Rabbit in the glass!

What is our relationship with Nature? Or what does Nature mean to us?

Nature means one and many things. Several definitions and ways to experience. While a large majority of people view the Earth as a fountain of infinite resources, forever at their disposal, another group of people believe in ‘Gaia’ as a self-organizing force, full of beauty and magic, which is life giving and equally furious. Another group thinks our attitude towards the Earth is similar to how we have treated each other for thousands of years. As slave and master, as man and woman, king and serf, leader and citizen, commander and soldier, boss and employee, etc. Yet still, another set of people accredit our relationship with Nature as “fundamentally based on the food web, which was egalitarian for more than one million years… still present in the essentially sustainable structure of so-called primitive society…” (Murray Bookchin). An emerging consensus speaks of the breakdown of Nature caused by us, ignoring all the warning signs while infinitely growing, consuming and polluting, almost like a “parasite species” on the host planet. But there are more ways to describe our rapport with Nature.

Ecologists and scientists such as Lewis Mumford, Donella Meadows, William Catton and Donna Haraway warned us for decades, that the living planet is not just a jungle. That the earth should not be treated as a market. Our oversimplified models of prey and predators or survival of the fittest, of buyers and sellers, winners and losers are flawed. Such Darwinian logic is insufficient as well as dangerous. That Nature is not akin to a competing marketplace, in which all organisms should engage in a struggle for existence. Or as humans developing processes, that we cannot control anymore.

An erudite scientist such as William Rees, defines our current relationship with the planet as one of “complete overshoot, based on a long disregard of biophysical limits and planetary boundaries”. Contrary to William Rees, a set of super-rich technocrats like Yuval Harari, Jordan Peterson, Bill Gates, Karl Schwab and Prince Jaime Of Bourbon frame yet another new society based on domineering via technology and data, one moving towards a “full mastery of the planet”. Last but not least, are those many who trust Nature to “take care of everything” and even wipe us out in great numbers, when the time comes.

These are just some of the many differing views and theories emerging from the Anthropocene. Powerful and conflicting, yet the multiplicity and abundance is not making the situation any better. Like meanings and values, ideas also compete. Grappling to attain a pristine past, while facing a totally polluted and out-of-control future, we are lost at sea. A sea of conviction, conflation as well as contradictions. So, what is our relationship with Nature? Yours and mine? To even contemplate, is to step away from the noise, the lofty promises, the arrogant solutions and not be terrified of mass extinction.

The rabbit in the glass is transfixed looking at it’s own reflection, running away from a world gone mad…” (Jean Gaumy 1985)

To make one thing clear, that we human beings are not ‘free’. Not free in the sense of moving atoms. But we behave as if we were like atoms, as buyers, sellers, finders, keepers, colonizers, conquerors etc while serving inside a planetary jungle called “the free enterprise”. Many experts and institutions insist on the “survival of the fittest” with their tails always pointed at ‘prey and predator’ or ‘natural selection’. Eat or be eaten, shows up within a range of ideas, plus almost everything that industry, economics, mass culture and technology provides us, to feel more powerful or secure. Nothing new right? The mindset or call it an ethos is way old, going back to 19th century marketplaces, constantly fought over by capitalists and colonial powers. Men who dominate other men, eventually want to dominate all Nature.

As time went by, that predatory mindset was internalized by a majority of people across the world, leading to a mentality that takes for granted the entire planet as a “free enterprise”. The same enterprise can combat climate change or create solutions as and when a planetary crisis occurs (the last pandemic). The very domination of human by human throughout history, helps us understand our relationship with Nature. The way the ancient Greeks, Persians or Egyptians visualized Heaven and Hell, also visualized Master and Slave. And visualized the woman and child under man. The timeline goes further to enable and construct solid hierarchy. Made of elites in the center of the ‘polis’ (city), the ‘serfs’ in the nearby countryside and the primitive savages in wild Nature with animals.

Over time as we advanced as a species, we began to view Nature itself as a type of corporation. Which could be turned into profit and conquest. Common people can be viewed as computers, wired together, holding up the planetary corporation and elite domination forever. To constantly spew out products, pollution and CO2. Questions of the native, non-native, toxic, non-toxic, natural, ecological or artificial became inconsequential as time went by. Which brings me to our time, where abundance, exuberance and consumption matters above all else. For who? For the affluent and the super-affluent. Say at best about 16% to 18% of the world, living inside a socioeconomic system founded on growth without limits. Is also where the biggest debates concerning Nature and our consequent relationship with it are taking place. Outside that ‘hoo-haa’ life goes on, one way or another, however polluted, or beautiful.

“World’s largest infrastructural experiments during the last 50 years, turned out to be anti-ecological in the long run.” (Anna Tsing, Detonator Landscapes, Feral Atlas).

The electric car is one such example of limitless solutionism and power. A great modern symbol of “a world rudely awakened to the profound challenges of unsustainability and climate change” (Scientific American 2021). I imagine that Deep Thought’s (Hitchikers Guide To The Galaxy) answer today about future life, about the Universe and everything might just be “EV” instead of “42”. Come to think, if electric vehicles are indeed the answer, what then is the question? EV fans will nilly ignore the entire question of material footprint: the aggregate quantity of biomass, metal ores, construction minerals and fossil fuels used during production and consumption of the product. Add the approximate weight of an EV, made of materials such as metals (including rare earths), plastics, glass and rubber. While making tall claims about having a positive impact on climate change, EVs have also caused a global spike in mining, destruction of ecosystems and the demand for each material. It’s so obvious that global material footprint will keep increasing, as long as it makes economic sense. Economics, capitalism and energy production, by construct are divorced from Nature and biophysical limits. Folks who love to blame the fossil fuel companies seldom look into their own destructive emissions, worthy lifestyles, all hooked to unlimited growth and energy.

But I can imagine a future EV zipping over vast wetlands and peat bogs of New Foundland, over landscapes emitting whopping amounts of methane! Be wary of those who try and sell you new technology and solutions with taglines like “otherwise, we have no future”. But like most climate change solutions are a matter of class consciousness, of buying power, of consumer choice, while totally ignoring our “true nature” and relationship with the dying planet.

Nature is spewing out events and wrecking catastrophe on all living beings, in ways which it hasn’t in millions of years. Even as scientists have mapped 100,000 years of climate history within decimal accuracy, the change in reality is way more chaotic and unprecedented. Regardless of where we live and how, be it Finland or Fiji, China or Chile, England or Ethiopia, as a species we face a very tall order of threats and challenges (Polycrisis). High modernist technology and existentialist philosophy do not help us with ways of coping with the unthinkable. But perhaps thinking about our relationship with Nature proves a better and grounded alternative.

Mainstream climate justice and action is totally sold out, subverted by green energy and fairy tale economics, which leaves very little place for Nature and Ecology. Today, the people who speak the clearest and the loudest in favor of Nature and ecological justice are the indigenous peoples, deemed as “Nature protectors” or more recently called “knowledge bearers”. Radical environmental actors and new green activism is about getting “deeply connected”. And how have the indigenous people done so? “By living in right-relation with their ecosystems” (Dahr Jamail 2023). “Before we can take the necessary actions to serve and protect the Earth, we must first fully understand and embody the interconnectedness of all things.” says Paty Gualinga (Amazonian Nature protector). Speaking of “interconnectedness” one cannot ignore almost half of humanity, which has no objective connection with Nature, while huddled inside megacities, working like automatons forever, just to make ends meet and maybe take a vacation once a year.

What makes children of today way more conscious of brand names, than the names of creatures and critters is sad, yet there is so much to accomplish, in terms of achieving real “interconnectedness”.

We find even less “interconnectedness” within global youth, engaged in a range of self-serving cultures, increasingly dependent on cybernetic stimulation and electronic economies. A gradual withering of overall connection in a totally “connected and mapped” digital universe. Flickering, moving images that we are scrolling endlessly. Why? Don’t ask. It’s almost “second nature” now.

For over 500,000 years, humans gathered around camp fires during the long nights, mesmerized by the flickering dancing flames. By controlling fire, prehistoric humans acquired power, further imagination and a “yearning for omnipotence”(Andrew Glikson The Event Horizon: Homo Prometheus and the Climate). As modern techno-industrial humans, we forfeited those primordial connections with Nature long back. Is why perhaps we yearn so deeply to save the planet, in order to avert total collapse. Is why increasing number of people have woken up to a deep existential crisis, as self inflicted and as self-healing. Nature has provided us with a new mission!

The unraveling takes on myriad forms, as biocentricism, as indigenous knowledge, degrowth, Eco-philosophy, Buddhism, veganism, even make films, write climate fiction, heckle politicians, boycott products and events, call out fossil fuel companies etc etc. Even as all such righteous actions are well meaning, our existential threat is not about climate change, but about our broken relationship with Nature. One that cannot be accomplished as if it was the greatest mission or some planetary level job. Can 8 billion people live “in right-relation with their ecosystems”? We may never know. Not unless the current systems are done with, in favor of the remaining ecosystems.

When we deal with Nature, we are not just dealing with it from our limited experience or that of some laboratory or scientist, but how we deal with each other, as human beings. A ‘deal’ which makes it sufficiently clear, that like human beings, every living organism and Nature are not objects of endless manipulation and destruction. As a species we will always change the environment and ecosystem that we live in. Beyond a point, an exhausted planet and ecosystem will collapse, perhaps to regenerate some time in the future, but Nature will continue as is with or without us. Our collective imprint on the planet might outlast our entire legacy.

We are looking at our own reflection, striking back at us. Call it “Gaia’s Revenge” (James Lovelock) or just like a ‘rabbit caught in the headlights’. We can impute any values to Nature. Assign as many threats. Create the worst and best outcomes. Less we forget, that we are the ones defining and not Nature. War, nuclear weapons, climate change, global warming, population, food shortage, exodus, survival etc etc. These problems make for the unraveling of our relationship with the earth and with each other. Also with all other living beings and non-living entities. By any means then, do we recognize Nature yet?

Change the spiritual conditions, change the cultural conditions. Change the economic policies, change social concerns, change the source of energy and labor. Change your diet and mantra. Great, yet Nature is not a market nor based on mere thought and policy. The earth is not a spaceship. Nature cannot be made sense of singularly via scientific vigor. Nor can we treat it as a host that we can dominate forever or just bow down to, as if it were a supreme deity. These pathways lead us into incoming headlights!

Not by design but a counter intuitive thought - what if our “second nature” can be understood as human culture, which developed “first nature” as biological evolution, leading to the very conviction behind wanting to dominate Nature. There lies a fundamental problem, with all such ways of thinking, dealing and relating with Nature. Currently we are far from rational, when it comes to our current relationship with Nature. Even as redefining my own relationship with the natural world appears difficult and conflicted, it is still guided by reason, by instinct and a growing desire to achieve something, which I should be part of. Nature itself, first and foremost.

“Humanity is too intelligent, not to live in a rational society. It remains to be seen whether it is intelligent enough to achieve one.” (Murray Bookchin 1990)

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