I’m surprised that in your question you didn’t mention the negative human impacts on nature. That’s sorta what affects me most, but much less so than it may affect others. But maybe the scope of your question was intentionally meant to be within nature itself (which we often consider ourselves removed from).
There’s obviously lots of beauty in nature to enjoy that can be done superficially, which all of us do to some extent. In regard to your statement about learning about the ‘uglier’ side of nature, I like to think of it as one magnificent web of interactions of organisms that all coevolved together to get where they are today. Prey gets faster, predator gets faster, host builds immunities, virus mutates, etc.,. There are certain actions that organisms do that we might consider grim but really it’s just nature doing what it does.
That being said, when things starts happening to things that I find beautiful/special it can be sad or very depressing. One such example is beech leaf disease which is rapidly spreading in my area. Beech trees are gorgeous with their smooth bark and gently oval leaves, which get retained through winter in the younger trees, and to see this disease come through and damage them is pretty unfortunate. I don’t know what the future holds for them, but it doesn’t seem to be good. Each tree I see that has it goes from a time where I’d say to myself “what a beautiful tree” to “another one with BLD, that’s too bad.”
As Thomas Hobbes pointed out, existence in the state of nature is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” That pretty well describes the life of most non-human animals and many humans as well. The problems of life as a modern human might be ameliorated by spending more time in nature but we shouldn’t expect that nature plays by any rules we would consider “civilized.” Of course most of us aren’t really grappling with nature for our lives when we go on a hike
Other responders have spoken to their varying sensitivity to the harshness of the natural world. Perhaps @headsoup put it most concisely for me: I get out in nature (with all it’s complexity) to step away from human-derived environments and seek a respite from human-derived problems of life.
The “dissonance” for me is the intrusion into otherwise natural environments from our species’ influences, large and small. For instance, the less modified a habitat is from our affects, the more I enjoy being in it. By contrast, I have a hard time enjoying a walk in my local (nature) park because all I see, step after step, are invasive plant species, and the soundtrack of wind and birds is overdubbed by barking dogs, leafblowers, and jet airplanes.
I’ll take the complex functioning of a truly natural world any day.
I was just reading about two guys who were recently out enjoying nature and were mauled by a grizzly bear but survived. I wonder if their perspective of nature as therapy has changed as a result of that.
Let’s face it, most of us experience nature in its modern pacified state. Our ancestors dealt with scraping out an existence while trying not to be killed by predators, including their fellow humans, disease, falls, etc. I think we’d agree that that version of experiencing nature would be less appealing as a form of respite. And I doubt those humans spent much time being disturbed by how other creatures struggled to survive.
I felt the same in a forest that had bears as in one that only has big ungulates, of course predators are scary and we as humans did everything to separate ourselves from them, but it’s not that this danger is everything out there, after all, you can feel good in nature while having a gun on you for protection, or just on look out, but not anxious to the point of total disruption.
Yet many ethnocultural groups practiced dendrolatry, animism and other forms of nature worship.
I believe that finding spiritual solace in nature is an inherent human trait, facing its harshness doesn’t change that.
If anything it’s modern man who’s most desensitized to nature’s beauty and romanticism, since he mostly experiences it in a depauperate form, as an outsider.
Yeah, BLD is the biggest depressor I’ve encountered in a while. Imagining a future eastern North America without one of my favorite trees is pretty sad.
One of my favorite places to go is el Cuadrángulo de los Pájaros, which is at Uxmal. So many people rush through it, maybe stopping to take a moment to take a photo of a worn carving of a bird, but sites here are largely unchanged rather than having a lot of signs explaining what they are and how to experience them, so visitors tend to hurry to get to the larger structures, to climb as high as they can, to get photos with the recognizable structure of the pyramid.
But if they slow down and stop, stay long enough to let the air still, they realize the Maya who built the cuadrangle did so in such a way that the small birds who fly overhead have their calls echoed by the walls of the quadrangle. It’s incredible really. The walls become an echo chamber of sound, of nature. It cannot be photographed or captured in any medium, really, how the birdsong bounces. It has to be experienced.
That part of Uxmal was largely complete by 900 AD.
I agree. But I suspect those ancient people had a different perspective about nature – maybe less sentimental, even if they worshipped elements of it – since they lived closer to it. To go back to the original question, I doubt they experienced “cognitive dissonance” when faced with some of nature’s brutality. .
Not dissonance, but rather the notion of balance between the human-constructed world and then the natural world; I can find respite in both, but usually I think of respite as “time-away” or “time to seek relief” from the status quo or typical pattern in living, existence, or Being. There are many ways for this to “happen” - but with nature there can be respite and awe and beauty and the sheer benefits of appreciating the natural world with landscapes that check hubris and provide joy at being alive in the moment - even if it is being in a kayak and watching an Orca pod heading directly your way… breathe !!!
I think the distinction between “appreciate” and “worship” is important. That is why I said appreciate, rather than worship.
So too the distinction between “cuadrangle” and “temple”, because there are temples in that place and cuadrangles. This was clearly named a cuadrangle, not a temple.
Maya is still spoken here. It is one of two official languages of this state, and for many, the first language spoken. I take my cues about what Maya ancestors believed and felt from those for whom maya is their lengua materna: my friends and neighbors, my older son’s promised and her family, and Maya scholars at UADY and INAH. I work really hard not to presume or interpret it through my own lens, which I believe is cloudy for time, for culture, for my own experiences in other places.
Couldn’t agree more!
btw I’d touch Sphagnum any time, it’s very cool.
@ItsMeLucy it’s not much different across the globe, there’re people appreciating nature everywhere (and we shouldn’t blame those that live in circumstances that don’t allow them to do that), it doesn’t have to be with making totems, but also the most logical person can go and see why people believe(d) why there’re spirits in every tree or lake (with the fact that plants weren’t seen as strictly alive), it’s a true magic to see a fast cold stream or hear leaves on the wind, to touch a century-old tree or stone that sits on its place since the last ice age. Maybe we shouln’t all become those loners that choose living alone in the forest without other people to being in the city, or become tree-huggers, but as naturalists seeing nature strictly for what it is can be a distraction of making new discoveries, for science and for ourselves.
I think when people first learn about predation, disease, parasites (fill in scary words), they have a knee jerk reaction, but once you get over that it’s not horrifying at all, it’s just more parts of the natural world to get curious about.
I had a customer come in and frantically ask how to stop a Cooper’s Hawk from nesting in her yard and asked if she could try to knock the nest down. I told her that if she touched the nest that I would report her to the DNR myself. I then told her that she had the opportunity to get to watch the nesting cycle of a cool predator and that her best bet was to try and enjoy the experience. Some months later she came in and told me how much fun she and her husband had watching that and had pictures of the juveniles to show me. She got to see “nature red in tooth and claw” but then saw it’s to feed their young.
Most of the therapeutic effects of nature seem to be physiological rather than intellectual. Patients in hospital waiting rooms with forest murals on the wall aren’t engaged in internal debate on whether or not nature is moral. There is just something deep down inside of us that acknowledges that peaceful green spaces are home. The mural has impact below the intellectual level.
Forest bathing (I hate that term) isn’t about stroking moss or hugging trees. It just seems to be that the most anemic form of nature makes most people feel a little more relaxed. Is it the colour, the smell, the terpenes and the other chemicals that plants emit? Who knows but it doesn’t seem to matter how much or how little scientific knowledge one has.
You may find it interesting that the presence of nonnative bushes (especially variegated ones) generally tended to severely worsen my mood even back in the days when I was unfluent in botany. They seemed very boring/depressing because they never visibly did much and were largely ignored by insects.
(Nowadays I still dislike their nonnativeness and frequent failure to support (native) insects of course, but after reading about the fascinating adaptions they had in their original habitats I softened on them and now like them somewhat. If given a choice between standing in a perfectly blank room and a blank room with a non-native plant in it, nowadays I’d choose the latter. However, this slight preference does not translate into any noticeable improvement in my psychological health; this is is contrast to articles I’ve read of people-who-aren’t-the-oversentimental-treehugger type still experiencing massive and obvious relief from the symptoms of, for example, depression after “spending time in nature”. And native plants/animals do not noticeably improve my mental health under normal circumstances either.)
I find it soothing regardless; I can’t pretend to know why or how. I know nature is pretty rough, I’ve seen predation, found lots of dead animals, etc. I don’t have particular illusions on that score. I can’t pretend I really understand why it’s still calming to me either but it is and that’s enough
Perhaps. It could be considered a morbid curiosity, though. Especially if, as in my case, it takes the form of a fascination with the organisms that cause “tropical diseases” – of humans.
Post 25 of 51. Nearly halfway through the thread someone got to this thought, which was kinda nebulously in my mind when I wrote the original post. The grim things I described – parasitoids, predation, epizootic diseases; the sometimes terrible ways that members of the same species treat each other; living on the edge of starvation, most offspring die before reproductive age – were once our problems, too. (Well, not parasitoids, but some pretty nasty parasites.) Being “in tune with nature,” as many modern-day Westerners idealize Indigenous people as being, would logically mean being part of this web of suffering. Which is why finding respite in nature seems so ironic to me.