About nature

Nature is of course beautiful and wonderful. It is the subject of countless superbly filmed BBC natural history documentaries. It is something in quest of whose greatest sights we are ready to travel the continents. Or more modestly, closer to home, we are ready to bask in admiration of, as birds twitter by a gurgling brook in the woods.

And yet I had a friend at university who used to say: “I don’t know why people get so excited about nature. Nature is just something that shits on me.”

He was, in his provocative way, reacting against the adoration of nature, a relatively recent trend in the history of thought, which seeks to glorify nature as being, for want of a better word, “natural” as opposed to corrupted by civilization. “Natural” is generally seen as good; note how the word figures so often in advertising. Rousseau’s “noble savage” is emblematic of a desire to shake off the artificial constraints of society and to return to something perceived to be spontaneously purer. “Back to nature” has become a rallying cry from the Romantics onwards, right down to today’s organic farming movement, for all those jaded with the worst excesses of how mankind has organized the economy and society. City-dwellers, including myself, in our spare time have sought to escape to the countryside, to the great outdoors, to embrace and commune with Nature. Painters such as Caspar David Friedrich beautified mountainous landscapes which for centuries had rather terrorized locals. Indeed they were right to be terrified, as once unleashed the brutal forces of nature can in a few moments soon destroy what mankind has patiently and painstakingly constructed over many years. This month’s earthquake and tsunami in Japan are stark reminders that nature does shit on us, big time.

Civilzation, beginning with agriculture, has striven to keep nature at bay, to claim from it a space for man that must be constantly defended. Virgil writes in the “Georgics”: “Though you drive nature out with a pitch-fork, she will return”. Generally, this Sisyphean endeavour can be made easier and more successful by trying to work with the grain of nature rather than against it. By respecting the patterns of nature, our activities may be more fruitful and sustainable. Hence, it is not a good idea to build on the flood-plain of a river or in a known avalanche path. Still nature is nothing if it is not unpredictable; or rather its recurrent patterns being often on a geological timescale may be imperceivable to man whose life is but the blinking of an eye by the same measure. And yet, man may reckon that a risk is worth taking. The soil around a volcano is so fertile that it may be worth cultivating it and living on it, on the assumption that the next eruption is a thousand years away. Whether building a nuclear power plant in a seismic area is a risk worth taking is, of course, another matter.

In modern times the godess-like Nature has come to be replaced with the more scientific Environment (to which administer also priests, but in white coats). The crucial thing is that man is essentially and rightly still filled with the same veneration and awe before it. The message remains, "Respect Nature / the Environment, or it will bite back": as in, overheat the planet and you will be flooded out along the coastline; or pour enough toxins into the soil and you will choke on your food. Make no mistake, Mother Earth will go on, with us or without us, shrugging us off if we are too inconvenient. Species come and go as part of the ever changing pattern of evolution that is life. At any one time the whole system (Gaia) is in balance; but if parameters change, such as average temperature, then a new balance will come into being which may or may not include us. It is the Earth / Nature that is robust and beyond our irreparably harming it, and it is we human beings who are the endangered species. Nature does not depend on us, nor can it be tamed.

As a mountaineer, I have learned to appreciate the unspoiled open spaces, majestic forms, fresh air and calm of the Alps, while at the same time to be acutely aware of the limitations of my own abilities and endurance, which often require that I must turn back without reaching my objective. I must respect nature.

As a gardener I have learned that my aesthetic is not really natural, that I have to constantly remove spontaneously growing plants which I have designated as “weeds”, in favour of ones I have artificially introduced. Yet I still let my chosen plants grow where they most thrive rather than where I might otherwise place them. It is possible then to strike a compromise with nature.

This compromise has characterized human development. It is perhaps only more recently that post- religious scientific man has abandoned his earlier humility and reverence before nature and assumed a more exploitative, unsustainable stance, which we are now coming to see as doomed to failure.

There need of course be no antithesis between man and nature, because seen properly, as an animal, man is also part of nature. All the laws of the natural world apply to man himself. As with the rest of nature, man’s number one objective is to survive and reproduce, perpetuating the species. And so man’s life too is characterized by cycles of birth, growing up, becoming in turn a parent, ageing and death.

On a daily level too man is ruled by his body, his need for food and drink, sleep and shelter. Our body itself has all its organs in common with other mammals, only the brain is somewhat more developed. As such our body is our first-hand and most familiar example of the fitness for purpose that is typical of nature’s designs.

The beauty of nature is first and foremost functional, the product of efficiency and the laws of physics. There is an underlying logic behind the patterns and forms in nature. That is why we see these shapes repeated through the plant and animal kingdoms and in the topography of the earth on the full range of scales from the miniature to the gigantic.

Man’s own aesthetic is informed by nature. As we, like other animals, are in form symmetrical on a vertical axis, that same vertical symmetry is our recurrent aesthetic ideal from classical architecture through to modern design. Other shapes in nature also inspire us: we borrow columns from the mighty forests, we copy the perfection of the circle seen in the sun; we fequently use botanical forms as decoration. Our own main contributions to design, on the other hand, which are the right angle and the straight line, seem crude compared to the gradual elyptical curves of nature, which have been lovingly copied for example by the baroque or art nouveau styles.

Yet in the end, all our artistic attempts remain artificial, clumsily stylized next to the infinite, fine and sophisticated variety of form, texture and colour visible in the natural world. It is a world in which the forms are instantly recognizable but the individual specimens endlessly varied: this is a tree, but it is different to the next one; just as I am a man but am different to the next one. This is the joy of observing nature. Our copying of nature in art may be imperfect but it can at least teach us to use our eyes in a different way, to look again and see afresh.

The longer you sit still outside, say in the woods, by a river or the sea, on a hilltop, the longer you look, the more you observe, then the more you see and absorb. Then you in turn may lose yourself and become absorbed yourself into surrounding nature. This is what we mean by contemplating nature: transcending the self, becoming part of the whole again. This sitting still outside, doing nothing, contemplating nature is not time wasted: it is one of the most profitable things you can do with your life; it is a moment of becoming truly alive.