Second Nature: New Territories for the Exiled
Matthew SkjonsbergIn De Natura Deorum (The Nature of the Gods, ca. 45 BC, which Voltaire called “perhaps the best book of all antiquity”) Cicero wrote: …we sow cereals and plant trees; we irrigate our lands to fertilize them. We fortify river-banks, and straighten or divert the courses of rivers. In short, by the work of our hands we strive to create a sort of second nature within the world of nature.¹ Cicero’s idea of “second nature” clearly encompasses infrastructure, agriculture, and the landscapes incidental to their creation. “First nature” – wilderness – is seen by Cicero to be the realm of the gods, but it is also the raw material and context for second nature. Jacopo Bonfadio wrote to a fellow humanist in 1541 that gardens make a “third nature, which I would not know how to name.”² John Dixon Hunt asserts that Cicero’s formulation would have been in the mind of Bonfadio, and identifies second nature as even more broadly encompassing the cultural landscape (agriculture, urban development, roads, etc.)³ – that is, inclusively, the nature we shape, intentionally or otherwise, through the activity of civilization. Seen in this light, it can be said that Cicero’s idea of second nature constitutes everything outside of wilderness. The connotations of behavioral second nature – our individualized, learned, socialized human nature – are equally important. With our built environment, we are normalizing our behavioral second nature. One might say, for instance, that in a society that actively recycles the act of recycling becomes second nature. But without the infrastructure to support recycling, that learned behavior is quickly unlearned. Our redefinition of the term “second nature” takes both Cicero’s definition and behavioral connotations into account, but differs in that for us “second nature” specifically describes a designed nature created in adjacency to existing urbanization, capable of absorbing future city growth into itself while maintaining ecological systemic continuity. As in an historic process of colonization, the urbanization front will once again be rolled out across this second nature. The special landscape features and ecological characteristics will be absorbed directly into the city. This principle of second nature is not based, as in Olmsted’s time, on a hermetic green structure, but rather on a nature having outgrown human hands, being full of character, and forming a magnetic field for an as yet unknown colonization. Unlike the historic pioneers and clear-cutters who could indulge the habit of expropriating or erasing the nature they encountered, a different opportunism will prevail. Topography, water, and vegetation will be utilized in all kinds of ways, generating an urban ambience with an array of integral spatial qualities, microclimates, stormwater management, leisure, and the innumerable incidental benefits engendered by ecological and social vitality available to all. 1. Marcus Tullius Cicero. The Nature of the Gods. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. p.102 2. Jacopo Bonfadio. Lettere del Cinquecento. Turin: Utet, 1967. p.501 3. John Dixon Hunt. Greater Perfection: The Practice of Garden Theory. London: Thames & Hudson, 2000. p.33