All-Natural Escape Hatch!
As I bet you can guess, I get very irritated at people that look for places in the world that are "better" than the places they currently live in. Nature is better is one of the classic irritants, especially when it's applied historically as an "always true".
We, as a species, have spent most of our history fighting nature. Fighting droughts, floods, bad hunting and poor crops. Plagues and locusts. Our world was always tied up with and in contrast to nature. Woods were scary places where anything could be, not idyllic wildernesses to explore. To claim that we've always loved nature is to have absolute blinders on our own history and the way humanity works.
These days, most of our contact with what we see as "Nature" takes place in parks and zoos and other planned outings. And, of course, the forest is beautiful when you can then leave it behind and go home to your lovely comfortable house. (I love the woods. I also love my computer and microwaves). And I think we like to romanticise Nature because we *can* go home to our nice house with the computer and the microwave. Even if we don't actually do it, for most of us it's an option. We don't live off the land directly, and so we don't see it the same way.
The problem with this is, first of all, that we're destroying our human world at the same time. "Nature" exists everywhere. There are birds in the city, squirrels, even deer sometimes. The "natural" places exist within the human world, and what we do in one affects the other. They're not separate. Every time we start romaticising one over the other, we act as though what we do to the one we reject is irrelevant.
And what kind of humans are we when we foul our own nest because it's already "impure"? Pretty damn stupid, if you ask me.
ooOOoo, more questions! (what a shock!)
Why do I think we separate the "natural" and "human" worlds? Can I say because we're idiots? No? Okay, I think it's because it's safer to stick the "sacred" far away from us. If nature is where sacred is, we go there, we do our sacred thing, then we get to "go home". If HERE is sacred, we have to behave very differently. If only THERE is sacred, we can behave any damn way we want over here. (not really, but we think that way some times.)
Why is the Earth impersonal? Why do we think otherwise? I'm not really sure. Nature has always been a grand-scale encounter. Even tornados, the most small-scale appearing weather as they pick one side of the road to go down and skip every other house, are impersonal. But it's easier sometimes to see things as personal, I guess. We can fix personal things. We can't do anything about grand cosmic forces.
What happens when we deny the sacredness of our surroundings? We destroy things. Nature was the enemy for a very long time; and it shows in how we've treated the natural world. Our world is a beautiful place: both the human and the natural parts. When we neglect one for the other, we lose an important part of what makes us sacred.
We, as a species, have spent most of our history fighting nature. Fighting droughts, floods, bad hunting and poor crops. Plagues and locusts. Our world was always tied up with and in contrast to nature. Woods were scary places where anything could be, not idyllic wildernesses to explore. To claim that we've always loved nature is to have absolute blinders on our own history and the way humanity works.
These days, most of our contact with what we see as "Nature" takes place in parks and zoos and other planned outings. And, of course, the forest is beautiful when you can then leave it behind and go home to your lovely comfortable house. (I love the woods. I also love my computer and microwaves). And I think we like to romanticise Nature because we *can* go home to our nice house with the computer and the microwave. Even if we don't actually do it, for most of us it's an option. We don't live off the land directly, and so we don't see it the same way.
The problem with this is, first of all, that we're destroying our human world at the same time. "Nature" exists everywhere. There are birds in the city, squirrels, even deer sometimes. The "natural" places exist within the human world, and what we do in one affects the other. They're not separate. Every time we start romaticising one over the other, we act as though what we do to the one we reject is irrelevant.
And what kind of humans are we when we foul our own nest because it's already "impure"? Pretty damn stupid, if you ask me.
ooOOoo, more questions! (what a shock!)
Why do I think we separate the "natural" and "human" worlds? Can I say because we're idiots? No? Okay, I think it's because it's safer to stick the "sacred" far away from us. If nature is where sacred is, we go there, we do our sacred thing, then we get to "go home". If HERE is sacred, we have to behave very differently. If only THERE is sacred, we can behave any damn way we want over here. (not really, but we think that way some times.)
Why is the Earth impersonal? Why do we think otherwise? I'm not really sure. Nature has always been a grand-scale encounter. Even tornados, the most small-scale appearing weather as they pick one side of the road to go down and skip every other house, are impersonal. But it's easier sometimes to see things as personal, I guess. We can fix personal things. We can't do anything about grand cosmic forces.
What happens when we deny the sacredness of our surroundings? We destroy things. Nature was the enemy for a very long time; and it shows in how we've treated the natural world. Our world is a beautiful place: both the human and the natural parts. When we neglect one for the other, we lose an important part of what makes us sacred.
posted by Vieva | 6:42 AM
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