The myths that make nature seem irreplaceable

We’d feel disappointed if we found out that a ‘natural’ woodland was actually designed and created by people. And comparing restored nature to a forged painting gives us a way to justify these feelings.

But all of this thinking is based on a couple of myths about nature. When we dispel these myths we can see that nature isn’t irreplaceable at all. A human-created forest can be just as valuable as one that’s ‘natural’.

The big myth is that being natural means being independent of people. If that’s the criteria we’re using, then there’s probably nothing natural left to worry about. In the UK, the patchwork landscape of fields, hills and hedgerows has been shaped by thousands of years of human interference. Even a dense old oak forest like the one in the story would certainly have been coppiced, the wood turned to charcoal to smelt iron.

That’s just for starters — when you look at it, there’s nowhere that hasn’t already been changed by our presence: we’ve polluted the air, altered the chemical composition of rivers and changed the global climate. Nothing is ‘natural’ if that means being independent of human intervention. If even the original forests were marked by our interference, what’s so bad about the replacement ones also bearing our fingerprints?

There’s also something a bit self-centred about our preference for ‘untouched’ nature. It’s only us humans who even notice whether a forest is ‘natural’ or human-created. The birds and insects, the trees and flowers, don’t care how the forest came about. So long as it’s the same in all the important ways, it’s still a valuable habitat.

But the biggest problem with our worship of ‘untouched’ nature is that it can stop us from taking action to protect the natural world. If ‘natural’ means free from human intervention, then there’s no way for us to actively help nature. As soon as we intervene, whatever we were trying to save can no longer count as natural. We devalue it by getting involved. This would mean the only thing we can do to help nature is take a hands-off approach and let it get on by itself.

You might think it’d be a positive thing for humans to stop interfering with nature. If we’re just going to end up doing more harm than good, then it’d be better to stay out of it. But this seems like a cop-out. It lets us off the hook, absolves us of any responsibility for trying to find solutions for the problems we cause. It prevents us taking any real action to tackle the environmental crisis we helped to create.

So let’s not get hung up on the idea that nature can never be restored or replaced, that its naturalness is destroyed whenever humans get involved. Sometimes nature needs a helping hand to overcome the problems we’ve caused. If we can help to restore habitats and ecosystems, we should do it wherever we can. Who cares if the forests we create aren’t pristine and free from human intervention? The birds and trees and insects certainly don’t.