BY SOFO ARCHON
Everything is connected.
Yet most of us feel separate from nature. And from this sense of separation stems most of the suffering that exists in the world today.
The reason we feel disconnected from nature is, first and foremost, that we’ve been physically removed from it.
From childhood, many of us have little opportunity to spend time in natural surroundings. This is especially true for children in big cities, where outdoor spaces are scarce and time outside is often restricted.
The education system also contributes to this separation. Conventional schools place children in artificial environments—classrooms—where they are forced to sit and stare at a board for up to eight hours a day. Lessons in nature are rare, and when they do occur, they last only briefly.
Most schools don’t teach children how to grow food, so they rarely come into contact with plants or soil. Instead, they learn about nature through books—and even that knowledge is fragmented. Science is taught in compartments such as chemistry, biology, and physics, rather than as interconnected, interdependent fields. As a result, beyond the physical separation from nature, a cognitive separation also develops, pulling us even further away.
By the time we reach adulthood, many of us feel so disconnected from the natural world that we avoid it. Nature seems strange, wild, even threatening. We prefer the comfort of indoor spaces and experience nature mostly through products. The food we eat has already been grown, processed, and packaged before it reaches us. We seldom feel the need to grow our own; we can simply buy whatever we want.
Because we aren’t involved in producing what we consume, we rarely understand what the process entails. For example, we eat meat shaped into burgers without fully realizing it comes from an animal that was slaughtered—and likely mistreated—during its life. The same is true of other consumer goods, from water to clothing, furniture, and electronics.
Even when we know all this, many of us are so desensitized that we still don’t care. Our “separation” from nature makes us see it as nothing more than a collection of objects without sentience or inherent value. We measure its worth only by what it can provide us. In other words, we treat nature as something to exploit.
This exploitative mindset has driven the destruction we see all around us. All life-support systems are in decline. The sea is poisoned, the land is degraded, and the air is polluted—all due to human activity.
If we truly felt connected to nature, how could we choose to destroy it? We wouldn’t, because doing so would be like intentionally harming ourselves, for we would see nature as our larger body.
As long as we believe we are separate from nature, we will continue to damage it, because we cannot feel love for something we perceive as “other.” Love arises only from connection. To heal our relationship with nature, therefore, we need to see it not as separate from us, but as an extension of ourselves—or better yet, we need to see ourselves as an extension of nature.
But how can we awaken from the illusion of separateness? How can we expand our narrow sense of self to embrace all that is alive?
I don’t want this to become just another “how-to” article. I will only say that simply spending regular time in nature—observing its presence, beauty, and wonder—can help us feel deeply connected and recognize how much it truly matters.
When we feel connected, we will no longer want to harm nature. On the contrary, we will want to protect it and do our best to care for it.
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