landscapes compelling and one that explodes received notions of place. Drenthen also examines how people identify with the historical, natural and artistic heritage of river landscapes. What, he also asks, is a ‘non-place,’ and how can we accommodate the multiple layers of meaning assigned to the places we restore? If places are philosophical individuals, they require our respect and command an ethics of action. If a non-place is something else, that is not an individual, perhaps it fails to merit ethical consideration or it requires an intermediary ethics appropriate to the middle-ground. The dichotomies of place and non-place, locals and visitors, and cultivated and wild landscapes, constitute unstable foundations for action. Perhaps, as commentator Kris van Koppen argues, our highly mobile society must also be considered and we need a new kind of mindfulness and awareness of the historical specificity of restoration projects and other mobilizations of nature. Jozef Keulartz and Cor van der Weele’s essay and the associated commentary of Matthias Gross return us to the role of metaphors in scientific and public discourse, important themes also investigated by Zwart and Juengst. Invasive species are ubiquitous, and Keulartz and Van der Weele here as elsewhere investigate how metaphors can be used to communicate between disciplines (Keulartz, 2007).3 Clarity on this issue is especially important in environmental problem solving as environmental issues rarely present themselves within the confines of a single discipline. Moreover, disciplines themselves can be quite international in scope and perhaps more so now in our age of economic and biological globalization. Keulartz, Van der Weele and Gross, like others in this volume, seek a middle-ground. Gross in particular is concerned that the rather absolutist positions of Robert Elliot on restored nature as ‘art fakery’ and Bill McKibben on the end of nature be evaluated against the actual practices of restoration ecology. In his view, and that of the German sociologist and philosopher Georg Simmel, humans can be accomplices of nature. Both partners have agency, but nature is replete in its unpredictable and non-linear aspects. For Keulartz and Van der Weele the epicenter of middle-ground struggles is invasion biology, and they urge us to think in terms of degrees of degradation of ecosystems and to recognize a continuum of conditions and tools between the rather extreme poles of nativism and cosmopolitanism which have framed invasive

3 On

the use of metaphors in biology and beyond see: Schlanger (1971).

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species issues. In this view, and that of Gross, the cultivation of nature is a given. We should worry less about the authenticity of nature and begin working on pluralistic approaches to restoration appropriate to the specificity and complexities of ecosystems.

20.5 Concluding Remarks The contributions to this volume range widely, through our intensely human relationships with nature, to our technological and artistic abstractions of nature, to the metaphors we use to explain nature’s functioning or the meanings of sequenced human and microbiome genomes, to finally the empowerment conferred by deessentializing ideas of both macro and micro nature. Summed together, if that is possible, these collected essays shift sites of analysis in psychology, genomics, philosophy of nature and restoration ecology to a middle-ground of landscape and multiple scales. New metaphors for explaining nature emerge, metamorphose and fade into obscurity all the time. What has happened, for example, to the Club of Rome’s ‘limits to growth’ notion of the 1970s? Most recently, the metaphors of personal, civic and global ‘carbon footprints’ gain ascendancy and appear in popular media and scientific literature. But even this has led to a new consumerism and a portable device called an iPed is proposed to inform us of our real time carbon emissions (Tierney, 2008). Perhaps we are nearing a future where the mark of material privilege will be how little carbon one emits, rather than how much one spends? The footprint metaphor, however, speaks directly to the problems and issues touched on in this volume: are we in nature, or are we out of nature, or are we residents of a middle-ground? Carbon footprints and iPeds function as links to the larger biome. But they also illustrate our present quandary, the residual perception that humans are curiously separated from nature and apart from the authentically natural. Thus we approach nature by ‘treading’ on it with our wastefulness, or are ‘managing’ it with our policies, or are ‘preserving’ it in parks and landscapes, or ‘experiment’ with it in manifold ways. So is the boundary between humans and the natural utterly impermeable on a day-to-day basis? Are we left only with carbon counters and public policies and fences? Or can we choose otherwise? Our essays explore perceptual borderlands and the sites of investigation have been varied in scale, complexity and location. Most contributions straddle the perceived boundaries between the human and the natural, or between an ‘out there’ and ‘in here.’ We have attempted to specify how nature has been publicly constructed, genomically constructed, known and described through metaphors and reenvisioned in terms of landscape and place. Perhaps when we once more insert the human race into our own vision of the ‘authentically natural’ boundaries to thought and effective action will recede. By parsing out and rendering explicit these divergent views and their problems we also ask for a reconsideration of how humans and nature are joined and considered.

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References Abbey, E. (2006). The monkey wrench gang. New York: Harper Collins. Bacon, F. 1863, 1891). The works of Francis Bacon, Baron of Verulam, Viscount St. Alban, and lord high chancellor of England. In J. Spedding, R. L. Ellis, & D. D. Heath (Eds.), 15 Vols. Cambridge, Mass., 1863, Vols. 1–10; Boston 1891, Vols. 11–15. Beveridge, C. (1986). Toward a Definition of Olmstedian Principles of Design. Retrieved on January 25, 2009, from http://www.njasla.org/newsltrs02/pdfs/7Ss.pdf Coen, D. (2008). The greening of German history. Isis, 99, 142–148. Cronon, W. (1995). Uncommon ground: Toward reinventing nature. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Cronon, W. (1996). The trouble with wilderness or, getting back to the wrong nature. Environmental History, 1, 7–28. Elliot, R. (1997). Faking nature: The ethics of environmental restoration. London, New York: Routledge. Gilbert, S., & Howes-Mischel, R. (2004). ‘Show me your original face before your were born’: The convergence of public fetuses and sacred DNA. History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, 26, 377–394. Keulartz, J. (2007). Using metaphors in restoring nature. Nature + Culture, 2, 27–49. Marx, L. (2008). The idea of nature in America. Dadelus: The Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 137(2), 8–21. McKibben, B. (2005). The emotional core of the end of nature. Organization & Environment, 18, 182–185. Nash, R. F. (1989). The rights of nature: A history of environmental ethics. Madison (Wis.): University of Wisconsin Press. Nash, R. F. (2001). Wilderness and the American mind (4th ed.). New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Olmsted, F. L. (1865). Yosemite and the Mariposa Grove: A Preliminary Report, 1865. Retrieved on January 25, 2009, from http://www.yosemite.ca.us/library/olmsted/report.html Schlanger, J. (1971). Les métaphores de l’organisme. Paris: J. Vrin. Tierney, J. (2008). Brad Pitt’s Carbon Footprint. New York Times, May 9, 2008. Retrieved on January 25, 2009, from http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/09/brad-pitts-carbonfootprint/. White, R. F. (1995). The organic machine: The remaking of the Columbia river. New York: Hill and Wang. Zetterberg, J. P. (1982). Echoes of nature in Salomon’s house. Journal of the History of Ideas, 43(2), 179–193.

Index

A Abbey, E., 267 Actor-network theory, 198 Adaptive preference, 44 Adolescents, 31 Aesthetics, 87, 92, 95, 216 African elephant, 94 AIBO, 13, 21, 25, 26–30, 38, 42 Alienation, 17, 114, 229, 234, 242 Alien species, 142, 241, 251 Alsberg, P., 125 Anthropocene, 8 Anthropocentrism, 186, 193, 217, 229 Anthropogenesis, 113, 124 Anthropotechnology, 124–126 Arabidopsis Information Resource, 174 Arcadia, 95, 230, 233, 234 Arcadian tradition, 233, 234 Arcadian vision, 95 Archaeology, 12, 210, 220 Aristotle, 103, 104–105, 106, 117, 261, 270, 271, 272 Attitudes, 5, 7, 9, 10, 11, 34, 44, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 93, 97, 232, 237, 258 Aug´e, M., 17, 221, 222, 223, 223 n.12, 224, 225 Australopithecine, 113 Authenticity, 6–13, 14, 32–35, 36, 42–43, 47–66, 67–72, 247, 267, 268, 270, 271, 272, 277 Autopoiesis, 120 B Bacon, F., 271 Balance of nature, 259 Bal, M., 16, 183, 186, 188 Beck, U., 8 Beliefs, 44, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 230 Bernard, C., 43, 126, 165, 166, 272, 275

Beveridge, C. E., 268 Bichat, M.-F.-X., 272 Biocentrism, 95 Biodemographic approach, 248 Biogeochemical approach, 248 Biogeochemistry, 152 Bioinvasion, 238, 239, 239 n.2, 241 n.4, 243, 248, 251, 254 Biology, 17, 94, 104, 105–106, 117, 118, 119, 123, 124, 126, 129, 130, 130 n.1, 133, 134, 136, 141, 144, 151, 160, 162, 167, 176, 237–254, 257, 267, 272, 273, 274, 276, 276 n.3 Bios/biotic, 66, 85, 132, 140, 183, 184, 185, 188, 189, 197, 247, 252, 253, 275 Biosystem, 118 Borgmann, A., 45 Born, R. van den, 13, 47–66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 232, 271 Boundary object, 96, 97 Brave New World (Aldous Huxley), 43, 44, 164 Brenner, S., 174, 175 Buber, M., 13, 21, 32, 33, 34, 35, 42, 43, 271 Buffon, 106 C California, 4, 14, 75, 76, 77, 78, 80, 82, 83, 84, 91, 92, 96, 97, 240, 240 n.3, 268, 272, 274 n.2 Callicott, J. B., 85, 186, 253 Capability approach, 44 Carbon footprint, 277 Causality, 108, 117, 119, 122 Chargaff, E., 272 Cheney, J., 66 Children, 13, 21, 25, 29, 30, 31, 36, 37, 38, 41, 42, 43, 47, 55, 104, 167 Claessens, D., 124, 125 Clark, W., 15, 156, 157, 158, 158 n.2, 162

M. Drenthen et al. (eds.), New Visions of Nature, C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-2611-8 BM2, 

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280 Clements, F. E., 252, 274, 274 n.2 Clinton, B., 157, 158, 239 Coal Oil Point Natural Reserve (California, US), 76 Coen, D. R., 269 n.1 Collins, F., 15, 130 n.1, 155, 156, 157, 158, 160, 161, 162, 163, 163 n.9, 169 n.16, 171 Community, 7, 15, 23, 24, 36, 81, 85, 95, 131, 133, 144, 164, 171, 175, 181, 183, 192, 197, 216, 219, 235, 241, 242, 243, 246, 247, 250, 251, 251 n.10, 252, 253, 257, 274, 275 Comparative genomics, 14, 110–111 Compensation, 15, 111, 112, 113–114, 115, 150 Complexity, 6–13, 50, 85, 87, 98, 108, 109, 110, 118, 130, 136, 144, 161, 168, 170, 171, 260, 261, 268, 270, 275, 277 Consciousness, 4, 33, 34, 119, 143, 185, 187, 188, 198 Conservationists, 75, 91, 92, 95, 96, 97, 200, 238 n.1, 246 Cook-Deegan, R., 129, 130, 156 n.4, 157, 161 Cosmopolitanism, 17, 237–254, 257–262, 276 Cronon, W., 81, 269, 270, 272 Cryptobiota, 94 Cultural landscape, 209, 213, 214, 217, 218, 219, 221, 222, 223, 224, 230, 231, 232, 233, 235 C-Value paradox, 110 Cybernetics, 248, 248 n.7, 249 D Darwin, C., 44, 103, 104, 117, 119, 123, 162, 164, 230, 275 Darwinism, 117, 119, 123 Data-gathering, 174 Dawkins, R., 104, 123 Decision-making, 48, 91–98, 200 Degrees of freedom, 14, 107, 108, 109, 111, 112, 118, 273 Deleuze, G., 16, 185, 192, 193 Dennett, D., 34, 104, 123 Desmoulin’s whorl snail, 91 Detachment, 10, 14, 15, 17, 103–115, 117, 118–119, 120–122, 123–124, 125, 126, 166, 259, 268, 272, 273 Developmental psychology, 109 Dialectics, 103 Dimensions of authenticity, 64–65 Disciplinarity, 16, 182, 183, 185, 186, 187, 188, 192, 193, 276

Index Disembodied knowledge, 199 DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), 3, 110, 130 n.1, 131, 132–133, 136, 155, 157, 158, 167, 168 n.12, 175, 269, 275 Domestication, 124, 125, 218, 270 Donald, M., 109, 113, 114, 123, 229, 244, 249, 274 n.2 Drenthen, M., 3–17, 205–227, 229, 230, 231, 234, 269, 275, 276 Dunbar, R., 113 Dupr´e, J., 15, 132 n.4, 135, 136, 140, 142, 147–152, 170 n.18, 273, 274 E Ecocentrism, 95, 229 Ecological Ethics Framework, 200 Ecological management, 258 Ecological surprise, 260 Ecology, 57, 75, 87, 94, 95, 132, 137, 144, 185, 187, 188, 216, 217, 238, 244, 245–246, 247, 248, 249, 249 n.8, 251 n.10, 252, 254, 257, 259, 260, 269, 273, 274, 276, 277 Ecosystem, health, 250, 253 Elliot, R., 48, 245, 258, 268, 276 ELSA research, 159, 161 Elton, C., 238, 247 Embodied knowledge, 199, 276 Embodiment, 108, 185, 216 Emergent nature, 4, 5 Empirical (research), 7, 13, 15, 41, 42, 47, 49, 65, 72, 92, 95, 110, 113, 115, 268 Endangered Species Act (US), 14, 77–81, 87 Enlightenment, 107, 109, 184, 190, 192, 193, 197 Environmental ethics, 9, 11, 16, 200, 205, 206 Environmental generational amnesia, 37, 38, 44 Epigenomics, 149 Epistemology of place, 197–203, 276 Essentialism, 142, 151 Ethics, 63–64, 181–194, 199–200, 205–207, 215–217 Ethics of place (EofP), 11, 16, 181–184, 185, 186, 188, 189–193, 194, 197, 198, 199–200, 202, 205–207, 211, 215–217, 218, 230, 276 Ethos, 170, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 194, 197, 198, 206, 212, 216, 275 Europe, 12, 48, 81, 86, 91, 93, 239, 243, 253, 258, 269 Evernden, n., 9, 226

Index Evolution, 8, 41 n.1, 44, 113, 123, 124–126, 129, 132, 133, 142, 151, 152, 162, 199, 273, 274 Evolutionary biology, 251, 252 Evolutionary nature, 4, 5 Existence, 106, 114, 117, 119, 123, 124, 125, 126, 185, 192, 201, 209, 225, 239, 246, 260, 267, 271 Exotic species, 17, 58, 237, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247, 251, 252, 253, 254 F Faking Nature (Robert Elliot), 245 Farmers, 81, 95, 96, 208 Final causality, 117, 119, 122 Final cause, 104, 105, 106, 112, 119, 272 Fish and Wildlife Service (US), 77, 81, 241 Flagship species, 94, 167 Focal length, 11, 187, 189, 192, 198, 200 Focal practices, 45 Form, 5, 9, 12, 15, 25, 27, 28, 32, 33, 34, 35, 37, 42, 64, 68, 71, 77, 78, 105, 120–122, 245 Forster, E. M., 35, 36, 43 Foucault, M., 175, 176 Freedom (degrees of), 10, 14, 65, 107, 108, 109, 111, 112, 118, 119–120, 122, 163, 167, 193, 226, 273 Friedman, B., 22, 23, 24, 26, 36, 37 Friesland, 96 Frontier thesis, 269, 274 Functionalism, 253 Functional vision, 25, 95 Functions, 4, 23, 35, 59, 86, 106, 107, 114, 120, 122, 126, 133, 136, 138, 144, 147, 150, 152, 158, 161, 165, 171, 185, 187, 191, 197, 200, 249, 250, 251, 272, 277 G Gehlen, A., 123 Genetic causation, 136, 144 Genetic determinism, 10, 15, 135–137, 149, 155–172, 273 Genetic interventions, 14, 50, 54, 59–61, 71, 72 Genius loci, 188, 197 Genocentrism, 151 Genomics, 14–15, 103–115, 137 n.5, 155–172, 269, 270, 272–275 metaphors, 155–172 blueprint, 15, 155, 156, 157, 159, 160–161 landscape, 275

281 Giant panda, 94 Gilbert, S. F., 269 Gleason, H. A., 252, 260 Globalization, 58, 205, 239, 243, 244, 250, 276 Glocalization, 11 Goal, 60, 63, 75, 76, 81, 85, 86, 117, 131, 173, 174, 218 Gobster, P. H., 245, 258 Gould, S. J., 159, 274 Greenpeace, 95 Groot, W. de, 13, 47–66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 271 Gross, M., 17, 257–262, 276, 277 Guerrini, A., 14, 75–88, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 268, 269, 271, 274 H Habermas, J., 143 Haraway, D., 9, 115 Hartmann, n., 122 Health, 22, 23, 36, 37, 55, 60, 93, 131, 133, 134, 136, 138–140, 143, 144, 150, 157, 159, 160, 168, 239–241, 250, 251, 253, 268, 273, 275 Heidegger, M., 124, 126, 182 Helmer, W., 218, 219, 220, 226 Herder, J. G. von, 109 Hettinger, n., 243 Hierarchical mind, 69 Historic authenticity, 247 History, 4, 5, 12, 30, 38, 62, 71, 75, 79, 97, 107, 108, 111, 118, 121, 129, 130 n.1, 140, 147, 151, 152, 159 n.6, 162, 174, 182, 184, 194, 208, 209, 211, 213, 216, 218, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224, 225, 229, 230, 232, 233, 238, 268, 269, 270, 273, 274 n.2 Homo erectus, 113 Howes-Mischel, R., 269 Human, the, 15, 38, 55, 67–70, 110, 122, 123, 129–133, 134–135, 137–138, 141, 155–157, 174, 188, 216, 267–277 Human/animal relationship, 92, 93 Human arrogance, 258 Human Brain Project, 174, 176 Human flourishing, 41–46 Human genome, 6, 15, 110, 129, 130, 133, 134, 135, 136, 141, 147, 149, 152, 155–157, 159, 159 n.6, 160 n.8, 161, 163, 170, 171, 173, 174, 175, 269, 273, 274, 275

282 Human Genome Project (HGP), 6, 15, 129, 130, 133, 135, 136, 155–157, 158, 159, 159 n.6, 160, 160 n.8, 161, 164, 167, 168, 169, 171, 173, 174, 175, 176, 275 Human identity, 141–143, 144 Human Microbiome Project (HMP), 15, 129–133, 134, 136, 138, 141, 142, 143, 148, 269 Human nature interaction, 10, 49, 51, 52, 53, 55, 92–95, 271 Human-robotic interaction, 26 Hutchinson, E., 248, 249 Hybrid landscape, 268 I Identity, 105, 120, 137, 141–143, 144, 151, 209, 210, 211, 216, 221, 223, 225, 226, 227, 246 Image of nature, 9, 10, 49, 53, 54–55, 61–63, 69, 234, 271 of relationship, 49, 51–52, 53, 55, 56–57, 67, 69 of technology, 54, 61–63 Immunology, 36 Indicator species, 94 Inter-rater reliability test, 72 Interventions in nature, 14, 50, 52, 53–55, 56, 57–61, 67, 68, 69, 71, 72 Interviews, 13, 23, 29, 36, 49, 50, 51–52, 53, 56, 63, 65, 69, 70, 72, 213 Introspection, 70 Invasion biology, 17, 237–254, 257, 276 Invasive species, 65, 238, 239, 240, 241, 245, 249, 253–254, 258, 262, 272, 276 Invented landscapes, 221, 259, 260, 262 Ishiguro, H., 30, 35 Island biogeography, 248, 249 n.8 J Jacobs, M., 14, 67–72 Janz, B., 16, 181–194, 197, 198, 199, 200, 202, 206, 275, 276 Jefferson, T., 157, 158 Jonas, H., 8, 103, 119, 120, 121, 122, 273 Jordan, W. R., III, 243, 246, 258, 259 Juengst, E., 15, 129–144, 147–152, 269, 273, 274, 276 K Kahn, P. H., Jr, 13, 21–38, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 268, 270, 271 Kanda, T., 30

Index Katz, E., 48, 245, 258 Kerner, C., 156 Keulartz, J., 3–17, 92, 98, 200, 232, 237–254, 257, 269, 272, 276 Keystone species, 94, 140 Knowledge, 7, 8, 10, 11, 16, 30, 32, 33, 114, 129, 130 n.1, 147–148, 160 n.8, 166, 170, 175, 182, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 214, 247, 260, 269, 276 Koppen, K. van, 17, 229–236, 275, 276 Kwa, C. L., 15, 173–176, 248, 274, 275 L Land ethic, 183, 184, 186, 190, 198, 246 Landscape, 16–17, 65, 76, 156 n.3, 181, 192, 197, 199, 205, 207–212, 213, 216, 217 n.6, 219, 220–221, 231, 233, 268, 272, 273, 275–277 Lapwing, 91–98 Lay people, 13, 47–66 Legible landscape, 208, 213, 226 Legislation, 91, 92, 93, 96, 159, 160 Lemmens, P., 15, 117–126, 272, 273, 274 Leopold, A., 16, 183–184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 193, 194, 198, 246, 247, 250, 276 Lewis, M., 15, 156, 157, 158, 158 n.5, 162 Life, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 21, 27, 32, 37, 43, 44, 45, 46, 50, 59, 68, 77, 93, 96, 104, 105, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 117, 119, 120, 121, 123, 125, 127, 142, 147, 151, 152, 159, 160, 161–164, 167, 168, 168 n.12, 206, 221, 224, 238, 246, 260, 272, 274 Light, A., 182, 245 Linnaeus, C., 106 Locals, 230–231 Lorenz, K., 198 Lowenthal, D., 12 Luxury, 123, 126 Lyotard, J.-F., 124, 192 M MacArthur, R., 249, 251 n.10 McKibben, B., 258, 267, 276 Malleable nature, 4, 5 M¨angelwesen, 111, 123 Marsh marigold, 94 Marx, K., 114 Marx, L., 267 Mastership (over nature), 49, 51, 52, 56

Index Materiality, 105, 106, 112, 117, 118, 122, 188, 269 Matter, 105, 112, 117, 119, 120–122, 206, 248 Mayr, E., 135 Meine, C., 187 Mendel, G., 129, 135, 155 Metabolic pathways, 150 Metabolism, 112, 119–120, 122, 134, 140, 141, 149, 152, 273 Metagenomics, 132 n.4, 133, 134, 136, 141, 142, 144, 147, 148, 148 n.1, 149, 151, 152, 163, 273, 274 Microbial symbionts, 149 Microbiology, 133, 147, 151, 151 n.2, 152 Microbiome, 15, 129–133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 140, 141, 147, 148, 269, 273, 277 Miller, H., 125 Mixed animals, 132 Mixoecology, 244, 252 Mobile nature, 235–236 Mobility, 96, 163 n.9, 222 Moral Allocation Principle, 200–202 Moral development, 28–29, 30, 32, 38, 142, 184, 188, 191, 200–202, 226, 235, 275 Morgan, T. H., 175, 176 Moss, L., 14, 103–115, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 125, 126, 269, 272, 273, 274 Multispecies symbiosis, 152 Munz, P., 199 “Museumification” of nature, 258 N Narrative, 6, 7, 9, 11, 66, 115, 124, 162, 168, 209, 212, 214, 215, 216, 217, 220, 221, 225 Nash, R. F., 269, 270 Nass, C., 26 Nativism, 17, 237–254, 257–262, 276 Naturalness, 14, 47, 48, 49, 50, 58, 59, 63, 64, 65, 69, 200, 231, 271 Nature as culture, 4, 5 invented, 260 new visions of, 6–13 psychological aspects, 35, 38, 41 public visions of, 13–14 real, 10, 41, 42, 43, 45, 46, 47, 64, 218, 258, 259, 268 reserve, 91, 96, 212, 214, 219, 224, 225 restored, 248, 258, 259 as sacred, 4, 5

283 surprising, 167 unexpected, 258–260 untouched, 258, 260, 267, 269 Neoteny (or pedomorphosis), 125 Netherlands, 3, 4, 6, 13, 16, 47–66, 95, 96, 200, 205, 207, 208, 212, 215, 221, 224, 229, 232, 235 New Atlantis (Francis Bacon), 271 Newell, C. L., 17, 267–277 New visions of nature, science, and religion, 3, 6–13 Niche paradigm, 251 Non-genetic interventions, 14, 50, 71, 72 Non-place, 16, 205–227, 276 Non-specific care, 201, 202 Norway, 96, 97 Nussbaum, M., 44 N-Value paradox, 110 O O’Brien, W., 243, 244 Oceano Dunes State Park (California, US), 82 Odum, E., 248 Odum, H., 248 Office environment, 38 Off-road vehicles (ORVs), 77, 78, 82, 83 Olmsted, F. L., 268 O’Malley, M., 15, 132 n.4, 135, 136, 140, 142, 147–152, 273, 274 Organism, 15, 49, 63, 104, 105, 106, 108, 109, 110, 111, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 125, 129, 130, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 151 n.2, 152, 158, 162, 163, 165, 167, 168, 199, 200, 237, 246 n.5, 248 n.7, 249, 251, 252, 268, 270, 272, 273, 274 Osborne, M. A., 267–277 Otter, 94, 214, 225 Overabundance, 222, 224, 225, 226 Owens, D., 37 P Pain of detachment, 111, 112, 113, 114, 122, 123, 125, 272 Palimpsest, 220, 276 Parfit, D., 44, 142 Participation, 10, 49, 52, 56, 109, 232, 247 Partnership (with nature), 49, 52, 56, 137, 232 Pervasive science, 6, 7, 13, 21 Pet animals, 21, 25, 42, 201 Philosophical anthropology, 103, 109, 114–115 Physis, 5

284 Place, 16–17, 52, 55, 181–194, 197–203, 205–227, 232, 234, 235, 237, 243, 246, 268, 274, 275–277 Plasma displays, 22–25, 35 Platial ethics, 182, 183, 184, 189, 192, 193, 194, 198, 199, 200, 202 Plessner, H., 9, 119 Postgenomics, 148 Post-normal science, 7–8 Potente, F., 156 Pragmatic ethics, 199–200, 201, 203 Praxis, 114, 115 Precautionary principle, 143, 201, 267 Privacy, 24 Process, 4, 11, 27, 48, 54, 58, 65, 70, 71, 72, 76, 86, 91, 92, 93, 97, 109, 120, 122, 123, 124, 125, 131, 132, 135, 137, 139, 140, 142, 144, 158, 173, 184, 185, 186, 187, 189, 199, 200, 201, 202, 213, 215, 217, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 232, 234, 235, 244, 247, 250, 251, 253, 258, 260, 261 Proctor, J., 3–17 Pyle, R. M., 37 R Recombinant ecology, 244, 252, 254 Reductionism, 6–7, 104, 105, 160, 160 n.7, 160 n.8, 171 Redundant species, 94 Reeves, B., 26 Rehabilitation, 249–251, 253 Rein, M., 244 Religion, 3, 4, 5, 6, 55, 104, 124, 274 Restoration ecology, 16, 17, 76, 86, 95, 200, 205, 217, 245–246, 247, 249, 249 n.9, 251, 253, 257, 258, 259, 260, 269, 276, 277 and gardening, 6, 76, 247, 254 ruin as metaphor for, 260–261, 262 Retention, 118 Rivers, 11, 16, 17, 36, 37, 47, 77, 158, 205–227, 231, 234, 240, 268, 276 Robot (dog, humanoid), 10, 13, 21, 25–30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 38, 41–46, 268, 271 Robotic technologies, 10, 13, 21, 25–30, 38, 268, 271 Romanticism, 185 Room for the river, 212, 213, 215, 218 Ruckert, J., 13, 21–38, 41, 268, 270 S A sand county almanac (Aldo Leopold), 183, 185, 193, 194

Index Santa Barbara Channel Islands (California, US), 80 Santa Barbara County (California, US), 75, 78 Schama, S., 199, 229, 233 Schermer, M., 13, 41–46, 200, 271 Schlanger, J. E., 276 n.3 Sch¨on, D., 244 Science, 173, 174, 176, 244, 249 n.9, 250, 259 Searle, J., 34, 67 Selfness, 122 Self-organization, 48, 64, 119 Sense of place, 205, 211, 212, 214, 216, 218, 219, 220, 224, 227, 243 Severson, R., 13, 21–38, 41, 268, 270 Shifting baseline, 37, 38, 218 Shifting baseline syndrome, 218 Sierra Club, 82–83 Simmel, G., 260, 261, 262, 276 Sloterdijk, P., 10, 123, 124, 125, 126 Smith, M., 16, 189, 215 Snowy plover, 14, 75, 76–77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 87, 91–98, 271 Social aspects of restoration, 260–261 Social development, 109 Social issues, 137 Social science methods, 70 Soul´e, M. E., 241, 244, 251, 252 Species/ecosystem relationship, 93 Specific care, 201, 202 Specific causation, 138, 139, 140 Spinoza, B. de, 118 Stakeholders, 7, 23, 91, 92, 96, 97, 200, 213 Stephanovic, I., 206 Stewardship (of nature), 49, 52, 56, 57, 95, 194, 232 Stiegler, B., 126 Stout, J., 143 Style (of research), 104, 113, 114, 173–176, 210 n.3, 229, 275 Super modernity, 17, 234 Superorganism, 108, 141, 142, 150, 151, 151 n.2, 152, 274 Swart, J., 16, 95, 197–203, 232 Symbolism, 87, 92 T Taylor, C., 10, 248 Techno-evolution, 123, 124 Technological nature, 13, 21–38, 41, 42, 43, 45, 46, 270

Index Technology, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 24, 27, 28, 34, 35, 41–46, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 61–63, 123, 125, 126, 143, 161, 164, 169 n.13, 174, 187, 188, 244, 258, 261, 267–277 psychological aspects, 35, 41 Techno-science, 6 Teleology, 104–105, 117, 119, 273 Temporality, 183, 184, 189 The End of Nature (Bill McKibben), 258, 261, 267, 268, 276 “Think like a mountain” (Aldo Leopold), 16, 183, 193, 268, 270 Thomas, K., 229, 232 Thoreau, H. D., 269 Tierney, J., 277 Toorn, W. van, 208, 209, 209 n.2, 211, 213, 214, 217, 217 n.6, 221, 224, 225 Tourists, 92, 96, 214, 221, 224, 230, 239 Transference, 124, 125 Translational genomics, 15, 129–144, 148 Translational science, 136, 151 Travelling concept, 181–194 Turkle, S., 25, 44, 44 n.2 Turner, F. J., 269, 274 Typhoid M., 139 U Uexk¨ull, J. von, 124 Umbrella species, 76, 85, 86, 94, 95 Unconscious mind, 67–72 V Values, 5, 23, 35, 42, 48, 49, 51, 53, 56, 65, 68, 75, 76, 85, 87, 93, 95, 110, 183, 187, 193, 206, 213, 214, 216, 217, 224, 235, 245, 246, 248, 249, 258, 260, 268, 269, 275

285 Vandenberg Air Force Base (California, US), 78, 80, 81 Venter, C. J., 15, 155, 159, 160, 160 n.7, 161–164, 169 n.16, 173, 174, 175, 275 Vera, F., 218 Verne, J., 164 Visions of nature new, 6–13 public, 13–14 Visitors, 82, 213, 214, 221, 221 n.8, 224, 225, 229, 230–231, 232, 234, 235, 268, 276 W Watson, J., 129, 130, 275 Western snowy plover, 14, 75, 76, 77, 82 Wetlands, 205, 212–213, 214, 218, 219, 238 White, G., 230 Wild animals, 91, 97, 201, 202 Wilderness, 13, 95, 157, 158, 187, 200, 202, 208, 233, 253, 254, 268, 269, 270 new, 17, 225–226 Wilderness vision, 95 Wildness, 227, 258 Williams, R., 3, 123 Wilson, E. O., 24, 108, 121, 123, 249 Windt, H. van de, 14, 91–98, 200, 232, 272 Wolf, 37, 96–97, 98, 183, 190, 191 Worster, D., 229, 230, 249 WWF, 95 Y ‘Yuk’ (-factor; Mary Midgley), 63 Z Zetterberg, J. P., 271 Zwart, H., 15, 155–172, 175, 176, 217, 269, 271, 274, 275, 276