the Land, the Sky and the Sea - all part of Nature
Last week Lupa wrote an excellent piece titled “We Do Not Return to Nature. We Are Already There.” If you haven’t already read it I encourage you to do so. The title is self-explanatory, and in the first paragraph she says:
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.
My initial, gut-level reaction was not favorable – when I read the title, I instinctively thought “no, you’re wrong.” But when I carefully read Lupa’s essay I couldn’t find anything to disagree with. Why? Why did I have this emotional disconnect on such an important concept? From reading the comments, I see I wasn’t the only one.
After thinking on this and letting it incubate for almost a week, I’ve come to the conclusion that my disconnect is the result of a no-longer-helpful evolutionary impulse.
The human brain has evolved to classify things into a few discrete categories – usually two. Forget computers and the internet – the real information overload is in the natural world. Look at a tree: how tall is it? How many branches does it have? What color and shape are the leaves? Does it have fruit? Is anything living in it? What does it smell like? What is the bark like? There are hundreds if not thousands of qualities of the tree for you to notice – and they’re all changing slowly but continuously.
While you were contemplating all the miraculous, continuous details of the tree, a lion ate you and removed you from the gene pool. Our early ancestors learned to focus their powerful but finite brains on the “critical few” instead of the “trivial many.” Nature may work continuously, but we instinctively divide Nature into good/bad, helpful/harmful, friend/foe, animals-I-can-eat/animals-that-will-eat-me and so on. On a deep time scale we aren’t very far removed from living in trees and many of us are instinctively dividing environments into “Nature” and “not-Nature.”
And if “Nature” is good, then “not-Nature” must be bad, or at least inferior.
One of the purposes of religion – any religion – is helping us overcome the limits of evolution. The traits that served our ancestors well for millions of years of living in the wild don’t always serve us well in the modern world. A biological urge to eat more than you need is a good thing when food is scarce. When food is always plentiful it’s not so helpful, as I and millions of other Americans can attest. The urge to divide everything into two diametrically opposed categories is similarly unhelpful in a world that grows more complex by the minute.
Modern Pagan and Earth-centered religions have developed in part as a response to the excesses of the Industrial Revolution: pollution, deforestation, and the mass migration from rural environments to urban ones. We are creatures of the Land, the Sky, and the Sea – remove us from that environment and our bodies and souls tell us something is wrong.
But the solution is not to go back to pre-industrial subsistence farming. For all their ills, modern industry and technology have made our lives longer, easier, and less risky. As I’ve said many times, I wouldn’t want to live in Texas without air conditioning… or at any time in history before the development of general anesthesia. Cities and suburbs have advantages over rural areas, mostly due to economies of scale: a city can support libraries, museums, hospitals, markets and businesses that support and employ their populations. Cities are inherently more energy-efficient than rural areas, primarily due to their density. We recognize this or so many of us wouldn’t live there.
The challenge of our lives as we live them here and now and are likely to live them in the future is how to live in cities and suburbs in a way that is responsible and sustainable and that maintains our spiritual connections to the Land, Sky and Sea. We can’t do that if we see these environments as “not-Nature.”
It’s easy to connect to Nature in the wilderness. It’s harder to maintain those connections in urban environments. But if we’re going to live there – and most of us are – it’s necessary. It requires intention. It requires mindfulness. It requires a commitment to regular spiritual practice.
And it requires an understanding that there truly is no unsacred place.
I am really impressed by your ability to illuminate the connections between the evolved way we perceive, and our current relationship with nature. It’s this beautiful revelation of irony that one of the very things that makes us a part of nature also may cause us to believe that we are otherwise. Thank you for this profound continuation of the thoughts I put out there.
This post is really resonating with me. Thank you!
As the noisiest knee-jerk reactor, I would like to say that I appreciate your thoughts, John.
Part of my (over)reaction was because I mis-read. I mis-read because I (like you) had already had a gut reaction at the beginning & decided what the piece was saying, thereby changing the meanings of her words in my mind. I lost my ability to focus on the “critical few,” obsessing over the details of her argument & ostensibly vilifying it in the process.
In reading her reply & re-reading the post, I gained clarity & like you, had no disagreement with the premise of her essay. Cities need to be tended, if for no other reason than they are part of us & thereby part of Mama Nature.
If I had read it with a clear head in the first place, I probably would not have commented at all, nor would I have been eaten by the lion.
What I find fascinating is what (I believe) were knee-jerk responses to some of my comments. I never intended to ‘demonize’ urban areas, nor do I think somehow my choice to live in a rural area is ‘better’ than another persons choice to live in a city. I was trying to offer a counterpoint for those of us who just don’t like cities. It is really that simple. Perhaps I did not express myself very clearly, or perhaps some people did just what I did in reading Lupa’s piece — reacted to what the *thought* I was saying.
Country folk can live gently too. It is funny that you mentioned going back to subsistence farming. That (in a modified form) is part of our future plan. As people with a mind for living gently on this planet, we are working towards the goal of homesteading, avoiding replication of material & agricultural goods though trade & sharing networks, working in a barter system, etc. I agree that cities (not Las Vegas), if well designed & managed, can minimize the impact of humans in droves. For those of us who just *cannot deal* with the urban ecosystem, there are ways in which we can also mitigate our impact. We have to get radical & give stuff up & maybe our footprint is still bigger than that of the city mouse, but people should not discount the country mouse’s ability to help make a change for the greater good.
Whether city mice or country mice, we all need to take a long, critical look at how we engage, or disengage with our environment on the micro & macro levels. Do we live with respect for the Earth each & every day? Are our choices made with Her in mind? Do we seek opportunities to interface with Her beauty frequently & regularly? Are we asking ourselves what we can do to help create change… & then doing it?
I would like to suggest a very inspiring post from yesterday over at Scarlet Imprint which discusses Paganism’s future & it’s relationship to Deep Ecology. I found it very powerful. Perhaps others might feel the same.: http://scarletimprint.blogspot.com/2012/02/question-13-future-of-paganism.html
Thank you for sharing your insight. I had also been grappling with the discussion over the past week. It was very helpful to read your reflections.
Oh & I might add that I think from now on, I will reserve comment until I have taken time out to deliberate the “critical few.”
Lupa – thanks. I needed to understand why I reacted like I did. I’ve always spoken of “Nature” as “out there” and that’s just not the case. Language is important.
Kat – glad you liked it.
Moma Fauna – your exchange in the comments of Lupa’s post was helpful in figuring out why I reacted like I did. Thanks.
And a big thanks for the Scarlet Imprint link. That fits in nicely with something else I’m working on, though it will probably fit better on my own blog than here.
This and Lupa’s post are both fantastic explorations of a really complex issue – so thank you for sharing your thoughts and continuing this conversation!
I’d like to throw another idea-wrench into the works by bringing up recent scientific research that suggests “time out in nature” produces beneficial effects on a person’s physical, emotional and psychological health, and can even influence their spiritual and ethical values. Whenever I read about these studies, I’m struck by the continuing assumption which Lupa pointed out, that human-dominated environments are somehow not “natural,” and how this assumption is built into the heart of these studies. I agree with both of you that it is a false dichotomy to think in terms of “human versus nature” instead of understanding we human animals and our living spaces as a part of nature. But the fact remains that these studies seem to be pointing to something measurably different about how human animals are affected by “nature versus not-nature,” and this suggests that our intuitive reaction to make this distinction might be based on some aspect of truth after all.
In other words, a person might receive measurable health benefits from being out in the woods, compared to a person who stays inside an office building all day. I agree that it’s problematic to say that the office building is not natural, since humans and human-created spaces are of course still part of nature, but that just forces us to rephrase the question: so if it isn’t “nature v. not-nature,” then what exactly is the difference between these spaces?
I can’t help but wonder what these kinds of studies would discover if they left the easy nature v. not-nature dichotomy behind and looked for subtler patterns of how we are physically and psychologically influenced by our environments. I have my own theories, but they’re really just guesses based on personal experience. For instance, I think that experiencing the wildness of wilderness, in which human influence is minimal or even non-existent, nurtures our inherent sense of being only a small part of a much bigger world, and that this trans-human-awareness of diversity is a necessary aspect of our emotional and mental health in itself. I think that spending time in landscapes full of non-human living things (such as other plants and animals), even if those spaces are cultivated gardens or farms, probably aligns with our animal instinct that monocultures are almost always “unnatural” (read: unhealthy) and unsustainable. And I would guess that it is precisely the human belief that we are separate from and above “nature” that has led human-created spaces and objects to aspire to an aesthetic that is harsher, harder and more complicated than patterns in the rest of the natural world which have evolved a simple complexity (I’m making a distinction here between “complex” and “complicated”) gradually or organically over what you might call deep time. In other words, the dichotomy is real…. but only because we have helped to make it so by enforcing particular aesthetics onto human-made spaces, aesthetics that might ignore the lessons of our own bodies, minds and spirits about what is healthiest for us as human animals.
But all of that is, like I said, just speculation. I’d love to hear your thoughts. Why do you think that scientists keep finding evidence that “time in nature” has measurable effects? If the human-versus-nature dichotomy is a false one, then what else is going on that might explain those results?
Thanks again for such awesome posts, both of you!
I love it when articles leave me with even more questions than I had to start out with.
Alison,
Have you read “Last Child in the Woods” by Richard Louv? It discuses just that sort of scientific evidence, only in relation to our children; their physical & mental health, their ability to learn, their ability to develop imaginative skills, etc. It deals with children’s need for “open spaces” & the data within is part of the “No Child Left Inside” campaign. Very informative, very worrying — for me anyway.
I haven’t had the chance to, but it’s definitely on my to-read list! I think spending time active and outdoors is a dying art for old and young alike, to our own detriment. :-/ It’s amazing how hard it is to make my stepkids go down to the playground to play (they act like being outside is so boring!), and how easy it is in comparison for them to waste hours hunched over an iPhone playing Angry Birds! I got to the point where I was ready to go buy them angry bird pillows if only they would go outside and build actual forts in the backyard!
A few years ago I attended a open Circle in a large basement. The leader of the ritual, while leading the grounding, kept talking about how we have to reach really deep and work hard to ground and connect with the Earth. because of all the concrete and rebar in the way.
All I could think was “Do these people not know what concrete and rebar are MADE OF?”
These posts and discussions have reminded me that it is hard to be ‘in’ the world when we are only ‘in’ our heads. Yes, the stress and noise and sensory bombardment we are subject to in urban life do make us retreat into our heads. But we CAN get over that, as John has so clearly demonstrated in a number of his articles, and in doing so we gain tolerance, understanding and a better sense of where we are; even when that is in the middle of a chemical plant.