1) The Natural World is One of the Reasons Why We’re Alive
Nature isn’t simply part of the world we live in. It provides us with food, water for drinking and bathing, and air we can breathe. It nurtures our crops and gardens with rain and sun, offers shade on hot days, and abounds with herbs and botanicals that have medicinal properties. Essentially, the natural world enables us to survive.
Books such as Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins, and C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe remind us to accept and be grateful for the sustenance and protection that nature offers us. Calling this theme “man versus nature” would be unfair and inaccurate for this reason and others we’ll discuss shortly. The point is, since we live in and are alive because of nature, it’s important for us to appreciate nature for all its beauty, nourishment, and lifesaving relief.
2) It Compels Us to Reflect on Our Relationship with Living Things
If you’ve read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe or watched its film or TV adaptations, you might remember that several of its characters – Aslan the lion, the Beavers, even Mr. Tumnus the Faun – are animals or mythological creatures with animal-like features. Now, what other stories have you read where animals are part of the cast of characters? I can think of Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, Stacey O’Brien’s Wesley the Owl, Anna Sewell’sBlack Beauty – and that’s just for starters.
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