Humans and nature are linked basically, inseparable. Our livelihood as a species depends on changing relationships with the natural world. The green outdoor void we call "nature" is at once so expansive, so detailed, and in other ways so vague. There's always more to learn if we have the curiosity and it's completely up to each of us where we stop inquiring. Thinking about the past, our ancestors, ignites in many of us a want to reconnect with it, to re-inhabit a place that feels ancient and really important. Some of this appears to come from a need to serve an ecological function. Other parts have to with anti-human expansion, and anti-corporate activity in the modern age. The philosopher Eric Hoffer once said “Man was nature’s mistake, and she has never ceased paying for her mistake.” We conceptualize a line between the activities of humans, and the independent movement of nature. Those who love nature have disdain for humans, and vice versa.

It's sometimes difficult to understand why people view nature in so many different ways until the factor of human interpretation and intention is considered. We should call to mind the wide variety of animal-based illustrations from cultures around the world. Animal representations are one of the most basic ways humans assimilate their experience of the natural world, something which has inspired us from the beginning. Depicted, the same type of animal can vary immensely between the cultures that drew them. Mostly, it has to do with differences in perception.

There is an essence to the word "wild" which implies something lost, in sight but just out of reach, something that escaped from you. This how W.S. Merwin describes it, how many artists work their fascination with the concept. Indeed I think mostly on having a slippery conception of the word; sure you can nail it down in various contexts, but then you’ve domesticated the word in a way haven’t you? This is purposeful vagueness to impart a sense of space. People resonate within a feeling of apartness from nature, and through our interests in it we experience a process of focusing and capturing things in ourselves. The modern world feels so destructive, awry. Wars, destruction of forests, pollution, the melting ice caps. Our own lives, those of the forests and the animals, even the surfaces of the planet have been forever altered by our growth and technology. We cut the tops off mountains, we peel birch trees down to toothpicks. We raze the wilderness to plant huge crop fields, build concentrated city communities out of wood and stones, mostly to insulate and comfort ourselves. We change our surroundings, in essence we are the terraformers of our own planet. All of it brings a feeling of drifting away from where we once were.

In recent thinking and conversation with others I have come to regard this feeling as more or less just that; a sense, a feeling, that we have perhaps forgotten the things which drove us to capture parts of nature, take more control, insulate ourselves to become modern humans. We've in a sense not really forgotten our wildness but rather haven’t experienced the fundamental indifference of earth completely without modern amenities and thought solutions. The real-time experience of growing through exposed, harsh and culling natural circumstances. That time has passed almost completely. It is the aspect which is most lost to us. What does this mean?

What Was Lost

In ages long past humans maintained connection with nature through direct contact and participation. Immersed, the thoughts and senses were inhabited, the relationship was straightforward, troubles rinsed away quickly by constant occupation of our minds; the need to find/grow food, have shelter, good water, and so on. Nowadays human attention and intelligence has been divided into modern concerns.

Emerging from an insulated modern lifestyle, a lot of us seem to experience the 'quiet,' the 'grounding,' the 'healing,' the apparent realignments of that general sense of disharmony. This is among the first things people notice as a result of contact with nature. There are things one might find out in the fields and woods - food, fresh air and besides: one's sense of origin, of mystery, of infinity, of homecoming, re-simplification, shrugging of modern conditioning. All the spiritual stuff people talk about. Thoreau, John Muir. It's a powerful realization how nature carries a profound neutralizing quality. So much that it tends to give an overbearing impression that nature is there just for us. To heal us.

These impressions, these genuine experiences people have, they aren't really about nature. They are mostly about people and what nature does for them, and how it feels to re-immerse from a sense of disparity. It's not about what nature itself really is. Which isn’t to say any of us can ever know what nature is, only that we can try to find out. I have come to consider nature a "reflecting pool" in recent years for this reason. The ancient quiet of nature tends, more than anything, to amplify one’s inner world.

It's complicated by how efforts to perceive become muddled by the feedback of human thought. Outside of people's images, without human thoughts chattering away with various concepts about it, nature is the thing that moves through time all on it's own. It is perhaps the most indifferent, quiet, primal entity one can experience; a seemingly open universe of things transpiring at all times. How do we stay fresh when inundated with the awe of our nature experience? How do we keep from imposing our thoughts on nature? It's not the most straightforward subject.

What is the word "nature" in essence? Nature might be simply regarded as that which takes shape by itself. The factor of human activity the contrasting point where "unnatural" things might begin. Human thoughts and intentions exerted upon nature's usual activity. To a further extent it's about what is real (nature; untouched) versus what seems not (thought, intention; artificial). Why does the division begin with the touch of humankind? What is it about us, our thinking, our products, that seems inherently unnatural? On one hand we might agree that humankind is from nature, part of nature and should be basically regarded as such, while on the other we use words and concepts which imply separation from, corruption of nature. This is the unseen argument, the contradiction. This has some apparent roots.

Nature Looks Like Us

Humans require basic symbols to communicate with each other; words, language, the images conveyed. When you recognize something as a "tree" the word is not the thing, only an association. In the same way a map is not actually the terrain it represents. We learn from a young age to think in symbols without realizing the very act of having language diverges conceptually from the thing we're describing. This may not seem mind-bending by itself but it has some implications. It sets a tendency for identifying more with the symbol, the words, concepts, the images conjured in thinking. That representation, being based in thought, is easily influenced by basic human things - wants, intentions, and so on. How we perceive reality is filtered through these concepts. We think we are seeing more clearly when we are lensing through thought artifacts which skew towards our own modern circumstances. Within all of this we also learn to concentrate more on identity in nature, over having an open and living interactive process that is basically moving through time. We are concerned more with the ends, the image, the anachronistic self-image type of stuff. I hope that makes some kind of sense.

But what is at the root? Is the base division of natural/unnatural, or nature-made/man-made, not itself an abstraction? We see what the words mean, what's implied in using them, but is that division actually there? Is there a fundamental fork? I will propose that indeed we came from nature, that we exist in our own self-made detour of nature as an active aspect and we always have been. It's just a different role than we had in the past. What we have done, instead of looking at this more holistically, is to look back into our own history and say "that's when we had it right" or "that's when it all went wrong." We say the answers are probably in our past. In this, naturally, we become resistant modern things, to innovation, to the current direction of humankind's thinking. “The whole thing must be redone, we’re destroying nature and ourselves.”

One can identify these reactive concepts rather easily, they define themselves largely in what they reject, by what they are not. They recast modern terms, substitute new or enlightened-sounding concepts. This is what the human mind does best, projecting into a duality which contains a piece of the very thing they are hoping to avoid. It's why countercultures seem to think, speak, behave, take up similar ideas; because they are reacting to a common thing. These concepts of returning to the wilderness, it's superiority, purity, it's healing power, the implied rejection of modern destruction and bearings, much of this is a reflection, artifacts of our thinking contrasting and repelling. I will propose that it further confuses and fragments the situation. To me, this looks like feedback.

How do we make sense of it?

In the spirit of pulling pieces together it makes orderly sense if one looks at humankind as part of nature with changing modes of participation through time. That's how nature is, always moving through time based on what occurred before. I see a lot of people concerned with “putting labels on nature.” A counterculture may argue that mankind is compartmentalizing, somehow missing the overall whole, the forest for the trees so to speak. We aren't naming species because that's what those creatures will be forever, it's just a snapshot of a changing lineage. The reality, I think, is that the interaction within the whole is only becoming better understood through knowing the parts and how they move. Arguably we may lose sight of the whole from time to time. Knowing the parts, movement, and structure is not the issue. There is nothing wrong with obtaining more, finer degrees of information. Perhaps we just want to know from a place of comfort, perhaps it seems massive, complicated, formidable and we'd rather insulate ourselves from the expanse. This is a common thing with humans, we've already done it with regard to nature at least once. [types from a cozy couch on a freezing April day].

It's unwieldy how our technologies and the modern planetary resource situation might seem and rather natural to look back at what might have been lost, experience a sense collective regret. We gravitate easily towards retrospective concepts, artifacts of our species' lost sense of true wildness. This is driven by that strong harmonization nature readily gives us. The human past arose from practical needs of practical times, generated in a living way from a circumstance. To mimic these things reflectively from the first world is not to breathe life into them again. When it becomes more than keeping tradition alive in effect we are merely chasing anachronistic images projected. Moreover, most coming in to their natural interests are simply eager to begin using the natural resources around them, to begin that personal sense of participating directly. We needn’t only romanticize the lost paradises.

You are already a product of earth's immense and dignified history and I suspect that essentially you only want to have an immediate thought-occupying interaction with earth that seems fulfilling. That same inclusive thing we had in ages past, the life we want to know tacitly. The want "just to be." However nature is positioned irregardless of our wants, and the less you impose your thoughts on the natural world the closer to the contour of reality you might be able to see. The more workable and objective your perception and discoveries, the more massive the complexity of nature becomes. It's about knowing and wanting to know. Nature doesn't care to fulfill thoughts, abstractions, and feelings. It just is. Everything else .. Is just us. Just people.

The future indeed needs serious course changes, but these are to be unique and modern, a living response to the situation, all of the aspects that led us to now. And indeed, looking to the past can spawn new ideas, new approaches and lateral applications. Time moves forward and so does our mode of participation with our environment which has itself grown as a living thing. So far we are the only creature basically aware of our surroundings, intelligent and capable of shaping nature for purposes of self-preservation, and in the modern age, to thrive. We could not have done this if we weren't smart. We are of course far from perfect, it's a two-sided coin of both great and costly things. I think that humankind's role should turn towards the responsibilities which come with changing power dynamics. In this case, our capacity to understand the parts of nature, to use them with good intention and to preserve the ancient heritage of our planet for the future. Especially in light of all the damage we've caused. We have to accept our role in all of it instead of rationalizing into concepts which for all intents and purposes, effectively lift the burden. Yes, the stakes are massive. Yes, we have a lot to do.

Rather than chase our own reflection back into the woods I think we should mind further our obvious step out of the forests. Not just for our own benefit, but for nature's own sake and for an an ambient respect and appreciation for what it is. With regard to nature I believe we are stewards and caretakers now, being the only animal thus far cognizant and capable of such things. It’s up to us. This is not a statement of arrogance. We’re the only ones who can.

We never lost our wildness either, it only feels like it’s passed because of all the change. We can at any time occupy our thoughts fully, immediately, sincerely. This is most evident in people with fundamentally curious minds. I will suggest that the full engagement of thinking, of mental and physical effort into what one is doing - that is the realm of human wildness. The wilderness is the place we learned, but indeed the states of mind never left us. That ability to engage intelligently is what kept us going through the ages, and what brought us to now. We are still “wild” and we still part of nature. It’s just not exactly as we imagine.