Mark Lynch
The Story of Nature: A Human History.
Jeremy Mynott. 2024. New Haven, Connecticut and London, U.K.: Yale University Press.
“The Greeks invented the idea of nature. They had a word for it.” (p. 62)
“All the facts of natural history taken by themselves have no value, but are barren, like a single sex. But marry it to history and it is full of life.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature (1836), quoted in The Story of Nature.)
I grew up in the fifties in Watertown, Massachusetts. Even though we lived close to Boston, and closer still to Cambridge, wildlife, of a kind, was all around me. DeKay’s brown snakes (Storeria dekayi) bred in trashy areas of empty lots on my street and in our school park. One of the earliest photos of me as a toddler shows me covered with a number of snakes playfully draped there by my brothers. Bats always seemed to get into our third-floor apartment. On summer nights, fireflies flitted around our small garden. Down my street a few blocks was the Charles River. I got to see the herring and smelt runs despite the horrific pollution. I was always bringing home a green frog or snapping turtle to keep over winter and then release in spring.
My two older brothers dealt with what was called a “reptile farm” in Texas. They would order stuff without telling my parents. The result was that my small home was also host to numerous alligator lizards, horned toads, and anoles that inevitably got loose from their terrariums and vanished. They would make their presence eventually known, usually at inconvenient times. We had family trips and vacations to Plum Island and Cape Cod, and I became familiar with horseshoe crabs, egrets, greenheads, and puffer fish.
Besides escaped herps, my apartment was also full of books that helped me identify what I saw. These included many volumes of the Golden Guides and a number of fascinating older natural history books. I loved pouring over the pages of these books and dreaming of seeing something exotic. Today my neighborhood has been developed, and all the lots and most of the gardens and fruit trees are gone. I doubt I could turn up a DeKay’s anywhere near there now. I’m sure the fireflies are absent.
Decades later, I was teaching a class at the Worcester Art Museum on nature and art for sixth graders. This class ended with a field trip to the Quabbin Reservoir to see and sketch some plants or creatures in situ. I found some coyote scat and was explaining what it was to the class when one student asked, “You mean animals go to the bathroom outside?” I realized the student was serious. I found out that many of these students had never seen a frog or held a snake. Most could not name five birds or plants that bred around them in the city. These were all things that were part of my earliest childhood memories. This lack of knowledge and contact with the natural world is a growing concern today. What happened? How did humans become so cut off from the natural world?
Jeremy Mynott has written a number of books on how different cultures have thought about the natural world through the ages. He is an emeritus fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge, and formerly chief executive of the Cambridge University Press. His books include Birdscapes: Birds in Our Imagination and Experience and Birds in the Ancient World. He was also one of the three contributors to The Consolation of Nature: Spring in the Time of Coronavirus, which I consider a classic of nature writing. He has long wrestled with why many people today seem separated from and ignorant of the world of plants and animals, even though the natural world is all around us. Do most people even care about nature? The Story of Nature is a splendid summary of his thoughts on the evolution of human thinking about nature. This grand story covers thousands of years and is told well by Mynott. It is impossible to summarize all of Mynott’s ideas in a simple review.
I was lucky enough to be imprinted early both on nature and on books. My first real book was a vintage bird guide, Edmund Sandars’ A Bird Book for the Pocket, which I think my parents acquired as a “damaged copy” from the local library. It certainly became damaged quite quickly, as I engaged with it in every way that a five-year-old can—smeared, scratched, torn, licked, crumpled, scribbled on and lugged around as my constant companion, indoors and out (especially out). (p. xii)
Mynott begins The Story of Nature by describing the current state of the planet. At no other time in human history have we known more technically and scientifically about the natural world, yet we willfully ignore the overwhelming existential threat that faces us. Of course, earth has endured cataclysmic climate changes over the eons caused by brutal cold, asteroid collisions, and massive volcanic eruptions. But this time a species living on the planet is causing the destructive changes. We are intelligent, we know what we need to do to mitigate the climate crises, but we seem powerless to actually enact any serious measures. At no other time has our species been so disconnected from the world that keeps us alive.
In this respect, science has tended to objectify the natural world as something separate that we can inspect, analyse and increasingly manipulate. But science is also giving us a growing understanding of the connections and interdependencies between human and other life forms, and this has tended to have an opposite effect. (p. 13)
These dystopias are far from unimaginable. They are happening now. David Attenborough, the nearest we have to a secular saint, was moved to issue the warning at COP24, the United Nations Conference on climate change in December 2018: “If we don’t take action, the collapse of our civilizations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon.” The stakes could scarcely be higher, but our response may one day come to seem very puzzling. (p. xvii)
Mynott looks at predominantly European cultures in The Story of Nature because those cultures are what he knows best. The earliest evidence we have about how humans have thought about nature is from paintings and curious sculptures from the Paleolithic period. Mynott begins with an intensive look at the stunning cave paintings of Lascaux in southwestern France and other cave sites. These date anywhere from 17,000 to 22,000 years B.C.E. These sensitive color depictions of numerous animals and birds have had anthropologists at odds trying to come up with a theory for their purpose. Mynott does a good job summarizing the major theories. Many people think that the cave painters were simply painting what animals they ate, or were creating images to celebrate hunts, or creating totems for future successful hunts. That would seem logical, but Mynott mentions a detail that contradicts the notion that these paintings are just about hunting:
Of the three most famous caves, Lascaux contains by far the largest number of images—including some 900 identifiable as animal images—but there is just one image of a reindeer, though we know from the bones preserved in the cave that reindeer was the principle food item for the hunters there. Reindeer are represented elsewhere, so this indicates that there is not an exact correspondence in any particular location between the animals portrayed and the preferred food items. They didn’t always paint what they ate, or vice versa. (p. 29)
Instead of asking what the artists intend, should we be asking what they reveal? (p. 25)
Mynott believes that these paintings could just celebrate the world around the cave people. We can never know for sure, but maybe at this time humans looked at themselves as just one animal among the many around them. Humans were a part of nature at this time.
Mynott later writes that agriculture and the domestication of animals were important steps for humans to begin to think about themselves as separate from nature.
It was the later domestication of animals, however, that made evident the logical progression of this distancing process. Domestication involved a deliberate de-wilding of certain key species, in which some of them actually became the technology, as living machines.” (p. 33)
Humans were no longer just “one animal among others,” and these others were progressively being subdivided into the wild and the domestic. (p. 42)
So, is it possible that the development of farming wasn’t an altogether positive evolution in human development? Mynott cites some authors who believe that may be true:
Indeed, some historians who study the broad sweep of human history have argued that, far from inaugurating an important advance in human civilization, the agricultural revolution was, as Jared Diamond put it, “the worst mistake in the history of the human race,” which created the conditions for new forms and levels of disease, warfare and inequality. (p. 59–60)
Things get even more complex as time marches on with the invention of writing. This eventually brings us to the Ancient Greeks who literally invented the idea of nature.
Writing also distanced them from the natural world they were describing and objectifying through these abstract symbols. This was a very different relationship from the tactile intimacy with which the cave artists had fashioned their lifelike representations of animals and their daily physical engagement with wildlife. (p. 87)
You could argue further that writing is the crucial distinguishing feature between humans and other animals. We are progressively learning that animals share more of the capacities for intelligence, communication and empathy we once thought were the exclusive preserve of Homo sapiens. But what they cannot do is self-consciously script their imaginings and thoughts to transcend the limitations of time and place. It was in this sense that the Greeks can be said to have invented nature. That is, they invented the concept. For the first time in Western history, it became a category that could be used to describe something and could be contrasted with other categories, argued about and invoked as a source of various human emotions and attitudes. We had become a different kind of animal and had now made ourselves aware of it. (p. 88)
Mynott’s writing in these chapters about classical cultures really shines. He knows the philosophers from the Pre-Socratics onward and has done decades of research on their writings and how they thought about the world around them. There is an old Zen phrase, and I am paraphrasing here, that declares that as soon as you have named something, you have lost it. As the Greeks described, debated, and philosophized about nature, nature became the realm of the non-human, a topic for discourse.
The final nail in the coffin for people thinking about nature as apart from the human experience came from the Christian writers during Medieval Europe.
The message seemed clear. Humankind occupied an intermediate position in the cosmic hierarchy between God and the animals, with authority from the former to exploit and control the latter at will. They had the power to subdue the earth and to dominate the whole of animal creation. It was a doctrinal double-whammy for nature: an extreme anthrocentrism, with man in God’s image (so presumably also vice versa) and carte blanche to subordinate animals wholly to human interests. (p. 90)
This view of humankind as the crown of creation is still with us today. If you believe that everything on earth was put there by God for us to figure out how to use for our benefit, then you look at the natural world as a commodity, something to be used and, when no longer useful, discarded.
There are many later chapters in The Story of Nature, but because of the limitations of space, I cannot possibly cite all those crucial themes in this brief review. I will note that some of my favorite chapters deal with the Romantic Period and the scientific revolution.
Mynott concludes The Story of Nature by imagining what the future holds. It is not a happy tale. He is aghast that despite the hard evidence, there are still climate deniers.
These debates go on, but the facts of the case are not in doubt. We are already in the Anthropocene. Extinctions are happening now. The species officially declared extinct each year may sound exotic, few in number and remote from our daily concerns. In 2022, for example, the bell finally tolled for the sharp-snouted day frog, the mountain mist frog, Coote’s tree snail, the giant atlas barbel, the Chinese paddlefish and others uncounted because they were unnamed—creatures that became extinct even before they had been discovered and identified. (p. 276)
We know what we need to do, but many believe that something will eventually come up that will not require any real sacrifice from us. Someone else can do what needs to be done.
That’s the classic free-rider problem. People benefit from the sacrifices of others and suffer from their own, so have no personal incentive to change their behaviour. Instead, they will always prefer to believe that less uncomfortable solutions could and should be found and that life will go on much as now. (p. 280)
We therefore seem to have a serious mismatch between what is scientifically necessary and what is politically possible. (p. 280)
If this situation continues, it may mean the end of human civilization as we know it. Some life will survive, of course, but that one species that could write about nature will not.
Nature would go on, but there might never again be a species for which it had any meaning. That is quite some cosmic responsibility and at the most fundamental level is the motive for avoiding this catastrophe. (p. 299)
Finally, Mynott writes about finding a Turtle Dove, a species that once was common in Britain. Its calls were once “the soundtrack of summer.” (p. 300) Now this species is very uncommon and rarely heard. The loss of the Turtle Dove in Britain is an event that echoes other declines of common and rare species around the globe. Mynott winds up this epic history with an appeal to our better selves to do something before it is too late.
We must strive to be good actors in the story of nature for as long as we remain part of it. But just as this epilogue is not a conclusion, neither is it an epitaph. The story is not yet over. (p. 316)
The Story of Nature is a powerful history, written by a person who knows the broad span of human writing about nature. Mynott’s writing is always interesting, very engaging, and sometimes surprising. This is an important book that you will actually enjoy reading. You get the feeling that Mynott’s long writing career has been building up to this one book. Despite what the quotes I have used in this review may have you believe, his book is not a simple polemic. It is not all gloom and doom. OK, maybe some gloom, but Mynott is relentlessly hopeful too. The Story of Nature is a powerful attempt to answer a basic question Socrates once asked and is quoted at the beginning of The Story of Nature:
His question, “What is nature?” turns out to be intimately connected to the more important questions, “Why does nature matter?” and “How should we live?” (p. 14)
LITERATURE CITED:
- McCarthy, M., J. Mynott, and P. Marreo. 2021. The Consolation of Nature: Spring in the Time of Coronavirus. London, U.K.: Hodder Studio.
- Mynott, J. 2020. Birds in the Ancient World. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press.
- Mynott, J. 2012. Birdscapes: Birds in Our Imagination and Experience. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
To listen to Mark Lynch’s conversations with Jeremy Mynott about this book recorded at WICN (90.5 FM) go to:
https://wicn.org/podcast/jeremy-mynott-2/
https://wicn.org/podcast/jeremy-mynott-pt-2/