Written on 25 April 2000 in response to Time Magazine's special edition for Environment Day 2000. In particular this article addresses the frontpiece/editorial by Roger Rosenblatt.

Roger Rosenblatt hit the nail right on the head when he said, "There is no concern these days more important than the environment – not gun control, violence in the media, campaign finance reform, not even poverty, war, refugees or the curing of fatal diseases." Here he clearly sees the central issue. Unfortunately in the rest of his article he doesn't really get to the nub of that issue and I believe his article sets the tone for Time Magazine's whole "Environment Day 2000" issue. It is full of the right sentiments and challenging statistics but nowhere, I believe, addresses the underlying spiritual dimension of these questions.

I quote Mr Rosenblatt's article at length to explain my objections.

To quote; "Nature is undemocratic…..the individual has no dignity. The strong eat the weak, and all one's humanistic ideals of equality and justice are drowned in acts of casual murder." Excuse me Mre Rosenblatt, but I think that casual murder, and murder in general are the domain by and large of the human species. Maybe we should withdraw all our "humanistic ideals" from the way we look at nature. Human ideas of dignity need not apply in the natural world. I have worked rehabilitating wild animals and seen an extraordinary sense of dignity in their lives even when death by misfortune or predation is the outcome. The act of killing for food, for survival, is no act of "casual murder" as Mr Rosenblatt calls it. To see animals in their least dignified condition take a walk through a battery chicken farm or an abattoir. It is the deaths of animals for human consumption which are surely the acts of casual murder. In nature the killer and the killed are in an intimate, life and death struggle. Need I go on to give examples of human in-humanity to fellow humans? Such acts are rarely casual and are all the more murderous for that fact.

To quote again: " The real difficulty with making a useful connection with nature….comes from the fact that nature does not seek to make a connection with us." This is simply anthropomorphism. Nature does not need to "seek to make a connection with us", least of all one constrained by our notions of usefulness. We only exist by virtue of its connection with and profound support of our very existence. That this is, from normal western perspectives, an impersonal connection is a measure of our profound alienation from our natural origins. It is not to my knowledge the experience of indigenous people. To say that nature does not care whether we live or die is personalistic to the point of solipsism. Nature is the very ground of our physical being and adapts continuously to our abuse of it almost as mothers will when they cannot see the wrong doings of their children. That we posit our connection to nature in terms of usefulness is the core of the problem. Usefulness is but a small aspect of what nature offers to us and our inability to see beyond it is the hallmark of our degraded relationship to our beautiful world. We are all the more spiritually bereft because of that fact.

Further Mr Rosenblatt says: " One might surmise that the natural world exists to test our capacity to care or preserve ourselves, but even that little fancy is man-made. Nature goes its own way, headless and heartless, and one either responds to it or does not." If we human beings have any capacity which sets us apart from other creatures with which we share this planet it is our particular consciousness of ourselves. We may see the exercise of this 'gift' either as an accident of evolution or our purpose in being here. If we see our god given consciousness as an 'accident of nature' we must see any purpose in our lives individually and collectively as a 'little fancy' that is man made. All our secular visions of human life and society and its humanistic goals are in that sense no more than little fancies that are man made. Maybe the very fact that Mr Rosenblatt and others still use the term 'man made' is indicative of a yang or masculine orientation in our approach to the natural world. Interestingly indigenous people most often saw the world as yin or feminine.

Wild animals also might teach us something about how to be in and with our world. They do not need to conceive a purpose in their existence. They live that purpose, to be themselves as they come into being, instinctively and with extraordinary grace and beauty and, dare I say it, passion. But, not only do they live their instinctive being to the full, however long or short their lives, they have a capacity for acting outside their instincts at times. Unusual individuals exhibit both choice and compassion which one only sees when in the intimate connection available when working with them as their wild selves. (See Stories of Our Friends the Birds)

If we do not see our purpose as exercising a conscious choice to remain in a caring and self-preserving relationship with nature we are doomed. This is the vital lesson that the world's remaining indigenous cultures have to teach us. Nature is neither headless nor heartless except in our need to fit it to anthropomorphic ideals but we suffer a serious alienation of head and heart which is at the centre of our threat to nature and ourselves. For indigenous people the land is 'mother' and the law is 'father' and both are given to guide us by our creator. Our 'test', if such it is, is to consciously choose to be in proper relationship to nature and thus to preserve ourselves and all of creation.

To say, "The hardest case to make for acting on an environmental conscience is that it is the right thing to do.", as Mr Rosenblatt puts it, is surely to show up the split of heart and head. Doesn't, by definition, one's conscience tell one what is right or wrong? Subsequently whether one acts on that ethical demand of one's conscience or not determines the dignity with which one lives one's life. Only an overly human centred view in which the right of the natural world to exist in and of itself is set against a perceived cost to humanity, both collectively and as individuals, could see it otherwise.

©. Rodney Ravenswood 2000