From ‘clean eating’ to the countryside to Goop, ‘natural’ is assumed to be good and is almost a new religion, argues this book. But is the author focusing on the right question?
The world was under lockdown and I was playing at being an outlaw. From the comfort of my sofa, I traversed alligator-infested swamps, skinned beavers and made a poultice from herbs. The video game was Red Dead Redemption 2, a simulation of the rural American midwest, where the player is free to roam through a fictional ecology. During the many hours I spent playing the game, it became clear to me that this wasn’t just an escape from reality, but its inversion. The nature I was consuming on screen – a vibrant landscape that existed to be mastered, harvested and utilised for human gain – was the opposite to what existed outside: a landscape that, insofar as it had been shuttered by a zoonotic virus, showed how our mastery of nature could eventually return to master us.
A few pages into his book Natural, Alan Levinovitz identifies this contradiction: “Again and again, the question of our proper relationship with nature is reframed in the same way: should we obey nature, or transcend it?” What Levinovitz, an associate professor of religion, calls “natural goodness” is all around us, from food packaging to “clean eating” documented on Instagram, to the belief that natural detergents are better than their artificial equivalents, to an unthinking dichotomy between urban (artificial) and rural (natural). It’s a logic often suffused with religious piety: clean, good, natural things are contrasted with the unclean and unnatural, mass-produced and industrial. As Gwyneth Paltrow’s lifestyle companyGoop puts it: “Clean, for us, is about avoiding potentially toxic ingredients.” Citing the anthropologist Mary Douglas, Levinovitz notes thatdeeming one thing natural and another toxic is about far more than cleanliness; it’s about imposing a moral order on the world around you.
Debates about what can be called 'natural' fail to engage effectively with what is to be done about the climate crisis
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