Natural Environments and Human Health. Alan W Ewert
what happened, and why they are concerned about lying when stories are exactly the same. When children are about 2 years old and again in their teens there is prolific brain activity and neuronal wiring. This is when life experiences turn into belief systems from which we operate. Therefore, for some humans the fear of scarcity led to a perceived need to dominate, while for other humans this concern led them to cooperate and share.
Those who took the opportunity to dominate also believed that nature’s primary purpose was to be conquered and cultivated. Society became hierarchical with kings, merchants, farmers and slaves. People could hoard food and use it as power or a weapon and they had to protect the land and material property they had, hence the movement towards warfare. This ability to accumulate and use material wealth as power gave rise to the belief that materialism is good, and launched a preoccupation with symbols of wealth rather than actual measures of health. Neuroscience tells us that humans are herd animals and as such often do what leaders say. Herd behavior has been identified by philosophers, economists, psychologists, sociologists, and marketers. Freud called it crowd psychology and Jung called it the collective unconsciousness; Nietzsche called it a herd instinct while Kierkegaard called it the crowd or herd morality. The book Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War popularized the term herd behavior (Trotter, 1914). Markets depend on the theory that enough members of a group want to mimic group members of a higher status, which is why companies hire these people to be pictured using products they are selling.
There is debate about the first archeological evidence of warfare; some references say a battle of some type occurred about 14,000 years ago. Evidence of a battle at Mesopotamia was dated to about 5000 years ago, the same time period that evidence of large-scale military engagements has been found in Syria. Bows, maces, and slings were the common weapons found through the Neolithic and Bronze Ages. Warfare and the agricultural stage appear related because it was near or during the agricultural stage that warfare seemed to begin. Warfare has the same foundation of power and control that grew in many agrarian communities.
Some cultures never used agriculture and remained hunter–gatherers such as the Bushmen of the Kalahari and the Batek people living in forests of Peninsular Malaysia. They also remained peaceful and cooperative people who travel in small bands tied spiritually and materially to their land. Indigenous Australians have occupied regions of northwest Australia for at least 30,000 years. A predominantly peaceful group relying on dreams to guide their day-to-day survival, they did not cultivate crops or maintain permanent settlements. A number of other Australian indigenous people maintain a WorldView that retains a close relationship with nature in practice as well as considering their dreams part of their reality. Closely connected to nature, they embrace natural phenomena and life as part of a vast and intricate system. Having dream time and a harmonious existence with nature is the foundation of their WorldView. They have maintained this WorldView even though the English colonizers introduced a WorldView inclusive of warfare, material accumulation, and dominance over nature and other humans. While some people label this indigenous WorldView as primitive or label Australian indigenous people as primitive—as an example, they did not know about metal until it was introduced to them in the late 1700s—their spiritual and physical relationship with nature maintained the biological diversity in their environment.
The Nharo Bushmen are another example of people who maintained a sustainable relationship with their environment until recent invasion by Europeans. Even today they want to keep their culture and continue to raise their children on the land as part of the land (Apelian, 2013). As Apelian said, they ‘hold true connection—to self, each other, and the land around them’ (p. 13). Medina’s (2008) conclusion that human brains are wired to learn experientially continues to be practiced in Bushman communities to the extent allowed by law.
The way of life in these cultures, guided by their WorldView of close connection with and respect for nature, is sustainable within our current knowledge of natural processes. Embedded in their cultures and language are their traditional wisdom and practices that honor the reciprocity between people and their natural surroundings.
Early modernity stage
The fourth stage began around the 14th century as humans transitioned from an agricultural, feudal, and barter economy toward an industrialized society. It is characterized by the split between science and the church, and movement toward capitalism, rationalization, and secularization. The people in the agricultural stage who turned to power, control, and violence entered the early modernity stage and basically split into two factions: one aligned with the church, and one aligned with the new science. Both factions viewed nature as a commodity.
Nature continued to be something to be cultivated and subdued, with an accompanying WorldView emerging that nature’s primary purpose was as the source of raw materials for growth. The 15th century saw the invention of the printing press, marking a huge difference in the way information could be distributed. Western imperialism burgeoned in the 16th century. The dominant scientific view was positivist, believing that there was one truth. Concurrent with these changes in the dominant scientific view was the rise of Western religion, though the connection between science and spirituality was severed by the time of the Renaissance.
Unlike the older spirit religions and Eastern religions, the Judeo-Christian WorldView holds humankind as being separate from and above nature (White, 1967; Simkins, 1994; Marten, 2001). Part of this belief system stems from the Judeo-Christian ideal that humans are similar to God because they are made in God’s image. While nature was still considered sacred by Christian religions—some aspects of the church such as Bible verses, hymns, and other writings praise nature—the worship of nature was rejected and replaced with the ideal of humans as the stewards and keepers of nature. The biblical cosmology of the creation story that emphasizes the task of humans to subdue nature and the anthropomorphic notion that humans stand above nature helped church followers see nature as subordinate. Some Christians interpret Genesis 1:28 passage of ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have domination over the fishes of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth’ to mean use and pollute. Pagans, druids, and other nature-affiliated groups of people were persecuted. Some factions of the church maligned nature as evil, wild, and something needing taming.
Copernicus went to jail for presenting a new model of the solar system with the Sun instead of the Earth at the center, symbolizing some of the tensions of the period. In the 17th century Descartes helped cement a mechanized view of the world, including nature, by describing the universe as a giant ‘clockwork’ with individual mechanical parts. This Cartesian view of the world as mechanistic influenced science to change from observing and experientially learning about nature intact as a system, as humans had done previously, to a mechanistic and reductionist enterprise with the primary purpose to control nature. Newtonian physics reinforced this separation by visualizing the universe as the interaction of billiard ball-like objects. The belief prevailed that matter is dead and inert—and that humans can rearrange it. Reductionism, along with binary and dichotomous thinking, became part of the dominant WorldView leaving us with the Newtonian–Cartesian mechanical model of reality, which championed rational objectivity instead of sympathetic intuitive understanding of nature and spirit. Westernized humans now had a firm perception of dominance, believing that if we can understand it mechanistically then we can control it.
During the agriculture stage people started living in larger settlements and therefore no longer developed their identity in small, close-knit, nomadic or semi-nomadic, tribal living conditions in which healthful attachment bonds to the mother and the symbolic mother—the Earth—were formed. Shepard (1995) and Chalquist (2013) argued that without these nourishing bonds humans remain in childish and adolescent confusion that includes not taking responsibility for the health of the earth or for each other. This immaturity, coupled with the inventions of potentially destructive technology, led to power and dominance as a base for many cultures’ WorldViews by the beginning of the industrial stage.
Life became more sedentary and wars more frequent. Medina (2008) talked about the human brain thinking better when people are physically moving. New research at Princeton shows that physical exercise reorganizes the brain to reduce the stress response (Schoenfeld et al., 2013). Exercise reduces anxiety,