Mother Earth can I have ... everything?

We tend to think of our earth and nature in terms of it being a female. Mother earth, mother nature and seemingly that would imply a sort of respect towards it, but just as we have a relationship with our own human mothers which tends to be a surface of respect and love we often find ourselves going behind her back to accomplish things she would not approve of. In my adolescence it was smoking and in that of industrious society it is plundering resources, both actions have consequences which at the time she but not we are aware of, or if we are choose to ignore. The mother earth label was already around in the 15 to 16 hundreds when women had little or no power in society. Modern science was being pioneered by Francis Bacon who did nothing to dispel this notion and in fact actively transferred it onto the earth. ‘Sensitive to the same social transformations that had already begun to reduce women to psychic and reproductive resources, Bacon developed the power of language as political instrument in reducing female nature to a resource for economic production.[1] Yes she is large, yes she is great and yes she is finite, the last being something we find it hard to come to terms with. When we are children it is inconceivable to imagine that your parents could ever not be there anymore, the same attitude would posses Bacon in the infancy of modern science. Now we have advanced in our thinking like when we grow up and we begin to realize that actually they are in fact destructible. The life casting ‘Dead Dad’ by Ron Mueck especially when displayed next to ‘Mask’ gives us that sense of awe in life and mortality in death that we are beginning to see in mother earth. I would say that now as a society we are ending our troublesome teens where we rebelled against our parents and are nearing the dawning of our adulthood when we are being forced into a world of consequence where we must take charge of our lives. As teens we seek independence, sometimes rejecting our families, the parallel in seen in how, ‘Modern societies tend to overlook the fact that humans too, are part of nature.[2] Through science and invention we have removed ourselves from nature so much so that we find it hard to even see how we need it in the first place. This attitude is being challenged now as Global Warming is threatening us and so society is moving into a time where we are conscious of the consequences of our actions. Our relationship with mother earth is shifting from expectation of her providing for us into that wonderful stage of friendship and understanding between parent and child where we recognize that she too has needs and it is our job to help her as she helped us before.

[1] The Death of Nature
[2] Contesting Earths Future



Bibliography:

Merchant. C (1980) ‘The death of nature: women, ecology and the scientific revolution,’ Wildwood House Ltd, London.

Zimmerman, M, E (1994) ‘Contesting Earth’s future,’ University of California Press Ltd, California, USA

Papanek. V ((1995) ‘The Green Imperative,’ Thames and Hudson, London.

Wann. D (1996) ‘Deep Design: pathways to a livable future,’ Island Press, Washington, USA.