LIVING IN THE REALM OF NATURE

The ancient people of the earth lived dynamically within the ebb and flow of the natural world, belonging as much to each other and the human community of life, as they did to the sun and the moon and the cyclical rhythms of nature around them. Because they depended on nature for all their essential needs, they upheld a sacred reverence for the earth that took into cognizance the give and take of the living order.

Over the millions of years since our early ancestors left the canopied forests of Africa, environmental conditions have shaped and moulded our passage on earth. In times of abundance, human society flourished and this was then tempered during periods of flooding or drought, when the earth sought to establish a natural balance.

In more recent years, our relationship with nature has shifted significantly, as our human needs and increasing self-sufficiency have grown. The rapid development of our technologies has also given us tremendous confidence in our abilities to subjugate nature in order to sustain human progress, thereby instilling the subliminal message that mankind is separate from nature, rather than being part of the earth’s broader community of life.

Indigenous people, living close to the land and being astute guardians of nature’s abundance, understood that through nature, we are fulfilled physically as well as spiritually, and that a reverence for the natural world was imperative to safeguarding the future well-being of all life on earth.

As never before, we need to remind ourselves that at all times, during all the stages of our human journey, we have lived within the realm of nature. We are always surrounded by nature and we continually interact with it. The impact of our collective attitude towards nature goes far beyond the possibility of losing wild life or wild lands, or losing biodiversity and destroying vital habitats.

The air we breathe, the water we drink and the food we eat are all dependent on the healthy functioning of the earth’s natural systems and to ignore this fundamental process is to stand back and watch the gradual, inevitable decline in the availability of natural resources upon which all our lives depend. As an example, it may seem that genetically modified foods are the answer to the ever-complex problems created by our ever-expanding human population, but in reality, is it conducive to life and the expansion of the human condition, to derive sustenance from food that has been altered in a laboratory, had its genetic coding modified to repel insects and increase productivity yields, and all this without any true scientific understanding of the potential impacts on human health and the biological functioning of our natural world?

And then externally to the demise of finding ourselves living in a rapidly changing world, as our wild places are steadily diminished, plants and animals are also struggling to survive and many species have been pushed towards the very edge of extinction. This scenario is compounded by the living conditions that we are creating for ourselves, including the impacts of rampant over-population, large-scale agriculture with its insiduous toxicity, urbanisation and pollution…and for many of the earth’s creatures, these are the twilight years of their earthly existence.

The implications of losing biodiversity are difficult to imagine, but I would suggest that we would experience a profound emptiness, knowing that the delicate magic of life - the call of a nightjar in the soft shadows of dusk, the gurgling of a mountain stream as it tumbles over mossy rocks - has been altered, perhaps forever.

It is not only the loss of wildlife that we should reflect on, it is also the knowledge that without clean water and fertile soils, without wild, remote places where we can lose ourselves within the earth’s ancient landscapes, life will echo with a loneliness that could never be filled, so that future generations, born into a world dominated by materialism, will never know that the earth was once a veritable paradise teeming with the most extraordinary life forms that one could ever possibly imagine.

“You do get like that, when there is suddenly a bright morning after long rains and a low wind stirs the wet grass, and you feel, for a little while, that you know the same thing that the veld knows, and in your heart you are whispering…” Herman Charles Bosman