Society, wrongly believing there is an abundance of nature, destroys more and more of it, and by this more and more harms our intellectual and emotional health. J. B. S. Haldane wrote:
We are all of us cut off from nature, and not only the town dwellers. It is perhaps important to remember something that we sometimes forget: that a field is as much a human product as a street. It is only on the seashore, on the moors, and in a few forests, that we see nature anything like what it was before man interfered with it. Yet if we are intellectually and emotionally cut off from nature, we suffer a loss which is hard to define. . . . (Quoted in The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 302.)
The color green easily fools us into believing that the world is full of nature. Sauntering across Nebraska on Amtrak in June, we saw nothing but green. Yet practically all of its landscape is a human product. Nebraska is a factory floor.
According to a credible estimate, at present only about half of the world’s land is unmarked by human activity. The part of this Saunterer that responds irritably to graffiti responds angrily to the defacing of nature, such as a road through a forest, a tire track in the desert, a. . . .
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For a brief biography of J. B. S. Haldane, click here.
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