Four Fifths a Grizzly (ePub)

mutually beneficial relationship - a symbiosis? And what about the fact that the process of photosynthesis, which produces food for every growing green plant, every plant-eater, and every eater of plant-eaters, is actually carried out by highly modified microbes - the tiny bodies we call chloroplasts - living within the plant's cells? What exactly is the individual creature here?


What is it about the history of human evolution that allows time spent in natural green spaces to automatically lower our heart rate and blood pressure, reduces anxiety and stress, boosts our immune system, and improves our mental clarity? What makes strawberries so extravagantly fragrant and tasty? (Hint: the answer has to do with symbiotic microbes in the plant's tissues.) And why does research on our fellow mammals and a wide range of other kinds of creatures keep uncovering so many mental and emotional qualities previously considered unique to humans?


I could go on... And I do in a new book that Patagonia will publish this coming spring. I wrote it because I realized how vastly different the workings of nature are from what so many people assume to be true. The problem is that most of us still tend to view species as separate, independent organisms the way previous generations did and taught us to do. At the same time, we seem firmly stuck on thinking of ourselves as somehow different from the rest of the living world and superior to it - freed from our animal past. I can't imagine how we're going to step up to begin saving nature faster than it is disappearing until we gain a clearer understanding of the deep, pervasive, absolutely vital, and altogether astonishing interconnections among organisms that have been uncovered in recent years. No matter how we like to define nature, it defines us in countless ways. No matter what we prefer to believe, we are intimately bound to ecosystems around and inside us, to the natural realm that shaped our bodies and minds and continues to do that today.


This fresh view of our relationship with other life doesn't make humankind any less extraordinary and amazingly inventive. On the contrary, it positively expands the idea of what it means to be human. It just might change the way you perceive life on Earth, including your own.