Natural Environments and Human Health. Alan W Ewert
offered many positive health and developmental benefits while also presenting hardship and challenge. Evidence of this relationship is depicted in 40,000-year-old cave paintings in areas such as Chauvet in southern France and Ulm, Germany, where horses are drawn with great perspective and accuracy. Archeologists interpret the drawings to represent a close connection to these animals in spiritual and physical ways. Prior to discovery of the cave paintings this sort of relationship with animals was believed to have developed much later in human evolution. Some societies continue to live in close contact with nature, even to the extent that they mimic the behavior of animals and plants—a practice that science now knows as biomimicry. McGregor (2010) talks about the Evenk or Reindeer people from the Siberian taiga in northern Russia who mirror reindeer behavior, historically following the migrations and relying on them for most of their needs including their shamanic spiritual and healing tradition. They believe that their soul connection to the reindeer allows them to ‘see the future, understand the unknowable, heal individuals, and advise the entire community’ (p. 13). They think of this as Bayanay or an all-knowing, all-feeling spirit, or a shared consciousness (Vitebsky, 2005; Klokov, 2007) that gives them a sense of belonging to a world larger than themselves. Originally coastal dwellers, the Evenk combine pastoralism (reindeer and horses) with fishing, hunting, and gathering; they were able to migrate into the more mountainous taiga region only because of their mutualistic relationship with the reindeer as pack animals. Today the destruction of the pasture land severely limits the reindeer herding, though local officials and Evenk are trying to revitalize their pastoral lifestyle. This disruption in connection to their natural environment has negative physical, mental, and spiritual health consequences for the Evenk people.
Human behaviors influence nature, further demonstrating our connection. A mutualistic relationship between the Evenk people and reindeer is evidenced in the behavior of herds used by the people for milk and packing burdens (though not for meat). These herds now naturally stay close by due to protection people offer from predators and by smudging biting insects.
Of course, not all human influence on animal behavior is positive or mutualistic. In the past century as human technology developed and wildlife habitat decreased, hunting pressure increased, resulting in changed animal behavior. Bears under hunting pressure now avoid hunters by shifting activity from day to night (Miller, 2012). This behavior change lessens an individual bear’s chance of being killed; however, the bear population as a whole is more vulnerable to starvation. Hunting season begins in late August and ends in late October, coinciding with the bears’ need to eat copious amount of berries and accumulate fat storage for winter. Daytime eating is more efficient for bears and the cost of not having enough fat stored for hibernation is low birth rates and death (Ordiz et al., 2012). Hunters’ use of deer feeding stations has also shifted deer activity from day to night to avoid hunting pressure.
Hunting is a connection with nature that humans have had since ancestral times. Many cultures exhibit emotional and spiritual ties with the animals they hunt. The Zunis people do not destroy the bones of animals they kill as an act of honoring the animal (Earhart, 2001). Swan (1992) asserts that hunting is a close relationship with the hunted animal. He cites examples of American Indian, Inuit, and West African conceptions of the willingness of animals to be killed and the misconception that hunting exhibits dominance over animals. In this systems way of thinking, an animal consents to be taken and a power greater than both animals and humans allows each to survive.
The previous examples illustrate evolutionary and social connections with the natural world; these interwoven relationships can be explained by systems theory, defined in Chapter 1. The following sections offer additional examples that demonstrate specific areas of connection.
Evolutionary connections
The evolution of the human species was made possible by the evolution of plants, especially trees, which process sunlight into energy through photosynthesis and release oxygen. Before the abundance of oxygen released by photosynthetic plants the Earth’s atmosphere was anaerobic and humans would not have evolved in the anaerobic environment. The oxygen-rich atmosphere formed the ozone layer, thus blocking ultraviolet solar radiation, and enabling more complex, oxygen-dependent forms of life, including humans, to evolve. The effect of this co-evolution, an absolute necessity for survival, continues today in terms of humans needing to breathe oxygen that plants make.
The results of co-evolution can be seen in many relationships in nature and this connection ties human health to the health of the natural environment. Humans eat plants which convert inorganic compounds to organic compounds (Pollan, 2002). Plants provide people with essential nutrients and human activity disperses plant seeds. Human guts also host intestinal microbes. For the past 5 years the National Institutes of Healthsponsored Microbiome Project has studied the bacteria, fungi, one-celled archaea, and viruses that live within the human digestive system. The conclusions were that humans can be considered a superorganism because of the extent and complexity of intestinal microbial life found. Microbes outnumber human cells at least ten to one and perform essential digestive and immune system functions. This relationship between humans and digestive tract microbiota mirrors examples of mutualistic evolution found at the global ecological system levels. These findings have implications for the healthcare and nutrition fields, and highlight the importance of human consumption of certain plants to promote growth of intestinal organisms that help human digestion and promote health.
Similarly, scientists have discovered the essential role of microbiota in plant health, a commensal relationship developed over 400 million years. Microbiota digest nutrients and protect plants from pathogens in a symbiotic relationship with fungi that creates mycorrhizae at plant roots. Discovery of the disruption and misunderstanding of the ecological role microbiota play in human gut and soil systems has caused some people to speculate a relationship between the loss of the organisms and the increase in immune system diseases in humans. Arden Andersen (2004), soil scientist and physician, claims that human health, gut microbiota, and soil health are directly correlated and have evolved concurrently. This evolutionary connection ties human health to the health of the natural environment.
Another connection humans share with nature is similarities in aspects of our response evolution. As one example, Sarah Earp, undergraduate music and neuroscience major, and Donna Maney, a neuroscientist at Emory University, report similar neural responses and pathways activated for birds and humans when listening to music, possibly demonstrating similar evolution of emotional responses to music and bird songs (Earp and Maney, 2012). They found that both music and bird song elicit responses in interconnected regions of human and bird brains thought to regulate emotion. The response of the mesolimbic reward system indicates the same neuroaffective mechanisms (meaning the way our emotions are tapped) in the bird and human listeners; namely, that some music or song results in dopamine release for birds and humans, and certain other music or song results in the activation of the amygdala or fear. This discovery may demonstrate that music shares many similar social functions in humans and in birds such as facilitating social contact, reducing conflict, helping to maintain personal attachments, and communicating emotional states (Koelsch, 2010). This study gives credence to the argument that humans, as well as other species, interact emotionally with their environment, including the natural environment.
Plants, like humans, have been shown to respond to music and emotions. Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird discuss this phenomenon in The Secret Life of Plants (Tompkins and Bird, 1974) and Cleve Backster, past Interrogation Specialist for the Central Intelligence Agency, has presented his work with polygraph instruments and plants demonstrating emotions or reactions at the Institute of Noetic Sciences and the Institute for Transpersonal Psychology in Palo Alto, California. Backster (2003) reported that plants communicate with humans on an energetic or intuitive plane, demonstrating connection. He measured stress increases in plants in relationship to the stress of their human caretakers thousands of miles away. Backster found the connection to humans’ emotions still strong even if the plants were in lead containers, e.g. as human stress increased plant stress also increased.
Many animals seem to be aware of environmental changes before humans. Aware humans piggyback on the animals’ reactions by using their abilities in sensing and noticing