We are nature: Spinoza helps diagnose the bad ideas and sad passions that preclude us from a finer relationship with the natural world

In his book Novacene (2019), James Lovelock writes: ‘We must abandon the politically and psychologically loaded idea that the Anthropocene is a great crime against nature … The Anthropocene is a consequence of life on Earth; … an expression of nature.’
This insight resonates with the 17th-century philosophy of Baruch Spinoza. Lovelock is the inventor of Gaia theory, the idea that the Earth is one living organism that regulates and strives to preserve itself. Lovelock’s ‘Gaia’ is an alternative name for what Spinoza in his Ethics calls ‘God, or nature’: the one individual who makes up the entire universe, ‘whose parts … vary in infinite ways, without any change of the whole Individual’. Lovelock follows Spinoza in believing that humans and our actions are expressions of nature, even when we appear to destroy nature. He follows Spinoza too in holding that we should rejoice in what the Anthropocene has made possible: massive increases of human activity and knowledge.