The Death of the “Natural” Environment

Managing human behaviors to prevent, or at lease mitigate, future harm is what many in my field are trying to do today. A Sisyphean task to say the least. We are, of course, acting on behalf of the greater society that was pushed by the environmental movement to recognize that our actions are leading to future challenges in resource availability. If this uphill battle is to be won, we need to be able to define the environment. So far, I believe that we have failed to do so.

By most accounts the natural environment is all living and non-living things occurring naturally on earth and all of the interactions thereof. However, most scholars in the field go on to contrast this against the built environment, which comprises of all things strongly influenced by humans. This anthropocentric way of defining the environment is logically flawed.


Once you start compartmentalizing the environment between the natural and the built, you will quickly see that there is no natural environment. There are numerous studies which show that we live on a planet where human intervention is reflected in the vast majority of ecosystems. One such example was conducted at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, which shows that there are more trees on farms than in forests (Ellis,2008). The communities we have built on former deltas and floodplains were only possible through the damming of rivers and the pumping of groundwater. Humans have fundamentally changed the chemical composition of the earth’s oceans and atmosphere through the release of industrial by-product gases. The current distribution of biomes would be an outright impossibility on a human-free earth.

It is not rational to assume that the environment is gone, but we need to re-look at our definition of it. The idea that humans are somehow divorced from the natural environment fits way too neatly with abandoned theories of creationism and anthropocentric supremacy over the environment. The gap between humans and the environment is purely psychological, not physical. Attempts to recognize a physical gap only enables the kind of behaviors that lead to poor decision making.

Let’s look at a common fixture of any urban environment: the lawn. It is hard to look at a manicured lawn and see it as a part of the natural environment, but separating that lawn from the environment ignores the fertilizers that were applied to it which runs strait to our watershed, it ignores the carbon dioxide used to mow that lawn, and it ignores the serious biome alteration that occurred when that lawn and all of the neighboring lawns, parking lots and structures caused in their formation.

I have heard many people who label themselves as environmentalists who seem to recognize physical connections between human behaviors and the environment and condemn the behaviors that adversely impact the environment. Yet I hear many of these same people argue that nature is something that only exists without the presence of human intervention.

How we define the environment is a matter of what kind of language we use in determining, implementing, and analyzing policy. In the field of Resource Management Policy, language is everything. How we define what it is we are saving will have a huge impact on our goals, our credibility, and our chances of success.

Erle C Ellis, and Navin Ramankutty. 2008. Putting people in the map: anthropogenic biomes of the world. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 6: 439–447.