On Humans and Nature.
What picture appears in your mind when I say the word “nature”?
If I’m not wrong, you thought about trees, mountains, rivers, oceans, wilderness, and anything but humans. Even when you make an online search for the word “nature,” you’ll rarely find any human in the resulting pictures. Why is it so?
Because in our minds, we’re separate from nature. Not only do we believe that humans and nature are separate, but also that humans are superior to nature and the non-thinking living creatures in it. What happens when one entity holds the belief that it is separate from and superior to another entity? It tries to exploit and control the alleged inferior entity, and that’s what we’ve been doing for centuries with nature.
This narrative that we’re different from nature is not based on facts but on lies told by some of the selfish and clever people in history who knew that promoting this narrative and pushing it into people’s subconscious minds is going to benefit them both socially and economically.
But it has not always been like this. In the philosophies developed in the ancient civilizations of India and China, humans had always been considered in entanglement with nature and it was agreed that existing in harmony with nature is imperative for the flourishment of humanity. The Eastern philosophies such as Hinduism, Sikhism, and Buddhism stressed that there is no such thing as an independent being on this planet; everything that exists on this planet is dependent upon others for survival and well-being.
When did the world start to transition away from this imperative knowledge?
With the rise of Christian values in the Western world over 2000 years ago, this belief that nature and humans are separate started to take hold. The Bible taught people in Western societies that God exists outside of nature, who created humans and gave them dominion over nature - which was in contradiction to the Eastern philosophy which insists that sacredness exists in nature and we should learn to adapt to nature, not to bend it.
The Western line of thinking about humans and nature started to expand into other regions of the world as the European colonizers started the era of colonization and enforced their culture upon the enslaved nations. That’s how we transitioned into Anthropocentrism.
What happens when anthropocentrism becomes our way of thinking?
We start looking at nature as something to be exploited and profited from, not as something to exist in harmony with. It justifies our ecocidal models of economic arrangement in which killing the planet is incentivized infinitely more than protecting it. The science fiction movies in which humans can travel to space and settle there without any problem seem logical as long as we believe humans are superior to nature. People subscribing to this kind of belief system have no problem continuing down the road of ecocide.
This whole notion that we’re separate from nature and have the right to exploit the nonhuman world is utterly false.
If nature is the ocean, then we’re the ocean wave.
If the ocean wave comes to you and says it’s different from the ocean, wouldn’t you be laughing at the evidently ridiculous claim it’s making? The wave may be at a higher level than the ocean surface, but it shouldn’t forget that it’s a tiny part of the vast ocean. Similarly, humans may be the only species with the ability to think abstractly but we shouldn’t forget that we’re just a tiny part of this vast life-supporting ecosystem, and our well-being depends upon the well-being of this entire biosphere.
We’re so deeply connected with the ecosystem that the astronauts have to take a part of it with them into space or else they’ll die. Yet, people believe the same astronauts or a billionaire sending those astronauts into space that we can survive without earth’s ecosystem.
If we were so separate from nature, why did we need to breathe its air to survive? If we were so separate from nature, why would our bodies contain tons of bacteria that are necessary for proper food digestion? If we were so separate from nature, why would every study conclude that we tend to be calmer, more caring, and more stress-free after spending some time in nature?
A person who is aware of the interconnectedness of humans and nature would know that any harm to nature is harm to himself because he IS nature. On the other hand, anyone believing in separation would conclude that we’re harming nature but that doesn’t mean it’s harming us back. That’s where the problem resides.
As long as we hold onto the beliefs about separation, we won’t act in the ways required to protect the earth’s ecosystem. The first step toward saving the planet has to be the people awakening to this reality on a global scale. We collectively have to make drastic shifts in the ways we perceive the relationship between humanity and nature.
We should be grateful for the fact that among all the planets we’re aware of, only this one has the perfect concentration of everything that’s needed for life to survive and thrive. We’re acting as if an Earth-like planet is ready to take us in when we murder this one. Earth is our only home. There’s no second home known to anyone where we can just move to once this home becomes inhabitable. Instead of being fantasized about “making life multi-planetary,” we must double down on the ways we can transform our social and economic system into ones that are in tune with nature if we are to survive.
If I give you a phone and tell you that this is the only one you have to use forever, you’ll be far more cautious while using it than we’re now about the fact that this is the only planet we can live on - which is one of the many symptoms of an unhealthy society.
Under our current system of capitalism - where the capitalists benefit tremendously by raping the planet while the ordinary people pay the costs in the form of floods, storms, hurricanes, excessive heat, infertile soil, etc. - the capitalists have a vested interest in making sure that the illusion of separation remains intact in people’s mind because only then they can continue exploiting the earth’s resources. We shouldn’t expect anything from them and the politicians they bribe.
We have to take the matter into our hands and start spreading awareness and then collectively overthrow the destructive system of capitalism to rebuild our societies based on the knowledge we had during the ancient civilizations.
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