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The manner in which we distinguish between nature and culture remains relevant, because it says something about the human perspective: what is our place in nature?

Koert Van Kensmoort

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Contents technobiophilia (Thomas, 2013) is our relationship with technology natural?...will it ever feel natural and ‘right’? are we becoming disconnected from ‘born’ nature?

biophobia (Orr, 2004) what are the implications of a world in which people fear nature? what is your relationship with nature?

the trouble with wilderness (Cronon, 1995) why do we love the wilderness? should we? if we realise that some things are cultural and natural, this can taint our idealised view

of the world and may cause us to enjoy “real” nature less - or value it less?

automated ethics (Chatfield, 2014) how much trust do we put in to machines, and how are we prepared to go? are we prepared to let machines decide our fates, even if this means saving others but it killing you?

the machine stops (Forster, 1909) should we be wary of our love of machines? how worried should we be that this 100 year old dystopian tale has come true?

is everything “natural�? (Partridge, 1995) if everything is natural, does that mean we should be able to act however we wish to? if nothing is natural, how does this affect our views on maintaining our planet?

real nature isn’t green (Van Kensmoort, 2006) are we beginning to see a new kind of nature, that is created by - but not controlled by - humans? does nature evolve along with us? what are the positive effects of this philosophy? are humans natural? does it affect our views of technology, to think that it is natural? is it as natural for us to bask in the light of our screens as it is to bask in the sun?

reared by puppets (Wade, 2014) is a condor that was raised by humans still a condor? is it right to keep animals in zoos? is it right to domesticize animals?

Gary Snyder, the American poet and environmentalist, offers alternative definitions from which we can choose. In The Practice of the Wild (1990), he distils down to two ways in which the term ‘nature’ is usually interpreted.

One, he argues, is the outdoors: ‘the physical world, including all living things. Nature by this definition is a norm of the world that is apart from the features or products of civilisation and human will. The machine, the artefact, the devised, or the extraordinary (like a two-headed calf) is spoken of as “unnatural”.’

The other meaning is much broader, taking the first and adding to it all the products of human action and intention. Snyder calls it the material world and all its collective objects and phenomena. ‘Science and some sorts of mysticism rightly propose that everything is natural,’ he writes. In this sense, ‘there is nothing unnatural about New York City, or toxic wastes, or atomic energy, and nothing — by definition

— that we do or experience in life is “unnatural”.’ That, of course, includes the products of

technology. This is Snyder’s preferred definition — and mine too.

However, though it’s not always made clear, I’d venture a guess that environmental psychologists might have a preference for the former, human-free definition of nature.

natural o t y r a r t n o mean “c ly n o n a c l” ossible. p im “unnatura y ll a ic s to say phy is h ic h w law,”

The “unnatural” includes perpetual-motion machines, time travel, faster-than-light velocities - unless and until, that is, these sci-fi notions are found to be possible, whereupon they are acknowledged to be “natural.”

“Artificiality” is thus abolished by semantic fiat, and with it all cause for concern about the warnings of the environmentalists.

“If it can be done, go ahead and do it don’t worry, be happy, after all it’s natural.”

“THE BORN�

Culture is that which we control. Nature is all those things that have an autonomous quality and fall outside the scope of human power. In this new classification, greenhouse tomatoes belong to the cultural category, whereas computer viruses and the traffic-jams on our roads can be considered as natural phenomena.

“THE BORN” CONTROLLED BY HUMANS

“THE BORN”

“THE BORN” CONTROLLED BY HUMANS

Between nature and artifice? Wild and tame? Puppet and animal? There’s fear and more than a little disgust in not being able to tell the difference.

Is Everything “Natural”?

by Ernest Partridge

“Nature changes the environment every day of our lives - why shouldn’t we change it? We’re part of nature.” Human beings are natural, therefore everything they do is “natural.” Ergo, human projects cannot “harm nature,” and thus the qualms of the environmentalists are without meaningful foundation.

No less an environmental philosopher than Baird Callicott has been enticed by this ploy, as he writes: “we are part of nature, so our recent habit of recycling sequestered carbon (i.e., through the consumption of fossil fuels) is not unnatural.”2 In an identifiable sense of the word “natural”, both Dominy and Callicott are entirely and indisputably correct. But this is not the only, or even the most relevant sense of “natural” found in environmental debates. And this equivocation is at the root of a great deal of rhetorical mischief in environmental debates and policy.

The sense of “natural” apparently intended by Dominy and Callicott in the above citations is this: “a condition in accordance with natural law.” By implication, “unnatural” can only mean “contrary to natural law,” which is to say physically impossible.

It follows, as Dominy suggests, that everything that human beings create and do is “natural,” including transuranic elements, DDT and chloro-fluorocarbons, atomic reactors, genetically modified organisms, exponential population

growth, etc. The “unnatural” includes perpetual-motion machines, time travel, faster-thanlight velocities - unless and until, that is, these sci-fi notionts are found to be possible, whereupon they are acknowledged to be “natural.”

“Artificiality” is thus abolished by semantic fiat, and with it all cause for concern about the warnings of the environmentalists. “If it can be done, go ahead and do it - don’t worry, be happy, after all it’s natural.” To repeat Dominy’s cheerful reassurance, “nature changes the environment every day of our lives - why shouldn’t we change it? We’re part of nature.”

“What is to be gained by abolishing the distinction between “artificial” (conditions and substances of human origin) and “natural” (conditions and substances not of human origin)?” Granted, all human acts and products are “natural” in the sense of being constrained by natural law (call it “natural/1”).

Within this category of “all-things-possible” there is a distinction, essential to science, technology and public policy, not to mention common sense - a distinction between conditions and substances of human origin (e.g., anti-biotics, genetically modified organisms, nuclear waste, CFCs, etc.) and conditions and substances not of human origin (e.g., old-growth forests, plate tectonics, solar flux, DNA, thermodynamic laws, etc. - call it “natural/2”).

“All human acts and products are natural” is true - but trivially true, if it is understood to mean “constrained by natural law” (i.e., physically possible). But it is a mischievous truth if it leads us to overlook another sense of “natural,” namely “not of human origin.”

It is true that Dominy’s triumph, Lake Powell of the Colorado, along with genetically modified organisms and atomic power, is “natural/1”). So too was the Black Plague which consumed one third of the European population, as well as any and every ecological devastation that we might bring upon ourselves and our planet. If, like the dinosaurs, we are annihilated by a collision with a comet or asteroid, this too will be a “natural” event. “Natural/1” makes no moral or value distinctions.

It is within the semantic domain of this second sense that the environmental scientists and activists make their warnings - the sense that utilizes the familiar distinction between the artificial (‘of human origin”) and “natural/2” (not of human origin). With this essential distinction as part of our conceptual arsenal, we can meaningfully raise questions about the practical and moral implications of our “artificial” interventions in “nature/2,” and thus make informed choices among the alternative futures before us.

“Nature changes the environment every day of our lives - why shouldn’t we change it? We’re part of nature.”

Environmental scientists tell us that global population growth, atmospheric carbon loading, loss of biodiversity and tropical forests, are all proceeding at unsustainable rates. All this activity is “natural/1” - namely, according to natural law. But are these anthropogenic alterations any less worrisome, if we choose to ignore the common-sense “natural/artificial” distinction?

These interventions are no less worrisome to informed and morally concerned earth-citizens, wellaware that “artificial” interventions into, and alteration of, the natural order that created and sustained us, are qua “artificial” our moral responsibility. And just what do we mean by “moral responsibility,” and how does such responsibility relate to our awareness of the consequences of our actions and policies? •

We have changed the atmosphere, and thus we are changing the weather. By changing the weather, we make every spot on earth man-made and artificial.

The very idea seems outlandish on its face. And yet, on reflection, it is not easily dismissed.

The contention that there is nothing natural on the surface of the earth follows directly from the assertion that the earth’s atmosphere is not “natural” - that it is an artifact. And if the atmosphere is an artifact, then so too is climate.

Thus, if that “artificial” atmosphere touches and interacts with the entire surface of the earth, then nothing on that surface is entirely “natural.”

What, then is “natural?” Isolated ecosystems at the thermal vents at the deep ocean floor are completely natural. Strata below the surface of the earth are natural. Events totally independent of human control e.g. earthquakes, tsunamis, volcano eruptions are natural... But life forms and life communities at the surface?

None of these are “totally natural.”

This, briefly, is the contention of Bill McKibben in his popular book The End of Nature. In the years since the Civil War, and mostly in the years since World War II, we have changed the atmosphere - changed it enough so that the climate will change dramatically...

Formerly, man’s efforts, even at their mightiest, were tiny compared with the size of the planet - the Roman

Empire meant nothing to the Arctic or the Amazon. But now, the way of life of one part of the world in one halfcentury is altering every inch and every hour of the globe.

The atmosphere an “artifact?” How can this be?

This is so, simply because industrial civilization has changed the chemical composition of the atmosphere.

The amount of CO2 in the pre-industrial atmosphere is believed to have been about 280 parts per million.

Today it is in excess of 370 ppm. Methane, a greenhouse gas more than twenty times more potent than CO2, has increased in concentration from 730 parts per billion in 1750 to 1843ppb in 2003. Add to that chemicals unknown 250 years ago, notably the ozone depleting chloro-fluorocarbons (CFCs).here is nothin Not even the oceans are unaffected, for ultra-violet radiation, increased by ozone depletion, is deleterious to phytoplankton, the base of the oceanic trophic pyramid.

Accordingly, McKibben concludes: The idea of nature will not survive the new global pollution - the carbon dioxide and the CFCs and the like... We have changed the atmosphere, and thus we are changing the weather.

By changing the weather, we make every spot on earth man-made and artificial. We have deprived nature of its independence, and that is fatal to its meaning. Nature’s independence is its meaning; without it there is nothing but us.

IS NOTHING NATURAL?

deforestation and settlement.

“Every spot on earth man-made and artificial?” Perhaps, but equally so? Does the “touch” of the artificial atmosphere render every spot on earth totally artificial - just as the law of the State of Mississippi once classified as “negro” anyone with “a drop of negro blood” (i.e., any negro ancestry whatsoever)?

Surely not. The center of the Amazon rain forest, the tundra of the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, the interior of the Australian outback - all these are surely more “natural” than an abandoned and eroded farm in southeastern United States, a clear-cut forest in the Pacific Northwest, or the saline wasteland that was once the lake-bed of the Aral Sea. Totally pure and pristine nature is gone - the artificial atmosphere and climate have accomplished that much.

In that “wildest” of regions, the central Amazon forest, the increased atmospheric carbon dioxide has variously altered the growth rates of the flora, resulting in a different composition of the forest community. So too the altered acidity of the rainfall and the changes in numbers and types of the in-migrating and colonizing species - changes brought about by advancing edge of

And yet it is surely more “wild” than the cut, tilled, and abandoned laterite wasteland beyond the forest border, that was once a part of that forest.

By identifying all of the earth’s surface as “equally artificial,” we stipulate the abolition of a concept and a distinction that is essential to science, public policy, and ordinary discourse. (Not unlike the abolition of the concept of “artificial” by stipulating that “natural” is to mean according to natural law).

Far better that we treat “artificial” and “natural” as endpoints of a continuum. McKibben’s point, then, is that the extreme totally “natural” end of that continuum, due to the consequences of industrialization, no longer exists on the face of the earth.

Nonetheless, landscapes and ecosystems can be more or less “natural” - or, as I would prefer now to call it, “wild”. •

Does the “touch” of the artificial atmosphere render every spot on earth totally artificial - just as the law of the State of Mississippi once classified as “negro” anyone with “a drop of negro blood”?

Surely not.

REAL NATURE

by KOERT VAN MENSVOORT

IS NOT GREEN

At the edge of the woods along the motorway near the Dutch town of Bloemendaal, there stands a mobile telephone mast disguised as a pine tree. This mast is not nature: at best, it is a picture of nature. It is an illustration, like a landscape painting hanging over the sofa. Do we have genuine experiences of nature any more? Or are we living in a picture of it?

In the Netherlands, every square meter of ground is a man-made landscape: original nature is nowhere to be found. The Oostvaardersplassen – which make up one of the Netherlands’ most important nature reserves – were, after the land was reclaimed, originally an industrial site; they were only turned into a nature reserve later. Even the ‘Green Heart’ at the center of the most densely populated part of Netherlands is in actual fact a medieval industrial area, which was originally reclaimed for turf-cutting.

Our ‘nature reserves’ are thus in fact ‘culture reserves’ shaped by human activity. “God created the world, with the exception of the Netherlands.

That the Dutch created themselves”, as Voltaire put it in the eighteenth century. And ever since, we have been doing everything we can to live up to his pronouncement. Today, we even actively design and build nature in the Netherlands. Prehistoric forests are being planted in locations designated by bureaucrats: our image of Nature is being carefully constructed in a recreational simulation (a ‘regeneration of our lost heritage’, as the nature-builders call it themselves [1]). Traditional cattle breeds are even being placed in this so-called ‘new nature’. The original wild ox unfortunately became extinct in 1627, but the Scottish Highlander is an acce­ptable alternative.

These cattle know what they’re supposed to do: graze, under orders of the forestry service. Thanks to them, the landscape stays clear instead of becoming overgrown (we find this attractive, as it reminds us of famous 17th-century landscape paintings).

“When a bird builds a nest, we call it nature, but when a human puts up an apartment building, suddenly it’s culture.”

In theory, the animals are supposed to look after themselves, but in winter the forestry service is willing to give them a bit of extra food. It also removes dead animals, lest walkers be offended by a cow rotting on the footpath. In our culture, nature is continually presented as a lost world.

It is associated with originality, yet appears only once it has disappeared. Our experience of nature is a retro effect.

It is a widespread misconception that nature is always calm, peaceful and harmonious: genuine nature can be wild, cruel and unpredictable. Our contemporary experience of nature is chiefly a recreational one [4]: Sunday afternoon scenery; Disneyland for grown-ups. Indeed, lots of money is required to maintain the illusion. But nature is also a terrific marketing tool: there are Alligator garden tools, Jaguar convertibles, Puma trainers.

Natural metaphors give us a familiar feeling of recognition. In commercials cars always drive through beautiful untouched landscapes. Strange that in this make-believe countryside there is not a billboard in sight, while logos and brands are so omnipresent in our environment, we can probably tell them apart better than we can bird or tree species. In my neighborhood, four-wheel-drives have become an integral part of the street scene.

These SUVs (sport utility vehicles, previously known as Jeeps or all-terrain-vehicles) have formidable names like Skyline, Explorer, Conquerer and Landwind. Luckily, you can buy spray-on mud for spattering your wheel rims, since SUVs rarely go off road. There are no hills around here, nor snow or other weather conditions that could justify a four-wheel-drive. It’s merely cool to join the urban safari.

NATURE BECOMES CULTURE The dividing line between nature and culture is difficult to draw. When a bird builds a nest, we call it nature, but when a human puts up an apartment building, suddenly it’s culture. Some try to sidestep the problem by claiming that everything is nature, while others claim that nature is only a cultural construction. It’s tempting just to lump the two together and give up thinking about it.

The word ‘nature’ is derived from the Latin word natura. This was a translation of the Greek physis. Natura is related to Latin terms meaning ‘born’ (and the Greek physis to Greek words for ‘growth’). By the time of the ancient Greeks, the distinction between nature and culture was already considered important. Various things have changed since then; nature in the sense of physical matter unaltered by humans hardly exists anymore.

We live in a world of petrochemical cosmetics, microprocessors and synthetic clothing (all things whose conditions of existence I know nothing of). New shower-gel scents are put on the market faster than I can use the stuff up. Shopping centers, websites and airports dominate our environment. There’s precious little nature left that has remained untouched by humans: perhaps a bit here and there on the ocean floor, the South Pole, or the moon. Old concepts like nature and culture, human and animal, and body and mind seem inadequate for understanding ourselves and the technological society we live in.

Cloned babies, rainbow tulips, transgenic mice afflicted with chronic cancer to serve medical science: are they natural or cultural? In an evolutionary sense, every distinction between culture

and nature has something arbitrary about it; both have been part of the same evolutionary machine since Darwin’s day. When we speak about nature, we are always in fact talking about our relationship with nature, never about nature itself. Nature is always ‘so-called nature’. The terms ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’ are usually deployed to justify one position or another. In the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas (the Christian father) believed art imitated nature, because human intellect was based on all things natural. Oscar Wilde (the homosexual), on the other hand, claimed that nature imitated art.

From this thought, it is only a small step to the idea that nature exists only between our ears and is in fact a cultural construction. Jacques Lacan (the postmodernist) claims that we cannot see nature [10] . A moderate constructivism is currently widely accepted among philosophers and scientists. Our image of nature has changed greatly over the cen-

turies. It is likely that in the future we will adapt it further. This does not release us from our need to keep looking for nature. The manner in which we distinguish between nature and culture remains relevant, because it says something about the human perspective: what is our place in nature?

An alternative approach is to distinguish between natural and artificial processes. Some processes can take place as a result of human action; others cannot. For example, a room can be lit through the flick of a switch or a sunrise. Sunrise is a natural process; flipping a light switch is an artificial one.

In this view, cultural processes are the clear consequences of purposeful human action, and culture is whatever human beings invent and control. Nature is everything else. But much of the ‘so-called nature’ in our lives has taken on an artificial authenticity. Genetically manipulated tomatoes are redder, rounder, larger, and maybe even healthier than the

Culture is that which we control.

Nature is all those things that have an autonomous quality and fall outside the scope of human power. ones from our gardens. There are hypoallergenic cats, and nature reserves laid out with beautiful variety. You can buy specially engineered living beings in the supermarket. Human design has made nature more natural than natural: it is now hypernatural. It is a simulation of a nature that never existed. It’s better than the real thing; hypernatural nature is always just a little bit prettier, slicker and safer than the old kind. Let’s be honest: it’s actually culture in disguise. The more we learn to control trees, animals, atoms and the climate, the more they lose their natural character and enter into the realms of culture.

CULTURE BECOMES NATURE Thus far I have said nothing new. Everyone knows that old nature is being more and more radically cultivated. However, the question is: is the

opposite also possible? I think it is. In contrast to optimistic progress thinkers who believe human beings’ control of nature will steadily increase until we are ultimately able to live without it, I argue that the idea that we can completely dominate nature is an illusion. Nature is changing along with us. It is said Microsoft founder Bill Gates lives in a house without light switches.

His house of the future is packed with sensors and software that regulate the lighting. Nature or culture? The average Dutch person worries more about mortgage interest deductions than about hurricanes or floods. Do you control the spyware and viruses on your computer? In their struggle against nature, human beings have become increasingly independent of physical conditions, it is true, but at the same time they are becoming more dependent on technological devices, other people, and themselves. Think of the dependence

Let’s be honest: it’s actually culture in disguise.

The more we learn to control trees, animals, atoms and the climate, the more they lose their natural character and enter into the realms of culture.

that comes with driving a car. We need motorways, for which we pay road tax. A supply of petrol must be arranged. Once you’re on the road, you have to concentrate so you won’t crash into the guardrail. You must take account of other road users. You need a driving license. All this is necessary in order to get your body from point A to point B more quickly. Along with physical de-conditioning comes social and psychological conditioning.

I believe the way we draw the boundary between nature and culture will change.

The domain of origin, of ‘birth’, previously belonged to nature, while culture encompassed the domain of the ‘made’. Thanks to developments in science and technology, this distinction is blurring. Origin is playing a smaller and smaller role in human experience, because everything is a copy of a copy. Insofar as we still wish to make a distinction between nature and culture, we will draw the line between ‘controllable’ and ‘autonomous’.

Culture is that which we control. Nature is all those things that have an autonomous quality and fall outside the scope of human power. In this new classification, greenhouse tomatoes belong to the cultural category, whereas computer viruses and the traffic-jams on our roads can be considered as natural phenomena. Why should we call them nature? Isn’t that confusing? We allot them to nature because they function as nature, even though they’re not green.

Human actions are not nature, but it can cause it; real nature in all its functioning, dangers and possibilities.

In spite of all our attempts and experiments, it is still hardly practicable to mold life. Every time nature seems to have been conquered, it rears its head again on some other battlefield. Perhaps we should not see nature as a static given, but as a dynamic process. It is not only humans that are developing; nature, too, is changing in the process.

Thus, I am proposing a new approach to distinguish nature and culture. At first – as is usual with paradigm shifts – it takes some getting used to, but after a while things become clear again.

Real nature is not green.

Rather, it is beyond control.

Tech an innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes within the virtual and technological realm

<3 no-biophilia

The term, coined in the 1960s by the German

social psychologist Erich Fromm, was intended to denote a psychological orientation towards nature, but it became better known when popularised by the American biologist E. O. Wilson in Biophilia (1984) as

an â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;innate tendency to focus on life

and lifelike processesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;.

There are fish in my phone.

Some are pure orange with white fins; others have black mottled markings along their orange backs.

They glide, twist and turn above a bed of flat pale sand fringed by rocks and the bright green leaves of something that looks like watercress. Sometimes they swim out of view, leaving me to gaze at the empty scene in the knowledge that they will soon reappear.

When I gently press my finger against the screen, the water ripples and the fish swim away. Eventually, they cruise out from behind the Google widget, appear from underneath the Facebook icon, or sneak around the corner of Contacts. This is Koi Live Wallpaper, an app designed for smartphones. The idea of an aquarium inside my phone appeals to my sense of humour and makes me smile. But I suspect its true appeal is more complicated than that.

In 1984, the psychiatrist Aaron Katcher and his team at the University of Pennsylvania conducted an experiment in the busy waiting room of a dentist’s office. On some days, before the surgery opened, the researchers installed an aquarium with tropical fish.

On other days, they took it away. They measured the patients’ levels of anxiety in both environments, and the results were clear. On ‘aquarium days’, patients were less anxious and more compliant during the

surgery. Katcher concluded that the presence of these colourful living creatures had a calming influence on people about to receive dental treatment. Then in 1990, Judith Heerwagen and colleagues at the University of Washington in Seattle found the same calming effect using a large nature mural instead of an aquarium in the waiting room of a specialist ‘dental fears’ clinic. A third experiment by the environmental psychologist Roger Ulrich and colleagues at Texas A&M University in 2003 found that stressed blood donors experienced lowered blood pressure and pulse rates while sitting in a room where a videotape of a nature scene was playing. The general conclusion was that visual exposure to nature not only diminished patient stress but also reduced physical pain.

I’m not in pain when I look at my mobile, though I might well be stressed. Is that why I take time to gaze at my virtual aquarium?

There is increasing evidence that we respond very similarly to a ‘natural’ environment, whether it’s real or virtual, and research confirms that even simulated nature experiences can be remarkably powerful.

A simple answer to this question is no.

Katcher’s fish were real. Mine are animations. But there is increasing evidence that we respond very similarly to a ‘natural’ environment, whether it’s real or virtual, and research confirms that even simulated nature experiences can be remarkably powerful.

In a 2008 study of Spanish energy consumers, the researchers Patrick Hartmann and Vanessa Apaolaza-Ibáñez at the University of the Basque Country examined responses to a new TV marketing campaign by one of the country’s leading energy brands, Iberdrola Energía Verde. The company was attempting to ‘green’ its image by evoking a virtual experience of nature through the use of pleasant imagery such as flying eagles, mountain scenery, and waterfalls. The intention was to evoke feelings of altruism and self-expression (‘Now, every time you switch on your light, you can feel good because you are helping nature’). The researchers found that consumers responded positively to the new branding, no matter whether they were already environmentally conscious or among the ‘non-concerned’. The ads brought the benefits of a ‘warm glow’ and a positive feeling of participating in the common good of the environment. The visual simulations were meeting a human desire to experience nature and reap its psychological benefits (pleasure, stress reduction, and so on). The research concluded that in societies where the experience of actual nature is becoming scarce, and life is increasingly virtual, the consumption of ‘green products’, especially those that evoke virtual contact with nature, can provide surrogate experiences.

The psychologist Deltcho Valtchanov at the University of Waterloo in Canada reached a similar conclusion in 2010 when he found that immersion in a computer-generated virtual reality nature space prompted an increase in

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ness, friendliness, affection and playfulness, and a decrease in negative feelings such as fear, anger and sadness. There were also significant decreases in levels of both perceived and physiological stress. Again, he and his colleagues concluded that encounters with nature in virtual reality have beneficial effects similar to encounters with real natural spaces. In other words, it seems that you can gain equal benefit from walking in a forest as from viewing an image of a forest or, as in my case, from watching virtual goldfish as opposed to real ones.

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But what do we mean when we refer to ‘nature’? It’s a common term that seems to have an assumed collective meaning, often romanticised and sentimental. We speak of ‘getting back to nature’ as if there was once a prelapsarian baseline before we humans interfered and spoiled it.

Gary Snyder, the American poet and environmentalist, offers alternative definitions from which we can choose. In The Practice of the Wild (1990), he distils down to two ways in which the term ‘nature’ is usually interpreted.

One, he argues, is the outdoors: ‘the physical world, including all living things. Nature by this definition is a norm of the world that is apart from the features or products of civilisation and human will. The machine, the artefact, the devised, or the extraordinary (like a two-headed calf) is spoken of as “unnatural”.’

The other meaning is much broader, taking the first and adding to it all the products of human action and intention. Snyder calls it the material world and all its collective objects and phenomena. ‘Science and some sorts of mysticism rightly propose that everything is natural,’ he writes. In this sense, ‘there is nothing unnatural about New York City, or toxic wastes, or atomic energy, and nothing — by definition — that we do or experience in life is “unnatural”.’ That, of course, includes the products of technology. This is Snyder’s preferred definition — and mine too. However, though it’s not always made clear, I’d venture a guess that environmental psychologists might have a preference for the former, human-free definition of nature.

Either way, it’s been claimed that the love of nature derives from ‘biophilia’, or the biophilic tendency. The term, coined in the 1960s by the German social psychologist Erich Fromm, was intended to denote a psychological orientation towards nature, but it became better known when popularised by the American biologist E. O. Wilson in Biophilia (1984) as an ‘innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes’. Note that Wilson avoid the ‘n’ word, referring to ‘life’ instead. Of course,

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HOST <HOST/> today the digerati are deeply engaged in conversations about what ‘life’ will mean in technologies of the future, a debate that will continue for a long time to come. More recently, the concept of biophilia has been celebrated by the Icelandic musician Björk in her 2011 album and musical project of the same name.

The notion of biophilia draws upon a genetic attraction to an ancient natural world that evolved long before we did.

It appears that our urge for contact with nature can, as shown in the experiments described, restore energy, alleviate mental fatigue, and enhance attention. It also appears to be surprisingly transferable to digital environments.

In 2004 I began collecting examples of metaphors and images of the natural world commonly found in computer culture — terms such as stream, cloud, virus, worm, surfing, field, and so on. I intended to find out what can be learnt from them about the intersections between human beings, cyberspace, and nature. mm I quickly amassed a long list of examples but found myself unable to suggest a reason for this phenomenon, until I came across Wilson’s theory. I realised that the story had been right in front of me all the time. It can be found in the images on our machines, in the spaces we cultivate in our online communities, and in the language we use every day of our digital lives.

<CLOUD/> CLOUD <TROLL/> TROLL <KINDLE/> KINDLE STREAM <STREAM/> <FIELD/> FIELD LIVE <LIVE/> WINDOW <WINDOW/>

<GENERATION/> GENERATION <MEMORY/> MEMORY <HEAD/> HEAD <BODY/> BODY <VIRUS/> VIRUS <WORM/> WORM <KILL PAGE/> KILL THIS PAGE <BUG/> BUG

It began the moment we moved into the alien, shape-shifting territory of the internet and prompted a resurgence of that ancient call to life, biophilia.

Our attempts to place ourselves in this new world nourished the growth of a new spur, a hybrid through which nature and technology become symbionts, rather than opponents.

I have coined the term ‘technobiophilia’ for this. It’s a clumsy word — probably not quite the right one — but for now it helps to spell out what is happening so that we can understand it better. Is there the possibility that perhaps biophilia can soothe our connected minds and improve our digital well-being?

How can we harness and develop our technobiophilic instincts in order to live well in the digital world?

One option would be that rather than keeping the virtual and the natural worlds separate — turning off our machines, taking e-sabbaticals, or undergoing digital detoxes, in order to connect with nature — we think about them all as integrated elements of a single life in a single world. There is already a growing sense in the wired community that connections with the natural world are vital to digital well-being, both now and in the future. This same community needs to pay attention to biophilia and to its implementation in biophilic design.

With the help of biophilic insights, we can connect the planet beneath our feet with the planet inside our machines. •

BIO by david w . orr

Serious and well-funded people talk about reweaving the fabric of life on earth through genetic engineering and nanotechnologies, others talk of leaving the earth altogether for space colonies, and still others talk of reshaping human consciousness to fit â&#x20AC;&#x153;virtual reality.

If we are to preserve a world in which biophilia can be expressed and flourish, we will have to decide to make such a world.

People can grow up with the outward appearance of normality in an environment largely stripped of plants and animals, in the same way that passable looking monkeys can be raised in laboratory cages and cattle fattened in feeding bins.

Asked if they were happy, these people would probably say yes.

Yet something vitally important would be missing, not merely the knowledge and pleasure that can be imagined and might have been, but a wide array of experiences that the human brain is peculiarly equipped to receive.

we will not fight to save what we do not love.

William CRONON

getting back to the wrong nature

the trouble with

wilderness

Sierra canyon, the tiny drop - lets cooling your face as you listen to the roar of the water and gaze up toward the sky through a rainbow that hovers just out of reach.

This will seem a heretical claim to many environmentalists, since the idea of wilderness has for decades been a fundamental tenet - indeed, a passion - of the environmental movement, especially in the United States. For many Americans wilderness stands as the last remaining place where civilisation, that all too human disease, has not fully infected the earth. It is an island in the polluted sea of urban-industrial modernity, the one place we can turn for escape from our own too-muchness. Seen in this way, wilderness presents itself as the best antidote to our human selves, a refuge we must somehow recover if we hope to save the planet. As Henry David Thoreau once famously declared, “In Wildness is the preservation of the World.“’ But is it? The more one knows of its peculiar history, the more one realizes that wilderness is not quite what it seems. Far from being the one place on earth that stands apart from humanity, it is quite profoundly a human creation-indeed, the creation of very particular human cultures at very particular moments in human history. It is not a pristine sanctuary where the last remnant of an untouched, endangered, but still transcendent nature can for at least a little while longer be encountered without the contaminating taint of civilisation. Instead, it is a product of that civilisation, and could hardly be contaminated by the very stuff of which it is made.

Wilderness hides its unnaturalness behind a mask that is all the more beguiling because it seems so natural. As we gaze into the mirror it holds up for us, we too easily imagine that what we behold is Nature when in fact we see the reflection of our own unexamined longings and desires. For this reason, we mistake ourselves when we suppose that wilderness can be the solution to our culture’s problematic relationships with the nonhuman world, for wilderness is itself no small part of the problem.

To assert the unnaturalness of so natural a place will no doubt seem absurd or even perverse to many readers, so let me hasten to add that the nonhuman world we encounter in wilderness is far from being merely our own invention. I celebrate with others who love wilderness the beauty and power of the things it contains.

Each of us who has spent time there can conjure images and sensations that seem all the more hauntingly real for having engraved themselves so indelibly on our memories. Such memories may be uniquely our own, but they are also familiar enough to be instantly recognizable to others. Remember this? The torrents of mist shoot out from the base of a great waterfall in the depths of a

Remember this too: looking out across a desert canyon in the evening air, the only sound a lone raven calling in the distance, the rock walls dropping away into a chasm so deep that its bottom all but vanishes as you squint into the amber light of the setting sun.

And this: the moment beside the trail as you sit on a sandstone ledge, your boots damp with the morning dew while you take in the rich smell of the pines, and the small red fox - or maybe for you it was a raccoon or a coyote or a. deer-that suddenly ambles across your path, stopping for a long moment to gaze in your direction with cautious indifference before continuing on its way. Remember the feelings of such moments, and you will know as well as I do that you were in the presence of something irreducibly nonhuman, something profoundly other than yourself. Wilderness is made of that too.

And yet: what brought each of us to the places where such memories became possible is entirely a cultural invention.

Go back 250 years in American and European history, and you do not find nearly so many people wandering around remote corners of the planet looking for what today we would call “the wilderness experience.”

As late as the eighteenth century, the most common usage of the word “wilderness” in the English language referred to landscapes that generally carried adjectives far different from the ones they attract today. To be a wilderness then was to be “deserted,” “savage,” “desolate,” “barren”- in short, a “waste,” the word’s nearest synonym. Its connotations were anything but positive, and the emotion one was most likely to feel in its presence was “bewilderment” - or terror.

Many of the word’s strongest associations then were biblical, for it is used over and over again in the King James Version to refer to places on the margins of civilization where it is all too easy to lose oneself in moral confusion and despair. The wilderness was where Moses had wandered with his people for forty years, and where they had nearly abandoned their God to worship a golden idol.’

“For Pharoah will say of the Children of Israel,” we read in Exodus,

To be a wilderness then was to be “deserted,” “savage,” “desolate,” “barren”- in short, a “waste,” the word’s nearest synonym.

“They are entangled in the land, the wilderness hath shut them in.“’ The wilderness was where Christ had struggled with the devil and endured his temptations: “And immediately the Spirit driveth him into the wilderness. And he was there in the wilderness for forty days tempted of Satan; and was with the wild beasts; and the angels ministered unto him. “The “delicious Paradise” of John Milton’s Eden was surrounded by “a steep wilderness, whose hairy sides/Access denied” to all who sought entry”. When Adam and Eve were driven from that garden, the world they entered was a wilderness that only their labor and pain could redeem.

Wilderness, in short, was a place to which one came only against one’s will, and always in fear and trembling. Whatever value it might have arose solely from the possibility that it might be “reclaimed” and turned toward human ends-planted as a garden, say, or a city upon a hill.’ In its raw state, it had little or nothing to offer civilized men and women.

But by the end of the nineteenth century, all this had changed. The waste-lands that had once seemed worthless had for some people come to seem almost beyond price. That Thoreau in 1862 could declare wildness to be the preservation of the world suggests the sea change that was going on. Wilderness had once been the antithesis of all that was orderly and good - it had been the darkness, one might say, on the far side of the garden wall-and yet now it was frequently likened to Eden itself.

When John Muir arrived in the Sierra Nevada in 1869, he would declare, “No description of Heaven that I have ever heard or read of seems half so fine. He was hardly alone in expressing such emotions. One by one, various corners of the American map came to be designated as sites whose wild beauty was so spectacular that a growing number of citizens had to visit and see them for themselves. Niagara Falls was the first to undergo this transformation, but it was soon followed by the Catskills, the Adirondacks, Yosemite, Yellowstone, and others. Yosemite was deeded by the U.S. government to the state of California in 1864 as the nation’s first wildland park, and Yellowstone became the first true national park in 1872.

By the first decade of the twentieth century, in the single most famous episode in American conservation history, a national debate had exploded over whether the city of San Francisco should be permitted to augment its water supply by damming the Tuolumne River in Hetch Hetchy valley, well within the boundaries of Yosemite National Park. The dam was eventually built, but what today seems no less significant is that so many people fought to prevent its completion. Even as the fight was being lost, Hetch Hetchy became the battle cry of an emerging movement to preserve wilderness. Fifty years earlier, such opposition would have been unthinkable. Few would have questioned the merits of “reclaiming” a wasteland like this in order to put it to human use.

Now the defenders of Hetch Hetchy attracted widespread national attention by portraying such an act not as improvement or progress but as desecration and vandalism. Lest one doubt that the old biblical metaphors had been turned completely on their heads, listen to John Muir attack the dam’s defenders. “Their arguments,” he wrote , “are curiously like those of the devil, devised for the destruction of the first garden - so much of the very best Eden fruit going to waste; so much of the best Tuolumne water and Tuolumne scenery going to waste.“” For Muir and the growing number of Americans who shared his views, Satan’s home had become God’s own temple.

The sources of this rather astonishing transformation were many, but for the purposes of this essay they can be gathered under two broad headings: the sublime and the frontier. Of the two, the sublime is the older and more pervasive cultural construct, being one of the most important expressions of that broad transatlantic movement we today label as romanticism; the frontier is more peculiarly American, though it too had its European antecedents and parallels. The two converged to remake wilderness in their own image, freighting it with moral values and cultural symbols that it carries to this day. Indeed, it is not too much to say that the modern environmental movement is itself a grandchild of romanticism and post-frontier ideology, which is why it is no accident that so much environmentalist discourse takes its bearings from the wilderness these intellectual movements helped create.

Although wilderness may today seem to be just one environmental concern among many, it in fact serves as the foundation for a long list of other such concerns that on their face seem quite remote from it. That is why its influence is so pervasive and, potentially, so insidious.

To gain such remarkable influence, the concept of wilderness had to become loaded with some of the deepest core values of the culture that created and idealised it: it had to become sacred.

This possibility had been present in wilderness even in the days when it had been a place of spiritual danger and moral temptation.

If Satan was there, then so was Christ, who had found angels as well as wild beasts during His sojourn in the desert. In the wilderness the boundaries between human and nonhuman, between natural and supernatural, had always seemed less certain than elsewhere. This was why the early Christian saints and mystics had often emulated Christ’s desert retreat as they sought to experience for themselves the visions and spiritual testing He had endured. One might meet devils and run the risk of losing one’s soul in such a place, but one might also meet God. For some that possibility was worth almost any price.

By the eighteenth century this sense of the wilderness as a landscape where the supernatural lay just beneath the surface was expressed in the doctrine of the sublime, a word whose modern

Wilderness was a place to which one came only against one’s will, and always in fear and trembling.

Satan’s home had become God’s own temple. usage has been so watered down by commercial hype and tourist advertising that it retains only a dim echo of its former power. “In the theories of Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, William Gilpin, and others, sublime landscapes were those rare places on earth where one had more chance than elsewhere to glimpse the face of God.” Romantics had a clear notion of where one could be most sure of having this experience.

Although God might, of course, choose to show Himself anywhere, He would most often be found in those vast, powerful landscapes where one could not help feeling insignificant and being reminded of one’s own mortality. Where were these sublime places? The eighteenth-century catalog of their locations feels very familiar, for we still see and value landscapes as it taught us to do. God was on the mountaintop, in the chasm, in the waterfall, in the thundercloud, in the rainbow, in the sunset.

One has only to think of the sites that Americans chose for their first national parks-Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Rainier, Zion - to realize that virtually all of them fit one or more of these categories. Less sublime landscapes simply did not appear worthy of such protection; not until the 1940s, for instance, would the first swamp be honored, in Ever- glades National Park, and to this day there is no national park in the grasslands.”

Among the best proofs that one had entered a sublime landscape was the emotion it evoked. For the early romantic writers and artists who first began to celebrate it, the sublime was far from being a pleasurable experience.

The classic description is that of William Wordsworth as he recounted climbing the Alps and crossing the Simplon Pass in his autobiographical poem Prelude. There, surrounded by crags and waterfalls, the poet felt himself literally to be in the presence of the divine-and experienced an emotion

remarkably close to terror: The immeasurable height Of woods decaying, never to be decayed, The stationary blasts of waterfalls, And in the narrow rent at every turn Winds thwarting winds, bewildered and forlorn, The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky, The rocks that muttered close upon our ears, Black drizzling crags that spake by the way-side As if a voice were in them, the sick sight And giddy prospect of the raving stream, The unfettered clouds and region of the Heavens, Tumult and peace, the darkness and the lightWere all like workings of one mind, the features Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree; Characters of the great Apocalypse, The types and symbols of Eternity, Of first, and last, and midst, and without end.”

This was no casual stroll in the mountains, no simple sojourn in the gentle lap of nonhuman nature. What Wordsworth described was nothing less than a religious experience, akin to that of the Old Testament prophets as they conversed with their wrathful God. The symbols he detected in this wilderness landscape were more supernatural than natural, and they inspired more awe and dismay than joy or pleasure. No mere mortal was meant to linger long in such a place, so it was with considerable relief that Wordsworth and his companion made their way back down from the peaks to the sheltering valleys.

Lest you suspect that this view of the sublime was limited to timid Europeans who lacked the American know-how for feeling at home in the wilderness, remember Henry David Thoreau’s

1846 climb of Mount Katahdin, in Maine. Although Thoreau is regarded by many today as one of the great American celebrators of wilderness, his emotions about Katahdin were no less ambivalent than Wordsworth’s about the Alps.

It was vast, Titanic, and such as man never inhabits. Some part of the beholder, even some vital part, seems to escape through the loose grating of his ribs as he

comfortable, almost sentimental demeanour. As more and more tourists sought out the wilderness as a spectacle to be looked at and enjoyed for its great beauty, the sublime in effect became domesticated. The wilderness was still sacred, but the religious sentiments it evoked were more those of a pleasant parish church than those of a grand cathedral or a harsh desert retreat. The writer who best captures this late romantic sense of a domesticated sublime is undoubtedly John Muir, whose descriptions of

the sublime wilderness had ceased to be a place of satanic temptation and became instead a sacred temple ascends. He is more lone than you can imagine. Vast, Titanic, inhuman Nature has got him at disadvantage, caught him alone, and pilfers him of some of his divine faculty. She does nor smile on him as in the plains. She seems to ray sternly, why came ye here before your time?

This ground is not prepared for you. Is it not enough that I smile in the valleys? I have never made this soil for thy feet, this air for thy breathing, these rocks for thy neighbors. I cannot pity nor fondle thee here, but forever relentlessly drive thee hence to where I am kind. Why seek me where I have not called thee, and then complain because you find me but a stepmother?”

This is surely not the way a modern backpacker or nature lover would describe Maine’s most famous mountain, but that is because Thoreau’s description owes as much to Wordsworth and other romantic contemporaries as to the rocks and clouds of Katahdin itself. His words took the physical mountain on which he stood and transmuted it into an icon of the sublime: a symbol of God’s presence on earth. The power and the glory of that icon were such that only a prophet might gaze on it for long. In effect, romantics like Thoreau joined Moses and the children of Israel in Exodus when “they looked toward the wilderness, and behold, the glory of the Lord appeared in the cloud.”

But even as it came to embody the awesome power of the sublime, wilderness was also being tamed - not just by those who were building settlements in its midst but also by those who most celebrated its inhuman beauty. By the second half of the nineteenth century, the terrible awe that Wordsworth and Thoreau regarded as the appropriately pious stance to adopt in the presence of their mountaintop God was giving way to a much more

Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada reflect none of the anxiety or terror one finds in earlier writers. Here he is, for instance, sketching on North Dome in Yosemite Valley: No pain here, no dull empty hours, no fear of the past, no fear of the future. These blessed mountains are so compactly filled with God’s beauty, no petty personal hope or experience has room to be. Drinking this champagne water is pure pleasure, so is breathing the living air, and every movement of limbs is pleasure, while the body seems to feel beauty when exposed to it as it feels the campfire or sunshine, entering nor by the eyes alone, but equally through all one’s flesh like radiant hear, making a passionate ecstatic pleasure glow not explainable. * Muir’s closing words on North Dome diverge from his older contemporaries only in mood, not in their ultimate content: Perched like a fly on this Yosemite dome, I gaze and sketch and bask, often- rimes settling down into dumb admiration without definite hope of ever learning much, yet with the longing, unresting effort that lies at the door of hope, humbly prostrate before the vast display of God’s power, and eager to offer self-denial and renunciation with eternal toil to learn any lesson in the divine manuscript.”

Muir’s “divine manuscript” and Wordsworth’s “Characters of the great Apocalypse” were in fact pages from the same holy book, The sublime wilderness had ceased to be a place of satanic temptation and become instead a

sacred temple, much as it continues to be for those who love it today.

But the romantic sublime was not the only cultural movement that helped transform wilderness into a sacred American icon during the nineteenth century. No less important was the powerful romantic attraction of primitivism, dating back at least to Rousseau-the belief that the best antidote to the ills of an overly refined and civilized modern world was a return to simpler, more primitive living. In the United States, this was embodied most strikingly in the national myth of the frontier.

The historian Frederick Jackson Turner wrote in 1893 the classic academic statement of this myth, but it had been part of American cultural traditions for well over a century. As Turner described the process, easterners and European immigrants, in moving to the wild unsettled lands of the frontier, shed the trappings of civilization, rediscovered their primitive racial energies, reinvented direct democratic institutions, and thereby reinfused themselves with a vigor, an independence, and a creativity that were the source of American democracy and national character. Seen in this way, wild country became a place not just of religious redemption but of national renewal, the quintessential location for experiencing what it meant to be an American.

communities and democratic institutions. For other writers, however, frontier democracy for communities was less compelling than frontier freedom for individuals.” By fleeing to the outer margins of settled land and society - so the story ran-an individual could escape the confining strictures of civilized life. The mood among writers who celebrated frontier individualism was almost always nostalgic; they lamented not just a lost way of life but the passing of the heroic men who had embodied that life. * Theodore Roosevelt wrote with much the same nostalgic fervor about the “fine, manly qualities” of the “wild rough-rider of the plains.” No one could be more heroically masculine, thought Roosevelt, or more at home in the western wilderness:

If one saw the wild lands of the frontier as freer, truer, and more natural than other, more modern places, then one was also inclined to see the cities and factories of urban-industrial civilization as confining, false, and artificial.

One of Turner’s most provocative claims was that by the 1890s the frontier was passing away. Never again would “such gifts of free land offer themselves” to the American people. “The frontier has gone,” he declared, “and with its going has closed the first period of American history.” Built into the frontier myth from its very beginning was the notion that this crucible of American identity was temporary and would pass away.

Those who have celebrated the frontier have almost always looked backward as they did so, mourning an older, simpler, truer world that is about to disappear forever.

That world and all of its attractions, Turner said, depended on free land - on wilderness. Thus, in the myth of the vanishing frontier lay the seeds of wilderness preservation in the United States, for if wild land had been so crucial in the making of the nation, then surely one must save its last remnants as monuments to the American past - and as an insurance policy to protect its future. It is no accident that the movement to set aside national parks and wilderness areas began to gain real momentum at precisely the time that laments about the passing frontier reached their peak. To protect wilderness was in a very real sense to protect the nation’s most sacred myth of origin.

Among the core elements of the frontier myth was the powerful sense among certain groups of Americans that wilderness was the last bastion of rugged individualism. Turner tended to stress communitarian themes when writing frontier history, asserting that Americans in primitive conditions had been forced to band together with their neighbors to form

There he passes his days, there he does his life-work, there, when he meets death, he faces it as he has faced many other evils, with quiet, uncomplaining fortitude. Brave, hospitable, hardy, and adventurous, he is the grim pioneer of our race; he prepares the way for the civilization from before whose face he must himself disappear. Hard and dangerous though his existence is, it has yet a wild attraction that strongly draws to it his bold, free spirit.”

This nostalgia for a passing frontier way of life inevitably implied ambivalence, if not downright hostility, toward modernity and all that it represented. If one saw the wild lands of the frontier as freer, truer, and more natural than other, more modern places, then one was also inclined to see the cities and factories of urban-industrial civilization as confining, false, and artificial. Owen Wister looked at the post-frontier “transition” that had followed “the horseman of the plains,” and did not like what he saw: “a shapeless state, a condition of men and manners as unlovely as is that moment in the year when winter is gone and spring not come, and the face of Nature is ugly”. In the eyes of writers who shared Wister’s distaste for modernity, civilization contaminated its inhabitants and absorbed them into the faceless, collective, contemptible life of the crowd. For all of its troubles and dangers, and despite the fact that it must pass away, the frontier had been a better place. If civilization was to be redeemed, it would be by men like the Virginian who could retain their frontier virtues even as they made the transition to post-frontier life.

The mythic frontier individualist was almost always masculine in gender: here, in the wilderness, a man could be a real man, the rugged individual he was meant to be before civilization sapped his energy and threatened his masculinity. Wister’s contemptuous remarks about Wall Street and Newport suggest what he and many others of his generation believed

The myth of the wilderness as “virgin,” uninhabited land had always been especially cruel when seen from the perspective of the Indianswho had once called that land home. that the comforts and seductions of civilized life were especially insidious for men, who all too easily became emasculated by the femininizing tendencies of civilization.

More often than not, men who felt this way came, like Wister and Roosevelt, from elite class backgrounds. The curious result was that frontier nostalgia became an important vehicle for expressing a peculiarly bourgeois form of antimodernism. The very men who most benefited from urban-industrial capitalism were among those who believed they must escape its debilitating effects. If the frontier was passing, then men who had the means to do so should preserve for themselves some remnant of its wild landscape so that they might enjoy the regeneration and renewal that came from sleeping under the stars, participating in blood sports, and living off the land. The frontier might be gone, but the frontier experience could still be had if only wilderness were preserved.

Thus the decades following the Civil War saw more and more of the nation’s wealthiest citizens seeking out wilderness for themselves. The elite passion for wild land took many forms: enormous estates in the Adirondacks and elsewhere (disingenuously called “camps” despite their many servants and amenities), cattle ranches for would-be rough riders on the Great Plains, guided big-game hunting

trips in the Rockies, and luxurious resort hotels wherever railroads pushed their way into sublime landscapes.

Wilderness suddenly emerged as the landscape of choice for elite tourists, who brought with them strikingly urban ideas of the countryside through which they traveled. For them, wild land was not a site for productive labor and not a permanent home; rather, it was a place of recreation. One went to the wilderness not as a producer but as a consumer, hiring guides and other backcountry residents who could serve as romantic surrogates for the rough riders and hunters of the frontier if one was willing to overlook their new status as employees and servants of the rich.

In just this way, wilderness came to embody the national frontier myth, standing for the wild freedom of America’s past and seeming to represent a highly attractive natural alternative to the ugly artificiality of modern civilization. The irony, of course, was that in the process, wilderness came to reflect the very civilization its devotees sought to escape.

Ever since the nineteenth century, celebrating wilderness has been an activity mainly for well- to-do city folks.

Country people generally know far too much about working

the land to regard unworked land as their ideal. In contrast, elite urban tourists and wealthy sportsmen projected their leisure-time frontier fantasies onto the American landscape and so created wilderness in their own image.

sacred sublime, it is the home of a God who transcends history by standing as the One who remains untouched and unchanged by time’s arrow.

This escape from history is one reason why the language we use to talk about wilderness is often permeated with spiritual and religious values that reflect human ideals far more than the material world of physical nature. Wilderness fulfills the old romantic project of secularizing Judeo-Christian values so as to make a new cathedral not in some petty human building but in God’s own creation, Nature itself. Many environmentalists who reject traditional notions of the Godhead and who regard themselves as agnostics or even atheists nonetheless express feelings tantamount to religious Now they were forced to move elsewhere, with the result that awe when in the presence of wilderness - a fact that testifies tourists could safely enjoy the illusion that they were seeing to the success of the romantic project. Those who have no their nation in its pristine, original state, in the new morning of difficulty seeing God as the expression of our human dreams God’s own creation. Among the things that most marked the and desires nonetheless have trouble recognizing that in a new national parks as reflecting a post-frontier consciousness secular age Nature can offer precisely the same sort of mirror. was the relative absence of human violence within their Nomatter matter what what the which we regard it, wilderness boundaries. The actual frontier had often been a place of No theangle anglefrom from which we regard it, wilderness offers us the illusion that we can escape the cares and conflict, in which invaders and invaded fought for control of offers us the illusion that we can escape the cares and troubles troubles of the world in which our past has ensnared land and resources. Once set aside within the fixed and of the world in which our past has ensnared us. carefully policed boundaries of the modern bureaucratic state, the wilderness lost its savage image and became safe: a place Thus it is that wilderness serves as the unexamined foundation more of reverie than of revulsion or fear. Meanwhile, its on which so many of the quasi-religious values of modern original inhabitants were kept out by dint of force, their earlier environmentalism rest. The critique § modernity that is one of uses of the land redefined as inappropriate or even illegal. To environmentalism’s most important contributions to the moral this day, for instance, the Blackfeet continue to be accused of and political discourse of our time more often than not “poaching” on the lands of Glacier National Park that originally appeals, explicitly or implicitly, to wilderness as the standard belonged to them and that were ceded by treaty only with the against which to measure the failings of our human world. provisio that they be permitted to hunt there.”

Wilderness is the natural, unfallen antithesis of an unnatural civilization that has lost its soul. It is a place of freedom in which we can recover the true selves we have lost to the The removal of Indians to create an “uninhabited wilderness” - uninhabited as never before in the human history of the place corrupting influences of our artificial lives. Most of all, it is the ultimate landscape of authenticity. Combining the sacred - reminds us just how invented, just how constructed, the grandeur of the sublime with the primitive simplicity of the American wilderness really is. frontier, it is the place where we can see the world as it really is, and so know ourselves as we really are - or ought to be.

To return to my opening argument: there is nothing natural about the concept of wilderness. It is entirely a creation of the culture that holds it dear, a product of the very history it seeks But the trouble with wilderness is that it quietly expresses and reproduces the very values its devotees seek to reject. The to deny. Indeed, one of the most striking proofs of the cultural flight from history that is very nearly the core of wilderness invention of wilderness is its thoroughgoing erasure of the represents the false hope of an escape from responsibility, the history from which it sprang. In virtually all of its illusion that we can somehow wipe clean the slate of our past manifestations, wilderness represents a flight from history. and return to the tabula rasa that supposedly existed before Seen as the original garden, it is a place outside of time, from we began to leave our marks on the world. The dream of an which human beings had to be ejected before the fallen world unworked natural landscape is very much the fantasy of of history could properly begin. Seen as the frontier, it is a people who have never themselves had to work the land to savage world at the dawn of civilization, whose transformation make a living - urban folk for whom food comes from a represents the very beginning of the national historical epic. supermarket or a restaurant instead of a field, and for whom Seen as the bold landscape of frontier heroism, it is the place the wooden houses in which they live and work apparently of youth and childhood, into which men escape by abandoning have no meaningful connection to the forests in which trees their pasts and entering a world of freedom where the grow and die. Only people whose relation to the land was constraints of civilization fade into memory. Seen as the There were other ironies as well. The movement to set aside national parks and wilderness areas followed hard on the heels of the final Indian wars, in which the prior human inhabitants of these areas were rounded up and moved onto reservations.

The myth of the wilderness as “virgin,” uninhabited land had always been especially cruel when seen from the perspective of the Indians who had once called that land home.

already alienated could hold up wilderness as a model for human life in nature, for the romantic ideology of wilderness leaves precisely nowhere for human beings actually to make their living from the land.

This, then, is the central paradox: wilderness embodies a dualistic vision in which the human is entirely outside the natural. If we allow ourselves to believe that nature, to be true, must also be wild, then our very presence in nature represents its fall.

The place where we are is the place where nature is not. If this is so - if by definition wilderness leaves no place for human beings, save perhaps as contemplative sojourners enjoying their leisurely reverie in Godâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s natural cathedral - then also by definition it can offer no solution to the environmental and other problems that confront us. To the extent that we celebrate wilderness as the measure with which we judge civilization, we reproduce the dualism that sets humanity and nature at opposite poles.

Bu t su ch a pe rsp ec tiv e wi lde rn es s is po ss ibl e on ly if we ac ce pt the pr ist ine - rem ote fro m be o als st mu , ral tu na be to re, pr em ise tha t na tu co mm on pa st. hu ma nit y an d un tou ch ed by ou r y kn ow ab ou t en vir on me nt al his tor we ng thi ery ev t, fac In

tin g the na tu ral wo rld on ula nip ma en be ve ha le op pe t su gg es ts tha or d of the ir pa ss ing . rec a ve ha we as g lon as for s va rio us sc ale We thereby leave ourselves little hope of discovering what an ethical, sustainable, honorable human place in nature might actually look like.

Worse: to the extent that we live in an urban-industrial civilization but at the same time pretend to ourselves that

our real home is in the wilderness, to just that extent we give ourselves permission to evade responsibility for the lives we actually lead. We inhabit civilization while holding some part of ourselves - what we imagine to be the most precious part - aloof from its entanglements. We work our nineto-five jobs in its institutions, we eat its food, we drive its cars (not least to

reach the wilderness), we benefit from the intricate and all too invisible networks with which it shelters us, all the while pretending that these things are not an essential part of who we are.

By imagining that our true home is in the wilderness, we forgive ourselves the homes we actually inhabit. In its flight from history, in its siren song of escape, in its reproduction of the

dangerous dualism that sets human beings outside of nature - in all of these ways, wilderness poses a serious threat to responsible environmentalism at the end of the twentieth century.

By now I hope it is clear that my criticism in this essay is not directed at wild nature per se, or even at efforts to set aside large tracts of wild land, but rather at the specific habits of

pristine devices. The classic example is the tropical rain forest, which since the 1970s has become the most powerful modern icon of unfallen, sacred land-a veritable Garden of Eden - for many Americans and Europeans. And yet protecting the rain forest in the eyes of First World environmentalists all too often means protecting it from the people who live there.

Those who seek to preserve such “wilderness” from the activities of native peoples run the risk of reproducing the

By imagining that our true home is in the wilderness, we forgive ourselves the homes we actually inhabit thinking that flow from this complex cultural construction called wilderness. It is nor the things we label as wilderness that are the problem - for nonhuman nature and large tracts of the natural world do deserve protection - but rather what we ourselves mean when we use that label. Lest one doubt thow pervasive these habits of thought actually are in contemporary environmentalism, let me list some of the places where wilderness serves as the ideological underpinning for environmental concerns that might otherwise seem quite remote from it. Defenders of biological diversity, for instance, although sometimes appealing to more utilitarian concerns, often point to “untouched” ecosystems as the best and richest repositories of the undiscovered species we must certainly try to protect. Although at first blush an apparently more “scientific” concept than wilderness, biological diversity in fact invokes many of the same sacred values, which is why organizations like the Nature Conservancy have been so quick to employ it as an alternative to the seemingly fuzzier and more problematic concept of wilderness. There is a paradox here, of course. To the extent that biological diversity (indeed, even wilderness itself) is likely to survive in the future only by the most vigilant and self-conscious management of the ecosystems that sustain it, the ideology of wilderness is potentially in direct conflict with the very thing it encourages us to protect.

same tragedy-being forceably removed from an ancient home-that befell American Indians. Third World countries face massive environmental problems and deep social conflicts, but these are not likely to be solved by a cultural myth that encourages us to “preserve” peopleless landscapes that have not existed in such places for millennia. At its worst, as environmentalists are beginning to realize, exporting American notions of wilderness in this way can become an unthinking and self-defeating form of cultural imperialism.

Perhaps the most suggestive example of the way that wilderness thinking can underpin other environmental concerns has emerged in the recent debate about “global change.” In 1989 the journalist Bill McKibben published a book entitled The End of Nature, in which he argued that the prospect of global climate change as a result of unintentional human manipulation of the atmosphere means that nature as we once knew it no longer exists. Whereas earlier generations inhabited a natural world that remained more or less unaffected by their actions, our own generation is uniquely different. We and our children will henceforth live in a biosphere completely altered by our own activity, a planet in which the human and the natural can no longer be distinguished, because the one has overwhelmed the other. *

* Perhaps partly because our own conflicts over such places and organisms have become so messy, the convergence of wilderness values with concerns about biological diversity and endangered species has helped produce a deep fascination for remote ecosystems, where it is easier to imagine that nature might somehow be “left alone” to flourish by its own

Moreover, we have unassailable evidence that many of the environmental changes we now face also occurred quite apart from human intervention at one time or another in the earth’s past. The point is not that our current problems are trivial, or that our devastating effects on the earth’s ecosystems should be accepted as inevitable or “natural.” It is rather that we seem unlikely to make much progress in solving these

the trouble with wilderness //getting back to the wrong nature

scars of fracking in texas

We are the most dangerous species of life on the planet, and every other species, even the earth itself, has cause to fear our power to exterminate.

But we are also the only species which, when it chooses to do so, will go to great effort to save what it might destroy.â&#x20AC;?

Wallace Stegner

problems if we hold up to ourselves as the mirror of nature a wilderness ourselves cannot inhabit.

wilderness that created us and the civilization created by us grew an ever-widening rift.”

However much one may be attracted to such a vision, it usually entails problematic consequences. For one, it makes surface wilderness the locus for an epic struggle between in malign civilisation and benign nature, compared landscapes with which all other social, political, and that have moral concerns seem trivial. Foreman already “fallen” writes, “The preservation of wildness and are no longer and native diversity is the most wild. This would seem important issue. issues directly to exclude from the affecting only humans pale in radical environmentalist comparison”. Presumably so agenda problems of do any environmental occupational health and safety problems whose victims in industrial settings, problems of are mainly people, for toxic waste exposure on “unnatural” such problems urban and agricultural sites, problems of poor children poisoned by lead exposure in the inner city, problems of famine and poverty and human suffering in the “overpopulated” places of the earth-problems, in short, of environmental justice. If we set too high a stock on wilderness, too many other corners of the earth become less than natural and too many other people become less than human, thereby giving us permission not to care much about their suffering or their fate.

To do so is merely to rake to a logical extreme the paradox that was built into wilderness from the beginning: if nature dies because we enter it, then the only way to save nature is to kill ourselves. The absurdity of this proposition flows from the underlying dualism it expresses. Not only does it ascribe greater power to humanity than we in fact possess - physical and biological nature will surely survive in some form or another long after we ourselves have gone the way of all flesh - but in the end it offers us little more than a self-defeating counsel of despair.

The tautology gives us no way out: if wild nature is the only thing worth saving, and if our mere presence destroys it, then the sole solution to our own unnaturalness, the only way to protect sacred wilderness from profane humanity, would seem to be suicide. It is not a proposition that seems likely to produce very positive or practical results.

too many other corners of the earth become less than natural and too many other people become less than human, thereby giving us permission not to care much about their suffering or their fate.

And yet radical environmentalists and deep ecologists all too frequently come close to accepting this premise as a first principle. When they express, for instance, the popular notion that our environmental problems began with the invention of agriculture, they push the human fall from natural grace so far back into the past that all of civilized history becomes a tale of ecological declension. ‘Earth First!’ founder Dave Foreman captures the familiar parable succinctly when he writes, “Before agriculture was midwifed in the Middle East, humans were in the It is no accident that these supposedly inconsequential environmental problems affect wilderness. We had no concept of mainly poor people, for the long affiliation between wilderness and wealth means that “wilderness” because everything the only poor people who count when wilderness is the issue are hunter-gatherers, who was wilderness and we were presumably do not consider themselves to be poor in the first place. The dualism at the heart apart of it. But with of wilderness encourages its advocates to conceive of its protection as a crude conflict between irrigation ditches, crop the “human” and the “nonhuman” - or, more often, between those who value the nonhuman and surpluses, and those who do not. This in turn tempts one to ignore crucial differences among humans and the permanent villages, complex cultural and historical reasons why different peoples may feel very differently about the we became apart meaning of wilderness. from the natural world.

Why, for instance, is the “wilderness experience” so often conceived as a form of recreation best enjoyed by Between those whose class privileges give them the time and resources to leave their jobs behind and “get away from it the all”? Why does the protection of wilderness so often seem to pit urban recreationists against rural people who actually earn their living from the land (excepting those who sell goods and services to the tourists themselves)? Why

the trouble with wilderness //getting back to the wrong nature

in the debates about pristine natural areas are “primitive” peoples idealized, even sentimentalised, until the moment they do something unprimitive, modern, and unnatural, experiencing what I and thereby fall from environmental grace? What are the consequences of a wilderness might call the sacred ideology that devalues productive labor and the very concrete knowledge that comes in nature, I often find from working the land with one’s own hands?” All of these questions imply conflicts myself remembering wild among different groups of people, conflicts that are obscured behind the deceptive places much closer to clarity of “human” vs. “nonhuman.” If in answering these knotty questions we home. I think, for instance, resort to so simplistic an opposition, we are almost certain to ignore the very of a small pond near my subtleties and complexities we need to understand. house where water bubbles up from limestone springs to feed a But the most troubling cultural baggage that accompanies the celebration series of pools that rarely freeze in of wilderness has less to do with remote rain forests and peoples than winter and so play home to with the ways we think about ourselves - we American waterfowl that stay here for the environmentalists who quite rightly worry about the future of the earth protective warmth even on the coldest and the threats we pose to the natural world. Idealizing a distant of winter days, gliding silently through wilderness too often means not idealizing the environment in which steaming mists as the snow falls from grey we actually live, the landscape that for better or worse we call February skies. home. Most of our most serious environmental problems start right here, at home, and if we are to solve those problems, * we need an environmental ethic that will tell us as much about using nature as about not using it.

What I celebrate about such places is not just their wildness, though that certainly is among their most The wilderness dualism tends to cast any use as important qualities; what I celebrate eve” more is that abuse, and thereby denies us a middle ground in they remind us of the wildness in our own backyards, of which responsible use and non-use might attain the nature that is all around us if only we have eyes to see some kind of balanced, sustainable relationship. it.

My own belief is that only by exploring this middle ground will we learn ways of imagining Indeed, my principal objection to wilderness is that it may teach a better world for all of us: humans and us to be dismissive or eve” contemptuous of such humble places nonhumans, rich people and poor, women and experiences. Without our quite realizing it, wilderness tends to and men, First Worlders and Third privilege some parts of nature at the expense of others. Most of us, I Worlders, white folks and people of suspect, still follow the conventions of the romantic sublime in finding color, consumers and producers - a the mountaintop more glorious than the plains, the ancient forest nobler world better for humanity in all of than the grasslands, the mighty canyon more inspiring than the humble its diversity and for all the rest marsh. of nature too. The middle ground is where we actually * live. It is where we - all of us, in our different places and ways - make our By teaching us to fetishize sublime places and wide open country, these peculiarly homes.

American ways of thinking about wilderness encourage us to adopt too high a standard for what counts as “natural.” If it isn’t hundreds of square miles big, if it doesn’t give us God’s-eye views or grand vistas, if it doesn’t permit us the illusion that That is why, when we are alone on the planet, then it really isn’t natural. It’s too small, too plain, or too I think of the crowded to be authentically wild. times I myself have come closest to Any way of looking at nature that encourages us to believe we are separate from nature-as wilderness tends to do-is likely to reinforce environmentally irresponsible behaviour.” On the other hand, I also think it no less crucial for us to recognize and honor nonhuman nature as a world we did nor create, a world with its own independent, nonhuman reasons for being as it is. The autonomy of nonhuman nature seems to me an indispensable corrective to human arrogance. Any way of looking at nature that helps us remember - as wilderness also tends to do-that the interests of people are not necessarily identical to those of every other creator of the earth itself is likely to foster responsible behavior. To the extent that wilderness has served as an important vehicle for articulating deep moral values regarding our obligations and responsibilities to the nonhuman world, I would not want to jettison the contributions it has made to our culture’s ways of thinking about nature.

If the core problem of wilderness is the question we must ask is what it positive values we associate with w will come by broadening our sense of the world we did not make, wilde our fellow beings and the earth itse self-criticism as we exercise our ow limits to human mastery-which with place where, symbolically at least, w

Wallace Stegner once wrote of “the that distinguishes man from all othe other form of life. It is simply the de are the most dangerous species of itself, has cause to fear our power t when it chooses to do so, will go to

The myth of wilderness, which Steg we can somehow leave nature untou that this for the most part is an illus becomes all the more compelling. If leaving marks on a fallen world, then kinds of marks we wish to leave. It is wilderness remain so important. In us to ask whether the Other must a under what circumstances it should intervention. This is surely a questio we do, and not just about the natura *

The romantic legacy means that wil mind than a fact of nature, and the most defines wilderness is wonder. the wild is that wonder in the face o will, but forces itself upon us - as an nonhuman world experienced throu cultural history - proof that ours is n presence in the universe.

Wilderness gets us into trouble only imagine that this experience of won otherness is limited to the remote c of the planet, or that it somehow depends on pristine landscapes we ourselves do not inhabit. Nothing could be more misleading. The tree in the garden is in reality no less other, no less worthy of our wonder and respect, than the tree in an ancient forest that has never known an axe or This a saw - even though the that s tree in the forest and unn reflects a more complete are wild;

anywhere on earth. It is a quality of one’s own consciousness. The planet is a wild place and always will be.“

remember and acknowledge the autonomy of the othermeans striving for critical self-consciousness in all of our actions. It means that deep reflection and respect must accompany each act of use, and means too that we must always consider the possibility of non-use. It means looking at the part of nature we intend to turn toward our own ends and asking whether we can use it again and again and again - sustainably - without its being diminished in the process.

It means never imagining that we can flee into a mythical wilderness to escape history and the obligation to take responsibility for our own actions that history inescapably entails. Most of all, it means practicing remembrance and gratitude, for thanksgiving is the simplest and most basic of ways for us to recollect the nature, the culture, and the history that have come together to make the world as we know it. If wildness can stop being (just) out there and start being (also) in here, if it can start being as humane as it is natural, then perhaps we can get on with the unending task of struggling to live rightly in the world - not just in the garden, not just in the wilderness, but in the home that encompasses them both.

s that it distances us too much from the very things it teaches us to value, then both in t can tell us about home, the place where we actually live. How can we take the a wilderness and bring them closer to home? I think the answer to this question practical of the otherness that wilderness seeks to define and protect, reminding us sense now erness can teach profound feelings of humility and respect as we confront To think ourselves depend on our elf. Feelings like these argue for the importance of self-awareness and capable of causing management and wn ability to transform the world around us, helping us set responsible “the end of nature” care. We are h- out such limits too easily becomes human hubris. Wilderness is the is an act of great responsible for both, we try to withhold our power to dominate. hubris, for it even though we can claim means forgetting credit for neither. Our e special human mark, the special record of human passage, the wildness challenge is to stop thinking of er species. It is rate enough among men, impossible to any that dwells such things according to a set of eliberate and chosen refusal to make any marks at all. We everywhere bipolar moral scales in which the life on the planet, and every other species, even the earth within and human and the non- human, the to exterminate. But we are also the only species which, around us. unnatural and the natural, the fallen and o great effort to save what it might destroy.” the unfallen, serve as our conceptual map Learning to for understanding and valuing the world. gner knowingly reproduces in these remarks, is that honor the Instead, we need to embrace the full uched by our passage. By now it should be clear wild continuum of a natural landscape that is also sion. But Stegner’s deeper message then learning cultural, in which the city, the suburb, the f living in history means that we cannot help to pastoral, and the wild each has its proper n the dilemma we face is to decide what place, which we permit ourselves to celebrate s just here that our cultural traditions of without needlessly denigrating the others. We intricate the broadest sense, wilderness reaches need to honor the Other within and the Other web of always bend to our will, and, if not, next door as much as we do the exotic Other ecological d be allowed to flourish without our that lives far away - a lesson that applies as on worth asking about everything much to people as it does to (other) natural relationships, al world. things. In particular, we need to discover a The tree in the common middle ground in which all of these things, garden could from the city to the wilderness, can somehow be easily have sprung encompassed in the word “home.” Home, after all, from the same seed lderness is more a stare of is the place where finally we make our living. It is the as the tree in the state of mind that today place for which we take responsibility, the place we forest, and we can claim The striking power of try to sustain so we can pass on what is best in it (and only its location and of it requires no act of in ourselves) to our children. perhaps its form as our own. n expression of the Both frees stand apart from gh the lens of our The task of making a home in nature is what Wendell us; both share our common not the only Berry has called “the forever unfinished lifework of our world. The special power of the species.” “The only thing we have to preserve nature tree in the wilderness is to remind with,” he writes, “is culture; the only thing we have to us of this fact. It can teach us to y if we preserve wildness with is domesticity.” Calling a place recognize the wildness we did not see nder and home inevitably means that we will use the nature we find in the tree we planted in our own corners in it, for there can be no escape from manipulating and backyard. By seeing the otherness in that working and even killing some parts of nature to make our which is most unfamiliar, we can learn to see home. But if we acknowledge the autonomy and otherness of it too in that which at first seemed merely the things and creatures around us-an autonomy our culture ordinary. If wilderness can do this-if it can help has taught us to label with the word “wild” - then we will at us perceive and respect a nature we had forgotten least think carefully about the uses to which we put them, and to recognize as natural - then it will become part of even ask if we should use them at all. Just so can we still join the solution to cur environmental dilemmas rather than Thoreau in declaring that “in Wildness is the preservation of the part of the problem.

World,” for wildness (as opposed to wilderness) can be found any- where: in the seemingly tame fields and woodlots of s will only happen, however, if we abandon the dualism Massachusetts, in the cracks of a Manhattan sidewalk, even in the sees the free in the garden as artificial-completely fallen cells of our own bodies. As Gary Snyder has wisely said, “A person natural-and the tree in the wilderness as naturalwith a clear heart and open mind can experience the wilderness ely pristine and wild. Both trees in some ultimate sense

•

AR T IFICIAL EXPERIENCES

In societies where the experience of actual nature is becoming scarce, and life is increasingly virtual, art is providing surrogate experiences.

humans gathered in a dark room, under an enormous globular light, which they accepted as their surrogate sun Olafur Eliasson - The Weather Project October 2003 - March 2004 Tate Modern

humans queued for hours to stand in a rainy room, despite the fact that, outside, it was actually raining

The Rain Room October 2012 - March 2013 Barbican Centre

inside, they waited - and for a moment the machine, the moisture and the light gave birth to a cloud Berndaut Smilde - Nimbus 16th December 2012 at 15:00 Platform 57

THE MACHI STOPS

INE

by E.M. Forster (1909) In 1909, English novelist, Edward Forster, predicted

Skype, video lectures and instant messaging and the isolation that exists in todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s technophilic society

THE AIR-SHIP

Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee. It is lighted neither by window nor by lamp, yet it is filled with a soft radiance. There are no apertures for ventilation, yet the air is fresh. There are no musical instruments, and yet, at the moment that my meditation opens, this room is throbbing with melodious sounds. An armchair is in the centre, by its side a reading-desk-that is all the furniture. And in the armchair there sits a swaddled lump of flesh-a woman, about five feet high, with a face as white as a fungus. It is to her that the little room belongs.

An electric bell rang.

The woman touched a switch and the music was silent.

“I suppose I must see who it is”, she thought, and set her chair in motion.

The chair, like the music, was worked by machinery and it rolled her to the other side of the room where the bell still rang importunately.

“Who is it?” she called. Her voice was irritable, for she had been interrupted often since the music began. She knew several thousand people, in certain directions human intercourse had advanced enormously.

But when she listened into the receiver, her white face wrinkled into smiles, and she said: “Very well. Let us talk, I will isolate myself. I do not expect anything important will happen for the next five minutes - for I can give you fully five minutes, Kuno. Then I must deliver my lecture on “Music during the Australian Period”.”

She touched the isolation knob, so that no one else could speak to her.

Then she touched the lighting apparatus, and the little room was plunged into darkness.

“Be quick!” She called, her irritation returning. “Be quick, Kuno; here I am in the dark wasting my time.”

But it was fully fifteen seconds before the round plate that she held in her hands began to glow. A faint blue light shot across it, darkening to purple, and presently she could see the image of her son, who lived on the other side of the earth, and he could see her.

SKYPE

VIDEO LECTURE

V: “Kuno, how slow you are.”

He smiled gravely.

“I really believe you enjoy dawdling.”

K: “I have called you before, mother, but you were always busy or isolated. I have something particular to say.”

V: “What is it, dearest boy? Be quick.

Why could you not send it by pneumatic post? ” “Because I prefer saying such a thing. I want----” “Well?”

K: “I want you to come and see me.”

Vashti watched his face in the blue plate.

“But I can see you!” she exclaimed.

“What more do you want?”

K: “I want to see you not through the Machine,” said Kuno. “I want to

“You talk as if a god had made the Machine,” cried the other.

K: “I believe that you pray to it when you are unhappy. Men made it, do not forget that. Great men, but men.

The Machine is much, but it is not everything. I see something like you in this plate, but I do not see you. I hear something like you through this telephone, but I do not hear you.

That is why I want you to come. Pay me a visit, so that we can meet face to face, and talk about the hopes that are in my mind.”

V: She replied that she could scarcely spare the time for a visit.

K: “The air-ship barely takes two days to fly between me and you.”

V: “I dislike air-ships.”

K: “Why?” V: “I dislike seeing the horrible brown earth, and the sea, and the stars when it is dark. I get no ideas in an air- ship.”

K: “I do not get them anywhere else.”

speak to you not through the wearisome Machine.”

“Oh, hush!” said his mother, vaguely shocked. “You mustn”t say anything against the Machine.”

K: “Why not?”

V: “One mustn”t.”

“What kind of ideas can the air give you?”

He paused for an instant.

K: “Do you not know four big stars that form an oblong, and three stars close together in the middle of the oblong, and hanging from these stars, three other stars?”

V: “Kuno, how slow you are.”

He smiled gravely.

“I really believe you enjoy dawdling.”

K: “I have called you before, mother, but you were always busy or isolated. I have something particular to say.”

V: “What is it, dearest boy? Be quick.

Why could you not send it by pneumatic post? ” “Because I prefer saying such a thing. I want----” “Well?”

K: “I want you to come and see me.”

Vashti watched his face in the blue plate.

“But I can see you!” she exclaimed.

“What more do you want?”

K: “I want to see you not through the Machine,” said Kuno. “I want to

“You talk as if a god had made the Machine,” cried the other.

K: “I believe that you pray to it when you are unhappy. Men made it, do not forget that. Great men, but men.

The Machine is much, but it is not everything. I see something like you in this plate, but I do not see you. I hear something like you through this telephone, but I do not hear you.

That is why I want you to come. Pay me a visit, so that we can meet face to face, and talk about the hopes that are in my mind.”

V: She replied that she could scarcely spare the time for a visit.

K: “The air-ship barely takes two days to fly between me and you.”

V: “I dislike air-ships.”

K: “Why?” V: “I dislike seeing the horrible brown earth, and the sea, and the stars when it is dark. I get no ideas in an air- ship.”

K: “I do not get them anywhere else.”

speak to you not through the wearisome Machine.”

“Oh, hush!” said his mother, vaguely shocked. “You mustn”t say anything against the Machine.”

K: “Why not?”

V: “One mustn”t.”

“What kind of ideas can the air give you?”

He paused for an instant.

K: “Do you not know four big stars that form an oblong, and three stars close together in the middle of the oblong, and hanging from these stars, three other stars?”

RE A RE D BY P UP PE TS

by Lizzie Wade t pull s u m e w a p t i v i t y, c n i s r o es that ond c o d d t e u e r B b .

To f n a t u re o s g n i r t cies? e p s on the s a e v we sa matter if

The condors wouldn’t leave Les Reid alone.

In the late 1990s, a pack of them regularly showed up at his house in Pine Mountain Club, California, a small community northwest of Los Angeles. They clambered around on his roof, making a racket. They perched, one by one, on his large patio umbrella, seeming to enjoy the slow slide down its slippery surface and onto the deck below. Once, Reid, a former member of the Sierra Club’s board of directors, came home to find that eight young condors had ripped a hole in his screen door and were enthusiastically tearing apart his mattress.

When he’d walked in on them, one of the birds had a pair of his underwear dangling from its beak.

Meanwhile, in Los Angeles and San Diego, the scientists and zookeepers who had been responsible for these birds since birth were shaking their heads in frustration. This was not the behaviour they’d hoped for when they began releasing their avian charges into the wild in 1992.

California condors are evolutionary relics of the Pleistocene, when they soared over huge swathes of North America and fed on the carcasses of mastodons and sabre-toothed cats. With 10ft wingspans, spiky neck ruffs that resemble Elizabethan collars, and mottled bald heads that range Wvyellow, they are hardly beautiful. Nonetheless, condors have a certain mystique; in his book Condor (2006), John Nielsen describes the archaic birds as ‘the soul of the wilderness’. Although their range has shrunk and their numbers dwindled, condors can still fly up to 100 miles each day in search of food. They read the wind and build their nests in caves carved into cliff faces.

They navigate a complex social hierarchy. They do not break into houses and eat underwear.

Condors released near the Grand Canyon posed for photographs andReidswooped balconies to– includwild Angry conservationists accused of corrupting the past Critics ofhotel the condor-reintroduction programme ing Reid – were quick to point fingers. The blame, they condors by illegally supplying them with raw meat from said, laylurked with the birds’ along shoddy parenting. condor’s the local grocery,from a charge he vigorously denied. After They applause the guests. theThe edges wild essence had not been passed down to this new all, he’d fought to protect the condor’s range back in generation, and now it was gone forever. For, you see, 1960s, when he and his wife would often see the of the trails and at‘That’s passing offparents. their these hikers, birds had never ripping met their biological vultures on hikes, soaringlunged miles above them. the Instead, they were raised by puppets. way you’re supposed to see a condor,’ he told Nielsen, decades later. He believed such wild birds deserved California condors have always been ill-suited in shoelaces.

A that field crew in Arizona told The Newto lifeYork to be left alone, and he knew better than to tempt them the Anthropocene. The species’ problems likely began toward civilisation. the first humans in North America drove mastoTimes in 2003 that they’d seenwhen experimentdonsfour and othercondors megafauna to extinction, and things have only gone downhill from there. Throughout the 19th and That hands-off approach to protecting the condor was 20th centuries, the impressive birds – the largest by most mid-century conservationists. Butto whenbe early ingshared with what appeared group sex. in North America – were prime targets for hunters and the total condor population dropped to a mere 22 birds in 1987, scientists decided they needed to take aggressive action to save the species. So they rounded up every last wild condor and brought them to live in the Los Angeles Zoo and the San Diego Zoo Safari Park.

These birds proved prodigious breeders and, a decade later, their children were being regularly released in California and Arizona by scientists working with the condor reintroduction programme. The mischievous birds that began showing up at Reid’s house were members of this zoo-bred generation. And it wasn’t just the Pine Mountain Club condors that were acting strangely. Around the same time, condors released near the Grand Canyon posed for photographs and swooped past hotel balconies to wild applause from the guests.

They lurked along the edges of trails and lunged at passing hikers, ripping off their shoelaces. A field crew in Arizona told The New York Times in 2003 that they’d seen four condors experimenting with what appeared to be group sex. The scientists tasked with keeping the young birds in line (and away from people) compared the job to running a rowdy middle school.

If the captive-breeding programme succeeded in its mission of raising birds that didn’t depend on humans for food, shelter, or any other basic necesWhen the total condor population sity of condor life, it failed in other ways. dropped to a mere 22 birds in 1987, The zoo-bred birds scientists decided they needed refused to adopt the manners we demand to take aggressive action to save of wild animals. They weren’t scared of the species. Puppet-rearing – the humans; they weren’t practice of raising a young animal even willing to politely ignore us. Rather, with a simulacrum of an adult of its they seemed fascispecies – seemed like the perfect nated by us.

solution.

egg collectors. Even after they became one of the first animals to be officially protected by the Endangered Species Act in 1967, urban sprawl continued to consume large swathes of condor habitat. Lead from bullets in carcasses left behind by hunters poisoned the few meals that remained for the scavengers. The captive breeding programme was designed to protect the vultures from these threats. For the next several years, every birth seemed like a resurrection.

The scientists and zookeepers hoped to one day release any chicks born under their care into the wild, so raising them around humans, as other captive-bred animals are often raised, was out of the question. Like many birds, condor chicks imprint powerfully on their early caretakers, and no one wanted them to bond with humans. The condor keepers were as committed to keeping the vultures wild as they were to saving them from extinction. Puppet-rearing – the practice of raising a young animal with a simulacrum of an adult of its species – seemed like the perfect solution. In this case, a particularly crafty zookeeper moulded three-dimensional hand vv out of leather to resemble the bald head of an adult condor. Inside the breeding centre, recordings of babbling brooks drown out the ambient noise of the human world, from footsteps to the hum of fluorescent lights Condors do two things that made them ideal subjects for puppet-rearing. The first is called double-clutching.

A condor pair usually spends two years raising just one chick. But if a pair’s first egg is destroyed or otherwise lost, they’ll often lay another one during the same season.

If the second attempt fails as well, they’ll repeat the process the following year. By discreetly removing eggs from condor parents’ nests and fostering the resulting chicks, zookeepers could induce double-clutching and potentially quadruple the number of eggs laid every two years, thus speeding up the population’s recovery.

Double-clutching, in other words, makes puppet rearing mathematically worthwhile. Second, condor chicks are

raised in near-isolation, in nests tucked into cliff caves. Often, they do not see any other birds besides their parents for the first several months of their lives; so once the captured condors started laying eggs, zookeepers sneaked off with their eggs, donned a homemade hand puppet, and took their place.

Raising animals is, of course, just one of the many uses humans have found for puppets over the centuries. Puppets entertain our children, they communicate with our gods, they act out our desires, they channel our dead, they preserve our stories, they creep us out. Puppetry traditions exist all over the world, from Bali’s sacred shadow puppets to hyper-violent Punch and Judy shows in the UK to Sesame Street on TV. Plumb nearly any human culture and, somewhere, you will find puppets.

As objects of art and ritual, puppets draw their power from being what the American puppeteer Janie Geiser calls ‘substitute objects’. On stage, they take the place of a human performer. They signal emotion without feeling any themselves. They gesture without agency. Most unsettlingly, they replace life with an imitation of it. Puppets, Geiser told me, ‘are a vessel of life’ without being a living thing; ‘they suggest life’ without being alive themselves.

A puppet’s ability to expose the cracks in reality makes it both beautiful and frightening.

Puppets call attention to the categories with which humans organise the world – person/ thing, real/fake, object/actor, body/soul, dead/alive – at the same time as they blur the lines separating them. They raise the terrifying possibility that maybe we can’t tell the difference between nature and artifice. Or even life and death.

These animals don’t cause as much trouble as marauding gangs of adolescent condors, but they can wind up with their own mysterious behavioural issues. Puppet-reared whooping cranes, for example, have trouble incubating their eggs in the wild; they will often abandon their nests mere days before the eggs are due to hatch.

John French, Patuxent’s research manager and head of the crane programme, has a couple of different theories about the crane’s parenting problems. In the wild, nesting cranes are often swarmed by black flies; perhaps the puppet-reared cranes, raised in relative comfort, can’t tolerate the parasites and are driven off their nests. Or perhaps their own puppet parents failed to pass along a crucial piece of information about the breeding process.

What the missing piece might be, French told me, ‘I have no idea.’ Meanwhile, the cranes’ failure to raise the next generation on their own guarantees, somewhat ironically, the need for more puppet-rearing.

It’s tempting to see puppet-reared California condors and whooping cranes as victims of a horrific real-life version of Plato’s cave: after living in a shadow world since birth, they are suddenly dragged out into the blinding sunlight and forced to cope with an incomprehensibly rich and complex reality. Ill-equipped to live in anything but a carefully managed simulacrum of nature, they crack under the pressure. When viewed from this angle, it is hard to imagine why keepers thought puppet-rearing would produce psychologically healthy animals.

But like all intensive, hands-on conser-

Captive breeding isn’t vation programmes, puppet-rearing was never really about the animals. While the stated goal of any captive breeding designed to save species. programme is to create self-sustaining It’s designed to make humans populations of wild animals that can survive and thrive without human intervention, the reason for their existence is guilt of a feel better about ourselves. true very human variety. We drove the condor,

Condors aren’t the only endangered species to be raised by puppets. It’s been tried with numerous birds, ranging from the common raven to the bald eagle, often with great success.

Across country from the condors, at the US Geological Survey Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Maryland, whooping cranes are taught to eat, drink, and form a flock by adult crane puppet heads affixed to the hands of humans wearing something between a burka and a beekeeping suit. Even baby pandas are sometimes cared for by humans in full-body panda costumes that make them look like team mascots.

the whooping crane, the panda, and countless other species to the brink of extinction; therefore, we have a responsibility to save them. Usually, our strategy amounts to fixating on the cutest or most symbolic of these threatened species and breeding as many of them as we can. Those offspring either spend their lives in zoos or are released into the very same world that killed so many of their ancestors. This flawed but seductive logic is taken to its extreme by the burgeoning de-extinction movement, which promises to literally bring extinct species such as the passenger pigeon and the woolly mammoth back from the dead without any concurrent resurrection of the environmental contexts in which they once thrived.

The set has been designed.

The performer has rehearsed.

The audience is prepared for rapture and amazement as a species is brought back from the brink.

Captive breeding isn’t designed to save species.

It’s designed to make humans feel better about ourselves. It’s proof that whatever horrors we’re wreaking on our planet, we’re still willing to make Herculean efforts to save the animals

most obviously suffering the consequences.

But to effectively assuage our guilt, we need to see results – and

truly successful captive breeding programmes, the ones that produce large numbers of wild animals which stay out of humans’ way, rarely give us those. Instead, we latch on to the adorable and conscience-soothing spectacle of captive breeding itself. We’re riveted by the Panda Cam, we turn up in droves to watch ultralight aircraft lead whooping cranes on their first migration.f This erasure of the human presence is what most starkly differentiates puppet-rearing from other forms of puppet theatre. Puppetry’s age-old appeal relies on a dissonant double vision, in which the audience sees the magic of the puppet and the skill of the puppeteer at the same time, and marvels at them both. But where a human puppet show is transparent in its falseness, puppet-rearing aims to be totally opaque.

For French and his whooping cranes, for example, the puppet heads are tangential to the costume, the robes that obscure the human wearing them. Pretending to be a crane isn’t really the point, French told me. Rather than channelling the presence of a whooping crane, his shrouded crane keepers try to perform the absence of a person. ‘I presume these birds know that we’re not cranes,’ he says. That’s OK – just as long as they still grow up to avoid humans.

Like many juvenile delinquents, these early puppet-reared condors lacked positive adult role models.

The condor keepers in San Diego have an advantage when it comes to fooling the chicks

in their care: they don’t have to walk around with them out in the open, wearing scary robes. Since condor chicks stay in one place for the first several months of their lives, a puppet head poked through a one-way screen will do the trick. But for the first few years of the condor-rearing programme, erasing the human presence also meant erasing any kind of disciplinary authority, which turned out to be vital to condor development. As the keepers were forced to recapture more and more misbehaving birds, like the ones around Les Reid’s house and at the Grand Canyon, they concluded that, like many juvenile delinquents, these early puppet-reared condors lacked positive adult role models. For the first several years of the release programme, it was basically a ‘Lord of the Flies model’, Michael Mace, the curator of birds at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, told me. ‘Kids were raising kids.’

These days, the puppets play, they groom, they tidy up the nest. And perhaps most importantly, they hit.

Mace counselled patience; he believed that the adolescent condors would grow out of their raucous behaviour and settle down once they started families of their own, around age five or six. But in the meantime, says Amy Utt, a biologist at Union College in Nebraska who studies the condor-recovery programme, some changes had to be made at the zoos.

Instead of focusing primarily on the absence of humans, condor keepers began viewing their job as a performance of condor-ness. They pored over videos of live condor parents interacting with their chicks and tried to precisely mimic their movements with the hand puppets. ‘There needs to be great attention to detail,’ Mace said, because eventually, the chick will ‘exhibit those

Puppet-rearing takes our love of captive breeding to the extreme by satisfying two guilt-absolving fantasies at once: it lets us play at being nature’s saviour while also symbolically erasing human beings from the face of the Earth. same behaviours with its own offspring.’ So instead of just dropping food into the chick’s mouth and leaving, for example, the puppets started depositing raw meat on the floor and poking around it alongside the chick.

These days, the puppets play, they groom, they tidy up the nest. And perhaps most importantly, they hit.

Condor parenting is ‘not super cuddly’, Utt told me, and a big part of learning to perform the role of adult condor was to stop being so gentle with the zoo-hatched chicks. In the wild, if a chick gets too clingy or does something else its parents deem not-condor-appropriate, it will get a smack. Later on, parents will sometimes push chicks off ledges to teach them to fly. Learning to mimic this wild behaviour was no doubt challenging for the keepers, especially when every condor chick born in the zoos seemed like a tiny, fragile miracle. But roughing up the chicks early in life, Utt said, ‘seems to actually produce birds that behave more like wild birds’.

What’s more, these condors will now know how they are supposed to treat their own offspring when the time comes.

Twenty-seven years after the last wild condors were rounded up and brought into captivity, the puppet-rearing programme seems to be doing its job.

As of November, 227 California condors live in the wild, with another 189 in captivity. Behavioural problems have decreased, though the birds must still be closely monitored, especially for lead exposure, which continues to be the biggest threat to the species’ long-term survival. If we humans took our hand off the scale, the condor population would no doubt plummet.

Still, compared to even 10 years ago, the condors ‘are doing so much better. So much better,’ Utt said.

Between nature and artifice?

Wild and tame?

Although few people now doubt the wisdom of saving

California condors by raising them in zoos, critics of the programme were right about one thing: captive breeding does, in fact, risk altering the essence of a wild species. So does that make a puppet-reared animal a miracle or tragedy? It’s both – or maybe neither. Puppet-rearing blurs the same categorical lines as puppet theatre does. When we must capture all the wild condors and raise their children for them, what is the difference between survival and extinction? Between nature and artifice? Wild and tame?

Puppet and animal? There’s fear and more than a little disgust in not being able to tell the difference. But there’s also beauty in how we’ve managed to carve out even the tiniest space between those categories and learned to live in the cracks.

Puppet and animal? There’s fear and more than a little disgust in not being able to tell the difference.

There’s still only so much a hand puppet can do, however, and the condor keepers realised they needed to bring in reinforcements. The chicks’ pens now have windows through which the chicks can see real, live adult condors. Hopefully, Mace says, that gives them a sense of identity, an idea of what they are going to be when they grow up. (Something similar is done with whooping cranes at Patuxent.) At around five months, the chicks are moved to live with an older ‘mentor’ condor. These mentors teach their charges how to live with other birds and respect the condor hierarchy. And now, condors do sometimes see humans in the zoo: the growing birds are occasionally ambushed and tackled by zookeepers, to train them to be afraid of people.

A condor soaring over the Grand Canyon or the California chaparral is no longer the ‘soul of the wilderness’. It is the manifestation of the passion, care, and effort of the people who worked so hard to create the mere possibility of that moment. The set has been designed. The performer has rehearsed. The audience is prepared for rapture and amazement as a species is brought back from the brink. Yes, humans are pulling the strings. But what we’ve created is a work of art. •

automated ETH I C S

by Tom Chatfield

is it natur al for dr i ver le s s c ar s to de cide our f ate?

For the French philosopher Paul Virilio, technological is inextricable from For the Frenchdevelopment philosopher Paul Virilio, technologithe development idea of the accident.

As he put each cal is inextricable fromit,the idea of the accident isAs‘an miracle…

When youinverted accident. heinverted put it, each accident is ‘an invent the When ship, you invent the shipwreck; miracle… you also invent the ship, you also invent when you inventwhen the plane, you also invent you the the shipwreck; you invent the plane, plane crash; and when you invent electricity, also invent the plane crash; and when you invent you invent electrocution.’

Accidents mark the electricity, you invent electrocution.’

Accidents spots the where anticipation met reality andreality cameand mark spots where anticipation met off worse.

Yet each alsoisa also spark of secular came off worse.

Yetiseach a spark of secular revelation: an opportunity to exceed the past, to to make tomorrow’s worst better than today’s, make tomorrow’s worst better than today’s, and on and on occasion to promise ‘never again’. occasion to promise ‘never again’.

This, at least, is the plan. ‘Never again’ is a tricky promise to keep: in the long term,

it’s not a question of if things go wrong, but when. The ethical concerns of innovation thus tend to focus on harm’s minimisation and mitigation, not the absence of harm altogether.

A double-hulled steamship poses less risk per passenger mile than a medieval trading vessel; a well-run factory is safer than a sweatshop.

Plane crashes might cause many fatalities, but refinements such as a checklist, computer and co-pilot insure against all but the wildest of unforeseen circumstances.

Similar refinements are the subject of one of the liveliest debates in practical ethics today: the case for self-driving cars. Modern motor vehicles are safer and more reliable than they have ever been – yet more than 1 million people are killed in car accidents around the world each year, and more than 50 million are injured. Why? Largely because one perilous element in the mechanics of driving remains unperfected by progress: the human being.

Enter the cutting edge of machine mitigation. Back in August 2012, Google announced that it had achieved 300,000 accident-free miles testing its self-driving cars. The technology remains some distance from the marketplace, but the statistical case for automated vehicles is compelling. Even

when they’re not causing injury, human-controlled cars are often driven inefficiently, ineptly, antisocially, or in other ways additive to the sum of human misery.

What, though, about more local contexts? If your vehicle encounters a busload of schoolchildren skidding across the road, do you want to live in a world where it automatically swerves, at a speed you could never have managed, saving them but putting your life at risk? Or would you prefer to

live in a world where it doesn’t swerve but keeps you safe? Put like this, neither seems a tempting option. Yet designing self-sufficient systems demands that we resolve such questions. And these possibilities take us in turn towards one of the hoariest thought-experiments in modern philosophy: the trolley problem.

In its simplest form, coined in 1967 by the English philosopher Philippa Foot, the trolley problem imagines the driver of a runaway tram heading down a track. Five men are working on this track, and are all certain to die when the trolley reaches them. Fortunately, it’s possible for the driver to switch the trolley’s path to an alternative spur of track, saving all five. Unfortunately, one man is working on this spur, and will be killed if the switch is made.

In this original version, it’s not hard to say what should be done: the driver should make the switch and save five lives, even at the cost of one. If we were to replace the driver with a computer program, creating a fully automated trolley, we would also instruct it to pick the lesser evil: to kill fewer people in any similar situation. Indeed, we might actively prefer a program to be making such a decision, as it would always act according to this logic while a human might panic and do otherwise.

The trolley problem becomes more interesting

1 m ill io n pe op le ar e ki lle d in ca r ac ci de nt s ar ou nd th e w or ld ea ch ye ar, an d m or e th an 50 m ill io n ar e in ju re d. W hy ? La rg el y be ca us e on e pe ril ou s el em en t in th e m ec ha ni cs of dr iv in g re m ai ns un pe rf ec te d by pr og re ss : th e hu m an be in g.

in its plentiful variations. In a 1985 article, the MIT philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson offered this: instead of driving a runaway trolley, you are watching it

as Peter Singer have persuasively argued, it’s hard to see why we should accept this.

from a bridge as it hurtles towards five helpless people.

Using a heavy weight is the only way to stop it and, as it happens, you are standing next to a large man whose bulk (unlike yours) is enough to achieve this diversion.

Should you push this man off the bridge, killing him, in order to save those five lives?

Great minds have been wrestling with similar complexities for millennia, perhaps most notably in the form of Thomas Aquinas’s doctrine of double effect.

Originally developed in the 13th century to examine the permissibility of self-defence, the doctrine argues that your intention when performing an act must be

A similar computer program to the one driving our first tram would have no problem resolving this.

Indeed, it would see no distinction between the cases. Where there are no alternatives, one life should be sacrificed to save five; two lives to save three; and so on. The fat man should always die – a

form of ethical reasoning called consequentialism, meaning conduct should be judged in terms of its consequences.

When presented with Thomson’s trolley problem, however, many people feel that it would be wrong to push the fat man to his death. Premeditated murder

is inherently wrong, they argue, no matter what its results – a form of ethical reasoning called deontology, meaning conduct should be judged by the nature of an action rather than by its consequences.

The friction between deontology and consequentialism is at the heart of every version of the trolley problem.

Yet perhaps the problem’s most unsettling implication is not the existence of this friction, but the fact that – depending on how the story is told – people tend to

hold wildly different opinions about what is right and wrong.

Pushing someone to their death with your bare hands is deeply problematic psychologically, even if you accept that it’s theoretically no better or worse than killing them from 10 miles away. Meanwhile, allowing someone at a distance – a starving child in another country for example – to die through one’s inaction seems barely to register a qualm. As philosophers such

taken into account when your actions have some good and some harmful consequences. So if you choose to divert a trolley in order to save five lives, your primary intention is the saving of life. Even if one death proves unavoidable as a secondary effect, your act falls into a different category from premeditated murder.

The doctrine of double effect captures an intuition that most people (and legal systems) share: plotting to kill

someone and then doing so is a greater wrong than accidentally killing them.

Yet an awkward question remains: how far can we trust human intuitions and intentions in the first place? As the writer David Edmonds explores in his excellent new book Would You Kill the Fat Man? (2013), a series of emerging disciplines have begun to stake their own claims around these themes. For the psychologist Joshua Greene, director of Harvard’s Moral Cognition Lab, the doctrine of double effect is not so much a fundamental insight as a rationalisation after the fact.

In his latest book Moral Tribes (2013), Greene acknowledges that almost everyone feels an instinctual sense of moral wrong about people using personal force to harm someone else. For him, this instinctual moral sense is important but far from perfect: a morsel of deep-rooted brain function that can hardly be expected to keep up with civilisational progress. It privileges the immediate over the distant, and actions over omissions; it cannot follow complex chains of cause and effect. It is, in other words, singularly unsuit-

able for judging human actions as amplified by the vast apparatus of global trade, politics, technology

If your v e hicle encounters a busload of schoolchildr e n skidding across th e road, do you want to liv e in a world where it automatically swerves, at a sp e ed you could never have managed, saving them but putting your life at risk?

Or would you pr e fer to live in a w orl d where it doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t swerve but keeps you saf e ?

and economic interconnection.

any driver be given the option of disabling this setting? And why stop there: in a world that we can

Here, Greene’s arguments converge with the ethics of automation. Human beings are like cameras, he suggests, in that they possess two moral modes: automatic and manual. Our emotions are ‘automatic processes… devices for achieving behavioural efficiency’, allowing us to respond appropriately to everyday encounters without having to think everything through from first principles. Our reasoning, meanwhile, is the equivalent of a ‘manual’ mode: ‘the ability to deliberately work through complex, novel problems’.

increasingly automate beyond our reaction times and instinctual reasoning, should we trust ourselves

It’s a dichotomy familiar from the work of behavioural economist Daniel Kahneman at Princeton.

Unlike Kahneman, however, Greene is an optimist when it comes to overcoming the biases evolution has baked into our brains. ‘With a little perspective,’ he argues, ‘we can use manual-mode thinking to reach agreements with our “heads” despite the irreconcilable differences in our “hearts”.’ Or, as the conclusion of Moral Tribes more bluntly puts it, we

must ‘question the laws written in our hearts and replace them with something better’.

This ‘something better’ looks more than a little like a self-driving car. At least, it looks like the substitution of a more efficient external piece of automation for our own circuitry. After all, if common-sense

morality is a marvellous but regrettably misfiring hunk of biological machinery, what greater opportunity could there be than to set some pristine new code in motion, unweighted by a bewildered brain? If you can quantify general happiness with a sufficiently pragmatic precision, Greene argues, you possess a calculus able to cut through biological baggage and tribal allegiances alike.

Automation, in this context, is a force pushing old principles towards breaking point. If I can build a car that will automatically avoid killing a bus full of children, albeit at great risk to its driver’s life, should

even to conduct an assessment in the first place?

Beyond the philosophical friction, this last question suggests another reason why many people find the trolley disturbing: because its consequentialist resolution presents not only the possibility that an ethically superior action might be calculable via algorithm (not in itself a controversial claim) but

also that the right algorithm can itself be an ethically superior entity to us.

For the moment, machines able to ‘think’ in anything approaching a human sense remain science-fiction.

How we should prepare for their potential emergence, however, is a deeply unsettling question – not least because intelligent machines seem considerably more achievable than any consensus around their programming or consequences.

Consider medical triage – a field in which automation and algorithms already play a considerable part.

Triage means taking decisions that balance risk and benefit amid a steady human trickle of accidents.

Given that time and resources are always limited, a patient on the cusp of death may take priority over one merely in agony. Similarly, if only two out of three dying patients can be dealt with instantly, those most likely to be saved by rapid intervention may be prioritised; while someone insisting that their religious beliefs mean their child’s life cannot be saved may be overruled.

On the battlefield, triage can mean leaving the wounded behind, if tending to them risks others’ lives. In public health, quarantine and contamination concerns can involve abandoning a few in order to protect the many. Such are the ancient dilemmas of collective existence – tasks that technology and scientific research have made many orders of

magnitude more efficient, effective and evidencebased.

What happens, though, when we are not simply programming ever-nimbler procedures into our tools, but instead using them to help determine the principles behind these decisions in the first place: the weighting of triage, the moment at which a chemical plant’s doors are automatically sealed in the event of crisis? At the other end of the scale, we might ask: should we seek to value all human lives equally, by outsourcing our incomes and efforts to the discipline of an AI’s equitable distribution? Taxation is a flawed solution to the problem; but, with determination and ingenuity, brilliant programs can surely do better. And if machines, under certain conditions, are better than us, then what right do we have to go on blundering our way through decisions likely only to end badly for the species?

You might hesitate over such speculations. Yet it’s difficult to know where extrapolation will end. We

will always need machines, after all, to protect us from other machines. At a certain point, only the intervention of one artificially intelligent drone might be sufficient to protect me from another. For the philosopher Nick Bostrom at Oxford, for example, what ought to exercise us is not an emotional attachment to the status quo, but rather the question of what it means to move successfully into an unprecedented frame of reference.

In their paper ‘The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence’ (2011), Bostrom and the AI theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky argued that increasingly complex

decision-making algorithms are both inevitable and desirable – so long as they remain transparent to inspection, predictable to those they govern, and robust against manipulation.

Where once the greater good was a phrase, it is now becoming a goal that we can set in motion independent of us.

If my self-driving car is prepared to sacrifice my life in order to save multiple others, this principle should be made clear in advance together with its exact parameters. Society can then debate these, set a seal of approval (or not) on the results, and commence the next phase of iteration. I might or might not agree, but I can’t say I wasn’t warned.

What about worst case scenarios? When it comes to automation and artificial intelligence, the accidents on our horizon might not be of the recoverable kind. Get it wrong, enshrine priorities inimical

to human flourishing in the first generation of truly intelligent machines, and there might be no people left to pick up the pieces.

Unlike us, machines do not have a ‘nature’ consistent across vast reaches of time. They are, at least to begin with, whatever we set in motion – with an inbuilt tendency towards the exponential. As Stuart Armstrong, who works with Nick Bostrom at the Future of Humanity Institute, has noted: if you build just one entirely functional automated car, you now have the template for 1 billion. Replace one human worker with a general-purpose artificial intelligence, and the total unemployment of the species is yours for the extrapolating. Design one entirely autonomous surveillance drone, and you have a plan for monitoring, in perpetuity, every man, woman and child alive.

Every single human life is an accident waiting to happen.

If you wait long enough, it always ends badly.

In a sense, it all comes down to efficiency – and how ready we are for any values to be relentlessly pursued on our behalf. Writing in Harper’s magazine last year, the essayist Thomas Frank considered the panorama of chain-food restaurants that skirts most US cities. Each outlet is a miracle of modular design, resolving the production and sale of food into an impeccably optimised operation.

Yet, Frank notes, the system’s success on its own terms comes at the expense of all those things left uncounted: the skills it isn’t worth teaching a worker to gain; the resources it isn’t cost-effective to protect: The modular construction, the application of assembly-line techniques to food service, the twin-basket fryers and bulk condiment dispensers, even the clever plastic lids on the coffee cups, with their fold-back sip tabs: these were all triumphs of human ingenuity. You had to admire them. And yet

As agency passes out of the hands of individual human beings, in the name of various efficiencies, the losses outside these boxes don’t simply evaporate into non-existence. If our destiny is a new kind of existential insulation – a world in which machine gatekeepers render certain harms impossible and certain goods automatic – this won’t be because we will have triumphed over history and time, but because we will have delegated engagement to something beyond ourselves.

Time is not, however, a problem we can solve, no matter how long we live. In Virilio’s terms, every

single human life is an accident waiting to happen.

After all, if common-sense morality is a marvellous but regrettably misfiring hunk of biological machinery, what greater opportunity could there be than to set some pristine new code in motion, unweighted by a bewildered brain?

that intense, concentrated efficiency also demanded a fantastic wastefulness elsewhere – of fuel, of air-conditioning, of land, of landfill. Inside the box was a

masterpiece of industrial engineering; outside the box were things and people that existed merely to be used up.

Society has been savouring the fruits of automation since well before the industrial revolution and, whether you’re a devout utilitarian or a sceptical deontologist, the gains in everything from leisure and wealth to productivity and health have been vast.

We are all statistical liabilities. If you wait

long enough, it always ends badly. And while

the aggregate happiness of the human race might be a supremely useful abstraction, even this eventually amounts to nothing more than insensate particles and energy. There is no cosmic set of scales on hand.

Where once the greater good was a phrase, it is now becoming a goal that we can set in motion independent of us. Yet there’s nothing transcendent about even our most brilliant tools. Ultimately, the measure of their success will be the same as it has always been: the strange accidents of a human life. •

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R A C T THA Y M D E R E D R U M !

D N BA S U H

Reared by Puppets (2014)

by Lizzie Wade Lizzie Wade is a science writer. She is the Latin America correspondent for Science, and her work has also appeared in Wired and Slate. She lives in Mexico City. http://aeon.co/magazine/nature-and-cosmos/condors-bred-in-captivity-need-our-

Technobiophilia (2013)

by Sue Thomas Sue Thomas is a writer and digital pioneer. Her latest book is Technobiophilia: Nature and Cyberspace (2013). http://aeon.co/magazine/nature-and-cosmos/can-we-get-all-the-nature-we-need-from-

Real Nature Isn’t Green (2006)

by Dr. Koert Van Mensvoort Dr. Koert van Mensvoort is an artist, philosopher and scientist best known for his work on the philosophical concept of Next Nature. http://www.nextnature.net/2006/11/real-nature-isnt-green/

Is Nothing (on the Surface of the Earth) Natural? (2005) Is Everything ‘Natural’? (2005)

by Ernest Partridge Dr. Ernest Partridge is a consultant, writer and lecturer in the field of Environmental Ethics and Moral Philosophy. He publishes the website, “The Online Gadfly”. http://gadfly.igc.org/ecology/concept.htm

The Machine Stops (1909)

by Edward Morgan Forster Edward Morgan Forster (1 January 1879 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 7 June 1970) was an English novelist, short story writer who is best know for his 1920 novel Howardsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s End. http://www.ele.uri.edu/faculty/vetter/Other-stuff/The-Machine-Stops.pdf

Automated Ethics (2014)

by Tom Chatfield Tom Chatfield is a writer and commentator on digital culture.

His latest book is called Netymology: from Apps to Zombies, a Linguistic Celebration of the Digital World. http://aeon.co/magazine/world-views/can-we-design-systems-to-automate-ethics/green/

Biophobia (2004)

by David W. Orr David W. Orr is the Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics and Senior Adviser to the President, Oberlin College.

He is a well known environmentalist and has written several books about environmental education and environmental design. http://faculty.fgcu.edu/dgreen/

The Trouble with Wilderness (1995)

by WIlliam Cronon A noted environmental historian,[2] Cronon is best known as the author of Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecolo gy of New England (1983). http://www.uvm.edu/rsenr/rm240/cronin.pdf

MANY THANKS TO THE CONTRIBUTERS, AEON.CO & THE BRITISH LIBRARY ARCHIVE

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