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TODAY Monday 25 August 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site.

 

TODAY IN THE WORLD: The End of Nature Again

When Bill McKibben wrote "The End of Nature" a few years ago, he endured both the upside and downside of a memorable title. Sales were probably helped by its zip and provocation. Unfortunately, only people who actually read the book knew that McKibben's language was nuanced and philosophical.

In the ten-minute half-life given to ideas that escape the academy, McKibben became associated with a point of view he never expressed, to wit, that humanity now had the power -- and tendency -- to destroy all natural life. He was upbraided for not seeing that humans were a part of nature, and that human management of natural phenomena was itself utterly natural.

What McKibben did say was that culture had created a construct called "Nature," the vitality of which depended on its apartness from humans. Always there existed some place somewhere that remained untouched by artifice. With anthropogenic climate change -- which changes the atmosphere, which envelops all -- the rules of the game have been altered irrevocably, he argued. There was no longer a "Nature" that existed beyond human reach.

Now we learn that McKibben's point about the atmosphere can be quantified, and that other measurable signs of human intervention have so transformed the planet that "... no ecosystem on Earth's surface is free of pervasive human influence." In the 25 July issue of Science, there is an important article entitled "Human Domination of Earth's Ecosystems." Its authors are Peter Vitousek, Hal Mooney, Jane Lubchenco, and Jerry Melillo. Here is its summary:

"Human alteration of Earth is substantial and growing. Between one-third and one-half of the land surface has been transformed by human action; the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere has increased by nearly thirty percent since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution; more atmospheric nitrogen is fixed by humanity than by all natural terrestrial sources combined; more than half of all accessible surface fresh water is put to use by humanity; and about one-quarter of the bird species on Earth have been driven to extinction. By these and other standards, it is clear that we live on a human-dominated planet."

The key word here is "domination." History provides ample evidence of human transformation of landscape, particularly in Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean. And human hunters have a 10,000 year experience in causing the extinction of large game animals. But scale matters: at some point in the life of every ecosystem, changes in quantity and diversity become changes in quality so profound that the essence of the ecosystem is transmuted. Whether Earth can be described accurately as an ecosystem is arguable, but it is surely a system of ecosystems, and that none of these ecosystems "... is free of pervasive human influence" marks a turning point in biology that one day will be reflected in human cosmology.

Perhaps this is mostly a question of rates of speed. All things die, after all, all species are headed for extinction. The sun will expire, and boil Earth as it goes. We probably won't have to wait so long as all that; in this age of rehabilitated catastrophism, astronomers each day seem to shorten the odds of a billion-ton comet smashing into downtown Philadelphia. Seen in this light, conservation is nothing more than an effort to delay the inevitable, to buy time. Conservation's success is measured by its capacity to reduce the human catalytic element in extinction, and thus to extend a little farther the period of grace given to us to comprehend, and love. It is the extension of those capacities through space and time that provides the impulse to conserve, and bestows added meaning to our daily work.

 

TODAY ON THE SITE:

Tom Turner, our man at the Media Watch feature, just returned from an arduous fact-finding trip to Paris and the Valley of the Loire. Fatigued by his pursuit of the perfect tarte de poire, callus-fingered from incessant lifting of the fork, Tom nonetheless thought of you, dear reader, and attended the first press conference of the new French Minister for the Environment. She's a Green, she talks tough, and she's hit the ground running.

 

Recent "Today" columns:

8/22: Our Friend Escerichia 0157:H7
8/21: Free the Greenpeace One Million!
8/20: Cattle and Jet Skis
8/19: Not Dirty, but Bad
8/18: Thirty Glorious Years
8/15: We Span the Energy Globe
8/14: Up in Flames
8/13: Environmentalism for Grown-Ups
8/12: Right to No
8/11: Cleavage

To access more "Today" columns, click "Archives" below.