Human Nature: A Blueprint for Managing the Earth — by People, for People by James Trefil. Time Books. $26. 249 pages.


The News & Observer

December 26, 2004

Human nature vs. mother nature

By PHILLIP MANNING

James Trefil sounds more like a 19th century Robber Baron than a 21st century scientist in his latest book, “Human Nature.” He states his thesis clearly: “The global ecosystem should be managed for the benefit, broadly conceived, of human beings.” In this age of eco-friendly ideology, organic foods and protection for the spotted owl, Trefil’s declaration that nature must serve mankind will rub many Americans the wrong way. In fact, the author says several colleagues who assisted him with the work “became so dismayed by ... my conclusions that they asked not to be recognized by name.”

However, Trefil is on to something. His thesis makes us uneasy because, when it comes to environmental issues, most of us are hypocrites; we talk the talk but don’t walk the walk. We may chip in a few bucks to environmental organizations, but we drive gas guzzlers, live in habitat-destroying suburbs, and rarely explore the natural world we say we want to save. We may proclaim piously that the planet should be managed to save endangered species or preserve natural ecosystems or conserve biodiversity, but most of us pay only lip service to these ecologically accepted goals. Credit Trefil then for making the case for what we do, rather than what we say. A physics professor at George Mason University, he is a clear thinker with an engaging writing style. He is also quite persuasive. So persuasive, he almost convinced me that his ideas about managing the Earth for people were right.

Trefil begins by pointing out that we humans already manage the Earth for our own benefit. The development of agriculture about 10,000 years ago, for example, allowed us to produce food that nature could not provide. We have come a long way since then. Those of us fortunate enough to live in modern industrialized societies — with our climate-controlled cars, houses, offices, and shopping malls — are now insulated from nature. For us, Trefil writes, “nature has almost ceased to matter.”

But what about the environment outside the plush cocoons in which we Americans spend much of our lives? What about the ecological ills we are bombarded with in newspapers and on television: polluted air, the loss of wilderness areas, global warming, and accelerating rates of extinctions? Trefil deals with each of these problems with a more or less even hand.

He argues, for example, that large gaps in insect fossil records make questionable the commonly held belief that extinction rates today are far higher than in the past. “Since most extinctions taking place today,” writes Trefil, “are supposed to be among insects, this makes a direct comparison of past and present extinction rates difficult.” Despite this uncertainty, Trefil concedes that human activity is probably driving some species toward extinction. Clearly, we humans, as managers of the planet, will have to make hard decisions about other species. “Some of those decisions,” he declares, “may well involve letting certain species become extinct.” These decisions should be made, he adds, “with a clear-eyed knowledge of both the benefits and costs of our actions.”

This conclusion poses some difficulties for us “clear-eyed” managers. What is the cost of allowing a species to go extinct? And since we are managing the planet for people, another difficulty is, Which people? Trefil says he got the idea for this book after encountering a buffalo while hiking in the Black Hills. The juxtaposition of untamed nature represented by the buffalo and the technology that allowed him to observe it in comfort — the car that got him there, his high-tech hiking boots, sunscreen, etc. — led him to muse about mankind’s relationship to nature.

The buffalo (a bison, actually, but I will stay with Trefil’s nomenclature) is a member of a species that once numbered about 50 million animals. Two decades of intense market hunting reduced their numbers to fewer than 1,000, and you can bet your cowboy boots that there were plenty of buffalo hunters that would have cheerfully slaughtered the rest. Fortunately, a few visionaries, including President Theodore Roosevelt, saw fit to save the buffalo by preserving them in zoos and a refuge in Oklahoma. Thanks to those very small, inexpensive steps, the buffalo were not wiped out. Today, they are common in the West.

Saving the buffalo from extinction benefitted few people who were alive in 1905. And it cost others — the buffalo hunters who missed out on the last few hides and the ranchers who lost grazing land when preserves were set aside to give the buffalo a place to roam. Most likely, however, most people back then didn’t care much one way or the other about the buffalo. So, what kind of clear-eyed cost-benefit analysis led us to save the buffalo? My guess is that there was none. And the people who saved the buffalo did so because it just seemed like a shame to see the once-widespread animals vanish.

“All ethics so far evolved,” wrote the environmentalist Aldo Leopold almost a half century after the first buffaloes were moved to protected ground, “rest upon a single premise that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. … The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals.”

Trefil sums up his ideas about extinctions as follows: “Surely feeding and caring for human beings is as lofty a moral goal as saving an endangered insect.” But how does saving endangered species hurt humans? In fact, Trefil’s seemingly reasonable statement is a straw horse; extinctions are not an either-or problem, and no one is suggesting that we sacrifice humans for insects — or buffalo. In fact, most measures aimed at protecting species and the environment cost only pennies compared to other government programs and inconvenience only a few, such as housing developers, mining companies, and buffalo hunters. Trefil is trying to put a good face on a bad idea, which is his central thesis of managing the planet for people. No matter how you disguise it, Trefil’s thesis contradicts Leopold’s land ethic, which holds that ethics should extend to creatures other than Homo sapiens.

Trefil is a reasonable man. He, no doubt, opposes the willy-nilly extinction of species. However, he wraps himself in a philosophical blanket that is threadbare. Surely, we planet-controlling humans have responsibilities to species other than our own. We are the bullies of the Earth. All species, excluding microbes and insects (cockroaches come to mind), survive only because we grant them that right. If we wanted to exterminate the buffalo today, we could do it. We may be hypocritical about some environmental issues, but most of us feel a responsibility for other species. I suspect Trefil does, too, but until he articulates those responsibilities in another book, we should stick with Leopold’s ethics.
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Phillip Manning’s book, “Islands of Hope,” won the 1999 National Outdoor Book Award for nature and the environment.