According to an ancient story, a tourist marveled at the creeping bent and bluegrass lawns of Oxford, England. He asked a passing groundskeeper for the secret. The groundskeeper replied, “First you level it and seed it and water it; then you roll it for about 800 years – and there you are.”

Like many stories that have the advantage of not being true – a cool climate and good soil conditions deserve the credit – this one points to an important cultural lesson. Europeans tend to perceive the natural as part of their cultural heritage whether in the meticulously kept lawns of Oxford, in the grazed hills of the Lake District in Cumbria, in the well-kept 865 hectares of the Bois de Boulogne near the western edge of Paris, or in the sedulously managed Black Forest in southwest Germany. Europeans believe that to cultivate nature – tending it as farms, vineyards, even lawns – is to respect, know, and revere it. As Simon Schama has argued, landscapes dominated by culture, such as urban streams and city parks, “have always made room for the sacredness of nature.” Domestication may express “not the repudiation, but the veneration, of nature.”

For many American environmentalists, in contrast, nature and culture appear to be separate things, so that to domesticate, cultivate, or manage a wild landscape is to turn it from the sacred to the profane. Nature qua nature must not be managed but follow its spontaneous course.