Nature at Its Best: Creating a healthy planet

Nature is a constantly adapting body of many interrelated systems that all evolve together in a chaotic harmony. It is creative destruction at its finest, rebuilding and restructuring that which fails.

Yet, as man persistently attempts to modify and alter natural patterns to accommodate his needs, his efforts usually bring severe and unintended negative consequences. As we’ve seen, water, agriculture, and energy cycles can’t be modified without significant repercussions such as famine, drought, or disease.

Alterations of the environment have spawned a series of incredibly powerful and lethal diseases as recently outlined in the NTY article Man-Made Epidemics. The current outbreak of Ebola in Uganda could spread to pandemic stages. Powerful diseases, which cannot be easily be contained, and have the potential to overtake large populations.

The same lack of respect for nature’s forces is apparent in our healthcare and farming systems and their approach to bacteria management. We have tried to eradicate relatively harmless bacteria with strong drugs and heal more significant bacterial infections with ever increasing potent drugs. These drugs in turn create new strains of extremely lethal and even more monstrous new types of bacteria. And the cycle continues.

New forms of E. coli (such as last year’s cucumber outbreak in Germany), and new advanced forms of Staph infection (such as MRSA) plague hospitals and are almost completely incurable.

The lesson here is that nature adapts to its environment much faster then we are able to stay in front of it. The long term solutions lie in man working with nature and its numerous systems to adapt to its cycles and its scale– not the other way around. We cannot stretch and exhaust our resources past the breaking point of the natural cycles. We will see many of our natural systems become unstable and possibly create an un-survivable planet for man. Instead, if we work with nature, we can co-exist and evolve together. This is not only our best path but probably our only path for long-term viability.

By working with nature and its amazing capabilities we can leverage natural cycles for our benefit, and co-evolve and co-exist as one healthy planet.Nature is a constantly adapting body of many interrelated systems that all evolve together in a chaotic harmony.  It is creative destruction at its finest, rebuilding and restructuring that which fails.

Yet, as man persistently attempts to modify and alter natural patterns to accommodate his needs, his efforts usually bring severe and unintended negative consequences.  As we’ve seen, water, agriculture, and energy cycles can’t be modified without significant repercussions such as famine, drought, or disease.

Alterations of the environment have spawned a series of incredibly powerful and lethal diseases as recently outlined in the NTY article  Man-Made Epidemics.  The current outbreak of Ebola in Uganda could spread to pandemic stages. Powerful diseases, which cannot be easily be contained, and have the potential to overtake large populations.

The same lack of respect for nature’s forces is apparent in our healthcare and farming systems and their approach to bacteria management.  We have tried to eradicate relatively harmless bacteria with strong drugs and heal more significant bacterial infections with ever increasing potent drugs. These drugs in turn create new strains of extremely lethal and even more monstrous new types of bacteria. And the cycle continues.

New forms of E. coli (such as last year’s cucumber outbreak in Germany), and new advanced forms of Staph infection (such as MRSA) plague hospitals and are almost completely incurable.

The lesson here is that nature adapts to its environment much faster then we are able to stay in front of it.  The long term solutions lie in man working with nature and its numerous systems to adapt to its cycles and its scale– not the other way around. We cannot stretch and exhaust our resources past the breaking point of the natural cycles. We will see many of our natural systems become unstable and possibly create an un-survivable planet for man. Instead, if we work with nature, we can co-exist and evolve together.  This is not only our best path but probably our only path for long-term viability.

By working with nature and its amazing capabilities we can leverage natural cycles for our benefit, and co-evolve and co-exist as one healthy planet.