Travel Reference
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As a result, some of the places we consider most pristine, most wild, are in some ways
deeply artificial. A popular park like Yellowstone is probably more controlled, more man-
aged, than the Exclusion Zone of Chernobyl. And even parks less besieged by visitors than
Yellowstone or Yosemite are premised on ideas and laws that define human beings as out-
side of nature.
This artificial division between natural and unnatural pervades our understanding of the
world. Industrialists may hope to dominate nature, and environmentalists to protect it—but
both camps depend on the same dualism, on a conception of nature as something to which
humanity has no fundamental link, and in which we have no inherent place. And it's a
harmful dualism, even if it takes the form of veneration. It keeps us from embracing a ro-
bust, engaged environmentalism that is based on something more than gauzy, prelapsarian
yearnings.
But we cling to the ideal of a separate and perfect nature as though to give it up would
be the same as paving over the Garden of Eden. When I met with the writer and academic
Paul Wapner, whose ideas I'm stealing here, he told me that a colleague had warned him
not to publish his book on this subject, titled Living Through the End of Nature. His col-
league thought it was a bad career move, and that anyone who argued that the concept of
nature was no longer a useful one was giving away the farm.
The farm has already been given away. We're just so entranced by the concept of nature-
as-purity that we won't face facts. Our environment is not on the brink of something. It is
over the brink—over several brinks—and has been for some time. It was more than twenty
years ago that Bill McKibben pointed out the simple fact that there is no longer any nook
or cranny of the globe untouched by human effects. It's time to stop pretending otherwise,
to stop pretending that we haven't already entered the Anthropocene, a new geological age
marked by massive species loss (already achieved) and climate change (in progress).
But the dream of nature is so dear to us that to wake from it seems like a betrayal. The
sense that we have not yet gone over that brink—not quite—is what motivates us to our
ablutions, our donations, our recycling, our hope. But it is a great untruth. The task now,
perhaps, is not to preserve the fantasy of a separate and pure nature, but to see how thor-
oughly we are part of the new nature that still lives. Only then can we preserve it, and us.
We went to find the rest of the loggers. The truck dropped us at the edge of a large,
muddy clearing with a dozen large, felled trees stacked around its periphery. The air was
alive with the riot of engines and saws. The clearing was a temporary holding area for trees
that had been felled in the surrounding forest. A man with a chainsaw went from log to log,
sawing off the sloping protrusions of roots at their bases, while other workers, both men
and women, measured and marked them. An angry, saber-toothed forklift picked logs up in
twos or threes and dropped them into a pile. They landed with a deep thunk.
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