In his essay “Nature,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that man should “go forth to meet nature, not to make war upon her, but to purify, to rescue, and to ornament.” This idea of cooperating with nature, not fighting against it, is a central theme in Emerson’s writing.

Emerson was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a critic of the countervailing pressures of society, and he is still regarded as one of the most influential thinkers of his time. Emerson’s essays, lectures, and poems expressed his philosophy of self-reliance, individualism, and the power of the individual to perceive truth.

Emerson believed that humans are innately good and that society, with its rules and restrictions, corrupts them. He felt that each person has the ability to find his or her own way in life, and he urged people to follow their own instincts and intuition rather than blindly following the crowd.

Emerson also wrote in “Nature”:

In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, — no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair.

This simple statement sums up his philosophy of life. Emerson believed that nature is the best teacher and that spending time in nature will help us to remember what is truly important in life.

Further to Emerson’s proposition to cooperate with nature, in 2015, Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hahn, provided the following statement to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) about climate change and our relationship to one another and to the Earth:

This beautiful, bounteous, life-giving planet we call Earth has given birth to each one of us, and each one of us carries the Earth within every cell of our body. …

We need to change our way of thinking and seeing things. We need to realise that the Earth is not just our environment. The Earth is not something outside of us. Breathing with mindfulness and contemplating your body, you realise that you are the Earth. You realise that your consciousness is also the consciousness of the Earth. Look around you–what you see is not your environment, it is you.

Part of the solution to our problems — within ourselves and with the environment — is to accept that we are one and the same as our planet. We are not living in the environment, we are an inseparable part of it.

Finally, Alan Watts, an English philosopher, thinker, and writer, sums up this sentiment of interconnectedness with nature in his 1971 television program “A Conversation with Myself”:

But what we call things: plants, birds, trees.. Are far more complicated than neurons, and there are billions of them. And they are all living together in a network. Just as there is an interdependence of flowers and bees, where there are no flowers there are no bees, and where there are no bees there are no flowers. They’re really one organism.

In the same way, everything in nature depends on everything else. So it’s interconnected. And so the very, very many patterns of interconnections, lock it all together into a unity, which is much too complicated for us to think about, except in very simple, crude ways. …

The individual and the universe are inseparable. But the curious thing is, that while that is rather easy to see in theory, very few people are aware of it in the important, strong way that one is aware of blue in blue sky or the heat in fire.

So, next time you can get outside and take a quiet walk in nature, try to actually feel and see what’s happening around you. Remember what’s important, realize you are the Earth, and as Watts surmised, “see in the world everything is happening altogether, everywhere all at once.”

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