For millennia, humans existed in harmony with the natural world. Our early days were spent hunting game, collecting berries, fishing, and gathering with family in the caves, huts, and teepees that were home. Then, nature was our life and our livelihood. Like a caring mother, the forests, oceans, grasslands, and mountains nurtured us in our infancy: as apes, then homo habilis, homo erectus, and eventually as homo sapiens.
Early religions and belief systems — shamanism, paganism, druidism — reflect our reverence for nature. In Shamanistic tradition, all aspects of the living world are believed to be imbued with spirit: trees are not just physical beings, but wise, old, souls; animals, rocks, mountains, rivers, and wind are spiritual entities in and of themselves. Mother Earth and Father Sky feature in Paganism, intertwining divinity with the natural world. Similarly, “mother Earth” is personified in Greek mythology by the deity Gaia. She is one of, if not the most powerful deity of Greek mythology, accredited with creating the entire planet as we know it.
By their very nature, gods are the culminations of human’s collective psyche: while the Christian entity “God” embodies hope in the face of death and the absurd, Satan is the avatar of our fears — physical, mental, and spiritual anguish. Similar themes are present among many other religions and their deities — Elpis, Spes, Chaac, the very existence of heaven and hell. Rain gods became synonymous with gods of prosperity (in many early American cultures), sun gods synonymous with life itself. Years ago, these gods were emblematic of how we feared nature, revered it, loved it, imbued it with our deepest hopes, most unattainable dreams. They are emblematic of our deep connection with and respect for nature.
Eventually, bows and arrows gave way to shotguns and bullets, our huts and teepees were replaced by castles and stone houses, our nomadic societies became villages, towns, cities, states, and, at last, our old gods fell to the wayside. No longer were Gaia and Chaac relevant; in the construction of our stone walls and cobbled streets, we had already begun to erect barriers between ourselves and nature. The advent of technology had somehow deceived us; we no longer thought ourselves a part of nature, but rather a part of “civilization”. By framing civilization and nature as diametrically opposed forces, we made the natural world an enemy of humanity, an enemy of progress. We began to view nature as something to be conquered rather than coexisted with. We destroyed large swaths of forests, polluted air, and dumped trash in oceans and rivers. The health of the environment took a backseat to gaining capital, and naturally, with the birth of these new interests came the birth of new gods.
Gods are representations of the collective dreams and thoughts of a population, and a new dream has risen to dominance over the centuries: the dream of capital. Instead of worship of the gentle Earth goddess Gaia or the nature-centric beliefs of Shamanism, the dominant religion of the modern world has begun to shift towards capital.
We are paid ritualistically and we pay others ritualistically. We pray for riches just as we used to pray for the rain and the sun. Rags to riches, meritocracy, the American Dream: these ideas are core tenets of capitalist mythology. We aspire to be our own Carnegies, Rockefellers, and Vanderbilts; we aspire to godhood ourselves (an impossibility, previously). And in the crossfire of our ill-fated ambitions is the environment: the rivers, streams, forests and grasslands we once called home.
And as we view the world through the lens of money and profit, the natural world seems to be the most valuable as a monetary resource. It is no wonder, then, that the health of the environment always comes second to corporate interests. At the hands of new gods, Mother Earth lays dying and Father Sky is choked with pollution. They have become collateral damage in our quest for money, power, and wisdom.
But, paradoxically, as we search for wisdom by compromising nature, we grow farther and farther from it. Nature, according to the Greater Good Science Center, is a “potent elixir” for happiness. Patients in hospital rooms with flowers reported less fatigue and less need for painkillers than their flowerless counterparts; even seeing photographs of the natural world accelerates cognitive function and recovery. In other words, nature is a source of fulfillment and content that cannot be replaced by a hospital’s drugs, a full bank account, or corporate success.
In many ways, human pursuit of progress has harmed us. Cities, industry and corporations — bastions of “progress” — have only dragged us away from nature, away from our origins, and, consequently away from true fulfillment. In the twenty-first century, the only way to advance as a species may be to look back into our history, to rediscover Gaia and Chaac and Inti and remember the times where we appreciated nature to the point of worship. Maybe there, in our humble, primitive origins will we find the meaning humanity has forgotten.
