UC Berkeley

Three hundred years after the Scientific Revolution and the exploration of the vast “wilderness” of the “New World,” concepts of “nature” have found themselves in some peculiar orientations. On the one hand, the hyper-advancements in science and technologies have continued to induce a sense of human mastery of nature, a story of the human hand skillfully manipulating earth as it deems fit. On the other hand, a strong idea of wilderness, or untouched and wild land, has remained in the lexicon and imagination of many American minds. These concepts – science and wilderness – rely on notions of the natural and the human as separate realms, and yet so much of science and wilderness indicates a special bond and symbiosis between humanity and nature.

In this work I explore the realms of the natural and artificial by comparing and contrasting two seemingly dissimilar institutions: The California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco and Muir Woods just to the north in Marin County. Both pillars of the Bay Area’s window into nature, these sites offer diverse and contradictory narratives about the human place in the environment and the kinds of behaviors and attitudes that are appropriate in each. What I uncover are the strange overlappings and coincidences of the apparently divergent institutional perspectives.

The idea that I bring to bear to confront these strange parallels is a concept I call the “artinatural.” Like other words that intend to integrate two opposing realms – hybrid or cyborg – the concept of artinatural combines the ideas of natural and artificial to suggest that things, institutions, and even ideas can be simultaneously artificial and natural. A wooden chair, for example, is both from nature (wood from trees) and artificial (made with human hands and/or technologies). The concept is also meant to ask whether the artificial is really outside the realm of the natural at all.

What becomes clear through the exploration of the questions and topics above is that American perspectives on nature that have assumed a great distance between humanity and nature have been a driving force behind both environmental destruction and social injustices. It is through a new understanding of nature, one that accepts humanity and its artifice as significant parts of the natural, that these destructive practices can begin to be counteracted.