Every day we are bombarded with the messages that quality of the natural world is deteriorating at an accelerating rate. For many this is a wake up call that we need to change how we think and act towards nature. Instead of treating nature as an infinite source of resources, we should develop a new set of attitudes towards nature. This is often summed up in slogans such as we need to develop a sustainable economy; we need to switch to green power away from high cost polluting sources of energy and that we should recycle many things. A second approach to dealing with our ecological crisis is to investigate our attitudes towards nature and try and understand what lies behind our indifference and lack of concern or rather why we say one thing (nature needs protection) but mostly do other things (go on exploiting nature).
In this essay I take this second approach and investigate some aspects of arguably the two most common ways of picturing nature. According to the first approach we treat nature as mother. This is usually positive (we thank our mothers for giving birth to us) but sometimes has a grim side to it (as when we blame our mothers for neglecting us). The second way of approaching nature is to treat it as a machine. We encounter this view at the doctors and dentists but it is also more widely made use of by developers and by governments. This is the view that nature can be controlled or should be and be developed and steered in certain directions as if it was a machine.
Let’s take the idea of nature as a mother. Nature as a mother is a complex ecosystem where is a web linking, animals, plants and other life forms in any particular environment. In Mother Nature everything hangs together in the ecosystem, to alter one part alter the others sooner or later. Humans are only one factor in the ecosystem but we don’t see it in that way. We set ourselves apart and call the other species natural resources or simply nature. Human survival depends upon preserving Mother Nature. It’s the frontier of existence, the framework of human activity. Mother Nature can do with us but we can’t do without the Mother Nature .
In mother nature, plants and animals use and pass on energy to each other in a continuous cycle. Only humans use nature as a machine, employ energy in a way that produces waste. We use energy in a straight line rather than a circle. Using fossil fuels to heat our homes and run our factories and cars creates dangerous waste products that cannot be used but must be disposed of. On the other hand Mother Nature nothing is wasted, the energy keeps getting used and passed on. Mother Nature has a spiritual value. Spiritual values have to do with feelings and memories .They have nothing to do with money. Everything in Mother Nature is priceless
Now I want to discuss the idea of nature as a machine. What difference emerges if we treat nature not as a mother but as a machine? How does the machine idea of nature influence and shape our attitude and behavior towards nature? I want to use some examples to explore this comparison.
One of the most common ways of using the nature as a machine concept is in relation to the economy. This is often also involves organic ideas as well. The economy for example ‘grows’ (as if it was a plant) but it is also said to expand and contract and sometimes overheat (as if it was a plastic or a metal). The nature as machine analogy becomes even more explicit in talk about ‘steering’ the economy. In this connection, the economy ceases to be something natural and instead becomes a car or some mechanical machine that can be steered, slowed down, and speeded up as when is needed. Similar thinking is also applied to cities. Is the city for example something that can be planned (a machine) or something that just grows in ways humans can only slightly affect (a force of nature). This example highlights the issue of how far humans can control the direction the world is going in. Can we manage the growth and expansion of cities however we wish or do they develop in defiance of planning?
Today consumption and economic growth have been progressively increasing more and more people have moved from the countryside to the city. Over half of all people throughout the world now live in the cities. The most caustic aspect of cities is the profound separation created between human beings and nature. In a human-made environment, surrounded by animals and plants of our choice, we feel ourselves to have escaped the limits of nature. Weather and climate invade on our lives with far less immediacy. Food is often highly processed and comes in packages, revealing little of its origins .We forget the source of our water and energy, the destination of our rubbish and our sewage. We forget that as biological beings we are dependent on clean air and water, uncontaminated soil and biodiversity as any other creature. Our powerful cities are more bubbles of technology and part of the big machine but we are far away from reality
A third example is the development of the Amazon basin that shows this contradictory attitude. For some the development of the Amazon is not development at all but vandalism. Huge areas have cleared of forest with the result that huge erosion has occurred, many species have been lost, Indians have lost their homes, and they had been absorbed in our “civilization” loosing their wisdom to protect Mother Nature, also the potential of the Amazon as a source of new medicines and natural discoveries has been massively reduced. But others would argue that clearing of the Amazonian forest has opened up the Amazon for new development such as new ranches and new towns. Forest clearing in other words has made the Amazonian land productive. But arguably this a consequence of turning the Amazon into a new machine. If the Amazon was regarded as a mother – a source of huge riches and a valuable place with rights of its own - then development might not have happened so readily and so destructively.
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To feel Nature as a Mother we have to learn from the vast repositories of knowledge that still exist in traditional societies .This was suggested in a report in 1987 by the World commission on Environment and Development . Entitled Our Common Future, it acknowledges the inability of scientist to provide direction in managing natural resources and called for recognition of and greater respect for the wisdom inherent in traditional societies:
“Their very survival has depended upon their ecological awareness and adaptation…These communities are the repositories of vast accumulations of traditional knowledge and experience that links humanity with its ancient origins. Their disappearance is a loss for the larger society, which could learn a great deal from their traditional skills in sustainable managing very complex ecological systems. It is a terrible irony that as a formal development reaches more deeply into rainforest, deserts, and other isolated environments, it tends to destroy the only cultures that have proved able to survive in these environments.
So what can we conclude from the discussion so far? Treating nature as a machine generates visions of controlling, shaping, steering, manipulating and managing nature.
Through our loss of a worldview, our devotion to consumerism and our move into the cities and away from nature, we have lost our connection to the rest of the living planet. In a new century of explosive growth in science and technology it is fitting that leading members of the scientific community are starting to understand that science alone cannot fulfill humankind’s needs, indeed it has become a negative power. We need a new kind of science that approaches the traditional knowledge of indigenous communities around the world to respect Mother Nature. As we distance ourselves further from the natural world, we are increasingly surrounded by and dependent on our own inventions .We become enslaved by the constant demands of technology created to serve us. We are separated from the sources of our own existence from the skills of survival and from the realities of those who still live in rural areas.
Bibliography: The Sacred Balance /David Suzuki
Ecology for Beginners/Stephen Croall and William Rankin
The Death of Nature/Carolyn Merchant
You are the Earth/David Suzuki
