What
would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wilderness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the
Wilderness yet.
–Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1881
Have humans become a form of cancer? We certainly behave like
one, busily doing our best to snuff out the life of our host,
apparently unable to alter our program of destructive growth.
We are now confronted with the terrifying prospect that we have destroyed “Nature” – that is, the environment we need in order to live – only to discover that it is too late to change the course we set in motion. We are witnesses to our own successful suicide, taking place in slow motion before us.
We hope that science will save us: At the last moment, we will figure out what to do and save ourselves. With science, and technology, we will build a better version of nature, without all those inconvenient bits that worry the tree-huggers and whale-savers. But can we?
Ask a scientist if we know enough about all the complex interdependencies of life to save ourselves from the damage we are doing to every part of the ecosystem on which our life depends. Even if we manage to save ourselves, after the end of nature, what sort of world will we have saved? Will we be alone, just people and the bacterial cultures required to sustain us, or will we manage to keep a few souvenir species alive for company—dogs and cats, or maybe trees and birds? Who will get to decide?
Then again, it seems to me that Nature may still be a contender in this struggle. As we expand our buildings ever further into the wilderness, hawks circle downtown and coyotes freely roam streets of the inner suburbs searching for food. Nature often adapts in surprising ways, whether we like it or not.
The example often cited in the press is the appearance of a new or mutated disease that will kill enough of us off all at once to stop the tide of destruction. Or, will Nature just simply wait us out.
Our suicide may extinguish life, but for how long—a few thousand years?—a few million? Either way, it seems inevitable that life will reconquer the Earth eventually, in one form or another. But when it does, who will be around to label it “Nature?”
The artists in the exhibition responded to that question by crafting visual explorations of the fragility of the natural world, our increasing encroachment upon it, and the unthinkable possibilities of a post-natural world. Using a variety of mediums, and some invented for the purpose, the artists give us a view of the end of nature.
Lisa
Sheire: Potomac
Jonathan Prull: Monkey Paw Mutliples
Adam Metallo:Zoo
