What nature tells us and cities make us forget
Posted By admin on January 11, 2009
My thought today, and what will be my first blog post I guess, will not be an essay, but just a half formulated thought which I put out their, perhaps to season or ferment into something of more value later, is about nature, urbanization, and God.
An old book, written long before Thoreau had his revelations in the woods, talks about seeing and understanding God through the nature He created. In some ways at least, even the most staunch scientific positivist, who puts all their faith in the natural world, is moved with awe the more nature is experienced and contemplated. In nature, there is beauty, and a breath catching, perspective granting connection with something else – something outside of us, but very personal.
In nature (here I’m imagining the woods in New England, but imagine what you will) we witness incredible breadth and diversity, harmony with individuality, and complexity with commonality. We see competition, yet community, and always innovation, and always beauty, but in many varied forms. We see perfection in use of resources, details thought through, a lack of anxiety, with constant strife for survival of self and clan. We see that each terrain is a poem, each season a movement, and each species an instrument, each creature a note.
But aside from grandiose scenes from The Blue Planet or National Geographic, there is much in the mundane to see -the simple realities, causes and effects, partnerships between our work and the environment in which we live, dependence on sun and rain and soil, which is seen in any agricultural community, like the farmer who lives next door to us in our small, Swiss community. 
There are aspects to life confusing to city dwellers, which are easy to understand for those in contact with God’s creation, because they see and understand this implicitly each day, as they work in soil and sun.
But on this planet, we are moving to the city. And in big numbers. 1 billion in 1960, 3 billion in 1985, and 4 billion by 2017, according to the World Urbanization Report . We live not only in houses that we made, houses made with materials we’ve made. We see nature, that we’ve gather and shipped to designated plots, books, or channels. We eat of nature that we’ve processed or modified. We enjoy nature, as we’ve planned it in our parks (if we’re in the minority of well planned cities with such features, though most cities do not have well planned parks). We change the terrain, and modify it, and control each facet which conflicts with a controlled well planned design. Now, to clarify, I’m certainly not saying that we’re to let nature run it’s course and do what it wishes with us and we just deal with it . . .cause it’s ‘natural’. Floods and monsoons and tidal waves should be planned for, warned against, and managed. Such a fatalistic approach ends up in the tragedies in Indonesia and Pakistan, which were horrific, but the worst aspects of which could have been avoided. No, I’m talking in general about what we loose in the general urbanization trend. So, my thought today is not about the danger of urbanization in terms of economics, environmental impact, social changes, or family or cultural impacts, but urbanization in terms of the subtle yet damning innuendo that all around me, everything that is, or that I need, man has himself created it. That I or my fellow man has authored or created or improved upon things to such a degree that the mystery, inspiration, or created-ness disappears, that in my own eyes, I am sufficient, and I create the world around me to say what I want it to say, and ignore what since it came into existence, creation has been crying out – that there is more to this world than simply me – that man is not the center, that there are some wonderful truths which we may not know, but that we can know. As we move into the cities, and the virtual world, which is even more of a world of our own creating, what are we at risk of missing?
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