This past week the IPCC released a significant new report on climate change. So, here’s another excerpt from that novel I keep sharing from—this time, the snippet is about the relationship between humanity and nature. It’s paid subscriber week, but this one is free to all because we all belong to the earth. If you want to upgrade your subscription, you’ll get to see my footnote. :)
Of rivers (de’fiumi)
This is what he used to believe: that nature was the mirror of the human body.1 That the rivers that sprang forth from the earth were just like the veins and arteries that branch and bend through the flesh. That lungs were the body’s ocean tides, rising and falling with its breathing, and bones its rocks and hills. That the body of man was, indeed, the world in miniature.
This is what he thought; what he was taught by men who got their learning out of books. Men who did not look closely. Who did not experiment and test. Who were made uncomfortable by questions to which they could not find the answer in Pliny or Aristotle.
Because while veins and arteries look like rivers and streams, they arise from the heart, whereas the waters of the earth arise not from one central location but come through the earth at an infinite variety of places. Too, the veins of the human body do not change course, but a river does, over time; whole lakes can vanish in the space of eons, rivers can alter their own flow, to say nothing of how humanity might change them.
If the earth were the mirror of humanity, she would possess a central heart and a pair of lungs, but instead the earth is breathing all the time, through an infinity of leaves, through the water evaporating off the surface of lakes and rivers, through the shudders of earthquakes and the releases of volcanoes. It is the moon that pulls the ocean tides, not the earth; and so in that case must it be said that both earth and moon are breathing? What then of the firmament itself?
True, the stones and soil might seem to form the bedrock of the earth’s body, but this too becomes an imprecise mirror, for our bones serve as a skeleton around which our muscles and sinew grow, whereas beneath the surface of the earth lie huge rivers, lakes and (he speculates) perhaps even a molten core of fire. Bones, muscles and sinew together serve to move the human body about, but the earth moves much more slowly, over such a space of time that he has not been able to satisfactorily calculate it.
Seeing all things of nature as endowed with their own inherent divinity makes him a heretic. Believing that the earth is not the mirror of humanity but an entity in herself…he does not know what this makes him. He calls himself a disciple of experience, he likes the sound of natural philosopher, but these do not express what he means.
This is what he wants to say:
If we only see the earth as a mirror of ourselves, then we never see the earth for itself.
Everything deserves to be recognized as an entity of its own, possessing its own sentience and agency.
(This list of everything would include but not be limited to: birds large and small, foxes, roses, lakes, fish, dolphins, bees, gnats, horses, dogs, cats, turtles, starfish, trees of all kinds, quartz and other stones, rivers, mice, snakes, vegetables, cows, donkeys, mules, bears, mountains, grasses, wildflowers.)
If the earth and everything upon her are living beings, then by what right do we use these beings solely for the profit of humanity?
This is what he would say, if he thought anyone would listen:
Nature is not our mirror. She is our home, our neighbor, our friend. Our teacher.
The earth is our mother.
If the earth is our mother, then all the creatures of nature become our siblings. We are related to and connected to everything.
What kind of person would wish ill upon his own brother? Who would use his sister for his own advantage?
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