“I am nature”
– Jackson Pollock

We Were Never Separate from Nature

Spend time in nature and you begin to feel something that’s difficult to put into words. The boundaries between yourself and the world around you seem to soften. The air, the trees, the mountains and the water no longer feel like something “out there” they feel more familiar and you feel embedded within it.

Modern life often encourages us to think of ourselves as separate from nature. We live in buildings, travel in cars and spend much of our time looking at screens. We think we are king of the world and above all that nature stuff. Yet beneath all of that, the reality is impossible to escape.

We are not separate from the Earth. We never have been. We simply cannot be separate – the separateness is an illusion – a concept in our minds.

Try Holding Your Breath

If you ever doubt how connected you are to the natural world, try holding your breath (not indefinitely though!)

Within as little as 30 seconds your body begins demanding oxygen, hold it beyond 1 or 2 minutes and your life itself is at risk. You just have to breathe in. Every breath you take is a reminder that you exist only because of an extraordinary partnership with the rest of life on Earth.

The oxygen entering your lungs wasn’t created by humans. It was produced by plants, trees and microscopic marine algae through photosynthesis. They absorb carbon dioxide and release the oxygen we breathe in.

Every breath is an exchange with the earths systems. 

Without forests, grasslands and oceans, we simply couldn’t survive.

The Earth Becomes You

Everything that makes you “you” came from somewhere else.

The water in your body once flowed through rivers, glaciers and clouds.

The calcium in your bones came from rocks that weathered into soil and then into plants and animals.

The iron in your blood was absorbed by plants before finding its way into the food you ate.

The carbon that forms much of your body was pulled from the atmosphere by plants using sunlight, before passing through countless living organisms.

Your body isn’t separate from the Earth. You are literally made up of what you eat, and drink, which comes from the Earth.

So you are the Earth, temporarily organised into human form.

Ancient Atoms with Incredible Histories

One of the most fascinating ideas in science is that the atoms making up your body are unimaginably old.

The atoms of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and calcium weren’t created when you were born. They aren’t invented on a daily basis. Most were forged inside ancient stars billions of years before our Solar System even existed. When those stars exploded, they scattered these elements across space, eventually becoming part of our planet.

Since then, those same atoms have been endlessly recycled. The Earth has contained roughly the same amount of matter and therefore roughly the same number of atoms since it formed about 4.5 billion years ago. These atoms are constantly being rearranged into different combinations, but very few relatively speaking are added or removed from the planet.

Because Earth’s matter is constantly recycled through the air, oceans, soil, rocks and living organisms, it’s overwhelmingly likely that many of the atoms in your body were once part of countless other forms of life.

Some almost certainly passed through forests millions of years ago. Some may once have been inside a woolly mammoth. And yes, statistically, it’s extremely likely that at least some of your atoms were once part of one or more dinosaurs.

Not because anything mystical is happening, but because matter has been recycled continuously for hundreds of millions of years. It’s a fact and not a theory.

Life on Earth changes shape. The matter and atoms on earth remain roughly the same.

The Water You Drink Is Ancient

The same is true of water. The water in your glass today may once have fallen as rain on prehistoric forests, flowed through Roman aqueducts or passed through the bodies of countless animals and people over millions of years.

Earth doesn’t continually create new water. It simply moves it around.

Evaporation, Clouds, Rain, Oceans, Rivers, Reservoirs, Plants, Animals, People. Then back again. We all share the same water. In fact the human body is about 50-60% water, and the Earths surface is about 71% water. Water is literally everywhere and passing through everything.

Nature Doesn’t Waste Anything

In nature there is no “away.” No disappearance.

Leaves fall from trees, decay and become soil. Dead organisms decay and feed new life.

Carbon cycles between the atmosphere, oceans, plants, animals and the ground.

Even our own bodies eventually return their elements to the Earth, our atoms don’t disappear, they just change into something else.

Nature isn’t a collection of separate things.

The Earth is one vast system continually recycling matter and energy. Nothing goes away – it just changes form.

A Different Perspective

Understanding this changes how we see ourselves. We’re not isolated individuals standing apart from nature. We simply can’t exist in an isolated form. On a physical level we need air, water, nutrients via our food.

Every breath connects us to forests.

Every meal connects us to soil.

Every glass of water connects us to rivers and rain.

Every atom in our bodies carries a history older than humanity itself.

We’re participants in an unimaginably ancient natural process that has been unfolding for billions of years.

Perhaps this is why so many people feel restored after spending time outdoors. Nature doesn’t reconnect us to something we’ve lost.

It reminds us of something we’ve always been.

We Belong Here

The more we understand the natural world, the harder it becomes to see it as something separate from ourselves.

Looking after forests isn’t simply protecting trees.

Protecting rivers isn’t only saving wildlife.

Caring for the planet is ultimately caring for ourselves and fellow humans, because we are woven into the same living system.

We often say we’re “going into nature.”

But that’s never really true.

We can no more leave nature than we can leave the air we breathe.

We have always belonged to the Earth—and always will. We cannot be separate from it – and to think we are is just an illusion in our mind.

Some may say this is new-age hippy stuff, but there is no escaping the fact that we are not just made from the Earth, we are the Earth, temporarily arranged into the shape of a human being.