How to Live in a Relationship with Nature
We call nature a resource when we have already decided the relationship is one-way. Here is how to treat it as the other half of a relationship, at home, on the land and at work.
We call nature a resource when we have already decided the relationship is one-way.
A resource is something you draw from: a store, a stock, a supply. The word quietly settles a question before we have asked it. It says nature is there for us, and the only open questions are how much we can take and how fast.
But almost nothing in nature works one-way. If we look at how it actually works, a different word suggests itself: not resource, but relationship. And a relationship is something we can learn to live in well.
This may sound like asking people to stop using nature altogether. It doesn’t. Every living thing takes. The question is whether we also return.
How nature already works
Madhyasth Darshan describes nature as four orders: the material order (soil, water, rock, air), the plant order, the animal order, and the human order, the one that can know.
Between them runs a cycle. Material becomes plant, and plant returns to material. A leaf grows out of the soil, falls, and becomes soil again. Madhyasth Darshan calls this cyclicity (आवर्तनशीलता): each order, in its own state, is useful, and complements the order that comes after it.
In that cycle there is no waste. Everything that is taken is returned in some form. The forest doesn’t need a recycling policy. It is one.
Where people fit
Humans are the one order that can choose. A tree can’t decide to stop returning its leaves. We can decide to take without returning, and for a long time we have.
But the same capacity that lets us break the cycle lets us understand it. Madhyasth Darshan says that awakened human beings show their understanding precisely here: by being useful to, and complementing, the material, plant and animal orders, rather than only drawing on them. Taking is not the problem. Every living thing takes. The problem is forgetting the other half.
“Taking from nature and contributing to its continuity are two halves of the same relationship.”
Step 1: See what you take
A relationship starts with attention. List what your household, farm or workplace takes from nature in an ordinary week: water, food, fuel and power, wood, paper, metal and plastic in what you buy, the land you live and work on.
Most of us have never made this list. It is usually longer than we expect, and it is the first honest picture of the relationship we are already in.
Step 2: Find the way back
For each thing on the list, ask: what goes back, and where?
- At home: kitchen scraps can go back to soil. Water can be used twice. Things can be repaired before they are replaced.
- On the land: soil can be fed every season, not only harvested. Seeds can be saved. Trees can be planted where trees were cut.
- At work: materials can be chosen that return to nature when their use is over. We say more about this in How to Decide What to Produce.
Some things you will find have no way back at all. That is worth knowing too. It tells you where to take the most care.
Step 3: Take no more than can return
A village that never takes more from its forest than the forest can grow back can keep taking for centuries. A village that takes more will run out, however careful it is about everything else.
The same rule works at every scale, but it needs a number: how much do we actually need? A family that knows its enough, worked out the way we describe in How to Calculate Enough for a Family, can set what it takes against what can return. Without that number, “a little more” never ends.
One caution. Returning something is not the same as making an activity sustainable. How much returns, when and where matters, effects add up, and some damage can’t be undone. Completing the cycle in your own life is stewardship; it doesn’t by itself balance out effects that happen far away, such as where a product was made, and those still have to be measured.
Step 4: Hold it in trust, not ownership
Much of our one-way relationship with nature rests on the idea that it can be owned outright. Madhyasth Darshan calls this an illusion. Plants, forests, minerals, air and water have a value beyond any price, and the belief that any one of us can hold a monopoly over them is a confusion to be cleared, not a right to be defended.
This connects to how we think about money. No one produces money. You place labour into nature and value appears. Money is only the receipt. When we forget that, we start to imagine the receipt is the wealth. Holding land, water or a forest in trust means asking, of every use: will this still be here, and as good, for the people after us?
How to tell whether it is working
Sustainability is not a target to hit. Targets are useful, but they measure a moment. What nature asks of us is continuity: a relationship that keeps working this year, next year, and for our grandchildren.
So look for signs of continuity. Is the soil richer than it was? Is the well as full? Have birds and insects come back? With people, trust is what continuity gets called. The same is true here. A farmer who feeds the soil every season, a family that knows how much water it needs: these are relationships nature can trust.
And our happiness?
A relationship that only takes is never satisfying, with people or with the earth. There is a quiet fulfilment in completing one: in eating food from soil you have fed, or drinking from a well you have helped keep full. That fulfilment doesn’t need more things. It comes from the relationship being whole, and it is one of the ways a happy life and a sustainable planet turn out to be the same project. We set out that argument in One question, not two.
A protocol to try
For one week, notice one thing your household takes from nature each day: water, food, wood, fuel, the materials in something you bought.
Each time, ask: what goes back, and where? Then choose one thing on the list and make sure, from next week on, that something goes back.
You won’t fix everything in a week. But you will have started treating nature as what it is: the other half of a relationship you are already in.
Limitations
- Natural cycles also include loss and destruction, so “no waste” is a simplification.
- Returning what we take is easier for a farming household than for a family in a city flat, and this post only begins to address that.
- The post relies on our reading of Madhyasth Darshan. Others who study it may read it differently.
References
- Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, प्रकृति (nature), p. 119
- Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, आवर्तनशीलता (cyclicity), p. 38
- Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, पूरकता (complementarity), p. 116
- Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, समाधानात्मक भौतिकवाद, p. 189
