Can we call a truce with nature?

I am often tempted to idealise nature. However, after a recent trip to the forest I realised that I had brought a passenger home with me, a tick that was potentially bearing encephalitis, which got me thinking about the perfectly good reasons that set us on the path to our current alienation from the more-than-human world. Here are some musings.

Untamed nature has always tried to destroy us – think wild animals, pests and diseases. She doesn’t give up food for us to eat easily. We have had to tame her, to become gardeners, to clear the weeds and manage the fertility of the soil, to make a safe space to feed ourselves and to rest. It has been a constant battle against slugs and aphids, ergot and blight. But we mostly subsisted.

Revolutions agricultural and industrial raised many of us out of the mire into a, by many measures, far better standard of living. But they were also apocalypses of a kind, destroying ecologies, damaging mental health, and making us into cogs in a machine.

But even that wasn’t enough. We pushed on, wanting to protect ourselves entirely from the forces of nature. We further mechanised and digitalized. Those of us who could hid ourselves away in semi-sterile boxes, while the rest of humanity and the more-than-human world paid the price for our comfort. But nature keeps coming for us in dry rot and black mould, in vermin and viruses, in coughs, cancer and cholera.

We can’t escape our vulnerable flesh. Even though we have forgotten it, we are a part of nature, nature that is designed for balance, for birth, death and resurrection. Resurrection of our organic flesh means composting, as our bodies decay and feed the worms, the atoms that compose our bodies are brought back into the cycle of life. We resist the call of the compost bin before it is ‘our time’ – but who decides when that is?

Can we call a truce with nature? In any case, she won’t leave our efforts untouched, but keeps showing herself, as weeds breaking through cracked concrete, lichen on fences and sodden moss on untrod tarmac.

If you found this helpful, I highly recommend that you read Window Poems by Wendel Berry