On the philosophical history of the Lawn

Physical landscapes are the stage on which we perform our own beliefs and values. Destroying and creating wilderness is a way to define who we are and who we want to be. Lawns represent the individual battles in a very long war. In this essay I will trace the paths of that fight from early medieval European Christianity, through the Enlightenment and American colonialism, down to my own front lawn.

Thoreau, projecting his own race-based worldview on the ecological reality of North America, wrote; "What does Africa - what does the West stand for? Is not our own interior white on the chart? black though it may prove, like the coast, when discovered. (1)" Using the ecosystem as a metaphor is common throughout Western philosophy and literature, from the trial of Jesus in the wilderness to the building blocks of Minecraft. Western philosophers, rather than understanding animals, plants, and mountains as independent beings, often see them as mannequins on which to hang ideas. It is as if Thoreau were playing with dolls rather than interacting with a group of relatives.

The use of the real, physical world as a spiritual or philosophical metaphor distracts from ecological realities and forces that, while they respond to our actions, are not driven by our ideas. The physical and biological forces of Earth are in motion, beyond the prescription of our beliefs. Maple trees don't change their motives with the price of lumber. The slow drip of glacial melting is insensitive to climate change denial. Interrogating how our beliefs and philosophies can distance us from the realities of the physical world is a crucial step toward fostering productive cooperation.

Created landscapes have long been a way of asserting philosophical ideals. Wilderness historian Roderick Nash writes; "In early and medieval Christianity, wilderness kept its significance as the earthly realm of the powers of evil that the Church had to overcome. This was literally the case in the missionary efforts to the tribes of northern Europe, Christians judged their work to be successful when they cleared away the wild forests and cut down the sacred groves where the pagans held their rites.(2)" Like these medieval priests, American landscapers are creating lawn out of forest, desert, or prairie as an expression of their deep beliefs and ideals, eradicating what they see as inferior, subversive, or threatening in favor of something good and proper and beautiful.

Medieval Christian attitudes about good and bad, civilized and savage, formed the basis for much Enlightenment thinking about the natural world. The path to the improvement of nature, reasoned Enlightenment philosophers, was paved with categorization and hierarchy (3). In order to progress, we must know what is good and bad and what steps we must take to move from bad to good. The idea of a "great chain of being" that ranked all living species hierarchically, was complemented with hierarchies of humanity from savage to civilized. Of course, the philosophers placed themselves atop this ladder, whether they believed it stretched to God or to reason. Lawns and gardens were and continue to be the botanical epitome of civilization, the opposite of savage wilderness.

Cultivation of nature was viewed as unequivocally positive progress, and was the sign of moral superiority, the difference between civilized people and savages. Increasingly powerful technologies were allowing European countries to build sea walls, dam rivers, and farm more land. Many prominent philosophers and historians of the time believed that increased control over nature would always result in benefits to society(4). This devotion to a narrow definition of progress was expansive in its aspirations.

To Enlightenment philosophers, the inner world of human nature was, like the outer world of ecology and society, something barbarous and savage that needed to be tamed and improved by human reason and effort. The eighteenth-century historian Johann Gottfried von Herder wrote "...so man is placed [on Earth] as a sovereign of the Earth, to alter it by arts. Since he stole fire from Heaven, and rendered steel obedient to his hand; since he has made not only beasts, but his fellow men also, subservient to his will, and trained both them and plants to his purposes; he has contributed to the alteration of climate in various ways. Once Europe was a dark forest; and other regions, at present well cultivated, were the same.(5)" Enlightenment proponents wanted to fundamentally change the face of the Earth. They believed, not knowing how right they were, that this would change the global climate. This path to domination used many tools we may still recognize today.

Enlightenment philosophers, like modern landscapers, understood that control of nature wouldn't happen spontaneously. Francis Bacon, concluding his philosophical treatise Novum Organum, wrote; "For man, by the fall, lost at once his state of innocence, and his empire over creation, both of which can be partially recovered even in this life, the first by religion and faith, the second by the arts and sciences.(6)" Enlightenment historian Nathaniel Wolloch argues that this belief was adopted into scientific inquiry and rational philosophy from its previously religious roots. He argues that Enlightenment historians believed in a "direct correlation between a society's level of civilization and its degree of mastery of nature, the last comprising the true measure of being human. Humanity was part of the natural order, but the superior part, and the conquest of nature was maintained by force rather than by any divine gift.(7)"

American landscapers also have a philosophical heritage from those early voluntary colonists of the United States, the Puritans. Puritans viewed wilderness as a trial, and the transformation from wilderness to civilization as symbolic of the journey from damnation to salvation, from an evil, tempting Earth to a safe, beautiful heaven. The wilds were home to perceived supernatural, social, and political enemies: devils, banished witches, Native Americans. Nash writes of the physical as well as philosophical manifestation of America: "Wilderness was the basic ingredient of American culture. From the raw materials of the physical wilderness Americans built a civilization.(8)"

With the idea of wilderness they sought to give that civilization identity and meaning. Cutting trees and clearing swamps was improvement, progress, cleansing, a demonstration of piety. The ripping out of roots, whether by kidnapping African people, displacing Native American communities, or tearing down forests, was and remains the defining act of the United States. It was the creation of identity and meaning, untethered from the reality of the colonies as pre-existing Native American nations, the reality of the humanity of enslaved African people, and the reality of the existing ecosystem as fundamentally life-giving.

Early American colonists loved assigning theological meaning to the landscape. Imposing the will of civilization was unquestionably imposing the will of God, and Puritans took pride in doing God's work(9). Romanticism brought the idea that wilderness itself was created by God, but these supernatural aesthetics still kept humans and nature separated as if by a one-way mirror of reverence. According to this philosophy, either humans should dominate nature, or appreciate it from afar, but they will never be integrated with it.

For Thoreau, the Romantic-era philosopher who looms largest in nature writing, the space of just a few miles between his Walden pond cabin and the town of Concord, Massachusetts was a radical chasm. As much as he congratulated himself for his temporary residence outside city limits, he wrote of an inherent conflict and tension between wilderness and civilization, barbaric and enlightened.

Wilderness was his trial, as it was to the Puritans, and it was something to overcome rather than embrace, especially within his own mind. He wrote; "We are conscious of an animal in us, which awakens in proportion as our higher nature slumbers. It is reptile and sensual, and perhaps cannot be wholly expelled; like the worms which, even in life and health, occupy our bodies. Possibly we may withdraw from it, but never change it's nature. I fear that it may enjoy a certain health of its own; that we may be well, yet not pure.(10)" The untenable concept of purity is the conundrum that underpins many of our landscape ideals today.

The Romantic movement within American settler culture sought to provide an alternative to the religious reasons for environmental destruction and land seizures.(11) Ultimately they and the subsequent Transcendentalist movement were unable to avoid the same desire to escape the Earth and become supernatural. Worster writes, "...the transcendentalist movement placed little value on nature in and of herself; indeed the transcendentalist was as often repulsed by this slimy, beastly world as any good Christian. The lower order was not coequal with the higher realm of spirit; it was inferior, blemished, incomplete.(12)" The goal was, of course, to mold this inferior sphere to their enlightened ideals.

The idea that nature can only be saved when people are excluded, and nature is inherently corrupted when people are present is harmful to both people and nature, and relies on philosophical or theological beliefs that humans are super- or extra- natural. The conflict is especially difficult when turned inward, against our own internal nature. Even that supposed nature-lover Thoreau often expressed a longing for a celestial, rather than Earthly, existence. Thoreau wrote, "He is blessed who is assured that the animal is dying out in him day by day, and the divine being established. Perhaps there is none but has cause for shame on account of the inferior and brutish nature to which he is allied. I fear that we are such gods or demigods only as fauns and satyrs, the divine allied to beasts, the creatures of appetite, and that, to some extent, our very life is our disgrace.(13)" This places him firmly in the Western tradition of desperately longing to leave the natural world and enter a supernatural space. Believers in this particular branch of theology, like Thoreau, long for a separation from the natural world. We can see the connection he made between inner and outer nature in his poem; "How happy's he who hath due place assigned/To his beasts and disafforested his mind! (14)"

Christianity proposes a supernatural soul, and a divinely mandated hierarchy which places humans above the rest of the natural world. Our limits are higher, and on a wholly different plane from those of nature. As Native American philosopher Viola Cordova wrote, "We persist in seeing ourselves as a superior life form - as some ethereal creature of pure thought - mind versus matter.(15)" The supernatural separation with the Earth, and the apocalyptic wish that we will leave it - either in spaceships or beams of heavenly light - allow us to see our world as disposable, and our bodies along with it. This theology of disdain for the natural world, combined with the imperative to control it and therefore limit its messiness, is turned inward as well as outward.

Modern evangelicals argue that humans belong on the Earth, that we were created for it. This opposes the common environmentalist belief that humans are inherently damaging to nature, and the Enlightenment idea that humans are separate from the Earth in their superiority. But these Dominionist theologians don't advocate for a productive cooperation with nature. Instead they believe that we are nature's master and our will is unquestionable. The often cited verse in criticism and support of this worldview is Genesis 1:26, which reads; "Then God said, "Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.(16)"

From the other side of the text, Revelations reads, "Then I saw “a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea.(17)" The longing for a heavenly existence extends not only to anticipating one's own death, but also the death of the planet. Apocalypse is a central belief in some Christian traditions, and holds that perfection is only possible after the destruction of the Earth, its creatures, and many of its humans. This is occasionally used by believers in a literal apocalypse to argue that since the Earth is temporary but our souls are not, we should not be bothered to care for the environment.

Our lawns are just one way we express our philosophical beliefs, but I believe they are an important and illuminating one. In the great chain of landscapes, lawns are a way of showing to ourselves and our neighbors that we are the advanced, civilized, pure ones. So many of the virtues of manicured landscapes are the ideals of the 'Civilized Man': control, order, cleanliness, hard work, mastery. This conquest is also a form of escape, a way of distancing ourselves from a frighteningly weedy material world and creating a manicured supernatural. Rachael Carson once said; "We still talk in terms of conquest. We still haven't become mature enough to think of ourselves as only a tiny part of a vast and incredible universe.(18)"

1. Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004) p529.
2. Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2001) p17.
3. Nathaniel Wolloch, History and Nature in the Enlightenment (United Kingdom: Routledge Press, 2011) p72.
4. ibid p132.
5. Johann Gottfried von Herder, Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, trans. T. Churchill (London 1800) p176.
6. Francis Bacon, Novum Organum p290. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/45988/45988-h/45988-h.htm#Book-II_Aph-21
7. Nathaniel Wolloch, History and Nature in the Enlightenment (United Kingdom: Routledge Press, 2011) p87.
8. Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2001) Preface to 5th ed. pp.xix-xx.
9. Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2001) Chapter 2.
10. Henry David Thoreau Higher Laws p.364.
11. Donald Worster, Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, 2nd Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) p86.
12. Donald Worster, Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, 2nd Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) p100.
13. Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004) p366.
14. ibid
15. Kathleen Dean Moore, How It Is: The Native American Philosophy of V.F. Cordova (University of Arizona Press, 2007).
16. Genesis 1:26 (NIV).
17. Revelations 21:1 (NIV).
18. April 3, 1963, Columbia Broadcasting System's television series "C.B.S. Reports" presented the program "The Silent Spring of Rachel Carson."