Terra: The Nature of Our World
TERRA News
The Fragile Division
One of the great things (or maddening ones, depending on your perspective) about being in an MFA program for science and natural history filmmaking is that you get to talk a lot about topics like "what exactly is nature?".
Related to that question, and to this week's episode, is the issue of the human/nature dualism. Before the Greeks came up with the label, there was no conceptual container or category for nature. Once they did, nature could be unlike us. The Renaissance thinkers followed up on this idea and abstracted nature as devoid of human qualities, thus firmly establishing the human/nature dualism.
This dualism erodes as you get into areas such as neurobiology. The brain is a material organ whose electrochemical properties can be studied objectively, but what if the brain belongs to a human? Consciousness presents a problem. There is nowhere in the brain labeled as self or consciousness, so we are nowhere to be found in our own bodies, and have defined our "selves" out of existence.
Where does this leave us? Once we accept, through the study of nature and biology, that all life is organically related through the linkage of evolution, then humanity is literally a part of nature. Not figuratively, not poetically, but literally.
(This essay borrows heavily from The Social Creation of Nature, if you want to read more.)
-- Rex
TERRA 428: A Natural Bond
9:22mins | 2008-05-13 | Produced by: Katie Gilbertson
Wild animals sometimes need a little help from their human friends to make it in the world. Don Duncan, Animal Care Manager at the Beartooth Nature Center in Red Lodge, Montana, has a special connection with the orphaned animals that come under his care. Katie Gilbertson shows us what "A Natural Bond" can do for both animals and humans alike.
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