Elegant Simplicity by Satish Kumar

Author:Satish Kumar
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New Society Publishers
Published: 2018-04-29T04:00:00+00:00

What would the world be, once bereft

of wet and of wilderness? Let them be left,

O let them be left, wilderness and wet;

Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

And Wordsworth wrote:

I wondered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o’er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

If there were no daffodils, there would be no Wordsworth. He was an ecoliterate poet par excellence.

All great art and literature comes from ecoliterate artists. Van Gogh sat in front of sunflowers and became an ecoartist. If there were no sunflowers, there would be no Van Gogh. People seldom value real sunflowers, they only think of Van Gogh in terms of the market value of his paintings that sell for 40 million dollars or more. They go to museums, but they have no time to sit in front of a living sunflower and contemplate Nature.

Monet created a garden so that he could paint water lilies, so that when he painted he could see Nature, closely, intimately, in detail. Monet observed the lilies hour by hour and day by day. Art and poetry are meditations on Nature.

Darwin studied earthworms, immersing himself in Nature, and from close observation of Nature developed the theory of evolution. He believed that we have come from Nature and we are Nature. Darwin’s fundamental notion has been forgotten and often misinterpreted as “survival of the fittest.” Nowadays in many universities, Nature has been reduced to an object of academic study. The old science tells us that Nature is red in tooth and claw. Scientists such as Francis Bacon advocated that we should manipulate and conquer Nature, and steal her secrets rather than trust her. Fortunately, the world of science is waking up, and new science sees unity between humans and Nature. Scientists such as James Lovelock and Lynne Margulis who have codeveloped the science of Gaia believe that the Earth is a selfregulating benign system and it is our responsibility to learn to live in harmony with the Earth rather than exploit her.

In general, universities educate their students to be specialists; they have lost sight of the big picture. University graduates are half-educated. Being half-educated is worse than being uneducated. They are like half-baked bread. They have book knowledge but very little experience of Nature, which is the source of all life. Universities need a new pedagogy founded on the conviction that we need to learn about Nature and from Nature. We need to be humble, we need to create a Nature-centered education and an Earthcentered worldview.

We human beings are Nature. Nature in Latin means “birth.” When a mother is about to give birth to a baby, she is given a prenatal check. Natal and Nature come from the same root. We humans are born, are we not? How can we say that Nature is only out there, or that trees, birds, bees, fruit, grass, rivers, and mountains are Nature but we humans are not?

First we separate ourselves from Nature, and then we think that humans are superior to Nature.

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