“Why do the Japanese think about nature so much?” I asked Miyazaki, who was preparing to eat a manta ray. “Don’t Americans think about nature?” he asked me. I considered. “Some do and some don’t.” But I was thinking, an amazing amount of us don’t, given our downward trends in outdoor time and visits to parks. “Well,” he mused. “In our culture, nature is part of our minds and bodies and philosophy. In our tradition, all things are relative to something else. In Western thought, all things are absolute.”
