Man in the Landscape: A Historic View of the Esthetics of Nature

CHAPTER SEVEN: VARIETIES OF NATURE HATING

Varieties of Nature Hating NEARLY EVERYBODY knows that this is an era of the ravagement of nature. It is one of those aspects of the times which we deplore, such as mass culture or a high incidence of crime. We put the problem in care of public agencies and interest groups, thereby organizing and delegating it. Occasionally it erupts into our lives as smog or water rationing or the difficulty of finding a fish to catch, but what are these compared to our personal problems? In truth, delegation is only what seems to be happening. The machinery for pigeon-holing the ravagement of nature is itself part of the process. We treat nature as though it were something out there, separate from ourselves, which we can turn over to a bureaucracy. It is convenient to blame the destruction of nature on impersonal, inexorable, collective forces incidental to progress, technology, or civilization. We can rise even to evangelical indignation against waste and greed. But what is commonly called the conservation movement , the political and educational form of this indignation, is only the inside of the skin of the hairy monster of destruction. And what is the monster himself if he is not simply Chapter Seven Varieties of Nature Hating ( 215 ) cupidity and wastefulness? What is personality? What is culture? We are like blind men exploring, not parts of an elephant, but the root system of a forest, the eddies of an estuary. The only certainty we have is that it is our monster; it is us. If we are interested in placing blame then we must go beyond blaming the tools we use; the monster is not a rabbit who happens to have big teeth. The feces it flings, its trumpetings in the midst of our angry accusation, its earthshaking footsteps are not the monster either, only its smeary disorder in our landscape. Like any good natural history, the life cycle of this beast has a time and place. It is part of a history of people perceiving their environment and formulating ideas of it upon which to act, ideas which haven't a chance of being completely right. Its genesis is a brew of images, ideas, and dreams working against the surface of reality, like the chemical mish-mash brewing the first life on the soupy shallow bank of an archaeozoic sea. Then the unfit molecules simply failed to survive; now we thrust our moribund notions upon the world and hold them stubbornly there. They become part of belief and tradition for reasons other than viability: their apparent harmony with some abstract convictions, their esthetic fit in a philosophic system, or as a convenient disguise of some truth which we fear. One of these truths, for example, is the inevitability of disease and mortality. Life is given only to be snatched away. Even our brief sojourn is fraught with pain and disorder. Suffering and death surround us. We fight disease, not only as individuals with our own antibodies and white blood cells, but as society—which is as it should be. Unfortunately the mythology available to organized medicine from its primitive prototypes associated sickness with demons. This was not properly an antinature attitude in a nontechnological society which did not conceive of itself outside nature. But when demons were given the Judeo-Christian twist, with its medieval delight in the corruption of the body and the association of the body with nature, the body became something base even in good health. The Western world is scarred by ( 2 i6 ) MAN IN THE LANDSCAPE pathophilia, a puritanical obsession with wounds and deformity . Miracle healing remains at the heart of fundamentalist preoccupation with the flesh, a long, sordid history of masochism , sadism, and fanatical hordes of pilgrims in search of divine cures. This emphasis on the flesh, and on the springs and caves and rivers where cures were supposed to be found, has been negative. Not that cures haven't occurred, but the image of nature in such a tradition is not sweet. The body is not only the gross husk to which the real self seems shackled in life, but a very dirty trick, first because it dies so soon and second because it sickens or malfunctions. If this body is our personal collection of the physical stuff of which the rest of nature is made then how gross and defective must all the landscape be. By the mid...