And we are all together

Why we are going about deconstructing our relationship to nature all wrong.

"We often forget that we are nature. Nature is not something separate from us. So when we say that we have lost our connection to nature, we have lost our connection to ourselves." -Andy Goldsworthy        

Today is Earth Day. What does that mean? To some it means a moment to bask in the wonders of mountains, oceans, rivers, animals, plants, and any other part of the Earth's ecosystem (except for humans, of course). To others it is a time to be conscious of the effects humanity has on the environment and what we can do to remediate them. To me it means a little bit of both. And the second concept is one that usually leaves me with a disconcerting sense of impotence and guilt.

In general, the conversation tends to revolve around these "opposites": humans vs. nature. The other in desperate need of protection from the one. But we forget that difference does not mean disconnection. And the answer seems to be anchored in a concept that has become mainstream, although maybe a bit misused to our own disadvantage.

Reclaiming deconstruction

At the center of being woke, and so acquiring acceptance in certain cultural and social circles, there is a process usually referred to as deconstruction. Although the term was coined by Derrida in the 1960s, today it has evolved to mean a constant questioning of our own privileges and generally accepted truths to uncover comfortable biases that might obscure the broader sense that other perspectives can give us. This is a particularly difficult and painful exercise, because it seems to strip us of what we had imagined to be our individual and very personal self and it can sometimes leave us with a sense of disorientation and incredible loss. Our relationship to nature is one of those concepts that had been historically taken for granted and that has now been harrowingly, but rightfully, put through the deconstruction lens.

We certainly need to break down how our relationship to nature was built. Where and how an idea of unrestricted, everlasting plentifulness comes from. It could be that evolution made us first concerned with our own survival through consumption, then able to go beyond fulfillment and into overuse of natural resources, and only now conscious of this historic exchange and the urgent need to change it. My point in reclaiming this deconstruction as an identity building strategy is that our current take on it is incomplete. According to Derrida himself, the journey can't stop at this reconsideration. Just performing an exercise of dismantling this unsustainable notion can leave us feeling impotent, remorseful, and maybe even hopeless. I know it has had that effect in me.

An invitation to reconstruction

The invitation is to reconstruct after deconstruction. That in understanding the scarcity and abundance of natural systems, concepts both irreconcilable and indissociable, we also grasp them in their complexity. That humans as part of nature are only one of those differences that, within their opposition to every component of our planet's ecosystem, reconstructs what Earth actually is.

So, on this year's Earth Day let us not forget that, as Carl Sagan said, "the cosmos is within us". Let us remember that we are the Earth and the Earth is us. That our planetary identity is built through the conjunction of all those differences that together forge us. Let us travel from inherited construction to painful deconstruction and into inspiring reconstruction in the quest for a renewed relationship with nature and with ourselves.