It was last year, during a conference at the Eden Project, the botanic garden and conservation centre in Cornwall, that Frieda Gormley first heard the dictionary definition of nature.
The businesswoman and environmental activist was answering questions about her plans to appoint a representative of nature to the board of her company, House of Hackney, when a member of the audience read it out.
“Nature,” the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) says, is “the phenomenon of the physical world collectively; esp plants, animals and other features and products of the earth itself, as opposed to humans and human creations”.
“Everyone in the room was really shocked and quite saddened by it,” Gormley said. “It got me thinking: if people feel we’re separate from nature, how can we really consider nature in our actions? This definition and worldview is just so much to do with the crisis that we’re in.”
Currently, all English dictionaries define nature as an entity separate from and opposed to humans and human creations – a perspective campaigners say perpetuates humanity’s troubled relationship with the natural world.
So when she got home, Gormley approached Jessie Mond Webb, of the collective Lawyers for Nature, with whom she was already working, and they decided to start a campaign to persuade dictionaries to grant a new, more expansive definition to the word “nature” – and with it, perhaps, to redefine what it means to be human.
“It started a journey for us, beyond how are we going to actually create this campaign, [to] a personal discovery of how did we become so separate, and how can we start to return to our place within the realm of nature again?
“We want dictionaries to reflect the scientific fact and overwhelming consensus that humans are part of nature, just as animals, plants and other products of the earth are.
“If we want people to protect nature then they need to feel a connection to nature.”
The understanding of nature as distinct from humans stems from thousands of years of western thought, according to Prof Tom Oliver, an ecologist at the University of Reading. And yet, he says, it makes no scientific sense.
“I think [the definition] is slightly insane in the sense that it reflects a kind of insanity in our modern society, or a delusion perhaps,” he said.
It was the French philosopher René Descartes who set the tone for the modern separation of humans and nature, by “putting forward the view that the mind is divine and God-like, and our bodies, and the bodies of other creatures, are just kind of lifeless matter”, said Oliver. Concurrently, other western philosophers were espousing the idea that human progress meant moving away from the “state of nature”, a life Thomas Hobbes derided as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”.
“All these cultural factors, our brains soak them up like a sponge … and that has then exacerbated a sense of isolation, a sense of being atomised, isolated individuals adrift in the world,” Oliver said.
But science, from Darwin onwards, contradicts the idea of human exceptionalism. Oliver points out that human bodies contain as many bacterial cells as human cells – bacteria with which humans share about a third of their DNA, “like a cut and paste”. Those cells that are human are constantly renewed and recycled, some turning over within days or weeks.
Similar processes are at play in human minds. “Every word, every touch, every smell influences our brain, and those 150bn neurons in our head are constantly reconfiguring in response to conversations with other people, aspects of the natural world that we experience,” said Oliver. “So really in this view of science our physical bodies and our minds are not separate from nature or other people. We are deeply interwoven.”
Oliver’s analyses convinced Gormley and Mond Webb they were on the right track. But then they hit a stumbling block.
“We thought about writing a campaign-style letter to the dictionary to say: ‘This is how it should be done, this is how this word should be used’,” said Mond Webb. But, she added: “Quite quickly we realised that dictionaries are not interested in that.”
after newsletter promotion
Dictionaries do not determine the definitions of words, said Fiona McPherson, a lexicographer at the OED, and as a result: “Sometimes words don’t mean exactly what people think they ought to.
“The reason a word comes to be defined as it is, is because of the way people use it. That’s always the way round it goes. We’ll see how a word is being used and that’s how the dictionary definition is arrived at.”
It seemed the campaigners’ goal was beyond reach. But then they noticed, buried behind the paywall of the OED and regarded as obsolete since 1873, a further definition of nature: “In a wider sense, the whole of the natural world, including humans and the cosmos.”
The goalposts had shifted. Now, rather than convincing the OED’s lexicographers they should unilaterally change what nature means, all Gormley and Mond Webb had to do was persuade them to bring the 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 does actually have a definition which mentions humans,” MacPherson said. “That’s not what we would call ‘the main current sense’, which shows typical usage.
“But when they contacted us we had a look and we had actually had this second sense, including human beings … we did some independent research and we added some quotations which brought it bang up to the 21st century and removed the obsolete label.”
OED also removed the paywall for the definition of nature, allowing anyone looking up the meaning to see beyond the typical usage and see there is, indeed, a wider meaning to the word.
For the campaigners, it is only a partial victory. But it is a beginning, and they are now calling on writers, artists and thinkers to embrace the broader definition of nature in the hope it can eventually predominate.
“This campaign has really planted so many seeds,” Gormley said. “My own views have evolved as well through learning about it. I keep thinking if we are nature – which obviously we are – then it’s our birthright to spend time in nature, to have access to nature. We are supposed to be connected.”