I remember the first time I drove out West from New York City. It was thrilling for a young man from an intense urban environment to drive through New Mexico and Arizona where the sky was vast, it was everywhere the eye could see and met the desert at the far end of the sunset. The sky with a few wispy clouds was all that one could see. Besides the scattered cacti scattered about the landscape, all was sun, sky, desert, sunset.

I was captivated by the beauty, the majesty of Nature looming, blooming, flourishing, before me: a sky painted with bright blues, howling reds and bright oranges, a land-and-skyscape that a great artist couldn’t sculpt quite like this.

Perhaps that illustrates the sentiment I was feeling: Nature is ubiquitous while man occupies his body in one, single place. Nature is great, and man small. As the Muslims are known to exclaim: “God is Great!”

Humility in the face of beauty & the law of proportion

I was humbled by the beauty before me. I felt deeply aware of my small place in this larger landscape. I had a place alright, as did all other sentient beings and everything else in Nature’s, the Universes, dare I say in a largely secularized society, God’s creation. (Recall Nietzsche’s painful comment about the loss of society’s truth, morality and perspective: “God is dead”.) It wasn’t more or less, greater, nor lesser--our human species was and is part of the Great Biodiversity our planet is so well known for right alongside all of Nature’s other sentient life. That’s the point: right alongside, not greater, not lesser, part of an elaborate eco-system more intelligent than all of us.

Outer architecture shapes inner architecture

I also realized that living in NYC where so many structures are vertical, our minds become verticalized. While many are aesthetically engaging, they de-limit the array of possible perception because the sun and sky are considerably blocked from view in mid- or downtown Manhattan. One can see Madison, Fifth Ave. or Wall St. just fine. Spend enough time here and it’s hard to remember the world outside it—not quite like Plato’s Cave but perhaps a faint facsimile.

For city dwellers, Rockefeller Center is a central monument, not the Great Tetons or the gorgeous and sacred red rocks of Sedona.

I recognized how the built environment, even with its own man-made beauty, by definition, limits the breadth of beauty and perception offered by the landscapes of Nature in general and the Southwest in particular.

There was a perception psychology experiment in which there were two groups of kittens, one put in a room where there were only vertical lines, and the other where there were only horizontal.

The adaptation was such that each group was only able to perceive the lines with which they were raised and bumped into objects of the opposite lines. This is how we get conditioned and even more, narrowed and de-limited in our perception, relationship and understanding of our world. Our biological structures are literally shaped by the world around us.

Do you know the phenomenon of dog owners and their dogs looking alike?

In NYC and every other urban environment across the planet, man is central and utterly important and Nature is more like a footnote. These built environments are virtually by definition, anthropocentric and in that sense, create a narrowed perception of reality somewhat analogous to the experiment with our little kittens.

The natural environment on the other hand, is by definition, naturocentric. Man isn’t a footnote, but nor is he King of the Universe though he clearly sometimes gets a bit confused. He is one of Nature’s bio-diverse, sentient creatures despite my being particularly fond of humans.

Still he remains highly important in his own mind, but contemplating a naturocentric view allows him the time, space and spaciousness needed to settle into his rightful place in the Universe, and yet stand tall, dignified and valuable within it.

Why is this distinction important?

I suggest that anthropocentrism is species-wide narcissism. It’s a macro-micro relationship.

In our minds, we are the important story to be told, not that of the magnificence of all Creation here and in the Heavens. We think that, because of our brain size or level of self-consciousness, our ability to craft tools and technologies that we are superior. But bonobos use tools too and socially, happen to be a lot more sexually liberated than humans.

By thinking that we are singularly superior, we are breaking with the Natural Order of Things. Of course poets and artists have noted this distortion over centuries, and often bring us back to a more balanced meter and proportion.

Just because we may have outsmarted the predator over and again, doesn’t make us superior. It suggests that we are intelligent, resilient and nimble as well as adaptable, excellent qualities for survival and thriving.

To the extent that these skill-sets keep our species alive, and even thriving, they are good. It’s certainly fair to say that “we’ve adapted well”.

To the extent that the development of these skills confer a sense of superiority or ego, support extractive, oppressive and destructive activity they are obviously harmful.

After all, we are the only species that has jeopardized the natural balance of the eco-system so severely that weather patterns have been profoundly disrupted, fish ingest micro-plastics with virtually every gulp and in fact, so do we—and we hang on the precipice of eco-system collapse.

As a species, we have single-handedly polluted and contaminated virtually every body of water on the planet. Being a ‘water planet’ that’s a lot of water.

We have wielded more destruction than any other species since perhaps the dinosaur, and quite certainly, we’ve done more damage than even them.

This is the poison and pathology of anthropocentrism. It has virtually destroyed our eco-system which is to say our and virtually all sentient creature’s lives.

Our institutions maintain the hubris of human superiority and support it. Yet we fight like animals in wars, for money and for power as though we are famished in the jungle and we are destroying our own and the entire eco-system on which life wholly depends. Now where is the superiority? Poof!

Yes, Walt Whitman was right: “I contain multitudes.”

Days of days, irony of ironies

The irony we live with, and probably what allows for humans to wield such destruction, is that we live by the false belief that we are separate from Nature. As its overlord, we hold ourselves as though “above” Nature, a la Descartes. which is analogous to the separation of mind and body.

Both are false beliefs.

Prior to that, there is a famous Biblical antecedent: “God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth‘”. The words “subdue” and the phrase “have dominion over” have been reviewed by Jewish scholars and etymologists for centuries as they have implications at some variance from the obvious meanings.

This notwithstanding, the net effect has been subjugation, extraction and destruction with “nary a care” for God’s precious Creation yet citing scripture as the basis for this millennia-old, consistently heinous conduct. Anthropocentrism (ego) at its peak!

We are not separate from Nature but are Nature

It is a quirk of our perception, embedded, as suggested above, by both conditioning by the above passage from Genesis and then further deepened by the confusion of 17th Century philosophers Rene Descartes and Francis Bacon.

Our mind is not separate from our body and our mind-body are not separate from Nature, but rather, these are eco-systems within eco-systems, embedded, nested and fractal.

Let’s go further. When we embrace the idea, or, the reality that [we are Nature], (https://acim.org/) our ability to extract, harm and wantonly destroy other sentient beings (including simply for purposes of financial profit) and the eco-system itself is at least vastly diminished not to mention the sense of ease and peace that then abounds.

The bio-regional movement sets perspective straight, and action

If you think back to our ancestors living in forests and savannahs, they foraged and speared animals for food. They walked in the way of Nature. Like other animals, they lived and breathed and thrived in the landscape in which they lived. The forest was their habitat, their shelter. There was no objectification, separation between habitat and human—it was one continuous stream.

Bioregional thinking is a perspective that is gaining wide popularity among many throughout the world—living locally with the native habitat. It’s not a “dominator model” but a cooperative one, one found among indigenous peoples across the world, among Taoists. I like to suggest this macro-micro perspective: “Think Universally, act locally”. We in Nature are in balance.

The perspective is succinctly described by the Well-Being Economy Alliance

*Bioregionalism is an ecological and cultural philosophy that emphasises the importance of defining human activities and societies in relation to natural ecosystems and geographies, rather than adhering to arbitrary political or administrative borders.

Bioregionalists advocate for a strong sense of place, putting the Earth first and highlighting the interconnectedness of humans with nature. This approach promotes sustainability, local economies, and community resilience by encouraging people to develop a deep connection with their local environment and to manage resources in a way that supports the long-term health of the region.

It calls for de-centralised, community-based governance and the use of local knowledge to address ecological and social challenges. At the same time, bioregionalism recognises and values cultural diversity within regions. Local cultures and traditions are seen as integral parts of the overall ecological fabric, contributing to the resilience and adaptability of communities.*

This article goes a step farther in looking at the psychology of a Dominator, anthropocentric mindset/culture and that of one that is Naturocentric. Bio-regional thinking provides a beautiful application and execution of this purview. Its elegant simplicity you could say is Naturocentrism-in-action.

Taoist practice provides other aspects of this thinking with more focus on combining Nature’s elements internally to create an elixir to be the confluence of Heaven and Earth, that is, taking the idea of being Nature to its next evolutionary, spiritual level.

While it may be great to live in NYC and eat mangoes in the winter, Professor Ching Man-Ching, physician to Chiang Kai-Shek and teacher of T’ai-Chi Chuan who brought it from China to the West instructed his students to “eat the food that grows in your backyard”, that is, locally. The idea is that our body was built in this food from this soil, this water, not from far-off lands. This is the food that most nourishes you because you are “built” from it.

Nature rules

As environmental scientist, Guy McPherson’s podcast’s name, Nature bats last says, we live by the rules of Nature, not Nature by the rule of man.

What has been going on for the past 200 years during which human activity through industrialization, mechanization, use of fossil fuels, massive extraction, all the way to extra-planetary “garbage” being dumped in space, man has so despoiled our natural habitat, on earth well, it’s now becoming uninhabitable. The damage is now [reaching into space] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6rExk9vUdE&t=1450s). The changing weather patterns due to arctic and Siberian ice melt, the warming of the oceans, dead zones, depleted fish populations, micro-plastics polluting all bodies of water planet-wide, raging forest fires, droughts, floods, snow in Dallas, the eco-system is massively out of balance, as Nature corrects the curve balls man has thrown to maintain homeostatic balance.

Cetacean & human intelligence

The more we learn, for instance, about cetacean communications, the more we are humbled and awed by their subtle methods of speaking and listening. Whales and dolphins both have large brains and of what we can make out, their respective languages are highly evolved and sophisticated.

Geocentric & heliocentric

Perhaps another way of understanding this perspective is to remember the shift in consciousness from the Ptolemaic to the Copernican models of the universe, the former being geo-centric, that Earth was the center of the Universe, and the latter, that Earth instead, revolved around the Sun. What a change that was! And what different outcomes even in understanding relationships of organs in the body when brought to a micro-cosmic level.

Bringing it home through biomimicry

Imagine a precocious child at age six who thinks he is smarter than his parents and can manage the family household, bringing in money, food, providing shelter, education, maturity and wisdom?

We would laugh and ask the young child to please have a seat and relax, just enjoy the ride! So Nature is that much farther ahead of us.

Certainly we should learn from Her and mimic Her. The brilliant work of Janine Benyus gives us tools to do so.

In short, I suggest that anthropocentrism, which shows up in virtually all of our institutions, from political to religious as it is a conditioned “way of life”, has skewed our perception of ourselves and our place in the larger planetary and Universal purview. It keeps us from humbly learning, being one and in harmony with the magnificent, swirling and spiraling evolution of the natural flow.

The micro-level of anthropocentrism, at its furthest extreme, I also suggest, brought to the personal level, is essentially solipsism, defined by Oxford English Dictionary as: “the view or theory that the self is all that can be known to exist. "Solipsism is an idealist thesis because ‘Only my mind exists’ entails ‘Only minds exist’". We can see how leaders who suffer from this pathology can profoundly affect the political, social and economic lives of billions around the world.

Naturocentrism, on the other hand, is an invitation to “spread our consciousness” and sense of Self to include all aspects of Nature, on Earth and Cosmos. We are not identified only with Self, or rather, with Self as an integral part of the whole. I suggest that our compassion and empathetic capacities are nourished by this point of view as well.

You could say that my emphasis on Naturocentrism is the mental appetizer for the full-course meal the bio-regional field and thinking provide.

Why is this inquiry relevant?

Good question! I believe that it is relevant because the larger arc of the question regarding our purview is fractal in nature. It reflects who we are and the way we see the world and ourselves.

Rooting ourselves Naturocentrically opens the lens and intimately, integrally connects us with Nature, Cosmos, with “all that is”.

Rooting ourselves in the anthropocentric provides a distorted view of nature and the Universe. The story of life is about all life, not just human life. In order to honor and preserve all life, the Naturocentric view, which is a holistic view, a systems view, brings us to greater clarity, and I believe, greater harmony and peace.