Humans, for the most part, don’t like nature. Nature is seen as slimy, grimy, and infested with predators, parasites and blood thirsty bugs. Since we are organic, slimy, sometimes grimy and as vicious as anything to be found in the wild, why is it we hate and want to escape and oftentimes destroy our natural environment?

It is natural for humans to be adapted to living unaided in the natural world. Our early ancestors such as Homo erectus had no barriers between cellular body and the remainder of the ecosystem, only a relatively thin integument to keep out microscopic invaders and hold in the moisture. What provided the impulse to escape the untoward forces found in the environment, like direct sunlight, rain and predators? Perhaps these were just escape behaviors instilled in the nervous system over many millions of years of evolution, survival of the fittest.Those unable to escape damaging forces died-off, leaving those that slept highest n the trees or deepest in the cave, to survive. The first barriers to these negative forces could be found preformed in the natural environment such as the shade of a tree.

One of the next steps was technological, the adoption of clothing which is essentially a “tool”. Man began assembling, with information still limited to his brain (not recorded) a number of barriers to the outside. Clothing could help maintain temperature in the cold. The use of fire could essentially provide a barrier against parasites, viruses and bacteria along with its digestive, meat-tenderizing capabilities. I can imagine that the original replicating RNA in the cellular realm did the same, creating and accumulating barriers against the negative forces impinging upon it until a complex enclosure was fully formed. In sum total, these retained adaptations would have a cost in implementation but would save energy overall. Cooking food could eliminate the need for an internal feverish fire brought about by multiple rounds of gastroenteritis and could save much energy by eliminating the parasite load.

Brazilian Headhunters – Amazon

These natives still live close to nature but have primitive technologies including clothing and primitive weapons. This type of natural malevolent head-hunting behavior pushes humans even further into the systematic use of cells, immune system specializations (law and order/prisons/locks on the door) because man is one of the things man fears most. How many people, comfortable in their technologically provisioned cells would like to be thrown back into the jungle with this group? Perhaps this is why gun sales have skyrocketed recently.

As the accumulation of tools and information broadened the scope of exploitable energy and resources, the systematic cellularity gradually emerged in which complex structures separating Homo sapiens from the natural environment could evolve. Man increasingly created barriers to the natural world including the fear instilling darkness with artificial light, foul water with chlorine treatment and other disinfectants, the cold with air conditioning and so on. The human brain/mind had already evolved to erect its own barriers to reality.

Sitting Bull Family

American Indian family of Sitting Bull in front of a primitive technological cellular structure (teepee). Pushed aside as inferiors, standing in the way of progress which could be fed by rapacious cutting of forests, agriculture, and eventually use of fossil fuels, many people living closer to nature were in the way of the consumption and development process.

Those humans living closer to nature have mostly been eliminated or enclosed in the cellular civilizations. They were probably looked-upon as grubby, grimy organic beings, much inferior to the civilized beings living within advanced systems. Even today the homeless are looked down upon, mostly because they don’t hold jobs within the cells, live within the cells and instead live closer to what remains of the natural environment. They don’t deserve the good things a cell can provide because they don’t work. Little do most self-righteous humans realize that they are working for and within a malignant cancer.

Homeless man.

Even though people are said to be empathetic, this is not always a good thing. Those living close to nature may be rejected because it makes those living in cells uncomfortable as they imagine themselves so close to nature. Empathy may also lead to helping the homeless find a cell (home) to live in and an RNA job with which to pay for such improvements.

Sometimes technological people want to get back to nature on a very temporary basis, for old times sake and it usually happens on a weekend and looks like this. Close to nature, but not really. Cool high-tech barriers continue to create a level of separation.

Since fossil fuels have been utilized the growth in cellularity has been exponential and cancerous with most humans wanting to get into a cell served by the civilizational cancer which consumes practically everything and serves it to the human inhabitants as some sort of comfort within their cells.

Today we have many humans separated from nature within technological cells and served by the system as they conduct their work as human RNA. All of those barriers are incredibly expensive in energy terms, both to build and to maintain with services. It will eventually fail or spontaneously combust as temperatures climb. In Kuwait this week the temperature reached an Eastern Hemisphere record of 129.4F. Most humans without their barriers/cells will likely perish in the damaged natural world. For those that survive there may be a devolution back to where it all began. The fossil fuel sun does not rise but once.

If a devolution were possible we would probably go back to resembling something like this, but this form may already be moving along the technological path even though much of the cerebral cortex and especially the prefrontal cortex are not well developed. Perhaps a tree-living species that has not yet found the usefulness of throwing stones. But evolution is full of dead-ends and at the present moment civilization is headed towards the greatest cul-de-sac in the history of life.