Health and Nature
By Katherine Cully
If we step back to take a hard and objective look at our modern society, it is apparent that a lot of our health problems are largely a result of our own making. Anxiety, depression, and drug addiction were all diseases that came about through social interactions rather than biological interactions. Once society figured out how to thrive rather than simply survive, a domino effect of achieving ‘progress’ ensued. Society began using empirical applications to understand the world and our phenomenal brainpower to craft it to suit our societies. Thus, it was no longer the external environment that dictated our actions, but our internal environment of the mind that largely shaped industrialization, followed by modernization.
A person’s pursuit to control his or her own destiny without the influence of nature caused us to rapidly deteriorate our relationship with nature. Those who are familiar with mental health issues have been offered anti-anxiety medications, SSRIs, and every man-made solution that we can think of. Many sociologists deem our society over-medicalized because we turned to the scientific institute to pump out pharmaceuticals that solve all of our modern problems. But many of our health issues are largely a result of how our society has been structured.
Rene Dubos was a pioneer of microbiology who had a similar holistic view of health. He emphasized the causation of disease as maladaptation with the environment, which is comprised of both the internal and external environment. The external environment includes our relationship with the facets of nature as well as our social relationships with other human beings. The internal environment is that of the physiological environment and our mind. The intertwining relationships that you may begin to imagine between these microcosms and macrocosms are endless and are proof in itself that health is multifactorial.
The Germ Theory, introduced by Robert Koch, was one of empirical medicine’s greatest achievements—identifying the sole pathogen that caused disease and supported the contradictory Dictum of Specific Etiology. But when sociologists look at the mortality rates from infectious diseases after modern society achieves production of its next revolutionary vaccine, the decline in mortality rates is negligible and is often a result of other cooperative social efforts applied against disease. Where do we look when science does not have a concrete, one-hundred percent effective solution?
Dubos argues that many of our modern health “enemies” are the
result of “the accelerated rate at which our old habits and conventions disappear and new ones appear…the marginal man can generally achieve some form of equilibrium with his environment if the social order is stable, but he is likely to break down when the extent and rate of change exceed his adaptive potentialities” (Dubos 208-209). Our skewed ability to evolve to meet the responsibilities of the changes in our world makes us suffer and crumble, especially in a society that seeks to place us in a static position. Our relationship with the external environment becomes continually deteriorated as the scale of ecological equilibria is tipped and is responsible for the propagation of our modern mental and physical enemies. And we, with our ignorant minds, continue to fire our empirical solutions at the enemy and tip the scale further as we neglect our position in a complex environment.
Maybe the true solution lies in trekking to the other side of the scale, to restore our relationship with nature, which is a large determinant of our health. Dubos refers to the rare periods of prosperous health referred to in history, stating that “these periods of relative static equilibrium probably correspond to the era of tranquility of which the Yellow Emperor spoke, which primitive people often evolve in their legends, and which the philosophers of the Enlightenment had in mind when they pleaded for harmony with the ways of nature” (Dubos 27). Also an ecologist, Dubos emphasized the close relationship between living in accordance with the laws of nature for prosperous health.
I had never explored these ideas at length until I had my own personal experiences with mental health issues. Two years of constantly rotating medications, most with severe side effects, had me spinning into a hole of doom. Every newfound promise of hope ended with failed expectations. As a pre-med student, I understood that psychiatry was not the most predictable discipline and the sense of urgency to find something that worked was boiling in my mind. It was not until I looked outside of the options presented in medication that I began to understand a different perspective from Dubos’ perspective. In a previous piece, I wrote about my love for hiking, and how revolutionary it was for my perspective and thus my mental health. While I could not always rely on medications to make me feel “better” per se—and there was always an unsure transition—hiking and being surrounded by nature was very healing to me. Therapy was a full circle with this revelation. I found therapy to be necessary to supplement medication in order to make progress with my health, and one of the daily practices ‘prescribed’ was a return to nature. Spending time outside and being amongst the natural world has statistically been proven to aid depression and other mental illnesses, and I had seen that right in front of me. Escaping the net that society has cast over our minds is vital for the pursuit of health and restoring our relationship with the world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson specifies that we must not do this by looking through the lenses of great figures, but by gaining our own original experience and perception of nature. His introduction serves as a bold message:
Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchers of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines today also. There is more wool land flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, and new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship (Emerson 1).
There is reason to hope, but we must be brave. The pursuit of a life of perfect health may not be possible, as nature itself is never static, but we sure can get close if we learn to change with it. It takes constant recognition of the role we play in our world, and the role the world plays in our life, the interactions go both ways and are infinite in time and space. No matter how many concrete jungles we built, nature surrounds us everywhere and all it takes is embracing rather than casting it to the side.
