Civilisation, nature, and wilderness

Schadenfreude (n.): the feeling that Australians get listening to Northern Europeans moan because the temperature got above 30 degrees for a few days

We all need to have a few vices in life. One of mine is the pleasure I get every few years or so when there’s a European “heatwave”. Thanks to the wonders of the internet, I get to sit back in the mild temperatures of a southern Australian winter and watch the British or Germans take to social media to complain about the heat.

That would be fun enough, but it gets even better when the Americans chime in with the inevitable, “Why don’t you just install air conditioners?” Apparently, air conditioning is an article of faith in the US. Everybody has the right to life, liberty, and a split system in every room of the house. To be deprived of temperature control is the equivalent of a human rights violation. Thomas Jefferson hand built the first ever air conditioner for his home, Monticello, didn’t you know?

In fairness, air conditioning tech was largely developed in the USA, so Americans do have reason for patriotism there. Perhaps that has something to do with why Europeans have come to despise it. For them, air conditioners are apparently the primary cause of global warming. Installing one is akin to murdering your firstborn child.

The issue of European summers has some personal relevance for me. I am genetically endowed with northern European skin. My dermatologist reliably informs me that I have the whitest skin it is possible to have without being an actual albino. That’s not good when you live in Australia. Not only are most parts of the country naturally sunny, but there are far stronger levels of UV than northern Europe.

As a result, it takes my skin only about 15 minutes of exposure to the Australian summer sun before it burns. Sunscreen can alleviate that problem, but it doesn’t prevent sunstroke. My only option is to remain covered when I go outside during the hottest time of the year. Spending a day in the summer sun requires military-grade precision planning: the right clothes, the right hat, water, deodorant, etc. That’s been my life experience with summers ever since I was a kid.

As a young adult, I happened to spend a couple of summers in Northern Europe. What a pleasure it was to realise that I could go outside for several hours without sunscreen and still not get burnt. That was true even when the temperature got into the mid-30s. Moreover, the weaker European sun meant that even the same ambient temperature never felt as hot as it would here in Australia. Suddenly, my genetic endowment was a blessing and not a curse.

All of this explains why I have some personal interest in European “heatwaves”. But this year was a little different because, at the same time as the heatwave and the associated online whining about it, I happened to be reading a short poem by Wordsworth, and I had a mini-epiphany that is relevant to debates around the environment, climate, air conditioners, and all the rest.

Readers will probably know that Wordsworth was the preeminent “nature poet” of the 19th century and one of the central figures in the Romantic movement in art more generally. In many of his poems, Wordsworth explicitly contrasts “nature” against what we might call “civilisation”.

Now, this little word “nature” is fundamental to the entire Western philosophical and intellectual tradition going back to the pre-Socratic philosophers. The ancient Greek word was φύσις or physis (pronounced “foo-sis”). It doesn’t seem to have been a widely used word at all, but it was adopted by the philosophers as a way to account for the fundamental properties of reality. For example, Thales said that water is the fundamental principle of matter.

It might seem obvious that Thales was using water as a metaphor, but no less an intellect than Aristotle took him literally and believed that he really was saying that water was somehow the fundamental principle of life. Since we can’t ask Thales what he really meant, it’s impossible to confirm either way. The same ambiguity holds for Wordsworth. Did he mean we really should “talk to the birds” in order to know what to do, or was he using that as a metaphor for following our instinct?

Whatever the real answer, it is clear that many people have taken Wordsworth literally. In fact, the modern environmentalist movement has been significantly influenced by Romantic art and especially the nature poets. Thus, our current debates about air conditioners are being conducted on intellectual premises that have been around for several hundred years and rest on a dichotomy of nature good/civilisation bad.

There’s a whole series of posts that could be written about the philosophical and scientific developments that led us to this point. For example, it cannot be a coincidence that the worship of nature began at the exact same time that modern physics was born. The word “physics” comes from the Greek word for “nature”. But ancient Greek physics was holistic and integral. By contrast, modern physics is reductionist and analytical.

Modern ideas about nature follows from this schism which has only gotten more pronounced with the continued advance of science and technology. Another way to think about it is that environmentalism and nature worship are irrational in direct opposition to the extreme rationality of modern science.

That is the broad philosophical background to the modern concept of nature. But what occurred to me when reading Wordsworth last week was something more mundane. Wordsworth famously lived in the Lake District of England. It’s a beautiful area. However, just like the rest of England, it is not what we would nowadays call a “wilderness” because it is the product of a very long period of human cultivation. Arguably, there is no wilderness at all in Britain or most of Western Europe.

Thus, for Wordsworth and the other European romantics, nature does not denote wilderness. It refers to a cultivated environment. By definition, a cultivated environment is human-friendly since it is humans who have been doing the cultivating. Therefore, a “return to nature” was not really about abandoning civilisation in general. Rather, it was a return to the pleasant and beautiful cultivated lands of the past.

Why was such a return necessary? Well, it is again no coincidence that nature poetry arose at exactly the same time that industrial capitalism first appeared on the scene. Men like Wordsworth had no direct experience of working in factories or anything like that. They were gentlemen of leisure. But they didn’t like what they saw, and who can blame them? The Lake District is self-evidently more beautiful than the slums of industrial Manchester back in the day.

The point is that the back-to-nature movement in Europe was always really a back-to-feudalism, at least in relation to the literal understanding of nature as the cultivated environment of the past. It arose in direct opposition to industrial capitalism, although, to make matters confusing, Romanticism was also in opposition to the old aristocracy which had formed the political basis of feudalism.

All of this made sense in the context of western Europe. But, at exactly the same time, a very different understanding was driving events in the USA, Canada, Australia, and similar places. The settlers in these regions were confronted with land that they believed to be uncultivated. Their mission was to cultivate it. At least in the United States, that is what mostly happened. For reasons of geography and climate, the mission was not carried out to the same extent in Australia and Canada.

It was only after this long period of cultivation was coming to an end that the concept of “wilderness” started to take hold of the popular imagination. With almost all land now turned to human purposes, leaving some areas untouched by human intervention was seen as desirable. Thus, there arose a subtle but important difference between “nature” and “wilderness”.

One of the defining features of wilderness is that it is a place that is inimical or at least indifferent to human life. To this day, Australia is famous for being a dangerous place filled with deadly creatures, but that is just because we still have huge areas of wilderness. The same is true in Canada and some parts of the US.

Therefore, it’s important to distinguish between the Romantic ideal of the return to nature, which was always primarily a European goal, and the preservation of wilderness which arose in the USA. One of the differences is in the poetry and art. The Romantic poets could write stanzas about listening to the wisdom of the birds, but, as far as I know, nobody has written a poem about the wisdom of bears, red-bellied black snakes, or box jellyfish.

The distinction between nature and wilderness has become largely confused in our time and it’s a good idea to learn how to spot the difference. The main nature or environmental movement (if it can still be called that) follows in the footsteps of Wordsworth and the romantics. It is mostly about ensuring that our lived (cultivated) environment is one that is conducive to human happiness. Often mixed in with it is a fringe movement that actually worships wilderness. Since wilderness is inimical to human happiness, this movement is really anti-human. It is an offshoot of modern nihilism.

The great air conditioner debate of 2026 fits mostly into the former category. Americans insist that aircon is conducive to human happiness. Europeans appear to be still toying with the Romantic idea that a return to feudal “nature” is possible and desirable (especially the Germans). To install air conditioners would be to admit that the “solution” to the problem is technology.

I don’t expect either side to convince the other and, in any case, I’m happy with the status quo. If Europeans installed air conditioners, then we wouldn’t get the pleasure of listening to them whine about the heat, and where would be the fun in that?