Mother Nature: A Biography

In the Outer Banks of North Carolina, fierce storms fell trees, devastate infrastructure, and can even cleave new channels through the thin barrier islands. In 2022, I was paying close attention to national press coverage of a storm during which three houses fell into the ocean. A bystander noted it was a “last stand with Mother Nature.” A worker on the clean up crew commented, “Mother Nature’s pissed off or something.”

Locals in the Outer Banks frequently invoke Mother Nature, especially if they are from families that have lived there for generations. While it would be easy to dismiss these comments as a figure of speech, this paper digs deeper to ask, who or what is Mother Nature? Drawing on my ongoing fieldwork in the Outer Banks (2021-- ) and my comprehensive survey of archived copies of the local newspaper (1932-1995), I find that Mother Nature has very specific characteristics in the Banks. Notably, she is most often invoked in crisis moments during storms. In that respect, Mother Nature is a non-human entity in constant dialogue with human beings. This dialogue is sometimes viewed as “messages,” but most often it is a type of intricate co-existing in which Mother Nature rearranges the material context within which humans must live. For example, when she washes out the highway, she is rearranging the material entities that make up the world: molecules heat up and create gale-force winds, which push water and sand up over the road, ripping up dune-stabilizing plants and cracking open huge sections of asphalt.

Mother Nature’s connection to ecological crisis is, I suggest, a response to an apophatic theology, a form of thinking that attempts to approach God by negation, that is to speak only in terms of what may not be said about God’s perfect wholeness. In earlier periods, North American Protestants, like those found on the Banks today, understood that God used natural elements, such as storms, to communicate God’s power and sovereignty. Over the twentieth century, most U.S. Christians shed this idea, including those in the Outer Banks. Yet storms continued to rage. Outer Bankers credit God with bounty and good weather, but cease to speak of God when natural elements bring destruction as it contradicts their ideal of a God defined through perfect wholeness and goodness. In negating God’s presence, these narratives build up God’s perfect wholeness and goodness. Mother Nature becomes the forces that remain beyond human control, with devastating and unpredictable effects.

Besides offering a preliminary biography of Mother Nature in the Banks, I also consider how to reconcile a Being that is often invoked yet never firmly claimed. In a sense, Mother Nature is an ontological reality; people see her actions in concrete terms—when houses fall into the ocean or the road gets ripped up. Yet they do not articulate connection as clearly as, for example, indigenous people with whom anthropologists normally work on questions about ecological forms of relation (Kohn 2013; de la Cadena 2015). They name Mother Nature yet disavow her independent existence: if one asks Outer Bankers if there is a Mother Nature, the answer is “no” (the same question about God usually yields an unhesitating “yes.”). Yet, through decades of local narratives, Mother Nature assumes a cohesive shape. She is what cannot be God. She is human agency in abeyance. She is the power in the storm. She is the fulfillment of the apophatic approach to natural elements.