It was last year, during a conference at the Eden Project, the botanic garden and conservation center in Cornwall, that Frieda Gormley first heard the dictionary definition of nature.
The businesswoman and environmental activist was answering questions about her plans to appoint a nature representative to the board of her company, House of Hackney, when a member of the audience read it out.
“Nature,” says the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), is “the phenomenon of the physical world collectively; especially plants, animals, and other features and products of the earth itself, as opposed to people and human creations”.
“Everyone in the room was really shocked and really saddened by it,” Gormley said. “It made me think: if people feel we are separate from nature, how can we really take nature into account in our actions? This definition and worldview has as much to do with the crisis we are in.”
Currently, all English dictionaries define nature as an entity separate from and opposed to humans and human creations – a perspective that campaigners say perpetuates humanity’s troubled relationship with the natural world.
So when she got home, Gormley approached Jessie Mond Webb, of the collective Lawyers for Nature, with whom she had already worked, and they decided to start a campaign to persuade dictionaries to adopt a new, more extensive giving definition to the word “nature”. – and with it perhaps to redefine what it means to be human.
“It started a journey for us beyond how are we actually going to create this campaign, [to] a personal discovery of how we became so separate, and how can we begin to return to our place in the natural kingdom?
“We want dictionaries to reflect the scientific fact and overwhelming consensus that humans are part of nature, just as animals, plants and other products of the earth are.
“If we want people to protect nature, they need to feel a connection with nature.”
The understanding of nature as different from humans stems from thousands of years of Western thought, according to Prof Tom Oliver, an ecologist at the University of Reading. And yet, he says, it makes no scientific sense.
“I think [the definition] is slightly insane in the sense that it reflects a kind of insanity in our modern society, or perhaps a delusion,” he said.
It was the French philosopher René Descartes who set the tone for the modern separation of man and nature, by “proposing the view that the mind is divine and God-like, and our bodies, and the bodies of other creatures, are just friendly of inanimate matter”, said Oliver. At the same time, other Western philosophers held the idea that human progress meant moving away from the “state of nature,” a life that Thomas Hobbes derided as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
“All these cultural factors, our brain absorbs them like a sponge … and that then exacerbated a sense of isolation, a sense of degraded, isolated individuals floating around in the world,” Oliver said.
But science, from Darwin on, contradicts the idea of human exceptionalism. Oliver points out that human bodies contain as many bacterial cells as human cells – bacteria with which humans share about a third of their DNA, “like a cut and paste”. Those cells that are human are constantly being renewed and recycled, some turning over within days or weeks.
Similar processes are going on in the human mind. “Every word, every touch, every smell affects our brain, and those 150 billion neurons in our head are constantly reconfiguring in response to conversations with other people, aspects of the natural world we experience,” Oliver said. “So really in this view of science, our physical bodies and our minds are not separate from nature or other people. We are deeply intertwined.”
Oliver’s analyzes convinced Gormley and Mond Webb that they were on the right track. But then they hit an obstacle.
“We thought about writing a campaign-style letter to the dictionary to say, ‘This is how it should be done, this is how this word should be used,'” Mond Webb said. But, she added: “Very quickly we realized that dictionaries were not interested in that.”
to newsletter promotion
Dictionaries do not determine the definitions of words, said Fiona McPherson, a lexicographer at the OED, and as a result: “Sometimes words don’t mean exactly what people think they should.
“The reason a word is defined the way it is is because of the way people use it. That’s how it always goes. We will see how a word is used and that is how the dictionary definition is arrived at.”
It seemed that the campaigners’ goal was out of reach. But then they noticed, buried behind the paywall of the OED and considered obsolete since 1873, a further definition of nature: “In a broader sense, the whole natural world, including humans and the cosmos.”
The goalposts have moved. Now, rather than convince the OED’s lexicographers to unilaterally change what nature means, all Gormley and Mond Webb had to do was persuade them to resurrect the more universal definition.
“What’s interesting here is that, as far as I can tell, the OED is the only dictionary that actually has a definition that people call,” MacPherson said. “This is not what we would call ‘the mainstream sentence’, which shows typical usage.
“But when they contacted us, we looked and we actually had this second sense, including people … we did some independent research and we added some quotes that brought it into the 21st century and removed the obsolete tag.”
OED also removed the paywall for the definition of naturewhich allows anyone who looks up the meaning to see beyond the typical usage and see that there is indeed a wider meaning to the word.
For the campaigners, this is only a partial victory. But it’s a start, and they’re now calling on writers, artists and thinkers to embrace the broader definition of nature in the hope that it may eventually prevail.
“This campaign really planted so many seeds,” Gormley said. “My own views have also evolved by learning about them. I keep thinking that if we are nature – which we naturally are – then it is our birthright to spend time in nature, to have access to nature. We are supposed to be connected.”
