Musings on After Nature

A group of garden writers I’m involved with reposted a report published in The Guardian two days ago titled “Human Connection to Nature Has Declined 60% in 200 Years, Study Finds.” Here is the link to read the whole thing for yourself.

It’s no surprise to anyone paying attention to modern life that we are living in the “after nature” period, nor that our loss of connection to what I call the really-real has had a profound, disembodying impact on humanity. The author suggests the typical cures— more government funding for green spaces & public education about the mental health ties to nature, but even he admits the scale would have to be astronomical to make an impact…like, an increase in green spaces by a factor of a 1000, not by 10. These are not bad things, but akin to spitting into the ocean in my view, with not an even a nanoscopic chance of turning the tide.

What’s really going on here? Well, a lot of things, but it seems to me that it’s much deeper than public policy or any individual’s personal orientation toward the natural world (ie “I’m just not outdoorsy”). It seems to me that human beings ourselves are changing- that this has much more to do with internal infrastructure than external policy. It has me thinking about Iain McGilchrist’s take on how the two brain hemispheres impact our perception of the world. The more I read of his brilliant book The Master & His Emissary (I’m admittedly not close to finishing as it’s a slow, deep, meaningful read that I can only take in chunks…likely because my own brain has degraded in much the way he describes), the more I understand that the left brain now controls our perception of reality, and the left brain has zero use for things like art, nature, metaphor, or transcendence. That’s all right brain territory. Take this except from the book:

”What ultimately unites the three realms of escape from the left hemisphere’s world which it has attacked in our time – the body, the spirit and art – is that they are all vehicles of love. Perhaps the commonest experience of a clearly transcendent power in most people’s lives is the power of eros, but they may also experience love through art or through spirituality. Ultimately, these elements are aspects of the same phenomenon: for love is the attractive power of the Other, which the right hemisphere experiences, but which the left hemisphere does not understand and sees as an impediment to its authority.

Through these assaults of the left hemisphere on the body, spirituality and art, essentially mocking, discounting or dismantling what it does not understand and cannot use, we are at risk of becoming trapped in the I–it world, with all the exits through which we might rediscover the I–thou world being progressively blocked off.”

I agree with him, but I would add that nature is included among these fundamentally human phenomena. For the overwhelming majority of history until just very recently, human beings have been at the mercy of nature- from the most awe-inspiring scale (I think of JMW Turner’s fear-inducing land & waterscapes) to the tiniest (will these seeds I’m about to sow germinate & yield needed food for my family?). This is the “I-thou” that McGilchrist references, where you stand under a thing with a power that you can’t control. It is “other” than you, a being in its own right, and in my experience the “otherness” of it usually has things to teach me. There is an enigmatic mystery contained within the “other”…whether in eros, or faith, or nature, or art, or music. However, in the “I-it” world, the other is simply a means to an end, which is certainly how the modern world (tracking with the last 200 years of the article’s study) has approached nature. I think of this except from Adam Kirsch’s little book The Revolt Against Humanity:

“Because we shape everything, from the upper atmosphere to the deep seas, there is no more nature that stands apart from human beings.”

That’s the loss of the “I-Thou” of McGilchrist. What remains of nature is now fully enmeshed in the “I-it”, and the “it” survives to serve us.

And:

“The survival of the fittest, the basic mechanism of natural selection, now means the survival of what is most useful to human beings”

I think about how my journey into gardening as a profession has had such a mysterious effect on my life, connecting to me to truths about myself and about life that I am quite sure I could not have discovered any other way. Some of this is related to the slow, patient plodding that the garden requires, and the lack of ultimate control that I have to recognize year after year. Some of it is related to the conversation that the garden and I have, where I do my bit and she responds with hers. What I know for certain is that this is right brain territory, and that the mystery unfolds over time in a way that I perceive but do not control.

At the same time, I’m not an anti-humanist, looking to rescue nature from the clutches of evil man by hoping for the extinction of our species so that nature can heal. I’m a Christian humanist, looking to restore man to sanity, which I believe means recognizing that there is a revolt against humanity underway- a revolt against the really-real things- a flattening, mechanical, reductionist mode of thinking in our culture that is stripping of us so much good. It’s also apparent to me that the ecological, spiritual & meaning crises of modern life are intimately tied to the loss of a reverence for humanity— a reverence for the whole person. The “I-it” mindframe splinters us into people who approach the world (or another person) as a thing to be manipulated, measured, categorized and controlled, whereas a whole-person approach seeks a relationship with the world that is present, reciprocal, and alive. If McGilchrist is right and we are swimming in largely left-brained cultural waters, it any surprise, then, that after 200 years we find our only meaningful relationship to nature is one of domination and utility?

I honestly don’t know how to change course on a large scale. If we are to recover what has been lost, it seems we must begin not with grand-scale policies alone, but with the quiet, stubborn work of reorienting our own gaze toward the “I–Thou.” This is an act of resistance as much as reverence — choosing to stand before the world, not as its master, but as its kin.