Dualism is not helpful

Another great passage from Another England, by Caroline Lucas. This one about our treatment of nature and proving, yet again, we just don’t seem to help ourselves nor give ourselves the best chances to learn and adapt responsibly and meaningfully.

This is a reality and one the market (and or economic growth), yet again, seems to be running and not owning the many repercussions, just passing them to the individual and selling it as if they could solve the problem with this product or service...

The problem is our tendency to treat nature as something beautiful yet separate: a bucolic realm to be viewed with a sense of whimsical nostalgia, but which is somehow discrete from our lives. So, we love the countryside, and want to share that love with others. We paint it, film it, write about it, photograph it. In the process, people are drawn into a closer engagement with their environment – which is hugely positive. The trouble is, this process of observing and describing simultaneously distances us from nature. The picture or the words risk becoming a substitute for the real thing. We turn nature into postcards or poems or social media posts, and then we no longer need the original. We see nature passing through a train window, or we watch documentaries about animals that we can no longer see in real life. We regret this, but not enough to fight it.

There is no shortage of evidence about how disconnected the English have become from nature. Prisoners now spend more time in the open air than most of our young people. A recent study in the UK found that half of children on these islands couldn’t identify brambles, bluebells or stinging nettles; no wonder there was such an outcry when it was discovered that words such as ‘otter’, ‘willow’ and ‘bluebell’ were to be dropped from the Oxford Junior Dictionary, to be replaced by words like ‘chatroom’ and ‘blog’. This does not only affect children: a quarter of adults say they have not spent any time in nature in the last fortnight, and this rises to a third for those on low incomes.⁸ This isn’t just about exploring ancient woodland, birdwatching in coastal marshes or fell-walking: ‘nature’ here includes walking your dog in your local park. And this is a shift with disastrous consequences for our mental and physical health.

The evidence for this point comes from a dizzying range of disciplines, from philosophy to epidemiology, psychiatry to bioscience. Some of it – for example, the strong link between time spent with nature and improved mental health – has been soundly established for twenty years or more. Other connections, such as the need for physical contact in childhood with the literal earth, strengthening our immune system, is clear but still not fully understood. In his book Last Child in the Wood, US writer Richard Louv presents the growing evidence of the harm that arises from young people’s alienation from nature, in everything from a diminished sense of self-worth to higher rates of physical and emotional illnesses, to an inability to form relationships. He coined the term ‘nature deficit disorder’ to capture this web of dangers and consequences, and his findings have now become a rallying cry for an international movement to connect children to nature. Louv also shows how the more distanced we become from nature, the less likely we are to value it – which accelerates not only the loss of nature itself, but also our further alienation from it. As he says: ‘We cannot protect something we do not love, we cannot love what we do not know, and we cannot know what we do not see. Or hear. Or sense.’⁹

The more we reflect on the importance of the natural world to our spiritual well-being, the more we see how our society fails to give us equal chances to engage with it. The air we breathe is polluted, bringing thousands of people to an early death and afflicting the health of millions. The water we drink is increasingly contaminated with microplastics and complex chemicals, and we have little idea of the long-term consequences. Governments allow this to happen because no one has a right to clean air and water, or a right to live in a world in which nature is protected, now and for the future. The amount of pollution the state will tolerate on our behalf, the amount of habitat they sacrifice, the number of species they allow to become extinct, is decided through a haze of trade-offs and cost-benefit analyses, in turn wrapped up in secrecy and deceit. The more that people see that their environment is being degraded, the more the government claims to be acting to reverse this – and yet the less that is actually done. More and more targets are announced, and fewer and fewer are met. Ambition is postponed to 2030, 2050, and beyond, to avoid any tough decisions now. Action is replaced by spin.

In parallel, government and business (supported by the media) conspire to create a framework in which nature and people’s well-being are presented as being in conflict. Economic growth is constantly framed as a fundamental positive, even when achieving it could be environmentally disastrous. Firms that stand to make profits from damaging the environment are given far too much latitude – even supposedly regulated businesses like water companies, who deliberately plan to dump raw sewage in rivers and seas because it is cheaper to pay the fines if they happen to get caught than it is to invest in upgrading Victorian infrastructure and proper treatment facilities. They cover their tracks by using sleights of hand like the notion of a ‘biodiversity net gain’ – a new law that would require developers to replace habitat they are destroying with even ‘better’ habitat elsewhere, despite their blatant harm to the environment.¹⁰

Caroline Lucas Another England