The idea of nature has always had a conspicuous place in the representation of American experience. For some three centuries, from the colonial era to the closing of the western frontier, the encounter of European settlers with wild nature was a defining theme of American history, art, and literature. But by the 1920s most Americans were city dwellers, and as the natural world became a less immediate presence in their lives, the idea of nature acquired a disabling aura of nostalgia. Since the advent of the ecological crisis, however, the old idea -- recast in the scientifically and politically up-to-date guise of "the environment" -- has been charged with unwonted ideological significance.

       Among recent obituaries for nature, the most telling, I think, is Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature (1989). He argues that nature came to an end, both as a discrete biophysical entity and as a meaningful concept, when the earth’s atmospheric envelope recently was penetrated -- and its filtering capacities damaged -- by greenhouse gases and other manufactured chemicals. By now, he plausibly suggests, humanity’s artifacts have contaminated all of Earth’s space, so that no wholly unadulterated segment of nonhuman nature -- no parcel of true "wilderness" -- any longer exists on the planet. “We have killed off nature,” he writes, “-- that world entirely independent of us which was here before we arrived and which encircled and supported our human society.”

       What distinguishes McKibben’s from the stock lament for lost nature is his insistence on its independence -- or separateness -- as its crucial attribute.... Though I share his sense of urgency, I regard the credence still accorded to the existence of "nature" (or, for that matter, "wilderness" or "environment") as a distinct realm, separable from that occupied by humanity and its works, as an obstacle to the protection of the human habitat.

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