control over nature

by Kelly Moody
...
He makes a point to say that,
‘nature is better with my help’ …
I do these things to help nature along, without the human, without my imposition on the land, without my shaping, pruning, ordering, beautifying the ugly chaotic state that it somehow puts itself in—nature is just seemingly inadequate. Technology isn’t just efficient, it is necessary, if you don’t use it, you are making bad decisions; even though this technology may not have been used millennia ago. Efficiency, utility, order, those are the things that matter to me—values he intertwines in the thoughts about his job, his duty as a horticulturist. A kind of job you wouldn’t think right off as utility-based. But it is---in disguise.
It just simply can’t exist any other way, he says.
He can’t take apart his actions.
Maybe it is too late.
Maybe this illusion is something to settle in, this constant imposition on the land gives him a purpose, while what he thinks he is doing is natural and absolutely necessary.
Those briars are ‘bad’
They are only bad to you, but what about to the ecosystem? Who are you to say what is of value for the whole of the ecosystem when only your value, the values of a thing only looking at the ecosystem not participating in it, judges the good or badness of a particular species? How can you judge the value of something that participates in a system separate from yourself? How can you impose yourself on that system like you have the right?
I make the land beautiful, and I take pride in that.
What is beauty? Subliminal selective idealized order? Putting circles and lines around the trees, creating curves where there were jagged edges, pulling up soft tall grasses to replant soft taller grasses perfectly spaced 4 feet a part, around the curve that once was a jagged edge..slow geometrics..
How is this different that putting roads, lines, curves, ugly cement onto chaotic uneven land? Are the imposed lines of one system any different than another? Do we even fool ourselves on the deepest level? We want to go back to nature for sure, but we only want it to serve us perfectly. This is something we discussed a lot in Dr. Redicks Religion and Ecology class last year. Hence the mass movement from urban to suburbia—we all want some grass, some plants, some ‘ordered’ nature, but this isn’t really nature at all, we just can’t afford to put faith in chaos. I feel like, nature is simply the beauty that comes from chaos, you go to the remotest places unaltered by man, and what is present, this intricate LIFE, the intermingling of land, rock, plant, animal, water, creating it’s own world, something that controls us, rather than us controlling it. The awe of this can be seen as true beauty. What happens when we don't interfere. It makes us view ourselves differently. Sometimes it is overwhelming for us, because we are out of that comfort zone we have created, that hierarchy of ‘us on top’, ‘it needs us to be beautiful’, ‘mixing nature and efficiency’. So because it is overwhelming, we ignore it, and then loathe it, and then urn to conquer it even more. We conquer because we want what is easiest, simplest; we want a way to forget.