NOTIONS ABOUT NATURE
The rationales we
employ on behalf of anything, including nature conservation,
reflect our attitudes and values. Our attitudes and notions toward
and valuation of those places classed as heritage sites are
revealed in the many traditional arguments used to defend those
places. Moreover, our attitudes and values profoundly affect the
manner in which we treat something.
Many claim that
heritage sites are important to maintain because they provide
inspiration for the artistically and intellectually inclined. In
the process, these designated areas add to and help shape culture,
and are the inspiration for painters, photographers, writers
and musicians find their inspiration.
They also serve to
inspire those in the intellectual arts as well. Philosophers, for
example–especially environmental philosophers–who seek
a wildness experience to be a contemplative catalyst or cognitive
genesis for the really big questions of philosophy: What is the
meaning of the universe where we all came from; what we are all
doing here; where we are going; what the character of our existence
is, and what our moral place in the world is. Heritage sites are
the only muses for art, but rather that they are excellent and
unique ones, and that to lose any such inspirational kindling would
be tragic.
One of the central
themes of conservationists is to be a friend of the planet and to
live at peace with ecosystems. The friendship concept is
embodied in 'Friends of the Earth', the largest international
network of environmental groups in the world, represented in 68
countries. Peace with ecosystems is at the heart of
Greenpeace. a non-profit organisation, with a presence in 40
countries across Europe, the Americas, Asia and the Pacific. As a
global organisation, Greenpeace focuses on the the most crucial
worldwide threats to our planet's biodiversity and
environment.
At a local level,
where most people interact with nature, a spiritual view of the
local environment emerges from trying to read and express various
signs of the workings of nature, in relation to our position in the
grand scheme of things. For example, the Koran has much to say
about 'signs' which, through the imagination, point to the deeper
significance of everyday life.
- "In the
creation of the heavens and the earth; in the alternation of night
and day; in the ships that sail the ocean with cargoes beneficial
to man; in the water which God sends down from the sky and with
which He revives the earth after its death, dispersing over it all
manner of beasts; in the disposal of the winds, and in the clouds
that are driven between earth and sky; surely there are signs for
rational men." (The Koran 2:163)
- In a
similar set of holistic notions, St Francis of Assisi praised God
"for our sister, Mother Earth, which brings forth varied fruits and
grass and glowing flowers", and ended with praise to God "for our
Sister, the death of the body." Neighbourliness on the part of a
stranger is signed, as an important element in the evolved pattern
of human behaviour, in the parable of the good Samaritan. A sunset
seen above an urban skyline can be both a scientific and a unifying
spiritual experience.
Religious ideas,
about origins and values in nature cemented families in the past,
but are now lost or diluted within minority subcultures, unattached
to the major world religions, who are left to develop their place
in an idiosyncratic cosmology.
Moral and spiritual
teaching has always relied heavily on visual imagery in the
formation and realisation of a society's attitudes, values, and
beliefs, and their transmission, as signs of what it is to be
human, from one generation to the next. An experimental meditation
is being developed based on images of the natural world which the
painter Graham Sutherland used to compose his Great Tapestry at
Coventry.
Examples may be
gathered through local appraisals of the influential role played by
the visual arts and architecture in the formation and maintenance
of religious and spiritual values in all societies since
prehistoric times. However, there is no generally accepted
educational framework to use neighbourhood notions about nature to
link communities and environment to a larger scheme of spiritual
values. In particular, classroom examples are needed which
highlight spiritual reasons for promoting a particular course of
local development.
Spiritual appraisals
take a world view that is rooted in the imagination and passes
beyond the limits of ordinary life. They start from the postulate
that the material cosmos in some way expresses or manifests a
deeper spiritual reality, expressed through human
consciousness.
Humanists such as
Julian Huxley have seen an apparent progress in cosmic evolution
towards increasing consciousness and control. That is to say, we
are part of a development from the unconscious simplicity of the
Big Bang to the conscious, diverse and complex carbon-based
life-forms of the planet earth. Our unknown future carries the
possibility of understanding and controlling the cosmos
itself.
Attempts to provide
biological explanations of consciousness are far from convincing,
and are certainly not established by scientific study. The ultimate
personal expressions of consciousness are through the arts. The
author Henry Rider Haggard, for example, through his fertile
imagination, kept returning to the possibility that the material
universe does express a spiritual reality. The purpose of cosmic
evolution may be the emergence of some form of conscious
relationship between that spiritual reality and entities in the
material cosmos.
Science is not
irreligious. It does not entail that there is no spiritual reality,
no God, and no purpose in the cosmos. Many of the greatest
scientists were strongly motivated by their religious beliefs. The
sort of highly ordered and emergent universe that science discloses
is compatible with, and almost overwhelmingly suggests, the
existence of a creator of enormous wisdom and power. Religious
myths depict the way in which that reality makes itself known in
the material universe. Religious rituals establish appropriate
responses to that reality. Religious symbols express its
fundamental character.
- Some
religious thinkers take the view that modern science can help to
clear away some elements of literalism, ignorance and myopia which
still disfigure religion by providing a new and better
understanding of the material universe. Spiritual notions extend
the this scientific world view through ideas which define a realm
of spirit, from which the material cosmos emerges, and to which it
will return. Religion has an irreplaceable role to play in relating
human life to that wider spiritual context. Our age offers the
possibility of relating the scientific and religious perspectives
in a mutually enriching way.
Taking Christianity
as an example, from the beginning it attempted to present a cosmic
vision of a spiritually ordered universe, whose purpose would be
somehow completed by a future full knowledge and love of the
creator.
The myths of
Christianity show:-
- how God
ordered the universe and produced a conscious moral agency;
- how God
expressed the essence of divine nature as self-giving in the life
of a particular human, Jesus;
- how God
disclosed the ultimate goal of the universe in the resurrection of
Jesus.
The cosmic vision of
the first Christians was that the spirit who was the creator of the
cosmos had acted in human history to initiate the liberation of
human lives from pride and egoism, and their union with the divine
essence of self giving. In other words, we are part of the whole
cosmic process from the Big Bang, and have emerged as conscious
agents which can consciously unite the material to God, its
spiritual source and goal.
- The
cosmos and all life in it, will eventually cease to exist. But the
Christian view has always been that the fulfillment of God's
purpose lies beyond this space-time, even though it must be
approached through it. God's goal for the cosmos is that everyone
who has ever lived will have the opportunity to share in a
trans-historical knowledge and love of God in a 'new creation'.
From a Christian viewpoint, this Cosmos is the place where souls
emerge in the material and temporal realm. But they were always
intended to find their fulfillment in the eternal realm, which is
the spiritual reality of God.