War Against Ourselves. Jacklyn Cock
a few kilometres away.
This book is aimed at those people driving at speed through the landscape, totally unaware of ‘nature’ and the creatures with whom we share this small blue planet. The book tries to convey something of the joy, as well as the emotional and spiritual benefits, of contact with ‘wild nature’. But this is only a part of the story.
J. M. Coetzee writes that ‘in the ecological vision, the salmon and the river weeds and the water insects interact in a great complex dance with the earth and the weather’ (Coetzee, 2003: 2). The crucial point that this book emphasises is that human beings are part of this ‘dance’ as well, though we are not always mindful of our partners.
OUR ALIENATION FROM NATURE
We have difficulty seeing our place in nature. There are a number of reasons for this, starting with the reality that what we understand by ‘nature’ is enormously varied. For increasing numbers of people, ‘nature’ means wilderness and wild animals, and is experienced very indirectly through magazines and television programmes. Even those who visit our national parks to see wild animals do so in a highly managed, ‘domesticated’ environment, enclosed in their cars and camp sites, separated from direct encounters with ‘wild nature’.
But the alienation of increasing numbers of people from the natural world is much deeper than this. ‘Nature’ does not only mean wild animals and wilderness areas. It is not something that exists outside of and independent of human action. We live in nature and interact with it every day in our actions of eating, drinking and breathing; we depend on nature for the materials and resources to meet our physical needs.
The act of eating illustrates both our direct relationship to nature and our ignorance of it, because we seldom know where the food we eat comes from. Most urban South Africans who consume meat in the form of beef, pork or chicken have never known an actual cow or pig or hen. This is because many urban people have absolutely no involvement in producing the food that sustains them. The complicated social processes involved in the production and distribution of that food is largely hidden from our immediate experience. And we anaesthetise our imaginations when we consume meat so that we don’t have to think about the actual creatures or their journey to the abattoir, or about the conditions of chickens in battery farms. Nor do most of us know whether we eat food whose production has involved taking a gene from one species and inserting it into another. Yet, a third of our yellow maize and soy bean crops in South Africa have been genetically modified. And in the same way that food is assumed to come from the supermarket, energy is thought to come from a switch or plug in the wall. No connection is made with the enormous (and polluting) coal-burning power stations, let alone with the peasants of Lesotho who are deprived of water so that people living in Johannesburg may benefit from the Lesotho Highlands Water Scheme and rich people may enjoy their manicured golf courses.
Thoughtful people have suggested that this alienation from nature is the source of unjust social relations. Racism and sexism, for example, are said to reflect our relation to nature, in that ‘ignorance and hostility toward wild nature sets us up for objectifying and exploiting fellow humans’ (Snyder, 1995: 211).
There is a vicious cycle at work here. Appreciation of our place in nature depends on a level of awareness. As people living in cities and suburbs are removed from any personal, direct contact with wild nature, they are often unaware of our embeddedness in nature. They are apathetic towards the conservation of water or the protection of wild nature: the threatened extinction of the Blue swallow is not very meaningful to a child who has probably never even seen a Cape sparrow.
OUR INTERACTIONS WITH NATURE ARE HIDDEN
It is easy to ignore our place in nature. It is uncomfortable to recall that in South Africa we live in a water-scarce country and use up 12 litres of water every time we flush the toilet. It is even more uncomfortable to think about what happens to our bodily wastes, but sanitation is the most fundamental problem of high-density urban living. In many parts of South Africa, much pollution and illness, including typhoid and cholera, result from inadequate sanitation.
We can ‘lobotomise’ our brains to block any uncomfortable awareness about bodily wastes, or water consumption, or killing animals, because the abattoir is shrouded in secrecy and the sanitation pipes run unseen underground. The irony is that the processes involved in our daily interactions with nature are not only hidden; they are also social in the sense that they involve thousands of people and complex social organisations. The company that supplies water to the millions of citizens of Johannesburg employs large numbers of people, but most of us take for granted the water that flows from a tap. Only the thousands of mostly low-paid manual workers in the sector penetrate this invisibility, yet we are generally as unaware of them as we are of the processes by which water reaches our taps.
It is not only the sanitation pipes that run underground, below our conscious awareness. We think of trees as separate entities, but most of the world’s trees, in fact more than 90 per cent of the known plant species in the world, are not separate at all, but connected by a vast subterranean network of fungal filaments (Sacks, 2005: 55).
Many of the biological processes of nature are hidden, either from our senses or from our understanding. As the pre-Socratic Greek thinker Heraclitus wrote: ‘Nature likes to hide’ (cited in Halpern and Frank, 2001: ix). It operates in hidden, invisible ways, despite the microscope and the telescope, which create the modern ability to see and detect connections invisible to the naked eye. Many creatures, for example, use ultrasound, too high for humans to hear, to communicate, and even if we can hear the clicks of the fruit bat, we still don’t understand how these noises enable it to find its way around in total darkness, using sonar to measure the time interval between each click and its echo. We have only very recently come to understand how termites under attack from fungi send out an alarm signal, frantically waggling their heads to warn the rest of the colony to run away. Only in 1965 was a microscopic bacterium discovered in a pool in Yellowstone National Park, which eventually led to DNA fingerprinting technology. We need someone like Richard Dawkins to explain the process of natural selection, what he calls ‘the blind watchmaker’ — the gradual, blind, unconscious, automatic process that Darwin discovered and that we now know explains much of all life forms.
‘The environment in which people actually live is complex, unyielding of its secrets’ (Davis, 2002: 21). Many of the crucial processes in our daily interactions with nature are obscure. Most of us do not understand a forest’s ability to cool and filter water, and to humidify the air. At the same time, many of our deepest environmental concerns are about invisible agents and processes: carcinogens in the atmosphere, pathogens in the water, teratogens in the food. The greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) that cause the phenomenon of global warming, which is altering our lives, are invisible. Many forms of environmental degradation involve imperceptible and incremental change such as the slow rate of global warming. Daily exposure to low levels of air pollution that cannot be seen or smelled ruins the health of millions of people. Most air pollution consists of five substances: sulphur oxides, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, hydrocarbons and particulate matter, which are all invisible to the naked eye, and some pollutants occur as particles, 50 times smaller than the thickness of a human hair. The reality is that ‘pollution itself never shows up on death certificates ... [though] the diseases worsened by bad air are among the most common afflictions in the modern world: heart disease, cancer and asthma’ (Davis, 2002: 194).
We are often slow to react to much of this pollution, which is slow-working, hidden, undramatic and insidious. Pollution such as sulphur dioxide emissions sometimes provokes social reactions because it comes from visible single-point sources like coal-fired power stations and smelters, while other forms of air pollution, such as that from cars, are more invisible and dispersed, and so accepted. Studies show that in Delhi, for example, over 75 per cent of the air pollution is vehicular, coming from private and public transport (Martinez-Aller, 2002). Yet for many people, this pollution is socially invisible, as cars are indicators of social status rather than sources of emissions (and accidents) that threaten human health. Beck laments how this kind of ‘industrial pollution of the environment and the destruction of nature’ is characterised by what he calls ‘a loss of social thinking’ (Beck, 2005: 25).
Environmental