"Cities are no more artificial than the hives of bees"
"Cities are no more artificial than the hives of bees. The Internet is as natural as a spider's web"
The philosopher John Gray makes this observation in Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002), challenging a familiar distinction between the natural world and the world we have made.
We tend to think of nature as something that exists outside human civilisation: forests, mountains, oceans and wildlife. Cities, machines and technologies belong to a different category, as though our ability to transform the world somehow separates us from it.
But human beings are part of the natural world. Our intelligence, our tools and our capacity to build complex societies emerged from it. Why, then, do we regard a beehive as a product of nature, but a city as a triumph over it?
natural goodness
The belief that nature offers something purer or more authentic than civilisation has deep roots in Western thought. In the biblical story of Eden, humanity begins in a garden before being expelled from it.
Centuries later, Romantic writers turned to nature as a source of beauty, spiritual insight and freedom from an increasingly industrialised world. Nature became a refuge from the corruption of society, a place where something of humanity's lost innocence might still be found.
"Come forth into the light of things, Let Nature be your teacher." - William Wordsworth, The Tables Turned (1798)
By the 1960s, the counterculture had given this ideal a new expression, rejecting aspects of consumerism and industrial society in favour of communal living and a closer relationship with the land.
The same assumptions survive today. Advertising sells us products described as natural, pure, organic or earth-friendly, drawing on the suggestion that natural things are healthier, more authentic or morally preferable.
Of course, some distinctions matter. Organic farming can offer environmental benefits, and reducing pollution is worthwhile. But the word natural often does more work than the evidence supports.
Nature is not inherently benevolent. It produces beauty and cooperation, but also disease, predation and destruction. Something being natural does not automatically make it good, just as something being artificial does not automatically make it bad.
Perhaps our relationship with nature is more contradictory than it first appears.
We long for nature as a refuge from civilisation, yet civilisation protects us from much of what we fear about nature. We imagine the wilderness as a place of freedom, authenticity and spiritual renewal, but we also fear its indifference to our suffering. We want to recover a connection with the natural world, provided we can retain some control over the terms of that relationship.
We seem able to find in nature whatever we need to find. It can be a source of innocence or a force of savagery, a model of harmony or a struggle for survival, a sacred order or a mechanism indifferent to our existence. We invoke its beauty to condemn civilisation, or its brutality to justify our attempts to overcome it. These interpretations need not be false. Nature contains all these things. But the meanings we draw from them, and the significance we give them, reveal something about ourselves. We construct different understandings of the world from within the world we are trying to understand.
Perhaps we need these contradictions. We want to belong to something larger than ourselves, yet resist the idea that we are merely one part of it. We want nature to offer meaning and reassurance, while also wanting to escape its limitations. Our beliefs need not form a consistent picture of reality to help us navigate it. They can answer different needs, allowing us to find both refuge and freedom, belonging and exceptionalism, in the same world.
The illusion of separation
Perhaps the deeper problem is not that we have made a world apart from nature, but that we continue to imagine that we have.
We increasingly see ourselves as custodians of the Earth, responsible for managing and protecting the natural world. There are good reasons to take that responsibility seriously. But the language of stewardship can also preserve the illusion that we stand outside the systems we seek to control.
We increasingly see ourselves as custodians of the Earth, responsible for managing and protecting the natural world. There are good reasons to take that responsibility seriously. But the language of stewardship can also preserve the illusion that we stand outside the systems we seek to control.
Our technologies allow us to transform the world on an extraordinary scale. But the ability to change something is not the same as the ability to control the consequences. The systems we create can become more complex than our capacity to understand them, let alone direct them.
We might destroy the conditions that support our own civilisation without destroying the planet itself. The Earth would continue. Life would continue in altered forms. What might disappear, or become much more difficult to sustain, is the particular ecological world on which human societies, cultures and countless other species depend.
The consequences would not be shared equally. Some societies would be better equipped to withstand the damage than others. For many communities, the loss might extend beyond livelihoods and homes to the landscapes, traditions and ways of life through which they understand the world.
We seek to understand the world, construct meanings from it and transform it to suit our needs. Yet we sometimes mistake these capacities for evidence that we stand apart from the reality that produced us.
Our technologies are no less a part of nature than our fears, our ambitions or our desire to find meaning in existence.
Perhaps our desire to transcend nature is not evidence that we have risen above it, but another expression of the very nature we are trying to escape.
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