Nature, a friend ?

I have noticed that since the Industrial Age and its flourishing capitalist economy, our relations as human beings with the rest of our biological environment have changed. We now consider nature as a disturbing factor for agriculture, industry and the economy in general. As a matter of fact, it is true that nature doesn’t function as an independent entity but only as species that have survived so far because of their genetical characteristics. One could therefore assert that nature isn’t « our friend » but species working for their own survival. This would be a terrible mistake. The relationship between those species is rather complex, and humans tend to simplify them and often forget how they could use them to bring something new to the biological balance of the ecosystem instead of weakening it for bigger profits that are fundamentally shorter ones. To illustrate this ideas I’ll take a simple example :
- in agriculture there was a general belief that you obtain higher yields by putting chemicals in your fields. So today the farmers tend to poison the mice that live in their crops. It has been a complete disaster. The poison the lobby gave them does not kill mice immediately so birds of pray, particularly owls, buzzards and kites eat the poisoned animals and die. Moreover the fungi helping the crops grow die because of poison. As a result they have destroyed a complete generation of natural mice eaters that are currently helping them regulate mice, and have poisoned the ground for at least 2 years for the fungi to recover and helps their crops again. The only profits have been for the lobbies, a shame...

Beside this abysmal stupidity, the world is getting crowded with good-intentioned ecologists buying organic food in enormous industrial supermarkets and crying about pandas dying in the opposite corner of the world, but who have never considered for a minute they could move using bikes or their own feet, or care a little bit more about the remaining biodiversity they is destroyed everyday because of their ignorance. I feel other people like me starting to get tired of this pathetic hypocrisy... The more we think about it, the more we realise ecology is a philosophical matter. So let’s forget about our old habits and change them in order to reach effectiveness. And Harmony. By thinking.

CPL