Civilization vs. Nature

I was a hunter. I hunted my prey, killed it, dressed it, cooked it, and ate it. Since then, however, I have become civilized, and no longer kill my own food. Someone else does that for me.

My family and I live in a suburb of Boston, Massachusetts. Outside our back window, wedged between commercial properties and multiunit housing, a narrow band of trees is home to cardinals, mockingbirds, newts, raccoons, opossums, crows, and mourning doves, among other species. On humid summer nights, four-inch slugs ooze determinedly across the sidewalk while bats flutter and dart across the moon. But even the most urban parts of Boston are not devoid of wildlife. Rats scuttle through the sewers and across the cobblestones as cockroaches venture out in quiet midnight kitchens. Mallard ducks and Canadian geese swim in every spot of open water, while pigeons pace the pavement for scraps and handouts.

One evening as I walked home, small, white feathers drifted down from a tree. Amid the high-rise apartment buildings, I looked up and saw a hawk on a branch, feasting on its kill, a mourning dove in its claw - the epilogue to a scene in nature's eternal play. At the bottom of the food chain, plants draw nutrients from the earth and sky, and in death, as they are consumed by plant-eaters, pass these nutrients up to the next link, and so on up the food chain. Predators kill and eat animals that are either predators of some other animal or consumers of plants. Predators die and return their nutrients to the earth, connecting the last link to the first in the endless chain of life and death.

Humans are the ultimate predators. There is no creature too big or powerful for us to hunt and kill. However, civilization has insulated us from the life and death cycle. We envision ourselves as far removed from hunting and gathering. We see only washed vegetables and fruits and pristinely packaged meats. Since we see neither the plant coaxed into fruition from the soil nor the animal killed and butchered, it is easy to mislead ourselves into thinking that these things are not part of our lives and that we are not part of the process.

As a boy in northern Wisconsin, I grew up in a hunting culture. We loved being in the woods at all times, but especially at hunting season. At school we excitedly discussed the prospect of our first hunt. Often three generations of any given family took to the woods. By Thanksgiving, many yards were adorned with a gutted deer carcass hanging by a meat hook from a tree.

As a young man, I moved far away from home to study music. I had no time for hunting and eventually sold my guns to a gun shop. Later I moved to Boston and did not miss hunting at all. I met my wife (who would never in a million years permit a gun in the house) and together we started a family. As the years went by, our family grew. Today we have three children, the eldest fifteen years old.

Last year, I put off a Thanksgiving trip to visit my family in northern Wisconsin because my brother-in-law is an avid hunter, and the tree in his front yard would definitely be one of those decorated with the carcass of a deer. In fact, dead deer were likely to be hanging from hundreds of trees in my hometown. Because we have virtually eliminated all other predators from our forests, a nationwide population explosion has made it almost impossible to venture into the woods without tripping over a deer. As a result, in my hometown, many more deer are killed during hunting season than when I was young. I thought that my children might be upset by the spectacle of so many butchered deer.

Apparently my time away from hunting made me more civilized. Not only had I stopped killing animals for food, but I had also adopted the ethic that even visual contact with animals killed for food was somehow disturbing and wrong. My children should not see the butchered kill; the kill should not be part of their heritage, as it was mine. We should evolve beyond that.

Yet as I shoved our Thanksgiving turkey into the oven, I felt that maybe I was being a hypocrite. After all, we are not vegetarians. While perhaps the joy of hunting and killing should be left behind in our quest for planet-wide peace, how much different is the joy of killing than the joy of eating an animal someone else has killed? Once having identified dead animals as the source of meat, my children would have had the opportunity to decide for themselves how to deal with the cost of their dietary choices in terms of animal lives lost. In sparing my children exposure to the carnage of deer season, perhaps I had denied them an important ethical lesson.

Many North American native cultures prior to the coming of the Europeans relied on hunting and fishing as their main sources of high protein food. In some cultures it was customary to thank the spirit of the animal whose life had been taken to provide food. The act of thanking the animal for its life indicates an assumption that the animal valued its life and questions the right of the slayer to take it. The reverence and gratitude of this tradition demonstrates how a feeling human being can support the killing of an animal for food with a belief system that values empathy and respect. Were empathy and respect widely esteemed, world peace would be much closer.

In our increasingly civilized culture, food animals are treated in an increasingly uncivilized manner. Whereas in Native American culture, food animals enjoyed a comparatively idyllic lifestyle until becoming prey, our food animals have no such advantage. Veal calves are kept in lightless stalls in a state of anemia for the entirety of their short lives without even a single opportunity to suckle their mother's milk. Chicken's beaks are routinely cut off, depriving them of their primary means of sensory contact with the world. Most food animals are injected with a battery of hormones and antibiotics to prevent sickness and enhance growth; they are scientifically bred and genetically manipulated. They live out their lives, are killed, processed, and even cooked in a food-factory environment. If civilizations were to be judged on their treatment of food animals, ours would be among the most heartless and brutal in history.

On the other hand, maybe our physical and psychological separation from domesticated food animals due to the industrialization of food production is a necessary step in the ascension of humanity from predatory animal to the next level of civilization. Perhaps that next step will be to genetically alter animals to the point that they are simple blobs of meat on life support, growing like fruit to be harvested at maturity. Instead of raising cows on a ranch we will clone pre-cut steaks and roasts in a sterile environment. We will kill no animals because our meat will never truly be alive.

If we achieved this, we might be tempted to think that we had at last gained independence from nature. However, cloning cuts of meat would be possible only through the natural process of cellular division. Bending nature to our will does not constitute independence from nature. Instead it underlines our continued dependence upon nature.

In northern Wisconsin, where hunters often kill and prepare animals as food, and farmers earn their living by growing fruit and raising animals, humanity's dependence upon nature is unquestionable. Here in Boston, where virtually no one kills an animal for food and agriculture is purely recreational, one can be lulled into a kind of civilized stupor in which one can seriously consider a question as ridiculous as, "Do we need nature?" while eating a large steak and drinking cabernet sauvignon.

Most people, I think, define nature as the way of things when humanity is not involved. Forests, mountains, animals, birds, fish, weeds, bugs, worms, and all the other things we try to keep out of our houses are all part of what we would call nature. But the things we can't keep out, such as germs, mites, insects, mildews, and other household pests, are part of nature, as are the bacteria that live inside our bodies, as are atoms and subatomic particles. All of these things occur naturally. Since down to the very fiber of our being we are constructed of nature's building blocks, how could we ask if we need nature? Isn't this like water asking if it needs hydrogen? Might we be wiser to ask the question, "Does nature need us?"

We are the great exploiters of nature. Forcing nature into a grid structure, we isolate species in forest-islands separated by cultivated land and asphalt-covered commercial property. We can wipe out entire species through mere carelessness. Perhaps the most powerful animal of all time, we feel we are in charge.

However, according to nature, we need oxygen to breathe, water to drink, and food to eat. If we combine carbon with all of our oxygen through combustion, we will suffocate. If all of our water, formerly distilled by evaporation and filtered through clean, natural soil, instead washes sulfur dioxide from polluted air and falls as acid rain on PCB-contaminated earth, we will eventually die of thirst. If we pave over all our arable land, we will starve. If we defile our environment, we will have nothing to sustain our lives.

Locked into our daily cycle of work and home, the life-and-death struggle for existence seems far away. Yet in the beginning we are formed inside our mothers, as are all mammals; in the middle we must breathe, drink, and eat; and in the end we must die. We are fully under the aegis and authority of the laws of nature and not even in death can we escape.

We are as inseparable from nature as we are from ourselves. Without nature, there is no "we".