I’m in a course theoretically about nature and culture, about how humanity interacts with our environment. But mainly we talk environmentalism.   What this has led me to is a few questions, though, about nature and culture on the big scale.

Firstly, in my life I have been approaching a relationship with nature based on observing details – looking for clues to nature’s working in the urban environment. Hearing birds, observing wildlife, noting the buds swelling in springtime.  I look for berries, nuts and thorns, crouch down to watch ants scrabbling across the sidewalk, and pay attention to all the minute changes in my own little garden. After years of gardening I know the feeling of spring and the set of summer, I know the tease of early spring warms and the chill of coming frosts. But is this nature? And how is this qualitatively different from someone who walks in the urban landscape and doesn’t notice a thing?

Am I engaging with nature, if there even is such a thing? All the clues point to the notion that Nature itself (herself?) is a construct. This is an archetype, an ideal, a model, not something real… But we sense our own alienation (linked inextricably with urbanism, agriculture and the loss of small tightly-knit communities) from it, we feel there is something Missing in the urban landscape if there are no trees, no grass, no shrubberies. Yet I am tempted to argue that Landscaping is Far From Nature. It is a garden, it is an aesthetic feature that adds value to a place, but it is not Nature.  I suppose it couldn’t be. Nature is an archetype. It can’t really exist.

Is nature linked to Wildness? Is the absence of human domesticity the marker of Nature’s domain? Is nature the same thing as an ecosystem? I am starting to think that nature is a force that operates -in degrees- on an intrinsic level of all parts of earth. In other words nature is apparent to us stronger when we encounter a “wild” zone – the culmulative impact of so many things-containing-nature is to have a sense of its system. Nature operates within us, as well, perhaps as instinct, perhaps as the processes of living, mating, and aging.  Nature, I think, if it is a force, is mightier than its parts alone… the more things-containing-nature there are, the stronger it is.

So in the urban environment nature is of course present – it is simply in lesser degrees than in the forest or desert. The urban environment reduces the quantum of variation to the point that you can count species on one hand in a city park. I think we can sense this force or character – even in the small rocks embedded in cement – but because the original form has been changed or because there are less things-containing-nature operating, we have trouble sensing it. The force of nature is muted, from lack of variation, from the forcible adaptation of form by humans, and also from our own tools that we have developed to silence “her”.

Not to say that nature is all good – this force – should we agree with this definition – brings us discomfort and even death in the form of disease, cold and hot. It brings us danger in the form of night, predation, and weather events. We have good reason to silence it. Or maybe we did, when it all began. We framed our basic needs as “food, clothing, and shelter” – all things that involve the transformation of nature’s objects into products for our consumption and use. We did not say we need nature, but it’s starting to come to that.

I don’t want to stop heating my home in an effort to connect with nature. Connect with Nature implies some kind of agency on its part. This force cannot be connected with. Instead, I would rather say “sense” nature – I’d rather say that if we can build the capacity to intuitively measure this force, we could develop responsible “ecological citizenship”.  I am starting to think that Nature, if it is not an archetype alone, is the force that powers ecosystems. It is the common link between all things – living or otherwise- within the system. The connectivity is already there. We just can’t feel it.