There are peoples who have no word for nature in their language. The Inuit in Greenland, various original inhabitants of South America, therefore know no other reality than the reality of being in and with nature. The landscape that surrounds them is no different to them than what water is to the fish from the well-known joke: ‘Two young fish encounter another, older fish. “Good morning guys, how is the water today?” The two fish swim on. After a while one says to the other: ‘What the hell is water?”
According to the etymological dictionary of Van der Sijs kind in the Middle Ages an important philosophical and scientific concept for ‘the creative force, the natural laws, with many shades of meaning; natural law, course of things, nature, disposition, quality, creation, creative power.”
The creative meaning is derived from the Latin natus (born, created, predestined, grounded) and nasci (to be born, to be born). In modern Dutch, one meaning has supplanted all others: the landscape around us, unaltered by man. With this meaning, the separation between man and nature seems final.
Wilderness
In his view of reality, philosopher Baruch Spinoza may have brought together all the nuances of meaning: untouched nature as the creative force. The creative, divine, not concentrated in a human form but in nature, everywhere and scattered.
While the landscape is changing more and more drastically due to human activities, nature as a creative force has been completely replaced by the modern Dutch definition. With the decline of the pieces of unexplored nature, nature has become further and further away from us. Nature has become something to own. This completes the divorce. And forget the notion that we are nature too. Nature has become something we look at, from the landscape we have changed, that society of concrete; not very different from the way we look at a movie or painting.
Every now and then we drive there, for an outing. But we aren’t anymore. We are no longer the trees in the forest that protect us, the animals in that forest with whom we share our habitat or the river that provides us with food.
The big question is in which direction the word will evolve further – and what the consequences will be. Like a boomerang the other way, back to the sense where we might one day ask ourselves, “What the hell is water?” Or ahead of the current course, until nature can only be admired in a painting? Something that, according to a more repressed definition – the course of things – is also completely natural.