Explore "The Presence of Nature in the Natural World: a Long Conversation" by Wendell Berry on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
THE GREAT TROUBLE of our age, involving the whole human economy from agriculture to warfare, is in our relationship to the natural world-to what we call "nature" or even, still, "Nature" or "Mother Nature. " The old usage persists even seriously, among at least some humans, no matter how "objectivity" weighs upon us. "Of all the pantheon," C. Â S. Lewis wrote, "Great Mother Nature has . Â . Â . been the hardest to kill. " With Nature we have, properly speaking, a relationship, for the responses go both ways: Nature is fully as capable of responding to us as we are of responding to her. In the age of industrialism, this relationship has been radically brought down to a pair of hopeless assumptions: that the natural world is passively subject either to unlimited pillage as a "natural resource," or to partial and selective protection as "the environment."
We seem to have forgotten that there might be, or that there ever were, mutually sustaining relationships between resident humans and their home places in the world of Nature. We seem to have no idea that the absence of such relationships, almost everywhere in our country and the world, might be the cause of our trouble. Our trouble nonetheless exists, is severe, and is getting worse. Instead of settled husbanders of cherished home places, we have become the willing parasites of any and every place, destroying the source and substance of our lives, as parasites invariably do.