Restoring Our Affection Towards Land And Nature
“This curious world we inhabit is more wonderful than convenient; more beautiful than it is useful; it is more to be admired and enjoyed than used.”
The economy as it now is, prescribes plunder of the land owners and abuse of the land. — Wendell Berry
In Wendell Berry’s essay ‘An Argument for Diversity’ he discusses the growing trend for ‘off-farm work’ that swept through the the U.S countryside in the 1970s &1980s as women and the young left farms and went to work, study and live in cities. While not a bad thing for the individual, the trade off for the human community, local economy and natural health of places are the things that have paid the price of progress.
This price has since been paid all over the world, as farming communities and local economies are destroyed in the pursuit of ‘professional status’ and a modern life full of convenience. For the communities left behind, they are under ever more pressure to abuse the land, either through using chemicals and machinery to meet yields, or to focus on mono-crops that decrease in quality over the years due to the lack of soil repletion. Berry argues that we need a greater variety of species, plants and animals back into the countryside, as well as humans and their knowledge and skills that can be adapted sensitively and elegantly to the place itself, not a generic ‘one size fits all’ solution from a textbook. More than that, he argues for affection towards the land.
How we lost our affection towards the land
Affection is something humans display towards each other, and something that in today’s world we show to objects that we own. We often see our neighbours affectionately polishing their cars every Sunday morning, city women carrying expensive handbags as if these bags were babies or animals. We see affection towards things more than towards people. And these days, we rarely see people paying affection to nature.
Perhaps this is because in big cities we are surrounded by great wealth, as well as many people engaging in pursuit of wealth. But what is this wealth for, if it does not make our lives easier?
When thinking of affection towards nature and living in cities, I am often reminded of Jon Jandai’s Ted Talk about living in a big city and the difficulties of modern life. In it he discusses the difficulties to acquire our basic needs, with the need to exchange our time for money just to afford housing, food and medicine. Jandai found that by moving back to the countryside his basic needs were met easily and he could focus on caring for the land and environment around him.
“Life is easy. And from beginning until now, what I learned is the four basic needs: food, house, clothes and medicine must be cheap and easy for everybody, that’s the civilization. But, if you make these four things hard and very hard for many people to get, that’s uncivilized.
So, now when we look at everywhere around us, everything is so hard to get. So I feel like now is the most uncivilized era of humans on this Earth.
We have so many people who finish from university, have so many universities on the Earth, have so many clever people on this Earth. But, life is harder and harder. We make it hard for whom? We work hard for whom right now?”
After a brief time living in Bangkok, Jandai moved to Northern Thailand, bought a piece of degraded land and focused on regenerating it, using it as a seed saving hub and learning centre. He again shows affection for the land, the human community and the local economy, and has shown many others the way to do so too. In his Ted Talk, just as Wendell Berry asks in his essays, Jandai asks “Why we destroy our spirit, why do we destroy our ability that much?”
Rebuilding our affection towards nature
So how then, do we start to show affection towards the land and nature?
Economics, the economy and the narratives of competition often exclude affection, as it cannot be easily measured nor can a scientific discipline easily account for our full range of emotions. Therefore it has traditionally ignored it. Yet affection is one of humankind’s biggest motivators, and as English philosopher Jon Ruskin said, part of the force of the Soul that powers us.
To properly approach affection towards nature, we must start to understand that our narrative of growth, competition and economic development is stunted. It ignores the costs that come from economic development. It forgoes the long term in favour of the short term. It ignores the environmental, social, communal and emotional effects of this growth, reducing progress down to numerical figures and abstract percentages.
Henry David Thoreau got it right when he said,
“this curious world we inhabit is more wonderful than convenient; more beautiful than it is useful; it is more to be admired and enjoyed than used.”
This is the quote we need to follow to relearn affection towards nature and the earth.
We need to renew our wonder in the world, to again see it’s true beauty, and to stop using nature, instead admiring and enjoying what it is still naturally providing. Thoreau presented his quote to his graduating class of Harvard back in 1837. Over 180 years later, we are still struggling to truly grasp his wise words.
