Natural Nature

“I used to eat a lot of natural foods until I learned that most people die of natural causes.

—?Author Unknown

Why are we so fixated on preserving nature and eating natural food? As someone who loves to hike in wild places, but loves Impossible burgers, I have recently begun to think more seriously about these two questions. In particular, why is anything we touch considered to be inferior?

In an interesting book called “Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature,” William Cronon makes a number of observations about what we think of as “nature.” To start, “we have been manipulating ecosystems for as long as we have records of their passage” and thus, … “ ‘nature’ is not nearly so natural as it seems. Instead, it is a profoundly human construction…tangled with our own values and assumptions.” That is, we create the idea of nature as something distinct from human engagement, but this is really an artificial construction.

It’s not just unspoiled nature that appears to be superior, we think the same with food. According to Food Insight, one out of three of us choose foods because they are advertised as “natural.” Numerous food writers maintain that natural food is healthier, even healthy by definition, but they do so without much in the way of proof. But let’s start with untouched nature, otherwise known as “wilderness.”

Prior to the 19th century, wilderness wasn’t revered the way it is today but was often described as “desolate,” “barren,” or “a waste.” It was where Christ struggled with the Devil and endured his temptations. By the 20th century, wilderness had gone from being the earthly home of Satan to “God’s own temple.” For some environmentalists, to protect wilderness today is to protect the nation’s most sacred myth of origin – the frontier. We even removed the original Americans, Indians, so that we could “protect” the wilderness from human habitation.?

Since 1872 when President Grant designated Yellowstone as a national park, we have added over 400 of them and they are wonderful places to visit. But this doesn’t necessarily make them more desirable than our own contributions changing wilderness to something both beautiful and useful. While some would disagree, although visiting national parks offers a wonderful way of finding peace and tranquility, so does visiting some of the world’s most beautiful golf courses, a combination of nature and man at their best. There are also magnificent man-made parks.?

One of my favorite examples of the latter is Butchart Gardens in Brentwood Bay, British Columbia. It is a 119-year-old privately owned and operated 55-acre garden designated a National Historic Site of Canada. Visitors come to appreciate Jennie Butcharts’ vision of transforming untouched land into a garden haven with 900 different plant and flower varieties.?

Some environmentalists even look at farming as despoiling wilderness. Cronon argues that those who place a high fantasy value of natural landscape over farms are people “who have never had to work the land to make a living.” What’s more, man’s technological ingenuity has produced “precision farming,” which produces higher yields per acre and has recently freed up 2 million acres of cropland to return to the wild (or whatever). So farming, while still “profoundly unnatural… as all domesticated plants and animals are man-made technologies,” is not despoiling wilderness but constantly improving it. In fact, France protects farms to guarantee “the scenic beauty of the countryside.”?

The idea of improving land is, of course, completely in opposition to those who believe we are destroying nature that must be shielded from where we work, live or play. As Richard White puts it, some believe it is “a place where leisured humans come only to visit.”

As for food, while FDA and USDA struggle to figure out what is natural and what is artificial, we know that all foods are artificial and without modern technology, we would be starving. To help those who still believe in natural foods, FDA has proposed that “natural” means that “nothing artificial or synthetic” has been put in a food if it wasn’t expected to be there. Although FDA has been trying to come up with a better definition for the last eight years – nothing has inspired them yet. USDA regulations currently say that natural meat and poultry should contain “no artificial ingredient or added color and is only minimally processed.”?

As civilization progresses, we will continue to both feed both a growing world population and make food healthier. We will also continue to wrestle with the best uses for land. But we shouldn’t insist that anything we touch somehow is inferior to the raw wilderness we inherited.

---

To learn more, go to?richardawilliams.com?and?sign up?for weekly posts.