In the End, Nature Will Win

That’s the title of a post I saw on LinkedIn: In the End, Nature Will Win

Why do so many people write or speak in a way that makes it seem as if nature is on one side and we humans on the other?

This false dichotomy, born from a bunch of philosophers and early science, persists and gives a false picture. Children grow up with this lie.

"What are we doing tomorrow, mum/dad/carer"?

"We're going to the park, it's good to get out in nature a bit."

The word nature comes from the Latin 'natura' "course of things; natural character, constitution, quality; the universe," literally "birth," from natus, "born," past participle of nasci, "to be born."

In its original form, it doesn't exclude humans.

Those philosophers and 'natural scientists' deformed the word to its modern version: 'all the animals, plants, rocks, etc. in the world and all the features, forces, and processes that happen or exist independently of people'.

This is obviously wrong; nothing exists independently of people, because we know that everything is interconnected. I and the legions of fungi, bacteria, bacteriophages, etc, etc, are an ecosystem. We live within the global biosphere, which is itself affected by cosmic forces. No sun = no life except, perhaps, on the deep ocean floors.

Why do we have animal heroes?

Beavers are in the news, superheroes who build dams that can reduce flooding and improve downstream water quality. Nobody gives a thought to the thousands of animals that get displaced by the floodplain created by the dam, nor to how they have to crowd into areas already occupied by other animals. We hear nothing about the old-growth trees that die from the flooding.

Yet another binary view of the world. Yet another anthropocentric take on things.

Why do we have favourite animals and villains?

It’s some sort of bizarre and obscene hierarchy. We appreciate songbirds like blue tits and great tits. Yet we are more concerned about the fleas and ticks on our pet dogs and cats. We treat them with insecticides, which kill the chicks of the birds whose songs we like. Fipronil, imidacloprid, and permethrin, banned in agriculture used on pets.

Up to one-third of a pillow’s weight after two years of use can be made up of: Dust mites and their faeces, dead skin cells, bacteria and fungi, body oils and sweat residue. They, too, are ‘part of nature’. As are chlamydia, coronavirus, and candida.

All of the above mean we carry around a fractured view of what is real.

We divide the whole up according to fads, preferences, lies, and propaganda. Once upon a time, our cuddly cats who feature so widely on social media were persecuted. In France, cat burning was a form of entertainment; they were suspended over fires or chased while ablaze. In the Flemish town of Ypres, cats were thrown from the belfry tower during the Kattentoet festival.

We can walk past a hungry person without a care, but a hungry-looking, cuddly dog will bring up all kinds of compassion. We watch the TV news and see pictures of starving children as we feed our cats and dogs. We turn a deaf ear to the fact that, globally, we use an agricultural area nearly twice the size of the UK to feed our pet cats and dogs. An area that could feed between 245–490 million people per year.

Why do we talk about the ‘animal kingdom’?

Disney has a theme park called the ‘Animal Kingdom’, the same title was used for a feature film in 2023. We have films for children called ‘The Lion King’. Another legacy from a bygone age dominated by those philosophers and natural scientists I mentioned. Humans were seen as having a natural hierarchy, a natural order. European Kings were seen as God’s chosen representatives on Earth. “I am the state,” said the Sun-King. Under him were the nobles, then the clergy, and on down to the peasants and merchants.

The Sun-King’s son died of smallpox, an infectious disease caused by the Variola virus. Viruses are part of nature, too.

There isn’t an ‘animal kingdom’, there are no kings, there is no hierarchy, we try and impose one, but it doesn’t fit. The hierarchies we impose on ourselves are neither ‘natural’ nor our ‘natural order’. Films, storybooks, nursery rhymes, and computer games keep these lies in circulation. Debunked views are perpetuated and passed from generation to generation via these media.

Bygone and modern culture infest wild areas with superstitions, terrifying monsters, and beasts. Educated, intelligent people are nervous or outright scared to sleep in a deep, dark forest. This, again, perpetuates the idea that ‘nature is out there’. From a deep, dark wood perspective, the real monsters are on the roads; that’s where hundreds of children are slaughtered each year in car accidents.

In the End, Nature Will Win

The author of this post is someone who has a broken and nonsensical view of the world. Perhaps it comes from watching too many films like ‘The Empire Strikes Back’? Nature isn’t on one side of a war, and we on the other. A better image would be a sort of Noah’s Ark where he and his family start to pull out nails and planks while out at sea. Eventually, it’ll fall apart, some will survive and others won’t, the Homo sapiens sapiens on board might or might not.

Thinking and seeing the world in an ecosystemic way is difficult. We aren’t educated for it, and many interactions and interconnections are hard to see. Most of the Earth’s inhabitants are invisible to the naked eye. I watched a bloke throw some ashes into a river. I went over and asked him to imagine the shock and impact of this on the waterborne micro-and macro-organisms. The organisms getting on with their lives, and their habitat suddenly goes from mildly acidic to strongly basic. Most of them will have died. He told me to piss off.

We need a generation of writers to come up with storybooks and rhymes that help kids understand all of the above. We need films and computer games that do the same. We need parents who encourage their children to see things in an interconnected way. Our vocabulary has to shift, and a whole bunch of expressions need to disappear. Changes also need to be made in our built environments. Yes, we need more trees and green spaces, even more urgent is the need to get the monsters off the roads and give streets back to kids to play in.

As an afterthought

English, as a language, is considered largely ungendered, especially compared to French, Spanish, or German, which assign gender to most nouns.

So why do so many people gender the word 'nature'? She, her, etc. Does making ‘nature’ gender binary help us understand things better? People I have discussed this with maintained that nature is supporting, nurturing, and caring, and this is why nature is a she, because these are more female characteristics associated with Mothers. This point of view seemed, to me, to confirm that modern European humans spend most of their lives indoors. I feel they should get out and about in places where there is more oxygen.