Environmentalism is built on a paradox. Since Darwin, we’ve known that humans are a seamless extension of the evolutionary tree of life. Everything we do, from hunting and slaughtering other animals to polluting and destroying habitats to altering the climate of the planet, is by definition a natural part of the biosphere. Environmental activism, though, is motivated by a sense that human activity is a profound rupture from the proper trajectory of nature. Humans are somehow culpable, threatening, and destructive in a way that the biosphere in general was not.
Endless debates on everything from whether ecosystems are fundamentally stable or dynamic systems to the proper treatment of invasive species in ecological restoration to the role of paleolithic humans in megafauna extinctions to the validity of the concept of “wilderness” all arise from the stubborn contradiction between these two premises. I have no way to resolve those disputes, and ultimately I don’t think there’s anything to be done but to continue hashing them out as we go. There is no “correct” way to square this circle; the paradox is irreducible and irresolvable. But I do think I have an idea that might help some people think about it differently.
As I’ve discussed here before, much of the literature on the unique ecological turpitude of humanity has engaged in a misguided attempt to name the trait that pushed our ancestors out of the harmonious bosom of nature. Robin Wall Kimmerer argues that it was the use of objectifying pronouns like “it” for nature that precipitated an “age of extinction.” David Abram attributes it to writing, while Derrick Jensen blames agriculture. Perhaps the most straightforward articulation is Jack Forbes’ diagnosis that Western civilization is afflicted with “Wetiko psychosis,” a disease it has forcibly inflicted on the rest of the world. Wetiko psychosis is in essence a cultural virus that encourages those who carry it to engage in “cannibalism.” That is, to hurt other people and destroy ecosystems in a violent effort to fulfill one’s own gluttonous urges.
Jensen, Abram, and Kimmerer are ultimately doing the same thing that Forbes is doing. Faced with the irreconcilable facts that humans are part of nature and act to destroy nature, they pathologize humanity. Industrial civilization might be natural, but it’s natural in the way that a tumor, or a virus, or a parasite, is natural. It grows ceaselessly and selfishly at the direct expense of its host--in this case, the whole planet. This is still a somewhat uncomfortable solution, since viruses and parasites and tumors are in fact ecologically important and occasionally even active targets of conservation. It’s more like viruses, tumors, and parasites are ecological metaphors for a violation that is fundamentally novel in scale and pace and cruelty.
The problem is that they’re not especially good metaphors. Humans are a genuine evolutionary novelty, while the selfish, cruel, catastrophically destructive endless growth displayed by tumors and viruses is among the most ancient and universal aspects of life on Earth. It’s the same thing that bugs me so much about moralizing explanations of colonialism, writ large. It simply isn’t tenable to suggest that humans, any more than Europeans, have grown and spread as quickly as we have because we were willing to take and hurt and destroy where others were not. In fact, pathology metaphors get it precisely backwards: humans are an evolutionary novelty because of our means of creation, not destruction.
The human ability to create is unprecedented because cultural evolution is unprecedented. Nonetheless, I think there is an ecological metaphor that describes what humans are doing with cultural evolution better than cancer: galls.
It’s a failure of ecological education that so few people, even entomologists and naturalists, understand what galls are. There’s a reason this hasn’t been a salient metaphor. So here’s a primer. Galls are structures produced by plants in response to very specific instructions given by mites, insects, and fungi. Gallformers are not hackers that systematically deactivate plant defenses to steal their nutrients. They’re not scars the plant creates in response to a wound or infection. They’re novel organs, structures the gallformer creates by activating the plant’s DNA in ways it can’t achieve on its own. Gallformers teach plants a new way to be themselves. They show their host that it’s only tried one way to read its DNA, and introduce them to one of the thousands of other ways they could grow.
Over millions of years of evolution, gallformers have designed new plant organs to provide themselves with food and shelter. And the word design really is apt here. The aesthetic variety of galls was the thing that drew me to learn about them in the first place. Galls made even by closely related insects on the same host species can vary wildly in their form, and many of them contain features that almost cry out to be called decorative (see, for instance, the portfolio of galls found on North American hickory leaves). All of them serve the same few functions--providing shelter from environmental extremes, an accessible source of food, and protection from predators--but different galls achieve these goals in very different ways.
(A Caryomyia asteris gall on Carya tomentosa. Photo by Ken Kneidel)
If biotechnology continues to progress, humans will one day be able to participate in the gallforming process directly, designing plant organs to fulfill our own aesthetic and functional purposes. More to the point, though, I think gallforming is a reasonably apt, if still imperfect, metaphor for the human process ecologists call “niche construction.” Yes, humans consume an increasing proportion of the biosphere’s resources. But we do so by, in effect, forming galls at the scale of the ecosystem. We design new ways to arrange the species, genes, and the physical environment present to provide us with shelter, food, and safety.
Of course, many human land uses are more like wounds than galls: purely extractive, allowed to recover as a scar, not reshaped by any particular design. And conversely, galls don’t increase their host’s capacity to extract energy and nutrients from their environment, while humans have already done both for the biosphere. It’s an imperfect metaphor and a self-consciously positive, even aspirational one (though many galls are neither especially pretty nor entirely benign for their host).
Still, I think it captures better than any alternative the unique relationship industrial humans have with the natural world. We are undeniably parasitic, destroying habitats and eradicating species, bending ever larger shares of the world’s productivity to our own benefit. We will never be a benign, commensal presence on the Earth. We are only rarely (and usually accidentally) like beavers, modifying the environment in ways that facilitate the flourishing of hundreds of other species. But like a gall, our growth is transformative but not necessarily lethal for our host. As our ability to reshape the world evolves, it will look less like a tumor and more like a gall: sustainable, first and foremost, but also contained, allowing the existing processes of our host to continue unmolested outside the systems we have modified for our own use.
Most importantly, though, galls are expressions of ecological creativity. If humans are like gallformers, we can aspire to see our works, from plant and pet breeding to architecture and landscape design, as a new expression of our planet’s creative potential. Through our hands, the biosphere is redesigning itself.