It seems unnecessary to state that other animals alter their environments. The project of life is to change its surroundings, however drastically, to achieve homeostasis (Dr. Trachtenberg cited beavers as an example of radical ecosystem engineering). If you don’t subscribe to the distinction between beaver dams and say, the construction of the American interstates being the beaver’s position in “nature,” then often the difference is said to lie in scale. Undoubtedly, if human activity could be understood as simple niche construction, than it is an extreme and pervasive sort. Balée’s work, and the research program of historical ecology, proves that the scale is such that there is no “nature” unaltered by humanity.
“In more recent times, a number of scholars have argued that agricultural impacts dating from the Holocene have essentially transformed the world so much that hardly any part of it is pristine… humans created the landscapes typically referred to as examples of Holocene environment.” (Balée 2006)
This could give empirical fuel to the view that human modification of the environment has ceased to be natural in its pure ubiquity, but this is flawed. The Great Oxygenation Event of 2.4 billion years ago is seen as “the most significant climate event in Earth’s history” (Zurich 2013). The GOE was the introduction of free oxygen into earth’s atmosphere for the first time, triggering the extinction of nearly all the world’s anaerobic organisms and the Huronian glaciation (ibid). It was also caused by the evolution and workings of cynobacteria. A form of life as natural and unassuming as Cynobacteria interrupted the atmospheric system to an extent that the surface and functioning of the earth was altered permanently.
Balée’s work on Amazonian dark earth and geoglyphs debunks the notion of a pristine nature, or the separation of landscape from man, but I think there’s an even more important false conception that it critiques. The notion of a singular nature, an idea that is greater than the life or geology that constitute it, a place in which organisms and earth systems work in harmony, is simply ahistoric. This is where the GOE comes in. Life has interrupted itself before. The working of one organism has caused mass extinction before, has “ruined” pre-existing earth systems before, and these actions shaped the nature we live within. There is no ideal or pristine earth that exists outside the actions of its individual components, but a dynamic ball of rock whose inhabitants did, and will continue, to define.
Balée, William. “The Research Program of Historical Ecology.” Annual Review of Anthropology 35 (2006): 75-98.
Trachtenberg, Zev. “Ethics of the Anthropocene.” The University of Oklahoma. 25 March 2014.
University of Zurich. “Great Oxidation Event: More oxygen through multicellularity.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 17 January 2013. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/01/130117084856.htm>.
Environmental Ethics in the Anthropocene 