You cannot put the wind in a bag: How we learned to see nature

We are taught how to see.

When a healthy child is born, their eyes go about things with genetic efficiency: blinking and blurry, but functional. A new world of color, shape, and depth overwhelms the eyes that have only ever been closed. These eyes are cameras on the world. They take a snapshot of whatever they’re offered and send it on to the brain. And this is where the real seeing happens.

Early in life, you absorb your native language. We give people and things names. That is mommy. This is an apple. Those are trees. We slice and sort the world with grammar. A tree’s roots will burrow into the ground all around it. It’s home to millions of microorganisms and hundreds of macro-ones. Blossom falls, water transpires, and vast networks of fungi will pulse messages between arboreal friends. Words, though, will abstract the tree. They’ll cut away the roots, disregard the organisms, and isolate their functions. Here we have a discrete, self-contained tree. We are taught to see only the tree.

For this week’s Mini Philosophy interview, I spoke with the award-winning, bestselling nature writer Robert Macfarlane about his new book, Is A River Alive? In the book and over the course of our conversation, we explored how far our words and understanding cut up and abstract the rivers in our lives. Macfarlane’s book is an invitation to relearn how we see rivers.

The standing reserve

In his 1954 work, The Question Concerning Technology, Martin Heidegger argued that so much of the modern mindset sees nature as a “standing reserve.” We see trees as lumber, wind as power, and rivers as sewage systems. We see the instrumental value of nature rather than recognizing it as a thing with its own value. Of course, as with any relationship, it can be both. Early humans certainly used rivers as waterways, and they cut trees to build houses. But, as Macfarlane put it, “we have toggled almost fully to the instrumentalized account of water. I say at one point that the fate of rivers under rationalism, to paraphrase Marcuse, has been to become one-dimensional water. So rivers are [a] resource.”

When Heidegger introduced his concept of “standing reserve,” he deliberately compared it with how people used to use the term. Germany’s Rhine, for example, has been the source of inspiration for thousands of poets, writers, and walkers. It’s existed as something with its own kind of life force and personality. Yet, as Macfarlane writes in his book, “once a hydroelectric dam was built ‘into’ the river [it] ‘appears as something at our command,’ wrote Heidegger. In his account, hydraulic engineering — for all the miracles it brings — fundamentally transforms our orientation to the river, replacing its autonomous liveliness with a subdued servitude.”

Macfarlane recognizes that nature can be a resource that advances human development, but he argues that the pendulum has swung too far one way. Our language reflects our mindset, and our language increasingly treats nature as an object — inanimate, impersonal, and ready to exploit.

The way a child sees a river

In his book, Macfarlane recounts the time he met Rita from the First Nation Innu community in Québec, who lives near the Mutehekau, or Magpie, River in Canada. Rita said to Macfarlane, “In your manner of seeing things, you put people here, and rivers over here. You think in hierarchies. This is not a criticism — it’s a fact. Instead, you need to seek the current, the flow.”

Macfarlane told me this about that encounter: “She sort of got me straight away. She saw a man who ‘looks too much with his eyes and thinks too much with his head,’ I think were her phrases. And, you know, we live — I mean, everyone lives — within hierarchies, binaries, as well. These are inescapable, but they mustn’t become all-defining. And I think the river undoes binaries like no other form, I suppose, no other landform, world form, apart perhaps from the ocean.”

Macfarlane makes a point in his book that pops up again and again: We need to be forced to see some things in binaries. Children have no problem whatsoever in seeing life in things outside. It makes sense to imagine a tree talking, the wind having moods, or a river having thoughts. Stories of fairies, gods, and spirits come easily to children because they are already inclined to see the world as animate. But rivers resist binaries. Nature resists hierarchies.

As Alan Watts put it, “The game of Western philosophy and science is to trap the universe in a network of words and numbers, so there is always the temptation to confuse grammar with the actual operations of nature. Air and water cannot be cut or clutched, and their flow ceases when they are enclosed. There is no way of putting a stream in a bucket or the wind in a bag.”

The rivers of your life

What is the point of Macfarlane’s book? Why bother to write — and to argue — that rivers are “alive”? Well, in some way, the question itself feels crude. Macfarlane writes beautifully, and while he’s written a book, you could pause it a thousand times to just appreciate the poetry of it. So, to ask “What’s the point?” of this book is often like asking the point of a symphony, or holding hands, or paddling in the wash of the tide.

And yet, there are two reasons to agree with Macfarlane’s thesis. The first is the ecological reason. Seeing nature as “standing reserve” to be maximally exploited is what leads to irreversible, devastating deforestation and species-destroying marine pollution. We pour sewage into rivers and burn ancient woodlands because we see them as resources.

The second reason, though, is the personal one. In our interview, Macfarlane paused to look me in the eyes and ask, “What are your rivers?” I was caught off guard and blustered and stuttered my way through some vaguely philosophical reply. But it was only in the days afterward that I reflected on the question: How have rivers affected me? How is my life richer and my spirit lighter thanks to rivers? Then, the answers came flowing.

I suspect the same is true for many reading this. We all have “our rivers.” We have relationships with nature. Macfarlane’s book is a call to talk about those relationships more. Use the language of connection. Don’t just imagine a river is alive, but believe it. You probably did once, and it’s not so hard to unlearn that which denies it.