Towards a Harmonious Coexistence Between Humans and Nature

The intricate relationship between human and nature has been formed throughout humanity's history. In recent centuries, human’s impact on nature has grown dramatically, leading to a significant degradation in the environment. Fortunately, in the current state, there has been a significant growth of recognition regarding the importance of protecting nature. However, we are still far from reaching the ideal state of coexistence. In order to find out how we could successfully coexist with nature, understanding human-nature interaction in depth should be preceded. Therefore, we will first start looking through the dominant view of human-nature interaction and then further stretch out to the modern view. Finally, we will briefly go through the challenges we are facing once we’re trying to coexist with nature, and the possible solutions that could handle these problems.

The frame of Human-Nature interaction

“The Nutmeg’s curse” strictly points out how humans caused the current climate crisis throughout history. The author demonstrates that the climate crisis is the actual consequence of western imperialism and colonization, driven by an ideology that prioritizes economic growth above all else. The history of Banda Island regarding the western’s exploitation of nutmeg clearly reflects this fact. Just as shown in this case, there had been a clear differentiation between human and nature, and nature had only been considered as a tool for humans. According to “Framing and reframing questions of human–environment interactions”, the dominant way of framing human-nature interaction has been environmental determinism, human ecology, natural hazards, human impact, and sustainability.

Figure 1: In each way of framing studies of human–environment interactions (A–E), the arrows represent the direction(s) of causation (from independent to dependent variable).

As shown in Figure 1, in the perspective of environmental determinism, an environment is the cause, serving as an independent variable, while the evolution of humans and social traits is the reaction. However, environmental determinism has been criticized since it promotes stereotypes, justified racism, and fostered imperialism. Next, in the perspective of human ecology, cultural ecology, and political ecology, human ecology is considered as a study of human adjustment to the environment, and here, causality flows both from the environment to humans and vice versa. This has broadened studies of human-nature interaction from a cause-effect relationship to a complex interrelationships of people and society to the natural environment. Natural Hazards is a research frame that focuses on examining the effects of natural conditions and processes on people and societies. On the other hand, human impact on the environment focuses on how human activities directly and indirectly change physical, biological, and chemical attributes of the environment. In summary, all A to D reflects the philosophical view of humans as separate from nature, simplifying the complex system of interaction.

In this framework, ‘The Nutmeg’s curse’ can be considered as focusing on the ‘human impact’ viewpoint. In Particular, the author introduces the concept called ‘terraforming’, which points out how colonization changed every identity of that place, starting from its name and everything including nature. Here, the mechanistic view was what strongly supported imperialism, which treats nature as a resource that humans can always use when they need. However, human and nature interaction is more complicated than how A to D states. Recent studies have shown that nature changes as a result of human activity and that human-nature interaction involves many types of feedback. For example, McKibben argues that we’ve reached the end of the notion that nature is permanent and since human’s activity resulted in critically changing the environment, the concept of separating human and nature is hard to be considered as appropriate. Therefore, this led to the concept of sustainability, which is represented as E in Figure 1. Sustainability successfully shows the intimate relationship between human and nature, putting both together in one large boundary. This also links to the Ghosh’s perspective of how we should coexist with nature. He emphasizes that we should change our mindset of treating nature as a tool for humans and recognize that nature is also alive. Therefore, now, we should not separate nature from humans, but rather think of humans and nature as living all together.

To go further to how E is reflected in the real world, today’s human-nature interaction serves as a complex mix of exploitation, negligence, and attempts for restoration. With the emergence of ‘sustainability’, humans have taken various trials to handle current climate issues and find ideal ways to cooperate with nature. Initiatives like reforestation, wildlife protection, and the promotion of renewable energy sources reflect such a shift of mindset. However, there still exist views that lack the coexistence of human and nature, as we can see from the ongoing deforestation, rampant pollution, and a continuous rise in greenhouse gas emissions.

The Challenge in Coexisting with Nature

In order to successfully lead to the ideal coexistence of human and nature, we should first face deep into the main component that makes such coexistence challenging. Firstly, the current human lifestyle and economic structure somehow block an ideal coexistence. The modern consumerist lifestyle and overpopulation result in an excessive waste generation and resource consumption, and this becomes more problematic once the consumption is held with no consideration of nature. Economic systems mainly focus on perpetual growth and therefore usually prioritize numerical gain over long-term environmental sustainability. Second, when focusing on how human’s current perspective is held, although it is true that more and more people are recognizing the perspective of sustainability, it’s taking some time for those thoughts to lead to an actual action and also there still exist those who retain the viewpoint of thinking humans as superior to nature. Especially for those who are still remaining in the traditional view, while some really haven’t got access to the modern view, i.e. need of sustainability, others already know the need but just ignoring it for their short-term well-being. Lastly, since various countries contribute and affect the whole human-nature interaction, some countries’ behaviors that degrade the environment complicates global efforts for sustainable coexistence. Therefore, trials for managing all three aspects are necessary to handle this problem.

For a Harmonious Coexistence

In order to handle the first challenge, we first have to step out from the human-centered perspective and maintain some long-term perspective. For human lifestyle, reduction in consumption, recycling, and supporting eco-friendly products should be highly considered. It is important to note that both the amount of consumption and what we consume strongly affects nature. Also, we should be aware that our consumption not only influences that particular product, but can lead to a huge chain effect on the ecosystem. For example, consider the case of how mass consumption of beef could affect nature. We can think of the result in a multi-angled way, considering environmental degradation, social/economic impacts, health concerns, impact on biodiversity. More specifically, this consumption may affect nature by deforestation, green gas emission, an increase in water usage, and species extinction since overconsumption would lead to a mass rear of cattle. It also affects humans such as causing dietary health risks, and causing land use conflicts for places to create pasture land. Moreover, we should embrace the importance of consuming the right thing, such as eco-friendly products. Fortunately, we can find plenty of efforts for the reduction of plastic, such as the transition of plastic straw to paper straw and research on advanced recycling technologies such as chemical recycling. However, more trials to take a global perspective of human and nature will be crucial. In order to manage the challenge in economic structure, we should try to maintain a long-term perspective. Just as we saw in how exploitation of nutmeg has led to harmful results in humans, we should be aware that every behavior that harms nature will come back to humans. Thus, even within the economic structure that prioritizes numerical success as the best, we should remember that cooperating with nature is indeed critical.

Now, since we know that such a perspective is important, we should find a way to solve the second issue, which is about how to make people have such a perspective and make them move for real action. For this, education could take a core part. Everything starts from making people have a right view of nature. Only when this is preceded, humans can treat nature with their heart, and this movement will be more powerful than simply emphasizing the importance. In order to do so, we should have a close experiment with nature, watching and understanding what nature is, and its animated aspects. Education should be held to provide such opportunities, and if humans could feel those precious breaths of nature starting from their childhood, it would be much easier for people to have a loving heart to nature. To be more specific, curricula should not just stop from showing videos or unilaterally speaking out about the protection of nature, but should include activities such as field trips, which could help students see the reality and communicate with nature. We could take an example of our field trip to Sura Tidal flat. I personally really enjoyed the field trip and made it so meaningful that I could see how nature exists, which led me to have a strong perspective that we should protect nature from the reclamation project. If I didn’t have such an opportunity, I wouldn’t have noticed the importance of the tidal flat, and couldn’t have the heart to it. Therefore, we should try to provide more opportunities to experience real nature and help people personally understand what makes nature struggle. Moreover, considering the fast interaction in the society, once such movement is held, it would stretch out to more and more, leading to a huge improvement in the human’s overall perspective.

Finally, for the last challenge, we should strengthen the form of global effort for human-nature coexistence. Currently, there exist various organizations such as the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and Conservation International (CI). Countries should try to cooperate by supporting such organizations and discussing human-nature issues in those spaces for better coexistence. Moreover, reinforcing global frameworks such as the Paris Agreement on climate change could help lead to global trials of carbon reduction, and help all the countries to contribute for recovery in nature. In order for this to happen, all the leaders in each country should recognize the importance of human-nature, and highly support such activities.

Conclusion

In conclusion, we have seen how human and nature interaction has been held throughout history, and how human’s viewpoint have developed within those days. Among those viewpoints, we should view human and nature as one group, and further focus on successful coexistence with the perspective of sustainability. Currently, since there exist some challenges, we should try to get a global view of perspective, and further spread this out with experience-based education. Also, constructing a global community that gathers every country all together and forming global trials for proper human nature interaction should be held. Once we collaborate all together and treat nature as an equal component as human beings, someday, we could face the beauty of the union between human and nature.