Summer 2004
A Natural Question
Photo by Leo Kim
Bruce Braun
Associate professor, geography
Education
B.A., University of Winnipeg; M.A., Ph.D., University of British Columbia
Geographical dream destinations
South Africa, or "my cabin in British Columbia, five hours from Vancouver."
On teaching…
"I enjoy seeing students develop genuine curiosity about the way things work. They're developing the ability to think in a rigorous, critical fashion."
What he likes best about Canada…
"The elements of social democracy—in particular, universal health care."
And the United States…
"There's a sense of optimism. Anything is possible.
Think about the last wildlife painting or photograph you saw. A deer in the woods, a buffalo amid tall grass prairie, or a pinecone frosted with snow. Most likely, it was an image of Mother Nature at her purest—carefully framed to exclude power lines, highways, fences, and human shadows. You probably didn't even consider humanity's—or the artist's— clumsy but invisible intrusion on the scene.
Bruce Braun finds this perspective curious. "North Americans love to think about nature as out there, over there, and separate from society," the U of M associate professor of geography says. "It's a dualism that's hard to break down."
The notion is reinforced in literature, music, philosophy, and even science: While "civilization" is tainted by pollution, poverty, greed, and lust, the "natural world" is paradise. Particularly in modern debates over development, Braun says, we tend to view natural environments as treasures untouched by human hands. That view, he notes, is often naïve.
A native Canadian, Braun grew up in Calgary, and spent the summers of his childhood visiting Vancouver Island with his parents. Years later, in 1993, the undeveloped western side of the island would become the site of a dramatic clash between environmental activists and forestry industry advocates. The dispute over logging the island's rainforest embroiled the entire nation: "The west coast of Vancouver Island has always held a privileged place in the imaginations of Canadians," Braun explains. "It's considered the most wild, the most rugged, the most pristine place in the country. It's nature's last stand. But this view assumes that nature is external and separate from humans."
Braun, who has written a book about the conflict, The Intemperate Rainforest, was intrigued by the nature of the debate. When environmentalists called for a campaign to save the forest, he realized, they were employing a definition of "forest" that dated back to Captain Cook's discovery of the British Columbian coast. "Cook saw the forest as a place of fantasy and desire. It was dense and impenetrable," Braun says. But both Cook and the 1993 protesters failed to see that the Vancouver Island forest was a human space, inhabited, logged, and shaped by Native Americans for hundreds of years.
Neither the environmental lobby nor the logging industry paid much attention to the view of Native Americans during the 1993 debates. "Often these voices are erased by the very way in which we talk about ecological spaces," Braun says. Unlike urban spaces, where residents often have a say in development decisions, the environment on Vancouver Island was presumed to be without inhabitants or human history—and therefore, without a "voice."
Braun studied Vancouver Island while living and teaching in British Columbia in the 1990s, but his primary interest is in urban geography. In recent years, he's begun to look at how our definitions of nature limit our views of the human world. Because nature is "over there," we tend to forget that our energy consumption in Minneapolis is directly related, for example, to hydroelectric dams in Manitoba that affect water flows and wildlife. We decry the development of Alaska's Artic coast, but we still drive SUVs that consume the world's limited oil supplies rather than bike to work.
"If we think of nature as the absence of humans, then we stop thinking about our place in nature," says Braun. "We don't often think about the our impact on nature. We become blind to the ecology of everyday life."
Understanding that few environments have been untouched by human history is important, Braun adds, because that understanding affects how we see our world. Is the Amazon River basin, for example, a pristine wilderness, or a dynamic environment that has been touched and shaped by multiple civilizations? If preservation is the goal, perhaps we should think of it as we think of architectural preservation—sustaining, restoring, and enhancing what we can, but never forgetting that people have used and will continue to use the space.
Not surprisingly, response to Braun's work has been mixed. To some, his critique only serves to muddy the waters of an already complex debate. But Braun says it's inevitable that as we unravel the stories and language of environmental discussions and debate, knots will appear.
"It's interesting," he says. "You pull that single thread and many other things come with it."