The Once and Future World: Nature As it Was, As it Is, As it Could Be
September 24, 2013
J. B. MacKinnon on human efforts to engineer nature, and whether we can restore what we’ve lost
By Sharon J. Riley
“Picture the first place you thought of as nature,” begins Canadian writer J. B. MacKinnon in his latest book, The Once and Future World (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). “It is an illusion that has in many ways created our world.” MacKinnon, the coauthor of Plenty, the book that introduced the world to the 100-Mile Diet, reminds us that the planet used to be home to nearly unfathomable diversity and abundance. Invoking the days when the Serengeti was densely forested, bison herds roamed California, and beavers grew to the size of small bears, he notes the trend in conservation circles toward “re-wilding” certain species and asks what we think we’re restoring wilderness to, why we’re doing so, and whether we can succeed. Ultimately, he argues that although humans have been responsible for great degradation of the natural world, it is still possible to enter an “age of restoration” — we have not yet passed a point of no return. “Nature may not be what it was, no, but it isn’t simply gone,” he writes. “It’s waiting.” I asked MacKinnon six questions about the world, the world that once was, and the world that we’re heading toward.
1. You write that we now live in a ten-percent world — one that has lost the vast abundance of its great species — and use the term “change blindness” to explain the phenomenon by which we fail to appreciate what that world once looked like. As you explain, we seem incapable of remembering the natural bounty that used to exist. How can we restore our ecosystems if we don’t remember their potential?
It isn’t that we’re not capable of remembering nature as it was, so much as it takes a conscious effort to do so. In the book, I write about a whale that swam into the heart of urban Vancouver — if it were Manhattan, we’d be talking about a whale spouting and flashing its flukes offshore of the East Village. Vancouverites saw it as a once-in-a-lifetime experience, because hardly anyone was aware that whales lived in the area by the hundreds until they were hunted out a century ago. History, as the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur puts it, is “too much memory here, too little memory there.”
The natural world has had far too little memory, and that has had serious consequences. If you know that whales belong to Vancouver’s past, then it becomes possible to imagine their presence in the future. If you aren’t aware of that history, then the absence of whales will seem perfectly normal — natural, in fact.
in full: http://harpers.org/blog/2013/09/the-once-and-future-world/