Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

It was probably OK for the environment? It wasn’t the worst. The kids, then four years old, had the wrought-iron fireplace tools (you question my judgment) and were using them to break up a rotting log at the edge of the forest. In rhythm with the falling of the poker, they chanted “This stump must GO!” The delicate mycelial structure of some fungus would be pulverized. Beetle grubs would die of exposure or bird-strike. But we’d sit by the fire; we’d have peace. Why don’t you work on that stump, we had said. I had requisitioned the intricate world of the rotting log for my comfort. I felt as furtive as the thief of fire from the gods.  Like the campfire at our feet and the log cabin behind us, the lake in front of us was man-made. Douthat State Park in the mountains of western Virginia was built by the Civilian Conservation Corps during the New Deal era. Founded in 1933 to employ unmarried men ages eighteen to twenty-five left idle by the Depression, the CCC built Virginia’s first six state parks, often from the recreational lake up. The dam that holds up the water at Douthat is a triangular prism of earth extended across the south end of the lake. A stone in the spillway says “1938.” You can still discern an ice-cream-scoop-shaped absence in the slope of the hills opposite the dam, where the crews got the earth. That dug-out cove became the swimming beach. Log cabins and hiking trails are tucked into the surrounding mountains. Every cabin has a grill and a firepit, a hearth and chimney of found local stone, and two rocking chairs on a stone porch. The lake itself is just as well-proportioned: on the south side, the dam and the beach; on the north, an RV camp and a boat launch; on the east, a camp store. The mountains rising on each side are almost cozy. Sublime nature will not trouble you here: the lake is human scaled, human made, human controlled.  Winter reveals the inner workings. The rangers draw the lake down in the off season until it takes up half its usual area, an icy lagoon backed up in front of the dam. They check the docks for rot and dredge out the swimming beach, which wants to silt back up and resume the stages of forest succession. The drained part becomes a mud flat. You can see the old path of the creek. Canada geese peck through the unappealing mud. Rebar sticks out of chunks of concrete on the constructed lake bottom. By spring all that is covered again.  Douthat Lake is Promethean: nature engineered for human use. Does it still count as nature, then? I want to say yes, against a view of nature typified, in the period of Douthat’s construction, by the early-twentieth-century activist and Sierra Club founder John Muir. Muir wanted the rigorous otherness of nature to be preserved. He fought to prevent the construction of dams in the West, successfully at Yosemite and unsuccessfully at Hetch Hetchy Meadow, which he called in 1912 “one of Nature’s rarest and most precious mountain temples.” Muir despised the preservation of nature for human use; he denounced the politicians “shampiously crying, ‘Conservation, conservation, panutilization,’ that man and beast may be fed and the dear Nation made great.” He could not save Hetch Hetchy, though, which was flooded to create a reservoir supplying San Francisco with water. John Muir died in 1914, possibly of a broken heart.  Muir was the heir of an idea with deep roots: the eighteenth-century idea of the sublime landscape. In his Enquiry into the Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, in 1757, Edmund Burke proposed that artistic subjects that were alienating, or even hostile, to human beings were productive of stronger aesthetic effects than human-scaled ones. As Tim Berringer and Jennifer Raab note in their essay “Picturesque and Sublime,” a contribution to an exhibition catalog on the nineteenth-century American painter Thomas Cole, landscape painters sought to capture the sublime in their paintings by depicting hostile and inhuman terrain, while travelers on the European Grand Tour sought it out in the form of breathtaking views of, for example, the Alps. Even today, this idea that nature is only really nature when it is entirely other, entirely inhuman, is not gone. We encounter it in Fredric Jameson’s understanding of our current “postmodern” period as one in which no nature is left, in which everything we encounter is already culture. One danger of such a purist view is that it might lead us to dismiss reverence for the nature that is left — bird-watching, mushroom hunting — as missing the point, even as a form of false consciousness. It seems to me that what we need now are intellectual resources for appreciating managed nature. Then we can protect, and be restored by, the living things that are left. That is increasingly the view of Muir’s own Sierra Club, whose “2030 Strategic Framework” treats nature as a human resource (referring to a “human right to have clean air, fresh water, public access to nature, and a stable climate”). And it is the view under which the state parks were constructed. Let’s follow the state park trajectory of conservation; a trajectory that is flawed no doubt, but with much in it worth celebrating. Just under twenty years after the California dam was built that destroyed Muir’s Hetch Hetchy, the Civilian Conservation Corps was founded; a few years after that, construction on the dam at Douthat State Park began. The “conservation” in Civilian Conservation Corps was of the kind that Muir might have called “shampious.” The Corps’ founding in 1933 by Franklin D. Roosevelt marked a shift in the conservation movement away from the safeguarding of unspoiled nature and toward the husbanding of resources, according to Neil Maher’s Nature’s New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the American Environmental Movement. In the early days, according to Maher,