Our Oldest Task: Making Sense of Our Place in Nature

by Eric T. Freyfogle

“This is a book about nature and culture,” Eric T. Freyfogle writes, “about our place and plight on earth, and the nagging challenges we face in living on it in ways that might endure.” Challenges, he says, we are clearly failing to meet. Harking back to a key phrase from the essays of eminent American conservationist Aldo Leopold, Our Oldest Task spins together lessons from history and philosophy, the life sciences and politics, economics and cultural studies in a personal, erudite quest to understand how we might live on—and in accord with—the land.

Passionate and pragmatic, extraordinarily well read and eloquent, Freyfogle details a host of forces that have produced our self-defeating ethos of human exceptionalism. It is this outlook, he argues, not a lack of scientific knowledge or inadequate technology, that is the primary cause of our ecological predicament. Seeking to comprehend both the multifaceted complexity of contemporary environmental problems and the zeitgeist as it unfolds, Freyfogle explores such diverse topics as morality, the nature of reality (and the reality of nature), animal welfare, social justice movements, and market politics. The result is a learned and inspiring rallying cry to achieve balance, a call to use our knowledge to more accurately identify the dividing line between living in and on the world and destruction. “To use nature,” Freyfogle writes, “but not to abuse it.”

240 pages, Hardcover

Published August 28, 2017

Reviews

[Dayton Martindale · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book asks a lot of important questions and gestures toward compelling answers but ultimately I found it dissatisfying. His broad theses seem to be: our individualistic culture—which prioritizes rights and liberties over virtue and the common good, which dices up nature into private property and market goods—is ill suited to addressing ecological problems, and that we need normative (not just scientific) standards to adjudicate between human fair use and abuse of ecosystems. I am mostly sympathetic to both claims, but feel like he could have made his case better with more citations/engagement with other thinkers, more empirical examples, and/or more structured arguments. But in fact there are almost no citations throughout the book, and the author’s opinions (which again, I 80% like!) don’t feel well backed up. The strategic proposal seems to be for environmental groups to reshape their messaging in a coordinated way, which no doubt would be important but feels incomplete or impractical. And I was also frustrated by the brief and unfair treatment of animal ethics.

I appreciate his critique of property and market norms, though, and share his concern for a normative distinction between use and abuse.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author describes his purpose as “This is a book about nature and culture, about our place and plight on earth, and the nagging challenges we face in living on it in ways that might endure.” Challenges, he says, we are clearly failing to meet.

I was never convinced about his environmental arguments, but along the way he has (well) written a brilliant book on the ethics inherent in modern society, particularly American society. Who would argue with Jefferson about the foundation of the USA being "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"? Freyfogle would say that at that time and in that place, that morality was workable, even exemplary. But in modern times, with the immense human population of Earth, there are serious flaws in Jefferson's vision. It isn't just Jefferson that comes up short, but all the great philosophers of ethics, except maybe Aristotle with virtue ethics.

In any case, Freyfogle makes us stop and think about everything we pretty much take for granted in a positive sense in our society. And his writing, while rigorous, is easy to read and follow. Every thinking person of good will should read this book.