The therapeutic effects of the environment are well known. There’s clearly a sense in which regular walks in the countryside, away from the noise and pollution of city life, an energetic swim in the clear blue sea, a holiday in the Alps, can work wonders for your health.
In cases such as these, the natural environment can literally help you get rid of a physical ailment, or cure you of a disease, by offering you the kind of sensory or sensual experiences – pleasures of sight, hearing, smell, touch and taste – which you won’t get in an urban setting. That’s why those who misappropriate parts of the natural environment are depriving the rest of us of a good that we can’t find elsewhere; and that obviously produces a stultifying, atrophying effect on us in many ways.
We all know what happened to Humpty Dumpty when he fell off the wall and “all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could not put him back together again”.
That’s what happens to the environment when it takes a tumble. Environmental degradation leads to physical and psychological disruption. When the ties between a person’s life and their natural and cultural environment are severed, they experience anomie, a deep physical and spiritual malaise, and their relations with others – with the rest of the community – will suffer as a result.
The Humpty Dumpty story tells of a character who meets a bad end in a fictive or literary context. We can think of that story as a metaphor for what happens to a person’s well-being in real life when they end up living in a poor or hostile environment.
We can make that connection between fact and fiction by referring to Karl Marx’s distinction between three kinds of alienation workers suffer from under exploitative relations of production: alienation from themselves, from their product and from their fellow workers.
People living in a concrete jungle, with no access to nature, suffer from the same kinds of affliction: they become strangers to themselves, they lose control over their actions and they feel cut off – alienated – from other human beings, from those they would normally be able to relate to and communicate with in a healthy environment.
Separating the quality of the environment from the quality of people’s lives would be splitting the person – Humpty-Dumpty-like – into two halves, body and mind, matter and spirit. It would be like inserting a wedge between the physical and the psychological, hiving off thoughts, sensations and emotions from the form of life in which they are embedded or expressed.
That kind of rift has all the makings of a disease. The cure would require a radical change of perspective. It would mean realising that we human beings have what Holmes Roston III calls “entwined destinies” with the natural world. It would mean “dissolving any firm boundary” between the two “so as to let nature take its course, as far as we can”. The cure would involve the resolve on our part to deal with the environment with the reverence and respect it deserves.
Environmental degradation leads to physical and psychological disruption- Joe Friggieri
The quality of human life will visibly improve once we realise that the environment we live in is not something to be exploited for private profit or financial gain but a good to be appreciated and enjoyed. In David Cooper’s words, such a realisation would bring about a change from hubris to humility, where hubris is defined as an urge based on the belief that human beings could “shape and exploit the natural world according to their whims”. Acting on that realisation would mean replacing that belief with a much healthier attitude towards the environment, one that instils a feeling of joy, friendliness and social well-being.
We cannot have a healthy culture in a sick environment because nature and culture, meaning nature and the way we live, are inextricably linked.
The words ‘culture’, ‘cultivation’ and ‘agriculture’ have common roots. Some 50 years ago, poet Anton Buttigieg wrote this beautiful haiku: “The farmers migrate. Throughout the fields all one sees are men of straw.”
That was 50 years ago. We all know what the situation is like today. Still we must not lose hope. There’s not much we can do about Humpty Dumpty after his fall. But there’s at least something we can do to save the environment from further degradation, given that there’s still quite a bit of countryside that needs to be protected, a considerable stretch of coast that must be kept accessible to everybody and a number of old villages whose character ought to be preserved.
We know what we should be aiming at and we also have the means to achieve those aims, if only we could convince ourselves and our lawmakers that the natural environment is a common or public good and should be treated as such; and that it is only when people are at one with their environment rather than pitted against it that they can function as healthy human beings rather than as “men of straw”.
Joe Friggieri is a professor of philosophy. This is an abridged version of a talk he recently gave at the Environment Forum organised by the Malta Chamber of Psychologists at the Majjistral Nature and Heritage Park.