Where Did the Notion of Natural Go

How can we describe nature?

In a scientific point of view, it's everything that is not man made; another point of view sustains nature is everything because all that humanity made, all the materials are from nature. This doesn’t mean most of what man created is natural, quite the opposite, it is unnatural or the more pleasant term, artificial. Because it is artificial, it has a negative effect on everything around it and on the natural order of things.

By creating cities, humanity is transforming – “mutating” – the nature around it in a less beneficial way, instead of exploring and finding ways to blend harmoniously with our Mother Earth. I’m not saying that we should not build houses and live in caves instead, but we build a house of concrete and rebar (construction steel), which are toxic for both us and the environment around us, while we could be building a house out of brick (earth), wood and stone that can easily last more than a lifetime.

We use farmland in a destructive way by placing the same type of plants on a large scale or even worse, by repeating the same culture year after year, killing the land by “sucking” out the same nutrients repeatedly. We then, of course, have to come up with fertilizers, more chemical than natural, and by that we sink deeper in intoxicating the land and the plants that we grow and eat; instead of that we could use a balanced way like permaculture, where we blend different types of plants for a more complex and healthier system, incorporating the land, the plants and us.

While we're on the topic of food, let’s take a look at the other things we eat. Flesh, or a more common word, meat; in these days it is fact, scientifically proven, that the digestion of proteins from meat is not well received by the human body; meat would be an unfortunate choice even if eaten in its raw state, not to mention that even less nutrients remain when cooked. All types of food, not just meat, loses some, if not most of the nutrients when boiling, frying or any other form of cooking takes place at temperatures above 40 degrees.

Let’s ignore for a moment the fact that eating meat is not good for humans, what do we do to make things even worse? We use chemicals! When feeding the poor animals to make them grow in an unnatural way, faster, fatter, “better”. And those chemicals, where do they go? In our bodies when we eat that meat.

Another negative fact about eating flesh is that the animal is killed in a cruel way… also we don’t kill the animals because we need to eat, as no human will die of starvation because he won’t eat meat, that’s for sure, we kill the animals because we want to… well that’s cruel at least. What’s the natural way? Well it’s simple: a vegan lifestyle, that if done properly, can provide all the nutrients that our body needs in a balanced, healthy way. The fact that “veggies” offer all the proteins, carbohydrates and fats to sustain us, along with vitamins and minerals, it's a story for another time.