I'm thinking about the term Mother Earth. Not in the flaky, Gaia, New Age woo-woo metaphoric sense. In the sense that the term is literally true.
We have literally emerged out of the Earth. We are made from the very chemical compounds that formed with the Earth's creation. We have been shaped and developed along with the evolutionary timeline of the planet and in response to it. Life emerged from its material, its energies, its climate, its forces. What we call “life” is not something placed on top of the Earth. It is something the Earth does.
Nerve by nerve, instinct by instinct, perception by perception, we are calibrated to the Earth's rhythms: light and dark, season and scarcity, sound and silence. Even things that seem esotheric, our sense of beauty for example, is not arbitrary. It's recognition of the conditions that made us possible.
We don't live in nature, we are nature. It's why when you go for a walk in the forest something inside you settles. The noise in your head drops a notch. That response isn’t spiritual, it’s biological. What some researchers call the Biophilia Hypothesis: we feel at home in the conditions that made us.
Think of the opposite, how it feels to live in the city. Towers of glass and steel, lengths of asphalt and endless right angles. Artificial light overriding circadian rhythm. Environments designed not for human coherence, but for efficiency, extraction, and control. It produces anxiety, alienation, and numbness—as though it were a malfunction of the individual rather than a predictable response to an unnatural environment.
We like to imagine that human ingenuity has freed us from dependence on the Earth. That we can engineer substitutes, optimize inputs, transcend limits. But everything we eat is still a variation on a single theme: plants, animals, fungi. All of it grown, fed, or assembled from the same planetary chemistry. We do not create nourishment. We reorganize it.
The illusion of independence is made possible by layers of abstraction. And the more layers there are, the more we forget where things actually come from, and the more distant we become from who we are.
The further we push into environments that ignore this fact, the more we should expect not just ecological breakdown, but psychological and social fragmentation as well.
Every harm we do to the environment, the more we bury our heads under digital covers, the more we lose a sense of ourselves.
This summer, I'm going for more walks in the woods.
