• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 478 0

a tabby-cat; we resort to chemical warfare. We don’t even like dust around us. In fact, we judge people harshly if their house is full of dust and dirt. And yet, on the other hand, we just as obsessively bring nature indoors. We can touch a light switch and daylight floods the room. We can turn a dial and suddenly it feels like summer or winter. We live in a perpetual breeze or bake of our devising. We scent everything that touches our lives. We fill our houses with flowers. We try hard to remove ourselves from all the dramas and sensations of nature, and yet without them we feel lost and disconnected. So, subconsciously, we bring them right back indoors again. Then we obsessively visit nature—we go swimming, jogging, or crosscountry skiing, we take strolls in a park. Confusing, isn’t it?

For the most part, when we go to psychologists we don’t discuss how divorced we feel from nature, how destructive that can be, or the tonic value of reacquainting ourselves with nature’s charms, the charms we fell in love with when we were children, when nature was a kingdom of wonder, play, self-discovery, and freedom. A special loneliness comes from exiling ourselves from nature. But even my saying that will strike many people as a romantic affectation. After all, we are civilized now, we don’t play by nature’s rules anymore, we control our own destiny, we don’t need nature, right? That attitude is so deeply ingrained in our modern culture that most people assume it’s a given and don’t worry about nature when they consider improving the important relationships in their lives. It’s a tragic oversight, but I can understand why that attitude is so appealing. Nature is crude and erotic, chaotic and profuse, rampant and zealous, brutal and violent, uncontrollable despite our best efforts, and completely uninhibited. Small wonder the natural world terrifies many people and also embarrasses the prim Puritans among us. But most people find nature restorative, cleansing, nourishing in a deeply personal way.

Sometimes it’s hard for us collectors of such rarities as paintings, buttons, china, or fossils to understand that we ourselves are rare. We are unique life forms not because of our numbers, but because of the unlikeliness of our being here at all, the pace of our evolution, our powerful grip on the whole planet, and the precariousness of our future. We are evolutionary whiz-kids who are better able to transform the world than to understand it. Other animals cannot evolve fast enough to cope with us. If we destroy their future, we may lose our own. But because vast herds of humans dwell on the planet, we assume that we are invulnerable. Because our cunning has allowed us to harness great rivers, and fly through the sky, and even add our artifacts to the sum of creation, we assume we are omnipotent. Because we have invented an arbitrary way to frame the doings of nature, which we call “time,” we assume our species will last forever. But that may not be true. There are little-known species alive among us right now, which have lived on the planet for millions of years longer than we have, but which may perish without our even noticing,

In my career, I’ve had the luck of going to some exotic and astonishing landscapes in pursuit of the marvelous—from the Amazon to the Antarctic—but fortunately the marvelous is a weed species. It grows everywhere, in backyards and in ditches. Sometimes we need to be taught how and where to find it, but it’s always there, waiting, full of magic.

Zoologist Karl von Frisch once described his study of the honeybee (which he adored) as a magic well that replenishes itself endlessly. The same is true for any facet of nature. However much water you draw from it, you always find more waiting for you. It is summer in North America. The well of nature is full today. Time to go outside and take a drink.

Poet, essayist, and naturalist Diane Ackerman is the author of two dozen highly acclaimed works of nonfiction and poetry, including A Natural History of the Senses—a book beloved by millions of readers all over the world.