Authenticity and the End of Nature
It’s snowing outside, fresh virgin piles of white that are quickly covering my windowsill, so there seems something incongruous about reading a book on global warming, Bill McKibben's excellent The End of Nature. I got motivated to read it because it comes up in policy debates in Massachusetts, and is oddly enough used to justify extensive forest management regimes- after all, if Nature’s dead, what’s wrong with wise human control? I had a hunch that this couldn’t really be what McKibben meant, and so I picked up a copy of the book from Harvard’s labyrinthine Widener library.
McKibben argues that climate change and other global environmental dilemmas are so severe as to, once and for all, destroy the concept of nature, wildness, out “there,” separate from human intervention and desires. He’s at his most eloquent when he talks about the psychological transition that accompanies this new reality, the loss of something special and sacred in our lives. As an environmentalist, there’s something immensely appealing about this argument, something I’ve felt in my own heart. However, as a scientist there’s something I find troubling about it too.
And, as I sit here pondering the snowflakes, I think I’ve figured out what it is, or at least given a name to my puzzlement: existentialism. McKibben’s argument is similar, at least, to that cartoon version of existentialism that we non-philosophers get taught. The existentialists critiqued the modern worldview, and science in particular, for removing the enchantment of the world, and giving us something less in return. McKibben feels similarly that the death of Nature, like the death of God, has made the world spiritually depauperate. As a sort of response to the failure of the modern worldview, existentialism posits the idea of authenticity, a fuzzy concept that I must admit to never having fully understood. McKibben’s idea of regaining a sense of the sacredness of the trees and forests even while acknowledging and grieving for the death of Nature seems to me similar, and similarly paradoxical.
Both of these trains of thought are a bit odd to a scientist, maybe even threatening, for at their core they are hostile to science’s materialistic roots. They both also seem utterly irrelevant to the real struggles for environmental justice (not to mention social justice!) going on in both the developed and (especially) the developing world.
