“The fourth mode of symbolic immortality is that associated with nature itself: the perception that the natural environment around us, limitless in space and time, will remain.” - Robert Jay Lifton, The Broken Connection
You hike for four hours, your legs are done, and you finally get to the top. You look out at a valley that was already sitting there a million years before your grandparents’ grandparents existed and will still be sitting there long after everyone you know is gone. And weirdly, that doesn’t make you feel worse. It makes you feel good. Small, sure - but a comfortable kind of small, the kind where you’re part of something instead of alone against it.
That feeling is the Natural Project, and it might be the oldest one we’ve got. Long before anyone painted a wall, stacked a monument, or drew a border on a map, humans were staring up at the stars and out at the horizon. Nature got here first. Every other project is us building something and hoping it outlasts us; this one is different, because the thing you’re connecting to already outlasts everything. You don’t have to make it. It’s just there.
That’s also why the good version of that summit feeling isn’t really about the summit. Yes, The Status Project is in the mix - part of you wants to say you did the climb. But the deeper pull is standing somewhere the trees have a few centuries on you and the rock underfoot is older than the species, in a spot that moved plenty of people before you showed up and will move plenty more after you leave.
Compare that to the neighbors. In The Creative Project you make something new; in The Community Project you join something people built. The Natural Project asks for neither. You don’t create and you don’t construct - you just show up and witness. You breathe air that’s been cycling through the place for longer than “years” is a useful unit, under the same sun that warmed everybody who came before and will warm everybody who comes next.
And here’s the part that does the real work. The atoms you’re made of were cooked inside stars billions of years ago, and they’re not going anywhere when you stop - they’ll carry on as something else. Recognizing yourself as part of that - as an animal, a pile of organized matter that’s on loan and will get returned to the earth - is its own quiet form of immortality. Stand in an old forest, or watch waves keep hitting a cliff that couldn’t care less that you’re there, and you’re not separate from that timelessness. You’re a temporary version of it.
Which, I think, is the real reason wrecking the environment bothers people at a level deeper than spreadsheets. It’s not only about resources for future humans to use. It’s that nature is the one thing offering us this glimpse of the eternal, and some part of us knows that if it goes, so does the glimpse - and we’re back to facing our mortality without it.
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