[MUSIC] The concept sustainable development addresses the dual challenges of underdevelopment and environmental degradation. Improving and maintaining a biosphere that accommodates continued human life on earth is a crucial constituent of the SDG measures. Ideas and preconceptions about human relations to nature and about the status of natural science define our scope for action as they either prompt or inhibit us. So historically formed imagine areas are vital for the prospects of actually achieving a transition to truly global sustainability. [MUSIC] Public discourse inadvertently described nature and society using the same terms and exchanging metaphors between them. As mentioned in Module 2, neoclassical economics tend to describe the workings of the capitalist market economy as natural flows of imbalances. But similar imaginaries have also been applied to identify what it is to be human - human nature, so to speak. In the 19th century, British philosopher Herbert Spencer turns Charles Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection into ideas of Social Darwinism. That considered possession of wealth and power as a natural outcome of survival of the fittest in a world that is universally competitive. A little later Russian geographer Peter Kropotkin, contrariwise drew on biological investigation of social animals such as ants and bees when claiming that humans are fundamentally prone to cooperation and solidarity rather than rivalry. Although both examples are old, the underlying notion of humans as either self-seeking individualists or charitable collectivist, continue clashing in deliberations about sustainable development. [MUSIC] For millennia after the emergence of Homo sapiens sapiens, the relation between these humans and their environment was one of adaptations. When something happened some geophysical change they adapted to new circumstances by migration or by invention of new technologies. This also applied to the small groups of hunters that colonized Southern Scandinavia 13,000 years ago. [MUSIC] Well, what we can say is that here we have a situation of severe climate change. And we can also see in this excavation that people have lived during these climate changes in Southern Scandinavia. So what we can say here is that people do actually cope with climate change during very long periods and during their history and prehistory. [MUSIC] Well, what we discuss here is occupation, that took place during the last ice age, in a warmer period, that we call Allerød period. And here we can see that they they lived for this period in this area, when there was a warming going on. Later on, during what we call Younger Dryas, we see no occupations at least not in this stratigraphy and in this spot here, this location. So what we can expect from these people, is that they move pretty much around according to the environmental situation in Southern Scandinavia and Northern Germany. [MUSIC] Yes, that would be what we would suspect from what we see here. That we only see them during the warmer periods, what we call Allerød and Bølling, which are warmer periods during the last glaciation. But we also have to take into account that these people were hunter gatherers, so they could so to speak find their life world in different areas depending on the environment. Okay, they were not dependent on a specific place in the landscape. There was probably no ownership of landscapes and there was vast areas with not much people and population, so therefore they could easily travel or migrate around within Northern Europe to find the best areas where the environment was best for them to live in. [MUSIC] The period of Allerød is around 1000 years, but the radiocarbon dating that we have is only in the last time of the Allerød period, so it's probably a few thousand people in Denmark. [MUSIC] I think we can learn a lot actually, the way we imagine climate change today, is that it will be devastating or chaotic. But what you can learn here, is that people do adapt to climate change and indeed very successfully, because see how we have evolved and how history has formed. Generally, it has been possible to cope with climate change that are much much different and much more severe, what we could call severe, formally, within history and prehistory, that we are now seeing and facing. Actually, I think it's possible to be a bit optimistic. So, what we actually imagine now, do we see as problematic, but when we go back in history, we see that we can cope with climate change, that are much harder or much more pronounced than what we see today. [MUSIC] In 19th century social sciences this deep rooted experience of our species that when endangered, we adapt to altering conditions, lead to physical determinism. This is the idea that "we are where we live", so to speak. And of course it's not totally without merit that individuals and societies are formed by their environment. Physical determinism, however, also substantiated those racial and national stereotypes of which the 19th century was unfortunately rich. The prehistoric justification for physical determinism that basically likened humans to all other large mammals, however, gradually receded as the organizational and technological capabilities of humans developed. [MUSIC] Gradually, our unquestionably unique capabilities instead promoted the perception that humans are qualitatively different from all other living organisms, that we are distinct from nature and so to speak, stand outside of it. This is a basic principle in most monotheistic religions: that humans created in the image of God are per definition in opposition to 'brute nature'. In the Judeo-Christian creation myth, God even bestows on humans a superiority towards nature that, according to historian Lynn White Jr. made us, I quote: "contemptuous of it, willing to use it for our slightest whim", end of quote. Nature became a resource for human exploitation. In parallel, nature was defined as all not human-made, while everything human was referred to as culture. Regarding humans as Homo Faber, the legitimate maker and modifier of environments, gradually replaced adaptionism. The gradual human alienation from nature paved the way for the conception that in modern industrial societies, humans constructed or at least shaped their physical environment. Within the field of geography, American Carl Sauer in 1925 defined all existing landscapes as cultural landscapes, saying that, I quote: "Culture is the agent, the natural is the medium, the cultural landscape is the result", end of quote. Still, by Sauers time, landscape gardeners had for more than a century considered what he called cultural landscapes as appropriate means to promote natural behavior. A romantic attempt to create harmony between human nature and the physical environment. [MUSIC] I wouldn't say, that it was sort of the same ideas that we have today, that we had in the late 18th century. I'd rather say, that there were parallels between the two and quite obvious there are some parallels, I mean lots of the ways that we think about nature, actually some way has a history in late 18th century. You could say that late 18th century was a somehow formative period for the way that we see nature now, I should say. There have been scholars, that have sort of pointed to the fact that in late 18th century a new sort of way to look at nature arised, that was particularly Keith Thomas and his "Man in the natural world" and Donald Worster with his "Nature's economy". And they pointed out that in late 18th century, nature sort of emerged as something that you can invest emotions in. Whereas before there was a much more sort of idea that nature would serve human needs. That it would sort of give humans the natural resources that they needed for the production. And they would actually place humans at the very center. It was a sort of anthropocentric way to look at nature. And in the late 18th century, Keith Thomas argues, and Worster argues as well, that here comes a new conception of what is the relation between man and nature. Because nature is now something to be admired, that you can be astonished in the meeting with nature and nature becomes some sort of aesthetical and ethical norm for human life. So that constitutes another way to look at nature. One could say that you have on the one hand, the sort of nature domination, the way that we also know nowadays, how people talk about resources and production and it's sort of incorporated in much of the production systems and and all the sorts of economical systems that we have in our world. And on the other hand, we have the idea of nature as something in which to take refuge, to go into, to admire and to look at and also something that we are inherently dependent on. It wasn't at all clear what nature then was, just as we have several I think, concepts of nature that sort of are intertwined and sometimes we know what we're thinking about, but we don't say it, really, sometimes we mean the landscape, the outdoors, the wild nature. Sometimes we mean the sort of order of nature. And we might also mean chemical processes and things like that. And this goes for late 18th century as well because then nature could be the sort of green nature, the sort of nature that you go into, the landscape, the garden as this garden we stand in, which is Søndermarken in Frederiksberg in Copenhagen. Which of course is a very unnatural garden in a way, but it's unnatural natural nature, just like we wanted. But nature could also be the sort of natural order, the natural world in itself. And it could be all sorts of different processes that people could intervene in order to produce things. So what nature is, could be very sort of diverse and not very clear at all. But the sort of emotions that landscapes and gardens were expected to evoke like, when we stand at the bridge where we're sort of, or we were, if we were late 18th century people, we would be sort of expected to feel certain emotions when looking at this. And the same goes for the study of nature itself, in the natural history study, because then people would be expected to sort of see a glimpse of the greatness of nature through the natural history and they would also be expected to be astonished as well as impressed by the very order of things in the natural world. One thing that you could say about the two sort of views of nature, the nature dominating thing and the other more admirational, the way to admire nature, the reverence to nature, is that they clearly coexisted. They even intertwined as Donald Worster expresses in his book. And I think that in late 18th century, nobody really saw any conflict between them. There wasn't any, you wouldn't say that they couldn't coexist. And this only comes after the 19th and 20th century and the sort of experiences of the sort of vulnerability of ecological systems and so on. So, I think that one of the take home messages I wanted to give you, was that the use of 'nature' sort of always come in plural. There's always more use of nature. They're always intertwined in complex ways. And one example of this is the way that late 18th century looked at natural history and the efforts that were and very pronounced as to give ordinary people natural historical knowledge. That was mainly done through books, that was the main channel for sort of upbringing, the common people to a more fitting knowledge of nature. I think, that many authors saw the common people as very emerged into their own superstition and ignorance. So they needed to be lifted up. And to even recognize, that there was a nature, that they could actually see. There was one vicar in Funen who in 1781 said in a paper on how to educate common people or why that is important, he stated that: "peasants go around in the beautiful nature, but they don't even see it. They just walk around like foolish ignorants". And then he carried on to say how this could be improved, because as he saw it, they didn't really appreciate the situation they were in because they were out there, they had all opportunities to sort of contemplate nature and to look into all the sort of species that they will see locally, but they didn't really care. And also Georg Christian Raff in his wonderful book "Naturgeschichte für kinder", which was translated into a series of European languages including Danish, states in some of the first paragraphs or chapters, states that: "Oh, Children, you shouldn't go around and not knowing, what are the names of the plants, just like the goats and the rabbits", meaning that humans should actually know about nature. Because this is a sort of moral obligation, to acquire knowledge about the nature. That means foremost to simply know the names, but also to know certain characteristics of each species, but naming plants and animals were actually sort of a moral obligation, when you read these books. And the thing is that when you go into these natural history books, it's clear that, whereas addressed to an educated public that would be nature as something that could be admired and that would be a certain willingness to also to discuss nature in foreign countries and very sort of exotic places perhaps. But whereas for the peasants it was considered that they should only have the knowledge of domestic plants and animals and it was always sort of framed in a very applied way so that they could actually go out and apply it in the actual farming or fishing. So, what comes out of this is that what started with the educated people and the leaders, something that was certainly inside the sort of admiration, the reverence for nature, part of it would actually, when addressing the peasants, become very sort of applied and very anthropocentric in a way because it would be the species that they would need in their daily life. There wasn't any idea in teaching them about nature in a wider sense. [MUSIC]
