By Peter Marshall
This blog is about ‘Liberation Ecology’ and the ancient view that humans should somehow ‘conquer nature’, as if that were ever possible.
I
have recently heard the BBC radio advertising its coverage of the
Winter Olympics by saying that the athletes would ‘conquer nature’. It
is almost unbelievable that people should talk about nature in these
terms. It was the whole theme of my book Nature’s Web,
an exploration of ecological thinking, that we should cooperate with
nature not conquer it. In my examination of Western philosophy and
Christianity, I showed that the dominant view was that human beings,
because of their so-called reason or soul, were somehow set apart from
the rest of nature and that they should subdue it entirely for their
own ends. The result of this way of thinking and acting has been an
ecological crisis throughout the world, particularly as the major
economies are still wedded to growth and wish to produce more consumer
goods. On the other hand the wise among us understand that they do not
lead to greater happiness but the further plundering of the planet.
Climate
change means that in this part of the world we will inevitably
experience more extreme weather. As the recent flooding in the British
Isles has shown, water will break sea defences and cover the land with
lakes. It is therefore absurd to think that we can still ‘conquer
nature’, however hard we might try.
As any child who has tried
to dam the flow of water on a beach or in the countryside appreciates
nature will have its revenge. To understand the flow of water means
that it is impossible in the long term to stop it. Nature will have its
nemesis to arrogant humans who interfere too deeply with its course.
Indeed, we are all an integral strand in Nature’s Web
and we have no God-given right to use the rest of nature to our own
ends. If we ruin the environment we will destroy ourselves as we are
inseparable from our environment. We should therefore be neither
conquerors nor even stewards of nature but fellow voyagers in the grand
odyssey of evolution. As I have argued in a later book, we should
practice a form of Liberation Ecology and Ride the Wind.
