The Green Wave, Part 2 - The Birth of Nature

We ended our last post by asking, "Why aren't we green by nature?  Why didn't the green wave arise earlier — and why is it here with us now?"  Green is an orientation towards nature — an attitude of appreciation and concern for the environment, coupled with a feeling of responsibility towards it — so understanding the green wave requires understanding the relationship of human beings with nature.

In the beginning, we had no relationship with nature, because there was no nature.

Huh?  What do I mean, there was no nature?  Didn't we arise from nature?  Weren't we initially a part of nature?  In the beginning, wasn't nature everything?

Yes, of course.  And precisely because nature was everything, it was nothing.  We know things by contrast, by their differences from what they are not.  When we were just a part of nature, and nature was everything, there was nothing to contrast it with, so nature as a concept did not arise.  And because we had no concept of nature, we had no relationship with nature.  We just lived.

Looking back, we can say that in those early days we lived within nature, as a part of nature — but that was not our view at the time.  We just lived.  And that may be one reason why, as Flannery points out (see previous post), we often lived destructively to our own future.  We related to the parts of nature — hunting and gathering some parts of nature and defending ourselves against other parts — but we took for granted the larger whole (nature) that supported what we hunted and gathered.  We didn't see nature because it was too big.  Because it was everything, it was nothing, and so we unknowingly abused it.

In some small, isolated ecosystems such as Easter Island and New Zealand, this abuse led to disaster as we stripped the land bare, but in larger ecosystems like Eurasia and the Americas we got away with it and came out ahead.  We grew, prospered and populated, to a point where the land could no longer support us by hunting and gathering.  So we switched to a more disagreeable way of living — initially less productive per hour of labor, but more productive per acre of land —  agriculture.

Agriculture allowed concentrations of people in towns and cities, surrounded by fields and farms, ordered by religion and government, protected by armies, and functioning through industry and commerce — humanly constructed environments. 

Some people — hunters and fishermen, soldiers and traders, foresters and hermits — still dealt with the fringes of the humanly constructed environments or ventured beyond them, but as cities and civilization grew, more and more people lived solely within them.  Now there was something to contrast with nature, so now it could be conceptualized.  This was the birth of nature.  Nature as a concept.  And nature was dangerous.

Once we had lived in that danger.  We took it for granted then, and were always on guard.  But in civilization we learned safety.  And the safer we felt, the more we feared nature, where civilization's safety did not hold.  Once our home, it became increasingly alien to us.  The more we became tame, the more we shunned the wild.

So we built walls, but nature often breached those walls in wild ways such as storms and floods.  Nature's incursions were not friendly, but often destructive and deadly.  Natural disasters.  We strove to isolate ourselves from the wilderness,  and the word wilderness itself contains "wild" — the opposite of tame.  Tame is controlled and safe; wild is uncontrolled and dangerous.

Today we agonize over rainforest destruction, and rightly so.  We treasure our visits to "untouched" wilderness, and so we should.  But old fairy tales truly tell the tale of old.  When a child ventures into the forest, it is not good.  It's an ominous moment in the story.  And that's no fairy tale!  For most of history, the boundaries of civilization demarked the zone of safety.  Beyond them lurked nature, invincible and terrible.

In the beginning, then, we weren't concerned about nature because we didn't even recognize it.  That's why we didn't develop a green instinct, an inborn concern for the environment.

Later, as we saw here, we did recognize nature — and feared it.  That fear kept us from appreciating nature and going green much earlier.  In our next post, we'll see how we overcame that fear.

.Keith Borden, Consultant
Brilliant Green Marketing