The first time Frieda Gormley heard the dictionary definition of nature it was during a meeting last year at the Eden Project, a botanical garden and nature conservation centre in Cornwall.
The businesswoman and environmental activist was answering a question 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 loud.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), “nature” is “the collective phenomena of the physical world, especially plants, animals, and other features and products of the earth itself, rather than human beings or human creations.”
“Everyone there was really shocked and really saddened,” Gormley said. “It got me thinking: if people feel so disconnected from nature, how can we really take nature into account in what we do? This definition and worldview is very relevant to the crisis we face.”
Currently, all English dictionaries define nature as separate from and in opposition to humans and their creations, a view that activists say perpetuates humanity’s troubled relationship with the natural world.
So when Gormley returned home, he approached Jesse Monde Webb, a conservation lawyer with whom he was already working, and decided to launch a campaign to persuade dictionaries to give the word “nature” a new, broader definition – and, perhaps, to redefine what it means to be human.
“Not just how do we actually create this campaign; [to] A personal discovery of how we became so isolated and how we can begin to reconnect with our place in the natural world.
“We want the dictionary to reflect the scientific facts and overwhelming agreement that humans, like animals, plants and other creatures of the Earth, are part of nature.”
“If we want people to protect nature, they need to feel connected to it.”
The idea that nature is distinct from humans comes from thousands of years of Western thought, says Professor Tom Oliver, an ecologist at the University of Reading, but it doesn’t make sense scientifically.
“I think [the definition] “It’s a little bit crazy in the sense that it reflects a certain insanity or delusion in modern society,” he said.
French philosopher René Descartes set the tone for the modern separation of humans from nature, Oliver said, “with the idea that the mind is divine and godlike, and our bodies, and the bodies of other living creatures, are just inanimate matter.” Around the same time, other Western philosophers were promoting the idea that human progress meant moving away from the “state of nature,” which Thomas Hobbes described as “solitary, poor, mean, brute, and short-lived.”
“Our brains are like sponges, absorbing all of these cultural factors, and it exacerbates that feeling of isolation, of being isolated individuals adrift in the world,” Oliver said.
But science since Darwin refutes the idea of human exceptionalism. Oliver points out that the human body contains as many bacterial cells as human cells. Humans share about a third of their DNA with bacteria, making it “like cut and paste.” Human cells are constantly being renewed and recycled, with some being replaced every few days or weeks.
A similar process is at work in the human mind: “Every word, every touch, every smell affects our brain, and the 150 billion neurons in our heads are constantly reconfigured in response to conversations with other people and aspects of the natural world we experience,” Oliver says. “So in this view of science, our bodies and minds are not separate from nature and other people; we are deeply intertwined.”
Oliver’s analysis convinced Gormley and Mondo Webb they were on the right track. But then they stumbled.
“We thought about writing a letter campaign to the dictionary, saying, ‘This is what you should do, this is how you should use this word,'” Mondo Webb said. But, she added, “We quickly realized that the dictionary wasn’t interested in that.”
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OED lexicographer Fiona MacPherson said dictionaries do not determine the definitions of words, and as a result “words sometimes don’t mean what people think they mean.”
“The reason a word gets the definition it does is because of how people use it. It’s a cycle all the time. We look at how a word is used and come up with a dictionary definition.”
The activists’ goal seemed unattainable, but they discovered a further definition of nature, buried at the back of the paid edition of the OED and considered outdated since 1873: “In the wider sense, the whole of the natural world, including man and the universe.”
The goalposts had shifted. Now, rather than convincing the OED lexicographers to unilaterally change the meaning of nature, all Gormley and Mondo Webb had to do was convince them to reinstate the more universal definition.
“What’s interesting is that, as far as I know, the OED is the only dictionary that has a definition that actually refers to a human being,” McPherson says. “It’s not what you’d call a ‘main current sense’ that indicates typical usage.”
“But when they contacted us, we took a look and we had this second sense, including of the human being… We did our own research, added some citations, brought it into the 21st century and got rid of the outdated labels.”
The OED also states: Definition of NatureThis lets anyone who looks up the meaning know that the word certainly has a broader meaning beyond common usage.
For activists, it’s only a partial victory, but it’s a start, and they’re now calling on writers, artists and thinkers to define nature in a broader way that will eventually make it mainstream.
“This campaign really planted a lot of seeds,” Gormley said. “My own thinking has evolved as I’ve learned about it. I’ve always thought that if we’re part of nature, then it’s our birthright to spend time in nature and connect with nature. We’re connected.”
