On the nature-culture dualism

Urban ecology as a disciplinary field did not gain serious attention until the 1970s (1). For most of the 19th and 20th centuries, wildlife—at least as conceived in much of Europe and North America—was something that happened ‘out there,’ away from the hustle and bustle of city life (2). At first, nature was feared—it was rough and dangerous and could bring a person’s life to a swift close—and then it was revered, beautiful and mysterious, the subject of poetry and lore (2). But still, it was ‘away’: somewhere to visit and then leave behind. This kind of thinking pitted wilderness and humanity against each another and created a space for the nature-culture dualism that dominated the European imagination for centuries (3). It was from within this chasm that European settlers felt empowered to colonise ‘wild’, ‘empty’ land, to preserve in all its ‘pristine’ glory, and to remove the very people who had stewarded it for generations (2). This systematic separation of natural processes from humanity, of ‘putting nature in a box’, was painfully wrought—and with lasting repercussions—in the great expanses of the western United States, whose national parks are an embodiment of our obsession with—and misunderstanding of—nature.

In the late 1800s, Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, as well as other parks around the United States, were created with an explicit goal of providing an experience of ‘uninhabited wilderness’ to wealthy tourists (4). What was perhaps less explicit was the forced removal of native people from this land, and the acknowledgment that the land that was viewed by Europeans as pristine wilderness was in fact shaped for millennia by the very people they were removing (4). In recent decades, this fatal misunderstanding has been recognised, and many wildlife organisations acknowledge their historical role in excluding indigenous peoples from conservation efforts on their own land (5). Today, the rhetoric around nature conservation has shifted, and rather than further embedding the nature-culture dichotomy into our ways of thinking, the 2022 Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework from the Convention on Biological Diversity frames indigenous people as ‘custodians of biodiversity’ (6), recognising the value of people in the natural landscape.

The latter part of the 20th century saw ecologists growing increasingly concerned with the impacts of humans on the natural world, and with this, their attitudes towards studying urban ecosystems changed (7). Since the 1990s, publications focusing on urban wildlife have increased dramatically, and new educational programmes have emerged (8), helping to legitimise the field of urban ecology. Yet as recently as 2001, urban ecology was viewed as a ‘soft science', with conservation measures carried out in urban areas described by professional ecologists as ‘highly experimental and without any guarantee of success’ (Harrison and Davies, 2002, p.103). Government funding of urban biodiversity studies lags well behind those from academic institutions, with the majority of public funds for wildlife conservation funnelled to rural areas (8).

Though the nature-culture dualism has weakened significantly, its roots are still embedded in much of the environmental literature, and in many minds (3). Misconceptions about nature conservation abound, with human-dominated, urban landscapes considered far less valuable, in conservation terms, than their sparsely populated, rural counterparts—a narrative that pervades ‘policy, practice and the public psyche’ (10). While it is true that urbanisation poses real and significant threats to biodiversity, there has been too much focus on the negative impacts of urbanisation, with not enough research or effort being funnelled into the opportunities it might create through intentional design (11). Rather than solely looking to our ‘wild’ landscapes to help us conserve some of our rare and threatened species, we might think to turn our focus inward, to the very landscapes we inhabit, so we might harness the positive impacts of urbanisation into a more thoughtful, inclusive conservation (12). The expansion of urban ecology as a legitimate field of study is part of the process of weakening the nature-culture dualism, as we acknowledge that ‘wilderness’ and humanity are not distinct entities; in today’s rapidly urbanising world, they must necessarily interact and be treated as connected phenomena.

Bibliography

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2.             Adams WM. Against Extinction: The Story of Conservation. Routledge; 2013.

3.             Haila Y. Beyond the Nature-Culture Dualism. Biology & Philosophy. 2000 Mar 1;15(2):155–75.

4.             Spence MD. Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks. Oxford University Press; 1999. 204 p.

5.             Lee E. Protected Areas, Country and Value: The Nature–Culture Tyranny of the IUCN’s Protected Area Guidelines for Indigenous Australians. Antipode. 2016;48(2):355–74.

6.             Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. In Montreal, Canada: UN Environment Programme; 2022.

7.             Niemelä J. Is there a need for a theory of urban ecology? Urban Ecosystems. 1999 Mar;3:57–65.

8.             Collins MK, Magle SB, Gallo T. Global trends in urban wildlife ecology and conservation. Biological Conservation. 2021 Sep 1;261:109236.

9.             Harrison C, Davies G. Conserving biodiversity that matters: practitioners’ perspectives on brownfield development and urban nature conservation in London. Journal of Environmental Management. 2002 May;65(1):95–108.

10.          Soanes K, Sievers M, Chee YE, Williams NSG, Bhardwaj M, Marshall AJ, et al. Correcting common misconceptions to inspire conservation action in urban environments. Conservation Biology. 2019;33(2):300–6.

11.          Spotswood EN, Beller EE, Grossinger R, Grenier JL, Heller NE, Aronson MFJ. The Biological Deserts Fallacy: Cities in Their Landscapes Contribute More than We Think to Regional Biodiversity. BioScience. 2021 Feb 1;71(2):148–60.

12.          Lepczyk CA, Aronson MF, La Sorte FA. Cities as sanctuaries. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. 2023;21(5):251–9.