Are humans separate from nature?

Shock horror! Look at the top two definitions for “nature” at dictionary.com;

1. The material world esp. as surrounding humankind and existing independently of human activities.

2. The natural world as it exists without human beings or civilization.

Is it right to think of humans as separate from nature?

Don’t you think it’s interesting that we see nature as being separate? Even so, we put the words “nature” and “mother” together in common language. We know instinctively that our relationship to nature is like that of a child and mother.

A mother nurtures and cares for her child, but also exercises control, influence and authority. A child doesn’t understand the world fully so the mother protects it by means of rules. Nature did that for us. There were definite rules and controls. We had to obey the rules. There was no other way. So, nature is a mother in the sense that there are rules, and that the rules exist to maintain harmony and balance…

We depend on natural resources for our life. Food, water, air, sunshine. How long would life on earth last without the sun? Yet in general we give mother nature about as much thought and respect as something we just trod in.

We do a lot of taking and not much giving in this relationship with our mother. Why? I think partly this has to do with our extremely complex social structures in which we all do different jobs. Most of us have play no part in the supply of our food, other than a weekly trip to the supermarket. Naturally then, we give it little thought.

Natural controls keep everything balanced

I’ve always loved nature. Study wild animals and you learn that their fate is totally tied to the natural world;

They eat what is locally available, in season. In nature there’s no choice. They eat what’s there or they don’t eat.
They eat fresh, organic, wild food in it’s raw natural state.
They generally eat only foods that they’re adapted to.
They get up with the sun and go to bed when it’s dark (at least the ones like us that are active in the daytime)
Their numbers are in direct proportion to the amount of available food.
The strong survive and the weak die out (natural selection)

We find the last one on the list particularly disturbing especially if it’s applies to us but it has a vital role in the health of individual species. It’s nature’s way of keeping the gene pool of a species strong and well-adapted.

These natural controls were the same for humans, as they are to a large extent for hunter-gatherer populations alive today. These controls allow harmony and balance to exist in and between different species and with the environment.

If the environment changes as it always does over time, the best adapted individuals are more likely to pass on their genes and so the biology of a species also changes over time and balance is maintained.

Humans left “home” — but why?

We left the protection of our mother between 5,000 and 10,000 years ago when many humans gave up hunter-gatherer lifestyles and started farming. This happened all over the world in different cultures. In genetic terms, this is the blink of an eye. We are pretty much the same today as we were then.

Farming allowed us to have control over our food supply. As our ancestors moved into more northern climates, the food supply became very seasonal compared to the tropics. Farming allowed us to be sure we always had food. Grains can be stored over the winter. And instead of following herds of wild game around, farming allowed us to domesticate animals for our own purposes.

The effects of leaving home

The farming strategy was amazingly successful and saw the birth of a human population explosion. This is the start of our separation from the controls of nature. It’s easy to see how now we can now see nature as separate from us, an untamed wilderness for our use and pleasure.

The human population has been growing steadily since the birth of farming and since the industrial revolution is spiralling out of control. 10,000 years ago the human population was 4 million and now it’s over 6,000 million. The future population predictions are frightening and many believe, unsustainable.

Our success is also a problem. We have the intelligence to cheat nature. Starting from the simplest tools, we passed on knowledge from generation to generation until today we have the power to destroy ourselves and our planet.

Now our cheating abilities know no bounds. We can even travel to the moon and build weapons that could destroy whole countries. We have power, without question. But without natural controls, things are getting out of hand.

I can’t help but think Agent Smith in The Matrix has an extremely insightful and poignant point…

“I’d like to share with you a revelation I’ve had, during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you aren’t actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with its surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply, and multiply until every natural resource is consumed.

The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague, and we… are the cure.”

Well I wouldn’t describe humanity as a plague or a disease! I have a much greater love of my fellow homo-sapiens than Agent Smith :-)

The point is that without natural controls, things can easily get unbalanced. The further we stray from our genetic inheritance, the worse things get. Genetically we are adapted to eat what comes from nature directly. It’s impossible to describe or even imagine the millions upon millions of tiny little changes that must have happened in our biology and behavior to adapt to a slowly changing world over millions of years.

The last 10,000 years have been a big shock to our system in genetic terms. Modern and unnatural foods, designed for profit and better shelf-life have appeared only in the last 200 years and they’re killing us. Heart disease, diabetes, stokes, cancer, depression, arthritis… the tip of the iceberg. Virtually non-existent in wild animals and tribal peoples.

Not only that, they are reducing our quality of life. Even more recently began the use of pesticides and fungicides. Your great-grandparents and possibly your grandparents ate organic food. There was no other kind.

One of the more obvious results of our modern lifestyle is lack of sunlight for many people. When our genes evolved, they did so in line with our outdoor lives. We need the sun in so many ways to maintain health, from making vitamin D, to regulating hormones and bodily rhythms to making the “feel good” chemicals in our bodies when sunlight hits the backs of our eyes.

This simple example shows how acutely and exquisitely we are adapted to the natural world. If we want exceptional health, we need to re-create natural conditions in our lives as best we can.

The modern world throws up many other challenges associated with our maladapted genes to such radical changes. The flight or fight response that served us as we evolved, does not work so well in “civilization,” where more often we’re faced with situations where neither flight OR fight is a suitable response.

Our natural food instincts don’t serve so well now either. They only work in a natural setting, not in McDonalds or KFC. Our love of fat served us well when fatty, high calorie food was scarce and the food supply uncertain. In modern times, it’s a problem.

When we lived in nature, our bodies were the perfect fit for our lives. And we were adapted to physically meet the demands of that life — exercise to you and me. These days, we must hit the gym if we’re to give our bodies what they’re truly adapted for… a life of exercise.

Although a better option is to get out into nature, fresh air and sunlight. The exercise needs of our bodies is another example of how our ancient genetic coding is maladapted to “civilization” or rather, civilization is maladapted to our genes.

Natural food is far superior

The first of the natural controls listed above are quick to say and easy to forget — animals in nature eat what is locally available, in season. They eat what’s there or they don’t eat. They eat food in it’s raw natural state. They eat only foods that they’re adapted to. The consequences of moving away from these natural controls are massive.

Eating foods that we’re not adapted to causes a massive amount of suffering in terms of poor health and vitality. I’ve seen papers comparing modern diets with both primate diets and those of our paleolithic ancestors. In both cases the modern diet is nutritionally bankrupt by comparison. Non-organic methods of farming compound this problem.

You only have to look at the teeth of tribal peoples and compare those to those from “civilized” people to see the massive error. Find someone you know without crooked teeth if you can. Chances are they’ve had surgery to have teeth removed, braces fitted and so on.

Wild animals don’t suffer chronic illnesses to the extent we do, if at all. The major disaster in modern diets is refined carbohydrates. Our biology is not at all suited to the quick-release sugars found in modern foods and grains in general have many health problems associated with their use.

It’s also unnatural to consume milk after weaning, let alone the milk of another species. Dairy foods are another group that have many health problems associated with their use.

Further divergence comes in the form of manipulating wild foods to suit our preferences. From the more minor problems of selective breeding to the outrageous “playing God” of inserting genes from one species into other species (GM). Seems like madness to me. I even read that scorpion genes were being inserted into tomatoes!

Fruit picked straight off the tree and eaten straight away is a lot different nutritionally to a fruit that’s picked unripe, shipped across the world and then sits in your fruit bowl for a week. The more we mess, the worse it gets.

Nature’s way v modern farming

Whether you choose to eat meat or not, there’s little doubt that pre-agriculture, we ate a lot of animal foods. In fact animal foods have always been a big part of the homo genus diet since it’s birth approximately 2.5 million years ago. But there’s a massive difference between hunting wild game and the barbaric practices of modern farming and butchery, both from a humanitarian viewpoint and a nutritional one.

If you look at wild animals hunting, it’s generally the weak ones that become victims and so natural selection is at work. Wild animals are part of the game of life, and they live their life fully and naturally until, if they are the unfortunate ones, it ends brutally but extremely quickly. There’s very little suffering involved.

Compare and contrast that to much of modern farming where the animals have no quality of life and suffer and suffer until the blessed day when they are released from all that suffering. Male calves kept in crates and hardly able to move the whole of their short lives. Chickens crammed into tiny cages that become their life-long prisons. That’s not nature and there’s a world of difference between the two scenarios.

And what drives all this cruelty? Competition and profit. As well as lack of consumer knowledge of the realities of what goes on. I believe if the truth was truly and firmly in the public consciousness, we would not allow it. And let’s not blame not farmers either. It’s no one persons individual “fault.” It’s the entire system.

The old farming ways were much kinder to animals I believe. Even today in Greece, you can see small holdings with chickens running around as they please. These chickens are free to eat the wild purslane which has omega 3 fats which get into their eggs. You just don’t get this with battery farmed eggs. It’s a world of difference.

Mono-culture or bio-diversity?

Endless fields of cereal crops are an abomination in terms of the health of our planet. Fragile eco-systems laid to waste in order to fill the landscape with cereals. As well as a lot of top soil simply being washed into the rivers, the vital mineral content of top-soil diminishes over time with constant farming. You just can’t keep taking and taking and expect things to stay the same.

In the old days, at least the goodness was put back in the form of organic fertilizers but these days the widespread use of NPK fertilizers is leaving both the soil and us, mineral deficient. And to add insult to injury, millions of tons of chemicals in the form of pesticides and fungicides eventually get into the water table and pollute everything. The sheer population of humans is incompatible with nature. In nature, numbers are controlled by the availability of food.

Human dominance over nature…

(A partial list…) Thousands of eco-systems destroyed by mass river damming. The pouring millions of tons of chemicals into the atmosphere. Melting of the polar ice-caps. Mono-cultures – masses of farm land devoted to one crop, rather than diversity. Disappearing rain forests – the lungs of the earth. Extinct species with many others on the verge of extinction. Our own closest primate relative – the bonobo chimpanzee is threatened with extinction as well as the orang-utans and gorillas.

Introduction of foreign species destroying fragile eco-systems. GM foods. Inhumane treatment of animals. Drinking the milk of other mammals. Suffering on an unimaginable scale due to unnatural lifestyles – the modern diseases of heart disease and cancer are just the tip of the suffering iceberg. Malformed dental arches endemic in the western world – a clear sign of malnutrition.

Erosion and demineralisation of top-soil. Mass pollution of ground water and seas with chemicals, fertilizers, pesticides. Acid rain. High concentrations of PCB’s in sea fish. Behavioural problems and psychoses in our children. Growing rates of cancer and adult-onset diabetes in our children… the list is endless…

The law is the law

I heard a theory that our super intelligence could have been caused by a gene mutation. Whatever, the reality is that we’re a product of nature and the law applies: What works will survive, what doesn’t will die out.

Humanity is on the verge of self destructing. If it does, our numbers will either drastically reduce or we will disappear altogether. It’s unlikely to be in my lifetime. Maybe my sons, or his children’s. Global warming is a real and present danger to our survival and the survival of many other species.

A human own-goal?

When I see films of chimps lazing in the sun, grooming each other, the infants playing and having fun, I wonder if we haven’t “shot ourselves in the foot.” There are human tribal groups existing today that parallel the lives of primates in many ways. Lives closely bound to nature. Their kids play in and around the forest edges. The jungles are their schools and are filled with thousands of wonders waiting to be explored. It’s unheard of for these kids to fight with one another. They are naturally kind and work together, not compete.

Why have we given up nature for the stresses and strains of the modern world? I don’t think it was a choice we made. It just happened as a consequence of farming and this is where we ended up. Tribal people don’t have mortgages! How bizarre when you really think about it that we must spend most of our lives working just to pay for shelter and food when every other animal gets it totally for free!

I’m not saying we could or should go back, I love a lot of what the “free” human mind has created — great works of science, art and literature. But we need to find ways of fitting into the bigger picture of earth functioning as a whole. Now that we’ve sidestepped the controls of nature we must have responsibility to act in the best interests of the whole. Both on an individual level, a governmental level and a global level.

What are we going to do? Score an even bigger own goal and destroy ourselves through global warming or unsustainable population spiralling out of control?

Or will we gather all our resources and help each other to overcome the problems the whole world now faces?

We should take heed of the fate of the Mayan civilization. If we don’t, the result of our meddling could be far more catastrophic.

Big thanks to Rob and Nadia Koh Bukar for allowing us to feature their beautiful photography in this article.

All the best,

Mike Kinnaird
Habit Guide: How to be Happy & Healthy

Are humans separate from nature?

Natural controls keep everything balanced

Humans left “home” — but why?

The effects of leaving home

Natural food is far superior

Nature’s way v modern farming

Mono-culture or bio-diversity?

Human dominance over nature…

The law is the law

A human own-goal?

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