The Nature Manifesto:

An argument for the Reunification of
the natural and social worlds.

T. Stuart (2018).

“There is no question but that you have sacrificed many beautiful things to achieve your great cities
and the domination of your wildernesses. To build so great a mechanism you must have
smothered many growing things”. 

Carl Gustav Jung (1912). 

The modern period is haunted by the misguided promises of progress. We were promised that we could have it all, and not pay the cost. That our over consumption of the natural world was a good thing, and the way to a modern future where a human economy and social life would flourish. Instead, as we move further into the twenty first century, fear and uncertainty over the fragility of that future permeate social consciousness. Progress has marched us out of a world where humanity had been at the mercy of nature. But now our great cities, our technological and scientific tools of progress have inverted themselves and threaten to smother the fertile world we all emerged from, and ourselves along with it. Hope has become fear where nuclear disasters, world-threatening wars, natural catastrophes, and the ever-looming threat of climate change, challenge the very fabric of a human future. It seems our greed must be paid for after all.  

The long forgotten concept of Mother Nature has returned as the grim reaper, come to collect the bill. Tsunamis, eroding coastlines, desertification, earthquakes, floods, and declining soil fertility close in on all sides. There is not only a speeding up of familiar natural risks, but also new hybrid monsters born from our great industrial cities and nature’s forces of entropy have joined the war. Micro plastics, toxic rain, radiation, air born chemicals and other nasty and largely invisible enemies have become mother nature’s sickles, slicing back what was once taken free of charge. Now, barely a month goes by where the earth does not triumph over some past held historical record of nature disturbances.

We live in an age of debt, it is a defining feature of the twenty first century, and our debt to the natural world is the most massive. Our modernity has taken without the intention to give back. In its first moments the twenty first century has ticked by into a maelstrom of environmental breakdown. Oceans have gobbled back landmasses in Indonesia; in Japan tidal waves have snuffed out human colonies like a strong breeze might snatch a flame from a candle; the great world currents are slowing down and Europe is under threat of a new ice age; Australia is drowning in floods, while simultaneously burning in uncontrollable wildfires. While our species has always warred amongst itself, it has forever been unified in its exploitation of the natural world, and our relationship to nature has shrivelled as a result. Regardless, of our national borders, economic power, or intellectual qualities we may all be victim to a war gone ignored too long. 

This manifesto calls for a long overdue rekindling of our divorce between cultural and natural forces. Until human persons can find comfort in the lost romance they once held with the natural world, the social world will remain in turbulence and fragility. By rediscovering the spirit of nature we may find time yet, from destitution, and track a path to more sustainable relations.

A Marriage to the Great Mother Forgotten,
A New Romance to the ‘Deus ex Urbanus’.

Everyday life has moved a long distance from our humble beginnings running beneath the forest canopy, and dancing around the graceful light of fire under an even larger canopy of stars. Each passing year humanity has withdrawn further from the hills, streams, and natural geography of the land that they were once so familiar with. In the 1950s 746 million people made up the entire global population of urban dwellers (United Nations 2014). In the short period of 60 years that number has risen to 3.9 billion people by 2014, making up 54% of the world’s population. We have seen a rise in a new form of urban entity, known as the megalopolis, or megacities. In 2014, 28 megacities were home to 453 million people.  Unquestionably, the twenty first century has seen a fundamental turn away from the natural world, and a turn toward an urban one. A concept of nature that was once intimate for the human in everyday life has now become almost alien. Green has been replaced with grey; soft with steel; and organic with technical design.

We have moved away from the forests and into the streets. Our growing experiences of urban lifestyles have necessitated a gradual divorce with our everyday experiences of the forest. The availability of electricity 24 hours a day has eroded our natural connection to the cycles of day and night, and the lunar phases. Drinking from attractive looking bottled water, fluorescent coloured, and nutrient enriched, has disconnected our bond to the land and the stream. Drinking from the stream has become suspicious where quenching our thirst from the bottle has become comforting. We walk supported by padded shoes on concrete structures that are well organised, systematic, predictable, and regulated. This is a stark contrast to the organic structure of the forest, where our movement through the world was rhizomatic, unregulated, and requiring constant attention and observation. In response our minds have become systematic, rational and functional, where once they were more observant, creative and organic (Ferguson 2011).  Existentially, we have remarried ourselves to the great Deus ex Urbanus of Modernity, or in other words, ‘The City’, and we too have become what the The City is, contrived. 

Nature Remade: Hyper-Reality & hybridity.

Of course, we have not completely separated nature from our everyday life to such a degree that we no longer have any sense of what it is. As a photographer and social researcher, what is apparent to me is the strong degree to which nature in the city is mediated. Through the use of digital darkrooms like Photoshop, heavy post film processing, the influence of the Hollywood aesthetic, and predominantly the effects of a rising digital age, our presentation of nature through film and imagery has become hyper realistic. Scenes are heavily saturated, artificial skies are added, entire topographical features and buildings are deleted, lighting effects are enhanced, and artificial suns are placed in the perfect position. In the modern period the chaotic properties of nature ‘out there’ in the wilderness have become mediated and unknown. Our experiences of nature are no longer real, but rather hyper real representations presented through the artificial photographs we view. 

While we feel we may be able to find a more genuine nature when walking through local parks, gardens, and nurseries, even a brief look into these places uncovers the highly regulated and domesticated naturalness of these experiences. Roses are trimmed on a timely basis, perfect collections and colour series of plants are aligned next to each other, weeds are removed, tall trees are lopped, and so on. This reflects a certain kind of hyperrealism itself. It suggests nature is symmetrical, often it is not; it suggests nature is behaved, often it is not; it suggests nature is always blooming beautiful colours and saturations; often it is not. Nature in the urban world, while still retaining a part of itself, has also become urbanised in its uniformity to the regulations of urban spaces. Half natural, half urban, it has become a hybrid creation of the Deus ex Urbanus. 

Wherever we look in the urban world we witness the constant divisions that take place between the natural world and the urban one. Whether it be the light of the sun made redundant through the light of the light bulb, or the natural growth of trees pruned and regulated. A great division between nature and human culture has taken place, on one-side stands the urban world and it’s hyper real and regulated forms of nature, and on the other, the wild nature outside the city. A nature that is forever under threat. That wilderness ‘out there’ is the frontline, where our global collective human habits have led to an extraction of resources to ever grow the cities we inhabit, and their need for more of nature’s finite resources.

A Romance Remembered, or A World Divided?

I was recently returning from a fieldtrip to one of the many waterfalls on kunayi, a mountain that overlooks Hobart City in Tasmania. As I’m driving along the main mountain road I stop behind an old beaten looking four-wheel drive at a set of traffic lights and notice a series of bumper stickers on the back window. “Australia is NOT a Quarry, Lock the Gates!” says one, “Not in my Wilderness”, says another. Others say: “No Future on a Dead River”, “Save our Sea Life”, “Save the Trees”. The car zooms off before I can read any of the other half a dozen stickers. 

The following day, I am perusing through the photographic books at a local bookshop in Hobart City. A man also looking at the books turns to me and says, “We need less of these books around don’t we”.

“Why is that?”, I enquire.

“Well, we need to stop showing people how beautiful our nature is so they don’t come and ruin it”, he responds.

These experiences convey a commonly heard story of the interactions between nature and human culture. It proposes that nature is in dire straits as the bumper stickers convey. It seems that all of nature, from the mountains and forests, to the rivers and oceans, need to be saved. It suggests that humanity is responsible for the declining integrity of wild and natural places in the world. And, perhaps most importantly, it suggests that human interaction is in no way healthy for the longevity of nature. For the sake of nature, humans should stay as far away from it as possible, as their interactions are bound to destroy it more than they already have. 

There has been an important reversal in our relationship with nature. Where once we were at the mercy of nature, it appears nature is now apparently at the mercy of human culture. We don’t need to look far to identify justifications for this kind of thinking. Tasmania is one such example. Incidents like Lake Pedder’s damming, over logging of the famous Huon Pine, wide spread deforestation, and the overhunting and eventual extinction of the Tasmanian Tiger, are all indications of the immense power of destruction human activity has over flora and fauna, and in only a few generations. According to this destructive power, it seems the gentlemen in the book shop was quite right when suggesting the division between nature and humanity should be enforced. It seems our interactions have become a wave of destruction towards the natural world, but are they…

Let me summarise what has been stated so far. I have suggested that nature/culture conflicts have permeated the 21stcentury. That humanity has become divided from the natural world through our new marriage to the city, and that the nature we are exposed to in the city is more hyper real and hybrid than it was originally. It now seems we should further enforce our division from nature through our desire to protect a dying natural world. As the sticker suggests, “lock the gates, keep all humans out”. 

It’s a rather inconvenient paradox, where our desire to protect nature from a human culture that has come to threaten it, should involve a greater division between the two worlds. I would argue instead, it is our division from nature that came to threaten it in the first place. Our forgotten footsteps in the forest, our lost romance to the stream, our ending reliance on the sun for daylight. The throws of progress led us to forget the inherent value of nature and lose our personal connection to it. Our obsessions with Deus ex Urbanus ‘seemingly’ made our more original marriage to nature redundant. It was under these conditions that the natural world became evermore: a larder for the taking; a resource for the machine of capitalism; a nature made material, soulless, and valueless in and of itself.

It is not two worlds divided that will save nature, and secure a human future. Instead, remembering our lost romance to nature hides the keys to a future where natural and social worlds may become more aligned once more, and where tragedy and disasters may begin to subside under promises of a new alliance between these two currently divided worlds.

The Promise of Alliance

An alliance must inevitably involve institutional changes and transformations of the very structures of modern society in a way that takes nature seriously; and plays a role in acknowledging its agency, or if ‘agency’ is too slippery a term, certainly a new view of the earth as having an ability to [imp]act on social forces. This is however, a topic for another essay. What must inevitably come before such institutional reformation is the development of a personal relationship with nature. Through personal experience of nature comes a new form of socialisation and ‘in-natured behaviours’. Reconnecting to the land, walking through the forest, and sleeping under the stars in the nature out there, teaches a new way of life. It eludes to a nature within ourselves and promises to uncover something we have lost. As the late Peter Dombrovskis (n.d) so elegantly put it: 

“When you go out there, you don’t get away from it all. You get back to it all. You come
home to what’s important. You come home to yourself.”

In a modern world of speed nature offers patience, in a world of violence, nature offers growth. In the hollowed grounds of the forest is a sacred remedy to the burdens of a society that has become dense with distraction; and a balm to a modern mind that has lost itself. A personal connection to nature is not only the first step in a new alliance, but a place of grounding and a fresh breath from the social and psychological pathologies of the city.   

A romance to nature, like that of the ancient hunter-gatherers, recognises the interconnected future of humanity with the natural world.To take from the natural world in the present with disregard, will inevitably take from our own future. This humanism ultimately leads to our end, whereas an alliance to the natural world secures our future. Humanity strangles the world by the neck, suffocating its fragile ecosystem under the noose of heavy industrialization.  But, as the Earth reaches its final breath, words of warning escape: “dead hosts can no longer feed or house” the ‘parasites’ that strangle its existence (Serres 1990/2011). The message really is a simple one, a world without a vibrant nature cannot feed a living human culture.  We must become allied to the world, or ‘symbiotic’ with it, for the sake of securing a future for our species. The time of humanism and antibiosis must end. In this symbiosis, the traditional argument of green politics turns its head in a new direction. It does not need to be about ‘nature for it’s own sake’ (although I still hold this to be the ultimate goal), but instead, it can simply begin with nature for the sake of mutual survival. An agreement that is far less difficult for those so unrequited with the earth.

It should be made clear that the goal is not to bring an end to the modern era and regress to a time of pre-modernism, but rather to find a new understanding of nature in a symbiotic manner. We must realign our compass of progress in a way that takes its bearings from both the Nature Mother and the Urban Deus. There is a way forward that does not abandon our modernity, but follows carefully the subtle wisdom of an older world, into a newer one. One which I think not only resides in the world outside our urban environments, but which through seeking stronger nature relations, will continue to grown within ourselves. The promise of such an alliance begins with our survival, but leads to an even deeper symbiotic actualisation. So, there is a way forward, because there must be. 

* Figure 1. Nimue, by Tristan Stuart, from The Living Land, (c.2020).