As the highest order species on this planet, we are not so highly evolved that we are above the laws of nature. We have risen to the mental prowess we possess and assume that we are conscious masters of all that we survey, of all that we are, yet we are not.

There is no denying the technological mastery we have achieved, or the subsequent complexity that rules our lives as much as we rule over it. As we have distanced ourselves from nature and the basic functions of life, our very lives have assumed an artificiality subject only to rules that mankind can create. Our ability to analyze, communicate, invent and reinvent in myriad disciplines and directions boggles even the sharpest of human minds.

As we live more and more in the worlds of our minds, we live more and more in a world of disconnected personal discontents, that are often tragically out of synchronization with the natural animal habitats we have abandoned. As I sit in my backyard and watch a hummingbird family feed and care for its young, I wonder if the superior being is the one who’s lured a semblance of nature back into his own personal space, or the living beings who have found enough remaining of nature (in a city like Los Angeles) to successfully raise a family. As I see the little one stretch its wings unencumbered by the artificiality so prevalent in human family life, somehow I feel like I’m the bird brain who hasn’t got a clue. A feeling of connectedness and content with nature, that words are strained to define, passes over my being as I watch the little family function without concern for the rules and regulations that are so wearisome and unnatural to living things in a big city. I find my thoughts longing for a more distant environ, untouched by the polluting creations of mankind, a place where feelings and instincts of what is right and wrong have yet to be recorded into voluminous statutes and regulations.

Governments in their arrogance, largely disconnect from nature’s established laws as they regulate the lives of humans based on theories of behavior and performance that have neglected to factor in all the subtle variables of human existence. Without the common sense that God gave a goose, some erudite politicians disregard the subtle nuances that nature has hard wired into us. In our quest for superiority and perfection we have neglected to see that the answer to the questions of self-governance lie in the capacity of the simplest of creatures, but those answers somehow elude the most gifted life form on earth. With all our great intellect and complex structuring, we seem more talented at making a mess of things than we do at governance. I have no doubt that the old adage, “He who governs least, governs best,” is true. However, that simple saying does not take into account all the exploitation, irresponsibility, and just plain corruptness that characterizes so many human lives, especially as traditional families and moral values slide further and further into the chasm of social decay that has become western society..

Just as the human race seems so close to attaining a golden age of brilliance that could foundationally provide the power and control to manage the needs of the human species for centuries to come, we face the peril of global extinction on a scale as real or greater than anytime ever before.

Nature is wise to imbue the young with the unfailing optimism of youth, and the power to bring forth new life, because as we get older and repeatedly see the unending onslaught of predation that comes not only from natural causes, but also from other species, and even ourselves, we grow weary of striving.

Nature from the dawn of life has been wise to discriminate in order to ensure the survival of life, yet we who are but the products of all that we survey assume to be wiser still, and deny the “political incorrectness” we see practiced in nature. In an unending quest to be the manipulator of all the natural elements in our domain, humankind has come full circle and now focuses its tinkering on itself. As an ever diminishing number of personal freedoms indicates, humankind, the master manipulator seeks ever more to have power and control over human life and all of its behavior and drives. The debate rages regarding the extent to which human behavior should be structured in society, and the direction that structuring should take.

Whatever spirit of freedom remains in us, passed down to us from the days of living free in nature, it appears it will not remain much longer. As environmental space diminishes, human beings, living “politically correctly” in their “lab rat environment” of modern civilization will ever more find human “free spirit” an undesirable social construct to be controlled or purged from all human life. Human life must conform with societies ever more restrictive structuring, and “free spirits” are notoriously bad at fitting in to restrictive structures. In time the memory of such freedom will itself be an anachronistic anomaly. Human life will possibly go on as survival instinct dictates it must, but in what form is not for us of passing away times to dictate. Perceiving the inevitable, stifling minimalization of future human existence (and human freedoms) somehow makes the inevitable end of ones own time seem less unnatural.

The rapidly changing construct of human life is accelerating into the future, where no one has gone before, and as nature has always decreed, “Only the very strongest and most intelligent will survive the longest.”

Ray Blumhorst