Why Are We Not Communing with Nature?

There seems to be an undercurrent flowing through many of our reappraisals of our human contributions vs. destruction of our world, pulled forth from the realization that our ability to commune with the natural world is something that is exceedingly important and valuable, and that this is being lost. This gradual loss of our human relationship with nature has, after a couple of thousand years of human growth across the planet, been appearing time and time again as something that is 'missing' in this world that we now find ourselves in. It is a loss that is becoming more evident as we grow to increasingly recognize the social and environmental problems growing around us.

I think that the groundswell of thought from environmental, social, political and psychological thinkers says we are well on our way in digging into appropriate territory with regards to locating the roots of our human alienation from the Earth. Religion has certainly contributed to this withdrawal from nature (the Earth and people are essentially sinful and sullied, where as ‘spirit’ is clean), and science with its powerful objectivity not only as science but as a socialized posture of looking at the world as object, have both encouraged us to ‘looking at’ rather than a ‘feeling with’ our world. Certainly, there is also our species-wide childlike narcissism and self-centered, human-over-world outlook as we developed our powers of control over nature, which has surely factored into this distancing. Then, there are the social, economic and political forces that have contributed to urbanization, roads, walls, roofs, automobiles and all the other physical factors that structurally prevent us from being with the natural world.

However, I would add that it is our very power as a conceptualizing creature that is part of the story as to why humans are not communing with nature. Surely, one can read a book in nature, just as one can conduct scientific observational experiments there, cut down trees there, build roads and houses there, and build churches over ancient grove sites. However, thinking and contemplating are different activities than ‘communing with’. It is a different mind/body/being.

A reapproachment with the natural world will necessitate a radical step: we are going to be calling into question our traditionally unquestioned primary power as human beings, our ability to 'think about things'. This power has been such an assumed 'virtue' that it feels somewhat immoral even to suggest that we reexamine the strength of the conceptual ability that allowed us to step out of nature’s immediate grip. I say this simply because it also has been showing as a disability that has distanced us from nature’s continuous source of information and healing. The ability to think about things opened up a whole new world of understanding and the creative acts that came from this. However, thinking about things is the same power that has set us a little to the side from our world that we are thinking about.

Thinking itself needs to reacquaint itself with the full nature of that which it is thinking about. Humans have evolved as the current poster child ‘thinking animal’. Gaia, our world, has produced us. We are her progeny, yet we are not distant, but rather completely connected to her. Like children, yes, born from her, yet completely connected nonetheless, even as we wander across her. There is no inbreath we can take, no food we can eat, nothing we can build on or subsist on without her immediate presence.

If we are not disconnected, I wonder if not only are we a part of Gaia, but that we are part of her self-reflective part, struggling to understand herself in a manner she is now genetically prepared to do. She produced us. Now we are here.

The image of our species as a butterfly comes to mind, just having emerged from a chrysalis. Groping to understand the nature of who we are and where we fit in… Thoughts are like wings: what are these things? On our backs, there are these attachments that move. What are they? My… they flutter. Why?