2024-11-07
(This is entry 30 of #100DaysToOffload)
Humans, in cities at least, feel themselves external, privative of nature. Not just nature as in the green stuff; the natural order. A hunter-gatherer is a part of nature, and living with it; he cannot exhaust or destroy it; he knows that he hunts as an animal hunts, and as a part of the natural ecosystem. A sports hunter can exhaust and destroy nature; his weapons are unnatural and not his own; he is an intrusion on the system. He can destroy it if unmanaged.
I am considering for myself the case of eating snails. If they were farmed and then bought (in plastic packaging) from a shop, I might know it is unnatural. However, here I can consider myself a part of the natural order, albeit in an unnatural ecosystem. My extent will be at most forty snails a week, which is a meagre number. I have killed hundreds in a day before and still made no outsized impact. The unnatural portion is in the keeping, and in the processing. The joy of the allotment I suppose is that, for a small portion of land, I am pastoral; I am a part of nature. The system around it - the rent payment, the allotment-holding laws of the UK - and my life around it - computers, data, fictional database languages, societal abstractions - are all unnatural. In their artifice, I know I am a modern man. I go to the allotment, and cannot *quite* shed this feeling of being an imposition. Yet: I know I am the field-worker here; I know, for this small lot of land, I am, within great confines, in nature. I am no imposition.
Implicit is that natural is morally good. Of course, unpleasantries occur in nature too. The lion tears apart the gazelle, etc. I am beginning to think what is immoral is the modern human condition. Intensive industry, specialisation, abstraction, intermediation. Even the words used point to the said idea: we have so thoroughly incorporated the polysyllabic words of industry and science, that are lengthy and unwieldy. In contrast, are the traditional words: the emmers and spelts and porks of yore.