Forgetting Who We Are

Ecological alienation, or what is better known as a habituated distance from and possible discomfort with the natural world, is an academic term broadly applied to a huge spectrum of manners of human disassociation from our planet. Everything from a lack of awareness to disregard, or even hate for the wild Earth mother from whom we found our lives and take our daily nourishment is included in this term, ‘ecological alienation.’ However, I am beginning to see this as not so much a disconnection from such natural manifestations as soil, wildlife and wind, as from our very self.

It is said that therapists utilize practices with clients that allow them to rediscover their awareness of their relationship with the natural world, and that such work allows for insight into the possibility of renewal and the naturalness of the client’s own life cycle. By observing the transit of the moon through its cycles and by a close familiarity with soil under the fingernails – by planting, nurturing, and harvesting – clients develop a more realistic understanding of human life. Therapeutically, this can lead to an easier acceptance of the difficult truths that otherwise freeze one into a ‘stuck client:’ overwhelmed in bitter resistance, anger, depression or immobilization.

This is good. However, my own sense is that when re-approaching what had been a distanced relationship from the biosphere, people are led to the threshold of rediscovering their own lives, as nature. This is a crucial difference. To be related to the Earth, or to be a part of the Earth, is a profound distinction.

I am learning to see what looks like a withdrawal from the planet, as a withdrawal from the self. Naturally, one might anticipate this simultaneous withdrawal. It makes a kind of intuitive sense. However, that they might be one and the same leads to some interesting speculation.

For instance, humans are extraordinary adaptive, known throughout the planet for their ability to strategize survival in the most varied and difficult environments. Thus, it is that an inner-city family can take a flat beneath the ground-shaking overhead railroad and eventually, hardly notice the pounding and conversation-stopping noise. Kids get used to sociopathic surroundings, learn ‘street skills,’ and posture or slip their way into adolescence and adulthood. Businesspersons get used to not seeing the sky amidst towering concrete monoliths and everyone loses the feel of soil between their toes.

This adaptability, however beneficial it may be, contains a ‘dark’ side. We can become used to that which is unhealthy. It becomes normal to be ill.

Now I realize that not everyone will immediately agree with me that a separation from our wildness, our selfhood as the Earth, constitutes an illness. Yet, that is what I am saying.

Moreover, there is a subtle but powerful ability of the brain to generate all sorts of biochemistry that floods into our perception as emotion, and importantly, pleasure. A rush of excitement, for instance, produces a thrill, like a drug. Extraordinary environmental stimulation, if repeated, may become so normalized that without it, we feel discontent. We may even crave it. When the movie, the vicarious excitement of danger, death and revenge does not seem fast enough, we look for another film. Nurses in the emergency room are notorious for thriving at the mortal pace of saving lives, and feel useless and empty when the hospital corridors are unaccountably empty.

Addiction to stimulation is the other half of what I am beginning to understand as the vulnerability hidden in human adaptability. Perhaps they are the same, I don’t know. However, what I do know, is that in a rather short period of time, though humans have been walking the planet for a long time, the world in which humans live has changed dramatically.

For eons, humans lived close to nature. Things were pretty similar for generations upon generations. We hunted, we gathered, we lived in bands and relied on our small communities to thrive in the relative silence of nature. We awoke to the sound of birds, and listened closely to the wind and leaves to tell us what we should be doing. Then, like a sudden spike in an otherwise nearly horizontal line across a graph, you find a sudden surge in human life change, the mark of civilization. With our very genes wrapped around a world of nature, our daily lives became surrounded by buildings and skyscrapers, our communities dispersed and children were gathered into schools, and the circle around the fire melted away into small, nuclear families who lived a distance from one another.

Ecological alienation is not so much a distance from nature, as it is a distance from ourselves as nature. The natural human life, so well engrained in the adaptive human that we became, has become distant from us.

We have forgotten who we are, and have created a world in which it is hard, and for some probably impossible, to find ourselves again.