Why Natural is Better

Humans find the world as it is after many millions of years of life evolving to utilise many of the Earth’s resources. As these resources have been exploited they have been transformed from one source into another. Perhaps pure water is used to excrete unwanted compounds from the organism thus rendering it polluted, or some entirely new waste compound is produced like oxygen from plants. As time progressed the raw materials became scarcer and the by products and waste products became more available. The pressure was in for some organism that could exploit the growing waste products to evolve. As soon as it did, like oxygen metabolism, it flourished in the environment now rich in the resource its specialised in. And so it came to pass that quite naturally recycling was folded into the ecology of the planet. Resources that could not be recycled were eventually all exploited and the organisms that depended upon them naturally gave way to organisms whose survival was ensured by the endless production of their resources by recycling.

Then arrives man. Man has for one reason or another (analysed in depth in this blog) required progressively more and more resources and has developed means of exploiting resources in ways never fully developed by nature like for example the mass uncovering of organic minerals like coal and oil. While bacteria exist that recycle coal and oil, its natural rarity means that they are not major components of the Earth’s ecology. But in just a century Mankind has brought coal and oil directly to the centre of the lives of all organisms. Such rapid changes does not allow for evolution to establish recycling and so these resources may be once again lost.

Another angle to this is that what Mankind feels he must make Nature is not already making. If Nature is not already making it then we can be sure that there is no place for it in Nature. A good example would be trans-fats. Partially hydrogenated fats come in two varieties the low energy trans fats and the higher energy cis-fats. Cis-fats occur naturally as products of animals and plant metabolism; trans-fats naturally occur rarely because they do not fit into metabolic processes. Unsurprisingly Man’s metabolism belonging to the same system as the rest of the Earth’s biosphere prefers the cis-fats and cannot metabolise the trans-fats. In the 1900s Mankind developed new, cheaper and unnatural ways of producing food fats which unfortunately favour the production of the trans-fats. These now dominate our food and it is these trans-fats which are primarily responsible for the huge rise in heart-attacks in the West making this by far the biggest killer in the West. Yet it is obvious that this was a risk we took because the new Unnatural chemistry doesn’t work the same way as the established biological Natural chemistry that has dominated this planet for a billion years, and upon which Mankind himself depends, and so there was no assurance that the products of the Unnatural chemistry would suit the complete pathways established in the Natural chemistry.

We cannot escape our Natural foundations that easily. Maybe, as fantasised about in Manga and Sci-Fi Fiction (which I love), we may one day be able to download “ourselves” from inside Natural bodies into artificial machines and so finally be divorced from the Biological Mother that spawned us a billion years ago. In reality however this is completely the wrong way to understand “ourselves”. We are embedded in a Natural system so deeply that even what I write here is the product of it; the energy to press these keys and to think these thoughts; the meaning of what I say is fuelled and dictated by the structures of biological life. I am a biological entity; within a biological world; there is nothing non-biological or non-natural to escape from this realm and inhabit a non-natural realm of Mankind’s making. Mankind cannot think in terms of a struggle between the Natural and the products of His labour; a realm of freedom from Nature. As all the religions try to remind us we do not own the products of our labour: they belong to God.

Nature and God are inseparable. In ancient times before agriculture when the fruits of the world mysteriously grew on trees, and in the oceans and in the forests for us to harvest and hunt we thanked the gods for what they had mysteriously given us. As agriculture was developed and we progressively over the millennia saw our own actions turn up on our dinner plate we gradually forgot that there was anyone else involved but us. Now we think it all comes from Mankind and as if from thin air Man makes food. So the markets would want us think anyway so that we feel that we are spending our money on something worthwhile. We have forgotten that all this food still springs from the ground quite magically. We may have studied it in depth, we may even be able to copy and replicate it in laboratories to some extent, but copying the Masters doesn’t make an artist a Master. We are still bound within the system that we have always been nurtured in. Our Sisyphine struggles to produce food in the end are only struggles to replicate, or direct the work that this global ecology system already does. We are slaves to our biology. We have no more escaped it than any of our ancestors and the only option we have is to enslave our fellow man to provide a buffer between us and our slavery to Nature. In this we have progressed no further than the simplest animals. God and Nature punish those who do not listen. Science at least does listen, that is its job, to listen well to Nature’s structure and heartbeat. Good science, as commented upon in this blog, understands that it is servant to Nature for without Nature to study what use is Science? It can’t make its own truths for then they wouldn’t be truths! And in making Nature’s truths it is obedient servant. Bad science however thinks that Nature should obey Man and so inevitably tries to push it in directions that it doesn’t want to go. Since Man is born of Nature, in so doing Man ultimately pushes against Himself and to his bewilderment the harder he pushes the harder the problem becomes until he is defeated. (This is all explored in the SRH).

Yet Mankind needs to live and is an inextricable part of Life on this Planet. We need to eat, we need to move and breathe and excrete. It is wrong to say we are doing anything “wrong” as though there were stone tablets dictating how this Planet should be used. However there are stone tablets that have been written in the Past and which Science is rediscovering and rewriting which tell us what will happen if we do one thing or another. If we develop and unnatural way of living too fast for Nature to evolve and accept it then Nature will quite naturally eject us and we will go the way of all those other organisms that depended on unsustainable resources. We may believe that Mankind’s resourcefulness is so immense that we can ignore Mother Nature at last and leave the Maternal Home but we make a huge amount of work for ourselves and if we ever get it wrong we end up working against ourselves; for we are born of Mother Nature and we are made of the same Nature that She is made from. We may escape from her but we can’t escape from ourselves. So she will haunt us forever in whatever corner of the Universe, or Multiverse, that we chose to hole up in, and one way or the other we have no choice but to understand what we are, what we need and what Nature is. Nature is our Home and so there is no place like Nature. Natural is always better.