Mastering Nature
I grew up a child of the woods. We didn’t live in the county, but I spent most of my days high in the tree in our front yard. I spent as much time in nature as I could, and enjoyed the Waldorf aesthetics passed down from my family and homeschooling community. I took pride in knowing local plant species, knowing what as edible and what wasn’t. I would confidently pop red currants from neighborhood bushes into my mouth to the dismay of my friends. For much of my life, I felt more kinship with the world of plants and animals than I did with the world of humans. The reason for this? I was horror-struck with the colossal mess we had made of things. I looked at the destruction of forests, the pollution of air and oceans, the skyscrapers darkening the horizon of every city as unforgivable sins against nature. We had taken something beautiful and corrupted it, turned it into something ugly, some monstrous GDP maximizing machine in which human life could not flourish. My childish mind struggled to cope with the magnitude of the atrocity.
The phrase “mastering nature” sent chills of rage through my body. It called up a cruel and cold desire to dominate, to attempt to wield something complex and intimate for one’s own pursuit of power. I had learned to love nature. I bristled at even the smallest attempts to control it or hold it back. I fought my father over his plans to remove dandelions from the lawn. I wanted to let things grow wild and free. In some sense, I took the desire to trim, tame, and control the natural world as a direct assault on my soul. I wanted to live in harmony with nature, not in opposition to it.
Yet my understanding of nature was always tempered by the comforts of civilization. This small caveat escaped my passionate young mind. Anytime I got cold playing in the snow, there was a warm house to retreat to. Anytime I got hungry while foraging sour clover and day lilies, I could return to a well stocked pantry and a satisfying meal. My naive understanding of the natural world combined with my acute perception of our destruction of it turned me into a precocious young ideologue. While the intensity of my fervor subsided as I grew older and became humbled by the complexity of the world, it has not been until the past couple years that I really have come to appreciate the reality of the natural world: specifically, that nature is not good.
Now, this is not to say that nature is bad. Nature, however, doesn’t care about you. She is the ultimate chaotic neutral. Nature will feed you, fill you with awe, bathe you in sunlight and whisper divine secrets to you. The next moment, she will freeze you, bite you, poison you, attack you and threaten your life. She will take away from you what you love most dearly, the same day demanding that you break your back just to eke a living off of hers.
To live in harmony with nature is indeed a worthwhile goal, but most people advocating this approach are quite unaware of the sheer force needed on our part to achieve this harmony. To live in harmony with nature is not a passive act. It is a constant battle, or dance, if you prefer, and it is not easy. As I considered this, the idea of mastery floated back to mind. What does it actually mean to master nature? Consider a parallel - the mastery of a musical instrument. Someone setting out on such a task would surely fail were they to attempt an absolute destruction and domination of the instrument. In fact, their every attempt at mastery would show to them a new way in which they were inadequate; a way in which they had to learn, become better, pay closer attention. Surely true mastery, in this instance, required an intimate knowledge of the object. Should it not be so with nature? What if mastery is compatible with living in harmony with nature? To go a step further, what if it is a necessary prerequisite?
A man who walks into a forest may appraise the value of it’s wood, clearcut the forest, and turn a tidy profit. Can we say he has mastered it? Surely not. He has exploited this for a profit, but that is where the story ends. Mastery implies an ongoing relationship, which, by clearcutting, he has cut short.
Another man may enter the forest and appraise the value of the wood. He then, may consider which trees suit which of his purposes, which are near the end of their life, or pose a danger to others should they fall. He may consider a young tree which, given 20, 50, or 100 years, may grow not just in value, but also contribute to the health of everything around it. This man may cut trees down slowly, perhaps clearing a patch in which he can grow some food, taking what he needs and favoring some trees over others. To master this forest, he must come to know it, to love it. In turn, through nurture and care, this patch of land will sustain his life.
The harshness of nature is something our ancestors were well acquainted with, but several generations later, situated in an established civilization, it is easy for us to forget. It is easy to forget that the default state of nature is for us to be mastered by her. We must exert an immense power of will to overcome this, leveraging the goods nature provides to protect us from her wrath.
Looking back, this knowledge was scattered throughout my childhood. It was apparent in stories of Laura Ingalls Wilder which my family cherished so dearly. Stories of their pioneer family, constantly immersed in the beauty, the wildness, and the ruthlessness of nature left some deep impression on me which I was later to discover. This dynamic also presented itself in the raising our childhood dog. The better trained she was, the better our relationship to her was, and the happier she became. It was clear too that people’s dogs who were poorly trained were restless and uneasy, and frequently a danger to the family.
As I reckon with this different idea of mastering nature, it still irks me. Perhaps I cannot shake the damage we have done to her from my heart, such that the idea of mastering something that has been long mistreated feels inhumane. Perhaps it is that the idea of having power over something is so tenuous and fraught with taboo that I shy away from it. Perhaps too, it is that in my comfortable life, I am so far from the harshness of the natural world that the will to fight for my own life, comfort, and potential has not been adequately stirred. I also consider that the idea of mastery, at least our modern interpretation of it, does not adequately capture the degree of reverence we must hold for that which we seek to master; the respect and attentiveness we must assume as we carve out a place for ourselves.
For now I will allow myself to sit with some discomfort around this idea of mastery, but I maintain that we must consider it, and consider a new way of relating to the earth. If we forgoe this idea of mastery, i expect we will be deluding ourselves about the difficulty of what lies before us. I can safely say that having lost the reverence and fear of nature, we cannot know her. For if we begin to understand the immense power she holds, we realize that the work of mastery is never done, but is a constant balance to be maintained. Our survival depends on it. Her strength is magnificent, and if we are to survive her we must meet it with all the vigor we can muster, and wield it with skill.
The reason that we may entertain our naive ideas about nature is that our lives have become fundamentally abstracted from her. The average person in the West does not need to grow their own food, protect themselves from the elements, or fight off wild animals. We simply need to maintain some kind of contributing role in a system which does these things for us. While this is a comfortable arrangement, our life depends on the stability of the system which in turn depends on an impersonal exploitation of nature which is horrific in it’s scale and destruction. It cannot go on forever. If we are to regain a more personal kind of security, we will have to come to know nature much more intimately. We may be surprised by the strength, perseverance and love she demands of us. We may also find ourselves becoming more human in the process.
