Nature

There are it seems, two ways to view nature: as a cruel, unforgiving, and thoughtless force which man must overcome, or as Gaia, the mother and great balancing force of the Universe.

Modern man, or Western society at least, has come to view nature as in opposition to humanity. We may have risen from nature, but that ugly little truth is merely an additional inconvenience in the endless battle to wrest our fate from the hands of Gaia. We look at the world and see the death and destruction caused by nature, we see the massive hurricanes and devastating earthquakes. On our television programs we watch sharks tear apart unsuspecting seals and lions devouring infant gazelles. Our science tella us that the supreme law of nature is "survival of the fittest" and man, surely the fittest of all, must do what he can to oppose the rest of nature and to rise to his rightful place above the rest.

It struck me the other day how truly separate humanity sees itself from nature. I was taking my brother to school when a bird struck the side of our car; it just flew right into it. My brother remarked, "I didn't know that could happen." I asked him what he meant, and he explained that he didn't realize that a bird could actually fly into our car, he didn't think such a thing could occur. I questioned him further, "You thought they were incapable of flying into our car? Don't you bump into things all the time walking around the house? And the house doesn't even move!" Yes, he explained, it made sense, he just never realized that birds could hit us, he had never seen it happen before and it seemed to him like something very odd.

Thinking about this incident with my brother further, I realized that for most American's, nature is something that occurs beyond themselves. Birds don't regularly fly into us, most of the time they are just there in the background, able to be seen and heard but rarely interacted with. Nature is not something that we experience or engage in regularly. As a society, we even suppress and diminish the significance of our own natural functions such as going to the bathroom, making love (having sex), and aging. These reminders of our status as animals are tabooed in our society to the point that it is by far more acceptable to see a decapitation than a love scene in a movie.

While only the occasional bird actually comes into direct contact with our balkanized existences, there is one constant reminder that nature exists beyond our doors and often, even sharing our home: insects. Bugs, spiders, creepy crawlies and the like seem to be one of the only constant sources of continued interaction with nature. And so what do we do? We exterminate, banish, and expel these unwelcome connections to the greater world. Us humans, we want our sterilized, quarantined, hermetically sealed homes where we can eat, sleep, fuck, shit, and die in privacy. We have become so caught up in our own myth of superiority, that we have forbidden any remnants of our relationship to the great unity of mother nature. I am not suggesting that we should allow bugs to overrun our places of dwelling, but I am suggesting that our "fear" of these mostly harmless cousins of life is perhaps rooted in our own insecurity as the wayward son of mother nature, always yearning to break away and prove that we are worthy of our imaginary independence.

But to break away is impossible, for there is nothing external to nature. We are born of her, when we die we return to her, and while we are alive, try as we might, we cannot deny that we are her. We are not only of nature, we are nature. To remain in opposition to nature is like the liver saying it is in opposition to the body. Occasionally though, the liver does deny the body, but like with the denial of nature, all that can result from this denial is death.

So it seems that the two views of nature proposed in the beginning are not after all at odds with each other. If nature is treated as the enemy, as something which must be overcome and superseded, than the great balancing force that it is, nature will resist with great fervor. And so, it is not only naive of man to believe that he has some sort of ability to combat nature, but it is even naive of man to think that our resistance will have any lasting effect on nature at all in the first place. This is not to say that we should not yield to nature when making decisions--not in the least--but nature will not mind one way or the other whether the totality of mankind chooses to fight her or worship her. Rather, it is in the interest of man that we ought to lay down our arms against the great mother of us all. If we can do so, we may find that Eden was not lost after all; it has been here all along.