It doesn't have to be us against the world

What is nature? Is it apart from us, and if so, what should our relationship with it be? These are hard questions to answer, and they go to the heart of our sense of ourselves as humans and as inhabitants of planet Earth. And of course they go to the heart of environmentalism.

Broadly, there are two sorts of environmentalists. Preservationists see almost any human intervention in the natural world as some kind of expulsion from Eden. Sustainable developers regard the natural environment as a sort of service industry for humanity - a garden rather than a wilderness.

Europeans, living on a densely populated continent, are perforce largely sustainable developers. American greens, with more space to play with, are more often fundamentalist preservers. European national parks are overt compromises; US parks such as Yellowstone are intended to be wilderness.

It is the preservationists whom Bruce Hull, a professor of natural resources at Virginia Tech, takes as his target. He says their fundamentalism puts economics and nature, biodiversity and development in perpetual conflict. "Our tendency to polarise issues as supporting either humans or nature saps our will to act." He favours instead a "pluralist"

approach. It means recognising that naturalness is not some single idyllic state, with an ecologists' nirvana of "climax vegetation" at its heart. It means seeing nature as a more dynamic, versatile and capricious phenomenon, capable of responding in unexpected (and sometimes even fruitful) ways to our activities.

It is worth taking a few instances of how the conventional fundamentalist view of nature and humanity in permanent combat often fails to fit the facts. We are mistaken, for instance, in imagining the densest, most biodiverse rainforests to be entirely natural. The Amazon, before Europeans arrived and decimated local tribes with their diseases, had been heavily cleared and planted with fruit trees and other economically valuable crops.

Most other rainforests are far from primeval. A millennium or so ago, much of the Central African jungle was cleared for palm-oil growing and to make charcoal for copper smelting. Even the "wilderness" of the US national parks is largely the result of the depopulation after the arrival of Europeans.

Similarly, however much the planet's overall biodiversity may be declining, humans have been so good at moving species around, both by accident and by design, that any given locality probably has more species within it than ever before. The gardens of England are far more biodiverse than ever before. So are many cities, often because of the bizarre ecological niches created by industry.

While his attempts at a new green lexicon sometimes come unstuck - I never quite got to grips with the meaning of "infinite nature" - Hull's central arguments are strong and useful. He attacks the contradictory myths of nature as fragile and unchanging. Most environmentalists seem to hold both views instinctively without considering them an unlikely combination. Hull argues instead that nature can be robust and dynamic.

Most usefully of all, Hull is pro-people. There is no trace here of the pernicious and potentially fascist idea of "people pollution". (If you think I jest, just take a look at recent arguments in the US, where anti-immigrant groups have attempted to take over mainstream environmental bodies such as the Sierra Club on the grounds that immigrants will trash the environment.) "I believe human creativity can improve, refine and enhance many natures,"

Hull concludes. "We can be prudent innovators, inspired visionaries and loving partners in the odyssey of evolution."

Fred Pearce is environment consultant, New Scientist .