A few weeks ago I decided to take advantage of the nice weather that we had and went for a walk through the woods. Normally when I talk walks like these, I spend quite a lot of time thinking about things that have absolutely no relevance to my life and are things that nobody really needs to think about for the amount of time that I do, like, "What if trees are actually sentient?", or "What if humans still lived like cavemen in a hunter-gatherer society?". But then I usually continue on until I see something that would make a good picture.
Most of the time my thoughts center on humanity's relationship to nature and how much it feels like we've separated ourselves from the world. It seems to me like humanity's engagements with nature are fleeting and center on going into nature and bringing something back out with us rather than realizing that nature is really all around us. This dualism has been critiqued by a large number of philosophers but when it really comes down to it, it's honestly just weird how humans, simply animals with thumbs and complex brains, created such a physical, social and psychological distance from nature.
It seems like we try to contain the world in a way that's easy to digest and control so that once we're done with our day trip into the world we can go back home to our technologically ordered society. As many have argued before me, this distance from nature and the dualism between humans and nature is unhealthy. Now you'll never catch me without my iPhone or see me living off the land in the middle of the woods, but I still do think that we need to rethink our relationship to the natural world, and I think we can do so in a way that preserves our way of life and the sanctity of nature.
This view that humanity has, that nature is somehow separate from humanity, is killing both humanity and nature. It's only once we start to see the environmental impacts as not within our "world" or outside of our reach that we can start to extract resources and damage the earth without any concern for the long-term impacts. I think that its high time that we understand that we are part of nature and that any damage we do to the earth we do to ourselves. This obviously isn't a one size fits all solution to environmental damage because, let's be honest, there's no way a change in mindset could clean up an oil spill. However, understanding our relationship to the world is a good starting point for coming up with the best solutions. Solutions that will benefit the earth and humanity in turn.
