How to portray a Nature Spirit

The concept of a mystical being protecting a forest is well known one, but, how do you portray them in a way that makes sense?

Naturally, these types of creatures would probably be against people hunting animals and chopping down trees, but, where do they draw the line in those regards? Would they be against a human hunting to feed their starving children? Would they be against a person chopping down a few trees for firewood to survive the long winter? Don't get me wrong, i'm well aware of the classic Aesop with both situations; take too much without seeing it and you may find out one day that both the trees and animals are gone. But even so, some people do need to hunt for food and some do need firewood for warmth.

Also, what would be the true extent of such a Nature spirit's power? What could they do and what shouldn't they do? For example: would it really be right for them to use their powers to regrow an entire forest or should they allow things to progress naturally?

Why does a nature spirit have to be against humans specifically, considering that humans are animals too? Is there a specific part of "nature" that it is protecting, such as trees or plants in general, anything that isn't humans, or all living beings, which would include humans? What about non-human animals who eat each other (hunting) and eat plants and destroy them?

Perhaps this nature spirit could have its own personal biases (favoring certain organisms over others) and the story could explore that.

I guess one thing you'd have to answer is, what counts as "natural" and what counts as "artificial"?

edited 21st Apr '15 2:48:45 PM by Rainbow

'd a bit... but anyway.

I feel it all comes down to how you see the relationship of humans and nature. Are humans just another kind of animal, or are they so alienated from nature that they cannot be considered a part of it anymore? In the end a human chopping down a tree or shooting a deer is not any more "wrong" than a beaver building a dam or wolf killing a deer. This is because right and wrong are human concepts, whereas nature doesn't have any beyond "survival of the fittest".

If your story views humans as being separate from nature, then the nature spirits will probably see people as enemies. If your story views humans as only intelligent animals, then the nature spirits are probably just going to defend themselves against people who actually do harm to them.

Another thing to consider is, how intelligent/sapient are your spirits. If they are very intelligent, then they can hold grudges like humans do and grow to hate humanity as a whole, which would make it difficult for even more nature-friendly humans to interact with the spirits. On the flip side, you can also become a friend or an ally with spirits that understand these concepts.

If the spirits are more animal-like, they will probably just act on their instincts and defend themselves when under a threat. Then again, at this point Orange And Blue Morality comes into play, which can result in the spirits also doing stuff that doesn't make much sense from a human's moral perspective. Nature Is Not Nice after all.

What it comes to the power of the spirits, if you consider them to be personifications of nature, everything they do will be natural, even if they speed up things a bit. Whether you want them to have this kind of power is completely up to you, but if you're writing with a Green Aesop in mind, it might be better not to give the spirits a magical Reset Button to fix all the destruction people have done to them.

A pretty typical ability given to nature spirits is the ability to create natural disasters, like floods, earthquakes, tsunamis etc. You can also make them fairly weak and defenseless, which of course reflects how things are in Real Life. In Princess Mononoke animal spirits try to fight humans who are destroying their home forest, and beheading the Great Forest Spirit turns it into a vengeful giant that almost makes the whole forest decay.

edited 21st Apr '15 2:58:59 PM by Paradisesnake

I would imagine proper respect plays a pretty big role.

An Egomaniac Hunter is just going to barge in guns blazing, but a guy who's looking to feed or shelter his family is going to want to make sure the Nature Spirit knows that he's only trying to survive, and isn't just destroying things For the Lulz.

Perhaps he can mitigate cutting down a tree by planting a new one.

I have a Nature Spirit in my story who's VERY friendly to humans because he's a river-fairy, and humans depend on rivers to survive so they've treated him very respectfully for thousands if not millions of years. He views people in general as a group he needs to protect, especially from the less friendly members of The Fair Folk.

The whole "Aloof and Easily Angered Nature Spirit" cliche just bugs me when there's no justification besides "nature good, humans bad if they're environmentally destructive."

Hmmm. I started thinking about one of my videogame fandoms and how it handled this.

In Kid Icarus Uprising - there is a Goddess of Nature, Viridi, who HATES Humanity and you wind up having to fight against and with her alternately. She is triggred into a mission to destroy all humans when a massive, destructive multi-nation war happens (the war being triggered by the villain who is even a greater spoiler than Viridi is... all under the spoiler tags on the trope page). It's hinted that she didn't think much of humans to begin with, citing that they've "gone off their path" - an indication that she may have once considered them "a part of Nature" but no longer does.

Humans fall under the patronage of Goddess of Light Palutena - so the story of that piece of fiction basically has different gods holding different domains and humans expressly under a separate domain than Nature.

The Princess Mononoke model that was mentioned is another way of looking at it and a good way to have a very "naturey" forest-spirit - indifferent unless under express threat, only angered when one part of the natural world (humans) take too much from the whole.

One way to handle things - if you want your forest spirit to be dangerous to humans is perhaps, treat humans as an "alien" force. Is this specific forest one in which humans had not been seen until recently? It could be some out of the way corner of the world which has never seen this new kind of clever, bipedal animal before. Maybe this forest has a delicate balance and the forest-spirit cannot risk or tolerate an invasive species. Maybe it welcomes humanity as "another kind of animal" at first, but quickly develops a distaste because the first humans it encounters are the destructive type and it does not understand humans as being "another creature trying to survive" - at least until it encounters such humble people.

It could, on the other hand, be fairly indifferent, seeing a man with a weapon come to take a deer in the same light as a hungry mountain lion doing the same, and, perhaps, could be the type to caution his/her animals and trees as to the marked cleverness of this specific kind of bipedal beast.

edited 21st Apr '15 7:11:33 PM by Shadsie

The nature spirit could ensure that humans cannot prey "too much" by ensuring that the hunters miss from time to time (animal gets spooked and bolts, tree branch "blown" into the path of the bullet and deflects it, even affecting the aim of the hunter as humans are just another animal to subtly manipulate) - just as they could ensure wolves and other predators don't take too much game.

They could ensure that the balance is maintained by not letting any one species over-graze or over-hunt.

If the plant eaters get too numerous and threaten the flora, the predators get more successful. If the predators are too numerous, the prey gets "luckier".

The nature spirit could take a case-by-case basis for humans and ensure that "accidents" befall those who are disrespectful of the balance while those who take only what they need tend to thrive.

That assumes the nature spirit has a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. True, human activity vastly speeds up the shift in equilibrium in an environment, but countless millions of species have lived and died, outcompeted, forced out of their niche, or just plain unlucky (with, say, an erupting volcano).

I'd imagine a nature spirit not so much as vengeful as very dangerous, but not actively malevolent or indeed active. Imagine it embodying the most extreme traits of a savage biome. Respect it and you can harness enormous power from it; slip up and you're dead, killed by a hostile environment you haven't prepared for. Go too far and deforest the place, Iceland-style? Well, it's probably not a forest spirit now, but a vast hungry creature of rock and wind that will eat your farmland acre by acre until you starve.

Niiice!

That is good.

Various environments, themselves, are like that - indifferent, but dangerous. I grew up in a desert. Don't take water with you and fail to find shade and it will kill you. In the forest... don't respect the chill in the air and don't dress appropriately, that will kill you.

Are we restricting "nature" to "unfriendly nature"? Because I mentioned my river-spirit above and everyone seems to have ignored that post, going on how nobody has mentioned more possibilities of a nature-spirit that actually cares about humans.

Humans are not all suicidally self-centered or disconnected from OMG NATURE. There is a gray area between "Giant decaying cities" and "Ghibli Hills."

edited 22nd Apr '15 12:43:27 PM by Sharysa

Hey, my idea was much closer to "indifferent" instead of "hostile". If you can strike the right balance and are willing to put in the work, its power can help you.

I'm having some trouble imagining a nature spirit as actively friendly. Maybe in the term of humans coming along and imbuing nature with significance, and bringing self-awareness to something that's already there; in which case it's more of a Genius Loci. In that case, though, it wouldn't neceesarily be a nature spirit as men bring along the plough and the axe.

Sorry—the tone of the thread seems heavily skewed towards Gaia's Vengeance since everyone's going on about how humans can be treated as aliens or too-far-removed from Nature, and nature is dangerous, and you can take what you need but DON'T TAKE TOO MUCH OR THE SPIRITS WILL BE ANGERED.

My river-spirit is technically "a fairy who lives in and guards the river" instead of "the personification of the river itself," but there's no functional difference between fairies and spirits in the story.

I guess I build my nature-spirits on the roles they fill in human life—bodies of fresh water are friendly, benevolent, and social because of their huge importance to, well, life. My river-spirit helps with baptisms, knows many of the nearby townspeople personally, and has had at least one romantic relationship with a human.

Forest spirits like The Wild Hunt and the bear-goddess Artio are two sides of the same coin: The Wild Hunt preys on humans for shits and giggles and the leader uses deer/elk-skulls as a calling card (I use the "skull mask" variant of the Horned Hunter).

Artio is technically a goddess and not a personification proper, but she's the Ur-Example of a Mama Bear and she does not enjoy the Wild Hunt preying on a woman with missing parents.

I guess I'm just bothered at how "Nature Spirit" in this thread seems to automatically mean "negative towards all humans, all the time, unless they're In Touch With Nature and therefore cool."

I object to that characterization, you know.

The thing is, I find it hard to visualize nature as other than, well, indifferent. The biosphere has been around for much longer than we have; whatever alterations we make to it will be scrubbed out in geological time. The worst extinction events humanity can cause will never measure up to the destruction of an ice age or a sufficiently large meteor impact, let alone the great pre-Cambrian extinction events.

(How's that for an environmental message: "don't worry, humans, you will never be able to fuck up the planet beyond what it's already endured and rebounded from in the past!" Of course, that's scant comfort if you're a subsistence farmer watching your farmland turn to dust over a few decades—just because life in general will certainly survive, doesn't mean you will be among them...)

Given that, I also oppose the "gaia's vengeance" interpretation, for the simple reason that I don't see nature being petty enough to bear humanity ill-will. The example I gave of the spirit of deforestation washing away topsoil and gobbling up arable land wasn't intended as vengeful: it's simply the spirit coming to a new equilibrium, and probably killing off much of the mammal population in the process of adjusting, but that's purely incidental. Of course, it's not innately helpful to humanity either, which is why I'm having trouble seeing nature as benevolent. A river or a lake can be envisioned as a terrible monster bringing destructive floods, but also as a lifeline to distant civilizations, or the bringer of water that enables agriculture to take place. It'd have to be a complex, variegated spirit to capture all those aspects.

edited 22nd Apr '15 9:08:19 PM by SabresEdge

I did not mean to offend. I was just sharing how I'd seen the theme played with in other canons and throwing out ideas for a writer whom I thought wanted there to be some animosity but wanted beyond 90s-era animated film reasons for it. (Cue the Nostalgia Critic and the crying panda "MAN!" picture).

I saw this on Deviant Art today - a bit of Earth Day art and thought of this thread:

http://humon.deviantart.com/art/Mother-Gaia-207388674

Pfheheheh, that pretty much sums it up.

In my setting, the nature goddess is also a goddess of fertility and health. Humans are not considered a part of nature by her, but this is justified in setting as humanity isn't native to the world the story takes place in. They were transported from Earth to the setting by the sun god, who's adopted them as a race. The Elves, who are native to her world, are considered a part of nature to her.

As for her morality, she's either Lawful Neutral or Blue-and-Orange Morality. She doesn't value individual life very much, just the ecology. Creatures that harm the ecosystem too much are "weeds in her garden" who she tries to destroy. She rewards her followers with good health, though.

EEEEE HUMON.

To keep things on topic, the benevolent nature-spirits in my story are benevolent exactly for the reason Humon's comic said: The planet survived and can handle much worse than us. Although since many of my spirits are immortal, there's a dash of Time Dissonance as well. Intense pollution like industrial and post-industrial society has lasted several centuries—a long time for humans, but that's maybe "a rough few years" in fairy/spirit time. My river-spirit is the equivalent of a young man and was a child when cave-bears died out in the British Isles, about fifteen thousand years ago.

And yes, I'm definitely making sure the nature spirits are layered: In my notes, the river-spirit's "angry teenage years" happened during the Norman invasion of Ireland. He was responsible for an infamous local flood and about three years of waterlogged land, which depopulated a city of 30,000 and forced it to splinter into small towns/villages of 1-5,000. None of this changes the fact that he's very friendly and compassionate to humans. He regrets the chaos he caused and did as much damage control as possible, but he's also glad that humans don't live very long precisely because it means they can't hold grudges for longer than fifty or sixty years.

edited 25th Apr '15 10:18:40 PM by Sharysa

I'd view anthropomorphism as something that nature spirits don't have innately, but rather something that happens when spirits are exposed to a lot of people.

A nature spirit is affected by the local as much as the local is affected by them. If people become a prominent aspect, then they'll grow in humanity.

But by themselves, they'll not have discernable human traits because they aren't human. A northern wind doesn't kill people because it's mean or cruel, because those are human traits. It kills people because cold winds do that.

Fire is fire until people make it no longer way.

The difference between a cruel river and a kind one are how people treat and interact with it. A river that people sing and swim and play in will be much nicer than one who gets filled with toxic waste, just because toxic waste is a lethal thing.

But how is toxic waste, an oil spill, or just bad/nonexistent sewage management—all human-dependent—any different than what happens with mudslides or avalanches?

A rock-slide that blocks a river's path might have nothing to do with humans—it was just raining a lot and the rocks became unstable, and therefore fell into the river and blocked its course. Or maybe an earthquake happened nearby and changed the river's course—again, nothing to do with humans.

Anthropomorphism probably varies HEAVILY by culture. Many mythologies and fairy-tales give humanoid appearances to things that aren't necessarily exposed to humans.

I'd take something of a synthesis between the two ideas. I like the idea of humanity giving it self-awareness by ascribing to the formerly inanimate river a sense of self; it's very Pratchettesque.

At the same time, Sharysa's right. Over its millenia-long lifetime, the river would undergo dozens of dramatic changes that have nothing to do with humanity or human activities; even as a spirit, it may not care about a minor event like a toxic spill or even the construction of a dam. (Bad for many species, good for some others, and in the end the effects of time and natural selection are going to populate that river again, just differently from before.)

Besides, consider the historical view. Some humans move by with their own culture and attribute the river with one set of myths; they move away, another group moves in, and they proceed to mythify the river in their way. As the embodiment of something that was there long before humanity arrived, it'd be silly for it to change aspects entirely due to the arrival of storytelling bipedal monkeys who live for only a few dozen summers. (Think of it as a vast creature whose heart beats once or twice a year, flooding its banks and receding again.) The only effect that humanity's arrival would be to imbue it with a sense of self, and that's because we humans imbue everything with that sense. Beyond that, if we pollute it or dam it...well, it might view us with interest or amused disdain, but any sense of enmity or empathy would be tempered by the fact that we are about the size of ants compared to the spirit.

Then there is the Native American approach. Different tribes have different traditions, but one common way of conceptualizing the relationship between humans and the spirits of nature is that they are our ancestors, and we are descended from them, same as all the other plants and animals. We owe a familial debt to them, and they to us. So long as each individual puts the needs of the extended clan, tribe and the environment everyone depends upon before their own, everything remains in balance. The relationship between species and the environment as a whole reflects the human one that exists between extended families ("clans") and the tribe as a whole. Just as individual families cannot exist without the tribe, and therefore must defend the needs and interests of the tribe, so each species depends upon all the others for their existence too, and each must act for the benefit of all (even while they hunt and consume each other). You may be descended from Turtle, and I from Bear, but ultimately turtles and bears depend upon each other, and so should we. Thus, so long as we fulfill our obligations within the larger whole, our spiritual ancestors will be pleased with us and bless us with health, good weather, and good hunting. Displease them, by betraying the needs of the clan, the tribe, or the environment, and we will all be cursed with illness, starvation, and death. Thus the society of humans, and the society of living things, are and should be exact mirrors of each other.

Happy hunting!

I have one Nature spirit in my stories. She is a Rådare (Ruler of the Nature). She is a real Cloudcucoolander who loves all friendly living things, humanity included and tries to help them if possible. Her small hints of Blue-and-Orange Morality and allround wierdness makes the "help" unsucessfull or not working as intended at times. However, Humans are a part of nature and she constantly tries to learn more about them so she can understand and help them better.

She might have had the occasional human friend or lover, but the enemies are far more common.

What she rules is a bit unspecified, but it seems too be everything in her region, both wilderness and human areas. After all, cities are just nature in another form...

edited 24th Apr '15 1:07:08 PM by TheBorderPrince