Hello, and welcome again to Every Dawn, where I try to give you a thought every morning that will accompany you, perhaps, or give you some inspiration for your day. I've been a little negative in the past two days when we talked about freedom and technology, so perhaps today we should have something a little more uplifting.
I was recently watching YouTube videos about rewilding. I don't know if you have heard of this; if you're interested in ecological topics, perhaps you have. There are many experiments now with rewilding, which means that we try to restore wild nature to places where it was, where it had been in the past, removed when cities took over the countryside, and when farmers tried to make more industrialized agriculture, and when golf courses were erected over large pieces of land. All the wildlife in there was eliminated, especially through agriculture, of course, because agriculture—the whole point of it—is to plant what the farmer wants and not what is growing there wild. So, these places were not wild anymore; they were cultivated.
But slowly, people realized that this is not actually the best thing. For example, if you want to cultivate something in intensive agriculture, you need a lot of input of fertilizers, and the prices go down. So, many of these traditional farms that were everywhere in England, particularly because this is what I was reading about, became unsustainable. People were thinking, what can we do in order to save our farms? With the supermarkets having so much power about the purchasing prices, it becomes a race to the bottom. Farmers have to produce cheaper and cheaper by using more and more machinery and chemistry to force the plants to grow faster. We know that this also has a very bad effect on animals which are kept in these industrialized farms and are suffering, and so on.
So, there is this rewilding movement, and this made me think a little more generally about wilderness and wild things because our perception of nature has changed very much in the past 150 to 200 years. If you look at the early modern period before the industrial revolution, around the 1700s, it was always the case that there was a lot more nature and a lot more dangerous nature than there was human habitation. You would have a village, and around the village, there would be a big dark forest, which created all these stories and fairy tales of dangerous creatures and adventures, which all connected to this idea that civilization is a small thing that needs to be protected from the dark forces of the wild.
But this has fundamentally changed in our time. We have expanded civilization so much that now wilderness exists only in small pockets between our human habitations, and we have tamed almost everything wild. It has either gone extinct, like many of the big animals, big mammals, wolves in Europe for example, or we have put it in zoos where we can go and watch the animals behind bars, where they are not dangerous to us. It seems that this is something that gave us comfort for some time. It gave us the comfort that now we are safe, and these wild things are not dangerous anymore. We don't need to be afraid of the dark forest because the dark forest has now become a park.
But on the other hand, something bad happens when we eliminate this wilderness, when we tame everything, and when we make everything into a zoo and a park and a harmless part of our human existence. What happens is that we lose respect. We lose the respect that we should have for nature, and we need this respect in order to have the right kind of relationship with the natural world.
We still are very small, and we still are powerless, as you can see if you look at space, for example, where you have all these huge distances, you have all these comets and meteors and dangers that could hit the earth, and we could actually do nothing. We're just lucky that these things don't come around too often, and all these other planets, even in our solar system, that are not hospitable to life, and if you go there, they will instantly kill you. Everywhere else in space we know of, will instantly kill you.
And if you see it like this, we have a very small bubble, and we are still surrounded by this big dark forest, only now we have managed to make it so that we don't immediately see the forest because it's beyond the atmosphere, it's beyond the beautiful blue sky, and it is hidden there. But it is still there, and it is good to be aware of our smallness because when we think that we can manage nature, that we can control nature, we are actually mistaken. Nature will always be more powerful than we are because when we think that we can control nature and that we can tame nature, we make a mistake. Because this leads us to think that perhaps we're independent of nature, that we don't need to listen to it, that we can do what we want with it. But this does not work because we are still dependent on nature. All our technological civilization can exist only because there are trees that produce the oxygen that we breathe. We can only be here because there is the sunlight that lets plants grow, and these, in turn, produce the food that we need. We are only here because bacteria decompose our garbage and recycle it, and insects fertilize our plants and make the fruits that we eat. No technology that we have can exist independently of sunlight, plants, insects, bacteria—all this web of life of which we are a part.
But being in our technological bubble, in our tamed society, hides this fact from us. We don't see it; we don't realize that we are part of this machinery and that we need it in order to survive, this machinery of nature. And then we become careless. We say, "You know, who cares if we kill a few insects with our pesticides? Who cares if we cut a few forests?" Well, who care should be us because we can, in the end, not survive without these insects and without these forests. We need them; we depend on them for our survival, but we don't see this anymore. It's not in our everyday consciousness because we think that our technological world can exist on its own, which it cannot.
So, perhaps when you go out today, just have a look around while you go about your day and try to see how much your life is dependent, actually, on nature functioning and doing its thing. Or how your food comes ultimately from natural sources, how the air you breathe comes from nature, how the CO2 problem we have, the weather, the climate problems we have, they come from disrespecting nature. And try to see where you can perhaps be a little gentler with nature, perceive it a little more, enjoy it a little more, and perhaps even protect it a little more because ultimately, none of us could live without it.
Thank you, and see you tomorrow.
