nature. Although he wasn’t talking about mirrors, Thoreau once wrote that he wanted to be “nature looking into nature.” That’s what happens in mirrors of America. But because we bring our cultural preoccupations to the mirror, we often turn out to be nature looking away from nature.21
The Student Body
The student body in the bathroom mirror is both natural and cultural. The human body is, of course, a highly evolved product of natural selection with bifocal vision, bipedal locomotion, and nimble hands with opposable thumbs. It comes with a big brain that supports complex thinking, toolmaking, communication, culture, and even college class work—not to mention autonomic functions like breathing and blood flow. It’s a mammal’s body in the mirror, with warm blood and temperature control, an internal combustion engine we call the digestive system, and a tangle of bloodlines and nerves that bring it all together. Right now, this animal body is brushing the teeth that make it omnivorous, able to eat both animal and plant life. But this is only the beginning. The natural body is in constant intercourse with nature.
We often speak about “people and nature” as though the body is bounded by its skin, but this is a dangerous illusion. The body in the looking glass is constantly sharing elements with its environment, amassing atoms from everywhere. As ecologist Christopher Uhl suggests in Developing Ecological Consciousness, “If you were to put an ink dot on a map of the Earth to designate the origins of the trillions of atoms that make up your body, the map would be covered in ink. Our atoms have journeyed to us literally from everywhere on the planet. We are a part of their cycles.” We are dependent on the Earth’s interdependence, and we forget it at our peril.22
The natural body depends on the natural world, not just abstractly, but viscerally, and not just occasionally, but constantly. For example, the body we see in the morning mirror is breathing, inhaling the oxygen that fuels the combustion of carbohydrates in the body. People can live about three weeks without food, and about three days without water, but only three minutes without air. We don’t think much about that, however, because air is invisible, because it’s not yet a commodity, and because it’s automatic. However, if we had to buy the air we breathe, we would pay a lot more attention. If all of us needed to inhale “Perri-air” (as Mel Brooks does in Spaceballs) or visit an oxygen bar for our daily requirements, we’d be more mindful. If the three thousand gallons of air we take in each day were as expensive as gasoline, we’d notice. But air is still free—an ecosystem service provided by the planet—so we ignore it entirely (and allow industries to pollute it). Likewise, if we had to choose to breathe, we’d keep it in our consciousness, but the autonomic nervous system takes care of air for us. As Christopher Uhl suggests, “Breathing happens on its own; you are not breathing so much as you are being breathed.”
Even more amazing, the body we see in the mirror doesn’t just exist in a natural habitat, it is a habitat for nature, filled with microorganisms that are essential to its functioning. Recent studies show that 90 percent of the cells in our bodies aren’t ours: They ’re bacteria. In the microbiome that is us, some bacteria are helping to convert plant sugars to usable energy for us, some are making vitamins essential to our health, some are neutralizing chemicals that could cause cancer and other diseases, and some are making food for other bacteria, including the cells that line the colon. These life-forms help shape the form of human life. Every minute of every day, we have a relationship with nature more intimate than our relationship with our families, friends, and partners. By nature, we are always in relationship with nature.23
The relationship, however, is not always harmonious, so we protect ourselves against microbes that have proven deadly in the past. In the United States, vaccinations are practically mandatory, so almost all college students are armed against the natural flourishing of organisms that thrive by causing disease. But we rarely stop there: On any given day a lot of the bodies seen in college mirrors are teeming with antibiotics—a word that literally means “against life”—as we try to kill the living organisms that unsettle our digestive and respiratory systems. Some of us also use antibacterial soaps and lotions to protect our skin from similar attacks. Unfortunately this defense can be counterproductive because it kills the good bacteria, leaving a body susceptible to hardier bacteria that develop resistances to our common pharmaceuticals.24
The natural body also absorbs the chemical elements of our culture. If we could look into the body, we’d see stuff we don’t imagine when we look in the mirror. In “The Pollution Within,” National Geographic writer David Duncan recounts the chemicals that tests found in his body in 2006—polybrominated diphenyl ethers (used in flame retardants and implicated in thyroid disruptions and neurological problems in mice); DDT (used as a pesticide until it was banned in 1973); the insecticides chlordane and heptachlor; PCBs (banned in 1976); Bisphenol A (used in hard plastics like Nalgene bottles and safety goggles); phthalates (used in shampoos, car dashboards, and plastic food wrap); perfluorinated carboxylic acids (PFCAs); dioxins (used in making paper); and mercury (from coal-fueled power plants). Like most Americans, including Jo and Joe College, Duncan is poisoned by the stuff our culture uses to free us from our natural limitations: gasoline, plastics, and fossil fuels. Like it or not, the environmental impact of American culture ends up in our bodies and blood. What goes around comes around, and the outside environment comes in.25
We miss a lot in the mirror, but some of what we do see is also deeply related to basic biology. The culture of cosmetics, for example, may be related to our natural need for healthy mates. Many sociobiologists contend that when we’re thinking about appearances we’re often thinking about the appearance of health—especially the appearance of people who look healthy enough to reproduce productively. Teeth are a sign of health, so we brace them and brush them to make them more attractive. Lustrous hair is another indicator of natural health, so we shampoo, condition, and color it. Some go even further. Nature doesn’t call Jo College to cosmetics, for example, but cosmetics can imitate the signs of nature. Although college girls seldom think of cosmetics in terms of evolutionary biology, they often involve biomimicry: a youthful look, with smooth skin and full lips, makes the face appear healthier to prospective suitors. In the twentieth century, a tan also became an indication of healthy outdoor activity, so many of us get tanned, if only from a bottle or a booth. We want to look well—or, as Carl Elliott says, “better than well”—and that’s natural. But how we get that look is decidedly not.26
Right now, when Joe and Jo College look in the mirror, they’re hoping to see someone beautiful or handsome looking back, because they’re trying to meet social expectations. They could look for a sense of beauty that’s more than skin deep, a sense of beauty that meets ecological expectations by connecting them to the biotic community. When Aldo Leopold articulated his land ethic, beauty was one of his criteria for when “a thing is right.” But he clearly didn’t mean scenic beauty, since he derides the shallowness of people who only like the landscapes of nature. For Leopold, beauty wasn’t just what you could see, but how you might relate—beauty was functional, harmonious, whole. What if we tried to arrange our lives so that when we looked in the mirror, we would see the loveliness (and lovingness) of people who harmonized with nature? Wouldn’t that be beautiful?
Waking Up to Responsibility
At college, when we wake up, we do what comes naturally, even though most of it is what comes culturally. American culture works hard to distance us from our environmental impacts and our ecological consciousness so that even though we wake up every day in nature, we don’t generally wake up to nature. Our morning routine offers all sorts of cultural cues about time, busy-ness, and convenience, but very
