The old Lakota was wise. He knew that man’s heart away from nature becomes hard; he knew that lack of respect for growing, living things soon led to lack of respect for humans, too.
– Luther Standing Bear, Sicangu/Oglala Lakota, (1868-1939)
For me, this has to do with an assumption of separation. If we live away from nature, it’s easy to imagine that we are separate from nature. We assume it’s not really so relevant to us. Maybe it’s something to visit in a park, or occasionally when we are outside of the city. We don’t think about or consider it very much. It becomes a kind of distant background.
We imagine that nature is out there somewhere, and forget that we are nature too. Everything is nature. We are nature. Our feelings and thoughts are nature. Our culture is nature. Our built environment is nature. It’s all nature taking all these forms. It’s all this living system we call Earth taking these local and fleeting forms.
All of this likely came with the agricultural revolution. Before the agricultural revolution, we were all native. We lived in egalitarian groups. We saw ourselves as nature. We saw the sacred in everyone and everything.
With the agricultural revolution, all of that changed. Some accumulated wealth while others did not. To justify that wealth inequality, and the new relationship with the land, plants, animals, and fellow humans, some started imagining separation.
They created an ideology to justify it all, and many expressions of that ideology is familiar to us today: We are separate from nature. We are special. Humans are more important than the rest of life. Nature is here for our use. Nature is infinite. Humans have soul and other beings do not. Don’t question wealth inequality. Wealth inequality is part of the divine order. You will have your reward in the afterlife so don’t bother with questioning the social order. We understand things best by taking it apart to its smallest parts.
This is all an expression of the heart of humans away from nature. It’s all an expression of a hard heart.
It also makes us feel lost. We are nature. We are a part of this web of life. Forgetting this, and pretending otherwise, makes us feel lost since we, somewhere in us, know better. We cannot escape that knowing.