‘In wilderness is the preservation of the world.’
- Henry David Thoreau
‘If you do not rest upon the good foundations of nature, you will labour with little humour and with less profit. Those who take for their standard any one but nature — the mistress of all masters — weary themselves in vain.’
- Leonardo da Vinci
The first of four chapters on the themes of nature, place, compassion and pleasure. The focus of these chapters is to explore subjects that I feel are essential for discussion, if a system of deliberative democracy is to be established. As such, all that is expressed here is simply ideas and not necessarily proposals. If we had the chance, we would be allowed to decide on what kind of governance we might like. If we opted for a deliberative democracy, then we might have an opportunity of all being involved in making decisions about the subjects addressed in these four chapters. Until then, this is all just speculation. I hope, nonetheless, that the ideas explored will be by way of an incentive to see what we could all be talking about, if only the opportunity were given to us.
Natural Commons and Wild Nature
As we discussed in Chapter 3, it is essential to our existence on Earth that we appropriate nature in some way in order to sustain and reproduce ourselves. I have designated this part of nature that we need to use as the natural commons. There remain however, features of nature that could be viewed as too important, unique or beautiful in themselves to be exploited as ‘resource’. I have used the term wild nature to describe this aspect of nature. How do we differentiate between these two types of nature — natural commons and wild nature? In Chapter 3, I suggested that this is a matter of attributing intrinsic and extrinsic value. One way or another — whether the choice is seen in these terms or not — there seems no way of avoiding this decision. It is also a ‘moveable feast’. Some parts of nature that we may use as a resource today we would be best to keep as wild nature, and vice versa, and these decisions may change over time.
We should also recognise our own wild mind, wild body and wild soul; in other words, the wild nature within ourselves. If we were more at home in our bodies, would we likewise be more settled in our minds, souls, relationships and even in our politics? How do we acknowledge these connections in our lives and respect them? Taking up the ideas of the last chapter, we might view wild body and wild mind as gifts from the economy of nature to our human economies of culture, making and re-making.
Gandhi’s social sin of Education without Character is applicable here. What is character, if not to recognise that there is something unique and special about each one of us that cannot be bought or packaged — and to likewise extend this to others, and to the wider world of nature? I believe this is something we might be able to teach, but nonetheless it is a tricky lesson to get across. Society’s current emphasis on individualism and self-worth can lead to narcissism. Our intrinsic value has to be set within the context of community, responsibility and nature herself.
Science too, as it is currently practised and promoted, does not really recognise the distinctions that we have drawn above. Our science is premised on dead matter as the basis of everything — hence, Gandhi’s Science without Humanity. As we progress from physics through chemistry to biology and psychology, the assumed dead nature of fundamental reality casts a long shadow. So to make a distinction between natural commons and wild nature — extrinsic and intrinsic value — is anathema to science. This is not to criticise individual scientists, who may be well-meaning in keeping a sharp divide between their research and the moral implications of its application. But again, that is a difficult balance. We are certainly given the impression that science, just as science, is about dead anonymous matter. Physics, at least for the time being, has triumphed over biology.
Connection and Inspiration from Nature
Nature is many things. We humans tend to project onto her the spirit of the age. It used to be competition and survival of the fittest. More recently it tends to be stories of co-operation, which I take as a sign of hope. Some writers (see, for instance, Jay Griffith’s Wild) suggest that nature provides us with a ‘morality’ that is superior to anything that humans have so far devised. (Meanwhile, Mark Rowlands’ The Philosopher and the Wolf says that only a truly nasty species would devise a system of justice!) But — whilst the examples of co-operation nature offers us are inspiring — to see her as a root of morality is not, I think, her primary source of value for us. There are, however, moral implications on how we, as humans, put value on nature, and we will look at this later in the chapter. Meanwhile, we look to nature for her beauty, wonder and enchantment. Encounters with wild places are essential for our well-being. I have no logical argument to offer as to why this is the case, but I think it is critical. I think that even looking out for a tree or a stream or some other small feature of the natural world close to where we live has immense value. One of the writers on deep ecology related his ideas to a small bank of grass near his house. Wild nature speaks to our ‘deeper’ selves — to our inner wildness. To lose this would be to lose something fundamental to who we are. It is often dismissed as romantic or anti-development to wish to have places protected as wilderness. But I would say that without some true wilderness on our planet we are greatly diminished. Without wilderness we will forget how fragile and trivial we are in relation to the forces that have shaped us.
Bill Plotkin (Nature and the Human Soul) offers us three premises:
‘(i) A more mature human society requires more mature human individuals.
‘(ii) Nature (including our own deeper nature, soul) has always provided, and still provides, the best template for human maturation.
‘(iii) Every human being has a unique and mystical relationship to the wild world, and that conscious discovery and cultivation of that relationship is the core of true adulthood.’
Nature then, is arguably our primary source of inspiration. The inspiration fires our imagination. David Abram tells us: ‘Bereft of contact with wildness, the human mind loses its coherence, and the human heart ceases to beat.’ So, it is nature that is the ultimate source of our creativity. It is imagination and creativity that give value, both to individual lives and to humanity generally. Our response to nature and beauty is hopefully one of wonder and gratitude. Our response to our way of being in the world is hopefully one of joy. The enchantment of nature provides us with a ‘radical de-centre-ing’ or ‘lateralness’, to use Elaine Scarry’s terms. (On Beauty and Being Just.) This, I suggest, is the threshold between merely surviving and genuinely living.
There are many groups and movements that are dedicated to protecting nature in different ways. They are variously described as environmentalists, conservationists, ecologists (either ‘deep’ or, presumably, ‘shallow’) and so on. Often these groups will back up their hopes and dreams about the natural world with facts and figures, as if to demonstrate that there are practical or economic reasons for preserving nature. (Essentially, in the terms adopted by this book, regarding all of nature as a resource.) However, one thing that unites all of the groups though (perhaps more than any of them would care to admit) is a love of beauty. It would be better for us all, I think, if more people would just admit to this heart’s desire and tell us that they care about the small and humble examples of the natural world close to their own lives and how deeply important this is to us. People might say that there are many big and important problems out there in the wider world that need sorting without us fussing over beauty. I suppose that in a world premised on ‘getting things done’, efficiency, and ‘pragmatism’, the ideas I’m presenting here will seem like vague and flaky notions. Our deep connection and reliance on nature might seem odd to introduce as a ‘reason’ for why we might seek to do things differently. I have no concrete explanations to offer. But I would say here, and throughout this book, that if we do not pay attention to the small things right where we live, then we will not be motivated to do anything about the bigger problems in the world. I think the care of nature is the true pragmatism — that our ways of doing things and getting things done today are deeply flawed.
So I am suggesting taking time to savour the little encounters with nature that our everyday lives afford. If a tree or a little patch of garden or a stretch of riverbank or shoreline does nothing for us, then the bigger problems of the world will not actually mean anything to us either. If we do not care about the tree outside our window, will we care about the rainforests of South America or an ice shelf breaking up in Antarctica? Without this connection, we are in danger of losing what is wild — of creating everything as bland and predictable.
Sometimes it is said that we have a ‘relationship’ with nature and that this is the source of joy that it affords us. However, we saw in Chapter 3 that all our human activities are embedded in nature. All production, for instance, is a relationship with nature — even mining or drilling for oil. I’d say that the term ‘relationship with nature’ is too abstract. Rather, there are specific relations — with our own bodies, with other people, with a dog, a cat, the birds in the garden, with a stream, a tree, the soil in the vegetable plot, the animal taken to slaughter, the crop we harvest for food. We are wild mind, wild body and wild soul — the embodiment of nature. The split that we identified right at the start of this book between Eden and the surrounding wilderness has stayed with us down the centuries and it is difficult to shake off. But, as with several questions we have encountered in our discussion, this need not be an either/or. Sometimes seeing the human world as a protected place, a haven from nature, is beneficial. But sometimes, we can find a haven in nature. Humans have the probably unique ability of seeing it both ways — of being separate from nature yet embedded within her.
The primary encounter with the natural world is through our own bodies. There is little, if anything, in human experience that is not felt through the body. Our physical presence, and our feelings about that presence, make an enormous difference to how we view the world. Much of the time our thoughts about our experiences are just rationalisations of our physical reactions — and often very inaccurate rationalisations at that. Our bodies are part of wild nature, so they share that intrinsic value that I have discussed above and in earlier chapters. Every day we spend time and energy ‘re-making’ ourselves. Should we not therefore be honouring that which we spend so much effort re-making? A first step to better acceptance of our bodies may be a compassion for ourselves — compassion in the sense of joy and celebration that we will be exploring in a future chapter. Our pleasure — rather than our power — is what could define our relationship with our embodied selves and the natural world.
But rather than celebrating the body, culture generally has been moving in the opposite direction, towards being more thought-based and abstract. In Western culture, our feelings about our own bodies are, to say the least, ambivalent. Rather than a celebration — as all bodies should be — most of us are made to feel ashamed and embarrassed about who we are. It’s an open question as to what effect this alienation from our own bodies has on our relationship with each other and with the wider world of nature. Our technology has created even more veils between our embodied selves and the natural world. So maybe it is no accident that our culture often seems to treat the natural world with indifference or sometimes wants to tidy and sanitise nature, as if it is not quite respectable when left to its own devices. I think that our relationship with our bodies needs to be healed before we can make real progress on improving our relationship with nature. It is only one aspect of our wider connection with nature, but I think that it is an important one nonetheless.
In the previous chapter, we took a look at the different ways that value is understood — in particular by our economics. We noted that utility value is the value that something has to us in its use, whilst commodity value is the value something has in exchange for other things. I hope it is clear from this that natural resources fall, more or less, within the first category — they have instrumental or utility value to us towards the manufacture of products. The way economic value is realised from natural commons is a peculiarity of the way capitalist economies function. Clear felling a forest, for instance, will always appear to generate more profit than managing and preserving it. There seems to be no good economic argument for the preservation of wilderness. In the longer term though, and from a wider, ecological perspective, the forest has value above anything that could ever be described or accounted for in purely economic terms. (Or, to put it another way, there is an opportunity cost that is missed in the preservation of wild nature — there is a market failure. If we were more savvy, we would recognise that keeping the forest would eventually generate more wealth.)
In this chapter, I have said that there is a further type of value that we need to take into account — intrinsic value. The value that the natural world holds for us in these terms puts it way beyond any calculation of utility value. This is more even than the value we might derive from nature as ‘environmental services’. So I have suggested a split between the natural commons (utility value) and wild nature (intrinsic value).
There is a place, of course, for accounting — but those who most strongly advocate this approach are apt to be very dismissive of the split between natural commons and wild nature. Dieter Helm argues in Natural Capital that, as I’ve noted in an earlier chapter, those I have described as Ecotopians set infinite value on all nature and will therefore not countenance the use of any of it. This is a caricature that I have not seen proposed by anyone else. Helm does not acknowledge the split I have identified above, except perhaps in an indirect fashion. He does, however, offer a simple formula for managing natural capital — that we should organise our economies such that the amount of natural capital remains at least constant going forward, and should maybe even increase in the short-term, until we achieve a better balance. In a similar vein, Evan Eisenberg (Ecology of Eden) suggests, ‘so to manage nature as to minimise the need to manage nature.’
Destroying wild nature might one day be seen as on a par with crimes that we are unequivocal about condemning without need for further justification, such as slavery or child abuse. No-one would seriously do a cost-benefit analysis for the re-introduction of slavery or the legalisation of child pornography. Perhaps, in decades to come, we will look back on the pricing of the destruction of our rainforests with equal incredulity. So the question of value, when applied to nature, might be better if it is not considered to be an economic question. A moral explanation has more hope of success than an economic one. The moral stance has now been taken up for nature by what is described as ‘widening the moral community’.
Nature as part of the ‘Moral Community’
From the above, it is our human culture that invests nature with either intrinsic value or extrinsic, instrumental value. At the most basic level, we might say that all animals and plants have a ‘right’ to their own life and autonomous existence. Furthermore, as we’ve seen, there is a tendency to think of ourselves as ’outside’ nature, whereas, in fact, we are one community. We’ve already looked at the ownership of land being more about stewardship and custodianship than property, and this is a step towards recognising that the use of land is about seeing ourselves as part of this wider community of nature. Deep ecologist Aldo Leopold offers us this perspective. He says:
‘We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us… But when we see land as a community to which we belong we may begin to use it with love and respect.’
Whilst this is still an invention of human culture, it would be a good place to start in giving the natural world a greater say in our politics. Nature is in no position to defend such a right — even to comprehend it. We need, therefore, to have human agents who will represent nature’s ‘interests’ for her in a formal and legal sense. Someone needs to speak for the land, the ocean, the air, the rivers, the fauna and the flora, whenever there are questions of our human activities disturbing a wild place. This, in practical terms, is the extension to the moral community. The governments of Iceland and Equador already give legal status to the environment.
From our discussions about Parapolity and Parecon in earlier chapters, I am suggesting that our deep connection with nature and the extension of the moral community need to include some representation for the natural world in our lowest level of government. So, if the ideas of Parapolity were to be successful, this would be at the neighbourhood level. It is the people who live near or within our natural habitats who are at the front line for their protection. People could be empowered to protect the natural places on their doorsteps. Owners of wild land may be encouraged to keep the land they hold in trust as wilderness. Businesses may be encouraged to keep some space for nature and developers encouraged to create parks and wildlife havens. Even within cities, there is a need for ‘wilderness’. Greenbelts and wildlife corridors are essential features of our built environment and deserve the utmost protection. All of this may be possible with the grass-roots system of Parapolity.
George Monbiot, in his book, Feral, speaks of ‘re-wilding’ our land, creating places that are ‘self-willed’. It is no longer really a case of ‘preservation’ of habitats, because we would often be hard-pressed to find an era to which we might want a particular area of land to return. (Even packets of ‘wild’ flowers, sold in the UK, contain species that are actually invasive!) Some have suggested that it takes 1,000 years for a species to become ‘indigenous’. (Perhaps then, the UK will eventually embrace the grey squirrel as its own.) We also hear reports of new species emerging with incredible speed — perhaps nature is going into overdrive as a result of the changes wrought by humanity. We are faced with a choice of whether just to accept this big shake up of species now and leave nature to find her way, or if we should still try to bring habitats back to some previous ‘pure’ state. As climate change starts to bite, we are also faced with the dilemma of whether to help species that cannot move in time to avoid disaster or leave them to their fate. These are complex issues, but as Monbiot reminds us, nature herself is self-willed and will find ways to respond to changing circumstances that may well surprise us and hopefully will delight us.
Despite the difficulties described above, of deciding when a landscape is ‘genuinely’ natural, or when it is in some ways compromised by invasive species, there is at least a clearer division between land that is ‘developed’ and land that is left to nature. As the human population grows, there is pressure on such places to give way to farmland or pasture, managed forests or tourism. The preservation of wild land — so far as this is possible — could be made a priority.
Re-wilding, and along with it, such alternative agricultural practices as regenerative agriculture and permaculture (including ocean permaculture) are the somewhat forgotten cousins of the efforts to curb climate change. It might be that we could manage to go back to an abundant world of nature and solve a good many other problems along the way.
As I write this in 2020, there remains only a tiny number of humans living completely within nature and untouched by civilisation. Often, we have viewed that ‘state of nature’ as a blissful state, somehow very much more pure and innocent than the ‘civilised’ world. Hard evidence might suggest otherwise, but nonetheless this feeling persists. People living in earlier centuries felt differently. Wild places were dangerous. Nature was seen as threatening, and potentially outlaws and bandits lurked outwith the bounds of towns and villages, seeking to prey on the unsuspecting traveller. A previous state of living happily with nature may have been there in myths — but then the Garden of Eden was still very much a protected place, not a wilderness. So, deep within the psyche of our cultures, there persists a strong threshold between nature and civilisation — wilderness and city or, as Evan Eisenberg has described it, the Mountain and the Tower, as explored in his book, The Ecology of Eden. The more ‘developed’ we have become, it seems, the more likely this desire to cross over into wilderness is manifested. Even if there were no environmental problems, giving us pragmatic reasons for looking toward simpler lifestyles, I think this longing for wilderness would still persist.
When it comes to an ‘indigenous’ people living on the land, their land inevitably now falls within nation states. The governments of these nations have a tendency to try to bring their populations under state bureaucracy, giving people ID’s, perhaps also looking for them to have a fixed address, so that administrative tasks can more readily be carried out. Up to a point, this is well-intentioned. We have already seen how Hernando de Soto understands this process as being essential to economic prosperity in poorer nations. Nonetheless, I think there is an argument for people to continue to live ‘wild’, and be exempt from the normal processes of government, if they wish. Let us protect those indigenous peoples who still survive, whilst we can.
This, in turn, raises the question of people who wish to live ‘off-grid’ from otherwise more ‘developed’ nations. It certainly gets difficult at this point, as we need to draw a distinction between what might be considered a suitably ‘organic’ lifestyle, and one that is too developed or technologically sophisticated. Perhaps there is room for some flexibility. For the truly intrepid folk who wish to go ‘back to the wild’, we might give people the means to live in the midst of wild nature. Why is it that so much of our dealings with government can only be achieved with a fixed address? We could make it easier for people to live off-grid by allowing them to have a postal address that is not where they actually choose to live — be it hut, boat or camper-van. People could then more easily choose to live in nature, yet still be able to interact with society where this is needed.
The dreams we have of our encounters with wild nature shape our relationship with the planet. If the story we tell of nature is only one of resources, or if we see the countryside or the mountains as just a theme park, then that is what they will become — first in our dreams, then in reality.
Our encounters with wild nature offer us some sense of perspective to our lives. Different types of natural landscape have their own specific qualities. Wild places that endure offer us a feeling for the fleeting-ness and insignificance of human life and the transience of our own lives in particular. What seems so important back home or at work, is shown up as trivial in relation to the stillness of the mountains or the crashing ocean on the seashore. Nature also has her cycles of seasons, of rain showers, trees budding, flowers opening, birth and death, the sun and moon rising and setting. These changing rhythms should be informing us — setting our own moods — but they are so often blotted out by our 24/7 culture of noise and ‘information’. I am suggesting therefore seeking out truly wild places as much as our life circumstances will allow.
When we encounter the wild it is important to keep our footprint — even as visitors — as light as possible. If we cannot visit such places with a sense of responsibility then better to go to the touristy resorts than venture into the wild. There is a big difference between ‘experiencing’ nature on a jet-ski and experiencing nature in a kayak, or ‘experiencing’ nature on a quad-bike and experiencing her on a push-bike.
In the UK, the area of private gardens is greater than the total area of all of our nature reserves combined. So, those of us with a garden have another potential source of contact with wilderness, and one that can have a significant impact on how wildlife copes in the future. The recent trend, unfortunately, has been to cover gardens over with tarmac or paving slabs — thereby making it difficult for wildlife to get a foothold. We very much need to reverse this trend, and we’ll have a bit more to say about that in the next chapter.
Let me stress again, the matters I’ve raised in this chapter — and will be raising in the next three — are only suggestions. If we had a choice of what governance systems to put in place, then whatever system that choice led to would then have the say on all the issues discussed above.