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Articles

On Being One With Nature

Niki Young tells us how we (humans) can look at our relationship with Nature in a way that neither alienates us from it nor indistinguishably absorbs us into it.

Given that our current ecological situation is to say the least not desirable, we often hear people claim that we need to ‘save Mother Nature’, or that we have managed to ‘destroy Nature’, or alternatively, that ‘we are part of Nature’. Hidden behind all such assertions lies the tacit assumption that there is either a fundamental fissure separating humans from Nature (hence the claim that we need to save ‘Mother Nature’ or what have you), or an essential relational bond between humans and nature (hence the claim that we are ‘part of’ or ‘intertwined’ with Nature). I am of the view that both these positions are deeply problematic. This is because both start off by implicitly assuming that there are two and only two different kinds of entities, namely humans and everything else, and that these two entities either need mediational bridging (as with the former position) or are always conjoined (as with the latter). For reasons I’ll explain in a moment, the eminent American philosopher Graham Harman calls such positions ‘onto-taxonomical’.

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