The Strange Death of Mother Nature
by Michael Giffin, Quadrant:
Twenty years ago the editor of a journal in a health bureaucracy was confronted with a challenge. The policy officers in primary care decided the term “drowning” was incorrect and attempted to impose what seemed to them a better alternative, “serious immersion”, but the editor refused to co-operate. If that incident ended there, the push keeps pushing. When the meanings of words challenge us, or lead down incorrect paths, progressives invent terms to promote their desired outcome, and proscribe the old meanings. This process can be so subtle the population doesn’t notice until it finds itself down the rabbit hole with Alice or on a farm run by pigs walking on their hind legs.
The term “nature” is an example of this process. Since the Enlightenment, the West has been studiously disengaging from nature’s traditional meanings. Originally, nature (Greek physis, Latin natura) referred to everything not made by humans; it was once a boundary between human activity and the natural order. Speaking metaphorically, the boundary started to blur when Prometheus flew too close to the sun and became increasingly blurry after Dr Frankenstein created his monster. The boundaries are invisible, now that the repetitive acting-out of The Rocky Horror Show has replaced Judeo-Christian belief as the West’s moral compass.
The ancient personification of nature as mother has been replaced by non-gendered, non-human terms such as “biosphere”. The consequences have been profound. Not long ago the concept of mother nature was at best a cosmology, at worst a marketing tool. There was once a value system around the belief that nature had intentions. If you behaved a certain way, believed in certain things, or consumed product such-and-such, you would be in harmony with what she intended. Attempts to invest the biosphere with this mystical role lack poetic resonance.
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