On Being a Naturalist

I am a Naturalist. I like being in Nature and try to be out there daily. I take similar walks each day and try to notice both obvious and subtle changes that are constantly underway in Nature. The obvious, like weather fronts, are pretty hard to miss, especially when you’re running for cover. The subtle, like the swelling of leaf buds in early spring, take a bit more observation.

While walking last Fall, I saw a bobcat in the tall grasses of a local prairie. It was retreating to the woods but gave me a startled few seconds to identify its bobbed tail. A couple of years ago a road kill bobcat was picked by the Ohio DNR on Route 20 about 8 miles northwest of where I live. But this sighting was practically in my back yard—about ¾ of a mile away. Ever since that sighting I have been trying to verify the bobcat via tracks in the winter snow. I’ve studied the tracks for their telltale “M” shaped heal pad. But I’ve yet to get a clear picture in the wild because most of the snow has been so powdery in the cold that any tracks I see are obscured, even the coyote tracks common in that prairie. So I don’t know if the bobcat is a resident or I happened to catch a glimpse of a migrating animal. I’m not discouraged. I haven’t seen a coyote either but I have identified many tracks and I know it’s only a matter of time.

I am content to take pictures of the changing seasons and wait. I know that I need Nature to work her magic. And I know that Nature is all I need.

I am dependent on Nature for food, clothing and shelter for my obvious subsistence needs. A CSA provides my vegetables. Animals and crops provide fibers for my clothes. Trees and rocks provide building materials for my shelter. And that big-brained marvel of Nature, man, nurtures the crops, animals and trees and from them fashions the things I need to survive. But I have an even deeper relationship with Nature. I only have to look into the night sky like thousands of generations before me, to wonder at the constellations and galaxies, and in this way, to experience the enormity of the universe, to realize that Nature provides all my spiritual needs as well. Perhaps this is the “macro” way. Equally spiritual is to look at Nature through a microscope to begin to understand the invisible structure all around me—the creatures, the minerals and the plants. From universe to atom I am amazed at what I see and realize all things are made from these, even to the most synthetic of substances invented by man, which things do not come from nothing—they come ultimately from natural substances. And so I am a Naturalist, being made by Nature, nurtured by Nature and in wonder of Nature. And one day I will return to Nature.

Nature is neither good nor bad. Though “good” or “bad” things may happen to us in Nature, Nature transcends dualism. Some argue that God is the transcendent. I don’t share that view. I believe Nature is the transcendent and that all flows from Nature. One could argue that Naturalism is my religion (if I believed in such things). But there is a major distinction between Nature (the “diety” in Naturalism) and God (the deity, in all its forms, of religion). Nature exists. Whether man says so or not, Nature exists. On the other hand, God only exists if man says He does. Any aware person will agree that Nature exists: to do otherwise would be to deny oceans, forests, fishes, animals, the universe. It would be to deny one’s own existence. Evidence for the existence of Nature is all around us, in everything we see, taste, touch, hear and smell. Our senses don’t lie. Whereas there is no similar, universal proof that God exists.

We hear arguments that God created the universe in a several days and populated it with all the plants and animals. But men and women, with their intellect and rigorous academic research, have proved that this version of creation is a myth. Like other myths, the creation myth was created by earlier people who were not yet able to comprehend the wonders of Nature. And let us not get side-tracked with the Intelligent Design myth either. If the universe were intelligently designed wouldn’t it be stable rather than ever-expanding with galaxies, stars and planets hurtling about and crashing into one another through the eons? Where do we imagine the craters on the moon came from? Science believes they came from the chaos. Things crashed into the moon leaving impact craters, easily visible from earth with binoculars but once only whimsically known as the man in the moon. Is that chaos ID? Or consider your appendix, an appendage to one’s gut that has evolved into uselessness. Is that ID? Every creature has evolved into what it is today. In that view, even the duckbill platypus makes perfect sense. But it is unlikely the platypus would have been designed that way. Is it ID that both life-sustaining food and life-sustaining air both enter the human body through the same tube? Is it ID that we die? If we are made in the image of God, shouldn’t we live forever? Better debaters than I have created a laundry list of unintelligent designs in animals, plants and in the universe. All these designs unarguably exist. But the Intelligent Designer only exists because some people say he exists—there is no reliable evidence whatsoever. (And I mean reliable in a scientific sense, like the fossil record which supports the Theory of Evolution.)

There are thousands of naturalists who study and appreciate Nature and who are much more accomplished in those pursuits than I am. There are fewer who believe, as I do, that Nature is all any of us really needs and that we all really do need it. How else to explain the exploitation of Nature to a planet-degrading degree? Why focus only on fossil fuels, for example, when “free” renewable energy sources are provided by Nature and are all around us? Sun, wind, currents, waves—others I don’t know about. Why do so many think we can extract every last ounce of coal and oil, and every last CF of natural gas and put those carbons into our atmosphere without ruining the planet? Science shows that we cannot but powerful individuals and corporations dominate the discussion with their money and drown out both common sense and scientific research. Ignorance is the ally of big business and of greedy billionaires. Their money, unfortunately, is very effective at buying information pathways and politicians that could otherwise disseminate scientific information and create earth-sustaining policy. In the balance? Mother Earth.

I return to thinking about the vast universe. There are millions of possible planets orbiting distant suns and possibly some have intelligent life like ours. The only optimistic idea I get from the former few paragraphs is that perhaps some of them have learned to sustainably manage their planets so that Nature’s only sentient planet is not Earth, which grinds toward self-destruction. If those worlds exist, I imagine they are peopled with Naturalists.