Defining nature as separate from people perpetuates troubled relationship with the natural world, say campaigners
It was last year, during a conference at the Eden Project, the botanic garden and conservation centre in Cornwall, that Frieda Gormley first heard the dictionary definition of nature.
“Everyone in the room was really shocked and quite saddened by it,” Gormley said. “It got me thinking: if people feel we’re separate from nature, how can we really consider nature in our actions? This definition and worldview is just so much to do with the crisis that we’re in.” “It started a journey for us, beyond how are we going to actually create this campaign, a personal discovery of how did we become so separate, and how can we start to return to our place within the realm of nature again?
“All these cultural factors, our brains soak them up like a sponge … and that has then exacerbated a sense of isolation, a sense of being atomised, isolated individuals adrift in the world,” Oliver said. Oliver’s analyses convinced Gormley and Mond Webb they were on the right track. But then they hit a stumbling block.
It seemed the campaigners’ goal was beyond reach. But then they noticed, buried behind the paywall of the OED and regarded as obsolete since 1873, a further definition of nature: “In a wider sense, the whole of the natural world, including humans and the cosmos.”The goalposts had shifted. Now, rather than convincing the OED’s lexicographers they should unilaterally change what nature means, all Gormley and Mond Webb had to do was persuade them to bring the more universal definition back to life.
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