Back to Nature
Considering our Relationship with Wilderness, and Euripides
Even if you do not follow politics closely, you may have seen the recent mess surrounding the land sale provision in what is known as the Big Beautiful Bill. Though the initial effort was scrapped, and revised efforts of the original continue to be proposed, the neutral summary is that this constituted an effort by Sen. Mike Lee to sell off large swaths of land currently held by the federal government under the authority of the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S Forest Service. The lands potentially under sale were quite expansive, and the potential for swift and considerable changes to the entire ecosystem — literally and figuratively — of public land in the Western United States became a very real possibility.
The response to this proposal was immediate, and united otherwise-disparate political factions in the country who all found it to be foolhardy at best. Beyond the merits of the provision itself, the messaging was largely a disaster. Others have pointed out that arguments in favor of the plan were frequently vague or misleading. While the National Parks were exempted, many thousands of acres of land with “high recreation or conservation value” were claimed to be considered “off-limits,” but the actual legislative language did nothing of the sort. It rapidly became clear that little prevented the sell-off from resulting in large-scale private purchase of public lands that can currently be used by anyone.1 There was a point where Lee and his office seemed to suggest that opponents of his idea were animated by their being paid-off by hardline environmentalist groups, which I found baffling given how many conservationists with well-established conservative bona fides were against the proposal from the start.2 Supporters of the provision bizarrely insisted that the land sale was to be used for "affordable housing," despite the fact that much of the land under consideration was rugged and hard to access unless you are an experienced hiker, and that there is plenty of underutilized land in existing cities that could stand to become an apartment building. In other words, it was a SNAFU.
This was a policy proposal that was easy to reject simply because of its completely incompetent presentation, but I found plenty to oppose on the merits. The idea that land that is important to maintaining local ecosystems should be casually and quickly sold at a market rate without public comment simply because it isn’t technically a National Park seems, to me, shortsighted. More frankly, it sounds ideological: an aversion to all forms of governmental control of land, long-term consequences be damned. There is a debate that reasonable people can have about federal, state, local, and private control of land, but this provision was surely not the way to do that. Hasty actions can have unpredictable consequences, and chasing the dollar in the short-term can have permanent effects.
That said, while my own favorite USFS land, Shawnee National Forest, would not have been up for discussion under this failed Lee initiative, the whole episode did make me think about a difficult element of how we often conceive of these natural areas. It is easy to think of them as “pristine” or “untouched,” given how sharply our time in them contrasts to urban life. And yet, an important attraction in Shawnee tracts is the ability to see homesteads, wells, and evidence of farming and logging. Some of the noble patches of forests that seem timeless when you walk under them may only be about 100 years old, which is a heartbeat in natural time. These now-idyllic lands were “touched” not so long ago.
But just because something was a struggling farm a few generations back does not mean that it should not be preserved as a forest today. There must be gradations between “open for untrammeled development” and “unchanged since time immemorial.”
All Greek to Me
I was thinking of these questions in part because I recently finished reading Euripides’s Bacchae for the first time in many years. Given the striking scenes of ecstatic worship of Dionysus well outside the city walls of Thebes, it would be tempting to view the Maenads as pursuing a primitive, back-to-nature commune. I think a more complicated interpretation is necessary, but it will be useful to first revisit the classical Greek attitude (using “Greek” broadly) towards nature and the divine in the first place.
There are two fundamental elements of the classical Greek worldview that should be top of mind before digging into the Bacchae itself.3 The first thing to remember is that nature predates the gods. This is not a situation of creatio ex nihilo, material creation pulled out of nothingness at the hands of God, nor do the early commentators necessarily engage with the philosophical debates of monism versus pluralism. On the contrary, we would see in Hesiod (f. ca. 700 BC[E]) that Earth emerges subsequent to primordial Chaos, with the personified, Olympian gods emerging only later to “govern the world after it has been created by natural forces.” Nature is still imbued with divinity, and there is a much longer discussion to be had about the relationship between creation and the divine in Aristotelian metaphysics, but the key point here is the role of the mythic, personified Olympian gods vis-a-vis Nature.
There is a second element of the Ancient Greek approach to nature that will become important in the later part of this essay, namely, the fundamental continuity between humans and the natural world. The connection is in the fact that all living entities are driven by having a soul, the “power behind every vital activity,” that which distinguishes animate from inanimate objects. There are differences in the ways humans might interact with the intellect, but that does not sever the connection between human and nature being discussed here. There are several conclusions one could draw from this observed continuity, namely, that there are issues with the way we often consider the sciences of the human soul and mind as wholly distinct from the natural/physical sciences. For our purposes, though, what is important is whether we think of human beings as intertwined with nature, or as separate by virtue of their cognition from a world consisting of impersonal and mechanical natural laws.
Interesting things may also happen between humanity and nature when the women of Thebes flee into the mountains outside of the city walls.
Surprisingly Few Dionysian Trysts
If you have not read the Bacchae, or have not read it since you were an undergraduate, the work opens with Dionysus arriving in Thebes and causing mischief. Insulted by the Thebans’ rejection of the divine nature of his birth and the insinuation that he was a mere mortal, Dionysus infected the women of Thebes with an ecstatic madness which has caused them to flee the city into the mountains. To the dismay of, particularly, the god-fighting (theomachos) king Pentheus, these Maenads have adorned themselves in fawnskin and taken up the thrysus, spending their days only in worship of Dionysus. As informed by the Chorus of bacchic worshippers, the rites to Dionysus are bolstered by miraculous plenty, with milk, wine, and honey running from the ground like water.
Pentheus is not convinced that the women are up to anything beyond consorting with the new stranger who has come to town, and promptly sends a messenger to discover the “true” story. Sure enough, the report returns that the women are engaging in no such sybaritic passions, but rather have communed with nature. They can handle snakes without danger; wine, milk, and honey spring from the ground; and they can summon water from stone by striking with a thrysus in Mosaic fashion. There is a dark side to this worship, though, when it is disturbed. When the messenger himself attempts to lead his band to capture Agave, mother of Pentheus, the Maenads are filled with superhuman fury, ripping cattle apart with their bare hands.
The reader is later forced to confront how much of this narration is reliable, as when Pentheus himself is attempting to infiltrate the bacchic rites, he is struck with visions — two suns in the sky, two cities of Thebes, Dionysus now revealing himself as horned. But let us take, for a moment, the imagery of the Bacchae at face value for the sake of argument. Would it be fair to say that what we have here is an example of a sort of communal living, a nature cult seeking to become one with the wilderness while pursuing undisturbed worship of the divine?
Not so fast: are the Maenads actually experiencing nature while in the mountains? Or, are they experiencing a moderated nature, made unnaturally comfortable by the intervention of Dionysus? The literal imagery used to describe the paradise of the bacchic followers is exactly that: a Paradise in which the usual laws of natural reality are suspended or altered to allow their rest and worship. For the mountain hideout of the Maenads to be representative of nature would be an affront to the very concept of Classical Greek nature, in which life proceeds in the way “nature intended [it] should be.”4
These followers of Dionysus, then, are a back-to-nature cult only on the condition that nature has been tamed and altered for their benefit, allowing for the full expression of their ecstatic rites.
Harmonious Balance
A modern analogue might be found in the fruits of technological development that allow for the more difficult and dangerous elements of the natural world to be tempered, if not fully “tamed.” Anyone who spends a lot of time outdoors and finds important meaning in this pursuit will likely also tell you that modern, industrial society has made it much easier to thrive in those portions of wilderness that still exist. Synthetic clothing, ultralight gear, effective insect repellent, backpacking stoves, water purification systems — essentially everything you carry into the backcountry short of a knife and compass has likely been perfected through modern technology.5 None of this cheapens the great meaning that outdoorsmen and naturalists of all types derive from time spent hiking and hunting, so much as it forces us to reflect on how we think of nature: what we expect from it, and what we expect from ourselves.
One sometimes sees an approach to natural preservation that takes on a sort of primitivist cast, a back-to-nature vision of humans able to thrive most harmoniously when in the wilderness and separated from the pollution and crowding of urban society.6 This vision is almost completely at odds with the fact that most humans who can flee a state of nature into “civilized” life try to do this as quickly as possible, and that living in said state of nature is frequently frightening and painful.7 While humans have developed many durable social structures in order to mitigate the dangers of living with much less sophisticated technology, several norms have also risen historically which we would be better off not replicating. In my eyes, this primitivism is ultimately utopian, which is to say, escapist, an attempt to avoid dealing with the necessarily complicated balance we have to strike between human civilization and the natural world. It is asking the genie to get back in the bottle.
I feel that this is a challenge for those of us who do find value in spending time in nature, who would not like to see what is left of it developed and disrupted for short-term financial considerations,8 who may have concerns over the costs of technological progress but who recognize that we, as humans, are not something distinct from a separate, pristine, and untouched nature. Humans are involved with nature through its preservation, maintenance, exploitation, or destruction.9 We yearn to spend time in wilderness just as we know we have to respect its periodic hostility.
Some may read this approach as a euphemistic manner of ceding ground on conservation, just as the factual observation that nature is in a constant state of change is sometimes used to wave away the ways in which human development and pollution have the ability to alter ecosystems in highly damaging ways. But I actually mean the exact opposite: the fact that we are, ourselves, reliant on the natural world in so many ways, that we are ultimately not separate from the wilderness but are inextricably linked to it, means that we must devote particular care and caution to the fact that our actions can have ripple effects in complex systems that can greatly exceed our predictions. It means neither treating wilderness areas as prime real estate just waiting to be sold developed, nor opposing any human use of wild lands altogether on principle. While my own conservationism is driven in large part by a feeling that time spent in nature can have great salutary, spiritual benefits for humanity, it is also not from a fear of any sort of human footprint on untouched wilderness. It is from an aversion to shortsighted and irreversible actions.
As Wendell Berry put it, “do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you.”
You really can just drive into a National Forest and set up camp wherever you want. One can argue about how the USFS manages the lands from a technical perspective, but from a standpoint of hiking and recreation, this is something with which it is hard to argue.
Maybe Passage Press is on the bankroll of radical left-wing environmentalist groups — anything is possible — but I doubt it.
My source is this 1934 article: M.T. McClure, “The Greek Conception of Nature,” The Philosophical Review 43, no. 2 (1934): 109–24. For those who want to dig into the archives, it begins with a very curious and perhaps unnecessary discussion of the lack of foreign influence on classical Greek thought (with the exception of the worship of Dionysus!).
The full quote from the McClure article is illuminating: “The Greek liked his world neat. Nothing offended him more than seeing things out of place. Rightness of place was grounded in the order of natural happenings. Things are in place when they are where nature intended they should be. Nature sifts, arranges and distributes things in her own way, and nature’s way is the right way. Effrontery, the cardinal Greek vice, consists in overstepping one’s natural limit.” (115)
Of course, you could still camp on Lake Superior like a voyageur. Good luck with the smudge fire. Having backpacked in the Northwoods within the past few weeks, I would advise against it.
For the record, many of the strongest opponents of the land sale provision were not environmentalist hardliners or anarcho-primitivists, but conservationists, hunters, and fishers who recognize the balance between environmental preservation and important traditions of human culture.
This was a favorite hobby horse of Michael Crichton, who both lectured on this topic and caused a minor stir with State of Fear, a slightly heavy-handed criticism of the state of climate science (“Interesting argument, but I am afraid I have already portrayed my position as the brilliant and iconoclastic scientist, and yours as the uninformed Hollywood actor who gets eaten alive by cannibals”).
It’s one of the oldest undergraduate thought experiments in the book, but it is always worth asking why monetary concerns are, in modern discourse, considered inherently more valuable than moral or spiritual appeals. I do not say “material” concerns, because a desire to maintain ecosystems which may be ultimately valuable to our own thriving given the many variables that go into the natural world is very much a “material” concern. It just doesn’t make anyone very much money within a lifetime.
The alternative view being that Nature created an aspect of Nature separate from itself.