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At times my work takes me to the big city and the tall buildings where people with power make decisions that affect the rest of us. While I am there, crossing busy roads, wearing tidy clothes and carrying out my duty, I think of faraway places where life is getting on without me.
Logrunners are turning leaf litter on the rainforest floor, albatross are cruising the wind beyond sight of the coast. Why does thinking about these creatures, who have no idea that I exist, bring me such comfort?
Because they are free, because they are beautiful, and because of their utter indifference to me.
I was in a pub in Newcastle a few weeks ago chatting to a stranger with a lot going on. He runs a business selling household appliances, employs dozens of people, is negotiating a divorce and paying a mortgage. He seemed sceptical about what people tell him about climate change. Given how much else he has to think about, that didn’t surprise me. I asked him, if he was free next week to do anything he wanted, what would he do? He said he would bundle his kids into a van and drive to Seal Rocks to go camping.
If you’re not familiar with it, Seal Rocks is among the most beautiful places anywhere on the New South Wales coast. I’d love to be there next week myself.
People seek and find freedom in wild places. There is toil in the rest of the natural world and there are dependants to care for, as there are in civilisation, but there is also a sense of boundlessness.
This feeling catches me up and I get carried away. I want to cruise in the great ocean currents like a tuna. I want to gather grass and spider silk and nest in the shrubs with the wrens. I suspect the tug of freedom is what takes some people out on hunting trips, and some to earn their living as jackaroos or prawners.
Then there is the beauty. Survival is necessary but being gorgeous, creative and excessive has played as important a role in evolution as survival skills. This has filled the world with the resplendent detail of iridescent insects, curly liverworts, currawong song and the synchronised courtship flight-dance of terns.
And it is not just living creatures making this beauty. Rays of sunlight bend through a running creek and make bright moving patterns of line and form on its bedrock. All beings have the urge to expression, even including non-living beings: rivers have it, waves have it, the wind. The wind heaps sand in rhythmic curls in the desert.
The freedom and beauty of nature guide my sense of right and wrong. If I am to be free, I must care for the freedom of other earthlings. Beauty is the signal to me that this is true.
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When self-consciousness traps me in its hall of mirrors, the outside world brings the relief of being unimportant. A friend and I once sat by a creek in a rainforest. A rose robin flew down to drink beside us, unaware we were there. The marvellous world is turning without me and my own life is as dear, marvellous, fleeting and irrelevant as a rose robin’s. What lightness!
People talk about cosmic vertigo but how about the giddiness of knowing that the ancestors of the lyrebird you’re listening to have been living in the forests of this continent for 15m years, since there were still trees in Antarctica?
We’re living in a thin film of biosphere that is creating its own atmosphere, recycling its own wastes, cleaning its own water, producing and metabolising in complex self-organising systems that we are too small and silly to understand.
When we talk about “protecting nature” it makes sense at a certain scale but it is quaintly hubristic. Nature is not all lovely creatures and majestic landscapes. It is mutating viruses, poleward-creeping cyclones and vengeful orcas. Just who needs looking after from whom?
Now that greenhouse pollution and the global environmental cataclysms of the last hundred years have broken long-familiar patterns of living within the biosphere, nature will reclaim its place as a terrifying quasi-divine force that cannot be mastered. This, too, is strangely comforting.
I often feel overwhelmed with sadness to be living in a culture that doesn’t seem to value all of this but I know that I am not alone in loving the living world.
The Biodiversity Council of Australia takes the trouble to ask people how they feel about nature, why and how it is important to them. The overwhelming majority of people feel as I do: that they are part of nature (69%); that being in nature helps them deal with everyday stress (79%); that it is important to them to know that nature is being looked after (88%). The vast majority want more to be done to protect it (96%). The way Australian politics treats “the environment” – either as a decorative irrelevance or as an insidious threat to our prosperity – doesn’t reflect the way the people feel about it.
Love and affinity for nature cuts across political, social and economic divisions. Of course, if you ask someone to choose between their own livelihood and the livelihood of a greater glider or a Maugean skate, they’re likely to choose their own – even more so for the non-specific thing they call “net zero”. But why should anyone be asked to make that kind of awful choice?
Nature shows me that we don’t have to choose between beauty and freedom on the one hand, and good living on the other. Australians’ desire to be part of and safeguard the living world is a good start but we’re going to lose so much of it unless we take some responsibility for what we’re doing.
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Georgina Woods is a poet, environmentalist and head of research and investigations at Lock the Gate
