East of Eden

“Man is born free,” wrote Rousseau in 1762, “and everywhere he is in chains.” Today that sentiment seems dated if not altogether mistaken. Man lives within biologic, chemical, thermodynamic limits he can’t transgress. Still, he tries--and the effort lays waste to our planet, producing a rate of extinction not seen since the comet wiped out dinosaurs. Man is born enchained, and everywhere--obstinately, obtusely--insists that he is free.

The political idealization of Nature long predated Rousseau; as early as the third century BC, Theocritus warned that city life corrupts. The tradition came to North America with the colonists, for whom Nature was a blank slate awaiting their essays in social perfection. Clearly it undergirds American environmentalism, stretching from Muir’s celebration of “God’s wildness” to contemporary arguments about tree-spiking (a form of self-preservation: The human psyche requires the wild) and gene splicing (devil work). To the romantic, Nature is Eden, tonic, touchstone, unimpeachable ideal.

Yes, yes. But what, exactly, is it?

The short answer: what we make of it. In idea (very much) and in fact (within limits), Nature is humanly made. The morals we draw from it tend to be ones we project there in the first place, and no physical landscape inhabited by humans is ever purely other, not even New World wilderness. (The ecosystems of this continent were shaped by their human members--people Europeans shot and chased away. The land wasn’t so much virgin as recently widowed.)

And this makes for a problem. As sources of transcendent (or at least trans-historic) meaning go, Nature was pretty much all we had left. Commandments from on high? The Almighty speaks in a cacophony of voices, none of which a consistent golden-ruler can enforce on others as the One True Voice of God. Tradition? Old practices and values are often demonstrably wrong-headed, and picking just what we like undercuts their claim to moral authority, their semblance of impersonal necessity. “Industrial progress” still has fans, despite an easy association with fascism and a reliance, increasingly unrealistic, on perpetual economic growth. Postmodern identity politics? Its relativism encourages cynicism, hostility and sentimental attachment to self, giving it all the moral heft of bad TV.

“Natural” seemed our last best hope. Now that it too has become too fluid, what’s an ethicist in search of firmament to do?

Study history. When caught in flux, an overview of the flow can orient.

Which is to say, maybe Rousseau is no better an ecological totem-saint than Thomas Hobbes, his anti-romantic predecessor, who thought life in a state of Nature “nasty, brutish and short.” Hegel ought to be our man: he of the historical, dialectical vision, the time-unfolding truth. History, he said, will ground us--history, that contest ground of antagonistic complements that combine, Tao-like, to form a larger, emergently perceivable whole.

The three books considered here each aim to ground us by giving a thoughtful survey of Nature’s history. They stand in sequence: more to less popular, more to less polemical, more to less distant from sources.

At the popular end, Evan Eisenberg’s “The Ecology of Eden” is an ambitious, thickly braided narrative that makes the clearest bid to nudge the dialectic along. In the 1940s, Aldo Leopold exhorted us to reject a narrow species focus and “think like a mountain.” Fifty years later Eisenberg calls on us to think like a Mountain-and-Tower--his terms for the opposites, wilderness and city, whose interplay defines our experience. We turn to these extremes as cosmopoles, places where transcendent meaning emerges in mundane life. Some get Commandments from Mt. Sinai or the High Sierras; others build Babel Towers and cyclotrons to spy the face of God. The result is a familiar division, Nature Fetishism versus Nature Management. Eisenberg’s message, difficult for explorers at either pole to hear, is that humans live in between. In effect Eisenberg pans the camera a step further back than Leopold, showing us not just Nature whole but wholly within nature-and-culture, a system we need to see entire.

The best vantage is historical, and Eisenberg traces the story engagingly, energetically, with a remarkable breadth of learning and a metaphor-maker’s eye for provocative formal identity. To the pathogens that infect us, an unsewered city street functions just like the human bowel; to wild grass, the life of wheat will seem risk-free and boring, like farming to the hunter. By showing how our ideas of Nature are rooted in what we’ve done with and to it, Eisenberg bridges the two distinct subgenres of the field, the intellectual and the ecological. He begins with as good a 60-page account as you’re ever likely to find of the history of human calorie wrangling (starting with the mutual dependence of grass and man and finishing with our current role as necrophage), before picking apart ancient epics for what they reveal of our urge to manage and fetishize the wild. Dramatic incisive thesis needs adjusting to messy historical fact, but even so there emerges a clear relation of idea to geography, moral vision to food delivery system: Sheep herders worship on the Mountain, seed sowers atop the Tower.

This just might be the only book you’ll find whose argument covers the biochemistry of eukaryotic cells and the history of garden design, the tale of Gilgamesh and the laws of thermodynamics. Eisenberg excels at pithy exposition; he’s got great short accounts of the rise and spread of sprawl, the ecological history of the plague, the decline of mass transit, the history of the prairie as the seeds themselves might tell it. He realizes the power of the well-wrought image and, a stand-up poet doing rapid-fire shtick, he’s got a million of ‘em. (Sometimes he doesn’t scruple to keep his metaphors unmixed.)

All that verbal energy serves a vision of substance and genuine insight. Given his exuberant metaphors, it’s no surprise that his remedy rests on a trope: “Earth Jazz,” the complex give-and-take that culture must learn to perform with Nature. Each species “improvises, following certain rules but obeying no predetermined destiny. Each responds to the riffing, comping, noodling and vamping of those around it. . . . Withal, a certain unity emerges that no one has willed.” You want soothing, predictable symphony? Stand among the Managers. You want the human tune to be one among millions in Nature’s harmony? Over there, with the Fetishers. Neither really works; the world needs what wildness gives, and we couldn’t possibly script it down to the last hemidemisemiquaver. And like it or not, the Earth band’s got a leader, a species that, metaphorically in the course of millenniums, stood up, tapped the music stand, got everybody else hushed. Abdication now would only bring confusion. (Besides, Eisenberg suggests, the sublime harmony of all voices would be boring New Age Muzak: spacey, mindless, all tonic and no discord.)

Eisenberg offers examples, ideas, efforts and programs to which his metaphor can apply. Good thing: Without them Earth Jazz is vague, it being hard to deduce concrete policy from literary trope. Unless, that is, the trope is ancient, deadened into truth; then the derivation will seem automatic. Controlling metaphors account for habitual mental cast, and Eisenberg’s metaphor casts us in the right direction.

“The Ecology of Eden” begins with grass. Peter Coates, in “Nature,” begins with definition: What is this main character whose life story we would understand? A shape-changer, really; Nature has dozens of forms and faces, presenting a confusion of narrative threads. Coates untangles them well. If Eisenberg worked a narrative delta, the broad fertile outwash plain where general readers thrive, Coates moves upstream, to the scholarly tumult of the gorges, where a hanging mist frustrates the casual reconnoiter. Centered in intellectual history but looking out on ecological history, “Nature” is written for college students and for boomer grads who wish the subject had been taught back when they were at school.

Though it’s an emergent field, the intellectual history of Nature already has some standard devices. Assigning blame, for instance; various authors have fingered Genesis, Plato, science, patriarchy, men, male sky gods, Descartes, hunting, agriculture, Bacon, Columbus, chemistry, steam, oil, et cetera, for our environmental woes. History of Nature is shadowed by a para-history of diagnostic squabble. Coates takes due note of it, apportioning merit and demerit by turns; here’s an excessively romantic interpretation of St. Francis, there a reductive fixation on the plow. The tour is remarkably circumspect. No axes are ground, at least not obviously. We come to understand the strengths and limits of Earth First!ers and deep ecologists, social ecologists and eco-feminists in terms they might find sympathetic, or at least accurate and fair.

Sometimes we’re not sure what Coates thinks; often judgments are ventriloquized through others. Thus he doesn’t say right out that postmodernism is hostile to environmental concern but says others condemn it for “demoting the natural world . . . into something of merely cultural and linguistic construction and significance.” Apparently mindful of these poseurs who deny Nature’s very is-ness, at book’s end Coates confesses to a “hopelessly 18th century and ‘certaintist’ ” conception of Nature. But unlike Bishop George Berkeley, who straightforwardly kicked a stone to refute similar all-is-mind idealists, Coates sounds apologetic. I wish he hadn’t felt the need.

Now and then Coates does take off the jacket of impartiality. Bill McKibben, for one, is criticized for his overly “punctilious” lament (“The End of Nature”) that kids in an ecologically repaired world won’t swim in natural streams. Coates is British, and his Old World confidence that culture and Nature have always been co-adapters is usefully outside the American tradition of nature fetishism. But in the next paragraph it’s hard to figure what he makes of Donna Haraway, author of “A Cyborg Manifesto,” a kind of po-mo anti-McKibben who revels in culture’s swallowing of Nature. Like the gender benders whose antic assaults on “masculine” and “feminine” proceed from the faith that they’re only social constructs, Haraway throws away quite a lot of baby with bath water that might prove needed after all. Circumspect, Coates allows only that views such as hers aren’t popular.

At 1,224 pages, “Encompassing Nature,” edited by Robert M. Torrance, threatens a kind of literalness of its title. It’s a world (not just Western) anthology; alphabetically it runs from Addison and Aelian to Yosa Buson and Zen poets, covering Gilgamesh and Montaigne, Chinese poets and Pawnee origin myths and hundreds of other selections in between. Strike human intellectual history on its nature-culture cleavage, and this is what you get, a comprehensive catalog of facets, shown here to good advantage by Torrance’s astute introductions. It makes a whole nearly too large to grasp, except the way less encyclopedic literature grasps at Nature itself--impressionistically, synecdochically. Check the index: four column inches of seven-point type under the heading “Birds,” ending with the useful advice to “see also Blackbird; Chicken; Cock; Crane; Crow; Cuckoo; Dove; Duck,” et cetera. All three Boazes--Franz, George, Marie--appear a full nine column inches above Tycho Brahe. Buddha and Buddhism shoulder in between “Buffalo, American” and “Bucolic poetry.”

However you grapple at it, you’ve got to admire the reach of a “sourcebook” on “Nature and Culture From Ancient Times to the Modern World” in which Plato doesn’t appear until Page 350.

Definitive, canonical, “Encompassing Nature” will serve as a pedagogue’s reference pony, an undergraduate’s seminar compendium, the general reader’s delightful browse. Indeed, it’s so encyclopedic that it’s hard to imagine a complete read-through without the colloquy and compulsion you’d get with a classroom tour. Nonstudents may find its campaign to original sources imposing, its cataracts too steep and slippery to scale alone. More’s the pity; here are materials to make everyman his own historian, every historian an explorer extraordinaire.

From springs to delta, to know the flow entire: That’s historical wisdom, an unnatural, consummately cultural product. It’s what each of these histories offers in its distinctive way. And if (Hegel again) the truth we resist the longest inverts a truth we hold too dear, then maybe Muir’s noble dictum--”In God’s wildness lies the hope of the world”--is ready for revision now that it’s a calendar cliche. In historical understanding lies the hope of the planet. Less catchy, but it tells us why these books are crucial. Failure to study the history of Nature won’t condemn us to repeat it. We should be so lucky; we won’t get the chance.