Nature & Not Nature:
Reflections on Religious Meanings
A few years ago when I took this photograph, my aim was to contrast the beauty of unspoiled nature with the mess of the junkyard. The photo certainly does project the vivid contrast between a ‘purely natural’ landscape in the background (cow, grass, trees, pond) and a foreground that has been littered with the waste products of the human experience (the brutal honesty of technologies left to decay and rust).
In the earliest periods of mankind’s history, we tend to think of humans as part and parcel of the natural world, and indeed most indigenous theologies still do so think. But with the arrival of Christianity and the Abrahamic religions four thousand years ago, the book of Genesis settled on another view of the matter in a short text which is perhaps the best-known passage of the entire Bible:
“Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. … Behold, I have given you every seed-bearing plant on the face of all the earth, and every tree whose fruit contains…
