Fish Out of Water

We measure our world by limits of our knowledge and experience. If only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to treat everything like nails. Bigotry, bias, and prejudice are all words that describe this limited view (hammer) each of us tends to embrace and apply. A dog does not comprehend poetry, nor does an infant calculus. The worlds of dog and of child are extremely limited in scope. For dog it is predominantly genetically determined. Even if a dog would like to understand poetry, it couldn't and will never grow into it either. On other hand, a child's view of world can expand continually throughout life. Unfortunately, as we get into our teenage years and become certain that our knowledge encompasses just about all that could be known – certainly more than both parents combined – we become increasingly arrogant, and with this arrogance, closed minded. Intellectual growth can actually stop by about age of 13, with vocabulary serving as an index of this growth and not increasing significantly for most people after this age. With that as a preface, let me say that it is easy for us to believe that world we were born into is only real world. Fluorescent lights, conditioned air, automobiles, pop, French fries, television, and polyester may seem like only real and natural world for humans. Without perspective of history, there would be no way of knowing any differently. But we do have history. Prior to Industrial Revolution, which occurred about 200 years ago, we were by and large in an entirely different setting. We spent majority of our time outside and without any of modern conveniences and technologies we have come to believe to be as natural and automatic as a tree or wind. Our genes, however, are not equally convinced. They remain encoded for natural world. They are, in fact, an inward definition of external natural, pre-Industrial, more pristine world. In this new modern synthetic world we are increasingly alienating our basic biological make up. We are like fish taken out of water. . On a broader environmental scale, human activity rivals natural processes that have built biosphere. About 40% of earth's photosynthetic capacity (plant growth) is now appropriated for human use. The biologically available nitrogen and phosphorus used by humans for fertilizer and chemicals about equals amount produced by nature. We apparently can alter our atmosphere on a global scale (ozone, Chernobyl, greenhouse gases). Huge numbers of species stand on curling tip of a wave of extinction – and list goes on.