Engineering Eden: The True Story of a Violent Death, a Trial, and the Fight over Controlling Nature

by Jordan Fisher Smith

John Muir put this notion succinctly a few years later: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”

The essential feature of wilderness, Zahniser went on to argue, was the ability of nature to operate free of the sort of human tinkering that was reorganizing everything else in the world. “Such tracts of wilderness land should be managed so as to be left unmanaged,” insisted Zahniser, and then summarized his position in an aphorism that would become the slogan of this side of the debate to the present day. “With regard to areas of wilderness we should be guardians not gardeners.”

Even among scientists and people who would not consider themselves traditionally religious, living there had a way of making a person consider what was eternal, and the ephemeral quality of human dominion over the earth.

“Starker had an adage for people in public service: ‘If you’re ashamed of it, don’t do it. If you’re not, publicize it.’ ”

“When we say we cannot afford a thing, we mean that we do not value it as highly as we do something else. But either the property damage done by bears is worth doing something about or it is not worth considering.”

What Starker Leopold was trying to teach Graber was not to master and control everything but, instead, to remember that because human hands were always unintentionally doing something to nature, they ought to do something carefully planned as well.

Natural, the authors pointed out, had come to mean two divergent things. On the one hand, the word implied that a place was unmanipulated by human beings, its processes guided only by nature. On the other hand, it meant the land still had species and features it had had before the wave of human-caused change that was sweeping the earth—that is, it wasn’t covered with cheatgrass, kudzu, Brazilian pepper, Russian olive, Eurasian wild boar, axis or fallow deer, or European brown trout. These two definitions were now in conflict. In the second case—those landscapes that had the approximate makeup of, say, Yellowstone in 1850—it would take more and more intervention to preserve that state. Yet that would make such places more unnatural if, in the sense of the Wilderness Act, natural meant uncontrolled by human beings.

But the questions behind those struggles from the Big Kill of 1962 that triggered the Leopold Report—How much should we respect nature’s autonomy? How much should we try to manipulate and control it to save it? Do we know enough to risk doing it? And what happens if we get it wrong?—have not been conclusively answered, nor should they be. They are more useful as questions that ought to be asked every time we face any decision about preserving life on earth than any answer we can give today.

However, given that our grandest planetary effects—our hijacking of the nitrogen and carbon cycles and the wave of human-caused extinctions—are for the most part entirely accidental, to say that the catastrophe we have caused has prepared us to take command of life on earth is akin to saying that being involved in a traffic collision qualifies you to be a highway safety engineer.

His analysis of the intervention-nonintervention spectrum makes sense to me. Kaye says that neither position works everywhere. In places such as the refuge, at least for now, a condition of nonintervention and respect for nature’s autonomy can be maintained, along with a healthy reticence to jump in and do things. In others, such as the Everglades, full-on intervention in support of native and endangered species is appropriate. No natural law requires us to embrace one or the other.