Wildlife, and The Agrarian Commons
Our use of the term ‘natural’ will be much profound in time going forward, as to make our representations suitable in which the rarity of the source as we refer the term with. The natural environment is the first setting of the Earth, the canon timeline of life-being affirming state — but we cannot say this statement without our already in mind the perception and understanding of comparison, and difference, caused by the perpetual changes of what is natural to us, to something that it is less or not even natural anymore. Arthur Schopenhauer said in his book The World as Will and Representation (1818):
"The world and its contents exist in the beginning, independent of the knowledge of 'intelligent beings' or humans. After the presence of humans with mind-knowledge, the world represents itself to humans, humans then repeat the representation of the world that previously existed outside of them. There is a separation between the representation of the first world (the world itself) and the representation of the second world (the result of the representation of the world from humans), although they still have similarities or small differences."To give a quite hypothetic example, could one in time of 7000 years ago, in their Proto Indo-European Language, say that something is ‘natural’? This but without the understanding of the term as it mostly helped by the recorded representations of the world throughout history. Different then, the world now with the human ability to produce representations vastly outside out of their own, is proven to be the strikingly ‘better’ result. Humans today have more stable ground in which to do their comparison, between the language — as goes with the very term ‘natural’, and these changing worlds they perceiving in.
Every word in every language has its own opposition. Comparison is neat when things are strong in distinctions, and this term natural — while it is still say something that has meaning and representation it refers to, one could not understand it in depth because of the frail comparison between their language and the world. What is ‘natural’ then is out of sight in everyday language, how uncommon to say, because of the world insignificant change. Even if the world did change — rather moderately, it would be beyond our everyday life and abilities to understand the bigger scale representation of the world outside our region. Globalization is yet anything on those years. To say what is ‘natural’ then is redundant.
Language is everything that is needed to relate our representation to the world. If what is ‘natural’ then 7000 years ago is understood communally, spoken as a term of conventional everyday language — it is referring to the environment? What do they compare the term natural for except something that is even further in the past? But the natural environment back then is like the evolution, the long going process of changing, as simple because human is not doing something affecting or rather unharmful to nature’s ‘natural’ motion.
We sentient is not hard to think as our ability of immediate knowing. If one ask a child these days, “What is a natural environment for you?”. They are most likely to answer something resounding the green trees and grass, wood, mud, waterfall, river, blue sky, any of that natural colors (kids like colors) This they continue to say — their hometown, back in the rural side if somehow they knew it still exists. Nothing much to tell, the kid’s hometown could be the city itself, the spatial condition where you asked the question — hardly natural, and the kid still could say “the rice field in the middle of the usual big concrete establishment, just near my house, down the alley”.
Nobody understands the term ‘poor’ without understanding the term ‘rich’. What is poor for how humankind started with ‘poverty’. It is a gradual understanding through comparison in language and material. If having a 100 dollar today is considered rich compare to having it back in the 1950 — it does not mean anything if one still has difficulty making ends meet.
If one has watched the film The Gods Must Be Crazy, will likely remember when the main character Nǃxau tried to hunt this one sheep as he always thought it is just something casually natural (even to give the punctuation here is rather peculiar) and to take out the sheep is just to take it. The natural environment roams free, and does not really belong to anything but itself — at first, but here we are now with our needs and expenses.
The Gods Must Be Crazy was and still is the best film to give one such comparison of different representations of the world at supposedly the same time setting. It is about modernity, but not only how it affects the natural environment, but also the people who inhabit it. The confusion of the people who live their life still holding to their default representation of the world, tragically the one that must adapt to the rapid changes. Aside from the modern world, one thing also from the film, is how the bushmen (the societies/tribe Nǃxau belong) firm critique to their God, which from the title one can get to know the specific. It is comical yet thoughtful, and I personally believe this is how one should interact with God. Bushmen to the extent did not even have the conventional language of ethics/morality, as to say something is bad or evil. Much credit to their stoic-survival instinct.
One should go to the natural environment to intensify their dying representation of what is natural, and it supposedly makes them feel depressed, but it rarely happens and I cannot force the likelihood. The natural environment is not so-called ‘natural attractions’ before it attracts people to come and experience the place for luxurious leisure. People even put names on them, often nobody understands the origin, and confused about the even so different version of names it attached. Luxurious leisure I defined as one defeating its own objective going to the natural environment, like blasting off high volume EDM music, driving their vehicles to put it as near as the spot which destroys everything it passed in the process, and most likely the littering.
These natural attractions once with the term ‘environment’, become establishments to even more sophisticated luxurious leisure, owned by anyone but the locals, or the people who inhabits the place for hundreds if not thousands of years. But the luxurious leisure must go on, people like luxurious leisure, it is good for the economic growth. From this, we can conclude that people who do luxurious leisure like to ‘look’ at the spectacle of the environment, but still stand in the ground or concrete establishment in which is comfortable by the city standard. In the surface impression, one could just say that everybody has their own taste of enjoying the natural environment that is provided before them, but this is not without consequences. The locals who live and own the area are forced to meet our needs, to apply to their cultural and geographical contrast — our city custom and lifestyle. They need to somehow made everything more accessible, more ‘plausible’, and put other interesting material stuff to support our forceful photogenic misunderstanding. The misstep of contextual and practical development of human fulfillment is paid by nature, and we cannot stop it except we’re gone entirely. It is difficult to change what is embedded for immense of years.
Wildlife and agrarian commons, inside oneself there’s only a single wolf — confused, forgetful, and keep mistaking itself as two. One wants to be side by side together in hands with what is natural, to keep the representation and the world aligned and fair. Yet at the same time, one also sometimes just like the sheep and follow what the herd usually does, which is to take a dump in the natural environment. These but the most contemplative, the despondency of the dumps…
