Island Civilization Summary and Response

Roderick Frazier Nash, the author of Island Civilization, believes that humanity has gone too far in its colonization of Earth. Early on, humanity set the goal of “conquering nature”, and it was not until late in the second millennium realized the damage and tried to reverse it.

Nash offers three popular continuations of this behavior, and proposes one scenario of his own.

In the first, called “Wasteland Scenario”, sees humans living in a world with no wilderness. They have used all resources and are left with nothing, dooming all of the earth’s species.

The second scenario is “Garden Scenario”, where humans control all facets of nature. This contradiction means there is no real nature at all, and Nash sees it as a failure. Humans may succeed as a species, but they will be homogenized and uncontrollable aspects of nature will be eliminated.

The final popular scenario is “Future Primitive”. Technology is abandoned as its impacts are deemed too detrimental, and humanity returns to a hunter-gatherer society a la Mad Max.

In Nash’s own scenario, “Island Civilization”, humans are expected to reduce their numbers by 75%, construct large dome areas where they can live without harming the natural earth’s environment, and live (with technology) only in these domes. He calls this scenario “Island Civilization”. In this process, humans would allow the Earth around them to return to a more natural state. While this approach may seem far-fetched, Nash believe that with technology developed in the future, Island Civilization will be possible

I believe that humanity will be able to restore the earth’s balance without any ultimatum or bizarre scenarios as long as they truly want to. Humans have always invested in what they believe is best for them at the time, and if restoring earth’s integrity is the best for humans, it’s almost guaranteed to happen.

Most of the proposed scenarios are asinine. We can in no way predict that humans will control all facets of natural process any more than we can predict aliens will come down and fix everything for us. The wasteland scenario might make sense if humans continued to use resources and never attempted to curve their use, but that’s untrue as already we lean towards items such as electrical cars and recyclable materials instead of their wasteful counterparts. The Future Primitive situation is quite literally something out of a science fiction script. Humans will never collectively abandon technology, and it doesn’t make sense to think that they would do so.

Nash’s Island Civilization is fundamentally wrong. It assumes humans with technology are something that intrinsically harms the earth, or humans with technology will exploit the earth for their own benefit. But there are many humans who want to keep earth in a natural state for their own benefit. As “green living” becomes more popular, humans are able to make profits by harming the environment as little as possible, or by helping restore nature to a healthy state.

Humans are a part of nature, and the technology they bring with them is as well. Secluding themselves in giant bubbles will only cause humans to be out of tune with the natural environment around them. Only by interacting with the environment in positive ways can we improve the state of non-human life around us.