More Regarding Disconnection (on the separation between humans and nature)

Another case of bad logic.

Heard on PBS? series “Race to Save the Planet”

(A) “The [Bushman] people, although they use the natural world, live in close harmony with it.” Nonsequitur. Why “although”? It seems (it is) more logical to say: (B) “The ___ people, because they use the natural world, live in close harmony with it.”

Or better: (C) “The ___ people, since they depend directly on the material world for their existence, therefore necessarily live in close harmony with it.”

Anyway, the point is the same, i.e., that using the natural world (or anything else) implies a relationship with it. harmonious or not. And a long-continued/sustained use implies that the use is harmonious.

Statement A implies just the opposite, i.e., that such a long and ___ use implies a disharmonious relationship, or even no relationship. Why such totally screwy logic? Simple. This screwy logic is informed by our own sick, unsustainable and disharmonious relationship with the natural world, in which “use” is equated with “exploitation.”

We have got to get over our idea that to use nature means to abuse it. Why else does “nature” exist except for the use of its components? We humans are one among millions of (kinds of) cells in the body of nature. How could a cell function (and fulfill its role in the maintenance of the body) if it didn’t use what materials and services the other parts of the body provided for it?

Of course we human-cells do use and totally depend on all those things the natural world provides us with, only we have taken to hypocritically pretending that we don’t We have taken to regarding ourselves as separate. And not only separate but better—we’ve set ourselves up in competition with nature rather than as one member of the community. We thereby fail in our responsibility of gratitude/thanksgiving to Nature. We hire specialists to do all the “dirty work” of extraction for us, so we can pretend that our food and clothes and soap and gasoline come from other people rather than nature, and we give our gratitude (in the form of money) to those specialists rather than giving thanks to nature.

Extending this analogy, you soon come to the conclusion that we human-cells have begun to behave like a cancer rather than a contributing member in good standing of the world-body.

We steal our food rather than accept it with gratitude. We use our waste to poison rather than to fertilize. We use our growth to compete with the body rather than to fill our functions as part of the body-community.