Planet Z Commentary: We are nature — it’s time we started acting like it

Planet Z: Voices of Youth for a Sustainable Future is a Gen Z–created series sharing unfiltered perspectives on climate change — from eco-anxiety and grief to the urgency, creativity, and resolve shaping their generation. Support for this series is provided by Consumers Energy. All photographs are taken by Henry Black, unless otherwise noted.

Humans breathe air curated by forests, drink water that’s been filtered through ecosystems, and eat food from soil abundant in microbial life. Yet, more often than not, we go through our days seldom remembering this dependence on nature. It’s easy to do when society has shifted so far away from the natural world. But our relationship with nature is not some abstract luxury; it is a biological necessity. 

For the majority of human history, we lived in nature, not secluded from it. We worked with the means of nature, not against them, and learned immeasurable lessons in the process. There are many reasons for this, one being connection. One of the most pertinacious, yet damaging trends in modern life is the notion that humans exist, even thrive, outside of or above the natural world. And it’s not some mystery how we got here. I remember being taught about it in my history classes; I just had to read between the lines. As humans acquired more and more land to establish, industrialization and urbanisation reinforced this divide, altering our view of nature. Something humans held so close was now viewed as something to take ownership of and advantage of. But when you put that authority over something, anyone can imagine it becomes difficult to sustain any connection at all, especially a respectful one. 

This shift advanced relatively slowly, over the course of about 250 years, but it’s picked up incredible speed since the 21st century began. Children used to spend their days exploring and immersing themselves in the world. These days, no one bats an eye at the eight-hour screen time reports coming from children’s electronic devices. Even in our classrooms, it is the norm to plop kids of all ages in front of a screen from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m., centering their lives around technology, not the real, tangible world. We live in a time where Gen Z-ers can name more social media influencers than animal species in their environment. 

An illustration and poem by Elsa Beskow, a Swedish children’s book author and illustrator, unveils the inherent, powerful connection between children and nature (1910), followed by a polarizing depiction of children’s free time in our modern world:

The children paddled and 

splashed in the stream, damming it to 

build a watermill. No one cared how 

wet or muddy, they were for no child

of the forest can ever catch a cold.

This disconnection poses major concerns not just for the environment, but for human development and race as a whole. When we are influenced to see nature as something separate from ourselves, it becomes easier to ignore the damage we cause to it. Our treasured forests become timber resources, unsustainable farmland, and data centers. Our rivers become waste channels. Wildlife becomes an obstacle to development. In reducing nature to its usefulness, many lose sight of the intricate systems that make human life possible in the first place. 

In a sense, we’re depriving ourselves of our “humanness” because human psychology and physiology are built for integration with these natural systems, not separation from them. This notion has been established as what biologist Edward O. Wilson called the biophilia hypothesis. This hypothesis proposes that the tendency of humans to focus on and to affiliate with nature and other life-forms has, in part, a genetic basis, according to the Britannica website.

So, why are we spending so much time trying to connect with metal and wires? 

Unfortunately, these human-technology connections are what’s been designed for us. In a capitalist society, we’re taught that the most value is in something we can buy at the shopping center, or something on our cellphones, not in the trees, soil, and wildlife we have for free in our yards. It may be hard to see the flaws in this system when you can attain pretty much anything you want using so little time and effort, but it proves to be a threat to the world’s natural systems. In nature, everything is shared, recycled, and reused. In capitalism, trade and industries are controlled by private owners with one goal in mind: profit. The benefit systems between the two could not be more different. 

Ironically, while capitalism and technological advancements have given us unprecedented control over our surroundings, they have not freed us from our dependence on nature. If anything, they’ve made our list of dependencies longer. Cellphones, television, constant consumption, and now the infinite development and dependency on AI have taken a major role in ruling over our lives. We as humans have strayed so far from the natural means that we engage in the exploitation of our most precious resource (water) so we can use artificial intelligence to… talk with computers? It seems unnatural. That’s because it is the hottest craze in our very unnatural system. But it’s what they want: us feeding into the system that benefits the owners of our trade and industries. 

A powerful idea from environmental psychology related to these lessons is “people protect what they love.” If our species is being taught to love the green of money over the green of leaves, profit over people, and quantity over quality, that’s what we will work towards protecting and advancing. If our primary goals aligned closer to working with nature rather than against it, we could live in a society where our benefits come from that cyclical connection. Because every product we manufacture, building we construct, and meal we eat ultimately traces back to natural systems, we’re already tied to the natural ways of life; it’s just a means of embracing and working with nature. 

And there are many ways to do this. The first step is remembering this core principle: we are nature.

The future of our species will not be determined by how much wealth we accumulate or how many technologies we create, but by whether we remember the core principle. Despite attempts to distance ourselves, we have never escaped our relationship with nature. The forests still clean our air, the soil still grows our food, and the rivers still carry our water. Every breath we take is borrowed from the living world around us. The continuous treatment of nature as something to dominate rather than something to live alongside is a risk for us to lose not only ecosystems, but a part of ourselves. Perhaps the greatest challenge of the twenty-first century is not learning how to live on a more advanced planet, but remembering how to live on the one that has always kept us alive.