Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
with Nature
A Daoist Perspective
David E. Cooper
Orientation
I set aside the book I was reading when, with the sun reddening, the
evening y-past of crows and green parrots began. For ten minutes,
squadrons of birds sped above or through the grove of coconut palms
that separated the Indian Ocean from the terrace of my room in a Sri
Lankan guest house. The book, as it happened, was about wildlife,
crows included. I rather associate Sri Lankan crows with reading books
about nature. Once, a ock of them tore to pieces my copy of Gaston
Bachelards The Poetics of Space, left unguarded on a chair in a hotel
garden. One chapter the birds shredded was called Nests.
The author of the book I was reading until the crows and parrots
returned to their roosts would approve of my putting it down. He
would think it more important to watch the birds than to read about
them. The choice between looking at birds and reading about them
does not sound like a grave one. But a related decision worried me for
some months.The book you are holding discusses how a person might
live in an appropriate relationship to nature; to animals and natural
places, both wild and, like farms and parks, humanised. Now, what if
writing about nature is the last form such a relationship should take?
Maybe I should be engaging with the natural world in a more immediate, more muscular, and less parasitic way?
I havent resolved this question, although some later remarks in
this book bear on it. But I have learnt to ignore it. In this, Ive been
encouraged by reading authors who write good books about nature
and, at the same time, seem to enjoy a good relationship to it.
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Nature writing
Several of those books belong to the genre of nature writing, which
has enjoyed a renaissance in recent years. Some ne contemporary
authors1 have written books that are worthy heirs to older classics such
as Gilbert Whites The Natural History of Selborne, Rousseaus Reveries of
a Solitary Walker, Wordsworths A Guide through the District of the Lakes,
and Thoreaus Walden. Not all the authors I have in mind would usually be labelled nature writers, but their books also address questions
about how human beings might properly relate to nature. Books, for
example, on food for questions about what and how we eat are, in
part, about this relationship. Eating, as one of these writers puts it, is
our most profound engagement with the natural world.2
Nature writing is different from natural scientic writing, even
when the authors are themselves botanists or zoologists and lace their
books with scientic information and conjecture. For nature writers
also, and essentially, convey their personal experience of wildlife and
natural environments their moods, emotions and fancies. As an early
reviewer of Whites Selborne observed, not only is the understanding
informed, but the imagination is touched.3 To borrow from the title
of a more recent book, the mountains that gure in nature writing are
mountains of the mind4 as much as they are piles of limestone or
granite.
Nature writing is different, too, from an environmentalist literature whose purpose is to enjoin us, with midnight said to be approaching, to save the planet. It is not that all nature writers pass over
environmental issues or eschew occasional calls to collective action.
But the main orientation is a personal one. The concern is with an
individual persons the authors own relationship with animals and
natural places. The focus, therefore, is not the triply impersonal one of
environmental ethicists and activists. That is, it is not on the formulation of general principles that are supposed to apply to everyone. Nor
is it on devising policies for collective, mass action. Nor is it on actions
and attitudes that, in keeping with our pragmatic age, are judged solely
by the effects they have on life in general, on the human condition,
on the environment, on the planet.
People whose orientation is a personal one whose concern is
with self-cultivation get accused of egoism and moral indifference or
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Philosophys roles
As this last remark implies, one source will be philosophy, my own
mtier. Philosophy, though, is not a single source, but a range of traditions, practices and speculations. Several of these bear upon the concerns
of this book upon, especially, the idea of human convergence with
nature.
To begin with, this is an idea that needs support from general
accounts, of the type that philosophy endeavours to provide, of human
beings and their world. For, if certain accounts are correct, then convergence sounds to be unattractive or impossible. Take, for instance,
the view that is forcibly expressed in Matthew Arnolds ironically
titled poem In harmony with nature:
Know, man hath all which Nature hath, but more,
And in that more lies all his hopes of good. [. . .]
Man must begin, know this, where Nature ends;
Nature and man can never be fast friends.11
If the worth of human beings consists in cultural achievements made
possible only through battling the processes of nature, then convergence with nature is a step back towards savagery.
Or take the view, popular among many scientists, that the world
of experience of birdsong, tree resin, owers is illusion, a veil
between us and the real world of invisible particles of which only
physicists have an understanding. Who wants to seek for intimacy or
unity with what is, in effect, a phantom? A yearning for convergence
requires, therefore, different philosophies of human beings and the
world from the views just mentioned.
The idea of convergence, moreover, will remain a coarse one
without analysis, of this and of related ideas (unity, identity, intimacy).
This needs to be an analysis, of the kind philosophers try to provide,
that exposes the implications of the idea for practice and perception.
Certainly, there are plenty of questions about these implications that
can be raised. Here are a few:
Is gardening a model of convergence of a fusion between culture
and nature or is it instead an exercise in human dominion over nature?
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