Caged out of our own nature

This morning I stumbled upon an article on BBC Earth titled "Back to Nature" by George Monbiot, and as I started skimming through it, I thought to myself “it is way too long and of no interest to me” but decided to keep reading…and there it was...that phrase:  "Now almost every aspect of our lives is lived within grids, either concrete or abstract"…now George had caught my attention. When you look at how our society has been built, it has been built based on structure and rigidness- which is completely against human nature.

And George continues to amaze me with phrases like “Thus we box ourselves out of the natural world”. We truly do. Think of how we have structured every part of our current way of living, even intervening nature's peace with farming and other domesticated structured practices. Nature inspires freedom, inspires creativity- why wouldn’t we want to inspire that to our current world? Don’t you think that most of our current problems are caused by the way we have organized ourselves and tried to compartmentalize each and every one of our surroundings?  The fictitious interconnectedness we have created among a compartmentalized network is as ironic as the way we interact with nature. We love animals, yet we drink their milk, eat their meat and etc. We love nature, yet we continue to build concrete and seek for that urban progress, that is just a fallacy. Capitalism has led us to forget of our beginnings in this world, which started among rural areas. Before we all looked into being self-efficient by producing our own goods, and working the hours necessary to sustain a comfortable living. Fast forward to now… we are not self-efficient- we depend on capitalism to feed us, train us and lead the way. Material items have gained more value than our own leisure and sanity.

Is this the world we want to continue to live in? Better yet, is this the world we want to leave for future generations? Should we start to look at things from a different perspective? As I  grow professionally, I continue to notice how our values have been misconstrued and mislead by that wonderful free-market which continues to imprison our happiness. It’s ok, if you disagree with my statements… but before you go back to your imprisoned self and to your daily routine please read and ponder on the following paragraph from the article Back to Nature:

“We become resistant to the experiences that nature has to offer; its spontaneity and serendipity, its unscripted delights, its capacity to shake us out of the frustrations and humiliations, which are an inevitable product of the controlled and ordered world we have sought to create. We bully the living world into the grids we impose on ourselves. Even the areas we claim to have set aside for nature are often subjected to rigid management plans, in which the type and the height of the vegetation is precisely ordained and, through grazing or cutting or burning, nature is kept in a state of arrested development to favour an arbitrary assemblage of life over other possible outcomes. Nothing is allowed to change, to enter or leave. We preserve these places as if they were jars of pickles”

Let's get creative and make some pickleback shots!

(All views are my own)

Francoise Mugnano