Civilization v. Nature

What our war with the earth tells us about our war with each other

Outside, I could see a mountain that defined the area where I grew up. As a child, there was snow on this peak year-round. It symbolized our moderate climate and flourishing water supply during the summer months. Wildfires were rare. Development based on tourism, military and mild climate took off as I departed for other regions. Still, I visit with my memories about the reliability of weather and community of my childhood.

Fifty years later, the region is in a multi-decade drought and wildfire is a year-round phenomenon.

I grieve as I watch the landscape morph into a high, dry desert. When will the ski areas -- a bustling infusion of tourism -- close? Will the military become the main source of employment; dedicated to war instead of defense as a means of economic production?

I’ve been sitting with this question: How do we acknowledge our part in nature rather than our dominion over it?

We did not go to war with nature because we were evil. That is important to say. We went to war with the natural earth because we were afraid.

This is the uncomfortable origin story beneath so much of what we are living through now. Not malice at the root, but fear — the fear of hunger, of cold, of darkness, of the predator moving through tall grass. Early human beings lived inside a world that was genuinely indifferent to their survival. The impulse to manage, to fence, to redirect, to control — it did not begin as greed. It began as love. The love of wanting children to survive the winter.

But love, under enough pressure, can harden into something else. The humility that once accompanied human survival — the knowledge that we were small inside a vast and ungovernable world — gradually became inconvenient. We discovered that power could feel safer than being in relationship with our environment. So we traded kinship for control. We renamed the world as we went: land became property, water became a utility, forests became timber, and somewhere in that renaming, we lost track of the fact that we still needed all of it to breathe.

The same pattern runs through our political life like a fault line.

Fear of the stranger becomes the wall at the border. Fear of losing status becomes the politics of exclusion. Fear of being ordinary, of being replaceable, of mattering no more than the next person — that fear, in armor, becomes authoritarianism. It becomes the insistence that someone must be in charge and that someone must be beneath. It becomes the language of enemies and invasion — the same language we once used for wilderness, now applied to human beings who simply want what we all want: safety, belonging, and a future.

Domination is fear in armor.

And here is what I’ve come to believe after twenty years of working at the edges of our political divides: we are not going to think our way out of this. The arguments are already available to everyone. The data exists. The history is documented. What is missing is not more information. What is missing is maturity.

Maturity, in the civic sense, means being willing to look honestly at how we got here — not to assign blame, but to understand what we are actually dealing with. It means releasing the fantasy that more control will eventually deliver the safety we’re looking for. It means accepting that we are members of something larger than our own preferences, and that membership comes with obligations we did not choose and cannot simply opt out of.

This is not a comfortable invitation. Maturity rarely is.

But I have noticed something in the people I’ve worked alongside across partisan lines: there is relief in it. Relief in no longer having to maintain the fiction that your side alone holds the answer. Relief in being allowed to acknowledge complexity. Relief in being, as one woman put it to me years ago, “a person instead of a position.”

The earth will not ask permission to continue. Life adapts, returns, and persists according to laws older than any civilization. The question for us — for this democracy, this particular generation, in this loud and frightened moment — is not whether the living world will endure. It will. The question is whether we will decide, before our options narrow further, that we want to belong to it.

Not as its masters. Not as its managers.

Just as creatures who are, finally, ready to grow up.

What would it look like if we chose maturity over mastery — in our relationship to the earth, and to each other? Leave your thoughts in the comments and thank you for doing your part in maturing.