Most of my forty years of men’s groups have focused on the inner life of men as explored through psychology, myth, and imagination. Every once in a while, that inner life connects clearly to the outer life and the bigger world. Inner lives are challenged by outer events like war, for example, wherein far too many men are triggered into their PTSD responses, and way too many need to go fight them. Inner lives were challenged by the public phenomena of #MeToo, which uncovered the rampant, awful behavior by so many men, or recalled behavior into men’s awareness of things they had done and would prefer to forget. Today, the inner lives of men are being challenged by climate change.
A post in The Good Men project, for example, asked these questions: Have we as men lost this connection to the natural world thus allowing for increased environmental destruction and runaway climate change? How can reconnecting with nature instill action to protect it?
Underneath these questions is something important: What does it mean to have a connection with nature? The odd assumption in that question is that nature is something to be connected with as if we are not already connected. In reality, we are in nature all the time. Everything is nature. Human beings have developed systems to control nature — provide water, food, warmth, health, and so on — but we are always in it. We breathe. We eat. We drink. We warm or cool ourselves in response to nature. In fact, climate change has brought to consciousness our enmeshment in nature in no uncertain terms. Indeed, we are nature, we are not separate and therefore merely connected to it.
The reason we have created the systems we use to control nature is simple — she can be very fickle, sometimes mean, extraordinarily violent, and even cruel. Everyone likes to see her beauty — the clear night moon rise, the morning sun peaking through the trees, glorious flowers in their prime, or the sublime forest lake on which we paddle our nearly silent canoes. We think less of the carcasses of the dead, which we see as rotting on the forest floor but a great many other species see them as sustenance. We think less of the violent death happening every day to sustain life — the killing and the eating so intrinsic to the actual circle of life. We are not so enamored with the fighting males of many species at mating time, especially if they are human species. Nature’s realities come to us directly as hurricanes, tornadoes, fires, droughts, heat waves, blizzards, and other natural weather events. We create systems for water, food, and shelter to protect us against nature’s apparent capriciousness.
Often, we think of these systems as engineering against nature, but the best engineers know that nature must be accounted for. That’s why pipes need to be buried well below the frost line in colder latitudes. It’s why roads need to be engineered properly. It is why space shuttle O-rings need to operate within a particular temperature range, or you get a disaster like the Challenger explosion. Engineers are connected to nature, perhaps more than many people, but I don’t think this is the kind of connection the questions are asking about.
Rather, these questions about connecting to nature are asking about a more filial connection. It is about appreciation for nature, perhaps even a spiritual connection. For at the end of the day, men can feel the spirit of the tree if they sit next to it in silence and listen. We can experience God in the heavens and we can experience the land as sentient. We can appreciate the silence and the quiet, feel a forest drain away our stress, or sink into the sublime reality of a peaceful lake. We can be captured by the loon call, the soaring eagle, or the standing bear. In many moments and practices, we would call these experiences “connection.”
The question being asked seems to call forth this kind of connection, suggesting that if men had more of it, we men would act more to protect nature. Such connection, however, requires a sentimental view of nature that is not in alignment with reality. It embraces the beautiful and the cute but pretends the violent and ugly don’t happen. But it does… all the time. An honest spiritual connection with nature would have to involve both sides, but then the emotional connection, which is what is really being asked about, is harder to sustain. We rarely celebrate death, destruction, and rot. It is hard to love them. Hence, if the basis of a decision to “protect nature” is based on one’s love of nature, that love is either profoundly shallow and sentimental, or it requires a much deeper perspective, which therefore must start with a deeper self. After all, many men love nature on the weekends but spend their professional/work lives raping it in one way or another.
This is to get to my point… The problem isn’t a connection to nature. Rather, it is the inner lives of men, a profound misunderstanding of our human entanglement with nature, and the conflicted systems we live within which no one in particular built and no one can be held accountable.
Let’s start with the last point first. People who love nature and want to protect it find themselves condemned to living in an irresolvable conflict. They will go out and have their spiritual moment with a tree or a shoreline, only to return to the office where their livelihood depends in some way on the extraction of value from or a confrontation with nature. Real estate people develop and sell nature. Manufacturers mine nature. Engineers manipulate nature. Nurses confront the nasty side of nature in diseased humans and do all they can to eradicate the effects of nature day after day. Even those who love nature live in a dual and conflicted reality. We admit this to ourselves and others every time we say we need to get out to nature for a while. Nearly everyone lives this way. Nearly everyone finds some way to get this kind of connection with nature. If you haven’t noticed yet, this “connection” has done very little to protect nature.
We can’t protect nature, and we really can’t connect to nature. We are nature. We are not outside it. We cannot control it. We try to manage certain aspects of nature in localized situations. We also gladly wipe away trees, fields, or streams that are in our way for one purpose or another. Much like beavers do. Or woodpeckers. Or the viruses carried by deer ticks. Humanity has grown such that local actions like these can aggregate into significant impacts on how nature functions — climate change is the obvious poster child for that. Even so, nature, per se, persists. Even if we were to launch a nuclear holocaust on Earth, nature would continue — the sunlight would come to Earth, the radiation would follow natural laws, and the oceans would cycle according to the laws of nature. We may be gone, and perhaps most of life as we know it may be gone, but nature persists.
This understanding means that we can let go of the hubris of saving nature. We are not saving nature; we are saving ourselves. We, humans, are not gods and we cannot control nature. Rather, nature reacts to us by making things harder for us, ugly for us, or profitable for us. The reality is that nature provides for us, not the other way around.
In other words, nature is the objective reality; we are the subjects. So the question being asked: Have we as men lost this connection to the natural world thus allowing for increased environmental destruction and runaway climate change? How can reconnecting with nature instill action to protect it? is actually nonsensical. It tries to personalize the catastrophe of climate change as if men “cultivating connection” could be a real solution. Nature is not being raped by people; it is being exploited by a system that no individual can change. The problem cannot be reduced to the personal or the subjective, for the problem is an objective catastrophe. The system marches on despite the comings and goings of individual people. It could not care less about the actors — much in the same way that nature could not care less about the actors. Both are utterly impersonal. Our lives are ensconced in them, not the other way around.
Hence, the answer to climate change, if there is to be one, is systemic change — not personal connection to nature, not personal action, not personal lifestyle choices. Where it gets personal is this: What can each person do to change the system? I’m not talking about political protest and speaking truth to power, although those have their place. I am talking about applying your knowledge and skill to solutions. Sell solar rooftops, finance alternative energy projects, engineer, produce, and market the next great solution, be it batteries, solar cells, carbon capture, or whatever. Add to the answers that end burning shit! Those actions and contributions are far more than anything any man or woman will do based simply on having a better connection to nature.
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You can find my newsletter Intertwine: Living Better in a Worsening World here.
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Anthony Signorelli
Ideas, insights, and imagination to help you live better in a worsening world. Topics include Men, #MeToo, and Masculinity; Postcapitalism; Climate Change; Digitalization and Cryptocurrency; Green Energy; Retirement and financial planning… basically everything that addresses making life better in this challenging time of history.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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