The Dialectic of the Wild
We talk about nature as if it were a spa. “Mother Earth,” “healing forests,” “balance.” It’s a lie we tell ourselves because the truth is unbearable: nature is brutal. It starves, freezes, infects, and devours. Every creature lives by killing or outcompeting another. The forest is not a hymn — it’s a battlefield.
That’s the first pole: nature as brutality.
The other pole is the postcard version: harmony, cycles, renewal. Bees and blossoms, rivers and rainbows. The problem is, this too is true. Nature is balance, but balance forged in blood. It is not love that holds it together, it is hunger.
You know this instinctively. When you sit inside your warm house, cat at your feet, canned food and tortellini stacked in the kitchen, you look out the window and see a picture of peace. Trees sway, birds flit across the sky, the meadow glows in the light. That’s one version of nature. Now flip it: imagine you’ve just survived a helicopter crash on a remote mountain. No kitchen, no walls, no rescue. Suddenly the same forest is not peace but a test of whether you freeze tonight or starve tomorrow. It’s the same nature, only now the mask is off.
And we, humans, are trapped in this dialectic. We spend our entire history running away from the wild — inventing fire, clothes, cities, medicine. Every wall we build is a way of saying: not today, death. Civilization is a fortress against the wilderness. And yet, once we’ve escaped it, we grow sentimental. We hike, camp, and post selfies under waterfalls, pretending the wild smiles back at us. But what we want is not nature — we want a safe simulation of it. The cruelty cut out, the beauty preserved.
Here’s the lesson: nature doesn’t care. It’s not a mother, not a friend, not a god. It is an indifferent process that will crush us if we forget what it is. The deer grazing in the meadow will be ripped apart by wolves. The virus mutates whether we pray or not. The storm doesn’t negotiate.
So how should we live? Without illusions. Stop preaching harmony as if the wild owed us kindness. Respect its cycles, yes, but don’t romanticize them. Remember that our survival depends on both fleeing from nature’s cruelty and remembering it is always there, waiting.
Nature is not love. Nature is necessity. And it will outlast our dreams.