Marching in a straight line
Humans make things in straight lines, with right angles, and clearly defined edges. We plant monocultures. We bend and prune plants into shapes that we think are more pleasing than their natural forms. We sweep the chaos into neat piles, we dust away the spider webs. And yet, when it comes to what we find visually beautiful, most of us will pick a wild view over the sight of a building, a road, or a regimented set of fields.
It’s not that what we do looks better, I think, it is that it looks different. It says ‘we were here’. Perhaps, long ago, when human settlements were few and the wilderness was vast, that meant something. These days we leave so little of the landscape unmeddled with, that the cry of ‘we were here’ seems a bit redundant.
We do it to ourselves, as well. The ideal human is groomed in such a way that they do not appear subject to nature. They are not hot, or sweaty, or windswept, there is no mud on them. They smell of chemicals – a sharp flavour that we’ve been taught to associate with cleanness. A sharp flavour often marketed to us as some kind of natural smell, which it most assuredly isn’t. And yet we spray on forest grove and pine and lemon. Or the vague illusion of them.
To be in a natural condition is to be primitive, or a barbarian – words we have used for centuries to denigrate and disempower people who don’t impose themselves on the landscape in the way we do.
We call our straight lines progress, even as they destroy eco systems. Our monocultures are good business policy, even though they are damaging the very things we depend on. We create horrible, depressing habitats for ourselves, even though we know we do better in greener spaces. Perhaps we are just afraid to admit that we are part of nature too, and that we need the natural world. We aren’t cleverer than a natural soil structure, or an underground fungi network, or the bees. It doesn’t matter how high we build or how much tarmac we put down, the mission to conquer nature remains a project of self harm.
