There is an assumption, writes the environmental legal scholar Holly Doremus, that “what nature needs most is for people to leave it alone”—that a landscape will “automatically produce the preferred human outcome, a perfect Garden of Eden, if it is simply walled off from human influence.” But nature doesn’t know what outcome we want, and it doesn’t care. Instead, it perpetually absorbs what we do or don’t do to it, and disinterestedly spits out the effects of those causes. Nature is not a photograph that will always look good if we keep our fingerprints off it. It’s a calculator, adding up
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garden of Eden
