I’ve talked loosely on the advantages and disadvantages to using personification while trying to relate to nature while writing. To iterate, describing plants, animals, and places through a human frame makes them instantly relatable and understandable to readers. If we can imagine a solitary black bear on the hunt for berries in the woods, we could describe him as a “grumpy old man waddling along” and readers may instantly relate the bear to an older male relative, creating an instant connection. However, your Uncle Mike probably can’t reach speeds of 55 km/hr (Kolenosky). As with every other question I pose in these essays, they can’t be simply answered with a simple “yes” or “no” (wouldn’t that make my life easier and my essays a whole lot shorter). Of course context is going to be important when deciding how to go about framing flora and fauna. A children’s book à la Wind in the Willows or Winnie-the-Pooh is probably fine with its personification as it’s understood as fiction, but in more adult media? I’d be wary of it. I’m not going to tell you you shouldn’t personify nature, as I’d be a hypocrite if I did. I’ve written many a poem envisioning Algonquin Park as a lover or friend. On the other hand, if we return to the above example with the black bear, we can see that if people are taught that a black bear is like our curmudgeonly Uncle Mike who’s impatient to carve into the thanksgiving turkey, they may treat the black bear like Uncle Mike. That could end badly for all parties, least of all Uncle Mike himself.
Let’s start with a few basic examples we might all be familiar with. For me what comes to mind is how some “fur parents” treat their pets like they’re human babies wrapped in fur and claws. I think of the videos of owners pranking their pets, such as by shouting at or otherwise provoking them for their reactions to just laugh as an animal acts like an animal. On the outside this does seem hilarious, but if you look in the animal’s face and see how confused it looks it stops being funny. And on the surface, this seems relatively harmless. How about when people try to apply human philosophy and ideology to how they take care of their pets? When I used to frequent Tumblr, often there would be posts about pet owners talking about putting their cats on vegan diets, which just has the animal-lover in me roiling. Even the most cursory of google searches showed many articles from the ASPCA (The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) (Why Can’t My Cat be Vegan?), the BBC (Dowling), and National Geographic (Donahue) all saying the same thing: while dogs and humans can do it carefully, cats are obligate carnivores and will suffer health issues if placed on a vegan diet. I’m not here to protest against your personal ideologies and do not care about how much you eat organic, fair-trade foods and only buy products not tested on animals, but if you inflict your personal philosophy on an animal without regard for their long term health or basic evolutionary instincts, you are not a cat-lover.
Let’s stretch out the lens from the microcosm to the macrocosm now. Think about how nature as a phenomenon and force is typically personified as a nurturing mother figure or sometimes as a vengeful wraith. It’s hard not to cling to this idea of a loving Mother Nature while we stand in the woods and remark on its beauty, or feel it has specific agendas, all to spite us when a summer thunderstorm ruins your plans for a picnic date or when you seem to have twice the amount of mosquito bite welts on your legs as your hiking buddies do. In turn, the complex persona of Mother Nature is often contrasted against, or in battle with, society or civilization. We should fear nature, conquer, control, and exploit it. This nature vs. society binary has led some feminists to making a women-nature connection (Warren), but like with attempting to feed your cat tofu, applying human philosophy to something decidedly non-human and continuing to separate ourselves from nature can only continue to sand of nature’s edges off in our minds, but not in reality. Sure, it may and can be a fun, creative exercise to imagine what Mother Nature might look like. By putting an abstract concept into human skin, we can feel we understand the sometime alien world of the wilds better. We can use Mother Nature as a metaphor in our writing to garner sympathy for the state of the environment. The thing is, nature isn’t a mother. It is a phenomenon, a force. It has no feelings, does not have a sense a vengeance, and has carried on before humans began to impact the landscape, and will continue to carry on and exist long after we have left, even if it doesn’t remain in a form we recognize. If we must personify nature, I imagine it is best to picture it as apathetic. Perhaps imagining a phenomenon such as nature as apathetic to our existence is what truly terrifies humans, as we can be a rather self-centred bunch.
Shocker, humans understand things through a human lens. Many of us are drawn to trying to understand what is alien, foreign, and on an incomprehensible scale whether that be through philosophy, science, or religion, but we so frequently do so by putting ourselves at the centre of that understanding. In trying to understand what is different from us, we often try to make it more like us. Think about how many world religions put humans or human-like beings at the centre of creation and how science is done not only to salve curiosity but to benefit primarily humans and their goals. While I do believe the innate human desire to search, explore, understand, and empathize with concepts, ideas, and subjects different than us makes humans special, we need to stop seeing ourselves as the centre of the universe.
There is another important reason we maybe should stray away from looking at nature as something we can simply touch, taste, smell, hear, and feel. Certainly we can assert our senses on parts of nature. We can run our palms against the rough bark of a tree trunk as we walk by, smell the petrichor after summer rain, watch moose grazing from the side of the highway, and hear the sound of woodpeckers hammering away on tree trunks high above our heads. As much as our senses grant us access to feel the sensations of the world, they do have a limited range. Think about a dog’s sense of smell, being at least 10 000 times more acute than our own (Tyson), about how a mantis shrimp has 16 photoreceptors in their eyes compared to our measly three, and can see UV, visible, and polarised light (Franklin), or about how some species of owls use a combination of their asymmetrically set ear openings and pronounced facial discs to hear the exact direction a sound is coming from in 30 millionths of second which aids them to capture prey in complete darkness (Traynor). We can only imagine how having these senses ourselves would affect how we perceive the world, but that is one of the beauties of being a writer: we can work to imagine it.
Despite many attempts in the past and present, and certainly into the future, I don’t think nature will ever be something we can fully hold in our hands and minds. Nature’s aloofness to us and its simplicity still manages to surprise us, and leave us in an awe that has us coming back to studying, researching, writing, and simply allowing ourselves to be immersed in it without distraction again and again. The flora and fauna of our world simply follows the path they were dealt in life, sleeping, eating, procreating and dying without worrying about politics or morality. In those moments we feel more among our fellow earthlings, maybe we can imagine we don’t have to worry about those things too. So many landscapes, animals, and plants seem to live out lives that seem entirely alien to us despite how we share this one big rock hurtling through space. While we can use personification to try to relate with these creatures and green things, trying to apply humanity to them robs them of their essence, taking away the wholeness of what makes us love the natural environment. We frequently go out into nature to escape what it means to be human (though sometimes we may find it), and as writers, I fully believe it’s our duty to attempt to bridge that gap between the known and unknown without leaving anything of ourselves and what we’re trying to reach for behind.
Works Cited
Donahue, Michelle Z. “Can Dogs and Cats Be Vegan? Science Weighs In.” 15 March 2018. National Geographic. Web. 25 November 2020.
Dowling, Stephen. “Can you feed cats and dogs a vegan diet?” 4 March 2020. bbc.com. Web. 25 November 2020.
Franklin, Amanda M. “Mantis shrimp have the world’s best eyes–but why?” 4 September 2013. Phys.org. Web. 25 November 2020.
Kolenosky, George. “Black Bear.” 1992. Hinterland Who’s Who. Web. 25 November 2020.
Traynor, Robert M. “Directional Hearing in Owls.” 17 April 2012. hearinghealthmatters.org. Web. 25 November 2020.
Tyson, Peter. “Dogs’ Dazzling Sense of Smell.” 12 October 2012. PBS. Web. 25 November 2020.
Warren, Karen J. “Feminist Enviromental Philosophy.” 2014 August 2014. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Web. 25 November 2020.
“Why Can’t My Cat be Vegan?” 2 May 2018. aspca.org. Web. 25 November 2020.