The Once and Future World: Nature as It Was, as It Is, as It Could Be

by J.B. MacKinnon

The past asks us how, what, and why we allow ourselves to forget.

We’re surrounded by a world that is, by our own description, “man-made” and “artificial”; nature is what rises up at the edges of cities and towns, or wherever else it has not been beaten back by human hands.

This is nature by our most ordinary definition: the sum total of everything that is not us and did not spring from our imaginations.

But then, no ordinary telling of history commemorates the caribou.

People may take the natural environment they encounter during childhood as the norm against which to measure pollution later in their life. The crux here is that with each generation, the amount of environmental degradation increases, but each generation takes that amount as the norm.

Sponges have an astounding capacity to remove microbes from water; in a single day, a sponge the size of a soccer ball can sieve 90 percent of the bacteria from more water than you will drink in your lifetime.

the white-tailed deer in particular is the only large animal in North America that now ranges over more territory than ever before.

“The ability to deny is an amazing human phenomenon, largely unexplained and often inexplicable,” writes the sociologist Stanley Cohen, author of States of Denial. Yet we find denial useful. It fulfills, to quote the definition preferred by Cohen, “our need to be innocent of a troubling recognition.”

rounding to the nearest whole figure, the number of coral reefs worldwide that are considered “pristine” is zero.

As our parents and grandparents did before us, we go about our lives in the midst of an ecological catastrophe that is well underway.

If so, then 1492 was a clash of shifting baselines: European nations reveling in the discovery of apparently infinite natural riches just as the Americas’ original cultures were formulating a widespread understanding of ecological limits.

In the city, we tend not to pay much attention to nature; for most of us, familiarity with corporate logos and celebrity news really is of more practical day-to-day use than a knowledge of local birds and edible wild plants.

Ordinary life in the past had an intimacy with other species that today we mainly associate with trained biologists and dedicated naturalists.

Awareness can be its own reward.

Great Britain is one of the least forested and most crowded regions in Europe—you