I think your culture/nature distinction is useful, Neocon. I would go further, and point out that culture is often directly, consciously, opposed to nature. You hinted at that yourself, in your original post:
Human history is a record of the changes wrought upon the Earth by those determined to tame and shape it.
The only example you gave of the "taming and shaping" was a very benign one: namely, a garden.
But man's desire to be the Boss of Nature can lead, at times, to sheer dementia. A discussion I just read (and cited in a post to nihil) of a huge river-reversal irrigation project the Chinese are undertaking put me in mind of another grandiose project, this one Soviet, which fortunately, was ultimately thwarted. This was called "the project of the century": and involved reversing the course of all the Siberian rivers. They flow in an unusual direction -- north; the idea was to make them all flow south, so that their water could be used to irrigate Central Asia.
Central Asia needed the water because previous badly-thought through and inefficiently run irrigation projects had ruined much of the land, without being able to supply the amount of water needed to grow cotton, which is what Moscow wanted Central Asia to grow. The mighty Amu-Darya and Syr-Darya rivers had shrunk to muddy trickles; and the inland sea they fed, the Aral Sea, had dried up almost completely. When I once drove up to see what was left of it, I was struck by what looked like snow on the fields all around, even though it was early summer. Well, it wasn't snow. It was salt. The native flora and fauna had all died off, and the people were dying off too (average life expectancy falling to 45).
So what better way to fill up the Aral Sea and to irrigate the rest of Central Asia's salinated fields than to divert the Siberian Rivers, which would have supplied the region with about 40 cubic kilometers of water a year. Of course, it would have been a huge blow to the fragile Siberian ecosystem; and metereologists abroad warned that it would have a major effect on world weather. But Central Asian leaders (some of whom are still in power, like Uzbekistan's Karimov) lobbied hard for this project, and it was given final approval in the early '80's. The whole scheme now seems so preposterous that it now seems amazing that anyone should ever have considered it.
But a noisy and persistent group of Russian intellectuals, mostly writers, were able to raise enough of a ruckus, thanks to the new policy of "glasnost," to get the Gorbachev regime to cancel the project. Fortunately for them --and fortunately for the rest of us, too, no doubt.
This is by no means the only example of its kind, although it may well be the worst. And the tendency of human beings to go overboard in their attempts to "master nature" would suggest to me that the "obsession" with environmental impact you speak of may often be not an obsession at all, but concern born out of experience and good common sense.
Joan |
