6. Faking: The Renaturation of Škocjanski Zatok

As we saw in the chapters above, there can be many shades of the “faking” of nature. Nevertheless, there is a concrete, physical and technological faking of nature. I had the opportunity to spend several days researching a case of the renaturation of a degraded area and to talk with the designers, experts and custodians of the project. In 2010, in Dnevnik’s Objektiv supplement, I published a longer feature about the Škocjanski zatok nature reserve in the hinterland of Koper, entitled “Prostor za ptice je prostor za ljudi” [“A Space for Birds Is a Space for People”] (Mazi, 2010). In the light of the reflection and research for this doctoral dissertation, I am today very critical of my own journalistic products about nature because of their “ecopoetic” admixtures. Be that as it may, journalistic work made it possible for me to experience the cases I write about here quite directly.

In the article “Faking Nature”, Robert Elliot was one of the first philosophers resolutely to reject the restoration thesis: the idea that humans can restore, replace, repair and arrange a natural environment that they have previously destroyed. His concern is not with the authenticity of such an undertaking; rather, he is convinced that such a maxim would nullify the otherwise strenuous efforts of environmentalists. Why protect nature if we can restore it? “Imagine, contrary to fact, that restoration projects are largely successful; that the environment is brought back to its original condition and that even a close inspection will fail to reveal that the area has been mined, clearfelled, or whatever. If this is so then there is temptation to think that one particular environmentalist objection is defeated”✓ (Elliot, 2005, p. 67). His example is, to be sure, hypothetical. There is a proposal to mine sand on a coast in order to extract titanium oxide. The dune area must be cleared of vegetation and the coast destroyed. The mining company understands people’s concern and promises that, once the minerals have been extracted, it will restore the area to its original state. In the book Estetika narave [The Aesthetics of Nature], Kante observes of Elliot’s approach that it tries to prove that the evaluation of the environment depends at least in part on the presence of properties that cannot survive the process of dissolution and restoration (2009, p. 51). The environmentalist must appeal to some property that cannot be restored as part of a natural given.

“One way of teasing out the suggestion and giving it a normative basis is to take over a notion from aesthetics. Thus we might claim that what the environmental engineers are proposing is that we accept a fake or a forgery instead of the real thing”✓, writes Elliot, adding that the engineers “merely fake nature; that they offer us something less than was taken away”✓ (2005, p. 70). The environmentalist can help himself with an analogy with art. A natural area is precious because the human hand has not intervened in it, while in art forgeries as a rule do not have as much value as the original.

Elliot overlooks that he is speaking of an “ideal photograph”. He speaks of cases so rare and impossible that they are suitable only for analytic philosophical articles. Most restorations of nature are not the re-establishment of a previous state, but the creation of nature as nature, according to the ideas of ecologists, landscape architects and biologists. And Škocjanski zatok is an example of how experts transformed part of the marsh next to the Port of Koper into a nature reserve. Slovenia, namely, has been a signatory, since the times of the former Yugoslavia, of the Ramsar Convention, which provides for the protection of wetlands. Škocjanski zatok was protected as a nature reserve only in 1998, and a group of people with vision set to work. By the end of 2007 the largest construction works were completed; 180,000 cubic metres of mud had been removed with heavy machinery, and an additional 40,000 cubic metres were used to create a habitat suitable for birds. Most people do not know that the lagoon was built from nothing: embankments, islands, lagoons and walking paths for recreation and visitors were created, and glassworts, shrubs and marsh vegetation were planted. In the area of the Bertoki reclaimed land (bonifika), on former abandoned agricultural land, an almost 30-hectare freshwater marsh was thus laid out as a replacement habitat for the marshes at the mouths of the Rižana and Badaševica, destroyed in recent decades (Mazi, 2010, p. 16). At the entrance to the reserve nothing can be seen. The visitor is confronted with high embankments that allow the birds to live undisturbed in the interior of the arranged area. Mind you, the area is advertised as a nature reserve of great value, backed by one of the strongest conventions in the world; at the same time it is the destination of school excursions and a true Slovenian ornithological centre.

Although Škocjanski zatok was not there, and generations of socialism could for decades, on their pilgrimages to the seaside, admire the remains of the industrial expansion of Koper’s window on the world, biologists today present it as one of the most successful examples of “renaturation” in Slovenia. On the outskirts of Koper there was no nature; it was simply planted there. Years ago the lagoon area was heavily degraded and full of mud. We built a system of ditches, islets and mudflats, a kind of muddy-sandy ground, explained Nataša Šalaja, the then head of the reserve, as we pushed through the reeds. Terns nest on the barer and sandier islets, while other reliefs are meant for other species. Peace reigns in the reserve, a sea breeze blows, and the contrast with the nearby cranes for transhipping ships’ cargo is surreal. The proximity of a global portal into other productive-financial dimensions is not the only such moment. Birds are not the only ones walking about the area, which is in fact the estuary of the river Rižana into the Slovenian sea. Camargue horses from the marshy basin of the river Rhône in France, adapted to life in marshes, were imported into the reserve; the first two mares were donated to the Bird Watching and Study Association of Slovenia (DOPPS) by the Italian reserve at the mouth of the Soča (Isonzo) (Mazi, 2010, p. 18). If anything, this is not nature but a postcard – an assemblage of elements that work well in a carefully controlled environment. Škocjanski zatok is a motorway rest stop for migratory birds on their long journeys. In the reserve, 225 species of birds have been recorded, which is 60 per cent of all species observed in Slovenia.

Elliot does understand the environmental engineers who maintain that “the exact similarity which holds between the original and the perfectly restored environment leaves no room for a value discrimination between them. He may urge that if they are exactly alike, down to the minutest detail (and let us imagine for the sake of argument that this is a technological possibility), then they must be equally valuable”✓ (Elliot, 2005, pp. 70–71). Kante, too, understands this position as one that takes into account only the intrinsic properties of a particular environment, and fails to understand that for the evaluation of an environment its relational properties (for example, the way in which a landscape came into being) are also important (2009, p. 52).

Let us maintain the tension between the ideal image of the restoration of nature and the case of the “renaturation” of Škocjanski zatok as a first-rate artefact: on the one side, a molecular replica of the natural environment of Elliot’s dunes (without the titanium dioxide, of course), and on the other, the laboratory creation of a nature reserve. The devil, as always, is in the details. Why is a perfect re-creation better than a created natural environment? The lagoon is, after all, as it is – left to itself and entirely natural. Elliot again serves up, as a true aesthetician of nature, an analogy from art. He imagines that he has been promised a Vermeer for his birthday. When he finally receives the canvas as a gift, it is explained to him that the painting he has is not a Vermeer but instead an exact replica of one of the paintings that had previously been destroyed. “Any attempt to allay my disappointment by insisting that there just is no difference between the replica and the original misses the mark completely. There is a difference and it is one which affects my perception, and consequent valuation, of the painting. The difference of course lies in the painting’s genesis”✓; the discovery of the origin of the object changes its valuation, since it reveals that the object is not of the kind I value (2005, p. 71). The analogies between forgery in art and forgery in nature must of course not be understood as if Elliot were proposing that we transfer the concepts of aesthetic evaluation and judgement directly to evaluations and judgements about the natural environment, Kante adds. We always regard a work of art as an intentionally created artefact. Nature in this sense has no author with purposes and plans, even if it looks like a work of art: “The claim is that if there is no judgmental element in environmental evaluation, then there is no rational basis to preferring real to faked nature when the latter is a good replica. The argument can, I think, be met. Meeting the argument does not require arguing that responses to nature count as aesthetic responses. I agree that they are not”✓ (Elliot, 2005, pp. 75–76). Kante by no means agrees with the claim that responses to nature are not aesthetic. Responses to nature can be, and certainly are, aesthetic, by which we do not of course mean that we would regard nature as art. The validity of Elliot’s analogy between faking art and faking nature, however, depends on whether we count the property of “originality” as merely an artistic or also as an aesthetic property. If we count it as merely an artistic property, then it holds only for the domain of art and Elliot’s analogy stands on shaky foundations; otherwise it is valid (Kante, 2009, p. 53).

I myself am convinced that the analogy is poor, regardless of whether we have an aesthetic response to nature. What, in fact, is the originality of nature? Who or what makes this “originality” possible for it in the age of the Anthropocene? Is the true originality of nature its randomness, which stretches all the way back to the Big Bang? At the end of the film K-PAX, the main character Prot (played by Kevin Spacey), who as an inhabitant of another planet chooses a psychiatric hospital for his visit to Earth, explains to the psychiatrist: we K-PAXians have been around so long that we have discovered that the universe expands [ever since the Big Bang] until it collapses in on itself. Then it begins to expand again. The process will repeat itself forever. What you [humans] don’t realise is that everything will be again as it is now. Every mistake you have made in this universe you will live through again in the next. Again and again. Forever. My advice would be to do the right thing this time, because “this time” is all you have (Schenkman, 2001).

And this is the sublime dimension of natural “originality”: untouched, left to the invisible lines of force of the laws of natural science, from the formation of the stars to the building of the Port of Koper, if you like. Let us imagine that Prot’s warning holds water. What, then, is an “ecological mistake”, and what is original? The causal chain from the present moment all the way back to the indeterminate and elusive origin of “natural originality” is total, deterministic, almost perverse … Artistic originality is the spirit of genius; it is a victory over the indeterminability of being and of nature. Natural originality is the domination of being over spirit. Spirit submits, humbly yields, and ascribes monumental value to insignificant things, such as a species of wader. Natural originality is another name for the mask of post-Romantic penance for the self-ascribed sins of human creative passions.

In truth there is no originality in nature. There is replication, there is mutation, there is domination and there is negation – the negation of life, not its expressiveness. The selfish gene (Dawkins, 2006), which devours everything before it in order to express itself in its fullest and strongest form. No one created nature, nor does it have originality. It is as it is by chance, and I claim that when we speak of its “originality” we in fact mean its ambiguous origin, its momentariness in the dimension of the existence of the universe, and its intangibility. That is what we, as beautiful souls, cling to: the sense of mystery, of a self-regulating life winding its way past us. Nature is the ultimate factory of machines that no one operates. Nature is a pack of robotic organisms that try every day anew to free themselves from culture and live their own life – just as, in Werner Herzog’s documentary Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World, the World Wide Web in the end “dreams itself” through our content, texts, messages, recordings, images and photographs (Herzog, 2016). That is why I chose Škocjanski zatok as an example. The renaturation of the industrial marsh was intensive. Every single plant was planted into a carefully planned reserve through which excavators roared. Over time the area is left to what nature “originally” does best: the spontaneous creation of habitat (in this case for birds). I can imagine – not literally, of course, but in the Herzogian sense – that through the artificially placed building blocks, which have begun to communicate and function with one another in a natural way, the lagoon, too, dreams itself.

Make no mistake: Elliot, too, is aware of the graded value of nature. He refers to the example of the Hetch Hetchy valley in the United States of America, canonical (in the aesthetics and ethics of nature), which nature writers particularly valued for its wildness. “Muir’s valuation was conditional upon certain facts about the valley’s genesis; his valuation was of a, literally, natural object, of an object with a special kind of continuity with the past. The news that it was a carefully contrived elaborate ecological artefact would have transformed that valuation immediately and radically”✓ (Elliot, 2005, p. 72). The attraction of wild areas lies, of course, in their “naturalness”. This we cannot deny. Elliot, too, does not oppose renaturation; nevertheless “there will be cases where we rightly judge that it is better to have the natural object than it is to have the artefact … What the environmentalist wants to claim is that, within certain constraints, the naturalness of a landscape is a reason for preserving it, a determinant of its value. Artificially transforming an utterly barren, ecologically bankrupt landscape into something richer and more subtle may be a good thing”✓ (p. 72).

I myself believe that, in the aesthetic sense, a renaturated area such as Škocjanski zatok cannot be something bad. It was designed precisely with the aesthetic experience of birds in mind.⁶⁸ The embankment along the footpath is interrupted every so often, and we find ourselves before wooden walls dotted with numerous slits. These are observation hides, and on the nature trail we have placed them where most is happening and where the most birds and other interesting animal and plant species can be seen. The basic purpose of the embankment and of the hides with slits is to protect the birds from people. Otherwise they notice the human silhouette and take fright, explained Rudolf Tekavčič, the long-time president of the Bird Watching and Study Association, at the time (Mazi, 2010, p. 16). I remember looking through one of them, and before me spread a huge marshy meadow inside the circular embankment. On it were enormous numbers of birds of every possible colour and shape – in groups, singly, in pairs, in the water, in the trees, in the bushes, in the air. The view through a slit a hand high and an elbow wide was a view into another world, inhabited by little egrets, terns, black-winged stilts, reed warblers, woodcocks, curlews, coots, grebes, moorhens …

I am aware of the meaning Elliot has in mind when he speaks of faking nature, but at the same time I wonder what, then, Škocjanski zatok is. The example of a successful natural area of no small proportions shows that we can re-create nature without faking it – simply because of the fact that the lagoon did not exist in this area before construction. And yet it is natural – as natural as Ljubljana’s Tivoli Park with Rožnik Hill, but natural nonetheless. Elliot is clear that today wilderness is a matter of one policy or another. “The idea is that by placing boundaries around national parks, by actively discouraging grazing, trail-biking and the like, by prohibiting sand-mining, we are turning the wilderness into an artefact, that in some negative or indirect way we are creating an environment”✓ (2005, p. 73). The preservation of wilderness today requires constant incentives and environmental policies, and in the case of the lagoon also its re-creation, but Elliot is convinced, in spite of everything, that this is not a sufficient argument against his claim: “What is significant about wilderness is its causal continuity with the past. This is something that is not destroyed by demarcating an area and declaring it a national park”✓ (p. 73).

True, but Elliot’s derivation is thoroughly “unnatural”, inflexible and remote from life. Škocjanski zatok, although artificially and artfully created, evokes powerful aesthetic responses to nature in people, and makes possible the experience of rare bird species, including some that rest on the outskirts of Koper for only a few hours on their migration route. It is hard to claim that it is faked nature, since it did not exist before. We can rather speak of upgraded nature. The lagoon is of course an artefact, but it lives on its natural life, and over the years of its operation it has become clear that, as regards aesthetic responses, its “originality” bothers no one except a handful of philosophers. Elliot is aware that “there can be loss of value without the loss being perceived”✓,Translator’s note: the Slovenian edition cited renders this as a “loss of knowledge”; Elliot’s original speaks of a loss of value. but his position is clear: this is not right, and with faked nature we are robbed of its authenticity. But are we really?

Eric Katz noticed the deficiency of Elliot’s analogy and set about analysing the comparison between the causal history of the value of an artefact and that of a natural object. At the beginning of the article “The Big Lie: Human Restoration of Nature” (2005), he candidly explains further his own (and also Elliot’s) insistence⁶⁹ against faking nature. The idea that humanity can restore or repair the natural environment had begun to play an important role in decisions concerning environmental policy. In this light we can of course understand and welcome the efforts of both authors. The successful renaturation of Škocjanski zatok or felicitous examples of restoration can and must by no means become an excuse for rejecting environmentalist warnings. “These policies also make us feel good; the prospect of restoration relieves the guilt we feel about the destruction of nature. The wounds we have inflicted on the natural world are not permanent; nature can be made ‘whole’ again”✓ (Katz, 2005, p. 79).

Katz thus summarises Elliot’s argument by saying that we value a work of art partly because of the fact that the work was created by a particular artist, an individual human being, at a precise moment in historical time. In the same way, we value a natural area because of its special kind of continuity with the past. What is essential here is that art experts bring a whole range of information into the analysis and evaluation of a work of art: about the artist, the period, the intentions of the work and so on. “In a similar way, the evaluation of a natural area is informed by a detailed knowledge of ecological processes, a knowledge that can be learned as easily as the history of art. To value the restored landscape as much as the original is thus a kind of ignorance; we are being fooled by the superficial similarities to the natural area, just as the ignorant art ‘appreciator’ is fooled by the appearance of the art forgery”✓ (2005, p. 81). Let me recall here Carlson’s natural environmental model, for this summary of Elliot’s thought by Katz is a faithful description of what is today a famous model in the aesthetics of nature. Very well: we are simply mistaken and naive in blissful ignorance. I myself observe that it can also be otherwise. The attraction – the beauty, if you like – of Škocjanski zatok lies, on the other hand, precisely in the fact that it is an artefact. It came into being from nothing and lives on its own life. Katz writes, for instance, that his reaction to the possibility of restoration policy comes almost entirely from the gut: “I am outraged by the idea that a technologically created ‘nature’ will be passed off as reality. The human presumption that we are capable of this technological fix demonstrates (once again) the arrogance with which humanity surveys the natural world”✓ (p. 82). He is convinced that the environmental crisis is a consequence of a technological state of mind, and he focuses on the creation of artefacts, because that is the bad thing that technology brings about.

In the aesthetic sense, in a thoroughly innocent way (even if we take into account the “state of the ecological mind” in 1982 and 1992), Elliot and Katz greatly exaggerate. People do not care, and Škocjanski zatok today is much more than a technological fix. In the northern Mediterranean, where many wetlands have been destroyed, nature reserves are rare oases where birds can stop, rest and replenish their reserves to continue their journey. If somewhere there are no suitable habitats for them, they simply disappear from there, and over a larger area they die out. Something like this happened with the lesser kestrel, which was for many years a permanent inhabitant of the Ljubljana Marshes. Because of pesticides, which decimated mole crickets and field crickets, its main food, it is no longer found in Slovenia. The nearest place to see it is Hungary. Last year [in 2009] a family of storks was ringed in Germany. It flew to Greece, where the parents separated, while the two young, migrating for the very first time, flew on to Africa. It is hard to say why. The case of a family of “Slovenian” storks is also interesting. After three years the storks returned to Slovenia. The parents flew to the same nest in Prekmurje, while the young sought a new one in Grosuplje, a hundred kilometres away. In Africa the stork from the nest in Prekmurje “married” a male from Switzerland and moved there too. Giving any definitive reasons would be mere guesswork, Rudolf Tekavčič recounted during the conversation for the feature on Škocjanski zatok (Mazi, 2010, p. 17).

European birds, namely, have precisely divided territories; they remember the places where they live and return to them. Pairs of barn swallows, for instance, return from Africa to the same nest every year. Through a monocular I watched a female swan around which there were several grey cygnets. Aha, look at that. It is typical of swans to organise themselves into nurseries, and one female looks after several young while their parents feed in the surroundings, said Nataša Šalaja. Such areas are priceless. Every creature deserves its living space. We cannot even debate that, she added, pointing to the numerous runners doing laps of the nature trail past us. Although the lagoon is still only half arranged, the locals flock to it to walk or run here in the evening and in the morning. We humans need areas where we can relax and do sport. Amid all the industry and traffic, this is a great buffer zone. We are at the entrance to the Slovenian coast, and this is its only larger green part (p. 17). Nor did Borut Mozetič, then the professional head of the reserve, have any great difficulties with the originality of the natural environment. As early as 2006, when we were deepening the freshwater part, swans began to nest; this year [2010] three pairs are already nesting. One pair had as many as eleven young, which means there is plenty of food in the reserve, explained Mozetič, who was also one of the initiators and main actors in securing its protection. Some birds are migrants, which means that they winter in southern lands and nest here from March to September. Black-winged stilts, terns and little egrets go to North Africa during our winter, winter there and return. Then there are the “passage guests”, which winter to the south of us but nest to the north of us. Sandpipers, for instance, stop here for a few days, feed and fly on. For them the lagoon is a migration point, Mozetič explained. As soon as we created the conditions, three or four pairs of black-winged stilts nested the following year, and this year already fifteen. It is similar with the terns, many more pairs of which nest on the islets in the brackish lagoon than in previous years (Mazi, 2010, p. 18). According to him, the goals that had been put on paper when the lagoon was planned were already almost entirely fulfilled at that time. Salt-loving plants also grow in the area that cannot be seen anywhere else in Slovenia except in the Sečovlje salt pans: common and shrubby glasswort, narrow-leaved sea lavender and sea purslane, Mozetič listed. They had also counted 35 species of dragonflies.

Even then I asked him whether such use of space by the birds was truly “natural”, but biologists and ornithologists think in different categories. The inhabitants of Koper and its hinterland evidently behave in the same way, making abundant use of the area for recreation and relaxation. I reflected on this experience while studying the material for the doctoral dissertation, and here I wish to show (admittedly in a journalistic way) that the restoration of nature in the extremely artefactual sense is not necessarily bad – not only in the ecological sense, but also in the aesthetic one. The lagoon is a space intended for aesthetic responses, and the new plant and animal species mostly settled there of their own accord. Would it be better if they were not there? Would it be better if they had died out? Out of vanity about whether the reserve is an artefact or not? In this case I can hardly agree with the claim that “most artifacts are human creations designed for use in human social and cultural contexts. But once we begin to redesign natural systems and processes, once we begin to create restored natural environments, we impose our anthropocentric purposes on areas that exist outside human society”✓ (Katz, 2005, p. 83). Even where the restoration is done well, this explicitly bothers the author, since “the area may appear natural; but it will not be natural, since it is the result of a technological acceleration of natural forces … But artifacts are essentially the constructs of an anthropocentric world view. They are designed by humans for humans to satisfy human interests and needs. Artifactual restored nature is thus fundamentally different from natural objects and systems which exist without human design. It is not surprising, then, that we view restored nature with a value different from the original”✓ (p. 86). A quarter of a century later it is clear that human influence on nature is already so great that nature constantly adapts to human plans, whether we notice it or not.

Katz implicitly tries to soften Elliot’s strict distinction by following Cebik (Katz, 2005, p. 87), and he analyses forgeries in art. In our understanding of art there prevails a paradigm that emphasises “production by individuals”✓, while nowhere in this analysis “is there room for paradigmatic art being fluid, unfinished, evolving, and continuous in its creation”✓ (p. 87). “These suggestions about a different paradigm of art show clearly, I think, what is wrong with the art/nature analogy as a useful analytical tool. Natural entities and systems are much more akin to the fluid evolving art of Cebik’s alternative model than they are to the static, finished, individual artworks of the dominant paradigm”✓ (Katz, 2005, p. 87). Kante (2009), too, agrees with Katz’s finding that it is a mistake to use, for the appreciation of natural entities and environments, the criteria of forgery and authenticity that derive from the ordinary, static conception of art. “They are fluid, evolving systems which completely transcend the category of artist or creator. The perceived disvalue in restored natural objects does not derive from a misunderstanding over the identity of the creator of the objects. It derives instead from the misplaced category of ‘creator’ – for natural objects do not have creators or designers as human artworks do. Once we realize that the natural entity we are viewing has been ‘restored’ by a human artisan it ceases to be a natural object. It is not a forgery; it is an artifact”✓ (Katz, 2005, p. 87). Interestingly, Katz is aware here that “the creation of artifacts is a natural human activity, and thus the distinction between artifact and natural object begins to blur”✓: “[W]e admit that the concepts of ‘natural’ and ‘artifactual’ are not absolutes; they exist along a spectrum, where various gradations of both concepts can be discerned”✓ (p. 88).

In the book Estetika narave (2009), Kante raises a number of questions about Elliot’s and Katz’s argumentation. First, he finds it surprising that they do not regard restoration in nature as restoration in art, that is, in some positive sense. With the example of Škocjanski zatok and the results of this project, this is also my own reservation, with which Kante concurs: we know, of course, that we can draw some parallels between a restoration project and a mitigation project. A mitigation project often involves the general creation of a new ecosystem, designed to look like a piece of nature that may have no historical continuity whatsoever with the natural history of the land on which it is placed (2009, p. 55). By contrast, restoration must of course be connected with the historical continuity of the area where it takes place. In Kante’s view, various examples – protected corridors connecting scattered national parks, for instance – show that this sometimes simply means connecting original pieces of nature for the sake of preserving the integrity of the original ecosystem. In this sense restoration is more like repairing a damaged work of art than creating a forgery (p. 55).

Katz’s emphasis is clear: all attempts to redesign, re-establish and restore natural areas interfere too much with natural processes. “All of these projects involve the creation of artifactual natural realities, the imposition of anthropocentric interests on the processes and objects of nature. Nature is not permitted to be free, to pursue its own independent course of development”✓ (Katz, 2005, p. 89). It is evident that Katz idealises nature and natural processes. An independent, free and untouched nature is an ideal, a post-Romantic sediment of the pure thoughts of a beautiful soul. Katz, like Adorno (see section 2.1), speaks of a policy of domination. “From within the perspective of anthropocentrism, humanity believes it is justified in dominating and molding the nonhuman world to its own human purposes. But a policy of domination transcends the anthropocentric subversion of natural processes. A policy of domination subverts both nature and human existence; it denies both the cultural and natural realization of individual good, human and nonhuman. Liberation from all forms of domination is thus the chief goal of any ethical or political system”✓ (Katz, 2005, p. 89). Restoration or redesign destroys nature, Katz claims; what is more, it creates a false reality that offers us merely a pleasing illusory appearance of the natural environment.

Kante asks whether so rigid and fundamentalist a position stands up to scrutiny. We can, namely, imagine cases in which nature cannot pursue its own interests because of damage caused by humans. Škocjanski zatok is certainly such a case. If the “interest” of a wetland is to provide habitat for various animal and plant species, but it has been destroyed because of the proximity of the industrial complex of a global port, then it will not “repair” itself of its own accord. Kante, too, reflects that restoration need not determine precisely what should grow in particular places, since it can simply be an act that allows nature once again to pursue its own interest, instead of being shackled in a perpetual trauma caused by humans (Kante, 2009, p. 56). Moreover, from the premise that something is more natural when it is relatively free from human interference, it simply does not follow that we must therefore always avoid intervening in nature (p. 56), Kante writes about the conviction that by restoration we always and in every case create mere artefacts, and he adds that there are certainly restoration projects that do not lead to the mastery of nature, even if their consequence is a certain artefact. Even if we therefore agree with Katz that humans cannot actually restore nature, we must of course not conclude from this that humans must not undertake restoration projects that repair the damage caused by past domination over nature (pp. 56–57). What is more, Kante observes that Katz confuses restoration and mitigation. If Katz’s objection is that when we restore a despoiled piece of nature we are at least doing something that satisfies our need to have more attractive natural environments, we can reply that, because of the constraints on restoration, the fact that we find the restored landscape attractive is really only accidental. It is often true that what we must restore a landscape to is not the landscape that most people would prefer (p. 57).

Kante’s last remark on Katz’s writing concerns the claim that human intervention in nature prevents its self-realisation. How are we to know, Kante asks, what this self-realisation is supposed to be in each particular case? Why should we exclude ourselves, that is, consciously decide not to take part in it and help it to be realised?

6.1. The Countryside as a Space of Authenticity, Then and Now

On reading the philosophical questions of authenticity, art and the relation to the countryside that Lev Kreft (2015) develops in the book Estetikov atelje: od modernizma k sodobni umetnosti [The Aesthetician’s Studio: From Modernism to Contemporary Art], it becomes clear that the essence of the contemporary “authenticity of nature” is closely bound up with the indeterminable origin of this conception. In the chapter “The Countryside as a Space of Authenticity”, Kreft puts forward a surprising thesis about the dialectic between the civilisation of industry and technology and the soil of the countryside. Perhaps the real question is not the originality of nature but the origin of the concept of its authenticity, with which Elliot and Katz try to justify their positions. And it is by no means only a matter of them. This perception of authentic nature returns at the margins throughout the whole dissertation. Kreft’s analysis can, in my opinion, at least partly calm the agitation and soften the dominion that the concept of the “authenticity” of nature establishes over a whole range of arguments.

The question of authenticity, in Kreft’s words, has become even more acute since we see the great majority of works of art, especially of the visual arts, in their virtual presence (Kreft, 2015, p. 67). The most famous paintings and sculptures of art history are present on the World Wide Web in numerous representations of the original, which, however, differ greatly from one another both in colour tones and in general impression. The use of authenticity, Kreft believes, reflects the threat posed by a prevailing inauthenticity. In relation to it, authenticity – which before the existence of inauthenticity was simply authentic, that is, was not even aware of its own authenticity and was therefore entirely at home with itself in authenticity, without knowing of itself – is now, confronted with inauthenticity, aware of its own authenticity, but only because it has been pushed to the margins and is in danger of being eaten into and finally overwhelmed by inauthenticity (p. 68). But once authenticity is threatened to such a degree, it becomes inauthentic itself, since it must fight to preserve its authenticity, and consequently it is no longer at home with itself in authenticity, but is forced to project its own authenticity against inauthenticity as a kind of barricade and trademark, in order to be recognised and to recognise itself (p. 68).

If I connect this with my own example, I can draw parallels between the industrial complex of the Port of Koper and the nearby Škocjanski zatok reserve. The example is truly radical, but all the more does it confirm Kreft. In the case of the lagoon, the first question is no longer at all whether it is “authentic”. No, the first question is to what extent, as re-made nature,Translator’s note: the author’s hyphenated “po-narejena” plays on ponarejena, “faked”, and narejena, “made”. it is capable of projecting the authenticity of a reserve, in its noblest sense, onto the ship cranes that nearby draw from the sky the shadows of unstoppable progress upon it. A natural oasis was re-created on the margin of the last true industrial oasis in Slovenia. If I were to speculate a little, I would venture to claim that its creators half-consciously protected it with the high embankment that surrounds it. Kreft, too, writes that when one begins to speak of the authenticity of the work of art and of the authenticity of human historical or other existence (and the two are certainly connected), this is the way in which the inauthenticity of authenticity dictates its inauthentic, threatened and dissatisfied existence … Inauthenticity always has this advantage over authenticity, that unambiguous existence belongs to it, while authenticity always resists and fights for recognition when it is already in dire straits (Kreft, 2015, pp. 68–69). And this is precisely the perspective that Elliot and Katz lack. It is not we humans who are at war with nature. Not any more. Today nature is at war with us – not only as far as survival is concerned, but also in that we impose on it the burden of authenticity; that we expect being to satisfy our unattainable ideals and ideas. How anthropocentric, then, is the dominion of the demand for authenticity?

The discovery of spaces of authenticity where inauthenticity has not yet supplanted and devalued it is, as Kreft follows Clement Greenberg, the most visible critical move of artistic modernity in its dispute with this modernity itself (p. 69), and among the best-known examples of invoking authenticity is Heidegger’s interpretation of Van Gogh’s painting of a pair of peasant shoes. “The peasant woman wears her shoes in the field. Only here are they what they are. They are all the more genuinely so, the less the peasant woman thinks about the shoes while she is at work, or looks at them at all, or is even aware of them”✓ (Heidegger, 1967, p. 257, in Kreft, 2015, p. 69). We become almost embarrassed, Kreft reflects, at being in the company of so excellent an authenticity as a banal pair of worn-out peasant shoes. Without Heidegger no one would have noticed them, not even on the canvas itself, since for modernist painting how something is in the picture is more essential than what. But the philosopher has not only us where he wanted to have us, that is, ashamed of our inauthenticity, which we could not overcome by ourselves; he also has art and its work of art where he wanted it – for the philosopher, the artistic character of the work of art is what the equipmentality of equipment is for the peasant woman with her shoes (p. 70). Kreft calls on us to take seriously the encounter of two authenticities, the peasant woman’s use of the shoes and the unconcealment of the truth of the shoes: the ground on which these two authenticities and their mutual interweaving can meet is only the ground of the countryside. The civilisation of industry and technology possesses no such space. On the contrary, what it is capable of is the destruction of spaces of authenticity, whether of art or of the countryside (p. 70).

Let us make a short detour in Van Gogh’s shoes, as Timothy Morton puts them on, slightly differently (and, to tell the truth, very much in his own way), in Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. With the help of Plato’s dialogue Ion and of poets, that is, rhapsodes, he introduces the concept of ecorhapsody. He seeks the origin of the term nature writing⁷⁰ in the Greek words οἶκος and μίμησις. Nature writing is thus the mimesis of the oikos – ecomimesis – and Morton is adamant that this is not merely artful imitation. No, for him ecomimesis is a powerful, magical form – by no means merely a copy, but a most convincing illusion that serves depiction. As is well known, for Plato mimesis is a divinely inspired form of madness. It is “not simply a matter of copying forms, but of being plugged in to a source of inspiration, ‘mainlining’ reality”✓ (Morton, 2009, p. 54). The poet is a rhapsode and mimesis is a form of rhapsody, and “the expanded definition of rhapsody still gestures toward reading. Ecological rhapsody is a reading of the book of nature”✓ (p. 54). Whether Socrates condemns poetry is left to interpretation, but he certainly excludes it from the sphere of rational thinking.

In its form, ecomimesis embodies automatism, spontaneity, the translation of ambience. Surrealist “automatic writing” aids passion – not towards copying, but in the transmission of something that constantly bypasses consciousness. The automaton-writer of nature writing becomes a recording device: “All is written on the blank page, and writers make far too much ado about something that is like a revelation or a photographic development”✓ (Morton, 2009, p. 56). In this sense ecorhapsody is a form of ecomimesis. Wordsworth’s poems begin by establishing an ambience, breezes, atmosphere and feeling … “The image suggests that significance and inspiration come from ‘elsewhere,’ even if that elsewhere is really an analogue for somewhere ‘in’ the poet’s mind. This elsewhere is beyond concept, but palpable, like the air. It exists in between somewhere so different that it is utterly unknown, and ‘here,’ the place of the subject”✓ (p. 56). For Heidegger, Morton is convinced, poetics is the true reading of the environment, a kind of “monitoring” – a technological comparison with which Heidegger, I suppose, would by no means have been satisfied. In Heidegger’s description of the peasant shoes, the environment of the countryside resounds. Leaving aside feeling and form, for Morton the description summons a presentiment of being itself, indeed of Dasein. If, then, the silent call of the earth resounds in the shoes, the language of this speech wants us to hear this non-sound, Morton writes. “Beyond a certain feeling, rhapsody is most properly the tone of the environment, registered in discrete things that, simply because they are discrete, are no longer just in the background, but have been pulled into the foreground”✓ (p. 57). Where is the inside, within these shoes? In the material? In the very idea of peasant shoes? Heidegger’s locative vagueness has, in Morton’s view, a precise role: rather than approaching a real pair of peasant shoes adequately, Heidegger criticises the conviction that art is adequate at all. “For Heidegger ‘man is the shepherd of Being’—he might as well have said that man is the rhapsode of being, a romanticized worker whose job is to hold it in mind … The environment just happens around us, without our intention. Or it is the objectified, perhaps unintended consequence of an intention—intention’s echo”✓ (Morton, 2009, pp. 58–60).

Regarding the numerous interpretations of Van Gogh’s painting, Kreft points out that between the work of art and philosophy or art history there is no ontological relation that would ground the question of truth in a factographic way (Kreft, 2015, p. 71). He himself opts for a different historicity, one that gathers facts and events and explains the contacts between them. His analysis of the relation between rural authenticity and metropolitan industrialism and scientism in nineteenth-century art is interesting. Modernity, Kreft writes, as it emerged after the French political and the English industrial revolutions, did more than merely threaten art in its old organisation and circumstances. It abolished its fundamental conditions. The artist had to find his way in the market and survive. Modern metropolitan life with its industrial production became alien to artists and to art. What were they to do? Adapt or resist? Art is a speaker who in this discourse speaks from the position of authenticity, and at the same time a wanderer seeking a dwelling suitable for its discourse, that is, an authentic one. Among the authentic dwellings it chose as a suitable environment, in which it would not have to dissemble and become estranged, the countryside stands out as a space of authenticity: a place where the artist and art come to themselves (Kreft, 2015, p. 75). He is interested in the countryside as a space of authenticity, also in the sense of a source of folk authenticity, the origin of pure demotic speech, the bearer of the authentically national, and a space of respite and withdrawal from modernity. He is convinced that this story was about a conflict over what in the new world would belong to industry and what to art – about the division of labour and with it the division of social competence and power (p. 75).

What, then, are Škocjanski zatok on the outskirts of Koper and the strictly guarded and protected Križna Cave mentioned above, if not “temples” of authenticity? In the postmodern world the battle is not only between industry and art; a world war is being waged between big technology and ecology. Because robotics is supplanting labour as such (in the case of nature and its manipulation too), a struggle for territory is under way. And in this sense our reserve next to the Port of Koper is a manifestation of territorial authenticity. It is an aesthetic action beside the car parks of thousands of cars from the Far East and the stacks of shipping containers. The capitalist present of a warehouse of consumer goods must tolerate on its margin a vision of a return to nature in the form of a refuge for birds and people. However small it is in comparison with the port complex, in the visual-aesthetic sense (fakeness or no fakeness) it is much larger – an installation of bad conscience for the drivers who travel along the Koper bypass to soak on the coast or further on the Adriatic.

And precisely the artistic search for spaces of authenticity in the nineteenth century was, in Kreft’s opinion, at the level of its time, not some kind of infatuation with the past. Similarly, the lagoon and Križna Cave are ahead of their time. Artists at that time produced a countryside such as had never existed before, while ecologists and biologists today, with the areas mentioned, produce territories that we once took for granted. Or, as Kreft writes of that time, with means that are not industrial means, but which nevertheless, as ideological means of production, are just as modern as machine production itself (Kreft, 2015, p. 76). An important topos of the territory of modernity were once the world exhibitions of industry and other skills, which were a direct product of modernity, exhibited as if they were objects and operations that had, besides a useful, also a pure aesthetic character. Art first had to fight for a place at them, and only later could international art exhibitions establish themselves as independent entities. With these [industrial] exhibitions the purpose is fulfilled that demands that man become master of the world – of that world which, with the Copernican revelation, was left without a true centre. What gives exhibition value to machines and their products, and also to all other exhibits, both craft and artistic, is the sense of man’s supremacy over nature (p. 77).

The topos that today corresponds, in the case of nature, to the world exhibitions of industry and other skills is the international political summits and meetings of the G8, the G20, the United Nations and the leaderships of the European Union in Brussels. These are “happenings”, if you like, at which nature had to (and still has to) fight – from the beginnings of the Kyoto Protocol in 1992 to its Russian ratification in 2005 – to be recognised as authentic; to be recognised as the last refuge of authenticity. The “Copernican revelation” today is the report on climate change of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The control over the world that industry established is no more. Nature is in control. The whole planet must become countryside – that is the tireless message of environmental organisations over the last three decades. Findings about the crisis, if not indeed the end, of history painting, at least as it had been known until then, accumulated just as findings about the end of imitative painting, especially portraiture, accumulated with the outbreak of photography, Kreft writes, adding that out of this crisis there emerged the official eclectic Empire realism, an academic, nationally celebratory art, which was of course the exact opposite of everything the artistic left swore by.⁷¹ That is why already in the first half of the nineteenth century, at least as far as these circles are concerned, the non-academic genre of landscape comes to the fore – which for the doctrine of academic painting, still educated in classicism, was a problematic genre, because it did not belong to the only two elite genres: history painting and the portrait of important, exalted persons (Kreft, 2015, p. 86). Landscape before 1830 was imbued with the Italian model and was treated as an ornament or background; then the painterly movement “back to nature” appears, Kreft observes, regarding the discovery of “French nature” and of a national model through the Barbizon School. The authenticity they would have liked to find, or did in fact find there, was at first a national landscape identity, such as they produced with their works (Kreft, 2015, p. 87).

The creation of areas such as Škocjanski zatok and Križna Cave has replaced painting. To evoke a national landscape identity it is no longer enough to depict nature on canvas or in a photograph; today, with the perspective of the view of the Earth from space, we must create and promote the identity of the global citizen, who allows a reserve to be laid out in Koper for birds, those global travellers, and sees in this an added value. Križna Cave is an underground treasure and a store of the surplus value of the science of karst phenomena, with which we can set ourselves against the world and wash our conscience that we still possess an authentic piece of the karst underground through which no narrow-gauge railway has been laid. The examples above show that what is at stake is not so much the faking of nature as its physical depiction. Because it has disappeared, we must create it and let it, in this post-authenticity, coexist alongside us, who have meanwhile become entirely inauthentic – the globality of our planetary citizenship notwithstanding. With the extensive feature “A Space for Birds Is a Space for People” (Mazi, 2010), in collaboration with one of the finest photojournalists, Bojan Velikonja, with whom I agreed precisely on what I wanted to convey to readers with the text and he with the photographs, I myself helped to co-create this image (at the time still unreflected). Or, as Morton would say, I was an ecorhapsode of nature writing, and behind my feeling the rhapsody recorded the tone of the environment of the nature reserve. It recorded discrete things which, simply because at that moment they were discrete for me, did not remain in the background; I put them in the foreground. Whether this is fair to readers, I am no longer as certain today as I was then.

6.2. Land Art and Bio Art as an Insult to Nature

In my view, a shorter reflection on environmental art, or “land art”, also belongs in the chapter on faking. If we somehow accept that art and the landscaping of gardens (by, let us say, artistic criteria) have successfully separated in the West, a new concept of environmental art comes to the fore, which is convinced of itself that it is sustainable, close to nature and in one way or another beneficial to the concept of nature. The fact is that environmental art is an exciting daughter of contemporary art that focuses on nature and natural environments, yet it arouses an indefinable unease. Why? First, because we may ask whether, when we appreciate environmental art, we appreciate nature at all. The next question is whether we can detect anything unethical in cases of environmental works of art. Once again, in the aesthetic appreciation of nature we encounter ethical aspects.

In Slovenia, besides the numerous interesting examples of artistic interventions at the molecular level carried out by Polona Tratnik (2016) or Špela Petrič (2011), the most interesting artist for this doctoral dissertation is Maja Smrekar. While Tratnik and Petrič deal experimentally with life and the environment at the molecular level, Smrekar is artistically active⁷² in the environment and in relations with other, larger organisms, such as dogs. At first we might conclude that environmental art can be grand in scale, rearranging nature over a wider area and disposing it as it sees fit, or that it takes place at the molecular level, perhaps in the near environment, and is entirely innocent – as innocent as, say, colouring a pond red with a performance of rubbing stones that release the right pigment. If I take Parsons’s definition of environmental art into account, it is such that it uses only natural materials and sites that are an essential component of the work of art (Parsons, 2008, p. 129). Works of environmental art cannot be made of synthetic materials, and they must not be moved to other sites. Natural materials are not only the essential medium of the works; they are the work itself. By this definition Parsons does not count bio art as environmental art. Environmental art is defined as art that uses nature as its medium in order to express something about nature (p. 130).

We find ourselves once again at the dilemmas above concerning the faking, restoration and authenticity of “nature”. Maja Smrekar’s project Maya YogHurt is quite a hard nut for them to crack. The pot named Maya YogHurt contains a product of Maja Smrekar’s enzyme. We are therefore speaking of a foodstuff made with the help of genetic engineering, since in the laboratory of the Biochemical Institute part of the author’s DNA was inserted into a yeast fungus. In this way, instead of alcoholic fermentation, they brought about the formation of lactic acid. You can thus consume the product of the fusion of two different organisms, one of them human. The modified yeast strains were completely removed through a process of straining … The author understands her DNA as an artistic potential which, as a subjectivised body, produces an idea. At the same time we find that the artist herself – that is, as a body with a genetic make-up – is simultaneously a constituent part of her own realised idea. Through an objectively conducted laboratory procedure, Maja Smrekar realises herself as an artistic subject, while in using her personal characteristics for scientific-artistic purposes she objectifies them as a mere means (Stopar, 2012). And this precisely in the case of yeasts, which are a natural environment in themselves and which in this case received an artistic intervention with a natural material – the author’s DNA. I wish to show that Parsons’s definition (also as regards aesthetic purposes) is somewhat outdated and rigid. In my opinion this is shown somewhat more clearly by Smrekar’s exhibition entitled Survival Kit for the Anthropocene – A Trailer (Kumerdej, 2015): a multi-layered and polysemic artistic engagement with the phenomenon of invasive plants – a phenomenon that brings many a debate about environmental aesthetics and ethics to its knees. In it the artist tackled the latest geological period, the Anthropocene, which began twelve thousand years ago with the Neolithic and is marked by human influences on the Earth’s ecosystem. Among them is also the ever faster spread of invasive biological species, which displace autochthonous species from biological niches; but like everything living, the currently greatest invader and predator on the planet – the human being – will sooner or later face extinction too. The exhibition Survival Kit for the Anthropocene – A Trailer is conceived as practical equipment for biological survival in apocalyptic conditions, while at the same time it addresses the process of the disappearance of local cultures and economies in the grip of the neoliberal economy (Kumerdej, 2015). The mobile survival kit ingeniously connects contemporary art with folklore and comprises a hybrid between a beehive and a Slovenian peasant chest, whose egg-like form evokes the symbol of life, while its exterior, in the spirit of folk ornamentation, is decorated with little pictures of the invasive species spreading ever more widely in Slovenia: Japanese knotweed, giant hogweed, the zebra mussel and the harlequin ladybird. The kit, in which the author combined autochthonous linen rope and pig’s bladder with invasive acacia and bamboo, is basically a water collector with impregnated pig’s bladders, into which water flows through water filters along a bamboo pipe (Kumerdej, 2015).

In this case, of course, it is not factually a matter of environmental art or strict “land art”, but in the aesthetic-artistic sense of the bare connection between the ideology of capitalism and the phenomenon of invasive species, in relation to the human being as the most invasive species, the art project could not be more “environmental”. The drawers of the “egg of life”, namely, contain the basic aids for the event of an apocalypse, from a radioactivity indicator and iodine tablets to a protective mask, while attached to it is a two-pronged wooden fork with a removable wooden net, whose usefulness depends on the imagination – it can serve as a sunshade or a fish trap, and the fork also as a handy catapult (Kumerdej, 2015). It is evident that Parsons, as well as others, conceive of “nature” as landscape, that is, as an environment outside civilisation and alongside it – with all the burden of authenticity that Kreft develops above. I am convinced, and this dissertation among other things serves this purpose, that this is too narrow a view, and that aesthetic problems are no smaller if we place them at the micro or any other level of existence, or even if we consider them at the level of communication between different species – whether it is a matter of the relation between bacteria and human genetic material, or of relations with animals.

At the time the dissertation was being written, Maja Smrekar was best known for the project Hybrid Family.⁷³ This is the second part of the series K-9_topology, in which Smrekar explored the parallel evolution of human and dog and the cultural intersections of the human and the animal. The series creates conditions for thinking about a society that would be based not on subjugating and instrumentalising nature for its own needs, but on a more balanced coexistence of the human being within the ecosystem that surrounds it. In a three-month seclusion, into which Maja Smrekar withdrew from the noise of everyday life, in the upper rooms of the Freies Museum in Berlin, she brought her emotions, thoughts and body to a state that enabled her to feed a new member of the family with her own milk. The new arrival was a female Icelandic Sheepdog puppy named Ada. Together with the already adult Border Collie Byron, the artist established a hybrid family, in which she explored the emotional economy between species as different as human and dog. She reflected on her maternal transformations and tried to extricate herself from the symbolic order of the human family.

Parsons writes about the aesthetic insult to nature in connection with a general definition. If we change or rearrange the aesthetic qualities of some X, this is an attack on the dignity of that X. In the case of environmental art, two concerns stand out. First, before the artist’s intervention nature had a set of aesthetic qualities that it has as a natural thing. A mountainside may, for instance, look wild and imposing; if so, this is an aesthetic quality it has as a natural thing. Second, in creating environmental art the artist turns nature into art and thereby changes its aesthetic qualities (Parsons, 2008, pp. 130–131). Parsons of course has in mind nature and natural environments, but in view of the examples above I ask myself whether we might perhaps extend the scope of the concept of aesthetic quality to other properties as well. Is not the “dogness” of the Icelandic Sheepdog an inseparable part of its set of aesthetic qualities? In the sense that, as Canis lupus familiaris, it is admittedly already a kind of artefact, yet as a descendant of the wolf it has wildness in it, and as a quarter-wolf it is part of a canine pack and lives in its own pack, not at a woman’s breast. The bond with the other members of the pack is part of the aesthetic attraction of the dog, and Smrekar is well aware of this; otherwise she would not have tried to transform these bonds into a hybrid family and to emphasise them aesthetically through her own transformation into a human-dog.

The idea that nature can be insulted was first developed by Donald Crawford (1983) in the article “Nature and Art: Some Dialectical Relationships”, and was further developed by Allen Carlson (2000). He, too, does not use extreme examples such as those I have listed above, and focuses on nature and natural environments in a more general sense, but he emphasises that the “insult” under discussion is an aesthetic insult. It concerns the aesthetic qualities of the object, and not so much its “its social, moral, ecological, or other such qualities”✓ (Carlson, 2000, p. 153). What seems to me very important is that Carlson clearly points out that in these cases we must not think about how the people who aesthetically appreciate such cases feel, but must ask whether the intervention is an insult to nature. “Nonetheless, it is true that the recognition of an aesthetic affront to nature requires an appreciator, for nature itself cannot recognize the affront”✓ (p. 153).

The same holds for environmental ethics. One of the foremost experts in environmental law and an advocate for the environment, Jack Tuholske,⁷⁴ explained to me, in an interview entitled “Kdo na sodišču zastopa naravo? Drevesom ne pustijo.” [“Who Represents Nature in Court? Trees Are Not Allowed.”] (Mazi, 2009), his long experience of representing nature in American courts. In the United States of America the rule is that in such cases the environment can be represented by people, but they must suffer some kind of harm or injury. Trees themselves cannot appear in court. We tried that, but legal doctrine simply did not accept it. The threshold for people to be able to represent nature in court is very low. I do not have to suffer economic harm or health problems. I can say that that forest (he points towards Rožnik, author’s note) is beautiful and that I enjoy it and value it. If someone were to cut it down, I would be personally affected. If someone wanted to cut it down, then, provided appropriate environmental legislation were in force, I could go to court and prevent it. Let us say that environmental legislation does not exist at all. What then? Is there some broader constitutional or human right that allows me to protect this forest? There is no satisfactory answer to that question yet either (2009, p. 19).

In explaining the aesthetic insult to nature, Carlson resorts to art and offers the example of Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q. of 1919, in which the artist added a moustache and goatee to the Mona Lisa. It is striking how the leading author in the field keeps returning to examples from art to explain aesthetic phenomena in nature. In any case, after the Dadaist transformation, da Vinci’s work became something it had not been before: incongruous and ironic. A similar aesthetic transformation also takes place in environmental art. For Carlson the Dadaist intervention is a clear case of insult. He grants Duchamp only enough judgement to have used a reproduction. Had he carried out the action on the original, it would have been even worse. Carlson tries to show that the insult does not affect only the appearance of the object; it changes its kind and thereby also its aesthetic qualities (2000, p. 155). In a similar way, even though nature is an essential part of environmental art, the artist, with small acts in the landscape similar to Duchamp’s strokes, changes the kind of things that are [otherwise] part of nature (p. 155). He destroys a set of aesthetic qualities or blurs them, and in this way imposes on nature new aesthetic qualities that were not there before.

I observe that both Crawford and Carlson have difficulty coping with the fact that the aesthetic qualities we regard as original were attributed to nature in the first place by humans, and that it can be an entirely arbitrary decision that changed circumstances (taking into account certain ecological guidelines) have worsened nature to such an extent that we may lament a great insult. We are prepared to accept that a devastating fire or a storm, such as an ice storm, are natural and simply a misfortune, yet we are very critical of environmental art. What is more, I myself perceive the function of environmental art as a marker that makes us notice nature at all, which, to tell the truth, is not such a bad purpose. There is also a different level of aesthetic insult to nature, which can take place with the help of art at an entirely ideological level, and which authors in this field do not perceive as important. The environmental artist Marko Pogačnik, already mentioned, during the years when he carried out lithopuncture projects across Slovenia and erected stone markers with cosmograms, left his mark (also) on the aesthetic perception of nature and landscape in Slovenia. In the mid-1980s, as he writes in the book Ko se Boginja vrne [When the Goddess Returns], he devoted himself with all his strength to healing the Earth. After the model of acupuncture, he developed a method of healing in which needles are replaced by stones, or stone sculptures (see Chapter 4), placed at suitable points in the landscape that follow the energy currents of the Earth, which for him is a living being. Crossing the Greek word for stone, lithos, with the Latin word for puncture, punctura, he named the method lithopuncture. Pogačnik knows well that if we do not accept his cosmology and his unusual view of the world, his artistic-healing intervention cannot achieve its purpose. For the artist, the human being and the Earth both have, at the level of space and time, a solid material body. In both cases this body would be like a corpse if it were not animated by a subtle energetic tissue that pervades it entirely. Just as the systems of energy centres (chakras) and acupuncture meridians do in the human body, “sacred places” and systems of energy flows in the Earth ensure that its planetary body is imbued with life at all levels (Pogačnik, 1993, p. 7).

The case is a borderline one, since Pogačnik does indeed use a natural material, namely stone, but he moves it into environments where it was not before. This is evident when we look at the lithopuncture park beside the Delo tower in Ljubljana. I am more interested in how his art affects the perception of nature. It is therefore not classical environmental art, which is supposed to say something about nature through nature, but art that, through the means of lithopuncture and the cosmograms the artist carves into the stones, appropriates the language of nature. It is a kind of art that exercises the dominion of the rhapsode Pogačnik, since the cosmograms are the medium through which he translates the message of nature – more, of the Goddess who is nature – into the space of civilisation. In this sense Pogačnik’s work does in a certain way insult nature, since it turns it into his version of the cosmos, and this with public markers that, if we are even a little curious, can be found from the Vilenica cave and the whole Karst to Lake Bohinj and the lawn in front of the Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljana. He turns it into a version in which there are elemental, fairy beings in the trees and plants, who, with Pogačnik’s help of course, make contact with humans, communicate their needs and give instructions. In a certain way the artist draws a moustache and goatee on nature while at the same time explaining that the goatee was there all along, only without him we were not able to see it. I would not mention Pogačnik if his work had not won him a not insignificant number of followers; he also designed state symbols, and on the art scene he ranks (also because of the OHO group) higher than most other creators.

Of course, not all environmental art or bio art is an insult to nature. Emily Brady defends environmental art as an expression of respect for nature. In cases where the artist carefully studies the original aesthetic value of a natural environment and carries out the artistic intervention in a way that acknowledges and recognises this value, we cannot, in her view, speak of insulting nature. The creator is able, for instance, to incorporate natural forces such as the power of the sun, wind and tides into the work, whereby the artist’s role supports or heightens attention to natural qualities by bringing them out and engaging creatively with them. In these ways ephemeral works of art show aesthetic respect for nature (Brady, 2007, p. 292). This is not human chauvinistic aesthetics, but support for the aesthetic qualities of nature itself. Similarly, in her view, we can think about cases in which environmental art makes an environment aesthetically more attractive than it was before the intervention. Carlson indignantly rejects such a view. For him, as an advocate of positive aesthetics, it is entirely unacceptable to try to improve landscapes that are not scenic or are barren. Such environmental artistic interventions “They are comparable not to Duchamp’s treatment of the Mona Lisa, but to improvements made on the work of a third rate hack”✓ (Carlson, 2000, p. 157). The desert is an example of a landscape that in its very barrenness has a subtle, quiet beauty, and for Carlson changing this beauty is as great an insult to nature as changing the aesthetic qualities of an otherwise scenic landscape. As I have already shown, the example of Škocjanski zatok testifies to the contrary.

Parsons shyly hints that, taking into account Brady and Carlson and the realisation that much environmental art actually contributes to spreading ecological awareness, the argument about insulting nature may be overblown. Although a handful of extreme cases may deserve the label “insult”, the transformation of nature into art can be carried out in a way that expresses respect for natural aesthetic qualities, improves the aesthetic value of the environment and is environmentally beneficial for nature (Parsons, 2008, pp. 133–134).

6.3. Katz's Reply Two Decades Later: Biological Beings, Too, Are (or Can Be) Artefacts

Two decades after the publication of “The Big Lie: Human Restoration of Nature”, Katz responded, in the article “Further Adventures in the Case against Restoration” (2012), to a host of criticisms of his opposition to restoring nature. They can equally be understood as answers to the questions about insult. In the original article of 1992 one can still detect an absence of awareness of the technological possibilities of restoration, but by no means any longer in the text of 2012. On the basis of Katz’s American examples I can clearly explain what is wrong with the Škocjanski zatok reserve.

Katz admits that there are harmful and well-intentioned restorations. The latter strive to re-establish the autonomy of nature by trying to remove previous harmful human influences. If, then, we simply remove the obstacles to the natural regeneration of an area or ecosystem, autonomous natural processes will take control of events and re-create the landscape or ecosystem. The efforts to eliminate anthropogenic influences fill Katz with unease. He asks whether the role of humans in nature really is such that we should first degrade it and then laboriously heal it. Once again he rejects the conviction that the restoration of nature can be something positive, “restored ecosystems or entities are no longer natural beings but rather artifacts. In doing so, I am calling into question the entire notion that humans can have an authentic experience with nature when they are dealing with a restoration project”✓ (Katz, 2012, p. 74). Working in the garden, pulling weeds and watering plants can be a positive experience, but it is not an experience of working with natural entities, Katz is convinced, since a garden is not a natural area. He is aware that nature, in due time, can undo most human influence. If we leave a garden to itself and do not touch it for a hundred years, it will become wilderness again. It is likewise true that without human influence environmental and biological systems will become natural again; nature will realise itself through them in an autonomous way. “But we cannot overlook the fact that the progress of the system will be different after the initial human intervention. The resulting system will be different from what would have been the case had no intervention taken place at all. … The defense of ecological restoration based on the power of nature to heal itself is merely a perverse continuation of the idea that humanity can and should dominate nature”✓ (2012, p. 75). What is more, the idea that nature is so strong and so beyond human influence that it can restore itself no matter what humans do to it is the mirror image of the idea that humans can (no matter what) control, heal and restore natural processes and entities.

Even two decades later, Katz holds firmly to the dualism between nature and culture. For at least ten thousand years, since the birth of agricultural civilisation, people have lived in a world of culture, created with the help of human technology and science. “Although we are biological beings, we do not live in nature; we live in an artifactual environment. Although we human beings are the products of an evolutionary process, the things that humans do—what we create, build, imagine—these are all artifactual, with a source outside the realm of naturally occurring entities, processes, and systems. Our artifacts, our culture, our world would not exist if we humans had not intentionally interfered with and molded nature”✓ (p. 76). Intentional intervention in nature and its transformation are the source of the dualism between culture and nature.

Some years ago, with a great deal of journalistic fieldwork, I prepared an extensive feature on the maintenance and settlement of populations of large carnivores in Slovenia. In the article entitled “Živeti z velikimi zvermi” [“Living with Large Carnivores”] I presented the efforts and measures of biologists and other experts who at that time were striving in various ways to preserve the populations of bear, wolf, lynx and jackal in Slovenia. Reason, logic and knowledge – that is, everything by which we place ourselves above other species – must enable us to live with those who are not capable of this, and in the case of Slovenia these are the large carnivores, said the biologist Dr Ivan Kos. There are, of course, several possible motives for striving to preserve the bear, the wolf and the lynx. I personally believe that humans have a duty to preserve species because they simply are. We must not exterminate and destroy them. Some will say that we in Slovenia are lucky to have large carnivores. Many will say that there are enough bears and wolves elsewhere too, but that is too narrow a view. In Slovenia, yes, but these two species once lived throughout Eurasia and today they are greatly decimated, added Dr Klemen Jerina, an expert in the telemetric monitoring of wild animals (Mazi, 2009, p. 5).

Besides wolves, lynxes too are very territorial, and each covers a truly large home range. In the last decade experts strove with all their might, including through reintroduction, to re-establish a healthy population in Slovenia. People used to think that every hunting club had its own lynx, but then telemetry showed that one lynx can cover the area of more than ten hunting clubs, the biologist Dr Miha Krofel described an important characteristic of lynxes. The territory of the female lynx Dina, monitored within the Slovenian-Croatian project DinaRis, also extended into Croatia, so that they established excellent cooperation with colleagues from the other side of the border and joined forces in observing and tracking lynxes. When the size of a population falls below a certain critical value, there is a problem with practically every species, no matter how adaptable it is to the environment (Mazi, 2009, p. 6), Dr Ivan Kos warned in 2009 regarding the position of the lynx in Slovenia, adding that it was not that the lynx was especially sensitive, but that at that time, because of its extremely small numbers (15 to 20 adult individuals), the state of the population was critical. Unfortunately, in 2016 experts feared that the lynx had once again died out in Slovenia.

Katz does not understand biologists and their efforts. He himself mentions the example of the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone National Park, which I can set alongside the efforts to reintroduce lynxes, which were also brought to Slovenia from abroad. Some of the wolves for Yellowstone were caught in Canada, and part of the population was raised in captivity. The wolves in this case are an autonomous natural entity that humans influenced only partly and which, after release into the national park, is capable of surviving with its own biological capacities. Why do I cite Katz’s mention of “entities”? Because Škocjanski zatok, too, once it was completed, came to live its own autonomous life. Katz points out that the Yellowstone example shows how broad the spectrum of human technological intervention is. The wolves caught in the Canadian wilderness are certainly not the same as the wolves raised in captivity. In this sense we can say that even autonomous biological entities that have been partly modified are (at least) artefacts. They obviously differ from entities that have not been modified … We can say that some people are at least partly artefacts: Mary with her pacemaker is more artefactual than Sally with her entirely biological heart (2012, pp. 78–79). The development of technology changes human bodies, so that we become ever less natural and ever more artefactual. With eyebrow plucking, plastic surgery, liposuction and Pilates we turn our physical selves into artefactual projects. We may try to prove that medical technology does not turn people into artefacts, but it by no means follows from this that ecological technology does not turn non-human entities into them. To claim that we humans are different from non-human natural entities is merely to confirm the dualism that is at the heart of my critique of ecological restoration (p. 79).

To tell the truth, the most common argument of the advocates of restoring nature is that wild nature is capable of restoring itself of its own accord. But we can develop it further. In his critique of Katz, Vogel argues that restoration projects can be consistent with … existing wildness, and that we would see how the wildness we care about is there all along, throughout the restoration process; it is not something that comes at the end, not something we create, but something we use (Vogel, 2003, p. 162). We humans do indeed start the process, but the wildness of nature finishes it; over some processes at the molecular level we no longer have any influence. Vogel plays with the idea that artefacts, too, contain a level of wildness that is, at least in our sense, entirely unpredictable. Even if we build a bridge, it may later collapse; a bed of tulips may fail to sprout, or a doctorate may remain without a clear conclusion. Wild nature exists in artefacts, and Vogel attributes it to the gap between the intention with which builders act and the consequences of their acting (2003, p. 163). Whenever we humans create with the help of natural processes that we cannot control, the outcomes can be wild and quite unpredictable. Vogel replies that we must take responsibility for our actions in the environment – in this case for a world in which the natural and the artefactual coexist – and humbly acknowledge that most of the consequences of our actions are beyond our control (pp. 167–168). Surely it is true, Katz adds, that we must do what is right! But how does Vogel know what is right? In his world natural entities are inseparable from artefacts, humans and their actions are natural, artefacts have wildness in them. “Everything is natural and everything is artifactual. Thus, all human activity is simultaneously natural and artificial and we have no way to make distinctions as to what is good and bad for nature or humanity”✓ (Katz, 2012, p. 85). Cases of ecological restoration or the creation of nature, such as the renaturation of Škocjanski zatok, open up a whole series of uncomfortable questions. The mastery of technological ecology creates landscapes that satisfy the human community. Policies of restoration and of the preservation and protection of nature are, in Katz’s view, not meant for nature. We must imagine the whole world as an artefactual system, the result of human transformation and action. To resist this all-encompassing humanisation of the world, we need a principle or ideal that can stand against human power and interest. “We need the ideal of a nature that exists independently from human culture. The conclusion then is that we must preserve the distinctions between humanity and nature, between artifact and natural entity, so that we have a normative principle to check the power of human domination”✓ (Katz, 2012, p. 86).

Consider, Katz suggests, that the preservation of protected areas demands great (human) effort. Even if we practise strict nature conservation and forbid direct management of the area through controlled burns, culling of animal species, even resolute non-intervention, such an area requires, for its protection from people, the erection of a fence and the determination of a clear boundary with sanctions. In this sense even fenced wilderness is a kind of artefact. For Katz the distinction between naturalness and artefactuality is in this sense of exceptional importance. “The artifactuality of protected wilderness areas or preserved national monuments is extremely small, falling at the end of the spectrum closest to ‘completely natural,’ as long as there is no direct activity that tends to preserve the natural entity”✓ (2012, p. 96). If, for instance, the US Forest Service decides to start controlled burns in an area, or does everything to prevent them, it thereby increases the artefactuality of the area. “This artifactuality does not mean that the policy is evil, and it does not mean that the actions should be prohibited: the point is simply that we recognize the human influence in the continued existence of the natural area”✓ (p. 96). Katz defends himself against charges of exaggeration by pointing out that already in the article “The Big Lie: Human Restoration of Nature” (2005) he admitted that a stain on the carpet is better cleaned for the sake of an easier life, but that it would be much better if we knew how to ensure that it never got there in the first place. “So restoration projects are often better than nothing, but what we must always remember is that these activities are generally on the far side of the spectrum, near the extreme of artifactuality”✓ (p. 96). Ecological restoration will take place regardless of what we philosophers write in academic articles, Katz candidly admits. He hopes that such projects will proceed in a spirit of respect for nature and for people. The problem is not in what we do, but in what meaning our actions have. Ecological restoration will always be a project of domination over nature, an attempt to control a world that is different and separate from humanity (p. 96).