Calling All People to Remember the Origins and Stop Fighting the

Love…

Biophilia (Bio=Life, Biology; Philia=Love)- : a hypothetical human tendency to interact

or be closely associated with other forms of life in nature

Most people have no idea what this word means or how important it is as to how humans and

society evolved. People forget that we too are part of a larger living system, an ecosystem, a

biosphere, and share this world with other living things from microbes to plants, animals, fungi,

etc. Over human’s time on Earth, we have lived in very close contact with other organisms and

understood them, sometimes better than ourselves. To me biophilia isn’t hypothetical at all. I

have lived in a rural setting my entire life, and know the smell of changing seasons before the

calendar tells me, I know when the horses start to go to bed, and can feel the trees and grasses

come to life before the sun rises. I have a sense of place and have not forgotten where my food

comes from or how small I am in the biological big picture.

Human’s live in such a mobile world these days, but less than 100 years ago it took months to

get Europe or even weeks to go cross-country, but with the advent of airplanes, we can take

a nap and wake up in a different geographic region with a different history and a different

biological story. This makes us think in the temporary. If we don’t like where we are for the

most petty (or rational) of reasons we just move and have little second thought about where

we really are or where we are really going. This technological world full of material ambitions

disconnects us from our foundation: the Earth and all the other living, breathing things on it.

People forget that every raw material we use to make everything comes from the Earth; even

plastic and other “inorganic” chemicals or materials. We as a “productive” species are limited

by what the Earth gives us. Even with food and agricultural products people seem to forget that

it comes from the Earth, trees and other living things. Unless a person actually grow his or her

own food, and sometimes even then, he or she can lose the connection between where the food

originates and how he or she gets it… in a store and/or restaurant.

In domestication, people made a contract with other organisms and ourselves to promote the

well-being of all parties involved. Many domestic species would not be alive today had humans

not made this contract with them, some such being the Horse (Equus caballus) or Cow (Bos

taurus), and the list goes on. Even the Dog, Cannis lupus familiaris, aka Cannis familiaris,

would not be with us, but lost somewhere in the genetic potential of Cannis lupus lupus (the grey

wolf). We made the dog.

Moreover, many people hate the idea of consuming a GMO (Genetically Modified Organisms)

because of the sci-fi implications, but forget that a huge percentage of the corn they consume

from Corn syrup to boxed items containing corn or corn byproducts are made with BT corn

(Bacillus thuringiensis corn, a corn cultivar derived from inserting a bacterial toxin gene into

the DNA of the corn making it more resistant to insect predation). Also they forget that half of

the organisms and/or cultivars of plants we eat are far from the way nature made them, due to

selective breeding over several generations, which is an early form of Biotechnology and Genetic

People like to think that they are not involved in the natural ecology of the planet they live in but

due to the biophilia component, and the contract of domestication, people are, and always have

been. We are the Keystone species of this planet, dictating what will survive and what won’t.

All I ask is that people accept the fact that they are connected on multiple levels with the roots of

biology and not above the natural order of connection. We are meant to survive, and at first we

realized we couldn’t do it alone as a single species. Remember that, love that… Be biophilic.