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Title: Nature and Ideology Author: Murray Bookchin Date: June 6, 2017 Language: en Topics: nature, ideology, green anarchism, social ecology, video Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8L9p1LpkHc Notes: Recording courtesy of Casey Holcomb. Date unknown. Transcribed by Ruairi Wood.
The fact of the matter is that every attitude we have had toward nature
has actually been an echo and, even more precisely, a reflection of the
attitude we have had toward each other, and that there have been as many
different views toward the natural world as there have been in society
itself in the relationship between human and human.
Our attitudes are entirely a product of our own relationship to each
other, our attitudes toward the natural world, but this can be traced
back almost to prehistory, to tribal society itself, and we can see the
evolution, not only of society, but with society and along with new and
different social relationships, different attitudes toward nature. Among
so-called âprimitive peoplesâ the natural world was seen almost as
though it were nothing more than a food web. Egalitarian: reflecting the
essentially egalitarian structure of so-called primitive society itself.
The Algonquins organised in clans, saw the beaver as organised in clans,
and saw other animals as organised in clans. Their image of the natural
world, reflecting to the degree that their society was egalitarian, the
egalitarian nature of that world â the natural world itself â stressed
harmony, stressed mutual aid, saw nature not as a competing marketplace
in which all organisms were engaged in a struggle for existence, but as
an arena for cooperation, an arena for community.
One has only to go further into the Greek world, for example, and there
in the dualism of Greek society itself, in the basic split between
master and slave, one witnesses again another attitude toward the
natural world, but not one that comes from the natural world itself but
one that comes from Greek society. Insofar as that Greek world was split
between master and slave, between man and woman, between polis and
countryside, so too nature was split between the cultivated and the
wild, the orderly and the chaotic. So that the Greeks projected out on
the natural world their own vision of their society.
In the medieval world again one finds the natural world organised
hierarchically just as medieval society was organized hierarchically.
One finds there a king of the beasts because one lives amidst kings, and
one finds lowly ants because one lives in a social world built around
the labour of lowly serfs. And finally with the emergence of the market
economy, where all corporate ties are dissolved, where the guild ties
are dissolved, and the clan ties are dissolved, and even the ties
created by the extended family are dissolved all into free moving atoms
who are buyers and sellers in a jungle called free enterprise, one
emerges with another image of the natural world. The natural world too
is a jungle of buyers and sellers, prey and predators, and the Darwinian
description of it, particularly those who follow Darwin, Huxley and
others with their emphasis on the survival of the fittest, with their
emphasis on prey and predator, with their emphasis on natural selection,
with their view of nature as a jungle, eat or be eaten, reflected
exactly the relationships that existed in the 19th century marketplace
between capitalists and between the capitalist class and the working
class.
Now we are moving into a new era and this is the era of corporate
capitalism, of state capitalism, of super planning and super
quantification. A quantification which already began to emerge with
Galileo and with the rising bourgeoisie with its concern for
accumulation, with its concern for prices, with its laws of supply and
demand. And weâre creating a new quantified constellation that we call
nature. This is a nature again that lends itself to quantification on
the assumption that quantification is truth. That what cannot be put
into an equation, what does not lend itself to systems analysis, what
does not lend itself to rationalised planning and manipulation,
numerical comprehension, is not truth, is not nature. We are foisting
the paradigm of our society on the natural world and staking out the
claim again that nature itself is a type of corporation, that nature
itself is in fact a kind of computer, and it works through a
reductionism with energy that finally turns complex ecosystems with
qualitative distinctions between species and between plants and animals
into the movement of energy within a whole system. A kind of plumbing of
energy as it were, a new kind of energetics which reflects the new
energetics of the corporate system, of the corporate system as a
complete ecosystem economically involved in the process of natural
exploitation and also of human exploitation.
The very idea that nature is an object to be dominated by man stems
ultimately to begin with from the very domination of human by human, and
throughout history we have been projecting our social relationships, the
way we have visualised our society, onto the natural world just as
Heaven was organised in the feudal system along feudal lines, and nature
was organized in the feudal system along feudal lines; just as Greek
dualism made its own distinctions between wild nature and tame nature,
just as so-called early human beings, primitive man, created a more
egalitarian system within the natural world that reflected the
egalitarian system in the social world. So everywhere along the way we
have to function self-consciously with the idea that whenever we talk
about nature, we not only have created a second nature called society,
but very importantly that in that second nature called society we have
always added a social dimension onto that first nature, we have always
made as its underpinnings our attitudes and our relationships as the
vision that we have of the natural world. We cannot have any social
ecology today, we cannot have any biology today that is so free of
social interpretation as to be a so-called science. We can state facts
that are true, but above all we must always be aware of the fact that
whenever we deal with nature we are dealing with it not from our
experience with the natural world, not even from the laboratory
experience of the natural world, but from our experience in our
interaction with each other. And if we live in a society of domination
then our attitude toward nature is going to be a domineering attitude as
an outlook premise on the supposition that nature itself is mere object
of manipulation.
Now we are beginning again in the so called ecology movement, and what I
would more properly call the environmentalist movement, to try to
examine the natural world within the framework of the given situation as
we have it now in society. We live in a world of wars, so we impute war
to nature. We live with certain values called profit, so we impute
profitability to nature. We live with certain emotions that we
emphasise, and we impute these to nature as such without any cognizance
of the fact that many of these concepts which we regard as value free
are products of our own society and products of our own relationship
with each other.
The most striking example in all of this is the whole population issue,
and I couldnât think of perhaps a more dramatic example of how we have
taken our social views and projected them upon the natural world and
then permitted them to bounce off, to reinforce these social views
again. We have a population problem only in a certain sense to begin
with, and German fascism and fascism generally saw this. As machinery
began to replace labour, as labour itself became increasingly
superfluous with the advance of technology in the 19th century and then
going into the 20th century, the problem of how to deal with masses of
unemployed who were restless, how to occupy them, how to keep them from
becoming a threat to the social system became one of the most pronounced
features of fascism. One does not have to go to Ehrlich and one does not
have to go to Garrett Hardin. Quite accurately, previous speakers have
gone back to Hitler himself, but not so much to Hitler but to a problem
that Hitler faced. From the standpoint of German fascism in the 1930s,
even though population was declining, even though France was giving
bonuses at that time for larger families, Europe was excessively
populated. It was excessively populated with respect to the technology
that was all around. It was excessively populated when one had 14%, 15%,
and 16% unemployed, even though at time the birthrate was going down.
Out of this German fascism built a whole demographic system based upon
racism which involved the readjustment of population to the realities of
the industrial system of the 1930s and, sinisterly enough, to realities
which exist to this day. The supposition and the ideological base for
all of these concepts which finally led to Auschwitz, which finally led
to Bergen-Belsen, which finally led to the gas chambers of Europe in
which millions of people were destroyed not only on the basis of ethnic
reasons but on the basis of overpopulation, the rationale for that was
an image of nature and an image of the natural world and population
dynamics in the natural world that was imputed to the social world
because of social needs, not because of natural facts.
Human beings will not multiply like fruit flies. Social conditions enter
into birthrate just as much as they enter into a death rate. Turn women
and to reproductive factories, reduce them to nothing more than
domestics of men, convert them into mere machines, biological devices
for taking care of the male and procreating a family, and at that
particular point under certain social conditions your birthrate may
soar. Change the status of women, see them not as objects but a
subjects, view them as human beings, give meaning to the life of a woman
and even to the life of a man in a family, and the population rate begin
to decline, especially if that family has material security, has
concerns other than problems of old age and support, is interested not
nearly in raising children and being a family for the express purpose of
breeding but as a family, as part of a community, to enjoy the culture,
to assimilate the knowledge of that society and hopefully of an
emancipated society. So then birthrates, unlike the case of fruit flies,
birth rates in human beings are not unresolvable owing to a pair
reproducing and then exponentially increasing until you finally have an
overcrowded planet and you have to edge into the Atlantic and Pacific
oceans or whatever oceans happen to be adjacent to your continent.
Change the social conditions materially, change the spiritual
conditions, change the cultural conditions and a birth rate will go
down.
The sinister aspect of a popular, purely biological approach to human
birth rate is not that we are dealing with biological facts when we
discuss human beings as being fruit flies. The sinister aspect of it is
that we are dealing with social facts. What would it mean if a birthrate
were not diminished owing to progress and cultural conditions, owing to
the emancipation of women, owing to the improvement of economic
conditions? What would it mean to reduce the birthrate then? What if the
birthrate had to be reduced or an argument were cited to reduce the
birth rate for ecological reasons under present social conditions? The
logic of that would be totalitarianism. The logic of that would be a
population bureau as Erlich has essentially suggested. It would be
triage. Donât think only of the lifeboat ethic, think of the famous
triage system which the paddocks borrowed from the army. The walking
wounded who can be kept on a side, the near dead who should be permitted
to, die, and those who you should concentrate on because if you work on
them you have a chance of rescuing them. Applied from the field hospital
to demographic theory this turns out to be one of the most sinister
techniques, a social technique, not a biological fact. A social
technique for dealing with population.
So population is not a neutral biological fact. It is not merely a
matter of education, because how can you educate people in the third
world, for example, who are literally on the edge of starvation if not
actually starving? How can you educate them into various practices of
birth control when the primary needs that they have consist not only of
getting food, but even the simplest and only pleasures, as Gandhi
pointed out long before anyone else, was to engage in sexual activity?
They have no TV, they have no movies, they have none of those marvellous
instruments for the pursuit of happiness that marked the first world.
Gandhiâs understood that about India decades ago, pointing out that if
you want to solve our population problem please solve the material
conditions that underpin the growth in population in India. The fact is
that there is general neglect. The fact is that population soared during
the period of the Industrial Revolution almost 170 years ago, even when
tuberculosis was pandemic and the death rate began to soar in all the
great cities of Europe, particularly of England, yet population
continued to grow. Because life itself was spiritually empty, because
life itself had no meaning, because the social conditions of life were
impoverishing to the spirit and impoverishing materially. And itâs not a
recent fact to be accredited strictly to Barry Commoner, itâs an old
demographic theory called the Theory of Demographic Transition, that as
you improve the material conditions of a community, as you change the
status of women â and this represents a new dimension â as you even
change the status of children in the community and what their purpose
is, then population will begin to decline, or will become stabilised, or
the rate of increase will begin to decline and finally there will be
population stability.
So we are not talking when we discuss population of a natural fact
alone, and to reduce population dynamics to society, population dynamics
to biology, is not simply an act of reductionism of the most vulgar sort
but has the most sinister implications in terms of a lifeboat ethic, in
terms of a triage system, and ultimately, and let us not kid ourselves
about this, in terms of an Auschwitz, in terms of a Bergen-Belsen, in
terms of the ovens and the gas chambers of German fascism. And you do
not have to be a fascist to provide a stepping stone to fascism.
Liberalism has provided more stepping stones to fascism in the form of
state control, in the form of state interference, in the form of
centralisation of authority, in the form of disarming populations, in
the form of creating more and more bureaucracies than anything the
fascists have done until they finally came to power themselves. You can
be the most well-intentioned person in the world and still create this
type of stepping stone toward extreme reaction.
Now let me reverse the picture. Let us say that it were magically
possible to reduce the American population from 200-odd million to about
100 million. We finally fulfilled every hope of the population bombers,
if you like, or the neo-Malthusians, if you like, or the ZPG
demographers, if you like. I submit to you that if you did that you
would no more diminish the ecological crisis today in the United States
than if you double the population over what it is today. Our society is
a market society, a society built around buyers and sellers. Its whole
rationale is grow or die. Despite the whole literature around limits to
growth, its most essential purpose is to produce for the sake of
production because if you do not produce, even if you donât know what
youâre producing, you will perish because your competitor will swallow
you up. And you donât need a free market economy to do that: it happens
between the best monopolies. And it happens not only between the best
monopolies but study this petroleum situation and youâll find that it
happens between the best cartels.
So cut the population in half and the whole thrust of the society will
be that if you have two cars, you should have three, and if you have a
colour television set in every single room, you should have one in every
corner, and if finally you have three or four coats, be safe, have five
or six. And if you donât consume it, the so-called Department of Defense
will, and if the Department of Defense doesnât consume it, it will be
the broker for Israelis and Arabs, for African states, and Latin
American military dictatorships to consume it for you. The Mesabi Range
will operate full-steam, the marketplace will burgeon, prices will soar,
the factories will boom, with or without people in them, even with
massive unemployment, but growth will take place.
The mystery in America, by the way, about the idle factories is that
theyâve simply moved them over to Taiwan, and they moved them over to
Hong Kong where labour is cheaper. Theyâve moved them over to the Near
East or theyâve moved them over or are in the process of selling new
ones to China and to Russia and what have you. But the basic fact is
that that growth will take place if you brought the American population
down to 50 million, and with that growth would occur the same ecological
dislocations, the same ecological disequilibrium, the same pollution,
the same waste that marks our economy today, and marks most economies in
the world today, particularly in the West but no less so almost
everywhere else in the world to one degree or another.
So what Iâm getting at is that if we cannot deal with population
dynamics, and when I speak of population dynamics I can talk of almost
any other biological dynamic, we cannot deal with these dynamics and we
cannot form our vision of nature as though we were passively dealing
with a scientific fact or scientific phenomenon. We are really
projecting our views everywhere along the way: our market economy, our
patriarchal society, our class society, our whole system of hierarchy,
and our whole system of domination onto the natural world, and then we
go back to the natural world and mine it to reinforce the very things
weâve projected on it in the first place. That is the supreme irony,
that is the real feedback of what is called environmentalism today, and
biological determinism.
Let me stress a very important fact here, that we donât have to be
polluters to undermine this planet. We have only to simplify it, we have
only to replace soil by sand, we have only to replace vegetation by
concrete we have only to replace trees by steel buildings or reinforced
concrete structures eating up our best arable land, we have only to
spread over, however thinly, this planet and simplify it. Breaking down
complex ecosystems and reducing them to simple ecosystems, turning the
organic into the inorganic to undermine the natural basis for life on
this planet. We can get every gizmo or every widget you could think of,
and stick it into any car you like, put it in any smokestack you wish,
and yet as we go around increasing or changing the ratio of gases in the
atmosphere, turning the oceans into a barren wasteland and, without even
polluting, building our structures along shores and destroying vital
estuaries, forever simplifying the planet and we will have undermined at
least a natural basis for any type of social life.
This simplification is no less important than the amount of pollution to
which we are exposed and the amount of pollution that we are creating. A
second feature which is terribly important in my eyes, and which Iâd
like to stress, is that we who come out of a quantified, financial
society in which numbers have never been more important (whether they be
statistics or stock market reports) stemming out of that mentality and
applying that to nature and calling that science, as it were, may well
find that we have lost hold of qualitative truths which cannot be
reduced to statistics, which cannot be reduced to energy flow, which
cannot be reduced to equations. Our existing science, far from being
value free, is not only very much a product of our own social relations
as we project them upon nature, but even in its methodology represents a
very limited vision of this planet and of experience. I feel very
strongly that men like Goethe and Rudolf Steiner, in spite of the
current trend today toward the mathematical paradigm, are correct in
stressing that there are qualitative aspects of nature, that there are
qualitative aspects of experience. Aspects which cannot be reduced to
equations, aspects which cannot be quantified, that are as profoundly
true, if not truer,than those that can be quantified.
It is only since Galileoâs time that we have suddenly put on a pair of
glasses which we call mathematics and the mathematical paradigm, and in
which we have excluded everything that we cannot see with those glasses.
Not only do we have social presuppositions to our image of nature, we
also have philosophical presuppositions for our methodologies.
Quantitative science has not said the last word. Mathematical paradigms
are not the culminating conclusion of human knowledge and the human
experience, and insofar as we coming out of a completely quantified
world in which human resources are literally statistics and census
tables, in which nature reduced to natural resources is quantified in so
many barrels of oil, so many tons of iron, in that world we have
projected for ourselves a very limited view of nature itself as being
nothing but the quantifiable, and what is not quantifiable is unreal. I
submit this to be false. I submit that just as an ecosystem is not
simply a flow of energy to be encompassed purely by systems analysis,
valuable as many of these mathematical tools may be, I argue that there
is in nature itself distinct qualitative differences between species,
plants and animals, the organic and the inorganic, humans and also even
between those individuals themselves.
There is nothing more revealing for anybody who has a quantitative
mentality than to read Roger Williamsâ work âBiological Individualityâ,
nothing more compelling to shake your faith in what is the minimum daily
requirement you are supposed to have of vitamin A, B, C, D, or whatever,
for what is regarded as the normative stomach, or the normative liver,
or the exactly correct electrocardiogram, than to read that work and see
for yourself the immense variety that exists not only between species
but within a species, within same age groups of the same ethnic
background, and even the same social background. One of the most
compelling things we are fighting for today is the recognition of that
individuality, the recognition of that diversity, not its subsumption.
Not its reduction into quantities that are manageable purely on the
basis of an already prejudged and preaccepted philosophical premise. I
would ask you too to read Burttâs âMetaphysical Foundations of Scienceâ
to see how science itself, which we accept as holy truth in its
quantified mathematical form, actually is built around fakeness
philosophy and marks a reaction to Aristotelianism and also marks a very
distinct bias, namely that the world is mathematical and what is not
mathematical is not of this world.
I wish to make this defence of qualitative science. I wish to invoke the
rights of intuition. I wish to invoke the insights of what might be
called your seventh sense, and demand that they have an authority quite
equal to that and at times even superior to that of what would be called
the purely mathematical paradigm. Iâve stressed that I believe this
world, as one who has been deeply concerned with ecology and not just
environmentalism, can well be undermined by simplifying it. The biggest
problem we face right now, if there is to be any nature mathematical or
qualitative, if there is to be any biological fundament for what we call
society, at least for soil that will give us food that is qualitatively
superior, at least an atmosphere that is breathable, at least a flora
and fauna around us that is not only aesthetically refreshing but
biologically and socially renewing, is to actually go to work on the
society itself. The problem is not so much our understanding of nature
as it is our understanding of each other. If there is any intrinsic good
in the fact that we as conscious creatures of nature can act upon
nature, to diversify the environment, to enrich it, to fulfill the whole
thrust of biological evolution, which has been for life to assume so
many different forms that it can colonise almost every area of the
planet, itâs very atmosphere itself and some of its hottest springs,
cover the whole surface of the earth with a sheet of life with what we
call a biosphere. If there is any intrinsic good in that intent, in that
goal, then we have to try in some way or other to harmonise our own
relationship with each other and to respect the diversity of society
itself, its potential for diversification, its potential ultimately for
liberation. It means that if we are going to have a sound ecological
relationship with nature we need an ecological society, and that is what
social ecology is all about.
Fundamentally it means this: not that we accept the existing conditions
and merely try to analyse them, not that we work with a methodology that
assumes that what is here must be here and how we going to manipulate
it, use it, either make it better or beneficial or less harmful, but how
we are literally going to change this planet, and that means above all
our society so that we will be living in a harmonised relationship with
the natural world. Fundamentally that means we have to develop a society
in which we live in a harmonised relationship with each other. An
ecological society ultimately is one in which domination, which has no
meaning in ecology, classes which have no meaning in ecology, go to a
food web and tell me what is the kingly animal and what is the lowly
animal, all of the components of the food web are interdependent. So too
in society we have to eliminate those very castes, those hierarchies,
and those systems of domination as well as exploitation which will lead
to a harmonised society and with that harmonised society we will have
developed not only the social relationships but the spiritual and
cultural equipment to project out on the natural world a harmonized
relationship between humanity and nature.
As long as we have domination in this society we will try to dominate
nature. As long as we have a market society, where production exists for
the sake of production, we will turn nature into natural resources and
mine these natural resources and simplify nature until we make the
planet uninhabitable for advanced forms of life. Until such time that we
homogenise and quantify, reducing forever to a lower common denominator
what things have in common, ignoring their differences, ignoring their
qualitative distinctions, this whole mentality of the buyer-seller
relationship, this whole mentality of a moneyed society, then too we
will deal with nature, not only as resources, but as sources of energy
and undermine all the distinctions within the natural world.
If we were to follow through what it means to produce an ecological
society that would be in balance with the natural world we would have to
work with certain definite assumptions. First of all there can be no
domination, if people cannot directly control the society in which they
live, they cannot take in in a single view the conditions of their own
social existence. And what Iâm presenting here is no more than the
Hellenic attitude, that we have to think small, think on a human scale
so that we can begin to comprehend, understand, grasp all the conditions
of life around us. This implies the decentralisation of our cities and
it implies the decentralisation of our technologies, both with a view
toward making it possible for all of us to control and understand how we
interact with nature through our technologies, but also that we can
control these technologies directly, completely comprehend all their
aspects, or as many or enough of their aspects so that we can form a
judgment about them, form an opinion about them, and have something to
say about what their destiny would be.
It means for us, in addition, more passive systems of technology which
can best be utilised on a decentralised basis: solar energy, wind power,
methane digesters, and with that along with such sources of energy,
organic gardens in our cities, around our cities, and breaking up our
cities, not into distant and far removed homesteads or hamlets but real
communities where we can get to know each other, where in terms of
population, where in terms of the very geometry of these cities it is
possible in the old Hellenic sense that you can take the community in in
a single view, as Aristotle would put it, in the politics. It means
also, not only these new technologies, a new integration of town and
country, of technology and agriculture. Small is beautiful in
Schumacherâs words, I would add small is indispensable to our survival.
It would mean not only that, it would also mean the elimination of
domination as a mode of human operation, as a mode of sociation, as a
mode of interrelating with our fellow human beings. That elimination of
domination is not only a classless society such as the Marxist would
have us fight for, it means even more significantly domination within
the family, the domination of the young by the old, the domination of
women by men, not only the domination of man by man and the factory, in
the office, in the academy in whatever. It means not only the abolition
of exploitation in its economic sense, it means the abolition of
domination in its spiritual sense, and with that we would have to go not
back to the factory, weâd have to go much further, much further than
Marx would have us go, down to the very nuclear basis of society itself,
the family, the commune, the community, on its most local level.
It would mean creating, in a sense, ecological structures, structures in
which there are no kings and there are no lowly ants. No kingly beasts,
no lowly ants, no kingly lions, no lowly ants. It would mean a new
regard for human individuality, a recognition of distinctions between
people, of differences in potential which are not hierarchically
organised, but which in fact take on the form of a gestalt in which
everyone has to contribute or can contribute what we today would
normally regard as failings to the society. One can go back for example
to the winter Indians. Among them there is no such thing as a village
idiot. There is no such thing as a cripple. There is no such thing as a
lunatic amongst them, rather each one has something to really contribute
to the society, is touched in some way by some degree of uniqueness and
insofar as it doesnât affect the harmony of the society, is not ranked
pyramidally as above or below but nearly as part of the group as a
whole. Itâs an entirely different sensibility, an entirely different way
of thinking.
Weakness has its attributes; strength has other attributes. Intelligence
or quickness of mind may be one attribute, wisdom may be another,
craftsmanship may be a third, but none is superior to the other and from
that point of view the very pyramidal ranking with which we organize
reality in our everyday experience dissolves into a gestalt, into a
harmonious integration of many different features of individuals so that
each pools into the common fund a unique individuality called the
community itself through their own uniqueness as individuals. The
problem with biological determinism, of trying to reduce everything in
our culture or most things in our culture, from population to emotions,
from family structure to class structure, to genetic material, to the
morphological apparatus of the individual, this reductionism validates
the status quo, it accepts the given and fixes it eternally in the
genetic material of humanity. The essential achievement of human beings
and ultimately their essential destiny, as it were, is their ability to
transcend the biological, not with a view toward dominating it, but with
a view toward bringing a new input into it, and that input is
consciousness. We in a sense have a destiny in the biological world,
oddly enough, and this is perhaps the most relevant biological goal that
we could aim for in our analysis of society. That is that having come
out of nature, having come out of the kinship systems of clans, having
come out of the sexual division of labour, having come out of age
groups, into a new type of territorialism in which people can associate
with each other not on the basis of blood ties, not on the basis of
sexual ties, but above them on the basis of a genuine community of
interests and consciousness.
This can give us a new freedom, and without a free society that can then
react upon nature, not to demolish the natural world, not to simplify
the natural world, but on the contrary to reconstruct, to help it
develop, to promote variety to do in 10 years what it may take nature a
million years, to recolonise and still further colonise and variegate
the world of life, placing it not in our service â indeed placing
nothing in our service, neither thing nor being â but on the contrary
developing a new mutualistic relationship with each other and with the
entire world of life.
You cannot have biology today without remembering that you have society.
You cannot reduce society to biology any more than you can reduce
biology to society. Both interact with each other, both have become
dimensions of a humanised nature and, hopefully, in Marxâs words, a
naturalised humanity. And a new balance has to be struck so that the
liberation, the freedom that we can introduce into our own society can
be returned to nature to enrich the natural world and thereby create an
even more substantial stable base for a pacified, a peaceful, a
harmonised, natural and social world.