The Earth is us, and we are the Earth

It seems to me that our society likes to perpetuate the idea that humans and nature are separate.

We see countless media representations of humans conquering the elements or surviving the wilderness. We talk about how nature interferes with city life, with deer disrupting our commutes or racoons rummaging through our garbage cans. We frame wildfires and tornadoes as enemies unleashing warfare against us.

But humans aren’t separate from nature. We’re part of it.

I mean, we’re, quite literally, made of the Earth. The elements that form our bodies—oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, phosphorus, and others—were once part of the land, sea, and air.

From the chromosomes that fused together when our initial sperm and egg cells united to the trillions of cells throughout our bodies today, every atom in our bodies has, at some point, been part of the natural world around us.

Each time we eat something, some of the nutrients in that substance eventually become part of our body. The iron in a steak, for example, might become part of our body’s haemoglobin. Or the calcium in a piece of cheese might become part of our skeleton. The carrots on our plate extracted all the nutrients they needed from the soil they grew in to create the vitamin A we use to improve our vision.

Likewise, each breath we inhale brings with it oxygen and other gases, which our body absorbs then uses in various processes. That oxygen itself came from the various plants around us.

When we drink water, our body incorporates much of it into our bloodstream. That water comes from all sorts of places; here in Lethbridge, for example, the municipal water supply comes from the Old Man River, which itself comes from melting snowpack in the Rocky Mountains.

This elemental connection ties us intrinsically to the planet, not just in a philosophical or metaphorical sense, but in a very real, material way.

If our bodies are built from materials that came from the Earth, then surely the planet’s health directly affects our own. The quality of our air, water, and food we consume depends on the integrity of the natural ecosystems around us.

When pollution contaminates the air, it infiltrates our lungs. When harmful chemicals seep into the soil, they enter our food chain. When plastic fills the waterways, microplastics find their way into our bodies.

The environmental crises we face aren’t just external threats; they’re deeply personal.

Deforestation doesn’t just strip the Earth of trees: it disrupts the delicate balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide that sustains all life, including ours. The destruction of wetlands and coral reefs doesn’t just harm wildlife: it eliminates crucial buffers that protect us from storms and flooding. Climate change doesn’t just alter the landscape: it affects food security, the spread of diseases, and the very habitability of our communities.

Politicians and capitalists, however, would have us believe that the world around us is nothing more than raw materials that haven’t yet been extracted, harvested, or exploited, that their value is only in how much money they generate within the economy, not in how healthy they make us physically, emotionally, and, perhaps, spiritually.

They accomplish this by denying this deep, intimate, and personal connection each of us has to the Earth. They obfuscate the fact that the Earth’s part of us and we’re part of it.

Recognizing our elemental relationship to the Earth should inspire us to become better stewards of it.

If we accept that our bodies are made of the same elements that form the mountains, rivers, and forests, then we must also accept that our fate is intertwined with those same mountains, rivers, and forests. We can’t afford to treat the environment as an afterthought or a luxury; it’s the very foundation of our existence.