“Nothing in the natural world has any intrinsic value to men”

The expression “Nothing in the natural world has any intrinsic value to men” names the human-centered logic that makes trees, animals, and plants valuable only as resources for human purposes. The novel places that assumption against Mi’kmaw ecological knowledge and, in its closing movement, the work of repairing damaged forests: nature is not merely material to be used, but a living system whose relationships and recovery matter beyond immediate human gain.

The logic of usefulness

In a letter, Père Crème describes how Mi’kmaq people organize their lives around seasonal abundance rather than the fixed routines he considers orderly. He observes that they regard trees, plants, fish, moose, and bears as equals, speak to small creatures as acquaintances, and tell stories in which humans and animals cross familiar boundaries. His own instruction points in the opposite direction: he urges them to cultivate gardens and grains and to treat trees as materials for houses and ships. The contrast exposes the belief beneath the expression: the natural world is assessed according to what it can provide for people.

The letter also reveals the limits of Père Crème’s perspective. He admits that he feels the Mi’kmaq may be teaching him, even as he continues to describe their practices through a colonial distinction between order and idleness. His account therefore registers both the extractive assumption and a growing uncertainty about it. In the world he describes, trees are persons, not simply timber awaiting human use.

Knowledge grounded in relationship

The novel repeatedly shows ecological knowledge as something learned through attentive practice. Mari teaches René Sel to fish for eels: she makes three traps, supplies scraps for bait, takes him to the river, and shows him where to set them. His frequent catches follow from her specific guidance, while her reference to other Mi’kmaq methods makes clear that the traps are one part of a larger body of knowledge. The scene presents the river and its creatures not as abstract resources but as a place requiring familiarity, skill, and reciprocal attention.

Mari’s handling of fish also puts practical knowledge in tension with René’s assumptions. She asks to clean the fish herself and buries the entrails in the garden. When René asks whether this is an Indian custom, she answers that it is common practice among people who grow gardens instead of gathering the riches of the country. Her response links care for what the land yields to a rebuke of those who imagine wealth as something to extract. The scene makes a small domestic act carry the larger disagreement about how human beings should inhabit the natural world.

The novel returns to this distinction when Kuntaw teaches Beatrix to read the forest. Instead of relying on books, he guides her through animal tracks, seasonal signs in plants and trees, scents associated with bears and approaching rain, frost-marked leaves, and changes in the water’s surface. He presents these signs as interconnected, explaining that the forest and ocean shore are joined by countless fine relations. What he calls reading is not the conversion of nature into a stock of useful objects; it is the recognition of a living network.

Recording, recognition, and repair

The account of Dr. Sarrazine further complicates the boundary between knowledge and appropriation. He travels to see Mari, carrying a notebook, drying papers, and French needles for her. After ten days he returns with wild plant specimens, some intended for the Jardin des Plantes. The episode shows Mari’s healing reputation reaching Kébec and brings her knowledge into contact with European scientific collection. The specimens may be preserved and classified, but the narrative also locates their source in a relationship with Mari and the living environment from which they were gathered.

In the novel’s later environmental work, Jeanne asks why Mi’kmaw people should be involved in forest restoration. Tom Paulin answers that the effort is not limited to them: participants include people from different backgrounds, and in many regions Indigenous descendants of forest residents are among those who step forward to restore forests and damaged rivers. His explanation connects dispossession to environmental repair while identifying practical, inherited understanding as a reason these communities can contribute. It shifts attention from who owns natural wealth to who knows how to help a damaged ecosystem recover.

A value beyond human use

Tom warns that ancient forests will take thousands of years to return, far beyond the lives of those doing the work. Even a small effort—one or two people carrying buckets of seedlings to reassemble fragments of forest—matters because the earth needs the diversity of its tree cover. This long timescale resists the short-term measure of value implicit in extraction: restoration is important even when its full result cannot be seen or claimed by its workers.

The final reversal is not that human beings can simply repair nature at will. Tom says forests have long experience in restoring themselves; people can help them regain diversity, but the forest’s own capacity remains central. Against the assumption that nothing in nature has value apart from its usefulness to people, the novel places a world of reciprocal knowledge, ecological connection, and patient recovery. Its answer is not to deny human dependence on nature, but to question a measure of value that recognizes the forest only when it serves human purposes.