NATURE, WHERE ART THOU?

If someone asks you about your favorite holiday spot where you can relax your tired limbs drowned in fatigue by the urban mechanization, your answer will probably be either Goa or a hill station. The answer is so prompt, so reflexive in nature that you hardly realize why you say so. It is because these are the places which possess the triumvirs-land, water and trees-which sustain the human life. They, like a balm, soothe our wearied body and souls alike.100 years down the line, we may as well be visiting the antique museums to get a glimpse of them, for we are losing them fast, faster, fastest.

When Wordsworth and Shelley in the Romantic Age defined their poetry by evoking and epitomizing the realm of nature, little did they realize that the very thing which acted as the lungs of their poems will find it hard to breathe in the highly industrialized and ‘civilized’ twentieth century global society. The present societal scenario does not provide even an iota of the glorified Spenserian and Arcadian pastoral milieu of Nature to thrive, primarily due to the mercantile and bourgeoisie principles of laisser-faire and the concept of industrial humanism. It is a grim irony which defines our relationship with nature today-the irony that the phenomenon of industrialization is slowly but gradually sucking away the very source which had given birth to it in all firms of perfection and nurturing it for centuries to mould it in its present form. It would not be wrong to say that Nature today, like Christ, is slowly sacrificing itself for the benefit of humanity. But while Christ’s crucification brought about salvation to the people, Nature’s silent endurance of the fatal injuries inflicted in it from the four zones of the worldly cross (north, south, east, and west) will lead only to human doom and despair.

The last few decades have seen the publication of an umpteenth number of articles and petitions urging people not to provide a step motherly behavior towards nature and suggesting ways and means to protect nature from the wrath of industrialization. Whole perusing through a few of them, I could not help but notice two major similarities in all of them. Firstly, all the articles define nature in respect of its relationship with mankind, i.e. they ask human beings to protect nature because it provides with food, shelter, comfort, etc, as if nature has no separate entity without its relationship with Homo sapiens. Secondly, it is surprising to note that most of these articles give more space to the effects of industrialization that the term nature itself! This only re-emphasizes the subconscious individualistic ideology which pervades the minds of human beings.

The term nature always brings in one’s mind an aesthetic aura which defines the glory of a tiny green spot in the vast ocean of the black universe, which today threatens to merge with its surroundings. We must try to protect and preserve this highly endangered ‘species’ of God’s creation, chiefly because not only we owe it our existence but also because it is the only stable space, far apart from the dizzyingly paced world, where a human mind can blissfully interact with the spiritual aura of the universe. Otherwise, perhaps a hundred years from now, bereft of any escapist aesthetic and spiritual delight from a blurring and schizophrenic world, one will be forced to mentally evoke the then utopic Muse to inspire his escapist dreams, crying out, ”Nature, where art thou?”