I wonder what it is that you imagine “nature” to be? Having asked this question, I could now go on to offer various suggestions so as to give you a multiple choice question from which you, the reader, would pick out the answer nearest to your own. Or you could read the previous blog in which several other people did that. But I’m not going to do that right now because what I really want you to do is think for yourself and articulate it yourself. This is necessary today in a world full of people more than ready to tell you what to think rather than let you come to your own conclusions - assuming you even think that “nature” is something about which you should come to some conclusion to begin with. And it isn’t necessarily so that it is.
Increasingly today, though, people do think that “nature” or, more precisely, the imagined human destruction of nature, and so the further imagined threat to it that human beings pose, is something that people should think about and, therefore, it is very much a topic of thought. It is my thesis, however, one very much in line with the thoughts I muse upon and express in the entirety of There is nothing to stick to, thoughts which surely encompass ideas from many times and places throughout human history [and so are not nearly as ‘eccentric’ as some might wish to categorise them], that those who ally themselves to this populist movement of sentimental concern have almost entirely misunderstood the thing they claim to care about. Instead, so I argue, they have anthropomorphised it, turning it, in the process, into some domesticated version of itself, something about which, quite bizarrely, we should have “concern”. What I do not refer to here, coincidentally, is the idea of self-preservation, something which all but the most suicidal of organisms seem to possess quite naturally, which is why those things that are alive don’t just go and sit in a metaphorical corner to die. No; self-preservation I well accept and understand. It is the characterisation of, and the imagined moral responsibility towards, nature that a number of people behind environmental movements seem to possess and attempt to communicate that concerns me here in a universe I insist is nothing to stick to.
Take, for example, a document produced in 2019 by Roger Hallam, one of the people responsible for one of the most public faces of current environmental concern, Extinction Rebellion. He has published on his own website a document just shy of 80 pages titled Common Sense for the 21st Century which attempts to provide an intellectual underpinning for the movement broadly conceived and to describe the political goals and actions in view to achieve it. For avoidance of doubt, I have read the whole document from cover to cover. What it reveals, so I am going to say in what follows, is a thoroughly wrong-headed view of human beings and their place in the world and a total misunderstanding about what nature is. One might be tempted to say that this was just a one off, an anomaly, but one cannot when one sees such a document being cheerleaded for by those such as George Monbiot, another green activist who attempts to supply intellectual underpinnings for green activism, and who are equally as wrong-headed about the things they tell us [ad nauseam] that we are “responsible” for.
But before I get into this in detail I need to make clear that my problem here is not with any diagnosis of the problem that either Roger Hallam or George Monbiot might give. They describe in lurid detail, based on current climate science, the harm that human activity is predicted to do to the biosphere of our planet and I neither deny anything they say about this nor do I wish to downplay its consequences. So whatever else I may be I am not a “climate change denier” and neither am I an ignorer of climate science. I do not deny that human industrial activity on this planet over the last 250 years has affected the planet’s climate [this is truly mere “common sense”] and I’m more than happy to agree that folks like Hallam and Monbiot are quite right about this. Where I differ from them is that I don’t care about it whereas they are telling me, and everybody else, that we should and that it is a moral duty or responsibility which suggests, in turn, that such things can and do exist.
I may now seem to you like a monster but, if I do, I casually smile a whimsical smile and think “so be it” to myself. Unlike Roger Hallam’s “common sense” that all humans have a “transcultural duty to create a world safe for our children”, I think there is no such duty. Its rhetorical, made up, empty-headed, sentimental nonsense. [And I’d think that even if I had any children which, I have to say, I don’t because, unlike those who claim to care about the environment, I’ve had the good sense to not voluntarily add to the burden put upon it!] People like Hallam and Monbiot will tell you all day and all night that “ecological collapse” is something that it is our responsibility to fix but I read this and go, “Huh? When did this memo come around?” much, in fact, as the American comedian George Carlin does here and here. And that’s a fair and reasonable question to ask because there never was any such memo. Nature, by virtue of us being born, something in which not a single one of us had any say, did not issue us with a list of responsibilities or duties the moment we popped out of someone’s vagina or got dragged through a C-section. Nature, which is passive and uncaring, without purpose or intention, doesn’t have the slightest interest in what lives or dies - including us! - and it didn’t give birth to us so that we could be “responsible”. So if people today are going to preach “responsibility” for nature then that is entirely on them. Its on their shoulders. Its not anything that nature itself cares about. Nature doesn’t speak and has no voice. That is simple anthropocentrism.
Of course, the current “climate emergency” is entirely one of human making. Hallam and Monbiot are clear about that and I’m happy to go along with them on it. Human beings, so it seems, haven’t got the common sense to even ensure their own survival and can’t cooperate to a level in which everyone is seemingly happy with their lot. Neither of these observations, though, are arguments for human beings’ responsibility for the planet or nature or the environment. Human beings, if we are observing this properly, are the problem not the solution! And how can the problem also be the solution? It is at about this point in the conversation that people like George Monbiot will talk about the basic altruism of human beings and how we can work together to help each other out and save the day. But surely it is because so often human beings don’t care to save the day that we are in this mess in the first place? As our species went along farting noxious gases into the sky for two and a half centuries and throwing our waste behind us surely it must have occurred to some of us from time to time as things got poisoned and people got sick that it was actually us who were dirtying our own nests? And did we care then? Of course not! I would argue its because nature hasn’t made us as beings who care, at least, not until the issue is present and existential and right in our faces. And unavoidably so. And then it just becomes self-interest. For human beings will always put off until tomorrow what they can get out of today. We have been made, or rather shaped by the shape of our existence, to deal in the present and take things as they come.
But "we are looking here at the slow and agonising suffering and death of billions of people" says Roger Hallam in his book. Let us agree he is right. Were any of these people expected to live forever? Were they immortal and impervious to accident, illness or disease? Were they going to live pain-free lives of happiness and prosperity in each case? Is that how life is on this planet? Is that nature? Perhaps Roger Hallam lives on a different planet to me but on the one I live on people suffer and die all the time. They get mental illnesses and degenerative diseases and live in poverty and misery and distress. I have no doubt that many of these people derive next to no benefit from their lives at all. They are just lifeforms which existed for a few years and then didn’t. No one noticed them when they were alive and no one misses them when they are gone. For some I imagine that prolonging their life is actually prolonging their misery. There must be reasons why over 800,000 people annually kill themselves according to those who measure these things. I wonder, do Roger Hallam and George Monbiot care about that? Do they care about those people who have no need of an apocalypse to get worked up about because their own experience of life is already quite terrifyingly apocalyptic enough? Climate apocalypse often seems to be the privileged concern of those for whom their middle class lives are quite comfortable enough. Hallam, Monbiot and even the starchild of environmentalism, Greta Thunberg, fit this description very well. Everything in their gardens is lovely and so they need something to worry about. That their garden might go up in flames or end up underwater fits the bill perfectly.
So what is this nature we all agree we have polluted? It is chance. It is “what can happen, will happen.” It is lack of intention, lack of purpose, lack of direction, lack of action. Taoism describes it as “actionless action” in its expression wu wei, an activity it wants human beings to follow as well. What this means is that, even though human beings might make decisions to care about things, these are not nature’s own decisions. We were not created to be custodians of anything. We are, in actual fact, not custodians of anything. Nature is not going to judge anyone for not trying to save anything or anyone because nature itself does not care what exists or what doesn’t exist. Nature just is, and just is as it is, because it could be, because what can happen, will happen. When nature creates something, quite randomly and accidentally, which we, in our human way, describe as beautiful, it didn’t intend to do that. Nature does not set out to be beautiful or create beauty. It is not oblivious to human feelings of attachment to it or happiness in its environment. It doesn’t care. It is nihilistic in this respect. It doesn’t feel and it doesn’t think. It doesn’t know anything and it has no truth. Nature means nothing, not in the abstract. It is simply that which came to be because it could in the ways that it could. Some bits seem beautiful. Other bits are cancer or flesh-eating viruses or animals that live by predating on other animals. Or us, another simple stroke of unintended randomness. There is no way to judge or value any of this. How can one judge what is simply because it could be? Nature is simply an environment, nothing more. Oh, and by the way, all this nature is strictly temporary and it exists by means of constant destruction. If a lion can kill and eat an antelope then a human can kill and eat a pig, a cow or a sheep. Or even something cuddly like a dog or a monkey. That is, by very definition, natural - as is any extinction that follows as a result.
Yes, that’s right. Nature destroys things all the time all by itself, including, incidentally, most things that have ever lived on earth. No humans to blame. Yet environmentalists love humans to blame. Its almost as if its an egotistical human fascination with itself that’s important here and not “the environment” that such people claim to care about. Roger Hallam, in his book, goes after governments and the corporate culture which has governments in its pocket. He is not wrong about this but that is a political issue, an issue to do with how people have let themselves become the slaves and pawns of other humans for a few trinkets and some shiny devices in the trap called “civilisation”. Human beings have, we are told, been given higher brain functions and greater intellects than all the other creatures nature birthed. But what have these resulted in? Greater and better ways to do more damage to more things in a faster timeframe. Civilisation. We are altruistic, states George Monbiot. There are none so blind as those who will not see. Human beings are those creatures which laud their abilities but who have little to feel laudable about as they stagger on wrecking their own home and destroying everything around them. As egotistical beings they, of course, play up their own role in all this but, in a way, they are the perfect examples of an uncaring nature which just does what it does because it can. There is no thought or care or intention in this. If it can happen then it will. This is exactly what human beings are like. Often human beings do things just because they can, a glorious and repeated exercise in “watching the world burn” just so they can look and point at the fire and say “I did that.” So human beings are very much “of nature” and we see its principles of lack of care, lack of genuine purpose or reason, working right through their actions - not least in those they anoint as “civilised”.
But it is not that this is the humanity of Hallam or Monbiot or many others, of course. Human beings, for people such as these, through centuries of human imagination, have been moulded into reasonable, rational, morally responsible beings, beings who needed to be rational and reasonable and morally responsible in order to operate in the world we had created for ourselves. This, I state it plainly, is a simple fiction which, in future blogs on There is nothing to stick to, I will flesh out in much more detail when I discuss morality or, as I believe, its lack, its fiction. Here let me say only that I see little “rational” in the operation of human beings and even less that is “moral”. “Morality” does not exist and in those places that it does it is simply fictions of human thinking piled on top of one another in an attempt to make some form of human culture work and feel justified about it.
Yet if existence, the universe, nature, is not moral, and it certainly is not even though we may observe the pragmatic trade offs that emerge for purely practical reasons along the way, then how can anything within it be? Here what things that nature creates quite randomly think about themselves is irrelevant. Can a part be a measure of the whole, a whole the vast majority of which it is not even aware of? Can a flimsy and primitive human cognition be so puffed up as to imagine that it is capable of knowledge or understanding or truth? Can it be so egotistical as to dream that it can be the ground of rationality or morality or even its dumb articulator? We would look at the ant and laugh if it dared to imagine it had the keys to nature in its imagination. Yet we are more often than not too stupid to realise that we are the ant. We are just as dumb as the squirrel, the dandelion and the microbe. Of course, we think we aren’t. But that’s part of the problem. We have mistaken our increased utility for knowledge and imagined that this knowledge gives us understanding. Because we imagined we could designate truths we took them to be the truth. This is all part of the human folly, all part of the purposeless, immoral nature from which we come and to which we will return.
So Roger Hallam and George Monbiot and Greta Thunberg want to save the earth. They are allowed to want this. But they are not the earth’s custodians. They are not responsible for it. None of us are. None of us are mandated to care. None of us can be condemned for not caring, for just going about our business until we are inevitably expunged. That is what nature is, that which is called forth into existence, which exists, for a while, as it can, and then it dies - at which point that which it is made of becomes something else. Or maybe, eventually, nothing else. Just nothing. For all of the something we so care about now once was nothing and, so our physical scientists and cosmologists tell us, it will be one day again - the tiny, inconsequential, egotistical, narcissistic human pantomime in between notwithstanding. I don’t blame anyone for wanting to continue to exist although, I must say, even this doesn’t really make any sense when any imaginable human life is utterly insignificant in the context of eternity but to imagine yourself a custodian, a saviour or a person responsible I find utterly bizarre, a basic misunderstanding of a human being’s place in nature and the universe in general. Its true that nature doesn’t stop people caring or taking responsibility, indeed, it created them as things with these possibilities and opportunities. But it didn’t do so with a purpose or as a mandate for us to be that way. Nature doesn’t care what we do or how we live or when, or from what, we die. It will carry on, remorseless, indifferent, regardless. We don’t matter. Nothing matters. To think it does, to argue for responsibility, or duty, or care, is straightforwardly sentimental rhetoric which attempts to erase the pain, death, misery and destruction from nature as if there were some dreamy, idealistic version of the same we could put in its place. All of these things, things which human beings often talk about as negatives to be erased from existence in our common hallucination of a natural utopia, are often, in fact, nature’s driving forces. This is yet another way in which human beings have misunderstood and miscast nature in the arrogance of their self-serving, narcissistic idealism.
What that idealism led to, historically speaking, is civilisation and it is civilisation, and its imagined benefits, that human beings now confuse with nature. For the truth is that it is civilisation that human beings want to save. It is that which they have created and built and imagined that they care about. They care about their own comfort and convenience rather than the nature that is chance and the non-intentional “what can happen” that will happen. Human beings domesticated the world and then replaced nature with their own domestication of it. Observe this in the writings of Hallam and Monbiot or in the speeches of Thunberg. They don’t want to go back to nature, they don’t want to dismantle civilisation, they don’t want to live “more naturally”, they have no concern for biodiversity as an abstract thing in itself. They simply want to clean up the environment, physically and metaphorically. They want to control it to their standards of cleanliness. This is their definition of hygiene.
But its not mine and, I suggest, it is not nature’s either. Roger Hallam writes that “the cost of freedom is civic duty” but this is utter fantasy in any and every respect. The context of any and all existence is not “freedom” - which would be unconditional - but constraint which is various forms of conditionality to which everything that exists is subject. That people live in a civic environment is not a given, either in its invention or its maintenance, and many kinds of people, notably for my purposes, the historical school of Cynics, have chosen to disdain such an environment and speak to its negative effects upon humanity in general. One may, in fact, argue very strongly that it is increasing the amount and depth of civilisation that has inevitably summoned the current ecological crises that people like Hallam, Monbiot and Thunberg talk about. Would an uncivilised human race have brought such destruction upon itself? I suggest not for lack of civilisation would not have supported humanity as it now exists in its highly industrialised and technological states, all things that the historical Cynics would have whole-heartedly opposed as detrimental to this and any other species. But civilisation and civilising has been the form human hubris has taken since it learned to wield fire and fashion the wheel and this is that which must not be stopped for it is regarded and promoted as a destiny.
It will be clear from reading this essay and, indeed, this whole website that I am no apologist for civilisation. Indeed, I laud and honour many within these pages who saw it as diseased and cancerous, a means to the death and dehumanisation of the human race and a thing against which they stood opposed. If Hallam and Monbiot and Thunberg want things to blame for the current state of the earth “civilisation”, the obsession of successive generations of human beings, has a good case for being near the top of the list. But if they are people who merely want to dust off civilisation, give it a make over and make it nice and shiny for us, more acceptable to their current fictions of equality, politics, fairness and naturalness, then what really radical alternative to the progression of humanity over successive millennia, to the detriment of the nature they claim to be inspired by and the custodians of, are they offering? The answer is none. There is no utopian civilisation; there is no impactless civilisation. Their fiction of a harmony is fantasy; their belief that the humans are in, or can be in, control is deluded. Nature is chance. Nature is what can happen, will happen. Nature is remorseless destruction and endless uncaring recycling of matter and life. Nature is pain, death and decay. Life is dependent on these things as we see in countless examples in the natural world and not in their distasteful, sentimental, anthropomorphic avoidance. If you want life you must also embrace death. That is nature. One implies the other.
And so it is my view that environmentalists, conservationists and green activists generally, and the ecological panic they have engendered and encouraged, is based on a million falsehoods about nature and the natural world. You can read about them and why they are false throughout the content of this website. The first and greatest of them is that nature needs a guardian: it doesn’t! And neither does it need self-important and self-interested species waffling on about their duty and their responsibility, things which are preposterous fictions of their own self-regarding reason. Yes, species that want to hang around or want other things to hang around with them shouldn’t dirty the nest without a second thought but, then again, neither do any of these things have to exist in the first place. If something comes to be nature pays it no attention and should it disappear again - as things inevitably do - then it doesn’t remember they were ever there. Nature has no ego even though it enabled us to have one. Understanding nature means fitting in with nature as it actually operates and not, in the hubris of our own egotistical minds, imagining we can create a better version embossed as the currency of human culture and civilisation, a currency which is substituted for the nature we claimed to revere but also a worthless currency that is as temporary as we are. It must be the aim of all people who understand nature as it is described in this essay and this website to devalue this civilisation and to expose it as the artificial unnaturalness that it actually is even if that means accepting the death and destruction that was our birthright from the moment what would become us came to be as nothing other than cosmic energy. An understanding of nature means an understanding of the whole and not, instead, exalting the pride of a species to manipulate and control its singularly unimportant environment. Leave things be. It is our meddling that is the problem. That’s nature’s way. Let it do as it will. Time and chance was all we were ever offered from nature’s well, nothing more, nothing less.
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