Notes on Landscape and Nature

"I am nature. Nature is me. What I create is what I must create. That I create

is fundamental. I am both anonymous and very precious since I belong to

all growth which is life. Therefore I must grow well. What I shape I must shape

well."

— Jack Shadbolt

If current popular scientific theories are correct, we are working with the same exact amount of matter that this solar system was originally created with. It is this very matter that constitutes what we currently call Nature1. The very idea of Nature as a human construct is wrought with problematics, however. It seems that the only way we can come to understand Nature is to understand culture. They are inextricably linked. This nature-culture binary has become one of the biggest binaries in modern science. French sociologist and anthropologist Bruno Latour regarded it as a defining point of modern life (Keskitalo). Timothy Morton, whose work focuses on philosophy, environment, and the coexistence of humans and non-humans with explicit relation to race and gender, suggests we rid ourselves of Nature altogether. He presents Nature as a “transcendental term in a material mask” (Morton 14). He argues that, “One of the ideas that inhibits genuinely ecological politics, ethics, philosophy, and art is the idea of Nature itself” (The Ecological Thought 14). Morton (Thinking Ecology 2009) reminds us of the interdependence theorem which tells us that all life forms are made of other life forms (theory of symbiosis) and all life forms come from other life forms (evolution). He then suggests that we begin to understand ecology in its totality as a mesh of interconnected matter/life forms where we are unable to fathom where it might begin or end, where there are no rigid boundaries between life and death, no real differentiation between species, and above all, there is no centre. He imagines all life forms as strange strangers mucking about in this unimaginably expansive ecological goo. It is intimate and awkward and queer — not unlike my own work, ha.

I am unsure that humans will ever be able to resolve our relationship with Nature, certainly not as a society. As an individual, I am continually grappling with all of my relationships, human and non, and forever in search of my own words to describe what I merely intuit. I quite like the suggestion of Poet Robert Bringhurst who looks to Taoist philosophy as he comes to terms with the idea of Nature:

“An old Chinese term for nature or the wild is zìrán, which means ‘just like itself’ or ‘that’s the way it is.’ There is a passage in the Dào Dé Jing, the classic of Láo Sim that says, rén fá dì, dì fá dào, dào fá zìrán: “humans align themselves with the earth; Earth aligns itself with the sky; the sky aligns itself with theTao; the Tao aligns itself with nature” — or, “the Tao aligns with being what it is.” (Bringhurst 17).

Just imagine — this matter, this energy, this nature, this ecological goo — all that is —never created or destroyed. It is transformed endlessly (Cohen 2022), as is everything within ecology, as is my own body — all of us continually transforming and co-evolving with all that is.

Through this ever evolving body, I experience the world in all its physicality, and am sensitive to its energies because I am a part of it. I am particularly drawn to wetland environments, because they have a similar resonance to the place in which I was born, Lake of the Woods and its abundant wetlands. For this reason, wherever I travel to, I somehow find myself resonating with the wetlands of that area. Wetlands are the places I can be fully ‘alone’ yet never feel lonely. Rather, I feel embraced, held, sung to … loved. My experiences in diverse wetlands have taught me that it is not necessarily a specific place that makes me feel at home. Instead, it is the cumulative orchestral rhythms and vibrations of various milieus (Grosz 2019).