What is Nature?

How would you define nature?

Often times we think of "nature" as green, beautiful landscapes. We think of nature as "natural" and define a word with the very word we are trying to define.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary (Man, I'm going to miss being a college student), nature is:

1. Senses relating to physical or bodily power, strength, or substance.
2. Senses relating to mental or physical impulses and requirements.
3.Senses relating to innate character.
4. Senses relating to the material world.

How does this help us to define what nature is? Nature is the sensory experience of bodily strength? Nature is our physical impulses or mental requirements? Nature is the senses related to who we really are? Nature is what is experienced in the material, tangible world?

Timothy Morton discusses how to disassociate our idea of nature as landscape and butterflies, for every aspect of our lives is nature. Just as music is about notes and sounds, music is also about the silences in between notes. Nature is not just what we see, but nature is the mere act of seeing something and the act of perceiving sight through sensory organs. By understanding nature as all of these things and not just pastoral images, ecology must take on new significance. I have no idea what Morton does with this newly constructed ecology as I have only read a chapter of his book, but I'll let you know when I do. (See for yourself: http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/, Zizek claims Morton's book is "Outstanding")

Why do I seek to define what nature is? I think we all too often put nature outside ourselves. We are Homo sapiens, of the Mammalia class, the order of Primates, the phylum Chordata and the Animalia kingdom. Thus, we are part of nature. Even me typing this into a computer is an action I've acquired through natural tendencies of the society I live in. Perhaps by seeing nature in all things, we can better see how intricately interrelated all of nature is and the dire need to resolve the ecological crises. If not for ethics, then we must better tend to our relatives plants, other animals and organic matter because their decline will lead in our own demise.

Walking as Retracing Steps

Despite how much I love food, going to the grocery store every other week becomes tedious and mundane. It takes up my money and time; I always want to buy more than I can afford. Driving over there, I often experience the “joy” that is New Orleans drivers and usually arrive to the store slightly flustered from avoiding swerving vehicles.

Yet, food is what nourishes us; it gives us the strength and energy to live our lives. It builds a communion between families, houses and friends. Why should going to the grocery store be so draining and agonizing?

My roommate Courtney and I decided to walk through Audubon Park to the grocery store. On our walk, we gawked at all the beautiful and inconsistent architecture, about her colorful friends back in Seattle, about my nervousness of graduating. The weather was beautiful, and we even befriended a particularly large turtle that was attempting to crawl through a fence.

While walking, we were able to notice details of our path that we can never see while driving or even riding a bike, as one is normally too concerned with safety.

We arrived at Whole Foods, though it is not a place I particularly enjoy shopping, and did research on the rhetoric of their products and company values. (To be discussed later). Normally when I’m at Whole Foods, I’m incredibly antsy from busy women nearly running me over with grocery carts and the bustle of particularly unhappy people. Yet, I walked around making fun of green marketing with Courtney and actually enjoyed walking around Whole Foods. We even asked questions to the meat employees about what is locally grown and what cloth-aged cheese is to the cheese employees.

And, for the first time, I walked out of Whole Foods feeling content instead of accosted or robbed. (part of this is because I didn’t buy anything). Courtney and I walked back and even befriended a kitty walking around Calhoun Street.


“For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels” (Thoreau, “Walking”) Perhaps Courtney and I were not “re-conquer-ing” the Holy Land of Audubon Park and Magazine Street, but we were learning to seek the presence of beauty in the space we too often overlook and cannot fully see. By making a walk out of a simple chore, such as walking to the grocery store, we become more able to better appreciate the place we live in and its constant changes, the act of acquiring food for our own nourishment and enjoying the presence of good company, as “half the walk is but retracing our steps.” The other must be to better understand the steps we take so that we can walk further.

Lionfish--Flamboyant Badasses of the Reef

This beautiful little baby is a Volitans pterois, otherwise known as a lionfish.

While they may not look particularly violent or dangerous, those spines are filled with venom that can kill other fish and cause extreme pain and breathing difficulties in humans.

Lionfish are carnivorous and attack their prey by herding it by alternating motions of their pectoral fins. When a fish tries to escape, however, the lionfish will stab it and thereby stun it with it's spine. Once stunned, the lionfish will swallow its prey whole.

Each lionfish generally leaves a solitary life unless they are breeding or in infancy. In fact, lionfish will remain hidden in caves floating suspended and ignore other fish, unless they want to eat one. Perhaps more interesting, lionfish males will mate with about three different females. Thus, lionfish are not dangerous and excellent hunters, they are also "players," to use a vernacular term.

Lionfish also do not fear humans who scuba dive. In fact, lionfish often sting divers and cause much more serious effects than the many jellyfish species. This does, however, enable

lionfish to be easy captured for the aquarium industry.

In response to the growth of the aquarium industry, lionfish leaked into the ocean from "recycled" aquariums, causing an invasion in the Georgia and Florida Atlantic coastline. As these fish are particularly "bad ass" due to the aforementioned reasons, their species remains unchecked and have few predators. Thus, they are slowly taking over coastal habitats.

These are both pictures taken at the Georgia Aquarium, aka the most amazing place ever.

Obviously, I take a strong liking to these creatures due to their bizarre natural history.

Journey to the Whaleshark

For my last Spring Break of my undergraduate career, I decided to drive 1,100 miles roundtrip to see the whaleshark at the Georgia Aquarium (which happens to be the largest aquarium in the entire world).

Of course, this roadtrip consisted of camping in particularly cold weather, sleeping on uneven ground and lying on a sunny beach in which the 50 degree wind made us wear sweatshirts. This journey, even if it was miserable in some aspects (especially Wal-mart in Montgomery, AL), rejuvenated my anxiety of graduating and making something of myself. Alain de Botton tells us that the ideal of travel is only achieved in reflecting on one's travels, as the actual experience of traveling is exhausting and never the way one wants it to go.

However, while traveling across five states with my best friend, I found myself enjoying even the most unenjoyable of moments because life is best lived in good humor. We began the journey after spending 5 hours at Pep Boys; my tires were in need of replacing and a. the alignment guy was late by 2 hours b. they didn't know how to start my car and c. they broke the clutch pin, so I had to start my car by getting on my knees and pressing in this broken clutch pin while Jennifer turned the keys. Thus, from the very beginning, our journey was much like the film Little Miss Sunshine.

The Georgia Aquarium was a religious experience for me. The first thing I encountered was a touch pool the size of a classroom full of cownose sting rays and bonnethead sharks. The aquarium divided their exhibits between different ecosystems in the aquatic world: coral reefs, deep ocean, cold water, amazon, gulf coast, etc. They integrated the different ecosystem into the exhibits themselves; The Amazon exhibit was layered with waterfalls, trees, tanks of giant fish on the ceiling to illustrate how interwoven the jungle is, and plenty of information cards detailing information that wasn't merely elementary. People around us were speaking French, German, Spanish, English and Chinese. We had to wait a few minutes by every tank because the aquarium was packed with people united from all different places just to stare at odd animals. Even though there were children screaming and squawking, running into my legs and knocking over each other, I was completely at peace.

I think this is why I believe in zoos. Obviously, there is an ethical and an unethical way to keep an animal in captivity. When handled intelligently, these places like the Georgia Aquarium can help people gain a consciousness of the interconnectedness and complexity of the world outside his or her own life.

Milton's Paradise Revisited (But not Regained)

While reading Muir's account on his thousand mile walk, I found it interesting that one of his few belongings in his satchel was Paradise Lost. Additionally, Gary Snyder composed a poem on reading Paradise Lost from a mountaintop in California. How is it that two naturalists bring an epic poem on the fall of man and lost paradise while they trek through the wilderness? Snyder obviously takes a tongue and cheek approach to the poem by pointing out that the Garden will outlive fallen man (Myths and Texts), but why would they chose a poem specifically about man rather than nature? (Instead of something like Wordsworth)

Consider the opening of Paradise Lost:

Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
Brought death upon the world, and all our woe.

Here, man's first disobedience--his fall--is that he takes the fruit from a tree that he is forbidden to take from. Thus, he takes the seeds and potentiality for the tree to grow from the tree and in stealing from a tree, he brings the problem of death and suffering unto man. In this sense, it could be interpreted that man's dominion over nature denies his place in Paradise.

The thesis to Paradise Lost is as follows:

What in me is dark
Illumine, what is low raise and support,
That to the height of this great argument
I may assert eternal Providence,
And justify the ways of God to men.

Milton's point in writing Paradise Lost is to make sense of the suffering and death in the world. i.e. to help others understand why Paradise has been lost. (And if Paradise is lost because Satan (representation of dominion) convinces Eve to steal an apple that isn't hers, this says a lot about man's attempt to overpower the natural world)

And, to jump ahead, after Adam and Eve join hands and walk away from the Garden, we can turn to Milton's poem Paradise Regained in which Jesus regains Paradise for men by denying Satan and his dominion.

In all honesty, this is not how I read Paradise Lost. It's one of my favorite poems because it allows us to understand and even like Satan, making sense of why people do terrible things and helping us to better reconcile injustice. Reinterpretating Genesis to teach stewardship over dominion, however, is a worthwhile art in adapting our culture to a more ecological consciousness.

Unintentional Elitism

While discussing my reading of Leopold's "The Land Ethic," I found myself frustrated with my friend. He informed me that it still sounds anthropocentric to apply human conceived rights to "the land" as soil, wind, and water in addition to living organisms. This reminded me of a debate I had with Keaton (I mention his name because his personality allows me no shame) about John Muir being elitist. Then, while rereading my posts, I discover that I sound elitist.

How does this happen? Someone thinks of a good idea, writes it out, and someone else reads it and thinks "Wow, what an asshole." Well, Leopold sort of did sound like a white guy in control of his land when I read his account of seasonal change in Sand County. Yet his land ethic feels much more authentic to me because he abandons his notion of "his" land and extends it to a consciousness for all elements of the land. John Muir wandered the wilderness in order to study the process of plant diversity across differing ecosystems but wrote for social change to preserve these lands. Thus, people thought John Muir was being elitist for taking plant samples in land he wanted to keep everyone out of. I write in this with a certain idealism in order to reflect and continually grow upon my goals and sound as if I am preaching or bragging. How does one then communicate without the danger of misinterpretation?

I don't think there is much of a solution to this. As Lacan would say, the object is a failure and one can never fully communicate through language. In order to be interpreted, an object must be delivered by one person and interpreted by the other, and each person's own experience with the object is taken into account. This is understood by a childish game of telephone or asking a group of people to draw a leaf; everyone has their own interpretation of what a leaf looks like, but there are different manifestations of what the object leaf can mean.

I do think there is a certain delicacy to argument a writer must consider. Alas, once something is written it takes on its own life beyond the one who wrote it. It is constantly recreated through each who encounters it.

The Perceiving Mind

Though I am not particularly fond of getting out of bed when my room is freezing, I do enjoy when the weather is cold.

Being able to see your own breath leave your body, form a cloud in the air, and then fade away is incredible to me. I suddenly become aware of my consistent breathing and am reminded of what being alive actually means. I can even feel my breath rising and falling within my own chest.

When I think of how I'm constantly breathing, I become aware of all of my sensory perceptions and feel overwhelmed that I'm aware of the world around me on so many levels. I think about how some animals only see in certain colors, some only in black and white and how when one sense is weak, others are intensified.