Being With Nature: Friendship, Care and Ecologism

In order to successfully address the global challenge climate change, it is frequently argued that we need to reconsider our relationship with the natural environment. In particular, we must alter the perception of the natural world as a ‘resource’ whose purpose is simply to provide materials for human industry and consumption. Rather than purely phenomena for exploitation, we must instead consider the intrinsic worth of nature and develop concern for it beyond the possibility of manipulating it for human ends. This paper will seek to explore the concept of friendship in relation to the environment in order to open possibilities in thinking about our relationship with nature in terms of an ethics of care rather than exploitation. The notion of being a ‘friend’ of nature is frequently evoked by environmental campaigners. This paper will however aim to give robust ethical meaning to the notion of being ‘friends with nature’. To do so it will distance its understanding of self-other relations form the western individualistic model which has a tendency to slip into forms of domination. Instead it will gravitate to a more Asian understanding of friendship as inspired by the Chinese relational theory of guanxi. Such a perspective does not posit relationships in ossified ‘self’ and ‘other’ categories but rather considers beings as intertwined and interconnected through relational bonds. Applied to our relationship with the natural world, the paper will argue such thinking allows us to consider human relations not as juxtaposed against nature but existing in symbiotic relationship with nature. It will explore how this understanding of friendship as ‘being with nature’ invites us to care for, rather than exploit, the natural world. Through this exploration of being friends with nature, the paper will finally seek to outline a global ethics of environmental care.