We Do Not See Nature With Our Eyes, But With Our Understandings And Our Hearts

Every night is sealed with the hope of waking up fresh the next day to see the beauty around. Our eyes would not be regarded so special without it seeing the beauty of things that nature has gifted us. As a child looks at the wide sea, coloured flowers, mountain ranges, animals, and plants with bliss and wonder, man does not do; especially when he grows up. Humans’ relationship with nature has undoubtedly been one of contention and turmoil; especially in the recent years. The manner in which we treat and define this living poem, the nature, has garnered increased attention in the past four decades. Is it possible to live in harmony with the nature? Are humans a part of, or apart from nature? With human interference with nature, do we intend to mean that nature can no longer be ‘natural’? These are some of the recurring questions which artists have grappled in literature as well as films.

For what is nature? Nature is no great mother who has borne us. She is our creation. It is our brain that she quickens to life. Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depend on the arts that have influenced us. To look at a thing is very different from seeing a thing. One does not see anything until one sees its beauty. Then, and only then, does it come into existence.

To stand and support for nature against all odds caused by mankind has come ecocriticism — critically voicing for the ecosystems. Ecocriticism is commonly defined as “the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment”. As one of the newest forms of literary criticism to emerge at the end of the twentieth century, ecocriticism was formalized as a literary theory in the late 1970s amidst concerns of human-induced environmental degradation, which has forced human, especially artists, to re-evaluate their relationship with nature. Ecocriticism has since grown in areas previously untouched by literary theory. However, despite significant development within the last thirty years, ecocriticism still exhibits great potential for further growth and cultivation.

William Rueckert, the first to coin the term ‘ecocriticism’ in his essay “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism” (originally published in 1978), but by no means the first ecocritic, developed this landmark literary theory as a means to “experiment with the application of ecology and ecological concepts to the study of literature”. Ecocriticism emphasizes that all living entities exist not only in a reciprocal relationship with each other, but with their nonliving environment as well. Man need to occupy nature’s place and multiply prospects have caused a threat to nature’s place. The issue of place exists for a long time, and is so high that it needs immediate attention. This is seen in a significant role in Wordsworth’s writings on the Lake District to such a great extent that it has allowed critics such as Jonathan Bate to claim that not only is Wordsworth a poet attempting to foreground his environment, but that the extent to which he does this, and the ethical slant with which he handles the portrayal of the land, allows us to view and regard him as “one of the begetters of environmentalism”. Hardy’s Wessex is another prime example of a place, that too complete with a map, which shows how the author is “intensely responsive to the natural world and human relations with that world”. Wessex is quite famously featured in the novel Far From the Madding Crowd, where, in the novel’s preface, Hardy describes it as a “partly real, partly dream-country”.

The application of ecocriticism to other artistic media, film in particular, has been lacking as more emphasis is given to written texts. “Rarely has cinema in general been viewed through an ecocritical lens, nor has there been much evidence in the main venues of ecocriticism of the sustained application of ecocritical strategies to film and cinema studies”. However, even though it is apparent that with critics such as Ivakhiv giving prominence to the use of ecocritical principals in studying filmic texts, the range of films that have been selected for such an analysis has been narrow, with critics concentrating mostly on films that “portray nature and its defenders positively”. Films such as Gorillas in the Mist (Apted), Never Cry Wolf (Ballard) and Erin Brockovich (Soderbergh) fit such a description. When representing the environment on film, it appears that what concerns the ecocritic is not only the issue of whether or not the environment is given as much importance as the human characters, but also the issue of the authenticity of the environment that is being represented on film. All films, fiction or non-fiction, occur in some place, with some setting. Some films choose to, or are able to, use the real location depicted in the film, such as the Amazon jungle in Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo. Nature is symbolized with women: several adjectives denoting nature are ideal and open reference made to women. For instance, ‘Mother Earth’, ‘virgin forest’, ‘rape of the land’ etc. are references which do little in sealing the fissure between humans and humans, and between humans and nature, are part of the cause of the mutual subordination of women and nature. These phrases, as Berman suggests, are very languages used by many environmentalists who are fighting for socio-ecological change.

Berman explores the harm inherent in the use of the ‘rape’ metaphor that accompanies environmental discourse by pointing out that if it is true that humans tend to actualize the symbols they create and use, then “we see that the rape metaphor sets up the exploitation of Nature as akin to the rape of a woman. If metaphors are not just arbitrary language use, but a reflection of our physical, cultural and social realities which in turn structure our activities, the use of the rape metaphor has grave implications”. The metaphor ‘Mother Earth, ’ and ‘Mother Nature’ are best examples of ecofeminism: in a world of patriarchal culture, the mother is the one who satisfies all our needs, takes away waste, cleans and feeds us without any cost to us. “While it is true that we have a certain dependence on our mother, we also have many expectations — it is unlikely that your mother will hurt you”. Basing her argument on similar principles, Louise Westling, a prominent ecofeminist, opines that “as we continue to feminize nature and imagine ourselves apart from the biota, we will continue to enable the ‘heroic’ destruction of the planet, even as we lament the process and try to erase or deny our complicity in it, ” a point which is applicable to human-nature relationships both in the real world and in literature. In challenging texts which, intentionally or not, uphold androcentric values whereby men are above both women and nature, ecofeminists aim to favour narratives in which the cultural and biological diversity that sustains life is celebrated; women’s biological specificity is recognized; and where women are seen, not as objects of nature, but as both subjects and creators of history. Ecostudies takes the position that all life exists as an interconnected web; with each life form occupying a node on the web — an indication that we cannot “separate humans from the natural environment”. In other words, humans are seen as mere extensions of the natural environment and there is no ontological difference between the two. Said thus, it is apparent that nature must be protected and that humans must live in harmony with nature. In this interconnected web of life, there exists no hierarchy — life is equal; and no life is more important than the other. Oh, yes, those trees! How terrible what they did with the trees. Because, the cottonwood suckles like a baby. Suckles on the mother water running under the ground. A cottonwood will talk to the mother water and tell her what humanbeings are doing. But then these men came and they began digging up the cottonwoods and moving them here and there for a terrible purpose.

Man is bent on using nature as the sole purpose of humanity — as a cultural expansion. The relationship between morality and nature is observed ages back. Ralph Waldo Emerson states, that which once existed in intellect as pure law, has now taken body as Nature. We can use nature as a convenient standard, and the metre of our rise and fall, when man curses, nature still testifies to truth and love.