We seem to have been locked in an eternal attempt at domination over nature for millennia. My recent trip to Thailand shifted this into clear focus: perhaps the attempt was never really about humans over nature. Perhaps it was humans versus anything that refuses to behave itself.
When I was in Thailand, I saw signs telling tourists not to anger, feed, touch or otherwise harass the animals. Sensible enough. Yet tourists, and occasionally locals, still seem determined to test the boundaries.
I watched a pig bite down on a plastic water bottle handed to it by a boy on holiday. The pig squealed and fought back when the boy tried to pick it up. He dropped it. I felt shocked and unnerved at his behaviour, but clearly I could not intervene; it was not my place, and his family was there.
And there it was: an acute example of our relationship with nature in miniature. We like animals right up until they stop being cute.
The pig had not suddenly become aggressive for no reason. A teenager had put a plastic bottle in its mouth, invaded its space and then tried to grab it. It reacted like an animal. Yet somehow the animal becomes the villain: ungrateful, dangerous, and stupid. We are remarkably good at creating the conditions for conflict and then blaming nature for responding to them.
The double standard becomes even stranger when we compare animals with humans. When a person causes harm because they ‘didn’t know any better’, we often regard that as an extenuating circumstance. With animals, ignorance is rarely afforded the same generosity. An animal trapped in a man-made environment can respond according to instinct and still be punished as though it possesses the same understanding and intentions as a human being.
And before anyone reaches for the familiar argument that humans are more intelligent, we should be careful about confusing intelligence with moral entitlement. Being clever enough to build skyscrapers, develop financial markets, and create nuclear weapons certainly does not give us a sense of moral superiority over the natural world. We cheat, lie, and steal, and are not the perfect paragons of morality we assume ourselves to be. Besides, anyone who has watched five minutes of reality TV anywhere in the world might want to reconsider how confidently we use ‘intelligence’ as our species’ trump card.
The more interesting problem is what happens when humans’ supposed love of nature meets modern consumer culture. We don’t simply want nature; we want nature packaged for consumption.
Our consumerist tendencies towards nature are best seen through the ‘cottagecore’ trend: curated hiking trails, luxury eco-resorts, wellness retreats, and the endless Instagramming of supposedly untouched landscapes. Nature is wonderful, as long as it is photogenic, accessible, and preferably equipped with decent Wi-Fi.
This is the deception of capitalist aesthetics. We take something wild, unpredictable, and inconvenient and remove the parts we dislike before giving it attractive branding and selling it as an authentic experience.
Nature, but with a convenient booking link. Mud is no longer mud; it is an obstacle on the hiking trail. Insects are not part of an ecosystem; they are pests. Decay is not part of nature’s cycle; it is something to clean up. And an animal behaving like an animal is an affront to our sanitised version of nature. Thailand makes this contradiction particularly visible. Islands are marketed as pristine escapes while motorways and industrial-scale ferries help move ever-growing numbers of people towards these supposedly untouched places. Humans want wilderness – but we also want convenient infrastructure capable of delivering us directly to it. Ideally, between 10 am and 4 pm, with a return transfer.
Our environmentalism therefore has a surprisingly low tolerance for actual nature. As soon as it contradicts our perfect reality, with biting animals, unbearable heat, or a lack of creature comforts, we turn against it. This reveals something deeper than hypocrisy; it reveals our obsession with control.
We have spent centuries trying to place ourselves above the natural world rather than recognising that we are embedded within it. We pave it, fence it, landscape it, label it, and commodify it. We make it predictable enough to enjoy and tame enough not to frighten us, because genuine nature is volatile. It grows where we don’t want it to grow. It dies, rots, bites, floods, escapes, and refuses to care about our schedules, property boundaries, or aesthetic preferences. This is precisely what makes it frightening.
The fantasy of the sovereign human depends on believing that we exist outside of nature and are capable of mastering it. But this is not the case. We are animals who build unusually elaborate buildings and maintain an impressive capacity for self-delusion. The pig did not violate some sacred contract with humanity when it bit the bottle; it simply behaved like a pig.
Perhaps the lesson is not that nature needs to be taught how to live alongside us. Perhaps we need to learn how to live alongside something we cannot completely control. Does the responsibility not lie with humanity to learn to live alongside the uncontrollable force of nature rather than vice versa? The battle was never between humans and nature. It was humans versus our own arrogance, the desire to dominate, sanitise, and commodify a world that we are terrified to admit we never truly controlled in the first place.
