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When European settlers first moved from the East Coast out into the great hinterland of North America, they believed that what they saw was nature. Jasper Cropsey, Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, and Albert Bierstadt painted their grand mystical visions of a landscape unsullied by mankind, and it is that pristine picture which has stuck ever since.

Of course, the settlers were wrong. It was in fact a landscape that had already been tailored by Indian nations to fit very specific lifestyles and satisfy religious needs. Like bees scattering pollen, the Indians had carried seed across the continent and bred wild teosinte into tender corn. If the first humans had not crossed the Bering land bridge over ten thousand years ago then much, perhaps most, of the prairie would have been deciduous oak and beech forests. Thoreau, on the other hand, who puttered about Walden for long enough to see what was under the surface, knew well that the “wilderness” in which he lived had been farmed and dwelt upon by earlier peoples. What he probably did not know was the reason they were no longer around: as many as nine-tenths of the natives had been wiped out by European diseases brought over by the Spanish nearly four hundred years before.

The point here is not another postcolonial rant about the crimes of the West, but rather what we mean by nature and what our conception of ourselves as humans in relation to it really is. If we define natural as that which is not human, denying that our species emerged as the result of a naturally occurring process, then we resemble the creationists who want school boards to ban even the teaching of human evolution. We did not suddenly supervene upon this planet by divine intervention. It is far more miraculous that we emerged, and are still emerging, from the matter, energy, and information of the world. We owe our humanity to our power of speech just as the elk derives his identity from his antlers, each species responding to the peculiar demands of their environments. Man himself grew up out of the earth. After all, “Adam” means “red clay.” If we do decide to define man as natural but classify our social and cultural creations as artificial, then we subscribe to the idea that humans are only natural in isolation. This is a theory that all the human sciences—anthropology, psychology, paleoanthropology, linguistics, ethnology—emphatically reject.

As the great bacteriologist Lynn Margulis has pointed out, we are part of an immense web of earthly life. We are ourselves made up of a collection of ancient bacteria, protists, and viruses that have been consolidated mostly—but not entirely—into our genes, expressed as organelles and ingenious chemical machinery, and still freely exchanging snippets of DNA and RNA with other organisms. Then again, if we say that everything is natural, including anthropogenic global warming, modernist art, and Hiroshima, then what becomes of our tendency to value the natural and revere nature? And if the word refers to everything, is it any use at all?

All societies, the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss tells us, distinguish between nature and culture, the raw and the cooked. The philosophical, moral, and aesthetic dimensions of the distinction, however, differ profoundly from one society to another. Indeed, one might almost categorize societies in a way that would nicely cut across the usual economic, technological, and historical divides solely by the content of their nature/culture distinction. Are emotions natural or cultural? Is nature “good” and culture “bad,” or vice versa? Is nature dynamic and culture static, or the other way around? Is nature self-aware and culture innocent? Is nature personal and culture collective? Different societies emphasize different distinctions, and the conflicts within all cultures consist to a large extent of a struggle over the strategic definition of these words.

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