In New York City, everything you see and touch was created or put in place by human hands. Every slab of concrete was carefully poured into delimited molds, every brick laid and mortared in methodical succession, every square inch of facade planned in architectural sketches and brought to life by union boys working their 20th hour of overtime this week. Sometimes this fact is less obvious—on a jaunt around Central Park, you might feel a calm connection with nature, an escape from the human-dominated city life. And yet, every dip, hill, and lake was created from the below-ground up, every tree and shrub transplanted into the ground in an arrangement which balances aesthetic pleasure with the plausible appearance of wilderness. In this comprehensively intentional world, everything was created, and everything can be destroyed. We are masters of this world of our making.
But this environment, and this mindset, are not the only options.
My trimonthly commute homeward starts with a Metro North to Grand Central, followed by two flights to Anchorage, and ends with a four-and-a-half-hour drive (four, if you have the good fortune to not get stuck behind an RV) from Anchorage to Homer. An hour in, as you round Turnagain Arm and enter the Kenai Peninsula, the Chugach Mountains emerge, towering on both sides above the two-lane “highway” that snakes through the valley between them. From afar, stealing glances at the mountains (but not for so long your car veers off the road,) they look to be covered in patchy shrubs and grasses which give way to melting patches of snow and variably metamorphosed rock. As you get closer, you realize that what looked like grasses and shrubbery are in fact fifty-foot-tall spruce trees, and your stomach turns a bit as the sheer size of the mountains sets in. If your gaze lingers too long, the sight and the ensuing thoughts prove so distracting that your car threatens to drift over the median. It’s better to take advantage of one of the many scenic roadside parking lots, marked 1,000 feet in advance by signs. The mountains, and other immense natural geographic features, instill a profound humility. We didn’t build the mountains, and even if we wanted to, we couldn’t get rid of them. They are brute fact — never conquered, only worked around. They are massive and powerful, and you are small and weak, and there is nothing in the world you can do about it.
Working in tourism during the summers, I’ve increasingly noticed that visitors here have a hard time understanding the intractability of natural phenomena. One example: many areas of Kachemak Bay are only accessible during particular portions of the tidal cycle, and therefore only during particular times of day. When I inform would-be water taxi customers of this fact, that they cannot go to the Halibut Cove East Public Use Cabin they’ve rented at exactly the time they wanted, and are going to have to go a few hours later, very-sorry-but-there’s-really-no-way-around-it, many respond with a brief silent bewilderment followed by a protracted explanation of why that just won’t do. “But that’s when we’re coming into Homer, and we can’t come down earlier, because we’re coming down from Palmer the previous day, and we have tickets to the Alaska Aviation Museum that we need to go to in the morning, so we really just HAVE to go in the early evening.” I’d explain it again, in a little more detail, that “no, really, we truly cannot get to the dock, it’s nothing but sharp, unfriendly rocks that will rip holes in the bottom of the boat”, and they’d eventually give a huffy “um, okay then.” As though the call was with the Bureau of Health and Human Services Medicaid Division, they seemed to think that I could make an exception for them if I felt enough sympathy, that the rule was a company policy rather than a fact of the world.
Another example: when the pilots would break the news to customers, fitted in company-issued shoe-goo-repaired thigh waders and rarin’ to go on their bear viewing trip, that the weather was unsafe to fly in, they’d insist that they be taken out anyway. “We paid for it; we deserve it.” They’d relent when we told them that we prefer our pilots go home to their families alive.
That feeling of powerlessness, of having no recourse in the face of the immensely powerful and indifferent mother nature, is distressing. But it’s a sort of distress that is ultimately psychologically productive. Powerlessness in the face of political or social power is a restriction of autonomy, the feeling of someone worsening your life to prioritize their interests over yours, but powerlessness in the face of nature is something different. A mountain doesn’t exert power over you. It simply is what it is, and does what it does. And you can deal with it and live with it however you choose, but its existence is ineludible. It’s easy, and dangerous, to get lost in the hubris of consciousness. The mountains serve as an ever-present physical reminder of your limits as an individual body and of our limits as a species. We did not make this world, and while we are always entangled with it, we are not its masters.
But while the mountains and the oceans are powerful and unchangeable, that doesn’t make them unchanging. They are, in fact, changing all the time. Hosts of flora and fauna proliferate and die off with the passing of each new season, new debris is deposited and washed away every twelve point four hours by the high tide, even the magnitude of tidal cycles themselves ebbs and flows with lunar cycles. Living with nature is living with cyclicality and instability.
Too often, we view ourselves, apart from and superior to nature, as linear, stable, and entirely within our own control, mechanistic meat puppets controlled by rational brains in a vat. We are not. Our “rational” thought is always embodied, and our physicality is always imbued with meaning. Thinking is part and parcel with feeling, and the imagined existentially free “I” is not the master of either. We change and cycle in unpredictable and uncontrollable ways. The body not only keeps the score, it plays the game, and it doesn’t play it in the linear, stable, rational terms we unfairly demand of ourselves. Physical proximity to nature’s cyclicality and instability helps us acknowledge cyclicality and instability in ourselves, and give ourselves grace and forgiveness for this fundamental aspect of our lives.
This isn’t a weighty spiritual claim—it’s not that there’s something metaphysically significant about “connecting with nature.” The divide between nature and humanity only exists insofar as we have created and reified it. Living alongside natural cycles doesn’t give us greater insight into the harmonic resonances in the interrelatedness of all things. There is no such thing. Perhaps humility and gentleness towards ourselves as unstable, nonlinear, and often irrational beings is just as valuable.