Report 6:03/15/2023
The Interaction between Nature and Culture
In my book, Nature & Culture–A Personal Crisis, I expressed the ways in which I see the world as centered on an individual. I also attempted to diagram that view from an institutional perspective in which the focus became “US” rather than “I”. (The diagram below is slightly altered from the one in the book.) All humans, as animals, are part of the Earth’s matter and energy, here labeled the natural world. Humans are joined together in a vast ecological system of life and its environment. Unlike other animals, humans have a unique form of consciousness and have developed distinctive patterns of looking at the world. This is what I call the cultural world, a world filled with stories. We, homo sapiens, have, through our history, created institutions (political, economic, societal, cultural, technological, scientific, artistic) in which we express ourselves. Institutions, as such, are uniquely human, whose behavior patterns differ from those of other animals in that humans are creative by the use of language and distinctive motor skills.
Humans can observe and participate in the natural world by their ability to name and categorize their perceptions of nature. They can also participate by remaking nature, both modifying it consciously in making artifacts from natural materials but also, unconsciously or unwittingly altering it in the making of those same artifacts. In my diagram I represent culture as being embedded in the processes of the natural world–ecology and evolution–in uniquely human ways. (Note that green, which represents all of earthly nature, completely encloses the cultural world, which is shown in pale yellow.) However, the processes of the natural world are altered by the cultural world. (The dark green) Humans have disrupted the evolutionary and ecological systems that preceded their own evolution. We might label these disruptions as increased entropy, pollution, extinctions, and extractions. Today, no part of pre-human, ecologic processes remain unaffected by the cultural world of humans; all ‘wilderness’ has become affected by human activities. (Shown by the darker green arrows and dots.)
Throughout human history, people have increasingly become focused on their cultural institutions. We humans have created stories of many dimensions and many topics, but principally, the stories have focused on ourselves or mysteries we cannot understand. Our stories rarely describe our relations within nature. When the grand stories have been told, nature has often been seen or felt as the province of God, gods, or simply with awe and mystery. Today, through scientific stories, nature may be seen in terms of matter and energy. Nevertheless, we have come to be fascinated mainly with stories about our day-to-day lives. Simply look at the news of the day, the content of television programs and internet sites, and of our usual conversations. We also recognize our creations–artifacts made from natural products, as ‘goods’ or things that we value. (Sometimes they are just ‘stuff’.) But, for the most part, we don’t recognize how we are embedded within nature nor how we have unthinkingly created the ‘bads’ of nature. (My spellcheck doesn’t even know the word.) Only very recently in the lifetime of humanity, has the natural world of matter and energy been so greatly altered by humans that parts of it may be seen as bad. or profane. In religious terms, I would go on to say that our institutions value goods–the products we consume–as sacred. We want more of them.
How does this diagram and short discussion fit in with the previous five reports? The short answer is that we have come to know great details about nature through some of the specialized categories of science and the ways that science can be used by technology to create artifacts that make what we call modern civilization. Modern institutions of politics, society, and economics have seen the advantages obtained by this story for their members. The evidence is extended lives, better health, better communication and transportation systems, etc.– what supports “growth and progress.” Modern institutions are unable to overcome the inertia of this successful past and change their stories to fit the reality of a rapidly changing and greatly altered nature.
The new science of ecology and the recognition of ways that matter and energy interact with life and cultural institutions are incompatible with the old stories based on ideas of continuous growth and progress. The existential predicament in which we now find ourselves needs a story that includes the realities of ecological and evolutionary processes.
In these first six reports, I have tried to show 1) that the ecologic interconnections of the natural world have been greatly disrupted by changes in land use and the increasing use of fossil fuels; 2) the consequences of the increases in the populations of humans and domesticated animals; 3) the historical increase in the use of fossil fuels and natural materials; and in the diagram above, 4) the stories we tell ourselves about the relationship between culture and nature.
Next, I will discuss the an existential predicament we humans face today.