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In Taking 'Harm' Out of 'Harmony with Nature' Don Boudreaux rebuts criticism of his earlier post Living in Harmony with Nature, citing Ologies and Urgies as one of the critical responses.
These objections fall into three overlapping camps:This misses the central criticism stated in Ologies and Urgies; the failure to grasp the advanced science of pre-industrial societies, especially the pre-Columbian inhabitants of the Americas used in his examples. The concluding graf of that post sums up.pre-industrial Europeans didn’t live so harmoniously with nature; . . .
not all that we moderns do is harmonious with nature. . .
modern humans’ footprint on nature is extensive. . .
Boudreaux's concluding point - It is science – rational thought, skepticism, critical inquiry – that furthers greater harmony with nature - is true, but that means recognizing the science of the past and its accomplishments. They were natural philosophers too and have some things to teach us. Their soil science, agronomics and forest management techniques were superb. We are only now beginning to be able to understand their accomplishments, motivated in no small part by the failures of ours. We could have done this long ago had we not been blinded by the assumption that they were barbarians who had no useful technologies. When we winnow the natural philosophy from the superstitious mumbo-jumbo - their's and our's - our ologies and urgies progress.Boudreaux restates his thesis:
In other words, knowledge of science is knowledge of nature, and those who best understand natural laws are best able to achieve their goals more readily and more fully than those who don't understand these laws as well.This still misses the science that was known in the past but has been lost, and so perpetuates the Euro myth that the people of the new world were barbarians who lacked scientific knowledge. This is especially relevant to the idea of living harmoniously with nature since the lost knowledge is of high quality natural science and engineering problems that are increasingly important for us today.I didn’t mean to suggest that we moderns understand nature fully; of course we don’t. To the extent that we remain ignorant of natural laws – and this extent is absolutely vast, I believe – our ability to live more harmoniously with nature is hampered. But because (mostly through science) we understand natural laws more than did our ancestors, we live more harmoniously with nature than they lived.
It’s time we stop defining living harmoniously as having no effect on nature. Nothing intrinsic to the concept ‘living harmoniously with nature’ requires that humans live in such a way as to leave the environment as close as possible to what it would be like if we didn’t exist.One myth battling another myth. Pre-industrial societies did not exist without impacts on nature. As noted in Ologies and Urgies the terraforming in the Amazon could be humankind’s largest engineering relic, covering at least 10 percent of Amazonia - an area the size of France. On every continent pre-industrial societies hugely altered their environments. What many think of as pristine wilderness are in fact human created environments.
It's important to understand this for two good reasons. First, they had knowledge, natural philosophy and science, that we lack today. Second, failure to grasp that these are human created environments leads to the false assumption that they can be neglected, that a depeopled landscape with little or no continuing management will recreate pre-industrial conditions.
Boudreaux's point is partly valid; It is science – rational thought, skepticism, critical inquiry – that furthers greater harmony with nature. But the examples used are false and the idea that people today live more harmoniously is mistaken in several important ways. A little rational thought, skepticism and critical inquiry - especially critical inquiry - will enable us to regain old knowledge. As noted in comments:
My understanding of the "living in harmony" trope, which may differ from what others understand, is informed by complex adaptive systems thinking. Each natural system is in a dynamic equilibrium at any given time, cycling through a short term series of states, as well as having longer term cycles. Cycles within cycles. Tacit and explicit knowledge of the cycles enables human objectives to be pursued with style and grace, expending less energy to achieve goals, reducing system disruption and unintended consequences. It's environmental jiu-jitsu that uses the momentum and inclinations of the system rather than struggling against them. Harmony is another way of describing such informed and coordinated behavior.The nativist "noble savage" myth is mistaken in that it fails to grasp the high science of the "savages". The "modern science" myth is mistaken for the very same reason. Both take it as an article of faith that science itself is modern, something that pre-industrial societies lacked. Not so. Their science was different but the process of observation, experimentation and step-wise refinement was identical. It's the default behavior, it's what humans do when they aren't blinded by unreasoning faith.
We can gain knowledge and improve our policies by open minded inquiry into the scientific and engineering accomplishments of pre-industrial societies that necessarily focused more on bio-engineering than mechanical engineering. They did some remarkable things that we recognize such as domesticating all our modern foods and fibers except those we have recently created with genetic engineering. They were genetic engineers too though they didn't use mechanical techniques. They also did some remarkable things that we do not yet fully recognize, especially in the use of microbial life to achieve sophisticated soil science objectives.
We are woefully ignorant of soil science. It was only in 1996 that we discovered glomalin, the durable soil carbon produced by VAM fungi that contributes so much to soil organic matter and fertility. Perhaps more importantly we discovered what VAM do with all those hyphae that extend sometimes for hundreds of miles below ground. Glomalin is dead hyphae and extremely good for soil but when alive it's the phosphorous transport system. VAM barter phosphorous to plants for sugar. It's a real underground economy that moves otherwise immobile phosphorous around and keeps the economy humming. All it takes to destroy it is a plow.
That is just part of our ignorance of the carbon cycle. We have few clues about terra preta, the super fertile Amazonian Dark Earth found in those ancient terraformed fields. It seems to have something to do with soil bacteria and charcoal like carbon compounds but we can't make it today. We are like a cargo cult that finds things we don't understand, and though we ape the activities of the past we lack crucial bits of information that would allow us to make our own.
A similar scenario can be described for forest and grassland management, but this post is long already. The central point is that pre-industrial societies had scientific knowledge that we haven't until recently even recognized as science. Only our most advanced science has begun to grasp what they were doing, that they even did anything. With our simplistic Cartesian minds we fail to see sophisticated order when we look at it. A multi-species polyculture explicitly created to be super productive looks to us like an uncultivated, disordered place though it is in fact far more cultivated than we can yet achieve.
It isn't that they were wise and good and we are dumb and bad. It's that they had lots of time and labor. They were able to develop systems that were extremely labor intensive and that took decades or even centuries to implement. When we understand what they did - either by reverse engineering their works or reinventing them ourselves - we may be able to implement them using modern robotics informed by sophisticated sensor networks. We may not have the time and labor they had but we are coming to have human equivalent sensor and actuator capabilities that can do the same work even faster and more precisely.
There is another possible future. We may just learn to synthesize everything from space rocks and no longer require sophisticated biological systems to produce our stuff. Nanotech may trump biotech though at that level there is little to distinguish one from the other. Our food and fiber may all be grown in vats or created on demand by molecular assemblers from inert feedstocks. Still, even if we each have personal Drexlers, we still have a planet to own and operate including not least an atmosphere to manage. What we learn about pre-industrial terraforming techniques may pay dividends for centuries.