Last year, during a conference at the Eden Project, a botanic garden in Cornwall, entrepreneur and environmentalist active Frieda Gormley heard his praise for the first time nature in the dictionary.
An audience member read out the appointment as he answered questions about plans to appoint a nature representative to the board of Hackney House.
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) says that ‘nature’ is ‘a phenomenon of the natural world – meaning the plants, animals and other features and products of the earth itself, as distinct from people and human creations’.
“Everyone in the room was really shocked and pretty sad,” Gormley said. “It made me think: if people feel that we are separate from nature, how can we consider nature in our actions? This definition and outlook has a lot to do with the crisis we are in.”
All dictionaries define nature as an entity separate from man
Today, all English dictionaries define nature as an entity separate from and opposed to humans and human creations—a perspective that activists say perpetuates humanity’s uneasy relationship with the natural world.
So when he returned home, Gormley approached Jessie Mond Webb of the Lawyers for Nature collective, where he already worked, and they decided to launch a campaign to persuade dictionary publishers to give a new, broader definition of the word “nature.” – and with it, perhaps redefine what it means to be human.
“It started a journey for us, other than how we actually created this campaign – a personal discovery of how we are so separate and how do we begin to return to our place in the natural realm? We want dictionaries to reflect scientific truth and the broad consensus that humans are part of nature, like animals, plants and other products of the earth,” he stressed. watchman characteristically notes that “if we want people to protect nature, then they must feel connected to nature.”
“Science has disproved the idea of human exceptionalism since Darwin”
According to Professor Tom Oliver of the University of Reading, the understanding of nature as distinct from humans stems from thousands of years of Western thought. However, he says this makes no scientific sense.
“I think that definition is a bit crazy, in the sense that it reflects a kind of madness or perhaps delusion in our modern society.
It was the French philosopher René Descartes who set the tone for the modern separation of man and nature, Oliver explains, “by suggesting that the mind is divine and that our bodies and the bodies of other living creatures are just a kind of inanimate matter.” At the same time, other Western philosophers advocated the idea that human progress meant moving away from the “state of nature,” a life that Thomas Hobbes derided as “solitary, poor, ugly, brutish, and short.”
“All of these cultural factors, our brain absorbs them like a sponge… and it’s reinforced the sense of isolation, that we’re separate, isolated individuals traveling the world,” notes Oliver.
But science, starting with Darwin, refutes the idea of human exceptionalism. Oliver points out that there are as many bacterial cells in the human body as there are human cells—bacteria that share about a third of their DNA, like humans cut and pasted. These human cells are constantly being renewed and recycled, some changing over days or weeks.
I don’t care about dictionaries but…
Similar processes occur in the human mind. “Every word, every touch, every smell affects our brains, and the 150 billion neurons in our heads are constantly reshaping in response to conversations with other people and aspects of the physical world we live in. So really, according to this view of science, our physical bodies and minds are not separate from nature or other people. We are deeply connected.”
Oliver’s analysis convinced Gormley and Mond Webb that they were on the right track. But then they hit a stick.
“We thought about writing a campaign letter to the dictionary: This is how it should be done, this is how this word should be used,” Mond Webb said, adding: “But we quickly realized that dictionaries don’t care about that kind of thing.”
Dictionaries don’t define words, explained Fiona McPherson, lexicographer at the OED, who explained: “Sometimes words don’t mean exactly what people think they mean.
“The reason a word is defined as it is is because of how people use it. This is the path he always takes. We’ll see how a word is used, and that’s how we’ll arrive at the dictionary definition.”
It seems that the goal of the activists was unattainable. But then they found, buried behind the Oxford Dictionary’s paywall (a method of restricting access to content through purchase or paid subscription) and what they considered to be outdated from 1873, another definition of nature: “More broadly, the whole natural world. , including people and the universe.”
Oxford dictionary work – How does it define nature?
The doorposts had moved. Now, instead of convincing the OED lexicographers that they should unilaterally change what nature means, what Gormley and Mond Webb had to do was to convince them to bring a more universal definition back to life.
“What’s interesting here is that, as far as I can tell, the OED is the only dictionary that has a definition that resembles a person,” MacPherson said. “It is not what we would call a ‘main current meaning’ indicating standard usage. But when they came into contact with us, we took a look and actually got this second meaning that included the human. We’ve done some independent research and added some quotes that bring it bang into the 21st century and remove the outdated label.”
The OED also removed the paywall for the definition of nature, allowing anyone looking for the meaning to look beyond the standard usage and see that the word actually has a wider meaning.
For activists, this is only a partial victory. But it’s a start, and now they’re urging writers, artists, and thinkers to adopt a broader definition of nature, hoping that it will eventually win out.