CURRENT MEANDER

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The tagline above, “We hold these truths to be self evident,” carries a lot of meaning, perhaps more than is first apparent.
As part of the American Declaration of Independence (and probably written by Jefferson) it demonstrates the philosophical underpinning of the new republic.

Truths are self evident, meaning that they exist in the natural world (or universe) and can be discerned by rational, informed study and thought, by reason and science. These truths are not handed down by some supernatural being, they are not encoded and revealed in some sacred tome. They are natural law.

Not only Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, and Thomas Paine, but also Ethan Allen, the hero of the Green Mountain Boys, and Thomas Young, the forgotten Founder who kicked off the Boston Tea Party―these radicals who founded America set their sights on a revolution of the mind. Derided as “infidels” and “atheists” in their own time, they wanted to liberate us not just from aristocracy and totalitarianism but from the tyranny of supernatural religion.

The ideas that inspired them were neither British nor Christian but largely ancient, pagan, and continental: the universe of the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius (epicureanism), stoicism, and the natural divinity of the Dutch heretic Benedict de Spinoza. Enlightenment reasoning, in other words.

This is a view of reality that is sees God and Nature as synonymous. Truth is “self-evident” —it has existence of its own that precedes all else. As with Lucretius, the pursuit of happiness is not wild pleasure-seeking but virtuous living. This leads to an “empire of reason,” a rational rule of law that recognizes the equality of all, unalienable rights, and government by the consent of the governed.

Since we have the natural world, there is no need of a supernatural one. The natural world is, on its own, spectacular, amazing, and worthy of awe and reverence.

One way to connect with the natural world is through environmental literature, or nature writing.
Writer and naturalist Joseph Wood Krutch characterized nature writing as “experience with the natural world.” Thoreau made his experience with nature immediate and personal. Those who have come after him have “taken readers into forests and deserts, to the tops of mountains, and out among coral reefs. Through experiential knowledge they have demonstrated the importance to our psychic and spiritual health of living in contact with—or, at the very least, of living with a consciousness of —environments as yet rich in biodiversity, wilderness, and geological beauty.”

“Nature writers past and present help us to understand in the most intimate fashion how our ideas about nature and our beliefs concerning the physical facts of science configure and disfigure the world that is not us—how our minds and hearts determine what we see and what we are blind to, how our perceptions determine what we value and therefore preserve, and by the same token, what we enslave, desecrate, or plunder.”

“We yearn to understand a state of being in which our modern separation form the nonhuman world does not loom as certain or final. By combining all our cognitive resources—imagination as well as logic—nature writing explores how we might restore balance in our paradoxical selves, a restoration achievable only by awakening our kinship with all the other parts and processes in nature.”

When our eyes are restored, as in nature writing at its best, we are not separate from the world but become, as Thoreau added, ‘nature looking into nature’.

A great anthology of nature writing is available on this website. Into The Natural World is intended to be an invitation and introduction to the best of all time.