Are humans part of ecosystems?

• Author: Houck, Oliver A.

It is an honor for me to be here at Northwestern School of Law of Lewis & Clark College, at an institution and in a region responsible for so much progress in environmental law. I knew that I was in a different environment this morning when my radio alarm went off with announcements of upcoming community meetings. The first meeting announced was that of the Progressive Singles of Portland, who would be having a vegetarian potluck next Tuesday. That is not the sort of announcement one would hear in Louisiana. If we were to have such a meeting in the Deep South--and I am not admitting that we do--we would never let anyone know ahead of time.

I have been here once before, in 1959. I was hitchhiking up the Pacific Coast, looking at signs at the side of the road that read "Fire Danger" when a forest service ranger stopped the car and I was volunteered for a brush fire on Miller Creek. When that was over I went on to other fires, and I soon learned that forest fire management involves a great deal of standing around and waiting for nature to take its course. When the rains finally came, we were put on campground management, which involved cleaning the ladies' and men's restrooms. What was written on the inside of the walls of the ladies' rooms was another learning experience for a young boy from the East. These basic lessons in natural resources management under my belt, my life then went off in other directions--but a third lesson from Oregon became indelible over time. We were out on trail maintenance. It was noon and haft dark in the woods, and the sunlight came down in shafts from the tops of the trees, turning green by the time it hit the ground. The ground was soft, with a murmur of water. The moss covered the logs so thickly that we could lie down on them and go to sleep which, being a forest service crew, we tended to do. But I was aware, before I dozed off, that I was close to the heartbeat of life and that it was good. What I did not know at the time is that I was also in the middle of--and this is the operative word--an ecosystem.

So it is no surprise to me that, almost forty years later, out of this same environment, out of these same wet, dark, and illuminated woods, a whole new species of thought--half science, haft religion--has arisen in research, articles, books, management plans, and litigation, a new field of conservation biology spilling out of the Pacific Northwest like El Nino and changing the language of the game. Driven largely by the Pacific Northwest, America is now rushing toward something called ecosystem management, at the bottom of which is an enigma. Each of the books (nearly every book), the plans (nearly every plan), and the lawsuits (nearly every case) trips over a fundamental question that none can answer. If humans are going to manage ecosystems, then what is the assumption about human beings in these ecosystems? Is what humans have done and are doing to ecosystems included in the baseline? Are we in or are we out?

At first blush, the question seems ridiculous. My son might reply, "like, we don't exist?" Like, Kansas is not wall-to-wall wheat? The proposition is a little silly. As this Author has recently read, "[W]e are animals. Very precocious to be sure, but just big monkeys nevertheless. We are therefore part of nature, not apart from it. Chicago is no less a phenomenon of nature than is the Great Barrier Reef."(1) From this point of view it is only a small step, indeed an inexorable step, to this conclusion of the American Conservation Ethic Project: "A policy cannot be good for the environment if it is bad for people."(2) On the other hand, however, if Chicago is an ecosystem, then where does the concept stop? At the L.A. freeway? Hiroshima, circa 1946? What I suggest is that once humans and their impacts are put into the definition of an ecosystem, the term loses all objective meaning. We simply mintage for whatever we want. So what is new?

This is the question and the paradox that I want to explore. Neither answer, people-are-in ecosystems or people-are-out, seems to work Taking the question as a little more legitimate than it first appears, then, let me surface three points of view on the human role in the environment that probably everyone at some point has embraced or embraces to some degree. Their history parallels the conservation history of the country at large.

The first point of view you could call "humans as God's engineers." People are not only parts of ecosystems; we improve them daily. From the time we were kicked out of the Garden of Eden, the Earth has been a pretty terrible place, full of plagues, fires, and floods--until we began to set things right. When I would go to the auditorium in grade school we would see films with titles like "Nature on the Rampage" about the Mississippi River or the Wild Colorado. To the rescue came the Army Corps of Engineers. On other days, to the rescue would come the Standard Oil Company or the Federal Highway Program. If I had grown up in Arizona, I might have been rescued by cattlemen or the Bureau of Reclamation. It was a mindset with its own delusions such as "raindrops follow the plow"--a reassurance that ushered in the dust bowl. It was supported by Social Darwinism, a theory that justified our displacement of life-forms-in-the-way-of-progress because we humans were, after all, part of evolution so whatever we did to the Earth was natural; we were just helping nature along.(3) It even carried its own theology which is summarized in the teachings of the Four Great Johns:(4) 1) John Locke, to whom altering the Earth conveyed the legal right to own it, 2) John Wesley, for whom these improvements gave us a claim to the Kingdom of God as well, 3) John Winthrop, for whom these improvements justified taking real estate from the Native Americans, who, after all, did not even bother to fence it in, and, lastly, 4) our own John Wayne, who showed us, over and over again, that it was not only right to take their lands, you could kill `em too.

Only recently, the excesses of the God's engineers point of view have sent us in search of others. At the opposite pole is a different view of people and nature. Always latent in the background of America, as early as the writings of Emerson and Thoreau, it has emerged in recent decades as a second major point of view: humans in the environment are, basically, Earth's virus.(5) This point of view features the sprawl of shopping malls, cul-de-sacs, and crumbling cities from Maine to Florida, California so done in by humans it is spinning them back out to Oregon and Montana,(6) and the Colorado front range now building at a rate of ten acres per hour.(7) It takes to heart a recent Canadian study concluding that, over the next fifty years, it will take four Earths and ten Earth atmospheres to perpetuate the American way of life,(8) and this was before the latest sales figures on Chevrolet Suburbans and the enlarged Ford Explorer. This is Bill McKibben's view in his recent classic, The End of Nature.(9) It is the only dark moment in Dr. Seuss, whose optimism and whimsy comforted us throughout childhood until we confronted our other selves, like some death-bed confession, in The Lorax.(10) It is the message of Robert Preston's chilling The Hot Zone, describing an outbreak of the Ebola virus. Preston writes:

In a sense, the Earth is mounting an immune response against the human

species. It is beginning to react to the human parasite, the flooding

infection of people, the death spots of concrete all over the planet, the

cancerous rot-outs in Europe, Japan, and the United States thick with

replicating primates, the colonies enlarging and spreading and threatening

to shock the biosphere with mass extinctions .... The Earth's immune

system, so to speak, has recognized the presence of the human species and

is starting to kick in. The Earth is attempting to rid itself of an

infection of the human parasite. Perhaps AIDS is the first step in a

natural process of clearance.(11)

It is the very darkness of this second point of view that triggers its demise. It is simply a dead end. You cannot hold on to it, personally or professionally, and function. You cannot apply it to basic transactions in your life. This realization came to me some years ago when I was moving south to New Orleans. My wife and I had two small boys in the car and were towing a U-Haul. We could make forty miles-per-hour, tops. We had been driving all day and by nightfall we arrived, exhausted, in Knoxville, Tennessee. We found a cluster of motels and happened to choose the tallest building, a Howard Johnson. We went up the elevators and into our room. The boys were very excited that they were going to stay in a motel for the night. They pulled on the curtain and it parted to reveal the full wall window and the landscape beyond. What was out there was shockingly, stupidly, and stupendously ugly--probably five square miles of pavement. There was not a tree. There was not a blade of grass. There was not even dirt. Only parking lanes, car lanes, and fast-food establishments to the horizon. A large neon horse revolved in the air. Neon arrows pointed here and...