Man vs Nature

I asked Cheryl what she thought was the most effective way to dispel people’s misplaced fears and animosity towards wolves, and replace it with awe and respect for life. She emphasized the importance of telling stories about individual lives like Takaya’s. Our tendency as humans is to glaze over when we are overwhelmed by numbers and statistics; but when we learn about the injustices faced by an individual, or the challenges they’ve overcome, we naturally build an emotional connection. Empathy takes root. That’s where real change can happen.

A decade after Maya Angelou channeled the selfsame polarity of human nature in her staggering space-bound poem “A Brave and Startling Truth,” Griffiths writes:

There are two sides: the agents of waste and the lovers of the wild. Either for life or against it. And each of us has to choose.

and

Reclaiming our wildness emerges as an act of courage and resistance amid the conspicuous consumption by which late-stage capitalism drugs us into mistaking having for being, anesthetizing the urgency of our mortality — that wellspring of everything beautiful and enduring we make. What Griffiths offers is a wakeup call from this near-living, a spell against apathy, against air con and asphalt, against our self-expatriation from our own nature

We could lament that the price we have paid for our so-called progress in the century and half since Muir has been a loss of perspective blinding us to this essential kinship with the rest of nature. But that would be a thoroughly ahistorical lament. We humans have always had a troubled relationship with this awareness — from the pre-Copernican days, when we hailed ourselves as the center of the universe, to the campaign launched against Darwin for demonstrating our evolutionary consanguinity to every single creature on this beautiful planet. 

Still, something deep inside us — something elemental, beyond the ego and its conscious reasonings — vibrates with an irrepressible sense of our belonging to and with nature

Our mother, The Earth, the green planet has suffered from her children’s violent and ignorant ways of consuming. We have destroyed our Mother Earth like a type of bacterium or virus destroying the human body, because Mother Earth is also a body.