Anna Wood

Ryne Beddard

RELI/PHIL438

What is the nature of nature, and what, therefore, are the limits and imperatives of human action?

The nature of nature is always to be slightly beyond our reach.  It ebbs and flows in a way that we as humans consider it to be sacred, or apart from ourselves much of the time, but it

is no more sacred than us.  It is us; but a one way mirror can only see out and not in.  While there is an observable hierarchy in consciousness and fitness, they are like shades or

degrees of pure and potent nature and humanity. At the pinnacle, I imagine the relationship between humanity and nature like an infinitely thin magnetic coin.  It is one, but the sides

pull in different directions.  If placed ridge-side down, the coin “chooses” which way to fall.  Now, only one side is exposed and as far as the experiencer is concerned, it is now just a

smooth surface.  In this way, the viewer sees the upward-turned face as magnificent and a slice of perfection.  It is now just the experiencer and the surface, but the viewer can only

view and all he sees is something apart from himself. He then worships this entity, this concept, because it becomes the one thing he is not, the one thing he does not understand. 

There is no indication that the coin ever had two sides pulling apart, or that a unity ever existed, but something deep down, as faint and obscure as a memory tells us that there was.

  That even, perhaps the experiencer is acting as the next coin in the infinite hierarchy of consciousness about to fall onto its face and fade into oblivion.  

As a human, that creature feeling outlined by William Cronon in “The Trouble with Wilderness” is not necessitated by grandiose landscape and terror, but something you can attain

simply by sitting with your thoughts and realizing how small you are.  By living in a state of blissful bewilderment of everything, you can spread goodwill to everything around you. 

We are living in entropy, no amount of recycling, and solar panels will change that. The greatest depiction of our situation and what humanity can do is to stop protecting the “sacred

myth of origin” that is nature (Cronon, 77).  We must not “return to being animal”, we must find what it is to be human (84).