Our panda is back! During World Wildlife Day yesterday, I looked at the things around me. There are some houseplants and a cat, which may or may not count as nature; there are a lot of things whose design is taken from nature: there are pictures and models of flowers, leaves and animals. A world without nature would remove a huge swathe of inspiration for artists of all kinds. We wouldn’t have had pandas for inspiration for our names and logos. That’s the least of it.
A world without nature would mean we’d only see concrete and tarmac, bricks and metal. And yet these very materials come from nature. We excavate the landscape, tearing great holes in it, so we can provide shelter for ourselves. The cost is destroying yet more of nature.
A world without nature would mean no natural food sources, which means we’d either have to eat synthetic food. Even if we excluded agriculture from the definition of nature, we still need nature to pollinate the flowers so that the plants we eat can come to fruition. Without bees, butterflies and other pollinators, we would have few crops.
A world without nature is a dismal world indeed. We must do all we can to protect it.