Last year, I saw a Facebook post from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service about the fraternal potter wasp. It began with the rather wonderful line, “Welcome back to ‘Moms Who Build Tiny Homes and Kidnap Caterpillars.’” Yes, I saved it.
Female potter wasps construct tiny vessels from mud, lay an egg inside, and provision the chamber with caterpillars. The caterpillars aren’t killed. The wasp stings and paralyses them before sealing them inside the nest. When the larva hatches, it has a supply of fresh food waiting for it, which it proceeds to eat alive.
Predation itself isn’t news to me. Animals kill and eat other animals, and sometimes they don’t kill them first. Parasitoid wasps have developed particularly gruesome variations on the theme. Nature is full of creatures whose survival depends upon the suffering and death of something else. Still, the image of a tiny mud pot containing a paralysed caterpillar waiting to be eaten alive stayed with me because it touches on something I struggle with as a Pagan and animist: we romanticise nature far too much.
Nature is not benevolent
There is a particular picture of nature that recurs frequently in modern Paganism, adjacent spiritualities, and, more recently, wellness culture. Nature is nurturing and healing. It teaches us balance and harmony. Reconnecting with nature will supposedly allow us to recover something that modern civilisation has caused us to lose.
There is some truth in this, but also a great deal of projection. Ecosystems contain cooperation and symbiosis, but they also contain competition, starvation, disease, parasitism, predation and mass death. Evolution does not select for kindness. Nature tends towards strategies that maximise survival and reproduction, not minimise suffering.
I’m not above it, by the way, the impulse to romanticise. I want beautiful, serene, kind nature. I don’t want bushfire, earthquakes, and flash floods nature. I don’t want animal being run down and torn apart to the soothing voice of Sir David Attenborough nature. Wanting the natural world to be gentle isn’t a failure of Pagan practice. It’s an ordinary human response to something that is genuinely hard to look at.
It’s spring in Melbourne at the moment, my favourite time of the year. Flowers are blooming, and birds are nesting, which also means it’s one of the more openly violent stretches of the year. Magpies swoop anyone who gets too close to a nest (#NotAllMagpies). Meanwhile, pied currawongs, our most prolific nest predators, traumatise backyard birdwatchers by snatching eggs, hatchlings, and nestlings to meet the high-protein demands of raising their own young.
The potter wasp isn’t evil, nor does she need to be made into a villain for us to recognise what happens to the caterpillar. Neither is the pied currawong. This is how these species reproduce. Their interests are incompatible with those of their prey, and nothing in nature requires the conflict to be resolved fairly.
Does the caterpillar suffer?
We don’t know what a caterpillar experiences, and it doesn’t much matter for the argument. We know that a great many animals feel pain. A willie wagtail chick doesn’t stop hurting because predation is natural. An animal dying slowly from infection doesn’t experience its illness as ecological balance. Animals experience fear, injury, hunger and distress. Long before humans appeared, creatures were being wounded, eaten, infected, crushed, burned, starved and killed. The dinosaurs suffered too. Suffering is not peculiar to human existence.
Why should we be different?
In my work in spiritual care, I regularly encounter questions about suffering. They often emerge within a Christian framework, sometimes explicitly and sometimes because Christianity has provided much of the religious vocabulary available to the person asking. Why did this happen to me? Why would God allow this? Why do good people suffer? Why would a loving God allow cancer, dementia, the death of a child or an earthquake?
I don’t know if people actually expect me to hold the answer to one of humanity’s oldest and most profound psychological, philosophical, and theological enquiries. Like any good pastoral carer worth their training, I turn the question back: what do you think? What does your faith say about suffering? What would it mean if there were an answer? Suffering doesn’t get resolved in that room. What happens instead is that the person gets to sit with the question in the presence of someone who isn’t going to flinch from it or rush to close it over.
I’m less interested in answering that question than in the assumption underneath it: why do we expect not to suffer in the first place? Suffering did not enter the world with human beings. Animals were hunting, starving, sickening, and dying for hundreds of millions of years before we arrived, through five major mass extinctions, long before anyone was around to ask why.
As a Pagan and animist, I don’t start from a God who owes anyone an explanation. The question doesn’t need answering; it needs accepting. It doesn’t disappear, but it stops being a puzzle and becomes closer to a fact of what it is to be alive, one more animal fact among the others.
Decentring ourselves
Finding our place within nature may require us to give up the expectation that nature should be arranged for us. We aren’t spectators looking out at something called ‘the natural world’. We are organisms within it. Our bodies are animal bodies. We need food, water, warmth and shelter. We become injured. We harbour microorganisms. Our cells malfunction. We age and die.
Recognising suffering as natural does not make it trivial or good, and it isn’t a licence to shrug at it. Disease is natural. Starvation is natural. Infanticide occurs in nature, as does forced mating. Nature can’t provide us with a ready-made ethical system, and another person’s suffering does not become less terrible because animals suffered millions of years before we appeared. What changes is the expectation that suffering must be justified as something specifically inflicted upon us. I am vulnerable because living things are vulnerable.
This is where respect for nature has to mean something more demanding than admiration. If I respect another being, I should encounter it as itself rather than demand it embody qualities that I find spiritually useful. The wasp doesn’t have to become a symbol of industrious motherhood, the currawong a lesson in ruthlessness, the caterpillar a metaphor for transformation, or the forest a place that exists to heal me. Their lives are not about me. The more-than-human world doesn’t exist primarily as our teacher, our healer, or our source of wisdom. We’re one community of creatures among innumerable others, all pursuing lives whose purposes frequently have nothing to do with ours. We may find some of those lives beautiful and others horrifying, but most of them are simply their own.
Who put us in charge?
The Christian tradition most of us reach for when we talk about “Western attitudes to nature” is one of dominion: God gave humans the earth, along with permission, sometimes treated as an obligation, to use it. There’s a harder edge to this in some strands of Christian thought: the sense that our time here is temporary and the world itself is disposable, that stewardship of a planet awaiting rapture or ruin doesn’t matter much. That’s a real position, though it isn’t the only Christian position. Plenty of Christian thought reads dominion as responsibility rather than licence.
Pagans tend to describe our own relationship to the earth differently. We talk about being stewards, custodians, protectors. In theory, we care. But who put us in charge? Because steward and custodian are still positions of authority, with duties attached rather than privileges. Someone entrusted us with something. That’s not obviously different in structure from being granted dominion. It’s dominion with better manners.
Pagan custodianship can function as identity rather than practice. We can hold the belief that we’re the earth’s carers while enthusiastically adopting energy-hungry AI tools, participating in hyper-capitalist economies without much friction, and staying politically checked out of the actual fights that determine what happens to rivers, forests and coastlines. Belief and behaviour are loosely coupled in most of us, regardless of which cosmology we hold. Believing we are appointed carers doesn’t seem to predict much.
Some indigenous frameworks work from a different structure entirely: not authority, but kinship. Caring for Country, as practised by Aboriginal peoples in Australia, is grounded in this kind of obligation. It’s a responsibility that comes from being related to a specific Country. It isn’t a framework I can borrow, and it isn’t mine to take up. But I live here, which means I’m always on someone’s Country, and that carries its own responsibility: to recognise it, and to respect a relationship to land that isn’t mine and that I’m not trying to replicate. Living in Australia has sharpened something I already believed in: that obligation grounded in relationship is fundamentally different from obligation grounded in authority.
I can’t point to where my own sense of kinship with the more-than-human world came from. There was no single teacher or book, although my high school ecology teacher, Ann Nelson, deserves some credit. I’ve been Pagan and interested in environmental thinking since I was a teenager, and the conviction has accumulated in pieces over the years. It wasn’t something I inherited from the immigrant Cuban community I grew up in, where environmental concerns were largely peripheral to more immediate questions of survival, stability and Cuba. Living in Australia has added another layer. It has sharpened something I already believed: that obligation grounded in relationship is fundamentally different from obligation grounded in authority.
None of which answers the question. Maybe nobody put us in charge, and the honest position is that we aren’t in charge of anything: not stewards, not custodians, just one species among many with some unusual capacities that create obligations without conferring any authority.
What do we do with suffering?
Accepting suffering as part of nature does not require indifference to it. A potter wasp has no moral obligation to devise a more humane system of feeding her offspring, and a currawong isn’t cruel for feeding its chicks the only way it knows how. But we have capacities they don’t. We can care for the sick, feed the hungry, comfort the frightened, protect habitats, treat animals humanely and try not to cause unnecessary harm to a world that already has enough of it.
Compassion may matter precisely because nature does not guarantee it. There is no promise that suffering will be distributed fairly, that good creatures will flourish while bad ones perish, or that anyone will receive the death they deserve. The natural world contains no mechanism ensuring that the caterpillar will be spared, or the chick, or any of us.
The caterpillar and the wasp, the currawong and its prey, belong in our understanding of nature just as much as the parts we find beautiful. So do suffering, predation and death. If we really mean it when we say that we are part of nature rather than separate from it, we have to find a way to belong to this nature, not an idealised version of it.