Redefining the word ‘Nature’

Re-storying the dictionary

Aug 08, 2024

In my last post I wrote about dreaming of a dictionary definition that was missing the word it defined. This week I write about a word sorely in need of a new dictionary definition. This theme of missing words and ill-fitting definitions in my posts takes me by surprise. It seems I am on the right track here on Substack for discovering what I do not know. It is also I believe one of many signs that mainstream English-speaking culture is lost for words in describing the realities and needs of our times.

a man sitting in the grass reading a book — Photo by Masjid Pogung Dalangan on Unsplash

Last week, devouring breakfast and news feed, I stumbled across a small article about a campaign to change the dictionary definition of nature to include humans. Are you shocked? I certainly was. I had no idea that all English dictionaries continue to define nature as an entity separate from and opposed to humans and human creations. This is not, I learn from the article, because it is the right definition, but because it is a reflection of typical usage, or what dictionaries call “main current sense”. In other words, this is how nature is most commonly understood through the way it’s currently referred to in English. A false truth that has compounded itself through centuries of repetition and denial.

Recently environmental campaigners Frieda Gormley and Jessie Mond Wedd have taken on the challenge to break through this circular logic. Delving behind the Oxford English Dictionary’s paywall, they found a nineteenth century definition of nature as “In a wider sense, the whole of the natural world, including humans and the cosmos.” It seems this definition had its moment over 150 years ago and then was judged to be obsolete and exiled behind the paywall. How mind boggling is this? And how revealing of the dominance of beliefs about human exceptionalism from the natural world in post-industrial societies.

Following this discovery, the campaigners successfully petitioned the lexicographers at OED to restore this definition to current usage.

so that now after this entry:

IV.11.a. c1400–The phenomena of the physical world collectively; esp. plants, animals, and other features and products of the earth itself, as opposed to humans and human creations.

Comes this one:

IV.11.b. 1850–More widely: the whole natural world, including human beings.

Interestingly the dictionary also now states that the IV.11.a definition is “Sometimes difficult to distinguish from sense IV.11b, esp. in early use”. This suggests that beliefs of human exceptionalism have deepened over the last five hundred years despite mounting scientific evidence to the contrary. .

Its little wonder that many of us have grappled with using the word nature because of the ways it has reeked of cultural stories or myths about human estrangement and the othering of the world we live in. I wrote about this in my book Climate Crisis and Consciousness:

The traditional naming and framing of “Nature” in the Western tradition is a mythic process which imagines a separation between humans and world… one story about Nature proposes that it is an innocent and peaceful Garden of Eden from which humans are exiled as sinners. Another proposes that Nature is a dangerous and savage jungle, which humans must separate themselves from to become civilised. Each of these mythic projections assign characteristics to the natural world founded upon moralistic judgements. Their agenda is driven by a process of human self-definition which determines “what is not me’’ or “what is not human”. What is not identified as human, is disowned, and then projected on to Nature and judged as “other”. As a result, Nature can be either idealised as perfect and harmonious, or demonised as hostile and harsh. This process of projection caters to a desire for certainty, understanding, judgement, control, and separation at the cost of holding a larger view which can tolerate openness, mystery, vulnerability and relatedness.

Projections, personal or cultural, have a way of coming home to roost. Human-induced climate and ecological disasters are dismantling the Western myth of human exceptionalism, despite the desperate attempts of right wing cultural warriors to defend their old stories with ever-shriller and sillier denials.

Joseph Campbell wrote eloquently about how we are born into myths and are formed by them. Some forty years ago, Campbell wrote that “the only mythology that is valid today is the mythology of the planet – and we don’t have such a mythology.”[i] A lot can change in forty years especially when climate and ecological upheavals threaten more and more lives.

Karen Armstrong observes that the most powerful myth-making arises in extreme times when we “have to go to a place we have never seen, and do what we have never done before” [ii]. Ring any bells? It seems to me a global myth is emerging, through the noise of conspiracy theories which inevitably accompany cultural upheaval, a myth which speaks the languages of biology, physics and complexity theories and pays respects to Indigenous ecological knowledge as it weaves human into the fabric of the world.

So where does this leave us with the word “nature”? There are many takes on this. These two both speak to me right now :

Eco-philosopher Timothy Morton writes:

I don’t really believe in nature, I believe in ecology; I think nature is actually a human construct, I think that’s what’s wrong with it. It’s not like I don’t believe in coral, I do believe in coral which is why I don’t believe in nature. And I think that not only is nature a human philosophical construct, an aesthetic construct, it’s also a social construct that is one of the reasons for this [ecological] violence.

Morton’s rejection of nature as a human conception, based on the belief that it can be fully known and understood as one thing, helps to bring me closer to the mysteries, gaps and in-betweens of life. As does Scott Russell Sanders more poetic take on how to address the problematic usage of nature :

To speak of nature as sacred is to say it is of utmost value, independent of our place or fate. To speak of nature as holy is to acknowledge it as the force that generates and shapes everything. It is our source, our sustenance, our home.^[ii]

Whether we use the word nature or not, an ecological worldview frees the mind and heart to uncertainty and a multiplicity of understandings which illuminate human and Earth’s relational processes, but never fully know them. Replacing an exceptionalist view of ourselves with an ecological one shifts the focus from ourselves as human in relationship to nature, to ourselves as nature in human form. Or as Aboriginal law says, “we do not own Country, Country owns us.”[iii].

Meantime the campaign to redefine nature in English dictionaries continues. The campaigners are calling on all of us but especially writers, artists and thinkers to promote a human inclusive, or holy, definition of nature to ‘main common sense’. Where better to nurture this movement than here on Substack with all of its interconnections between arts, nature, science and political writing, along with its cornucopia of nature writing devoted to celebrating human embeddedness within our living world. “This campaign has really planted so many seeds,” says Gormley. Its up to us now to germinate and water them through our posts and conversations.

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