"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication"

I wrote this back in 2012. I never published it as it was more a personal diary entry at the time. I’ve finally decided it’s worth posting as my opinions haven’t changed.

I like to think of myself as a peaceful individual, for a male homo sapien. I don't like conflict; I am uncomfortable around it. Why? Because I'm a peacemaker, I guess. I don't like pain, injustice, or discrimination. I prefer to resolve conflict with non-aggressive,and effective solutions...when possible.

I also possess nuetral feelings towards many of today's global debates including religion, politics, and the environment; I feel I'm fairly unbiased and tolerant of most non-violent organizations, radical or not. I try and view the world in a more simplistic frame of mind than most "thinkers" that have inherited the luxury to sit around and ...well, think; instead of gathering food or making some extra money to buy the necessities of life like billions of people do daily in order to survive.

Given my lifestyle and career as a wildilfe biologist, I have the opportunity to mix and mingle with people with diverse backgrounds. Some people I associate with are very simple-minded, while others make their lives more complex and believe a person's intelligence is measured by how well you can speak, your degree, or how much money you earn. 

I've also had the privilege of working closely with mother nature's most intelligent creatures, the wildlife species that live in and around our...well, plastic world. The natural world in which these wildlife species live in isn't nearly as complicated as ours. These wild animals live by a simple law that I call the laws of nature. There really isn't anything complex about the laws of nature and that is the beauty; as well as the unforgiving beast.

You live by the laws of nature, you increase your chance of survival and your species benefits by your choice. You decide to go against these laws and you'll most likely suffer early death impacting the survival of your species. Simple enough? 

Let's pick an animal and dig a bit deeper. A coyote. A coyote is one of the strongest-willed creatures and will be one of the last species on planet earth. Why. The coyote understands nature's laws. For example, if a coyote is hungry, what must that particular coyote do? The coyote must expend energy into hunting in order to capture a meal. If the coyote decides that it is too difficult of a task to seek out a meal, the coyote will die of starvation.

If a pair of coyotes establish a home territory and provision pups. How would the pair of coyotes respond to an aggressive transient coyote that decides to enter their territory eating their resources and threatening their pups? Laws of nature teach that you must protect your offspring and resources, even if it means becoming aggressive. 

If the pair of coyotes decides to compromise or put their head in the sand and allow the threats and taking of the resource in their territory, they and their offspring will lose simply because the laws of nature teach that the powerful instinctively and consistently prey on the weak.

If coyote parents do not teach their pups about the dangers in their world, the pups will be uneducated and at greater risk. If coyote parents do not find a good shelter in a covered den to raise their pups, the pups are vulnerable to elements and have less of a chance of survival. 

If a coyote becomes complacent and looks for an easier meal in a sheep corral, there are deadly consequences. If a coyote wants to bum some meat from its larger cousin the wolf, the coyote will most likely become the wolf's next meal. I could go on and on and on...

I’m not sure if I made up this analogy or not, but it’s an image that has stayed with me for years. The elastic band analogy. An elastic band represents Mother Earth. Humans work hard to resist the unforgiving nature of Mother Earth through medical, tech, and social advances that work against the natural way. This resistance stretches the elastic band tightly until there are two options: 1) the elastic band snaps back and resets itself or 2) the elastic band will break.

My point is for any animal, including humans, to survive long-term on mother earth, one must live by her rules. Period. No exceptions. The rules seem obvious, right? Not so much. Humans have decided that mother nature's rules aren't politically correct. Humans have worked incredibly hard to bend the rules to make a better way of life. Agriculture production, electricity, cures for disease, and social welfare programs are just some of the man-made inventions that go against mother nature. Go back to the laws of nature. These inventions have made human-life much simpler, but life was not meant to be simple...or fair. We need to learn to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. 

Mother nature has her way of keeping populations in check and humans continue working hard to find ways to live longer…and lazier. In fact, mother nature has become the nemesis of mankind. She is the killer of the human masses and, comically, if humans could find a way to bring her to justice for all the pain and suffering she has brought the human population, there'd be a long line of hungry attorneys ready to press charges. Disease, competition for resource (war), and natural disasters are reminders that no matter how hard humans work towards immortality, we live by the same rules as the rest the earth’s organisms.

 I have learned to accept this universe for what it is. Raw nature. Beautiful. I don't feel a need to change it with plastic and politics. But this type of thinking has been attacked. We human beings that want to live a simple lifestyle, want individual freedoms, that want to harvest our own food, that feel it's important to use our managed natural resources, that don't really want to sit in a luxurious home nor in a sushi bar. We really don't care about Hollywood. We are the minority.

The only animal species the preservationist wants controlled is the homo sapien. They want to completely extract humans, one of the ultimate mammalian predators, from the natural food chain. It goes against the exact philosophy they fight against: the taming and manipulation of mother nature.

There, I’ve said my piece. Our human civilization needs to digitally detox, take care of Mother Earth by living more in-line with her natural laws, and learn to be a little uncomfortable.

I fear the day that technology will surpass our human interaction. The World will have a generation of idiots – Albert Einstein