The Problem With 'Nature'

Have you ever noticed how many times a day you use the word ‘nature’ to differentiate between human experience and – well, all other life? Or maybe felt a little pinch of discomfort at using it because philosophically or spiritually you’re subscribed to a way of seeing the world that understands us humans, as a part of nature, but the convention of culture and language conspire to keep you in the habit of using this small, six-letter word of separation, this incendiary device in the syntax of a sentence, blasting away the fragile bridges built by your deeper knowing ever since you heard that talk, took that course, read that book, did that retreat, took that plant medicine or went on that shamanic journey.

It is not nature herself that I object to: not the exquisite abundance of life in all her wondrous forms and colours; nor the kin-family of creatures, plants and other living beings with whom we share this planet. My concern is with the word ‘nature’—or, more precisely, with our continuing need for the word, because it was not always so.

Words are spells that carry great flowing rivers of meaning within their etymologies.  In the case of ‘nature’, the word bubbles up from Proto-Indo-European, the pre-Bronze Age bone-language of many modern European tongues. We find its source there as *gene-, meaning ‘to give birth’, ‘beget’, or ‘produce’. To this day, this origin flows in the Cymraeg words geni ~ to be born, and genedigaeth, ‘the process of being born’.

Through the great network of European languages, *gene- flowed into Latin and came to shore as the verb nasci, ‘to be born’, which then formed the noun natura. In classical Latin, natura retained the meanings of ‘birth’ and ‘quality’ or ‘essential character’. By the 12th century, in Old French, the word had become nature, meaning ‘the principle of life’, ‘character’, or the active force maintaining the universe. It is only in the late 13th century that English felt the need for such a word, and ‘nature’ crossed the channel and sailed into the English language.

In the muddy waters of post-Norman England, modern English was busy surfacing from Saxon roots. The word ‘nature’ entered the eddies and floated into the language initially to denote the ‘essential qualities’, ‘internal forces’, or ‘bodily processes’ of a specific organism—for example, ‘human nature’. It later swelled to describe the entire physical world, or the collective, personified creative power governing the material world ~ ‘Mother Nature’. By the 1660s, following the Scientific Revolution, it had come to denote wild, undomesticated environments separate from human civilisation and artificial creations.

In short, from its origins of ‘birth’ and ‘to become’, the word ‘nature’ had evolved to mark a schism between humanity, now defining herself as ‘civilised’ and therefore better than and separated from all the other, wild, untamed mass of creation. In that semantic shift lies as dark a magic as any that humanity has cast upon herself: a conceptual separation from the web of life.

It is not by accident that ‘nature’ flooded the languages of Europe and transformed meaning rapidly during the Renaissance, a period in which European philosophy and spirituality began to shift from sacred reverence to intellectual detachment. While artists celebrated natural beauty, they simultaneously developed tools to measure, categorise, and dominate it, setting the stage a century and a half later for the Scientific Revolution.

The Scientific Revolution of the 16^h Century transformed humanity’s relationship with the living world. It introduced a mechanistic view of existence, in which the cosmos was increasingly understood not as an animate, ensouled whole, but as a system of parts governed by measurable laws. Empiricism brought tremendous powers of observation and discovery, yet it also helped establish ‘nature’ as something outside the human self: an object to be studied, mastered and, eventually, dominated.

The Cartesian divide was another cut in the web. In separating the thinking mind from the material world, René Descartes helped render the more-than-human world inert: a vast machine rather than a living presence. The quantification of natural laws further demystified the cosmos, translating mystery into measurement and reducing the forces of the world to what could be predicted, calculated and controlled. Thinkers such as Francis Bacon promoted empirical science as a means of extending human power over the natural order, encouraging a view of the Earth less as kin or mother than as matter available for human use.

I am not anti-science, far from it, but the rationalist view of the world and the empiricism that lies at the heart of science, has over the past three centuries flooded across disciplines and into the deep pools of culture, so that scientism has become the only valid way of evaluating experience, with the result that other valuable ways of considering, relating to and understanding creation and our experience of life, have been consigned to ridicule as some cheap fantasy.

Once nature had been made into an ‘it’, she could be approached from an external, supposedly objective standpoint: observed, disassembled, classified and exploited. This shift provided us humans with the conceptual foundation for modern industrialisation, enabling forests, rivers, soils, animals and whole ecosystems to be reframed as resources, reservoirs or raw materials for human consumption. 

The ecological crises we now face is a direct consequence of this worldview and the deeper imaginative rupture, in which humanity learned to see herself as observer, manager and owner of a world from which we imagined ourselves apart.

What comes first: word or culture is one of those chicken-and-egg debates. Whether we conjure words to capture something arising within culture, or whether in having a word – often adopted from another culture – a concept is harnessed, making something ephemeral, lasting and definite to flood our perceptions and conversations and subtly inform our experience.

What might it mean for us to consciously take ‘nature’ out of our vocabulary? How might this force our minds and mouths to work hard to find nouns and adjectives and a new grammar that leant towards awe and relationship, repairing the breach and reaching once more for the truth of ourselves as a part of the web of life? Might this way of speaking help us reweave our understanding of ourselves as intrinsically a part of nature, and how might that impact our reparative actions in alliance with the ecology and thriving of all life?

A panel from the Gundestrup Cauldron c. 200-300 BCE, showing a horned human holding a torque of 'culture' in one hand, a wild horned serpent in the other, and surrounded by images of animals and plants. Possibly a depiction of a far older understanding of the experience of being human.

Before the word ‘nature’ arrived in the British Isles, we had other round, beautiful words: there was in the old Brythonic, anian (still in use in Cymraeg today), and in the Saxon tongue, ġecynd. Both are words that in slightly different ways celebrate deep empathy between humans and all life through a shared experience of being alive, sentient beings in this wondrous creation that we share.  I wonder what might happen if we consciously reclaimed these and others from our bone languages and coined beautiful new ones to express what we truly mean when we relate to this glorious diversity of complex life with which we are inextricably bound. Maybe rewilding begins with the words we choose.

I’m leaving it here as a possibility, as a prayer.

I’m currently working with a brilliant group of international animism teachers, thinkers, writers and philosophers exploring the impact of language on how we relate to our world. If you happen to be at Medicine Festival this year, I’ll be leading a workshop at the Land Kin area on Thursday 13^th August, 3.15pm – 16.30pm:  WORDS TO CHANGE OUR WORLD: Reclaiming the Language of Connection, Animacy and Belonging. Please come and join us!

 SOURCES

• Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology

• Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Primer

• Lost Knowledge of the Imagination by Gary Lachman