Human and nature

Our view of nature has changed considerably over the centuries. But contrary to what some think, there has never been a time of "true harmony" between humans and nature.
Man has always influenced nature. What has changed is the way in which humans view themselves and their place in nature.

Paradise
The Judeo-Christian Bible, which has had (and still has) such a great influence on Western thought, opens with the paradise story with Adam and Eve as the first people on earth, in complete harmony with nature. It is a harmony with our natural environment that many people in the 21st century long for, as they watch with horror how modern humans are guilty of deforestation, loss of biodiversity, pollution, animal suffering and climate change and overpopulation.

But anyone who zooms in on that word 'paradise' will see that man has never lived completely in harmony with nature. The word originally did not refer to a dreamed-up natural environment that was still unspoiled by man, but to the pre-Christian custom of the Persian nobility to create a 'paridaida': an enclosed area that was to serve as a pleasure garden, game park or hunting area. .

There has never been a time when humans had no influence on nature. What has changed over the centuries is the way in which humans view themselves and their place in nature.

Fall

There is a tendency to point to a 'fall'; a moment when things went wrong. Take, for example, the Neolithic Revolution that took place about 12,000 years ago in what is now the Middle East. The hunter-gatherers, who were used to gathering their food by traveling, settled in one place and started farming. This meant that for the first time they began to manipulate nature on a large scale, by breeding plants and animals.

Christianity is also to blame. According to this belief, nature is a valuable gift from God to man, over which man should rule as a steward. That sounds good in itself, but it did mean a turnaround: with Christianity we said goodbye to the idea that nature itself could be divine.

A third main suspect for the Fall is the Enlightenment, the movement of the 17th and 18th centuries that focused on human reason and perception. New ideas were shared all over Europe: the German astronomer Johannes Kepler described the universe as a clock, the British physicist Isaac Newton discovered the mechanical laws of nature and the French thinker René Descartes saw animals as automata: organisms that experience neither happiness nor pain .

All these changes in our actions and thoughts have played a role in our interaction with nature over the centuries. Yet there is more of a wave movement in the relationship between man and nature than of a hard separation between before and after the Fall. Take Antiquity: the Greek Stoics looked at the world as something that existed for the salvation of people and the gods. The Roman author Lucretius (in the 1st century BC) saw nature as something that had to be 'finished' by man. The word nature comes from the Latin word nascere, which means 'to be born'. Nature is always in a state of development and humans have an important role in this.

The big difference

The most important difference between the past and present has arisen from the growth of our technical capabilities and the growth of the world population. In the 18th century, the Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain. Coal-powered steam engines were introduced. Thanks to fossil fuels and new scientific thinking, humans gained more control over nature, more prosperity and better health.

Let's look at the Netherlands at the beginning of the 19th century. The French occupiers had left our country destitute and King I was fully committed to the economic development of the country. The Dutch landscape, which still largely consisted of swamps and wastelands (sand drifts and heathlands), had to be made 'useful'. Thinking about nature conservation was a luxury.

At the time, the Netherlands was nothing more than a patchwork of individual regions. To integrate those areas economically, canals, paved roads and railways were built. Crucial to this were new inventions: artificial fertilizer made it possible to turn poorer soils into agricultural areas; barbed wire ensured that bushes and hedgerows were no longer necessary to keep livestock together; thanks to steam pumping stations, enormous areas could be drained.

The same drive to design the Dutch landscape down to the last centimeter according to our economic wishes also became visible after the Second World War, when our country was left destitute for the second time by a foreign occupier. Even then, the Dutch government was fully committed to intensifying agriculture and industrialization.

Countermovements.

Counter-movements arose both in the 19th century and after the Second World War. First, these were the thinkers of Romanticism, who drew attention to the intrinsic value of nature from a spiritual perspective. Then there were people like Jac P. Thijsse, who founded Natuurmonumenten in 1905 to preserve some of Dutch nature in its original state.

Our view of animals also changed. They are not unilaterally determined by their rationality, but animals - just like humans - have an inner capacity to experience feelings such as pain. That idea was partly fueled by Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, which described the relationship between humans and animals. A new concept that emerged at that time was 'ecology': the doctrine that revealed that there is an interaction between people, animals and plants and that they are mutually dependent on each other. From the idea that nature is not as far removed from humans as previously thought, the conviction arose that she too deserves rights.

In the 1960s, the major environmental movements emerged in the United States, born from concerns about the population explosion, air and water pollution, agricultural poisons, nuclear fallout, acid rain and the depletion of raw materials. The nature movements have also been prominent in the Netherlands since then. Environmental legislation was introduced and a lot of pollution has stopped.
In terms of attention to the protection of habitats and animals, an enormous amount has improved.

Biodiversity
Nowadays we often talk about 'biodiversity', a term coined in the United States in 1986.
States under conservationists emerged. The concept emphasizes the importance of preserving a wide variety of species, but it is also a catch-all concept. This can obscure the fact that reality is layered: where one species struggles, another flourishes. In the book The Discovery of Nature (2021), Dutch ecologists emphasize that it is not possible to provide a clear picture of what has happened to Dutch biodiversity since 2000. For example, insects are not doing well, but some large mammals are flourishing.

Apocalypse

A development that has become more visible in recent years is the 'globalization' of our thinking about nature. We increasingly discuss nature problems in a global context. This is partly due to the formation of international organizations such as the United Nations after the Second World War. But also due to the arrival of satellites that have been orbiting our earth since then. These satellites take photos and make measurements that cover the entire world. The advantages of this are great, but there is also a disadvantage. As the realization has grown that we as humanity share one small globe, an old religious fear has been awakened. Just as paradise in the Bible only returns after the End of Time, an apocalyptic image of the future has also emerged in thinking about nature. Out of fear of a global catastrophe, we long for the harmony of paradise.

“But just as paradise never existed, neither does the apocalypse.”

[origanal text: Jurgen Tiekstra, De Lichtkogel.nl]