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

by Jordan Fisher Smith

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.