When do we stop considering ourselves part of nature?

When do we stop considering ourselves part of nature?

Our relationship with natural resources is what has always marked the pace at which we evolve as a species. We became sedentary when we learned to harvest, when we learned to manipulate fire, which is energy.

Revolutions, for example, such as the industrial one that occurred when we learned to use coal to use steam engines, generated an entire industry and a brutal social transformation. Now we are experiencing the social transformation that many call a technological revolution, because we learned to use oil as we learned to use oil, there came a point where we stopped conceiving ourselves as beings that belong to nature and we began to conceive ourselves as something separate.

This for me happens when the resources we use in our daily lives come to us through mechanical intermediaries. We don't have to go to the river for water, but open the faucet and we no longer have to harvest fire to keep ourselves warm at night. When we don't know how difficult it is to obtain natural resources, we use them on a much larger scale than we could use them if it were up to us to get them every day. We forget that they are natural, not only do we use more water than we would if we had to go for it, but we forget that this water comes from rivers and that we share it with other living beings, we share it with plants, we share it with fish, we share it with turtles.

We have been taught that everything is reproducible, everything is replaceable, everything is easy to obtain, everything is cheap and we don't really pay in the cost of the products we buy on a daily basis, the cost of repairing the environment we harm by deciding to use those products. These are costs that we are leaving to the earth and we expect the earth to absorb them in a certain way but for which we are not responsible. It's like living in a building and not paying for maintenance, clearly, the building is going to deteriorate and deteriorate rapidly.

Let society remember that it lives on a planet that is made of systems that work together and break down if something goes wrong. We live on a planet that has a delicate balance that we are messing with. I would like us to remember that and to have that knowledge in the background of every decision we make.

This is an excerpt from “A Future” a documentary by Toroto that you can watch here.