Hi, Twigga, thanks for asking this! Apologies for the slow response, I must have missed the notification.
Nature is... everything. Intellectually, nature is the fundamental thing. I keep coming back to the sheer complexity of nature, of how interconnected it is; how resilient and yet how fragile; so fearsome yet so delicate. On this level, nature is first.
Nature is always first in other ways, too. From a young age I was taught to respect nature, but, even before these lessons took hold of a mind old enough to comprehend them, I remember carrying an innate instinct for the importance of life. Not necessarily human life. Gosh, how I despised those other children who would destroy snails! How angry was I, at being forced to play with the little boys who liked to build dams and kill the bugs left in the dry. Years later, I would find patterns of behavior in myself very similar to theirs. That was a wake-up moment for me; an "enlightenment" moment of sorts. That anyone can harbor these vicious natures -- perhaps there is a piece of our nature which is innately so. That's okay. I realized that this wasn't who I wanted to be, I got better, I moved on and became a different sort of child.
I take great solace from the natural world. Some people use petty logic to argue that "humans are natural, so what we create is too." This is a foolish argument. Human beings take a naturally complex system and impose our ideas, our simple-complex systems, over it. We pave away those things of which our ancestors were afraid; we pretend we've transcended those things which our ancestors were devoted to. Human architecture can be beautiful, magnificent, meditative; wonderful. But without nature? Concrete lanes, glass and steel towers, smoke and pollution, boxy buildings, architecture built for profit rather than the glory of our own inner joy -- these things cannot match the simplicity, the complexity, the magnificence of nature. The ocean on a gray and stormy day. The forest of redwood trees during a rain storm. The wild boar, fifty feet away from your tent in the middle of the night; there is something in the wilderness which we desperately need in order to be human. We need the wild places of the world. And, mostly due to our own carelessness, many of those wild places now need us, too.
Jedi should protect the wild places. There is nothing about this which is remotely "political," that only comes in when we start quibbling over "value" or when we try to decide which extreme we want to belong to. At the end of the day, a Jedi's life must include a sense of what it means to have nature in balance; a Jedi must be committed to ensuring that a balance in nature is maintained. Human beings can, actually, sustain themselves on the resources of our planet and solar system. We consume, yes, but we can find ways to coexist with the wonderful systems of which we are a part -- we must, actually, for without such coexistence we will all perish from this earth. Understanding that this is part of what the Force is has been important to my journey: the Force calls us into action even as it asks us to grow our perspectives and settle deeper into a place where our presuppositions are less strenuous and trapping. The Force is a lessening of our egos, of our ideas that we are superior to elephants or bees -- but also that our instincts to kill and eat are not "unnatural" or wrong.
So, what do I do? I do many things, including writing and dreaming up a sort of world that's better. I also always make certain to cut open the nooses of the six-pack soda can rings whenever I get them so that they, at least, won't strangle innocent beings quite as easily.
We are all the sum of our tears. Too little and the ground is not fertile, and nothing can grow there. Too much, the best of us is washed away. -- J. Michael Straczynski, Babylon 5
