Thursday, January 13, 2011

Human, Nature

The subject of humans in nature (and nature in humans) is one I'd like to explore a bit in my next few posts.  I've been asked to give a guest sermon at a local Unitarian Universalist Church in early February.  This will be a new experience for me.  I have done many public education programs for work, and lead many ritual services for my own church, but actually standing at the pulpit will be a new box to check on my life list.  I'm planning to discuss the relationship between humans, spirit, and nature, specifically with regard to the Place of the Salish Sea ecosystem.  There's a lot to say, but I only have twenty minutes, so hopefully musing here will help me to pare down my thoughts into a coherent sermon.

Western thought has famously created an artificial separateness between humans and nature.  The idea that the body, our physical selves, reliant upon the products of the natural world to survive, is completely separate from the soul, the thinking part of the Self, goes back thousands of years, even before Descartes did such a good job of fleshing it out (if you'll forgive the pun).  When your religion, rulers and scholars keep perpetuating a message like that, either by words or deeds, pretty soon it starts to feel like it is an eternal truth, and like nothing was ever any different...and here we are in 2011, most of us still acting as though what happens to the earth has no bearing on what happens to our bodies, and that how our bodies relate to the earth has no bearing on what happens to our minds, our hearts, our souls.  Indeed, the average human being living in the United States today has no idea where their food or water come from, or where their waste goes.  North American school children today might be able to tell you the names of several different kinds of exotic endangered wildlife living on distant continents, but can't name a single plant or bird species they might see out their windows.  Some of them won't even see birds out their windows, living as they do in such highly urbanized environments that even the most adaptive, invasive species don't often show their faces there.

To our ancestors a few generations back Nature was merely uncivilized, unknown, unexplored, and dangerous.  In modern times we look at Nature through our television screens and see in the shows about wild weather, aggressive wildlife, and the perils faced by those who seek adventure beyond the suburbs that it is still dangerous, maybe even more than it was before.  As the news media bleats an endless stream of stories about weather and wildlife anomalies, earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis, we see that Nature is uncontrollable.  And above all, Nature is dirty--this last, perhaps, the greatest threat to modern humanity if the advertisements for anti-bacterial cleansers for every surface of your home and your own filthy body are to be believed.

In addition to reinforcing an artificial separateness between humans and nature, the Western world has for centuries viewed the relationship between humans and nature as adversarial.  Christianity, with its teachings that the body is inherently sinful and that all things earthly should be eschewed as much as possible in order to receive an intangible eternal reward in some disembodied Heaven, helped to widen the gap between humans and nature.  Living on earth, toiling through one's life with the physical discomforts of weather too hot or too cold, illness, the pains of childbearing and old age, these were the trials.  Suffer through them, and go to your reward.  There were no rewards in nature, unless you were a wicked heathen who enjoyed your food, sex, and other earthly pleasures.  Although we don't consciously articulate this idea in a lot of modern discourse about the human relationship with the natural world, it is still very much there, just beneath the surface, vividly coloring the way we consider our place in the web of life.

I don't feel the need to dwell to deeply on the physical impacts of this way of thinking.  It should be fairly obvious to anyone who is conscious in this time that the results of this Western attitude toward nature, combined with the imperialistic push that has spread this worldview to every corner of the planet, has not resulted in a harmonious relationship with nature.  Stories of environmental degradation and imbalance and the way it is finally making humans uncomfortable are everywhere in the news.  Some even embrace it, welcoming what they interpret as signs of an impending apocalypse because it means that intangible heavenly reward might come sooner.  Indeed, in the United States, recent administrations have even encouraged various types of environmental destruction as a means of hastening these "End Times".  But this pervasive believe of separateness has had a profound affect on our very souls--the souls Descartes and others claimed could exist independently of the body, and, therefore, the earth.

Why, then, do so many of us feel in our souls a sense of being incomplete, a yearning for something that speaks to us in a sunrise, a birdsong, the smell of rain-washed leaves?

Next:  pining for the fjords

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