ON BEING NATU R A L
The nature–human connection and health Alex Laird Medical herbalist
Humans are nature. We inhabit a rhythmic web of life. We are one of at least 10 million, possibly even a trillion species on Earth. From her megafauna to her vast microbial diversity, modern humans have schemed to re-engineer and exploit the natural world for short-term gain. Yet there is no functional separation between humankind and the rest of life. Nature designed and assembled us, so good health requires us to remember this intimacy, pay attention to how our body and mind naturally function, and co-operate with this evolved wisdom.
© Journal of holistic healthcare ● Volume 16 Issue 1 Spring 2019
Wondering at the perfection of an autumn morning as a child on the shores of Loch Lomond, I had an epiphany – nature was saying something about how to live. This eventually led to my move from television to aromatherapy, working with HIV drug users and hospital staff, then to herbal medicine and founding the charity Living Medicine. Nature, through its extraordinary design within and outside us, is for me the ultimate teacher. In my practice, I love learning about and teaching about how life and our bodies thrive through foods, plants, people and the rest of nature. Exchange between all cultures is central to Living Medicine’s self-care courses for patients and public. It’s the impetus behind our vision to create Britain’s first global medicinal garden as a centre of excellence, co-created with the public and linked to medicinal gardens worldwide.
Nature is not a place to visit. It is home. Gary Snyder (1990)
Humankind is a young and not-yet wise species who left home and lost its way. Our love story with nature is going through a very rough patch. As the industrial society wreaks destruction on itself and other species through over-consumption, waste and global warming, we may wonder what went wrong and how we might fix it. Our hubris may be taking us down, yet the rest of nature will probably prevail long after we were gone. Yet surely, if nature can survive, we can learn to do so too. As health practitioners, how can we share our knowledge of how life functions to help us recover a healthy relationship with nature?
We are nature Our shared natural history started some four billion years ago, with the formation of a persistent, tiny singlecelled organism. It’s thought that all life evolved from this last universal common ancestor, or LUCA. Billions of years ago, bacteria and viruses shared genetic information which transferred to animals and eventually became part of our human genome (Crisp et al, 2015). Every individual life-form that
has developed since shares many of the same genes necessary for basic cellular function, such as for replicating DNA, controlling the cell cycle and helping cells divide, and other genes that control the basic metabolism of all plants and animals. It is not surprising to learn that consequently humans share some 75% of their genes with the pumpkin. So nature embraces all life within our vastly biodiverse system. This common urge for life is reflected in the form and function of all organisms, which have themselves been shaped through evolution by the co-creative and co-operative relationships between organisms and their everchanging environment. This symbiosis, as first proposed by biologist Lynn Margulis (1967), is recognised as driving evolution onward.
Our human-nature connection; biophilia These shared genetic codes may explain in part why our connection to nature is in a sense instinctual and why it feels so fundamental. We may feel awe, wonder and love for the exterior natural world, as Stephen Harrod Buhner suggests, ‘because the experience of nature and other life
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