What Grows on Trees and it Ain't Money

Today I was thinking about the word “Natural”.  People bandy the word about as if it had some magical properties.

“Is it a vitamin?” someone asks.  “No, no,” they are assured, “It’s natural.”

Yeah, cause those little tablets grow on trees just like that.  If the only quality required to qualify as natural, was that something had to start out its life as a plant, animal, or mineral, why, then everything would be natural, which I argue it sort of is.  But now I digress.

French fries, I love them, start out as potatoes, but I don’t think that one would describe them as natural.  Cars start their lives as metals found in the ground, but they are just not even remotely considered natural.  So why, tell me, do some people consider everything in the health food or naturopathic store natural?  I bet most people couldn’t tell a lithium capsule apart from a St. John’s Wort capsule.  Lithium, an element from the periodic table, not natural.  A plant, pounded, powdered, processed, stuffed into lovely naturally growing gelatin capsules, they grow on bushes, check your local nursery, now that, is as natural as it comes. ?????

Natural, according to Webster, adj produced by, or according to, nature; not artificial; innate, not acquired; true to nature; lifelike; normal ( a natural result); at ease; (mus) neither sharped nor flatted. –n one having a natural aptitude (for), or being an obvious choice (for); (inf) a thing assured of success by its very nature, a certainty.

Nowhere in that definition do I see an assignment of good or bad.  However, this is an attribute which the word natural now carries.  Natural, good and artificial, bad.  

But here’s the thing.  We are creatures that by our very nature, create, problem solve, build, and explore.  We also exploit our surroundings as do other creatures.  Would one call a termite mound, unnatural?  It didn’t grow there by itself.  The termites built their artificial home because it was in their nature to do so.  If the termites destroy the habitats of other creatures in the process, they don’t lose sleep over it.  I don’t know if termites even sleep at all.

This is not to say, that humans should run roughshod over the planet because it would seem that that is our nature.  No, we are self aware and therefore should be expected to exercise responsibility, not because we are the stewards of the planet (a wholly impossible job), but because we wish to remain part of the natural environment of the planet.  If we screw things up too much, the planet, nature will go on.  Look at Mt. St. Helens.  That area took a beating, and yet life persists.  The question is do we want to be part of it.