Exploring our relationship with nature sometimes creates a strange feeling and excites it. There may be moments when your senses show an exotic, fascinating and entirely new world. In other times, familiar and customary things are felt during this process, like standing up in the morning and hanging out with old friends. Why not? You are already wrapped up in the natural world; It was so since before your birth. Every day of your life you look at trees, plants, clouds and sunlight, you already know what they are and long ago you found ways to connect them.
Some of us define nature in quite similar ways: the existent material world that encompasses people and is free from human actions and civilization; mountains, trees, animals, rivers, etc., which are elements of the natural world. This is probably a valid definition that many of us can agree on. In common use, everything that lives separately from nature is everything in and around civilization we build.
Now let's take a closer look. First, notice how our broader definition includes a fundamental distinction between humanity and the rest of the world. It's like drawing a kind of line on kumun, suggesting that everything on "us" is human, everything on the other side is "nature". But can we really do that? Where did you draw the line exactly? If you have a garden, is it part of nature? When you are not interested in the same garden that is part of nature for a few months, does all these local plants begin to come out of the streets? What about a deserted beach? How will the beach change if someone builds a small club on one end? What if the club is a high-rise hotel? Is the beach still part of nature?
When we look at plants and animals we encounter the same kind of questions. Are pets and dogs we regard as pets part of nature? What about the rambling cows? What should the antelope and the bison in the grassy fields look like? Does nature include all the pigeons in the city? Whales? Elephants? Bloody bears? All these organisms are increasingly dependent on human protection for their lives. Are they still part of nature? Now take a look at your own body. You are dependent on an extraordinary number of other species to stay healthy and alive. Consider other organisms that feed them, beyond the plants and animals that feed you by providing food directly. We need millions of tiny beings to protect the land that keeps the plants alive and there are millions more to help grind everything you eat in your own digestive system. We provide you with clean water, we need natural systems for plants to take oxygen in the air, insects to polish the products you eat, and organisms to recycle the waste of our bodies. The closer we look to ourselves and the rest of the world, the more difficult it is to draw the so-called lines.
The question of "What is nature?" Has become meaningless to many people who are the residents of this world. Most of the people living closer to nature than us could not perceive that people are being separated from the living environments. According to their view, the world is a gigantic network of people, which is represented by a multitude of human beings, a single shore. Although we have a unique place here, our slaughter is ultimately no more important than the others. Here are some of them how they describe their relationship with nature:
Give us the earth, our healer and our source of inspiration.
(Robbie Niquanicappo, Cree Indians, Quebec)
We do not think of ourselves as the protectors of the earth, and the earth is not only earth and rock, but for us. Create all; all the land, the water and the air and everywhere where life is, including people. All things are related and connected in the Land of Dreams.
(Pauline Gordon, Bunjalung Tribe, Australia)
The most beautiful thing I learned from the Lakota Indians is 'mitakuye oyasin': all my relatives. When they said that, the direction told me was very beautiful. It is so comprehensive, because everybody who comes to the world, even those who do not come in, includes all the two spiders, the four spiders, the birds, the animals, the stones and everything else that is here today. The trees, the plants, the mountains, the Sun, the Moon, the stars, and all who are born.
(Janet McCloud - Tulalip Indians, Washington)