INTRODUCTION: 17 HUTS IN A FIG TREE BELEAGUERED BY LIONS

It was on an outing organised by the Tree Society that I encountered what has come to be called ‘Moffat's tree’. This is a huge wild fig (Ficus ingens, ‘the mighty fig’), many hundreds of years old, growing on a farm near Rustenburg. The organisers of the outing provided us with Thomas Baines’ picture, based on a sketch by Robert Moffat, showing 17 inhabited huts in the tree, watched by a hungry lion.

It is called ‘Moffat's tree’ after the famous British missionary because of an entry in his journal in 1829:

This was a peak experience for me. The tree itself was beautiful, but what made the encounter memorable was Moffat's historical account. The experience is suggestive of how relations to nature depend on a specific social and historical context. It illustrates the fusion of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, and in a way represents the central argument of this book: that nature is not a place apart, something external to human beings. We are all embedded in nature, all intricately connected in the matrix of soil, water, plants, wildlife and humans that Rachel Carson called the ‘web of life’. However, we are not always aware of the connections.

This ‘ecological vision’ is holistic: it is structured on the notion of an ecology as a whole defined by internal relations and interconnections. This book equates nature with such a whole, defining ‘nature’ as a set of relationships rather than as the environment, which is often defined as a space or a ‘set of things outside us, with no essential structure’ (Kovel, 2002: 17).