It is now almost a prerequisite of any dispute among environmentalists to recall a judgment offered by the literary critic Raymond Williams – that ‘nature’ is perhaps the most complex word in the English language. Attempts to unravel its meaning are fraught with challenge. Does it signify just the living elements of the biosphere, or does it include inanimate parts, such as mountains and rivers? The extreme heat of the Sun at its core makes it the place least hospitable to life – yet it is equally the source of the whole process. Perhaps the greatest of all associated questions is whether humans are subsumed within, or inexorably separated from, the Sun’s operations.
Jeremy Mynott’s book does an exceptional job of teasing out most of nature’s multiple meanings. In case we imagine that such issues are the preoccupations of a marginal sect, the author points out that climate change and the Sixth Extinction arise almost entirely from actions that assumed we are outside nature’s living fabric. Today,94 per cent of the mammalian biomass is either human or our livestock, while two-thirds of wildlife has vanished in just half a century.
Mynott is a philosopher and classicist by training, and a translator of Thucydides. He is also a naturalist, and the author of Birds in the Ancient World (2018). His main contribution in this latest book could be his detailed survey of Greek and Roman thought on nature, and the links between classical speculations and the 2,000-year tradition of western ideas. He concludes that in many ways the Greeks invented the idea of nature and mapped its areas of confusion.
To capture the full muddle, Mynott goes deep into prehistory – to the invention of language and the flourishing of human consciousness. While we imagine our primitive ancestors to have been deeply attuned to their world (judging by the magnificent cave paintings at Lascaux and Altamira), archaeology tells a different story. It shows that migrations of the first peoples through Asia into the Americas and Australasia coincided with collapses in the Pleistocene megafauna of those regions. Could the prehistoric hunter with his Clovis spear point have been basically as destructive as the modern settler in Amazonia with his chainsaw and bulldozer? In mitigation of past crimes, Mynott is at pains to emphasise that climate change and subsequent habitat loss were also implicated in those multiple extinctions.
Most commentators agree that the main factor which drove a wedge between humans and the natural realm was the development of agriculture. The anthropologist Jared Diamond called it ‘the worst mistake in the history of the human race’ for the way it unleashed disease, war and inequality. What Mynott prefers to emphasise is not how much we mastered nature through farming, but how in many ways we were enslaved by its opportunities, quoting the historian Yuval Noah Harari: ‘We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us.’
The part of Genesis about ‘man’s dominion over all the Earth and every creeping thing’ is often cited as encapsulating this exploitative mindset. Yet most surprising is Mynott’s analysis of Christian attitudes, seen in the words of scholars such as St Augustine and Albertus Magnus. Since nature was God’s divine creation, human love of the living world was itself seen as an act of devotion. Religious reverence for wildlife has thus been a part of the official doctrine and encyclicals of Pope Francis, and a repudiation the Old Testament notions of dominance is the most recent expression of this long tradition.
A chapter on American contributions to later western thought about nature is most revealing. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Thoreau were both proponents of a uniquely New World sensibility, yet their writings are part of the very fabric of environmentalism. To this Mynott adds the American ‘invention’ of national parks, which was later exported worldwide, aided by the advocacy of the wilderness pioneer John Muir. Two other remarkable American naturalists, Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson, are credited with kickstarting the whole 20th-century conservation movement.
Yet Mynott also notes how the united States was founded on a mission of wilderness conquest, as well as the deliberate dispossession of the indigenous inhabitants. Today the beneficiaries of Manifest Destiny consume twice the hydrocarbons of their European counterparts and nearly three times those of the average Chinese citizen. What is perhaps most troubling, and telling, of all Mynott’s conclusions is that our concern for the full spectrum of nature increases in almost exact proportion to our excessive consumption. Like life itself, our attitudes to the natural world are an unfolding process. They are not fixed. They evolve.
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