What is the importance of nature?
Nature plays an
important role in human beings life, it’s not so much that humanity has
destroyed a large part of the natural world and withdrawn from the remainder.
We have also expelled it needlessly from our daily lives. Today, the number of
people living in urban areas has passed the number living in rural areas.
Simultaneously, the home range of each person on average, the area traversed on
a regular basis, is declining steadily. In the cities we do not grow our own
food or hunt for it. Mostly, we pick it up at a market and have little idea of
its origin. Our eyes are fastened upon the digitized images of screens. Even
the images of nature we see are those of remote places, taken by other people.
No matter, we say the city sustains us, and we are
happy. But so are cattle in a feedlot. They are provided with the essentials of
maintenance but can never live the lives true to their species and the epic
million year evolution that put them on Earth. They cannot visit the habitat in
which they were born. They cannot roam freely, explore, learn the dangers and
discover the delights that shaped their bodies and brains. And to a lesser
degree, the same is true of humans in most of the cities around the world.
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