Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts

of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org

where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast, and find links to

another information related to today's conversation. Our email address is mailadicontalk.org. We'd

love to hear from you. My guest today is Daniel Botkin, professor emeritus in the Department

of Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He's

the president of the Center for the Study of the Environment, the author of numerous books,

including discordant harmonies, a new ecology for the 21st century, No Man's Garden, Thoreau,

and a new vision for civilization and nature, and the textbook Environmental Science, Earth as a

living planet. Dan, welcome to Econ Talk. Thank you. I'm glad to be here. In one of the themes in your

books are the metaphors that we use as humans to think about the natural world. Give us some of

the history of how we look at nature and our place there.

As long as people have written about nature and our place in it, we tend to think that these

are modern ideas starting in the 60s and 70s with silent spring, but actually you can find

writings about this 4,000 years old. There's been three metaphors for nature. People have

always asked the question, what is nature like, undisturbed by people, and then how does nature

affect people? And then the third question is how do people affect nature? Of course, you know,

those come to mind to us. What is nature? What's wilderness and what ought to be in our terms?

And what do we do? That's very current. What are we doing to the environment? And the problem

the ancients had was that they believe the gods had made the world and therefore it must be perfect.

Then they'd look around and find it wasn't perfect, so they had to explain it. And so they had

three great metaphors. The first was the great balance of nature. That was the idea that the gods

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