214. I'M GOING FOR A WALK - Connecting and Disconnecting from Nature

I’m about to head out for a walk. A lovely National Trust property nearby. And I’m privileged enough to be a member. If you ignore the annual cost then you can pretend you get to visit all these places “for free”. I’m the same way with my local cinema. I pay a monthly fee to see “unlimited” movies, tricking myself into believing when I turn up and get any ticket I want that they are just giving them away. Another illusion afforded by financial privilege.

I don’t have to go as far as the National Trust place to have a lovely walk. Although I live in the depths of built-up suburbia, there are enough dog-walkers, cyclists and golfers in the surrounding area to have necessitated the development of a series of green and woody cycle paths behind all the houses and along the outskirts of a golf club. When walking them, if you ignore the occasional sighting of a golfer, you can pretend you aren’t in suburbia anymore and are on some rural footpath. They lead to a housing estate which was built around a small wood. The developers left a patch of woodland in the centre of the estate in homage to the site of natural beauty they once colonised, and as a place for dogs to run around. Again, if you squint your eyes a bit between the end of the cycle path and start of the woods, you can pretend you’re not ten minutes away from supermarkets, shops and unlimited cinema and make believe you’re somewhere deep in the heart of the countryside. Just make sure you open them properly to cross the busy main road that separates the street from nature.

Sometimes, of an evening, especially after a whole day spent indoors or at work, my wife and I will take a walk around the block to clear our heads. We don’t even pretend we’re not in the depths of suburbia in those moments. We comment on the houses we see, the front windows which, from the street, offer a glimpse into other people’s urban lives. But the fresh air, the trees and bushes along the pavement, the front gardens we pass, they all add to a sense of space and outdoors that life inside a building was lacking. We have a garden too - another privilege. That place is an oasis that allows us to keep one foot in nature while the rest of our leg stays locked in the city. Even on a cold day there is no denying the good that comes from a brief sit outside, watching newts and frogs in the pond, seeing birds in the trees, watching neighbour cats prowl across the lawn, looking for birds, frogs and newts…

My favourite city in the world is New York. Second would be London. The one I live closest to, Birmingham, has always been a good place to shop, but not a place I’ve ever truly loved. The reason is simple. New York has Central Park. London has Hyde Park. Both of them have lots of other, lesser, parks dotted around. Birmingham’s “pigeon park” in the centre of town has never quite offered the bucolic break life in the intensity of a city requires. You can never quite not see the cars and buildings. The air never entirely feels free of the city smog. Now Cannon Hill Park, on the outskirts of the city - that’s a peach. But too far to walk for the instant release offered by Central Park or Hyde Park. It’s not the sort of place office workers stroll to for five minutes of relief on a busy lunch-break. What makes New York and London so great is that within the metropolis, there remains a garden.

What has any of this to do with philosophy?

Maybe nothing. Maybe I am providing this week’s post as a break from philosophy; the way that going for a walk outside provides us with a break from modern urban life?

Or maybe everything. Maybe, as I grab my keys and fill a water bottle from the tap, ready for my walk to see rivers, lakes, geese and sheep, I am thinking about what exactly this deep human need to connect with nature might mean? After all, it has long been a feature of our existence for as long as we have had urban environments. Going for a walk. Clearing our heads. Escaping to the country. One of my favourite things about reading novels from the past - 1800s, 1900s - is the persistent idea of doctors prescribing sick patients with visiting the country, the seaside, or even another continent, for several months to “get better air” for their condition. Some days, when work feels too hard and ever-demanding, I daydream about such doctors, and a note given to my bosses telling them I have had to leave for three months in Italy to alleviate some ailment.

An obvious reading would be that our need for nature is an acknowledgement - conscious or unconscious - of the weirdness of our civilised state. A nod to the fact that we are merely animals with grand ideas about ourselves, but ultimately part of nature no matter how much we try to separate ourselves from it. But is that reading too obvious? Aristotle, after all, once claimed that stones fell to the ground when you let them go not because of gravity - which he didn’t know about - but because they wanted to return to where they came from. Perhaps there is some force - like gravity - drawing us into nature, not simply a longing for connection with our truer selves?

At the same time, I think of the things which always put me off nature. The flies, the spiders, the bugs. I walk through the gardens of this lovely National Trust property and get grossed out by the giant caterpillars I see devouring plant leaves. Their tubular bodies lurching and crawling hungrily somehow put in me the idea of parasites and bacteria eating away at my body and I walk quickly away. The walking boots I wear act as armour against the mud and puddles, separating my foot and ankle from the vile reality of what I am stepping in. On rainy days I cover myself in plastic to keep away the damp. On sunny days I slather myself in cream to ensure my flesh doesn’t burn. Once, walking in the same National Trust property to which I am now headed, we found a dead sheep laying, rotting, in a field. There is no flower bed without a few dead-headed stems. Rot and mulch is everywhere if you choose to stare too long. Insects crawling. Fungus growing. Nature, when you focus on it too much, is an endless churn of death and decay. A wasp picks up a spider and flies off with it to certain doom. A spider traps a fly in its sticky web. A beetle scuttles looking for lunch. A heron swoops down and carries off a baby duckling.

There is always a point when out in nature where nature gets too much. I wonder therefore if we like to connect to nature to both feel that link to where we have come from, evolutionarily speaking, but also to remind ourselves of why we constantly try to transcend it?

Last October an unnoticed leak in my home office, from a stopcock behind a bookcase, led to the grim discovery of mushrooms growing inside the house, on the carpet, where the water had pooled. I cannot explain the utter horror I felt seeing those fungal blooms inside the house. A reminder that our separation from the natural world is an illusion. That we put a lot of hidden effort into using materials and mechanics - heating and plumbing - to keep the natural world at bay, but if our guard is dropped for even a few days, nature will remind you that it was there all along. That the transcendence we pretend to have achieved is only ever temporary.

Why do the National Trust own so many beautiful gardens across the country? Because most of them are attached to grand old houses. Houses which need to be maintained. What are we maintaining? The illusion that the house is somehow separate from the land outside. Maintaining the home means maintaining the gardens too. Ensuring the land won’t reclaim what we humans pretended was something distinct from it. The idea of “garden” enforcing a pretence of order on the land by constant vigilance against natural growth. Labelling unwanted plants as “weeds” and pulling up that which self-seeds and was not planted with intent. We pretend we have transcended nature again in our landscaping, but every gardener knows that it is only a matter of time before nature claims the landscape back.

And we all, of course, will die. A truism of every life that we would sooner try to forget. Looking after ourselves with medicines, healthcare and protections that we try to convince ourselves will stave off the inevitable. Allow us to transcend that most natural and inevitable thing about us: our finitude. Our end. The transcendence another illusion all of us will eventually be forced to face.

We take these walks through nature, I think, on some deep level, to remind ourselves that the majority of our lives are illusions. That nothing is permanent and eventually the march of nature will stomp right through our assured lies that we are someone separate from it; somehow protected. We check in with the world as it really is, to both maintain the illusion for little while longer once we get home, and to ready ourselves for what is inevitable: when the illusion necessarily ends.

I’m about to head out for a walk. Maybe I’ll see some deer? If so, I’ll try and ignore the venison steaks they sell in the shop on the way out. It should be easy enough. After all, I think we’re ignoring a lot.

Author: DaN McKee (he/him)

If you liked this post and have enjoyed what I do here at Philosophy Unleashed - and have been doing every year since 2019 - and want to buy me a coffee or cool philosophy book as a gift to say thank you, feel free to send a small donation/tip my way here.

My own book, ANARCHIST ATHEIST PUNK ROCK TEACHER, is out everywhere on paperback and eBook. You can order it direct from the publisher or from places like Amazon. Paperback or e-book.

My academic paper - ‘An error of punishment defences in the context of schooling’ is out in the Journal of Philosophy of Education here.

My other book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE , from the publisher, and from all good booksellers, either in paperback or as an e-Book. It’s celebrating its fifth birthday this month, so if you haven’t read it yet, check it out. 

I also have a chapter in THIS BOOK on punk and anarchism.

Listen to me on The Independent Teacher podcast here. Read my Anarchist Studies journal paper on Anarchism and Character Education here. Listen to me on the Philosophy Gets Schooled podcast here. Listen to me talk anarchism and wrestling here or anarchism and education here. For everything else DaN McKee related: www.everythingdanmckee.com