Nature as Process, Not Just Place

Unceasing change with no end goal

Dandelion in an alleyway in Ft. Bragg, CA [Photo by author]

Here in our techno-industrialized culture, we often think of "nature" as a place. Those who live in urban and suburban settings tend to think of this place as somewhere else. So, nature is a mountain, a river or a forest and it is "out there," without us in it, and we must go there to see it or to be in it.

What's more, we tend to think of such places as permanent; that they are fixed in their shape, composition and behavior. If we go visit a spot, we expect it to be pretty much the same when we return, barring seasonal changes such as snow cover, water flow or leaf color, which we consider reliably predictable (or have until recently).

These perspectives—that nature is just a place and that on top of that it is a stable place (climate change notwithstanding)—are misleading. Our continued belief in them will lead us in dangerous directions as human-induced impacts on the planet intensify. If we don't understand what is going on, we won't understand how we're affecting it, nor what we must do differently if we want to sustain habitable circumstances for ourselves.

The mountain, the river, and the forest are places, yes, but they are also manifestations of ongoing processes. These processes are unceasing, they occur on every level in time and space from macro to micro, and furthermore, they have no end goal.

Mountains are uplifted by tectonic forces and volcanism, and worn away by wind and rain and lichen. Their slopes are carved by glaciers and scored by avalanche chutes. Their very rock is broken down into soil by the plants that cloak their surfaces. They are old, but not eternal.

The shape of the river's channel is in constant flux, with rocks rolling in spring floods, silt settling in summer, and fallen vegetation checking its flow in any season. From time to time, a watercourse jumps from one side of its own bottomland to the other, stranding its former bend as an oxbow lake. And what we call the river is only the above ground portion of a larger movement of water across a landscape. The subterranean ebb and flow is marked on both sides by the plant life on the surface.

The mix of tree species that makes up a forest is always changing. Over decades, one species shades out another. Year to year, felling by fire or storm makes openings that are filled by grasses, wildflowers and berry bushes until trees grow up again. Over centuries, the border of the forest expands or shrinks with climatic shifts. The forest is a communicative cluster of flora, fauna and fungi that is different from day to day.

Animals are a player in all these environments. Chipmunks dig tunnels, beavers make dams, bears and birds spread seeds.

Some of these changes are so gradual we would never notice them. Others we have simply not been trained to look for.

"Weeds" (aka "nature") in an alleyway in Ft. Bragg, CA [Photo by author]

The examples I have mentioned here are a mix of what scientists call "biotic" and "abiotic" processes, by which they mean "living" and "non-living." In this way of looking at things, plants and animals are living while rocks and water are not. Of course, this is a cultural concept and in other places and times humans didn't (and don't) draw that division, but science will probably get there in its own way eventually. Nonetheless, what's vital here is that everything is always changing.

What we call "nature" is a visible, physical expression of continuous interaction, including immediate responses and evolved adaptations. Response and adaptation are themselves fluid and ever-morphing. Nothing is "stable" in that sense.

As the conditions in a spot become different over time—as they are always doing—the species present respond either by adapting, dying out, or moving with the shifts. For example, when Ice Age glaciers moved down out of the north, we say that species "retreated" before them, and that as the glaciers receded, species "advanced" again. Each time this has happened—during each interglacial period, like the one we are in now—the mix of species returning has varied from the previous instance. There is no set of species that inherently "belongs" to a region in this way. Nor does this process have a completion point. Some plants are still moving north from the most recent glacial retreat 12,000 years ago. The very continental mass itself is still expanding after being compressed under a mile of ice (see “isostatic rebound”).

There is no spot on the planet where change and interaction is not happening. This is why it's misleading—false, actually—to say that nature is something that exists in some places and not others. The processes of response and adaptation are occurring everywhere at all times, including in our cities, industrial areas, transportation corridors, farmland, etc. Some biologists are now recognizing this and have coined the term "novel ecosystems" to describe these new collections of species and their interactions.

The Dandelion growing out of a crack in the sidewalk is nature in action. Like many other plants that we call "weeds," Dandelion is at home in human civilization. Many such species have followed Western-style agriculture as it has expanded around the world, because they have adapted to conditions like mechanized soil disturbances, irrigation ditches and fence-lines, none of which have exact analogues in the non-human world.

"Weeds" (aka "nature") in an alleyway in Ft. Bragg, CA [Photo by author]

The severe environmental alterations of human civilization—farming, mining, deforestation, dam-building, urbanization—have provoked the response and adaptation that is nature. I won't say, "just like anything else," because human disturbances have unique characteristics (and malice is its own factor) but the fact of response is the same. In that way, nature-as-process is fully operational despite the massive disruptions to particular places.

Don’t get me wrong: Not for a moment will I minimize the brutality and ugliness perpetuated on particular places by civilization, like the 95+% of the Coastal Redwood forests razed in California, and the 95+% of Tall Grass Prairie plowed under in the Midwest, or the 95+% of wetlands drained or damaged in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Likewise, there is no justification for the 95+% mass slaughter of the Buffalo, the Beavers, the Wolves and the Prairie Dogs. Such actions demonstrate a profoundly sick society. Nor is it an excuse that eventually humans will be gone and "the planet will survive."

But we must not demonize nature's response to our bad behavior. When we bulldoze a landscape, the first seedling that pops up is nature—no matter what species it is. Nature works with whatever is at hand that happens to be best adapted, and doesn't make any of our judgments about what is "weedy" or "noxious" or "invasive.” Current campaigns that trumpet such terms and wage war on the targeted plants must be stopped. They are not helping. They are compounding the destruction with their herbicides and other ham-fisted efforts at eradication. "Restoration" that focuses only on nature-as-place and ignores nature-as-process ends up working against nature.

It’s no wonder this happens. Our lack of connection to place is what makes us think of nature as merely a place, and to be blind to nature-as-process. If our culture were more place-based, we would be more familiar with the processes, and would not be so alienated from our own home and how it works. We would hate less and love more. Renewing conscious relating to both place and process must be at the forefront of all our endeavors moving forward.

I do want to acknowledge the deep emotions we can feel in particular places like a certain mountain, river or forest—as well as a certain desert, swamp or a steppe, which are places that too often get short shrift, but who have their own appreciators. I’d also like to point out that such emotions are not the full spectrum of experience that is available to us. Our affinities, and hence our eyes, have been trained to appreciate particular forms of spectacle, much of it on an aesthetic level, in a way that leaves us on the outside. We are still looking at something, as if it’s a snapshot. The rise of visual media since the late 19^th century starting with photography has played a role in this. So has urbanization and the increasing disconnection from the means of our survival that accompanied it. The result has been a narrowing of reality in which mere appearance plays a vastly out-sized role.

That is to say, as much joy as the beauty of a place might inspire in us, that is only a taste of the profound fulfillment that is possible for us as the creatures who we are, in and of nature as both place and process, living in relation with it all.

Dandelion in an alleyway in Ft. Bragg, CA [Photo by author]