BY STEWART SLATER

“The closest place to Paradise on Earth” Clive Myrie solemnly intones over a shot of a lush tropical landscape at the start of his latest series (free holiday funded for by the licence-fee payer i.e. you). Who could disagree? The view is, undoubtedly, majestic, the deep green of the trees contrasting with the spume and blue of the ocean below. But heaven? Really?

I have had the fortune to live in a rainforest. And it does have its attractions. The family of monkeys (mummy, daddy and baby) which shared the compound with me were certainly sweet and the similarity of their lifestyle to my own – breakfast by the pool, followed by some gentle ablutions, then a commute down the road for elevenses – might, to a mind more similar to David Attenborough’s than my own, have prompted thoughts of inter-species connection. The house was nice and spacious, built in that post-WWI period when Britain retained much of its Victorian desire to bend the world to its will.

But it had its downsides. The cat-sized rat which took up residence in an overflow pipe looked like the product of the fevered imagination of a seventies author of penny dreadfuls. Every month, a group of lads turned up to paint a stripe of yellow sulphur around the outline of the house to keep snakes out. This was not always successful – a cobra had been discovered in the lobby a few months before I moved in and one evening, on my way for a nocturnal pee, I stood on what appeared to be a juvenile grass snake, possibly coming from the nest believed to exist behind the china cupboard. When the anti-snake guys did not turn up, the anti-mosquito lads did, fogging the atmosphere with noxious chemicals to prevent the spread of dengue, chikungunya and other unpleasant and potentially fatal diseases.

For while tropical landscapes look attractive, it takes a lot of work to make them habitable. An early settler on whichever Caribbean island Myrie chose to extol would have laughed at his description of it as Heaven, pointing out that he was soaked from the daily downpour, couldn’t move without great effort due to the plants and trees in his way, was becoming mal-nourished due to the lack of recognisable food and was suffering from (in the best case) a constant low-grade fever and suppurating boils.

But the labour required to make the world habitable is never done. Nature is like a Japanese soldier, unwilling ever to give up. The moment the anti-snake guys stop turning up is the moment the local cobra decides it fancies moving in. The moment the anti-mosquito guys stop coming is the moment I turn on Google to diagnose whichever disease I have acquired. The jungle is only kept at bay by constant cutting. Nature does not want man to lead a life of easeful contentment, she wants to stop him doing so.

Myrie is, I am sure, not alone in his view. For, the fetishisation of Nature has a long history. Disaffected by the cold, clock-work universe understandable to human reason and, therefore, amenable to human control, they had inherited from the Enlightenment, the Romantics turned their backs on that vision and elevated emotion over thought. Nature was to be prized because of the awe she could inspire, Nature and Nature alone could reach that highest of all categories, the Sublime.

Elevating Nature to the highest good, of course, serves to diminish Man and his works. If nothing we can produce is as good as what she produces, then we should stop. Man does not control and improve Nature, Man ruins Nature, lowering her from the lofty pedestal she would otherwise inhabit. From this, the modern eco-doomerist view of Man as a plague evolved, leading a disconcerting number of those who infest our television screens to conclude that a world with far fewer people would be a far better place. Their reluctance to lead by example in this project merely reveals them to be every bit as hypocritical as those Royals who lecture on climate change and jump on private jets (all of them).

If this is common thinking, it is also shoddy thinking. If Man is part of Nature (which none of them would deny), then so must be Man’s ability to control and alter Nature. His doing so, therefore, far from being an aberration to be extirpated (others first, of course) is, in fact, deeply natural.

Romanticism evolved at the same time as the Industrial Revolution was gathering steam (literally and metaphorically) and it would be easy to see it as a reaction not just to Enlightenment rationality but to the dark, satanic mills now dotting the landscape, in the same way that the Arts and Crafts movement would hark back to a twee world which never existed. But Romanticism owed a much greater debt to Industry than it cared to acknowledge. For not only did new technology make the world more controllable but it is the ability to leave Nature which gives one the ability to worship her. What is a threatening place of struggle against the elements to those who live there can become a beauty spot only to those who can get the train back to a warm home with plentiful food and (usually) drinkable water. It is by controlling Nature that we can turn her into an object of purely aesthetic appreciation. Sitting in the comfort of Edinburgh, London and Berlin, Mendelssohn was able to turn his trip to the Hebrides into an overture; my ancestors who lived there faced an annual question of whether they would need to eat their sheep or their children to get through the winter, always assuming the croft hadn’t blown in before they did so.

Wiser heads have long known this. Shangri-La in James Hilton’s Lost Horizon is not some prelapsarian wilderness, but an orderly society replete with library, central heating and a grand piano. In Islam, paradise is a garden – people who lived a nomadic life in an inhospitable environment chose to elevate not Nature, but controlled Nature. Similarly, Adam and Eve lived not in Eden, but the Garden of Eden. It is only in modern times, when we have been able to remove ourselves from Nature that we have come to worship her. Those forced to have more contact with her have always known she needs to be domesticated. I am, I confess, not much of a nature lover. I am one of the Country Squire’s tame townies. A view of a beach, or an island or a majestic mountain can be perfectly pretty but no more and only for a short time. I far prefer the works of Man – the Pantheon, the Queen’s House, the Royal Hospital (which often strikes me as a pointed reminder to the exhibitors at Chelsea of what god-like genius truly is). Heaven, to me, would be like the dining room of the Hong Kong Club – slap bang in the middle of a great city and serving the finest Yorkshire Pudding yet conceived. You may differ. But before you decide it is a tropical island, or a lofty mountain, or an endless beach, try living there first.

Stewart Slater works in Finance. He invites you to join him at his website.