What is nature to us?

Few subjects have been more deformed by doublethink and muddle than that of the entity—if it is an entity, and not an ongoing event—we call “nature”.

Nature, we read, is something that should be revered, obeyed, protected and redeemed; from which we should learn virtues such as simplicity, balance and humility; by which we are occasionally punished for our hubris and thoughtless greed (floods and pandemics, earthquakes and sharks); within which we can find a form of therapy for the unhappy conditions of modern living.

As if, that is, the “natural” world is not shaped by the practices of camouflage, deceit and brute force, and not driven by the desire for sex, sustenance and territory; as if landscapes and ecosystems altered by human activity are any less “natural” than those altered by, say, beavers or trees or marine invertebrates such as coral; as if the landscapes and ecosystems we now recognise as “nature” are not a tiny fraction as old as the earth that supports them and were not preceded by innumerable landscapes and ecosystems with which they have vanishingly little in common; as if all forms of human existence and activity (from microprocessors to same-sex desire, from industrial warfare to elaborate theories of natural order) could be anything other than “natural” themselves. In the words of the great biologist EO Wilson, “We did not arrive on this planet as aliens. Humanity is a part of nature, a species that evolved among other species.” Even anthropogenic climate change is, as it must be, as natural as the rites of spring.

Suffice it to say that I approached the title under review, Jeremy Mynott’s The Story of Nature, in a spirit born more of duty than of prospective joy—and that I now rank it as a compelling example of why we should not allow ourselves to be constrained by our prejudices. Mynott’s book is, in all respects, refreshing: beautifully written, yes, but also animated by the deeper lucidity that only comes from thinking long and hard about what one wishes to say. Doing so is never easy, but doing so about a topic as elusive and as mutable as Mynott’s takes skills of a different order. He is equal to the challenge.

Mynott clears the ground with some introductory—and quasi-Socratic—dialogue in which he makes it plain just how difficult it is to define “nature” without recourse to special pleading. The remainder of the book is divided into 10 chronologically arranged chapters, each of which traces our changing attitudes to what might be called the nature of nature, along with our efforts to comprehend, or sometimes just to describe, the natural world more satisfactorily. Mynott begins with a discussion of prehistory: do the representations of animals on cave walls, such as those found in Lascaux, imply an emergent idea of the natural? Maybe. If so, it was one in which the boundary between human and other kinds of animal life was thoroughly porous. 20,000 to 50,000 years ago, human beings had not yet seized the position of apex predator from megafauna such as cave lions.

Things began to change with the end of the last Ice Age, about 10,000BCE, and with the agricultural revolution that followed. Human beings now became farmers—animals that no longer relied on hunting and foraging for survival, and that put the remainder of the natural world (animal, vegetable and mineral) to work for them. The relationship between humankind and newly domesticated creatures such as cows, pigs, goats, sheep, horses, cats and dogs may have been profoundly symbiotic, but laid the foundations for the notion that human beings are a class apart—less primus inter pares than tamers and vanquishers of the wild.

It remained to justify this sense of superiority, lest it should become vulnerable either in moments of quiet meditation or through contact with the frequently hard reality of living in the world. Enter the ancient Greeks. Mynott’s chapter describing their attempts to grapple with the natural and its lines of demarcation contains some very deft accounts of pre-Socratic philosophy, as of the botanical writings of Aristotle’s pupil Theophrastus—but it sometimes moves a little too quickly, and engages less with the problem of “nature” than with the history of how the physical world was first investigated and analysed.

Mynott has perceptive things to say about how “inventing” the category of nature provided the Greeks not only with the wherewithal to assert human elevation over the other animals, but with positive evidence that such elevation was in fact the case: what other creatures could “self-consciously script their imaginings and thought to transcend the limitations of time and place”? Likewise, it is good to find Epicurean theories of the cosmos, as preserved by the Roman poet Lucretius, given their due. But Mynott is silent, for instance, about the creation story outlined in Plato’s Timaeus, within which it is a given that, because the physical world is subject to change and decay, it can only offer a defective representation of the principles of perfect and unchanging order according to which it was created. The intelligent souls of human beings can detect shadows of this order in the beauty of the physical world, but their cardinal responsibility is to look beyond nature to the metaphysical plane on which truth and beauty and goodness are one. The Timaeus was immensely influential throughout Roman antiquity and, because it was so easily Christianised, remained so up to the 16th and 17th centuries. Not for nothing does Raphael’s famous The School of Athens depict Plato holding a copy of it while pointing airily upwards. Alongside him, his younger and much better dressed pupil, Aristotle, asserts the primacy of engaging with the physical and moral worlds around us.

Attention to the Platonic tradition would have tied up some loose ends within Mynott’s fine account of the dominion over the created world bestowed upon humankind by the Book of Genesis. Mynott is good on the circularity encouraged by the belief that the lineaments of true religion can be discerned from the study of creation, as also on the notion that the natural world comprises a series of moral lessons to which human beings should be alert (on the positive side of the ledger, the Christlike self-sacrifice of pelicans; on the negative, the rancid guile of foxes). But he is slightly at a loss when confronting St Augustine’s conviction that, although close attention must be paid to the “book of nature” (secondary reading with which to reinforce the revelations of scripture), there is no need to worry about strict accuracy: what matters is what your readings can be made to mean within your theological schematisations, not whether they are observationally true. Neither Christian Platonism nor human exceptionalism get much more Platonic than this.

On the Enlightened side of the argument, nature was there to be analysed, named and exploited for human benefit—principally, for material resources, but also in order to affirm the designing genius of its divine creator. On the Romantic side, such instrumentalising approaches to the natural world were an affront. Wordsworth suggested that they “murder to dissect”, and Keats saw them as an attempt to unweave the mystery of the rainbow. From such perspectives, it was the very mysteriousness of the natural world, its sublimity, that at once inspired human creativity and served as a check on the prideful triumphalism of the modern age.

What both approaches have in common is the conviction that human civilisation, at least in its western forms, is fundamentally unnatural. For the Enlightenment, this is a good thing. For the Romantics, it is an index of all that is wrong with the empty self-conceit of modern living. Mynott writes well about Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau as the high-water marks of Romantic naturalism, convinced as they were in their different ways that “the phenomena of the natural world reflected universal spiritual truths”, that these truths were “wild”, and that we should as such be more concerned with wildness and the wilderness than with civilisation.

Such beliefs, as Mynott reminds us, were not just about the vibes. They were also the mainspring of the moves to establish the system of national parks throughout the United States in the late 19th century. But, in discussing them, Mynott misses something significant. The insistence that humankind had become alienated from the “natural” also allowed the indigenous human inhabitants of the American “wilderness” to be treated as primitive and often as savage—as natural phenomena differing only in degree from the wolf and the bison, and that the god-fearing bringers of civilisation could decide to conserve or eradicate as they saw fit. It followed that Native Americans were forcibly relocated to “reservations”. The US was able to pat itself on the back for its magnanimity and broadness of mind, all the while vigorously and profitably expropriating the land and resources of its manifest destiny. And, of course, this kind of magical thinking has by no means been confined to the Americas. I would like to have read Mynott on the dynamics of reactionary Romanticism from, say, Joseph de Maistre’s early 19th-century tirades against scientific modernity through to social Darwinism and the discourses of “nature” and “conservation” as they played out in the first half of the 20th century—not least in the German-speaking lands.

Mynott traces the origins of the modern conservation movement to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) and its exposure of the ecosystems destroyed by the pesticide DDT. He also has sensible observations on the history and evolution of the parts of the UK voluntary sector concerned with natural conservation—including, as one might be inclined to forget, the National Trust. All do important work, even if their “campaigning rhetoric” regularly relies on unreflective idealisations, and sentimentalisations, of that which they seek to protect: everything we do may be “natural” all the time, but saying so is not an effective way of persuading people to commit to the conservationist cause. Better perhaps to speak of protecting the environment, though as the case of the novelist and ardent birdwatcher Jonathan Franzen—who accused the National Audubon Society (the US equivalent of the RSPB) of forgetting that “the most serious threats to American birds” are “habitat loss and outdoor cats”—tends to confirm, this shift in focus comes with challenges of its own, particularly when the epochal threat of climate change makes it hard to think clearly about anything else at all.

Mynott concludes by looking ahead to the possible futures of conservation, environmentalism and space travel. Whatever else comes to pass, the history of nature as an idea is likely to remain on the same tracks; we will carry on regarding ourselves as Noah, and not as one of the species that have made a home on the ark.

Viewed as a source of rules or paradigms through which human beings should govern themselves and their treatment of the physical universe to which they belong, “nature” is at best inadequate and at worst actively dangerous. Viewed as a topic of enquiry in the history of human thought, it has important things to reveal about who and what we think we are. The virtue of Mynott’s The Story of Nature is to shine important new light on why we should care about it today.