of nineteenth-century landscape painters who saw nature and wilderness both as counterpoint to civilization, and as escape from it. This explains how car manufacturers can sell us environmentally destructive SUVs by advertising them in cultural landscapes that look “natural” to us, like a stunningly beautiful beach or a striking mountain scene. Because of Romantic assumptions that conflate nature and wilderness, most of us don’t think that we’re interacting with nature unless we find ourselves in an officially designated wilderness area.
But we are always in nature, as a second way of seeing, called “resourcism,” suggests. Resourcism interprets the natural world mainly as natural resources, useful to supply human desires, but not as a living, breathing community of organisms. Surrounded by resources repurposed as products all the time, we are always in nature. The concept of “the culture of nature” doesn’t mean that nature is only cultural; nature is clearly a dynamic force of its own. And it doesn’t mean that people aren’t nature. Despite all our cleverness and intelligence, we remain bifocal, bipedal, big-brained mammals. But we’ve invented a “culture of nature,” so, once we’re socialized, we always come to understand nature through culture.
This culture of nature is part of college culture, which is a subset of American youth culture, a twentieth-century development that increasingly gives young people the freedom to make sense of the world by themselves. Profs control the official curriculum, but students teach each other the hidden curriculum of college—beliefs and behavior shaped without much conscientious consideration. This hidden education is, environmentally speaking, generally more important than what is learned in classes. Students may take a few credits in environmental studies, but they live their environmental values every minute of every day and exemplify them to their friends. When they graduate, therefore, those practiced values, good and bad, tend to become the “culture of nature” for the next generation.
It’s one of the functions of culture to teach us what’s “natural”—in two ways. The first type of “natural” is what’s normal, expected, routine. We think “it’s only natural” to live in buildings with bathrooms, to eat three meals a day, or to party on the weekends. In this sense, the word “natural” generally means “cultural,” and the word “natural” is employed because it seems less arbitrary, and therefore more compelling, than the word “cultural.” If we say “it’s only natural to eat meat,” it’s a lot more powerful than saying “it’s only cultural to eat meat.” In this way, culture naturalizes itself, trying to place some actions beyond the bounds of conscious and conscientious reflection.
The primary way we learn what’s “natural” is through the assimilation of common sense. Common sense is everyday knowledge, what we think when we’re not really thinking about things, the stuff that “everybody knows.” Most of us follow common sense because it’s supposed to be the accumulated wisdom of the tribe. These days, sadly, a lot of common sense is no longer wise because environmental impacts have dramatically changed the cost-benefit calculations of our normal behavior. At college, common sense is written into the cultural scripts of everyday life. Cars and computers are common sense. Air conditioning in the summer is as commonsensical as heat in the winter. TV and video games are commonsense entertainments. It’s common sense to support systems—social, economic, political—that don’t support ecosystems. Therefore, common sense may not be good enough for the ecological revolution of the twenty-first century.
The second way that culture teaches us what’s “natural” is by defining what’s nature and what’s not. This is never clear or precise or consistent. Science and religion, for example, define “nature” differently, but generally speaking, in college culture the natural world is the nonhuman world. We speak of people and nature as if they existed in separate spheres, and we plan on “getting back to nature” over the summer, forgetting that we are nature in nature, always. This confusion has real consequences because our common cultural understandings don’t remind us of our natural lives and impacts. Except in science or environmental studies classes, college students don’t customarily think of nature or the environment. And that fact—that omission—is educationally important because, as one of my mentors wisely says, we are taught very well by what we are not taught.
The concept of the culture of nature, then, helps us to see the complexity of our relationships with the natural world, and our complicity with commonsense patterns of thought and behavior that don’t make sense anymore. It helps us to pay attention to the nature of our lives, and the nature that results from our lives. It also helps us pay attention to the culture of our lives. And because culture is something we create collectively, it offers us real opportunities for substantial change. If the current culture of nature doesn’t make sense, we can help to create a better one, and a better world.
2) Consumption, Materials, and Materialism
To parents and professors, students are people engaged in academic learning. To America’s commercial interests, however, students are materialistic consumers and a major market niche. In fact, whole books have been written on taking advantage of this segment of the population. David A. Morrison’s Marketing to the Campus Crowd, for example, notes that college students offer corporate America opportunities for “branding, selling, sub-segmenting, and new product strategies,” and that, conveniently, college students can be less price-sensitive than other consumers, especially when subsidized by what Morrison calls the “Bank of Mom and Dad.” College students are a profitable market, says Morrison, because of the sheer volume of their discretionary spending, along with their high concentration, rapid turnover, avid willingness to experiment, propensity for innovation and early adoption of technology, ever-changing brand loyalties, strong influence on other key consumer segments (and the mainstream marketplace as a whole), and receptivity to the right advertising, sampling, and promotions (in contrast to the average consumer). “The basic mantra behind college marketing,” Morrison claims, “is to generate short-term financial gains to the bottom line and simultaneously establish long-term brand loyalties.” And, as marketing consultant Peter Zollo says of younger students, “School delivers more teens per square foot than anyplace else!”1
If we only consumed discrete objects disconnected from the rest of the world, this might not be a problem, but in buying stuff, we buy into a system of stuff called materialism. Materialism is the way that Americans manage resource flows, both intentionally and unintentionally. When a student buys a computer, she thinks about its advantages for her connectedness, including (sometimes) her connection to academic resources. But while she’s thinking about Internet access and word processing, she’s actually world processing: setting off a chain of demand and supply that has far-reaching environmental consequences. She can ignore the environmental impacts of the purchase because the common sense of consumption lets her focus on her material desires instead of the material consequences of her decisions.
Locating college culture within consumer culture, then, helps us to see how American culture routinely expects us to consume stuff that consumes the world. It helps us to see how advertising pressures and peer pressures combine to make our consumption both “normal” and normative, despite its extensive environmental impacts. At the same time, however, our understanding of our consumption helps us to take control of it, so that we can change the culture of consumption to increase both our happiness and our harmonies with the natural world.
3) The Moral Ecology of Everyday Life
College culture and consumer culture aren’t just sociological issues. They’re ethical issues, which we can explore by examining the moral ecology of everyday life. In Habits of the Heart, Robert Bellah defines moral ecology as “the web of moral understandings and commitments that tie people together in community.” In this book, moral ecology also includes the web of social values that
