Remember how nature programs used to be? A cloud forest, gorillas appear from the mist to a hushed a reverent voice over, maybe a small solitary Attenborough giving the awesome exotic landscape a human scale.
Remember the first time you switched on the TV to beautiful scenery, no people, mountains reach down to a sparkling clear lake - what's that SUV doing? Oh no it's a car advert. Find beautiful virgin landscape and be the first to wreck it.
And now in a curious clarksonification all nature / science programs include long sequences of the presenter fourwheeling, flying, helicoptering his way to the remote spot he's going to describe for you. Even a series on the solar system, while mercifully not demanding personal space flights, had him jetting round the world to show us an interesting rock formation that reminds him of Ganymede.
It's too ubiquitous to be a coincidence. Part of the fantasy is that you too could get there if you were rich enough. Most cruelly ironic was the closing scene of Tropic of Cancer, a deserted beach that had just been cleaned up but was still strewn with plastic rubbish from the pacific gyres. Closer examination showed that the sand was actually mostly small plastic particles. He made a heartfelt plea for us to stop trashing our world. Shame we'd just seen him flown there specially by helicopter.
Where is nature? wildness? Out There in the old programs, now it must also be accessible, clearly a paradox.
The Wild Places, The wilderness within, by Robert Macfarlane takes us firmly back. To Britain, where he finds wildness in Essex marshes, the top of a tree, or "looking down into a gryke in the limestone pavement, filled "with a tiny grove of ferns, mosses and flowers. This, Roger (Deakin) suddenly said... is a wild place. It is as beautiful and complex, perhaps more so than any glen or bay or peak"
Under Roger Deakin's example, Macfarlane leaves behind the initial conception of the utter, outer form of wildness. "I thought about how the vision of wildness with which I had begun my journeys – inhuman, northern, remote – was starting to crumble from contact with the ground itself... The human and the wild cannot be partitioned. Everywhere that day I had encountered blendings and mixings."
I wrote this by a tiny stream in our garden, surrounded by weeds and overgrown trees. Wildness is still in us and all around us, in all the abandoned in between places no one has managed to grind up into money yet. Waiting to be let back in.
I wish I could show nature programs to my children. These days, the nature shows have a strong element of fear as the guide is having an adrenaline rush as he conquers the deadly crocodiles, venomous snakes, or man-eating sharks. They always have pumped up, scary music to add to the drama. It is really quite sad and speaks further to our culture's separation from nature and the lack of a sacred, symbiotic relationship. It is just now in my 40s that I begin to shake off the cultural conditioning of egocentric thinking to new possibilities of fully loving, in both thought and action, this amazing web of life. I appreciate you and your wisdom!!!
Posted by: Bob Hanna | Monday, June 07, 2010 at 08:59 PM
thanks Bob, yes the gratuitous violence is a problem too. Better we go outside into real nature.
Posted by: harriet | Thursday, June 10, 2010 at 07:28 AM
Yes, this morning after taking a few nature photographs, I gently took one leaf with apology from each favorite newly grown plant (...this one for its tanginess, another for the nutlike flavor, that one for its lemon taste, others for their strength in renewal of the body after a long winter) the thought occurred to me how I was following a ancient way of being.
As I left this ditch of wildlife, I found myself set in direct contrast to the town's morning crew who descended upon the area with grand sweeps of destruction through bladed motorized vehicles and hand-held whipper snappers that could better navigate and cut down the area I had just left.
This invasion of a moment of serenity and reconnection with nature pushed me to make a wide berth around and away from the annihilation of life.
Upon setting my bicycle back into its resting place at home, I thought of how humanity was being made bereft of many of our natural salad choices and flavors, with the offering of only cultivated items, often sprayed, irradiated and/or genetically engineered–that our limited agriculture could in the end deprive us of much diversity that keeps things interesting, vibrantly alive and thriving.
I thought of a headline recently announcing birds are starving and how this alarming situation could be somewhat alleviated if humanity could learn to leave more areas wild so that the bugs and natural life that thrives within them could serve their purposes. This then will allow the generation of more mosquitoes and such, but perhaps if we all actually partook of some of this wildlife in the form of weeds, our immune systems would gain the strength needed to withstand their bite. We may then need not fear nature so much and live in better balance and harmony with it.
Posted by: Janet | Thursday, June 10, 2010 at 04:00 PM