Our Relationship to Nature

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
- William Wordsworth, The World is Too Much With Us

The World is Too Much With Us, a powerful poem by William Wordsworth, written in 1802, underscores a tragedy. The world was changing rapidly. For Wordsworth, England’s rolling green hills and meandering clean rivers were giving way to thriving industry and smoke as black as death. In his eyes, we were cleaving ourselves from the sacred bosom of nature and replacing it with something far less pure, far less engrossing, and far less meaningful. This tragic state of affairs lead to the romantic movement and its noble efforts to recapture that corrupted state of nature.

This selfsame tragedy is even strikingly more evident now than when this poem was written centuries ago. We have created a spiritual division that has profound consequences through our superhuman efforts to tame and master nature and a perfidious and conscious effort to separate ourselves from it. Through commercial agriculture, industrialism, commercialism, and social media we have separated ourselves from something that we were once an integral part of. We are disconnected from a powerful source of meaning and sublimity in our lives. The ramifications of this are felt deeply in the individual and collective psyche.

This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

We have fallen out of tune with nature. We struggle to truly hear words of the whispering brook, to feel the sacred and mystical power of looming mountain ranges, the stillness and majesty of the woods we once roamed so freely. Our generation’s exalting of the profane has led us to a tragic disillusionment from the sacred that once pervaded our lives and provided a profound source of meaning. Regardless of religious persuasion, this disillusionment has created discord between our species and the very thing that is the precondition for our lives. We are unmoved by a force our ancestors respected enough to deify and honor. Our separation from nature is a regression in the guise of evolution.

It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

This state of affairs should make us all quite forlorn. It should equally call us to remember and seek to better fulfill our sacred duty as the human race. Whether this duty is placed on us by a divine creator or by an evolutionary chance, we are all stewards of the state of nature. We should venerate what is sacred in our world and seek to earnestly protect it. We should not see ourselves merely as its masters, seeking to reap its boons, but as its protectors and stewards. This can be accomplished through conscious effort and deliberate separation from the aspects of our modern lives that perpetuate this division from nature. Take time to deliberately retreat into nature and remember our place and our insignificance relative to it. It is challenging to delude ourselves of our own primacy in the face of our world’s grandeur and vastness. From this lens, the sanctity of nature is not merely intellectual but experiential.