In this episode of Discern Earth, I speak with my good friend and philosopher Bryan Kam about what nature is. We discuss the etymology of nature and related terms, whether there is a hard distinction between man and nature, hypostatization and reification, the Christian roots of theories about the inherent value of nature, and the role of embodied experience in facilitating ecological regeneration. The below transcript has been lightly edited for readability.
Transcript
David Valerio: Hey, Bryan.
Bryan Kam: Hey, David.
David Valerio: Great to hear from you. This is Discern Earth, basically a podcast where I ask people about why they care about nature and how it influences their work. And today we're going to be talking about an even higher level question than “why do you care about nature,” just what the hell is nature? I'm really excited about this. Maybe first you could just talk about your own work with Neither/Nor and how this concept of nature plays or does not play a role in your work and then we can sort of just dig into it. How does that sound?
Bryan Kam: Yeah. Sounds great. So my name is Bryan Kam. I am based in London. I know David, I met you about four years ago through the Interintellect and we got to know each other first online and then a few times in person, which has been awesome. And I'm working on a book called Neither/Nor, which is a practical philosophy book that covers a lot of ground. And one of the, I would say principles in it, is that it takes a kind of historical approach to things. Like it assumes that all of the things that we as humans care about have some kind of history within human thought. And so even things that we think are just part of the natural world or part of the cosmos or things like that. And maybe we can talk about some of those terms, even the idea of nature or the idea of the cosmos itself has a history. So that's one of the, kind of, principles of Neither/Nor. And so that's one reason I'm really excited to talk to you about this particular one.
David Valerio: Yeah, no, I mean, I think nature, like you said, it's a concept that has a tremendous history and there are like various different synonyms for it—like essence, being, substance—all of which are trying to capture and discretize this very nebulous, this thing at the heart of whatever we think of as the perceivable universe or even imperceivable universe. And I'm coming at it from a Catholic perspective, and we use these terms a lot in trying to describe the mystery of the Trinity. So there's just a whole, whole mess of stuff here to dig into. But let's just start with nature. And I guess, I'm just going to ask you a question, and you better give me the right answer. What is nature, Bryan? Please.
Bryan Kam: Well, already there's a really interesting tension, right? Because when you said nature at the start of the episode, I was thinking of what we typically think of as like the natural world, like the world out there, the trees, the parts that are ideally untouched by man or something like that, which is a vanishingly small amount of the actual world now but you went to sort of essence, which is like the nature of a thing. And I'm very clear, very curious about the two meanings there. I will just say like a little brief overview of what little I know about this, the history of this term. So, the term natura is Latin. There's another term called physis or phusis, I think you say in Greek, and that's the earlier term, which gets associated with physics. So, the word physics has an etymological root, which is phusis, and phusis is the word that later gets translated into Latin as nature. And from what I know of the early use of this phusis term, there is a kind of contrast between phusis and nomos. And so in ancient Greece, this is like before Plato or any of those guys, the kind of pre- Socratics, the main thing was that phusis is like what's unfolding or arising outside of human control. Whereas nomos is like the man made stuff. And I think nomos gets increasingly associated with laws. And I think you might know a little bit more than I do about that. But the contrast is usually between, okay, is this phusis or is this nomos? And the question is one that we ask all the time today still which is, basically, is this nature or is this nurture, right? It's kind of the same question, even though I think their understanding of what belongs with phusis and what belongs with nomos is very different from ours, the question to me feels related, like what is natural? What is not natural? And we can talk maybe a little bit about what natural means as well.
David Valerio: Yeah, you're right, and this is what's so interesting about this kind of concept. And there are other words like this, where you're still dealing with the same questions in perpetuity, essentially, and there's not really an answer to it. I was looking into sort of the distinction between nature and essence, overlapping but distinct, and I brought up there's like the natural world, which is typically what we're thinking about now. Which is like the environment, trees, birds, bugs, plants, mountains, oceans—things that are not human. And this is where that physis, or however you pronounce it, nomos distinction is like physis is that kind of nature that we're talking about versus nomos being how we are interacting with nature and shaping it and changing it. But there's also like a dynamic versus a static tension between some of these different words. Like substance and the Greek hypostasis. So substance comes from the Latin substantia, which means literally like that which supports, like it's beneath something, the thing underneath the thing, right? Turtles all the way down or something. That's a static thing. That's like a thing, right? Like, what is the thing that is beneath the thing? What is the truth beneath all of these things that we perceive? Same thing for the Greek hypostasis—beneath the thing. But then nature is dynamic. It's the unfolding, as you mentioned—nature and physis, natura and physis, are the unfolding, the process by which things come into being. And to what extent are those things shaped or not shaped by humanity? That's where like that sort of distinction between human and nature comes in. There's like a static conception of these words that are adjacent to nature and that are often used in over overlapping ways with them, but then also nature as unfolding growth. I found that to be a very interesting thing as I was sort of preparing for this episode to think about that, these are two things that are at the heart of what we see in the world, right? We see a tree and think, oh yeah, that's a tree. But then the tree itself was at once a seed, right? And the seed grew and grew and grew and grew and now there's a tree here that's not a seed. I don't know. It's very interesting. Both, like, there's the human-nature distinction. But then there's also the thing-process distinction that are both involved in this discussion.
Bryan Kam: So would you say essence is the kind of more static one and nature is the dynamic one?
David Valerio: Yeah, that's how I think about it. Essence, from what I understand, comes from the Latin esse which means to be born. And then natura, I believe, is more like the verb version of to be. Like you're becoming, or something like this.
Bryan Kam: Yeah, this being and becoming is also very important from the beginning of Greek philosophy. So, it's usually associated with the divide between Parmenides and Heraclitus, and Parmenides becomes associated with being. He's really obsessed with being. Everything has to be either being or not being and it's all this categorical kind of stuff and essences whereas Heraclitus, you know, kind of famous for this you never step into the same river twice kind of idea of flux. There's this idea that Plato began as a Heraclitian and so he had this view of things constantly shifting and changing. And so that being-becoming divide is one that was often made a lot of in the pre-Socratic phase.
David Valerio: Yeah, and I wonder if this can map onto the human-environment distinction as well in that environment are the things that are not human controlled in nature. One way that we define nature is that it's not in human control, and that we're not turning it into static objects, if you will. It's unfolding in its own manner according to its own desire, right? And so it's like a continuous thing that we're not turning into stone, if you will, whereas the human controlled part of the universe are things that we're making like buildings. So we're taking things that are natural objects and turning them into something and trying to keep them in in stasis. When I think about that same distinction in terms of being and becoming, where it's like, you know, is the natural world, the becoming part of it, where it's like this is going on absent human assigning categories to it, right? And then the being part is like humans we're observing this process, this flow, this beautiful complex process that's going on. And we turn those becomings into beings. I don't know. That's something that I think about. It seems like it's pretty related to your project with Neither/Nor as well.
Bryan Kam: Yeah, absolutely. So one thing this makes me think about is the question of what is objective. Because we also think about things independent of human minds as being out there in the world, and we go from this idea that what's true is what's reliable. Etymologically true relates to tree and it's like something stable. Ideas of like facts come from some kind of consensus, it's usually like about a fact is a sort of idea that comes out of like multiple people witnessing something in legal terms in like the 16th century or something. So there's this idea that there's like a human consensus about a thing and then we try to kind of get rid of human consensus and say, well, what is there out there that is like not subject to human minds, and we then try to say, well, that's the objective thing and then we start to try and start our investigation from, let's say, the objective or materialist standpoint. But this is kind of a weird way of going about things because it hides the fact that those things arose in relation to what humans care about. And so then it's like all these things that we care about and that we have a consensus about, and that we arrange our world around, and then we say, okay, now all these things that we care about—these specific things that we care about—we're going to cut them off and say, well, some of them are not subject to human minds. Or we're certain enough of them that they seem independent of minds and then we're going to say that that's the stuff that really matters. But it kind of hides the whole provenance of where consensus came about in the first place? Do you know what I mean?
David Valerio: Yeah, no, I mean, this is something I encounter directly. This is part of the reason why I started this podcast. Its that there's this idea of nature, like there is inherent value in the natural world, right? Like it's beautiful, it's good. We love trees. We love birds. We love bugs. There must be some inherent value there. And people try to assign that to it in its essence or by its nature, whatever term you use, like this is good. And so we need to protect it, whether or not humans agree or disagree with it. So it's exactly the same process you were talking about, where it's like in reaction to disagreements among humans about the value of these things that are nominally outside of human control you define what is outside of human control as either like good or bad, and then there's no argument to be had because, by definition, you've turned this thing that, that you think should be wholly one, I don't even know what the term, like you're just trying to take it out of the realm of human control. But the very fact of putting it out of human control is an act of human of humans, right?
Bryan Kam: Human decisions, right, yeah exactly, its like this question of okay, we're gonna do a deductive process, but you still have to decide the terms that you're going to use for that deductive process and almost by definition that can't be decided within the deductive process, right? So there's always this element of subjectivity and induction, you might say, or abduction or whatever. The other thing I wanted to come back to was this hypostatization. So I think you said hypostasis is like underlying the thing. Is that right?
David Valerio: It's analogous to substance and so hypostasis is the Greek term for substantia, or Greek analogue to substantia, in Latin. And, yeah, it's the thing beneath the thing that's holding things in being, if you will, like somewhat like metaphysics, the thing behind the thing.
Bryan Kam: Although there's a debate with metaphysics about what exactly that means.
David Valerio: Yeah, what does that mean?
Bryan Kam: Yeah, exactly. Hypostatization, have you come across that word? Because that word means something like reification. I've come across it in Buddhist literature where they talk about hypostatization and it means to make something into a thing like reification does. There's this idea that reification or hypostatization, which sound like insanely obscure terms, but for me they're really important because like I'm really interested in what is a thing or like when we treat something as a thing, what's happening? That's in Neither/Nor because a lot of times when we're doing conceptual reasoning, then we really readily produce categories and the category. But once we've adopted a category, then we start seeing things in terms of those categories. So if I say “oh yeah, well, there's two types of people” or something like that, and then you accept this claim, then you start perceiving that there are two types of people, and what I'm saying is that we're very good at like applying categories and choosing which things fall under which categories, but it's very hard to perceive the way your perception changes in the presence of categories. So I'm trying to think of like a more vivid example. Like maybe you never paid attention to two different types of trees outside of your window or whatever. And then I'm like, “oh, one of them has this shaped leaf that has three points” or something, “and the other one has five.” And now you've got this new category that you didn't have previously. That's the kind of thing that I'm interested in. I would call it reification or hypostatization which is now when you see that tree, you're like, oh, this is one of those things. Like you place it under a class. Does that make sense?
David Valerio: Yeah, no, that makes a ton of sense. And when you talk about hypostatization, I was actually thinking of deification. Which is funny when you say reification, because in early Christianity, we had this profound mystery of, you know, Jesus Christ, God the Father, the Holy Spirit. They're all supposed to be one God, the same God. But they have different expressions? Like are they just different expressions of this one nature? It's a great mystery. Jesus Christ, a man, but also God. Anyways, there is this process of turning the Greek word hypostasis that I mentioned earlier—the thing beneath the thing—to mean the Latin persona or person. So like it's taking this term for essence and making it reflect a person, the subject of a particular essence or nature. Like you would be a subject of human nature broadly. Bryan Kam is a subject of human nature broadly. And in the Christian context, hypostatization was turning this Greek term into meaning: God, the Father, Jesus, the Son, and then the Holy Spirit are each subjects of the same divine nature, but they're individual persons. In that case it's kind of analogous to what you were laying out in terms of defining categories, right? Like we have this transcendent mystery that is really hard to describe and that we had to figure out how to shape human language to describe this mystery that was revealed to us. It doesn't sound like it's the same process of hypostatization that you're talking about, but I wonder what the history of that term hypostatization comes from. And I wouldn't be surprised if it actually comes from that historical process.
Bryan Kam: Yeah, I think you're probably right that that is the origin of it. And so does that mean that previously the idea was that there were three natures and then it changes to being one nature but three persons?
David Valerio: No, so the idea is that it was revealed in Scripture, that it was one essence, or that God is one essence in three persons. But then in trying to translate that mystery, or revelation, into Greek philosophy, they had to modify the Greek philosophical tradition to accommodate that. And so they basically had to change a word's meaning to more deeply reflect this thing that was revealed to us by God. So trying to translate something that has been supernaturally, if you will, revealed, and to try to express them in whatever words are possible in a natural way. But of course people disagree. If you're not Catholic or Orthodox or whatever, you would say like that seems to me to indicate that people thought these were three gods at first and they had to change it around to match their view. But from the Church's view, the mystery was revealed. This process that I was just describing was figuring out how we can describe it in human language, if that makes sense.
Bryan Kam: Yeah, that does make sense. The other word that's coming up for me, so as I mentioned in English at least true is a tree related word as is druid. And true just means reliable like hard, sturdy, something you can lean on, right? Like a tree. And so then truth gets kind of abstracted out of this tree-like quality. Now I know this kind of indirectly from Heidegger in that he's interested in this term that often gets rendered into truth or truth related words in other languages. And that word in Greek is aletheia, and aletheia I think means something like revealing or unfolding or arising, which is very different in its emphasis to truth, right? The way we think about truth now, first of all, we don't always think of it in these kinds of physical terms, about like this is something we can rely on, with analogy to the physical tree that you lean on. But aletheia seems to be more about revealing, unfolding, kind of emerging. Something like that. I guess I'm curious how it relates to this idea of growth that you mentioned. Because I do think that phusis as well has a kind of growth sense to it.
David Valerio: Yeah, like a drawing forth. This term aletheia that you're talking about, and also nature, in a sense, it's about growth unfolding. Which you might think, it's not sturdy. It's not something that you can completely rely on because it's changing and change is scary, at least for us now. Because change implies movement forward in time and movement forward in time implies death. So I feel like it's gotta be related. I don't know enough about aletheia to understand fully what it is. So you're saying that Heidegger, that he translated out this Greek term aletheia, which is more of like a process word into truth. Is that right?
Bryan Kam: I think it's more that truth is the standard translation of that term, but Heidegger actually queried whether truth has the same associations. It's almost like aletheia is like the big reveal. Like you open the door and there's like someone there that you didn't expect or something and that's kind of like aletheia. Yes, it's also the case that that's a revelation of what's truly unfolding or whatever, but there's something more sudden and like emergent about the aletheia term.
David Valerio: This reminds me, you mentioned literally the word reveal, like revelation, right? Revelation does not make sense in the eyes of the world. Like what? This guy died and rose again? It's unexpected, although in retrospect you might say like, oh yeah, that's obviously true. In this case with Heidegger, whatever words he was talking about, like it's translated as true, but really this truth that they're translating as the word truth is not so evident. It's something that had to come suddenly. It's kind of related to this discretization thing where like truth is something that could stand by itself, in a sense, but there is a process of taking something that was growing and evolving, if you will, aletheia and turning it into a truth. Turning it into something static. But that doesn't mean that the truth was there the entire time. There's this process of taking from this ever-flowing river and like taking a cup of water out of the river and then, oh, it's a cup of water. It's not a river anymore. I don't know. There's something there.
Bryan Kam: Something in there. Aletheia as well, I think the etymology is unforgetting or something like that. Like Lethe is the river of forgetfulness or something like that. So it's like remembering to some degree, maybe even like a wake up call or something. To take it back to the nature question: so it is interesting to me because I can see the division we make, like we are out in this world—living, breathing, dying, and interacting with each other—and there are parts that we kind of intensely manage. Let's say, we take a tree, we chop it down, we make something out of it and we're like, nomos like that's the human stuff, the artificial stuff. And nature is kind of defined as the rest of the stuff. And if you define it in those terms it kind of preserves this mysterious element. It's like everything that we don't manage, that we don't interact with. It's a kind of negative definition. But then I'm curious about, you know, as you're talking about these types and kinds and discretizing, or making discrete objects out of nature. And then we come to think of like, well, this thing has a nature, right? Like there is a nature of tree or something like that. And then each individual tree somehow interacts with this more universal term. And it almost seems like a shift to say, at least to me, to say nature is all this stuff that we don't control. To then saying, well, there are these natures to things or essences of things, which seems to me like a lot more categorical. And I'm curious if you have any like thoughts about that.
David Valerio: Yeah, no I agree that there is like a shift here where especially in at least, I don't know, post-20th century environmentalist thought/post-19th century romanticism, nature has been defined as everything outside of human control, right? Nature is this untouched wilderness that humankind has not interacted with, has not modified. In a sense, like if it was really untouched by humanity, it would be something that we've like never seen before and never put words on, right? Some part of the universe that's so far away that light has never gotten to us that we can't say like, you know, there's like some star out there. We name it though. Is that modification of it? By putting a word to it? So what you're talking about with tree, right, it's like, okay, that's part of nature. Like some forest, I don't know, in some isolated mountain range that humanity somehow never touched. Although I don't really know if that's a real possibility, maybe it is. Even if we've never seen it, we still have this category of tree, right? That we can say like, this is a tree, even if we've never seen it before. I think that even this whole framing of nomos versus physis is wrong. I feel like even the nomos, human interactions with stuff, like we are interacting with stuff that is a part of nature and turning it into something else, right? So there can't be a hard distinction, in the sense that what humans are interacting with and are changing was at one time part of nature. And so in that sense it's not actually a category. I think that increasingly people, just in terms of history, are realizing that this idea of untouched wilderness and nature that was never interacted with is a myth. You can think about North America and South America pre-Columbus. Native Americans there were actively managing these landscapes at scale. They were cultivating fires. These open woodlands that the Europeans encountered on the East Coast, they weren't “naturally there.” Native Americans were actively managing them with fire. Same thing throughout the continent. Obviously epidemics wiped out these populations as Europeans came in deeper into the continent. There was like, oh hey, there's no people here, but there's like this wilderness. What's going on? But people were there, and it's true globally. Like, I don't think, maybe there are, I mean, Antarctica is probably the best example, right? Where humans have not really interacted with it. But I think that that definition of like the natural-unnatural distinction doesn't really hold. If you believe in evolution and humanity evolving, like, we have to be a part of nature.
Bryan Kam: Yes, because what else would we be?
David Valerio: Right, exactly.
Bryan Kam: What is natural versus unnatural? Because it's not like we can make material out of anything, right? Like everything already exists that we manage, right?
David Valerio: Exactly, exactly. It's like, what is natural? What is unnatural? For me, if you take the scientific materialist worldview at face value and follow it to its logical conclusion, there is no distinction between natural and unnatural, especially with humans, right? It's only if you have some sort of religious view in which you think man has a spiritual element, right? Or something that is outside of atoms and evolution and stuff, in which that makes sense. But most of the people who think that there is a distinction between humanity and nature, they don't have a grounding for that belief. I think it's really a holdover from Christianity in a lot of ways. That doesn't make sense absent belief in Christianity, if that makes sense. That's true for so many things. Like the idea of the inherent value of nature. Why should there be inherent value in nature? Absent a Creator who made it and made it good, it's all just atoms bouncing around theoretically. Most people don't intuitively feel that same way. It's interesting, this thing that I come across a lot in my own work where it's like, where is this belief in the value of nature actually coming from? Is it rigorously thought through? I mean, maybe it doesn't need to be.
Bryan Kam: It's a really interesting one. I've queried people with a strong scientific materialist perspective on why something like extinction is bad, let's say, like from what standpoint do you say that? Like, I get that we have a kind of emotional reaction and we think, oh, these earlier waves of extinction were bad things because they reduced diversity. But then at the end of the day, you kind of have to be stabilizing or reifying or hypostatizing a type, an idea, about what nature should be in order for you to defend why change is bad. And it's not that I don't think that some changes are better than others or something like that, but I guess what I'm saying is from a human point of view the loss of the human race is catastrophic. But how do you ground that from just a scientific materialist point of view, where you have this perspective that lots of extinctions have happened before. But why are those bad? And also like don't some of those extinctions allow for the emergence of later life? You know, there's this Great Oxygenation Event where life goes from being intolerant of oxygen to producing so much oxygen that everything that's intolerant of oxygen just dies off, right? Like two and a half billion years ago or whatever. And then now we have this oxygenic atmosphere and presumably we regard oxygen as good. But from the perspective of anaerobic life forms, like, it's bad. When people say, I've had friends say this, where it's like, well, obviously if the climate changes then a bunch of things die off, that's bad. And I just want to know like, from what perspective? Because it seems to me there's like a baked in valuing of humans, and they can't quite justify where that valuing comes from. And I basically agree with you that it has to be a kind of holdover from Christianity. I'm not saying that they shouldn't value it, but just like when questioned, they can't actually answer where this value comes comes from.
David Valerio: This is exactly the key thing I find so interesting about all this is. This desire to protect biodiversity or nature and address climate change is framed as being a scientific problem, right? Science shows that the world is going to end in 50 years or something. One, it doesn't do that. But two, if it did end, why is that bad? If we are really just one part of the evolutionary process there's going to be new life forms that come out of this. Some interesting, remarkable new things are going to come about. The concept of species, like losing these species, where is the inherent value there? It's not a scientific question, because from a scientific perspective these are just things that are happening. But you have to have some sort of source for valuing these things. And like you said, I've had the same discussions with people and there has not been a rigorous answer to this question. It's all just like, oh, this is obvious. But it's actually not obvious, right? There's a reason it's not obvious. It's kind of the same process we were talking about earlier, where you take like a human conflict about the demands of expanding economic growth to support human wellbeing, whatever that means, against the desires of more species and more plants and trees and stuff. But caring about plants and trees and stuff is a human thing. Like we care about that. The other thing, economic growth is also a human desire and need. But the framing of saying, well, it's obvious that nature has inherent value, therefore we should not do this, is trying to take the discussion and the arguments and the conversation outside of the realm of humans and saying this is just a part of being. That we need to protect this stuff. So it's like exactly what you were talking about earlier. I haven't seen a rigorous answer to like how you get value, like where's value come from, in the scientific materialist worldview that justifies that kind of thing. Again, I'm not saying it's a bad thing. I like nature. I think it's great. But I feel like I have a grounded reason for it versus others, it's just more like, no, you should just believe. You should just intuitively understand this. This is an essential part of our world.
Bryan Kam: It's really fascinating what you say about it being obvious. I'm really interested in obviousnesses because I think things that are obvious, and especially ones that cause an emotional reaction, often hide kind of ideological assumptions underneath them. And so I'm very sensitive to things that are obvious. I guess one idea that I've been playing with as a grounding source for what is good or bad is if something is kind of emerging and growing versus like withering and dying. We can kind of, I don't know about instinctively, I wouldn't want to make a claim like that, but you know what I mean? Like I don't know much about plants, but I know when a plant is healthy, or I know when it's like not happy, and just by looking at it, right? There's something that might, like, I'm not trying to divorce it from the human because I think that even that is itself a human thing, right? Like it's a human experience for me to look at a blooming rosebush and be like, that's awesome. Whereas something that's dying, from my point of view, seems sad. Even though maybe to like worms or something that feeds on decaying material this would be like a great opportunity or something like that. I guess I'm just thinking about it in kind of almost like Spinoza's terms, which is just like diversity, let's say that for diversity of diet we can come up with all kinds of like scientific explanations of why it's good. But in fact, at the end of the day, all of those scientific discussions are just going to boil down to people feel better if they do this thing and they feel worse if they do this other thing. I'm almost like tempted to just say, like, why do we need to ground nature in like a conceptual way? It might just be the case that we like things that are in bloom and diverse and wild. They seem to improve our health and our health is revealed as well by this kind of diversity or something like that. I mean, I know it seems circular and kind of like a cop out, but there's something that appeals to me of like, how do we know what's poisonous versus what's not poisonous? Well, some people ate the poisonous thing and they just said, don't do that, basically. Like rather than good and evil as like black and white categories, something more like what is revealed through experience. Like a health model.
David Valerio: I think this kind of fits into a utilitarian framework. Pleasure, pain, let's optimize the amount of pleasure utils, or whatever, out there in the world and minimize the number of pain utils. I don't think that's like an objectionable viewpoint, it's just that the current way that people frame it is not that from that viewpoint. They're framing it in terms of good and evil and not in terms of like, this makes me feel good, this doesn't make me feel good. Or I like this, I don't like that. That would make more sense to me. But then if you were to take it away from the good-evil distinction and just pleasure versus pain, or what I like and what I don't like, there's no principled reason why the other side cannot do the same thing. And say like oh, well, I don't like nature as much as I like having a big truck that consumes a bunch of gas. So there's not like a principled way to say we should actually do this thing. It's more just like how many of people are on this side—who like more trees, birds, bugs, don't want to see oceans heating up—are there versus how many are there out there that don't really care and just want to like have electricity and stuff.
Bryan Kam: That's a good point.
David Valerio: What do you do in that situation? It's like, it would be fine if that's how people were framing it, but they're not framing it in that way. There is a lot of this morally charged language, a very religious, if you will, approach to saying, no, we must stop doing this because this is evil. And if you are going to say something is evil, I think you need to have a strong argument and like a comprehensive or coherent worldview of why good and evil exist and where those sources of meaning come from that you can then use to actually go and discuss these questions.
Bryan Kam: Could I ask you a question actually about nature?
David Valerio: Please.
Bryan Kam: How do you think the idea of nature has changed over the past, let's say, few centuries?
David Valerio: Yeah, it's a great question. I think it's changed dramatically at least like post 19th-century romanticism. Since the Industrial Revolution and the increasing mechanization of the world, increasing human control over the world, if you will, extended extraction of resources, a lot of ugliness has been brought into it. Coal plants, people dying from going and mining coal. There is a dramatic reaction to this increased human mechanization of everything. I think that 19th-century romanticism has led to a lot of these thoughts about the inherent value of nature. Even the idea of hiking was not really a thing before they started doing it, right? People didn't really do that as a source of pleasure and wellbeing. At first there was an increased desacralization of the world around us through like this increased human control over things and the expansion of cities and peoples and agriculture and all this kind of stuff. And then that reaction to it, the sacralization of nature of these things that are outside of human control. I think that that really feeds into all of modern environmentalist thought, this talk about the inherent value of nature. It comes from that. I don't know like the religious backgrounds of people in that space. I intuit that they weren't super Christian. Let's just take the theoretical medieval society. They were definitely extracting a lot still, but like you could see nature around. It was just more, there was less of a disconnect between the peasant out in the field with a wood lot next to them and nature versus post-industrial society where a lot of people live in cities, there's factories everywhere and you see all this gray ugliness and you start to reify this nature that you can't really see but you think is beautiful and like, it must be better than what I'm dealing with now. That would be like the main shift I would see is like the increasing destruction of “nature,” but then also taking whatever nature is left and lifting it up and saying like this is the ideal, the Rousseauian, like we need to go back kind of deal. That's what I think has been the biggest shift over the past few centuries, but I'm curious what you think about this.
Bryan Kam: Yeah, it's fascinating. I was looking a little bit at Rousseau recently, in part because I think Schopenhauer like kind of gets him wrong. A lot of people go to this noble savage thing in Rousseau and say that he's idealizing these extremely basic states. Whereas I don't think he is. He's pretty unhappy about like recent developments. And I guess he's writing in like a little bit earlier than the period that we're talking about, like the 17th century. He definitely is opposed to, I don't know if it's like agricultural development or something like that, but it's not like he truly wants to reverse everything. And he's pretty clear about this as well. So it's really interesting to hear you talk about this kind of nostalgia or something, but it's interesting because it's like a created nostalgia. right? Like what I'm hearing from you is that we are defining nature as not this, which to me has this almost, I don't know about sacred, but like reverent tone. At least in the ancient Greek distinction, it's kind of like the humility of this is the small part that we have any efficacy over versus everything else. Whereas, what I'm hearing and what you're saying is under industrialization and like the Agricultural Revolution and Industrial Revolution, people are increasingly alienated from the land itself and their lives in contact with nature, let's say. And so then it's almost like a rejection of that and in favor of an almost imaginary nature, would you say?
David Valerio: Yeah, no, I think it is an imaginary nature. You could talk about Eden, the Garden of Eden, like we've been pushed out of this place where humanity was great. We've talked about this before, like how maybe that's like a way of describing human, I mean literally Cain, work off the sweat of your brow agriculture or something like that, this time before that when everything was good and it was beautiful and we were in harmony with the Creation. But it's always about what are you measuring that relative to? Has it actually been getting worse since then, or were there already like terrible depredations happening but we just weren’t doing it at scale. It's an idealization of nature because of the very fact that you're encountering less of it. Again, it's a man-made ideal, a taking of something that is supposedly supposed to be out of the realm of human control physically, but then putting it into a mental box of here's what this thing should be and was like, and here's what we need to strive to do to try to bring back this imaginary world that perhaps never existed.
Bryan Kam: Yeah, it's fascinating. I can see the difference in emphasis and it may just come from the power of industrial processes, right? Like German forestry management, like James C. Scott writes about, you know, like the ability to over a short period completely destroy a forest, let's say. And so the reason I'm bringing that up is because in 700 BC in Greece, you've got, well, it's just obvious to some degree that we only manage these small parts of everything that's around us. Whereas by the 19th century, you're seeing big things disappear, right? That you may not have thought were possible to disappear. I was speaking to someone who was looking at the deforestation of the Ottawa Valley in Canada, which is like this enormous area, and I think it was the late-18th to mid-19th century and they just like, this is England because of the Napoleonic Wars, could no longer get wood from the Baltics and wood was super important for naval purposes. Basically a ton of wood was needed for building ships. So they tried to figure out, can we somehow make it profitable to take wood all the way from Canada back to Europe and then build these ships? During that period, it's like 70 or 80 years, they just keep saying and using the word inexhaustible, inexhaustible, inexhaustible until literally the last tree in this valley is cut down. And it's this enormous valley, it's probably like the size of like a state or something like that. So maybe that's like the difference in emphasis where we go from this idea of like almost a humble view of what nomos is. I'm not saying that that's necessarily what all Greeks had or attributing that to them necessarily, but just saying, okay, this is the small amount that I can manage. Whereas by the 19th century, it's almost like, the equation has changed to like we're going to try and preserve these little patches. It's almost like we went from, live in these little patches and that's all we manage, to like, now we're going to try and preserve these little patches that we don't touch.
David Valerio: I think that's right on. And I think it's a speed and scale question. So like if you think about like Mesopotamia, right, now it's a desert. At one point it was not. At one point it was forested. Now it's not. I feel like changes in those civilizations took much longer such that it was perhaps not immediately noticeable in each generation like, oh, hey, this is getting worse, it's getting worse, it's getting worse. Such that there could not be such a strong counter reaction saying like, hey, no actually we need to stop doing all this and protect the cedars of Lebanon or whatever. Whereas now, we can go and like literally level a whole mountain to get coal. We can go and industrially harvest whole old-growth rainforest in like a matter of years. It's so obvious that the human nomos is very large and very powerful. So you want to say, well, let's stop that completely and go to the complete opposite idea wherein somehow the nature that is being plundered by the human nomos is actually the most valuable thing and should be allowed to expand and grow. Whereas I think the answer is really much more of a synthesis or a balance of these two approaches. Humans aren't leaving anytime soon. Also like the world is changing. We just have to be a lot more pragmatic and like realize that the actual, like, going forward path is not to just try to make the human nomos as small as possible and make natura as huge as possible because realistically people aren't going to do that.
Bryan Kam: Emotionally, I am drawn to this idea of kind of wild nature, but then I also fully know that I don't spend a lot of time there, as in exactly like in a rain forest, most of the time. I guess I'm reflecting on where this value comes from. And I'm curious also whether when it comes to people who are really passionate about preserving different areas of the Earth, to make it more specific than just nature as like a big concept that you may be defending from your desk in some big city or whatever, I'm curious if you have a view about like a difference there. Like I'll be at like Lake Algonquin in Ontario next month and there are people that are quite involved in preserving it. Do you have a view about like that kind of effort versus more general, lets say, sustainability goals or something?
David Valerio: Absolutely, yeah. This is something I think about a lot. And I'm one of those guys who works on very abstract nature problems that are not necessarily directly related to where I'm talking to you from now in North Dakota. I think, in particular, this sort of romantic environmentalist view is really strong in urbanites, right? And it goes back to sort of this reaction, like we're in the cities, but like, oh, this isn't great. There must be something better out there. I've never been to a tropical rainforest. I've never been to any of these other number of things I've seen on like the Discovery Channel or something. But you see it's so beautiful and so wonderful, and so you're like, this is great. This is something that is much better than what I'm dealing with now. We've got to do everything possible to expand these areas, without recognizing that people live in those areas as well and they have a different relationship with the lands that are being sort of abstracted and packaged in different ways that you're observing from a screen in a city. People actually live and breathe and die in those places. Often it's much more complicated than just like get rid of all the humans, bring back a bunch of nature. I think that those embodied particular local actions are a lot more impactful and positive than broad scale giant sustainability goals because you must be much more familiar with the particular place that you're interacting with because you're focusing on like this small landscape scale and so you can be there for however many years, observe the seasonality of the land, see how native and non-native species interact and what like the pluses and minuses are of those. I think in that context you get a lot of the the lack of realism beat out of you because you're dealing with a real place, and you realize that the idealism that you may have come into that venture with about like, oh, we're going to be able to do all these things and it's going to be awesome. It's like, actually the world's hard to change and like moving and interacting with nature takes time. I think that if a lot of people who had more of these romantic ideals, and I'm not saying I'm excluded from this as I certainly do, if we went down into particular areas and were like, I want to help regenerate this place. We’d just, one, realize it's a lot harder than like, we just like somehow throw all humanity off half the Earth and let the rest go and do whatever it wants. But also realize that that's probably not the best answer to the question because we live in times that are changing and human management and cultivation of these landscapes is actually important to their thriving, from our perspective.
Bryan Kam: Yeah. One final question. I know this podcast is called Discern Earth and you're concerned with the Earth and concerned with nature. What do you think of when you think about the Earth and what do you think of when you think about nature? Because we've talked about a bunch of different definitions of nature and I'm curious, like what, it's not like you have to nail down a definition, but just like, what are some associations maybe?
David Valerio: Yeah, I mean when I think of Earth, I think of that picture of the Earth from space that Stewart Brand got out from NASA—which was a dramatic shift in perspective. I think of Earth as like this little blue dot in the universe that has life, has water, has trees. That large scale macrocosmic view of a particular planet among this giant, huge cosmos that somehow, at least from what we've gathered, is like the one place that has complex life, although I don't think that's true, but at least it's the only one that we have. So I think of Earth at that like high abstract level, but then I also think of like the Earth beneath my feet. Earth as like more like soil, I guess, or ground is another way I think of Earth, but mostly I think about it in terms of the eye. The logo of this podcast, it's an eyeball with the Earth in the middle and it's tied to seeing, observing the Earth and trying to try to understand it. And then nature is an even more… I feel like that I don't really have a good image in my mind for it. In terms of my work, there's a lot of talk about like nature-positive companies and nature action. And that's more like, you know, how is a company or how are these projects positively impacting things like biodiversity, water quality, and water quantity on a landscape, pollution, these things like this. But when I think of nature, I think about it more of just the entire thing. All of perceivable reality from my perspective as a human person walking around. Like nature is this computer, it's this microphone I'm speaking into, it's the tree that's outside my window, it's the prairie that's like 20 miles east of me. It's all of that. It's the thing that I as a person am observing. I think nature, in the way that I'm thinking about it, is like my own direct experience of everything outside of myself. Whereas the Earth is like the outside looking in view of someone, maybe theoretically me, looking at this particular planet that myself as a person am experiencing as nature. I don't know if that makes sense. But that's what I think about when I think of those terms.
Bryan Kam: No, that's really helpful. And it sounds like, I was going to ask you about discern as well, but I think you might have answered it because it is about kind of perception and distinguishing, would you say?
David Valerio: Yeah, yeah, it comes from the Latin discernere and it's basically distinguishing, grasping, like partitioning. In a sense, it's kind of the opposite of your project, right? There are these things and I need to figure out the boundaries between them to understand, but then like balance tradeoffs between them. Like the way I think about Discern Earth is like, okay, we have this natural world and discerning is okay, I'm a human observing it. And each of us has to discern how we should properly interact with the world around us. So there's like a moral question there. There are also practical questions in particular for me, it's like, you know, how do I, as a person who works on nature from my desk, my computer, what is the proper way for me to engage in this and what are the problems that I should be solving to achieve the positive outcomes that I would like to see for the Earth? That's all contingent on what you think the Earth is and what you think nature is and like how do humans fit into that? That's kind of the idea behind the project really. I'm glad this was our first episode, because I think it really hits the nail on the head of it's like, okay, what am I supposed to do here? How am I supposed to interact well with these things?
Bryan Kam: Amazing. Thanks very much for having me on.
David Valerio: Thanks, Bryan. This was excellent, and I really appreciate you coming on. We'll chat again soon.
What is Nature? with Bryan Kam