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You wake to your alarm ringing and open your eyes. The bright light on your iPhone tells you it’s 6.30am, and time to get moving. You tell Siri to turn your light on and read out your day’s itinerary.
The streets are already busy on your drive to your local gym, where you spend the next 45 minutes completing your personalised high-intensity interval training routine, designed for you by the trainer on your free introductory session.
After a shower, you change into your business clothes. You check your Apple Watch; it’s 8.15, so you hurry into your car and commute another 30 minutes into your city office. It’s a cold morning, so you blast the heating along with your favourite song.
On your lunch break, you meet with a friend at the pub down the road. You discuss the traffic, your families and the upcoming football game. You decide to shout lunch today, so you pay with your watch and tell your friend to get you next time.
There’s a traffic jam on your way home again, so it takes an hour to arrive back at your apartment. You’re tired after a long day, so you order pizza and turn on Netflix.
With around 50% of humanity residing in the greater cities, the workday of many of us may be much like the one described above. A human in the modern western world can live at ease in the comfort that technology creates, allowing one to focus more attention on their work. While this certainly provides its benefits, there seems to be something amiss.
Today, there exists a vast, collective dissociation between humans and nature. Distanced from the natural world in our houses and apartments, many of us will rarely notice the impacts of our daily lives of consumption.
I know this urban existence because I’ve lived it before. Something was missing, but what?
For some, it may seem obvious; for me, it took moving to the other side of the world to live for four years in the United States to realise that my life, surrounded by technology and comfort, was so very distanced from the natural world that I often forgot it was there.
I never used to think twice about what I was buying, eating or wearing. But since (literally) diving deep into ocean studies, I’ve learned that the consumer society we are living in is not sustainable. And since we as humans are an integral part of nature, in broadening the gap between us and it, we are becoming more distanced from our true selves – or our “true nature”.
Endless production and consumption, and the idea that owning more things equates to more happiness, has led to the depletion of Earth’s natural resources. In fact, roughly 80% of them are harnessed by about 20% of the world’s population, which is mostly those living in consumerist societies.
With more places to shop, and ads being delivered to our cell phones daily, consumerism perpetuates our society like a plague. People buying and throwing out more stuff leads to more waste, which often ends up harming wildlife and polluting our seas. In fact, if everybody lived like the average Australian, we would need 4.2 planets to sustain the world’s population.
The feeling of being underwater, fully immersed in the natural world while listening to only the sound of my breath, quickly brought me back down to earth. Rather than participating in accumulating more goods, I have learned to slow down and schedule my work around the tides and the winds (AKA the good diving conditions). It was as though being underwater gave me a sense of what was important and somehow brought me back to reality.
I discovered there was another way to live, and that was to tread lightly on the planet around me. But I was still curious to know about how we came to be this way. Here’s what I found:
Descartes once wrote that science can “make us masters and possessors of nature”, and environmental philosophy has certainly come with a heavy presence of domination and white supremacy. Since the 17th century, humans have fabricated a human-nature divide. Nature has since existed to serve us, as an entity we can bend to our will.
Today, nature is treated like a second-class citizen. The value of ecosystems is calculated based on their natural “capital”. The idea is that we can quantify how useful nature is to us, put a price tag on it, and then buy, sell, and exploit its resources as we wish.
Movements in eco-feminism liken our elite domination over nature to the patriarchy. The way that we treat nature as a subordinate entity without rights is similar to how we have treated (and continued to treat) women, Indigenous people, Black people, people of colour and other oppressed peoples the world over.
Ecofeminists have critiqued the rationale for western culture’s mastery over nature as unable to acknowledge our total dependency on it. Indeed, as African-American author, distinguished professor and social activist bell hooks once wrote:
“Feminism, as liberation struggle, must exist apart from and as a part of the larger struggle to eradicate domination in all forms. We must understand that patriarchal domination shares an ideological foundation with racism and other forms of group oppression, that there is no hope that it can be eradicated while these systems remain intact.”
I mean, fair enough. But it can be hard to relate to these concepts of ecofeminism and nature when our lives are so distanced from it. Groceries are delivered fresh to our door. Rain, rather than being seen as essential for the survival of our crops, provides only a slight inconvenience. To many, nature is an alien concept, only indulged upon in a controlled environment (i.e. on a safari while on family vacation), or viewed second-hand through social media (or perhaps even a David Attenborough documentary).
However, when used as a replacement for first-hand contact, nature imagery and media can further perpetuate the idea that the natural world is different, even separate, from our own. This false conception perpetuates western society today, resulting in many people feeling indifferent or uninterested in nature’s destruction. Indeed, when our individual lives seem to be going just fine, it can be hard to be concerned about distant environmental matters.
Often, we are too busy following procedures to stop and reflect upon the consequences of our actions. Rarely do we look up from our consoles and look at the world we are creating and the life we are living.
But this way of life is not only absurd, it is now outdated. More and more so, we are moving away from the patriarchal mastery of nature and reconnecting with our planet Earth.
And this, of course, makes no sense. We should not need to “reconnect” with nature; we are nature.
Reimagining the scene I opened with to incorporate more nature in our daily lives could see us having a day something like this, instead.
You wake up to the sun shining through your window. You check your watch; it’s 6.30am. You hop out of bed, grab your board, and run down to the beach.
The surf is small today, so you go out for a fun paddle. You spend the next hour catching waves and playing in the sea.
You rinse off at the beach and run home to change. After throwing on some warm clothes, you jump on your bike and cycle to work.
You enjoy your job, take coffee breaks and chat about mental health with your colleagues. For lunch, you head to the local park with some fellow workers for a picnic. You check in on how their projects are going, and chat about your families and weekend plans.
After work, you cycle home. A friend is already at your house, ready to pick you up for your weekly hike to the top of your local hill.
You watch the sunset from the summit. It’s a full moon, so you don’t need to use your torches on the way down (but you brought them, just in case).
You invite your friend to stay for dinner, and together you cook up some tofu, rice and veggies. After he leaves, you light a candle and open up your book to read before bed.
It’s been a long day. You’re tired, but you’re excited to do it all again tomorrow.
Incorporating more nature into our daily lives doesn’t need to be drastic. Whether it be a morning surf, a picnic in the park or an afternoon walk outside, time in nature can be the most refreshing part of our day.
At least, I know it is for me!