If you’ve watched much cable news or streamed other programs lately you’ve probably seen the ads for a dietary supplement called “Balance of Nature.” These are pills that, even though they are not whole foods, are said to contain nutrients present in fruits and vegetables. The name of this product benefits from two widely-held and related beliefs: one, that people should eat a balanced diet; and two, that the natural world is (or should be) balanced: it is self-regulating and in the absence of significant human meddling an ecosystem such as a forest corrects disturbances and moves over time in the direction of balance, as for example in the fluctuating populations of a predator species and its prey.
These two beliefs are so widely held that they are thought to go without saying. But if one is asked about them, the usual reply is that according to scientific studies, a diet of too high in its proportion of fat, carbohydrate, or protein has been shown to be unhealthful. Similarly, scientists have observed and studied self-regulation and dynamic but balanced equilibria in natural ecosystems such as lakes for more than a hundred years. Nevertheless, each of these beliefs has undergone significant challenge. Think, for example, of high protein or low carbohydrate diets; these are not balanced in the usual sense, yet they are said to be more healthful. As regards balance in the natural world, scientists for the past fifty years have found so many instances in which nature absent meaningful human influence does not return to a previous balance after significant disturbance but, rather, changes to a different state or regime with different components and a different kind of equilibrium, that within the field of ecological science the idea of natural balance has by now been discredited and abandoned. I return to "balance of nature" because some members of our DERT (diverse environmentalist research team) will be speaking in a forum five weeks from now on the subject of ecological imaginaries, and as I wrote in this blog a year ago, balance of nature is an ecological imaginary--and I intend to say some more things about it.
Here, then, a few further thoughts. Despite it having been discarded by ecological scientists, the belief in natural balance persists in the public sphere and especially among people concerned with the current environmental crisis. Oversimplified, the idea goes something like this: human beings have so disturbed the natural world through extraction of natural resources like fossil fuels and the ensuing emissions, unsustainable economic growth and endless construction that destroys natural habitat, and so on and on, that the result is an environmental crisis whose symptoms are climate change and species extinction. The natural world is obviously now out of balance but if we stop emitting carbon and stop destroying habitat the world will come back into balance. As a result, environmentalists are keen to reverse the major cause of this unbalance and replace fossil fuels with the natural energy of solar and wind power.
My point here isn’t to promote or discourage dietary supplements or to agree or disagree with the opposing views of ecological scientists and environmentalists concerning natural balance, but, rather, to consider the idea of natural balance as an “ecological imaginary”—that is, a network of ideas and beliefs that a particular group of people have about the natural world, what it is, how it operates, and how we should behave in relation to it. Such an ecological imaginary rises in contemporary America to the status of cultural myth. By myth I don’t mean to imply a superstition or something false, as myth is commonly understood, but rather a belief so powerful and pervasive that it usually goes unquestioned, regardless whether it is true or false. A contemporary example of such a myth is the belief that continuous economic growth is required for national prosperity and wellbeing. American myths that were powerful when I was younger included "e pluribus unum" (out of many, one) -- that is, the melting pot; and the idea that hard work and virtue will be rewarded because America was a "land of opportunity" -- equal opportunity. Today the opposite of those myths are prevalent: that instead of assimilation and harmony Americans are increasingly fractured and at odds with one another; and that due to growing inequality of opportunity, rewards come from not from diligence and integrity but from gaming the system.
I associate the folklorist Richard Dorson with the idea that these American cultural myths are examples of folklore; that is, they are better understood as folk beliefs than as belonging to the world of verifiable fact. I
haven't yet found just where Dorson's wrote about these myth-symbols as
folklore. He did write about American (national) folklore, however, and
in a 1978 article, "American Folklore vs. Folklore in America," he wrote
briefly about the frontier and its influence on the formation of
American folk traditions. As J. L. Austin would have said, these folk beliefs and traditions are “performative”: they were affirmed in the process of being enacted, and they brought about change in the world by virtue of their performances as speech acts. As a graduate student after World War II, Dorson had been immersed in the so-called “myth-symbol school” of American Studies. Its guiding idea was that Americans shaped their lives on the basis of deeply held beliefs related to certain symbols, such as the American frontier, thought to encourage a belief in the abundance of natural resources, as well as personality traits such as courage, forbearance and ingenuity, along with the belief that merit was based on ability, not birth or status. If he were alive today he would say that Americans perform their beliefs in expressive cultural forms related to those symbols. Examples would be environmentalists performing their beliefs by protesting the progress of fossil fuel pipelines, and rural people sharing stories about the land and sustainability of its resources, what Mary Hufford has called a “narrative ecology.”
To return to “balance of nature,” then, as both an ecological imaginary and a folk belief that environmentalists perform and ecological scientists debunk, is there a way to reconcile these opposing viewpoints? In the next entry I will discuss one possible way to do this, looking at different ways that the two scientists who proposed the Gaia Hypothesis, Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock, have approached planet Earth as a holistic entity. It turns on the difference between function (Margulis) and purpose (Lovelock).
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