Between recently moving to the country after twenty-three years of city apartment living and teaching a course last semester called Great Themes in Literature: Nature and the Environment, I’ve become a bit of an eco-nut in recent months, and at long last I’ve come to appreciate literature that has to do with nature. In one of the pieces we read for class, Luther Standing Bear discusses a particularly wise “old Lakota”: “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.”
Although there are plenty of ways to stay connected with nature living in a city, I didn’t really take advantage of parks, the beach, and rooftop gardens as often as I could have. I found myself wondering if, in all my years in Chicago, Saint Louis, and New York, I had come to respect humans less as a result of being as utterly out of touch with nature as I was. The more I considered the possibility, the more I thought perhaps all these years I’ve had great respect for the individuals I come into contact with but not enough respect for humanity as a whole. In those years of city living I developed the very attitude of “us” versus “them” that we all abhor so in Washington D.C. “We” are the solution to the issues the world faces, went my thinking, and the rest of the people out there who have different opinions and ideas are the problem.
One of the poems we read in the nature literature course last semester was William Wordsworth’s sonnet “The World Is Too Much with Us”:
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; --
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
“Little we see in Nature that is ours.” Does it matter if climate change is caused by humans? Not as much as it matters that we do everything we can to improve our treatment of the planet. If the process of decreasing oil dependency manages to slow the current trajectory of the planet heating up, kudos to us. What’s clear is that profit for the present should not trump our children’s future relationship to the planet’s natural resources.
Perhaps the old Lakota was right: We’ve spent too much time out of touch with the land and now have less concern for fellow and future humans. In our obsession with “getting and spending,” we have given our hearts away. Nature “moves us not.” We aren’t letting ourselves feel the urgency of respecting nature now. At least I wasn’t. Not enough.
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