Mother Nature

Mother Nature is an anthropomorphized and feminized personification of the natural world. What comprises the natural world has been subject to changing interpretations from religion, philosophy, the visual arts, and literature. Nature has either included or excluded elements such as the Earth, the universe, or “cosmos, land, or landscape.” In the human relationship with the natural world, nature has either been seen to include and encompass human beings or has been regarded as separate and distinct.

The anthropomorphism of the natural world, where human attributes or characteristics have been ascribed to nature, has traditionally been associated with the role women play in human reproduction. The attributes ascribed to the natural world in this personification are the idealized traits of motherhood: nature represented as a nurturing, empathetic, cooperative, fertile, and bountiful mother. However, the concept of Mother Nature was also imbued with the opposing characteristics: reckless, indifferent, disobliging, barren, and miserly.

The positive attributes reflected a worldview that regarded human beings as part of an ordered universe with readily recognizable cultural and social rules, while the negative perceptions revealed a preoccupation with disorder and the idea that humans as the children of Mother Nature could equally be subject to her wrath. With the advent of the scientific revolution, the symbolism of Mother Nature became less potent as humans began to see themselves as separate from the natural world.

Nevertheless, this imagery has begun to reemerge, most recently in the service of social and environmental causes. Mother Nature is a reoccurring motif whose shifting definition is a marker of a changing human relationship with the natural world in the areas of literature and religion, philosophy and science, ecocriticism and feminism, and environmentalism in a Western discourse.

Literary images of nature as mother, particularly in the Chaucerian and Elizabethan descriptions of the natural world, were intimately linked to the Christian idea that nature was the handmaiden of God. While God was the ultimate source of all creation, Mother Nature existed to nurture and provide a framework for humans in the natural order of the cosmos. The pastoral tradition, nature as a benevolent female, portrayed nature not only as benign but as passive, and if cultivated, productive. The combination of these discourses provided axioms or directives for the behavior of humans in both culture and in their relationships to the natural world, upholding a discourse of restraint and stewardship.

Ancient Greece was the birthplace of the symbol of Mother Nature, rooted in the description of all natural phenomenon as an object, or physis. Aristotle amended this definition by limiting physis to the Earth, which he described as female, and named the heavens as the cosmos, a masculine entity that was the cause for biological generation within the Earth. This portrayal of Mother Nature continued well into the 16th century and functioned as a restraint against the mining or destruction of the natural world. With the scientific and technological revolution, the desire for resources deep in the Earth saw a new interpretation of Mother Nature as a stingy stepmother intent on hoarding these riches from human reach. In Francis Bacon's work, these resources were essential to improving the human condition, and therefore accentuated the negative mothering aspects of Mother Nature. The potency of the image of nature as mother gradually faded; nature became inanimate and devoid of meaning.

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