You notice how the URL for this section of the Pagan Newswire Collective has the word “nature” in it? Of course. It’s specifically for nature-based pagan religious and spiritual discussions and ideas. I would bet that the majority of people who think of “nature” are thinking of open areas that have a minimum of human impact, where the signs of humanity are reduced or even almost entirely eradicated. And I feel that’s a grave shortcoming in our perceptions.
I want to share with you one of my very favorite quotes. It’s a statement by Richard Nelson, quoted in The Sacred Earth: Writers on Nature and Spirit, edited by Jason Gardner (emphasis mine):
It’s dangerous to think of ourselves as loathsome creatures or as perversions in the natural world. We need to see ourselves as having a rightful place. We take pictures of all kinds of natural scenes and often we try to avoid having a human being in them…In our society, we force ourselves into a greater and greater distance from the natural world by creating parks and wilderness areas where our only role is to go in and look. And we call this loving it. We lavish tremendous concern and care on scenery but we ignore the ravaging of environments from which our lives are drawn.
This is a perfect image of how we have separated ourselves from the rest of nature. Not separating ourselves from nature, but separating ourselves from the rest of nature. That’s been the entire problem all along. Numerous factors ranging from religion to the Industrial Revolution have systematically convinced many portions of humanity that we are “above nature”, that “nature is to be used”, and otherwise referring to “nature” in the third person—nature the It as opposed to nature the Us.
Baby slugs from my apartment balcony garden - photo by Lupa, 2011
Nature? Nature is everywhere. Nature is the flora in our gut and in the sewers. Nature is the moss growing on old house shingles. Nature is the wind blowing through skyscrapers, in cities whose presence changes the microclimate. Nature is the sun that shines and the rain that falls on every place above ground. And humans? Humans are nature, too. Our big brains and bipedal stance are the adaptations we evolved in order to survive the challenges of being ground-dwelling, omnivorous, hunter-gatherer-scavenger apes. Our cities and buildings are exaggerated manifestations of our nest-building instincts, tempered with aesthetic self-awareness.
And remembering that we are nature reconnects us to everything else. If we remember we are nature, that we cannot separate ourselves from nature, then we come to realize that our cities and other habitations are part of ecosystems—dramatically changed ecosystems, but there nonetheless. We may find that suddenly the issues that affect the environment are immediate—not out in the woods somewhere where we can ignore them, but right here, in our bodies and homes and streets. We can still value the wilderness, but we no longer ghettoize nature as being “out there somewhere that we escape to”.
That’s a very valuable point: the idea that we “escape to nature”. Isn’t it sad that we in the cities feel we are escaping from something that isn’t nature, when in reality nature is all around us? I instead propose that when we are speaking of relatively human-free places, open, quiet areas, we speak of “wilderness” instead of “nature” as a defining term. Wilderness contains an element of primal quality, but without the overarching completion of “nature”. It gives us some way to delineate between the Hoh rain forest on the Olympic Peninsula, and paved-over downtown Seattle, without denying that these places are still family to each other, the blood connecting them embodied in the intertwining waters of Puget Sound and surrounding ways.
"Urban Wolf's Child" - photo and mask by Lupa, 2011
My Therioshamanism blog has had the John Muir quote “In the silence of the wild, we find the home we lost in the city” at the top of it ever since I started it in 2007. I don’t agree with it any more, though I’ve not yet found a good substitute for it just yet. I don’t feel I have lost anything in the city, at least not anything that I can’t find here as well. While I love my trips to the Columbia River Gorge and other wilderness areas, I don’t value them above my talking with the maple tree across the street from my apartment or the scrub jays that vweeeeet though the neighborhood. And it is here in the city, not in the wilderness, that I have found, discovered, returned to the knowledge that I am nature. I joyously embrace the fact that this place is nature as much as Mt. Hood, as much as the Columbia River Gorge, as much as any of the wilderness places I have fallen in love with over time.
For like me, the maple and the scrub jays and all our neighbors are continuing the cycles of nature in this human-strong place, with all its benefits and challenges. I can’t get that experience when I am sitting next to Wahkeena Spring, or at the top of Devil’s Rest. The trees and the jays and I must learn the lessons of nature in this unique place, remember that there are lessons of nature to be learned, and share that remembering with others. If we can accomplish that remembering together then we have more hope, not of destroying cities and losing what is valuable in them, but of bringing our urban nature places back into greater harmony with the rest.
This piece has given me pause. While I agree with you on certain points, particularly the part about not separating ourselves from the rest of our living planet, I have learned from personal experience that I cannot live in an urban area. I fail to thrive. My consciousness shifts from the person I am today, the one I want to be, to a superficial, consumerism-driven, aggressive, stress monkey. This happened to me the year & a half I lived & worked in the heart of Boston (which is a beautiful city w/plenty of opportunities for contact with other life forms & “natural” features, e.g., the Charles River, along with wonderful cultural amenities). I did not even know what had happened to me until I left to return to my native desertscape. I was aghast at the person I left behind. I was relieved to rediscover my true self.
Perhaps what I am speaking of is not the features, terrain, non-human inhabitants (the pigeons, the jays, the weeds, the trees & fungi — all of whom I love) of the city, but of the energy, the cultural values & priorities of the majority of the humans in urban areas. I don’t find much value in most of what cities have to offer. I don’t want or need the (mostly excessive) “conveniences” of the city. I would rather have to plan ahead for the 3 hour (one-way) drive to buy groceries once a month than live in a place where the humans are obsessed with a consumer-driven lifestyle.
It should not be assumed that only “rich people” can get away. We chose this. My family is not wealthy. We live in a very poor, rural town because we choose to. We give up a great deal to be here, but less is more for us. We live here with many other people who are not rich, people who made a choice to leave the superficiality, the pollution & the pressure behind. There are also those who were born & raised here & would never choose anything else.
We too are humans being human with other humans & the rest of nature. I don’t think we have to embrace our cities to be human. After all, we humans (& our ancestors) spent the bulk of our evolutionary history NOT living in cities. This place you call “wilderness,” that you separate from us with your language — that you imply is for visiting — it is my neighborhood. I don’t travel anywhere to “visit” it.
That said, I am heartened to hear that you have found that connection in your city, that you can shut off the buzzing of the hive to be your true self. I think some people possess that skill. I don’t, or at least, I didn’t at the time I was last tested. I also very much agree with you about bringing urban nature places back into harmony, especially since there are many humans who will never opt to give them up.
I think it is important to remember the cities as part ourselves as humans, as nature, especially when looking at how we live upon this Earth, but we don’t have to love them. We don’t even have to consider them a good idea. The Mayans abandoned their cities, some of us are just following suit.
@Moma Fauna I don’t think she meant that you have to love cities, or that the wilderness is just for visiting; I think she meant that, for those of us who do love and live in cities, we shouldn’t feel that we are disconnected from nature there, since we, and our cities, are a part of nature. Or at least, that’s what I took away from it.
Yes, that’s exactly what I was getting at–reconnecting instead of further disconnection. Thank you!
Yep, I got that out of it, as well. Seems pretty clear, to me, but people intent on being offended will find offencce.
No one is saying that you have to like or even live in cities. All I was saying in this essay is that cities shouldn’t be shunted away as not being “nature”. If we’re going to make cities more habitable places to be, then we need to stop treating them like scorched earth.
I don’t feel that the things you attach to cities are only found there. I grew up in a rural place where there were plenty of people who displayed their materialism through oversized pickup trucks and ATVs and huge gun collections, as well as the usual stock market investments and big, new houses, and paving over pastures to make way for truck stops. And I escaped that small town I grew up in a decade ago because it was full of homophobia, religious intolerance against non-Christians, and other bigotries, and moved to cities with more progressive politics and better public transit and more job opportunities. That still doesn’t mean that being in a small town is automatically a bad idea, and my experience isn’t everyone’s, and your experience doesn’t mean that a city is uniformly a bad place to live, for Mayans or anyone else for that matter. (Plus the Mayans didn’t exactly abandon their cities voluntarily.)
Anyway, my main point is that for those who *do* live in cities, whether voluntarily or not, remembering that they are a part of nature as much as any place else is the first step in making cities more habitable. Google “Green Metropolis” and you’ll find not only a really good book on re-greening cities, but also other info about the concept. Cities actually have a good, sustainable infrastructure if people would actually use it that way–public transit is better for the Earth than cars, and apartments use less energy for heating than individual houses. If we can condense the resources a city needs into that city, to include growth and manufacture, we cut down on the need for cross-country and international shipping. And the more people who are in cities, the fewer there are chewing up wilderness so they can have their own acreage; a human taking up a few thousand square feet of urban house and yard is less of a strain than one who fences in a hundred acres of wilderness for their personal, private use.
But it all starts with not treating cities like blights upon the land. We need to look at them as ecosystems, and parts of bigger ecoregions, and that they affect everything else as well as being affected by it. Once we have that in mind we can start making more decisions that make the most of these compact, dense places and the opportunities for sustainability they offer if used correctly.
I wish you had said those things in the post. I had a lengthy discussion with my husband about your essay & made those very arguments above, sounding very much like you, including the small footprint of people in city apartments, the concerns of suburban sprawl, giving cities respect, tending to them properly, etc.. etc. Cities can provide a unique opportunity for us to curb our impact… if we take it.
Perhaps I misread, which led me to feel you were trying to say that as humans we need to embrace cities. I could not agree as a human that feels decidedly unhappy & unhealthy living in a city. (For the record, my Pagansim has little to do with my disdain for the city.)
Community living is part of our nature, absolutely. Modifying our environment is also part of our nature. Small towns are fine. Communes are fine. Cities are fine. There are things that I get from cities that I cannot get here, like healthcare, clothing, decent food, museums, cultural amenities, etc. Our small town has none of these things. We chose it anyway.
I’m sorry your rural experience was full of people being greedy & excessive. Ours has little material excess (not that I am naive enough to believe if people here had the means they wouldn’t do it), but it definitely has its fair share of “conservative values.” We chose it anyway. We feel that strongly about not being in the city.
I personally believe cities have the capacity to be blights. At the same time, I also believe they have the capacity to be positive ecosystems. It is all a matter of how we humans design them, tend to them, nurture or neglect them. Perhaps I am jaded because I interface most regularly with a bad example. The large city we visit for our (2-3x/year) grocery runs is 4 hour drive away (admittedly, not a small carbon footprint for us). That city is Las Vegas. Spend some time there & tell me it isn’t an environmental nightmare — from Strip to suburb. Ironically, we have a certain fondness for it, having teased out the gems from the seedy underbelly. It makes for a nice visit, but there is no denying that it exemplifies nearly all of the egregious abuses a city can commit.
I had no intention of ruffling feathers (yours or anyone else’s) with my reply. I simply could not agree entirely with what I understood your essay to be saying. When read in the context of people “who *do* live in cities, whether voluntarily or not, remembering that they are a part of nature as much as any place else is the first step in making cities more habitable,” I find myself in complete agreement.
There is much more that I could say here on the finer points, but I will not. It is a well written essay & well considered. It just did not resonate with me as a human who made a conscious effort & decision to take her family & leave the urban ecosystem. What can I say? Different strokes…
I think I had figured I had made my point clearly enough that it wasn’t a city vs. rural thing, but rather a “bringing the city back into the fold of nature” perspective. Not that your replies haven’t had value; on the contrary, they pointed out some assumptions I had made about the reception of the essay, and I really do appreciate that. Thank you.
> I don’t feel that the things you
> attach to cities are only found
> there. I grew up in a rural place
> where there were plenty of people who
> displayed their materialism through
> oversized pickup trucks and ATVs and
> huge gun collections, as well as the
> usual stock market investments and
> big, new houses, and paving over
> pastures to make way for truck stops.
Hear, hear! These are all simply negative aspects of HUMAN nature, these traits are unique to neither urban nor pastoral living, and they are things that can be overcome. I’ve seen so many horrible people in the country, and met some of the warmest, most inviting people in the heart of a metropolis –and vice-versa. No region “owns” these negative and positive traits any more or less –where humans are, these things follow.
You may well want to read Emma Marris’s Rambunctious Garden (http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/28/q-and-a-the-rambunctious-garden/). I’ve got a copy if you’d like to borrow it sometime.
David This was a very touhghtful piece. I think your distinctions between pastoral nature and wildnerness is very helpful to us in 21st century America. We confuse the two, though in reality romanticizing the one and having no real contact with the other. Most of us wouldn’t know what to do with a wilderness if we were dropped off and left on our own. I think making these distinctions is important as we interact with the world around us, finding our way in an increasingly techno-noisy world.
Yes, I think you are right. Most ainamls are like us in that they actively reshape their environments into something more desirable or hospitable. Of course, we seem to take this to such a higher degree that I often wonder if it becomes a difference of kind instead of just degree. Thanks for making this point!
> While I agree with you on certain
> points, particularly the part about not
> separating ourselves from the rest of
> our living planet, I have learned from
> personal experience that I cannot live
> in an urban area. I fail to thrive. My
> consciousness shifts from the person I
> am today, the one I want to be…
It’s great that you know this about yourself, and I’m sure your thoughts reflect those of others in the vast mega-community of pagans and polytheists. But your own lived reality is not that of everybody else, and frankly, there is already so much pagan media for those who seek the Divine in a setting of wilderness, or even a pastoral place (making it seem like a community tailor-made for those such as yourself), that I really do feel that everything Lupa has said here is something that needed very much to be said.
> I don’t find much value in most of
> what cities have to offer.
I’m not a Capitalist (pretty far from it –registered with the Socialist Party), and I find so much value, both Divine and mortal, in the living, breathing microsystems of cities. If you don’t, I can’t make you, but can’t you see how such disparaging remarks can ostracise people?
Your whole comment is very unsurprising, especially as a First Comment, but it’s still a very disheartening thing to read so many negative feelings toward the urban divine.
Well done. Thank you.
Yes, I have never liked the way urban life has been so strongly demonized among a lot of neo-pagans. I grew up in a very big city, and I loved it.
I have my limits on how much city I can handle–Portland’s about as big as it gets–but my partner grew up in southern California just downhill from the foothills on the northern end of LA, and even he managed to make connections there, and with the ocean.
Also, I’d like to add this – there is a secondary meaning to the word “nature” which is “essence.” So it could be said that just as it is a beaver’s “nature” to build a dam, it’s our human “nature” to alter our environment and build houses and be social creatures and live in villages, townships, counties and cities, etc. This is part of our “nature.” It’s what we humans do. I think that’s a far more positive way of looking at urban life and cities, etc.
That’s a really good point! Thank you for adding this to the discussion; it’s very good food for thought, especially when we are redefining what “nature” really is.
Lupa, when I first read this, my reaction was, well, reactionary, even defensive… particularly in light of the piece I wrote back in September titled “Immersion” http://nature.pagannewswirecollective.com/2011/09/27/immersion/
But when I read through your essay carefully, I didn’t find anything to disagree with. In fact, you seem to be saying much the same things I try to say with “The Sacred in Suburbia” – that there truly is no unsacred place.
My reaction is pointing to a disconnect somewhere. It needs more thought and meditation, but I suspect the disconnect is with me and not with you…
See, the thing that I loved about your piece is that there is a definite experience to immersion. Most people can’t get that in urban areas because it’s so easy to get distracted. And in the same way I don’t feel a city is the same sort of ecosystem as a forest or a desert, so the experiences in each of these must be tempered by the unique environment.
I would be more than happy to keep up the conversation as you have more insights about your own end of things. I suspect that a lot of readers may have had similar initial reactions.
I dunno, I definitely feel that there is a sacred to commune with in urban immersion. And I’m not alone in this. When I go out to immerse myself in the city’s contours, its breathing, there’s something distinctly sacred, divine, about it. I commune with that divine nature, I become balanced, rejuvinated by it. It’s a wonderful experience.
I totally love this article! I am at heart a city girl, but I never felt less natural. I’m not inclined to materialism or shallowness, I love long walks under the moon and watching finches and squirrels. I just also love the organic human organism on summer nights with drumming and people selling jewelry on the sidewalk and everyone having their experience in their own way. I guess I like watching people in their varied habitats as much as I do the jays and neighborhood cats. It’s all the same underlying Life moving in its ever-flowing rhythm, I’m just along for the dance!
Hi Lupa.
This essay resonated with me.
When I moved to Wyoming nearly two years ago, my first year was spent in a very self-righteous attitude bubble. ‘Here I am, living the truly free life, and the cities are pollution and evil.’ .. in a nutshell, anyway, as I was processing a lot of anger at the time. I had lived in cities before and never much cared for them. I still don’t; the amount of people is just too much for me. I like big spaces and having the mountains in my backyard.
However, that does not put my lifestyle above anyone else, and for a while I held that narrow mentality because of what I had suddenly found in my life. Sometimes spiritual movements can put us in our own heads for a long time.
But reading this reminded me of the moment when I made peace with the cities after I moved, because although I love Wyoming, there have been times where I missed the cultures and art and openness that my tiny rural home does not have an abundance of. I do not judge the people here (much like what you described in a previous comment; most are conservative, but still, they are good people and only know what they have experienced), and surely I challenge them in areas that I feel are necessary (like opening a tattoo studio on the main street and blowing their minds), but there is something to be said about being surrounded by a tribe of artists or musicians or open, free-thinkers. I have found a network of those in WY, and we are strong in the undercurrent, and I feel that the sacrifices I made – like the trade-off of giving up concerts to walking five minutes to the river to fish – are worth it for my personal needs.
And I remembered to appreciate the green efforts that have been rising in cities as well. There are a lot more minds supporting this movement in places like where you are.
And there is nothing wrong with that. People are people no matter where you are, or where you go.
And I also remembered that when I did live in cities, or in suburbia with my parents, I found nature everywhere. Truly, like you say here, it never left: it was the rustle of the leaves when I walked home from school, the big tree over our communal bonfire at the Lundr house, it was the fortresses my brother and I made in the dirt behind our houses, the moon in my window reflecting off my treasures. It was not like going to Red River Gorge or running through the fields in the country, but to make such comparisons would be demeaning those special moments that were found in populated areas.
Life surrounds us at every moment if we are open and present enough for it.
So – thank you. Wonderful essay.
I’ve enjoyed this essay!
However, I still agree with the John Muir quote. “In the silence of the wild, we find the home we lost in the city.” Yes! There IS something about being in the non-city wilderness that gives me the solitude that I need, the quiet, the ability to hear the wind, hear the voices of the other animals. It is religious for me, an open-air cathedral.
I think even the (Cheezburger) folks at Failblog must agree with you, because when I read their “Wins!” site, occasionally “Brother Nature” photos show up — cityscapes surrounded by sunsets, rivers, mountains… the content we add to the natural world, then remarked upon by Nature.
And after a little internal debate when they introduced these, I feel okay with it.
I’m sorry, but I don’t agree with you. Lupa. And looking over your excellent article, I noticed something very relevant… when you speak of connecting to nature in the city, you speak of connecting to the “maple tree” or the “scrub jays.” You’re NOT speaking of connecting to the streets, buildings or the pollution that is inevitable in a city.
In other words, the city is not a part of nature, it IS a blight on nature. We can dither over how much of a blight it is, and whether we can ameliorate the worst aspects of it, but the fact is (as I can see reading your own words) that the city is not part of nature. Contrary to what you state, people ARE trying to “green up” their urban environments, and thus bringing a bit “nature” back into the blight of the city.
Also, I’d like to point out that there is considerable scholarly debate as to why the Mayans abandoned their cities… to the point that no one can agree whether it was “voluntary” or not. (Of course, I have a different definition of that term- everything, to me, is voluntary. A mugger with a gun to your head cannot MAKE you do something- cooperating with his demand for your wallet is simply less severe than the alternative- but it’s still your decision, and thus “voluntary” if not what you’d prefer to do. Of course, I believe that the mugger is still guilty.)
Sun Dragon, I also disagree with your opinion that it’s in humankind’s nature to build cities. If so, it is a fairly new addition to our “nature”- and very abrupt as well. We all know how the Sumerian culture appeared “from nowhere” in the historical record. For most of our presumed history (from aprox. 130,000 BP to about 8000 BP/6000 BC), we lived in small, migrating tribes of hunter/gatherers. No city-building tendencies in our “nature” what-so-ever…!
I firmly do not agree with this: “And the more people who are in cities, the fewer there are chewing up wilderness so they can have their own acreage; a human taking up a few thousand square feet of urban house and yard is less of a strain than one who fences in a hundred acres of wilderness for their personal, private use.”
1. If that person is NOT clear-cutting all of “his” property, the trees and “wilderness” is still doing its job of providing oxygen, wildlife habitat, and processing rainfall and neutralizing toxins from your cities.
2. You are comparing apples and oranges by putting one single apartment in a city against one owner of a wilderness tract. That’s because the apartment will never exist in isolation, but comes with the attendant problems of a city. Whereas the wilderness owner, if retaining most of the vegetation, has a minimal impact on the local environment.
3. As someone who “voluntarily” left the city of Atlanta for the rural life, I am the very person of whom you are speaking. But far from “chewing up wilderness,” my goal was to preserve this rather small (130 acres) tract against the massive onslaught of clear-cutting… something that is done, I might point out, to make cheap paper and pulpwood products for use by urbanites.
I think the only way to “perfect” the city would involve ultra-advanced technology- i.e. Star Trek perfect matter/energy conversion- where all trash and pollution is converted directly to energy. This being beyond us at present, the city is far from being the better way to handle our huge, expanding population. Just like a landfill is not the best way to handle our trash, concentrating people in one place is not better for the people or the environment.
You have a point that a city apartment is only part of the story, one point in a large network that supports it. However, we can see the efficiency of cities if we try to imagine all of the world’s human population living rurally. It wouldn’t be possible to sustain all of those people. The rise in civilization and human population has coincided with the rise of urbanization.
Whether a growing human population is a good thing is another matter.
Also, I agree with Lupa here that the city is part of the natural world just as much as a beaver dam, a termite mound, or a coral reef. It might be useful to distinguish it as a human-made part of nature, but the nature/not-nature divide seems to be an arbitrary outgrowth of modernity. It doesn’t reflect true reality. It is part of the problem with our mindset that allows us to imagine that we don’t depend on nature for the resources that make our cities possible, for everything we have, for our very bodies.
Like it or not, we and our cities are an integral part of nature. This being the case, it’s in our best interest to avoid being an unbalanced participant in the natural world.
From one country mouse to another: thank you for speaking to the finer points that I did not have the energy to address.
> You’re NOT speaking of connecting to the streets, buildings or the pollution that is inevitable in a city.
Large numbers of humans create large amounts of waste while consuming large amounts of stuff. When they’re doing it in a predominantly rural context, it had better be across a huge area, and they’d better not do it for long or else the whole ecoregion’s screwed. Cities concentrate that process. Yes, they have an impact, but it’s kind of impossible not to. You who live in rural areas have an impact too, and if you make use of anything like modern transportation methods or ways of getting your food, you’re not actually doing anything but ranting at the cityfolk while being subsidized by the economies of scale and centralization that enable their existence, and vicariously yours.
> In other words, the city is not a part of nature, it IS a blight on nature.
You say that, but what does it actually mean?
The pigeons and peregrine falcons, raccoons and foxes, coyotes and cottontails, crows and geese, rats and rabbits, mice and squirrels, so many songbirds, monkeys, lizards, gulls, boars and deer, oppossums and so many insects, arachnids, plants and fungi worldwide disagree profoundly with your assessment that cities are a blight. They come in, and they thrive.
Those wilderness landowners aren’t operating in a pristine ecosystem, and they do their own damage. Rural areas often have to deal with primary-sector economies, which are massively polluting in and of themselves; they also have to deal with the fact that fences and farming and centuries of ecological upheaval have resulted in an unstable, unhealthy ecosystem that wouldn’t persist if it wasn’t created and maintained by human activities. There are very few really pristine places left, and if you live in North America or Western Europe, then even the ones that seem like it usually aren’t.
Also, that wilderness landhold *can* be fairly compared to the apartment block for one simple reason: forget all your abstractions, there really are about 7 billion humans alive right now, and if your response is “that’s too many” I would humbly ask you how you plan to select the ones that have to die for your vision of a pristine “nature” that was DOA the second a certain bipedal primate species, itself very much a part of nature but inordinately good at large-scale activities which change it noticeably, came on the seen.
The real nature is messy, dirty, complex and shifting. We live in the kind of world where a rock from space might at any time plunk down and set fire to half the globe and wipe out all animals over 25 kilograms, or where even before humanity came on the scene a runaway greenhouse gas event wipes out 90 percent of life in the sea.
Humanity and its artefacts can do tremendous damage, but saying cities are a blight merely sounds good — it means nothing useful, and even city-dwellers can tell you that pollution and overconsumption are bad.
You as a rural North American, even one who is moved to preserve your land from clearcutting, are not an example of the alternative — you are simply one of the ones lucky and privileged enough to opt out of the crowding and the pollution while still being tied into the cultural and infrastructural networks that support the cities you so roundly condemn.
Korak’s point still stands: Lupa is talking of connecting to animals and plants, not streets or buildings or sewers (whereas one could talk of conencting to streams, mountains or caves).
I’d point out that nature worship was generally only one part of ancient pagan religions: they had Artemis and Pan (nature-related deities) as well as Hephaistos, Athene and Hermes (deities of civilisation, laws and crafts). Tools and buildings used to have names, spirits and purposes.
For the cities to be perceived as something more than a place with less wilderness than we’d ideally like to have, we need to appreciate them as human creations, not try to cover that part up and present them as a kind of an ecosystem.
There are plenty of animals and plants in the cities. As I said in my reply:
“The pigeons and peregrine falcons, raccoons and foxes, coyotes and cottontails, crows and geese, rats and rabbits, mice and squirrels, so many songbirds, monkeys, lizards, gulls, boars and deer, oppossums and so many insects, arachnids, plants and fungi…” are well-represented in cities. Dandelion, Milkweed, Poplar and Cottonwood do well here — leave a lot undisturbed for a year and it will be covered in new greenery. By the next, it will have tree saplings. Yarrow, Queen Anne’s Lace, Sunflower, Clover, Yarrow and Chicory thrive.
> “For the cities to be perceived as something more than a place with less wilderness than we’d ideally like to have, we need to appreciate them as human creations, not try to cover that part up and present them as a kind of an ecosystem.”
If that’s the limit to your perspective, I don’t begrudge you it, but others can see farther and deeper. A city *is* an ecosystem, of a sort that’s only been on Earth a comparitively short time. Humans create them, but we don’t inhabit them alone. When a city has been in place for centuries or more, its nonhuman inhabitants can scarcely be though of as mere meager stragglers huddling in our shadow — they’ve developed longstanding patterns of relationship to it, and with the other inhabitants, which may be stable or in flux at any given time — just like any other ecosystem. As a matter of scientific fact this isn’t worth questioning — how many species do you see in those photographs, of plants alone?
The real question is whether you find it spiritually meaningful to think this way. It’s okay if you don’t, but don’t confuse your unverifiable personal gnosis for The Way Things Really Are, let alone other peoples’ limits.
Further thought: are the watersheds created by beaves damming an area, the nest mounds of termites, and Australia’s Great Barrier Reef not parts of nature? Why are the large-scale accretions of human activity and deposition different?
> Korak’s point still stands: Lupa is
> talking of connecting to animals and
> plants, not streets or buildings or
> sewers (whereas one could talk of
> conencting to streams, mountains or
> caves).
She didn’t say one CAN’T connect with those parts, either, and I can probably very easily argue that she implied all over the place that one can and should attempt to –at least it was very easy for me to infer that meaning. She simply said that finding the city’s flora and fauna can be a good place to start, if one’s having trouble with that sort of communion.
> The pigeons and peregrine falcons,
> raccoons and foxes, coyotes and
> cottontails, crows and geese, rats
> and rabbits, mice and squirrels, so
> many songbirds, monkeys, lizards,
> gulls, boars and deer, oppossums and
> so many insects, arachnids, plants
> and fungi worldwide disagree
> profoundly with your assessment that
> cities are a blight. They come in,
> and they thrive.
So, so true.
You make me wish this blog had a FB Like button for comments.
Wow. Hateful, much?
Excellent Post Lupa! I’ve felt the same for a long time.
One thing that this puts me in mind of is when hiking along a path we crossed paths with another family just starting their hike, and their young daughter, of around the age of six, had saw a butterfly and exclaimed, “Look Nature. We are in Nature!” I had become startled by that, to see a child not know that they were never separate from nature to begin with. Which saddens me.
I like your point of when realizing that the urban environment is in itself nature, that people will begin to care about its connections and invest in a healthier urban environment, instead of trying to escape it. I’ve seen that be the case for some communities where they’ve worked at adding more vegetation, gardening for food, and lessening their footprint. I look forward to seeing urban environments that are healthy and harmonious.
Wow….first, I think this is about as close to an intelligent conversation that I’ve read in a very long time. Second, it shouldn’t be that surprising to me that every single one of you bring up very good points. Third, being the dreamer that I am, it’s too bad that we couldn’t break up the big cities and get rid of everything that brings harm to us and mother earth and develop smaller communities where we could go back to being friendly and accepting of peaceful people. Little communities with culture and art.Learn to plow fields again and live without all this “modern technology”; a much simpler life. I personally would choose to live in the woods near the ocean but people could be free to live wherever their energy was drawn to……”Aw crap”, I say to myself as the ring of my cell phone snaps my day dreaming mind back to a sad reality……
Debi, we could do that if we’re prepared for a truly significant reduction in population and technological benefits such as vaccinations, dentists, antibiotics, etc. Some think that would be worth the tradeoff. To each their own, but there are places where we can try those lifestyles on for size if that’s really what we want. I suspect that most of us like daydreaming about it rather than actually living it.
Just wonderful. This oppened my eyes a lot as a city boy.
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otherwise it is complicated to write.