Welcome to Issue 5

Here is the place, my lord; good my lord, enter,
The tyranny of the open night's too rough
For nature to endure.
—Kent, as Caius, to Lear in William Shakespeare's King Lear, 3.4.1

Greetings,

This installment of the magazine is somewhat tardy, but I hope that fact does not prevent patient readers from finding its essays cause for asking what is natural.

What is natural?

Another one of those big, abstract questions easily shrugged off for the day, and then the week, and before long piling up with other "important" questions into a seemingly insurmountable heap of laundry that starts to stench subtly in the corner of the room at the same time you find fewer and fewer clean clothes to wear to work.

I began writing this introduction outside, at peace, within earshot of waves lapping at the shore, children's joyful shrieks on a playfield, airplanes droning overhead, and birds singing beneath a summery deciduous canopy. While a county park may not meet everyone's definition of nature, I was assuredly outside my own private environs and inhabiting, for the moment, a space shared by life and light and air. A few weeks ago, however, I had made a note to myself to use the following detail in some way because it seemed to speak volumes about how unnatural my, and perhaps your, modern world can be: I didn't know it was cold outside until I opened the window. The climate control inside my building was such that I had no idea of the outside temperature. With the windows shut, I was safely ensconced in my own little homeostatic world, seemingly cut off from the discomforting variability of the weather and the persistent stimulation of nature. (Though, of course, I was not really cut off except mentally—playing the civilized game of pretend that creates the semi-shared platform of our society where all manner of things amazing are casually deemed natural but nature herself.)

Another real detail—the kind novelists dream of making up, though I swear to you it happened to me—forced me back inside. Picture me, sitting cross-legged on a picnic table and pecking at my laptop, under some trees, overlooking Lake Michigan. Though ants and other insects approach me and my computer, they are easily swiped away. When suddenly, my arm gets wet and something has splashed onto my laptop like rain. But it's sunny. There is no rain. Did a bird poop on me? I look up. I see nothing. Did someone, unseen, squirt water on me? I look around. I see nothing. The small splash on my laptop appears slightly amber. I wipe it off with a leaf. It has splashed on my hat, on my arm, on my shirt, on my shorts—laundry I just washed last night now soiled by a mystery liquid. Suddenly, I hear a rustling high above. And I realize what has happened. I have been peed on by a squirrel.

This is the kind of thing that drives one indoors, away from nature. It's the kind of thing humans have built fires and roofs and roadways for over thousands of years, culminating in something resembling our sprawling civilization. It's why HVAC is big business and why my fifth grade social studies teacher, Ms. Giuliani, imparted on us the "three As"—air conditioning, automobiles, and aqueducts. These three technologies opened up the hot, harsh American southwest to colonization and development. Without them, the land would have been too hot, too harsh, and too dry for the kind of lifestyles enjoyed by millions of Americans today. I believe applying this kind of thinking is not just an American tradition, but one of all humans wielding technology. We seek to control and contain the world in ways that we hope will make us more comfortable. But as the power of our innovation has increased in its capacity to recreate environments to suit immediate human desires, where does that leave whatever is natural? And, are we intelligent and willing enough to approach the natural world more sensitively, with an appreciation for more than our own immediate comfort?

Contemplating the nature of the natural naturally (pardon me) raises such issues, posing an ethical challenge at the same time it opens a philosophical discussion. In this issue, each contributor touches on both the ethical challenge and ponders something of our human nature.

Luke Balsavich draws on a lifelong love affair with snakes, frogs, and other herps—plus a little inspiration from the likes of Aldo Leopold and Richard Dawkins—to introduce us to the innocence of two American children in "To Save the Whales." Charles and Jennifer could be any of us or any of our children. Charles delights in the outdoors his father reveled in, and Jennifer empathizes with the plight of whales and manatees though she has never seen the ocean. Their parents provide perspective for our noble youngsters. Charles' dad is a living reminder that the "wild" his son appreciates is a far cry from the "wild" he knew as a child. Jennifer's mother encourages her to actualize her hope by joining with the collective efforts of others. The stories of Charles and Jennifer provide an entryway into Balsavich's discussion of why we seem innately curious about nature. To have the best chance to save entire natural habitats, Balsavich suggests we focus our natural fascination—which may be an adaptive trait that has served humans throughout time—onto species sensitive to the onset of environmental degradation. Species like amphibians. Placed in a precarious position by human activities, amphibians are canaries in the coalmines that comprise our biosphere, but in the past two decades, approximately 160 species have gone extinct. Balsavich provides the reader with links to learn more about amphibians and what some are doing to help them.

In my own essay, "A homily on human nature," I raise questions about what is or should be natural, suggesting that whether to locate humans within the category is perpetually problematic. I further suggest that, to put it bluntly, "our" technology is domesticating us much as we domesticated plants and animals. Following that assertion, the question I'm left with is what psychological alternatives remain to us humans (at least the technologically "plugged-in" among us) if our relationship with technology continues to dominate more and more aspects of our social culture? Are we co-evolving along technological lines? Are our historical and biological strategies for relating to one another, and for finding or creating meaning, resilient enough in the face of new patterns of connecting made not only possible but culturally compulsory by our evolving technology?

Taking a less abstract and likely more accessible approach to the question is Brandon Lorenz in "The Art of the Natural." Informed by years as a newspaper reporter and now a magazine editor, Lorenz points out that if everyone agreed on what was natural there would be no news business. These days, he's refined his ability to identify "greenwash"—when products are misleadingly labeled or advertised as being environmentally friendly or more natural than they really are. Greenwash has piggybacked on the skyrocketing cultural appeal of the green movement, because "nature" sells. But in his essay, he turns inward, considering his evolving perception of what was natural, or normal, throughout his life. Lorenz presents a candid reflection on some of his personal transformations—from adolescence to adulthood, from overweight to in shape, from in the closet to openly gay. "I would like to think I'm unique, but I'm not sure that's the case. I'm more than likely just another journalist full of self-doubt with an untidy personal life," Lorenz bravely writes. "One of the biggest lessons I have learned over the last few years is to stop viewing The Art of the Natural as a Venn Diagram that I'm left outside of."

Finally, while not an essay drafted for this magazine, I want to provide you with a link to Will Allen's "A Good Food Manifesto for America," in which Milwaukee's own urban agricultural advocate (with literal and figurative superman stature) lays out a case for reorienting our food production system (surely relevant to the topic of the natural). The Growing Power leader depicts a silent crisis not dramatized by breadlines or food shortages but rather an insidious malnutrition hitting the poorest most: "And this is coming to haunt us in health care and social costs. No, we are not suddenly starving to death; we are slowly but surely malnourishing ourselves to death," Allen writes. To face this crisis, Allen, recently profiled in the New York Times, proposes the creation of a national public-private partnership, the Centers for Urban Agriculture, to be a Milwaukee-based "do tank" rather than a "think tank." Comparing the seed money estimated necessary to the billions injected into Recovery Act infrastructure projects, he calls on Congress to provide $63 million over two years to a newly formed CUA, which he argues would provide long-lasting social, economic, and health benefits. "It simply had not occurred to anyone that immediate and lasting job creation was plausible in a field such as community-based agriculture," Allen writes. What else has simply not occurred to us because of our perception of the way things are?

Air conditioning, aqueducts, and automobiles. I find myself thinking about my fifth-grade social studies textbook and how straightforward some things were made to seem. Funny how the tide has turned. Our vision for the future seems to have shifted from grandiose outward expansion (space-age skylines with glittering towers and not a farm in sight) to cultivating local resources more wisely (with farms counterintuitively as cornerstones within cities). If this even qualifies as a shared vision yet, I don't know. But if it is, perhaps it's simply the result of there not being any more physical natural frontiers on the surface of the planet to reach or breach. Perhaps we must inevitably turn inward, to our technology, to "our" land, and to each other.

I wonder if one day our descendants will stumble outside on the planet that once we thought was ours, rub their eyes in the light and wind, and point around them at the spaces surviving whatever physical remnants of our culture still stand then as the antiquated marvels of the Roman aqueducts stand among our own cities today. I wonder if they will say to one another knowingly before returning inside, "This used to be nature."

Michael Timm
July 14, 2009


P.S. I am altering the stated topics of the upcoming issues, returning to the "question" format of the first four issues. I reserve the right to change even these, but here they are.

Fall 2009: What is our purpose and how do we know it?
Winter 2009: What is happiness and how do we get it?
Spring 2010: What is democracy really and is it really a good idea?