Running Away from Nature

It is obvious we no longer have the same quality relationship with nature that we used to. In fact, humans have been trying to distance themselves from dirty, savage, ugly nature since man discovered he might actually be different than the beasts he encountered—the beasts could easily dominate and eat.

One primary reason why man opposed Darwin’s theories so vehemently is that humans abhorred the idea that we might be related to such disgusting beasts as apes. They saw utterly no correlation with such animals: they were stupid, they defecated in the woods, they didn’t wear clothes, they were ugly, and of course, the most important reason, they were not God’s chosen animal. (Just for the record, I do not wholeheartedly believe in Darwin’s theories myself, but not because I find animals disgusting.)

Before Darwin’s theories swept the human world, humans never even considered the idea we descended from anything at all in nature. It seemed we were obviously “connected” in some way—we were physically related to other mammals, we had two eyes, a head, two arms, teeth, etc. but we were so radically different in spirit, intelligence (so we thought) and other obvious things we would be fine, if not better off, to distance ourselves from any of that dirty stuff we call “nature.”

Western man’s concerted effort to separate himself from nature traces back to the Enlightenment era, when thinkers like René Descartes proclaimed “Cogito, ergo sum” (”I think, therefore I am”), positioning human reason as supreme and distinct from the mechanistic, soulless world of animals and the natural environment. This dualism framed nature as a resource to be conquered through science and industry, culminating in the Industrial Revolution’s factories, urban sprawl, and exploitation of resources. Religious influences, particularly Judeo-Christian interpretations of Genesis—where man is granted “dominion” over the earth—further justified subjugation, viewing wilderness as chaotic and in need of taming. By the 19th century, Romanticism briefly pushed back with ideals of sublime nature, but Victorian hygiene movements and urbanization accelerated the divide, associating rural life with backwardness and disease while celebrating sanitized, controlled city environments.

In stark contrast, indigenous peoples, particularly Native Americans, have long embodied a profound interconnectedness with nature, seeing themselves not as dominators but as integral threads in the web of life. Tribes like the Lakota viewed the earth as a living mother—Wakȟáŋ Tȟáŋka’s creation—where humans, animals, plants, and elements share kinship and reciprocal responsibilities. The Navajo (Diné) concept of hózhó emphasizes harmony and balance with the natural world, guiding daily life through ceremonies that honour the land’s cycles. For many Plains nations, the buffalo was not mere prey but a sacred relative providing sustenance, clothing, and spiritual lessons.

This worldview rejects hierarchy; as Black Elk famously expressed, “All things are our relatives; what we do to everything, we do to ourselves.” Such perspectives foster stewardship over exploitation, with rituals and oral traditions reinforcing that human well-being depends on nature’s health, not its conquest. So, we are not ALL running away from nature—many indigenous cultures remain deeply rooted, offering a counter-narrative to Western detachment.

That said, the modern world has essentially been homogenized into this technocentric blob of “nature be damned” mindset. This reminds me of the central theme in C.S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength where the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E.) embodies a sinister technocratic agenda to eradicate organic life in favour of sterile, controlled artificiality. The organization’s leaders seek to “cleanse” the world of its messy vitality, replacing it with mechanical perfection. As one character, Filostrato, declares in pursuit of this vision: “We want to get rid of the bugs . . . the whole insect nuisance.”

Jump to 2025 and we see more and more focus on the nature-less human existence. Technology is rampant, intertwined in everyone’s life beyond any true reason. The mass of people avoid nature like it is the plague. Most people I know are terrified of insects, snakes, lizards and dirt as well as small, annoying and scary animals like squirrels, rats, opossums and skunks. People are less and less “connected” to their bodily functions, having antiseptic rooms to relieve themselves of bodily wastes, running to the doctor if they have a tiny blemish on their skin, avoiding dealing with any bodily malfunction and leaving all that up to “experts.” I could go on and on with this, but I am sure you get the picture. And of course the medical focus now is to extend life with no end, to create artificial organs, implant brains with faster thinking micro chips, and essentially do away with organic humanism—all manmade, all artificial, all better than the original God-made version.

Sure, there are exceptions to this cosmic escape—just as there are outliers in any bell curve of human behaviour. And the exceptions are indeed extreme: recently, there has been a huge emphasis on getting out into nature, hiking, camping, canoeing and the like. But statistically, they are the exception, and these activities are not the “norm”—people should be engaging with nature naturally (no pun intended), not through a concerted effort to bring something missing back into awareness. Although that isn’t a bad thing, the concern is how natural it is beginning to be to just forget nature even exists.

A wise friend recently pointed out that nearly everything we touch, see, or even hear, these days is man-made—crafted by human hands or machines, not born of God’s wild creation. Sure, a fine table made of wood is still made of the product of nature, a tree, but even that is becoming less and less common. Even though anyone could make the argument that everything has its origin in nature, even a cell phone, that really isn’t the point. And even in the world of “man made things” there is a distinction between things made by a person’s hands, and things made by machines.

But think about this for a minute. Very few things we come in contact with in our daily lives are not man-made. Very little in our awareness is nature. Sure, we drive down a tree-lined street, we look out our window onto our lawn, we see the horizon consisting of tree tops, and we bite into a succulent orange (can you say, “G, M, O”?) Yes, it isn’t yet all gone, but one day it probably will be. As C.S. Lewis so eloquently proclaimed in That Hideous Strength, if the devil had his way, all of God’s creation would disappear.

I foresee a day when humans never come in contact with nature, living in human-built structures of steel and glass, eating laser-printed food, going through their day, never setting their eyes on all that we currently take for granted. That image is not too difficult to conjure up, we are well on our way to accomplishing it with Smart Cities, which include, for one example, vertical farming towers that seal inhabitants from soil and seasons. Take for example Saudi Arabia’s The Line—a 170-kilometer mirrored megastructure in the desert enclosing 9 million residents in a climate-controlled linear city with no external vistas, no wildlife, and artificial everything from hydroponic greens to simulated skies.

In this flight from the feral, we shrews must claw back to the wild’s wisdom, lest we awaken in a soulless cage of our own making—starved of the very dirt that birthed our souls, and blind to the truth that without nature’s untamed pulse, humanity withers into mere code.