For thousands of years humans lived in relative balance with the planet. As far as we know there was a harmonious balance of humans and nature. The gatherer and hunter way of life adapted to the capacity of the land to provide.
A form of understanding of the world is called pantheism. It includes the concept of animism which “involves the theory of the existence of immaterial principle, inseparable from matter, to which all life and action are attributable. The entire phenomenal world contains godlike attributes “the relations of humans to the world are sacramental. It is believed that the actions of humans in nature can affect his own fate, that these actions are consequential, immediate and relevant to life. There is, in this relationship, no non-nature category – or is there either romanticism or sentimentality.” Humans changed their view of the world over time. But, imagine, what would the watershed look like now if all of us humans here saw the world in this way?
As an example, “The Iroquois view is typical of Indian pantheism. The Iroquois cosmography begins with a perfect sky world from which falls the earth mother, arrested by the birds, landing upon the back of a turtle, the earth. Her grandchildren are twins, one good and the other evil. All that is delightful and satisfactory derives from the first: twin streams that flow in both directions, fat corn, abundant game, soft stones and balmy climate. The evils twin is the source of bats and snakes, whirlpools and waterfalls, blighted corn, ice, age, disease and death. The opposition of these two forces is the arena of life; they can be affected by man’s acts in the world of actuality. Consequently all acts – birth and growth, procreation, eating and evacuating, hunting and gathering, making voltages and journeys – are sacramental.”
This world view changed to “The conception of man – exclusively divine, given dominion over all life and non-life, enjoined to subdue the earth – contained in the creation story of Genesis (in the Christian bible). (It) represents the total antithesis (opposite) of the pantheist view.”
As an example of how this affects the land, is the garden where “decorative and tractable plants are arranged in a simple geometry as a comprehensible metaphysical symbol of a submissive and orderly world, create my man. Here the ornamental qualities of plants are paramount – no ecological concept of community or association becloud the objective. Plants are analogous to domestic pets, dogs, cats, ponies, canaries and goldfish, tolerant to man and dependent upon him,: lawn grasses, hedges, flowering shrubs and trees, tractable an benign, are thus man’s companions, sharing his domestication.
This is the walled garden, separated from nature: a symbol of beneficence, island of delight, tranquility and introspection. It is quite consistent that the final symbol of this garden is the flower.
Not only is this a selected nature, decorative and tame, but the order of its array is, unlike the complexity of nature, reduced to a simple and comprehensive geometry. This is then a selected nature, simply ordered to create a symbolic reassurance of a benign and orderly world-an island within the world and separate form it. Yet the knowledge persists that nature reveals a different farm and aspect beyond the wall. Loren Eiseley has said that “the unknown within the self is linked to the wild.” The garden symbolizes domesticated nature, the wild is beyond. It is indeed only the man who believes himself apart from nature who needs such a garden. For the pantheist, nature itself best serves this role.
“The rejection of nature as crude, vile –the lapsed paradise-and the recognition of the land as the milieu of life, which could be made rich and fair is the volte face of the western world.
The attitude of Islam to nature is derived from … genesis. The Moors emphasized the second chapter, with the injunction to dress the garden and keep it – man the steward – and developed the belief that man could make a garden of nature: paradise could be created by wise men and realized by artists.
Such is our inheritance. A ragbag of ancient views, most of them breeding fear and hostility, based on ignorance, certain to destroy, incapable of creation. Show me the prototypical anthropocentric, anthropomorphizing man and you will see the destroyer, atomic demolition expert, clear feller of forests, careless miner, he who fouls the air and the water, destroys whole species of wildlife: the gratified driver of bulldozers, the uglifier. The early colonists who came to this continent were rapacious. Their whole inheritance had seemed a war against nature; they were determined to conquer this enemy. They were unaware that it had been the selfsame depredations, accompanied by the same ignorance that had depleted their historic homelands. Yet this was their heritage and their view - nature bestial, savage, rude, the arena of the carnal, the temptation of the flesh, the antithesis of the aspiration to godliness. We might well ask whence came this astonishing illusion, this most destructive of all views, a testimony to a profound inferiority complex, reflected in aggression. The aboriginals whom they confronted bore for no such resentment. They had other views of human destiny and fulfillment.”
Paraphrased and quoted from Ian McHarg, Design with Nature, p.55
No comments:
Post a Comment