I’ve talked many times here about nature, our relationship with it and all that it offers. Beyond our more obvious physical dependence upon it for resources such as air, water, warmth, light, and food; there’s also the other, psychological, sustenance it provides by way of beauty, wonder, and reassuring metaphors around renewing life (see Notes One). But I’m aware such musings can seem anachronistic.
There’s obviously immense splendour to the natural world; as well as many other qualities like humour, poignancy, danger, or scientific value. All these ways that nature can pop up within modern life, whether as light relief from the strain of how we’re living or alongside growing concern around the risks attached to that lifestyle in terms of natural resources and environmental impacts.
And maybe those broad simplifications of modern ‘interest’ in nature hint at our altered relationship to this world around us? At how we’re now loo