Taming Anthropocentrism, Embracing Symbiosis

[I think this will be my next talk, though I would have liked to do a poem - since the main goal of my next assignment is body language, and the evocative nature of poetic language lends itself well to that (I think the talent of someone like Rives is something to aspire to). I am quite pleased with this one though. Enjoy. Edit: On second thought/reading, it comes across as a highly refined stream-of-consciousness - a collection of disjointed dribble shamelessly strung together. Oh well.]

Climbing Mount Everest. Landing on the Moon. Building the Great Pyramids of Egypt.

Three events that are hallmarks of history. Three feats that inspire similar sentiments in all of us. Achievement. Triumph. Three trials with a common enemy. Nature.

The overcoming of nature's challenges has long been our yardstick for measuring progress. Look at how far we've come. We should be proud. But I can't escape feeling guilty that our pride may be blinding us to how much we have forgotten along the way.

A divide has formed in our minds between a chaotic nature, where life is nasty, brutish, and short, and an ordered civilisation, where we enjoy prosperous, full lives. We celebrate accomplishment at overcoming nature, innovation by taming it, and relief when we escape its wild fangs. It appears to us as a barbaric foe, when it really deserves our reverence as a learned, wise teacher.

Over thousands of years, we've accumulated the ore of knowledge, whereas billions of years have beaten nature's wisdom to a well-tempered tip. It has conceived designs blindfolded that our best engineers have not only failed to notice, but have produced markedly inferior solutions.

Our cities are the perfect exhibit of taking this separation between nature and humanity too far. Early attempts at broad-scale city living - like the cesspit that London originally was - have taught us the importance of sanitation; but even now, the pollution emitted by our largest metropolises is damaging both the people in them, and our world as a whole.

We have been polluted with pride, its smokescreen veiling our ignorance. We've been like a three-year-old seeking emancipation from its parents. We too easily forget that there is no human at the root of our family tree (though some religions will disagree with me there). We are rooted in nature, it provides the foundation upon which we can all grow. It is our common parent.

You could argue that we've quickly developed solutions to problems that nature took much longer to solve, but then you'd be forgetting that we couldn't even think of solving them had nature not provided our mental machinery to begin with. I mean, you could say that a bird performs fantastic feats of differential calculus before it swoops down to collect it's prey, or marvel at an ant colony taking advantage of network effects to increase its efficiency as it scales in population. The birds and the ants are just doing their business, but we should be humbled at our own abilities, given the pieces nature has already laid in place.

From nomadic, hunter-gatherer societies living in temporary huts we've come to the bastion of our modern cities, laden with skyscrapers. We don't need to look at the changes in our ways of life or the facades of our buildings to see our separation from nature, the history of our ideas also presents it in clear relief. In ancient Greece and Rome, people were thought to have a genius – as a guiding spirit – in their accomplishments, whereas now we refer to people as geniuses. People now own their successes, but of course the flipside of this is that they also own their failures. Ever wonder at our increasing rates of depression and suicide? In England during the Middle Ages, when you met a poor person, they would be described as an 'unfortunate' – someone not blessed by fortune, whereas now they would often be referred to as a 'loser.'

By losing touch with nature, we part with ourselves - both physically and mentally. The naïve, and extreme response to this would be to forsake technology. We need only appreciate the value inherent in both ourselves and nature. Taking inspiration from its successes, and repairing its flaws. It knows how to build sustainably – it has lasted this long. It knows how to delight our senses with its pleasing symmetries. Let us not lose that balance.

There is a method to nature's madness. We can't attain order by renouncing chaos. This is important. We can't attain order by renouncing chaos. To hope for the 'perfect' is to delude ourselves that nothing changes. Time is change, and nothing is timeless. A farmer with no diversity in their crops will lose their entire yield if some pathogen comes along that they lack resistance to. To survive, we must embrace change. I was quite struck by a quote from the 14^th century Japanese Essays on Idleness – “In everything … uniformity is undesirable. Leaving something incomplete makes it interesting, and gives one the feeling that there is room for growth … Even when building the imperial palace, they always leave one place unfinished.”

Nature and humanity aren't at odds. It has been said that if we were to vanish from the face of the earth, all forms of life would prosper. Nature would go on without us, but if we want to stay around, we need to embrace the natural order, not displace it. Let us keep the scales in our favour.