Any average person can tell you that the key to a healthy relationship is balance. What most people do not realize is that our relationship with the environment works the same way. Most people can understand why you may want a healthy relationship with an individual (your spouse, your grandma, your dog, etc.) but too many people do not realize that it is important to have a healthy and balanced relationship with nature.

Why? It is pretty simple: we cannot exist without it. For example, take the air we breathe 24/7. Trees and plants respire naturally to keep it clean. So when we pump our air full of carbon dioxide, the plants keep us from suffocating ourselves. I would say nature is important in that aspect. Also, humans cannot live long without drinking water, which we get from nature. It needs to be conserved in order to sustain life around the world. Also, humans must eat which raises some issues of how to grow food the most efficiently without destroying the plants and trees that help us breathe. Don‘t forget the many natural remedies, such as pharmaceuticals derived from plants through biotechnologies, which have taught us so much about ourselves and our health. Depleting biodiversity would be detrimental to our existence. Nature supplies us with basic sustenance as well as scientific advances. These reasons should be enough to get people to open their eyes and see that without a healthy relationship with nature, we could not survive.

We need to wake up and put some effort into balancing our relationship with nature because right now, people are doing a terrible job.

First of all, there are those who take advantage of nature without giving a thought to the effects of their actions, behaving as if they are completely detached from nature. They think they own the world: they abuse nature by drilling for oil, using slash-and-burn agriculture, polluting the air with coal plants and excessively large vehicles, destroying valuable rainforests, poisoning the air and water, depleting soil nutrients, contaminating water, poaching and sprawling. People just don’t think about their relationship with nature at all—they live to dominate: all taking and no giving. If people keep taking from nature without respecting it in return, the imbalance will catch up to us and we will no longer have resources for survival.

Then, we have environmentalists and biologists who counter the first group with an imbalance in the other direction. These people are attached to nature in a sense, but because they put too much of an emphasis on preservation and making land “off limits” to humans, they actually create a rift between humans and nature. They, of course, have good intentions, desiring to serve nature to the greatest extent. They want to protect biodiversity for scientific reasons: for the clean air that plants generate, for the clean water that marshes filter, to maintain soil richness, not to mention possible biotechnological advances in areas such as pharmaceuticals. As much as they desire to save nature, they do create a disruption in the balance of the relationship between humanity and nature by doing too much without thinking of repercussions. By creating large areas for preservation that are “off limits” to humans, they force indigenous people off of their land, transplanting them to other areas where it is unnatural to live off of the land, thus creating a severely unhealthy area for both the humans and the environment there. Humans are a part of nature and have been for a very long time. So when people are forced to live unnaturally in displaced areas, the relationship suffers from this detachment.

You can’t blame the environmentalists for being so extreme. When the rest of the world is slacking off big time, ignoring the consequences of their actions, environmentalists feel as though they must take drastic measures to help the environment. Thus, the problem lies in the lack of unity among humans and their relationship with nature. What we have now are two separately imbalanced human-nature relationships. What we need to have is a unified focus on balancing our relationship. I suggest that we stop looking at nature as something that doesn’t affect us and that we stop thinking of nature as something very separate from us. We cannot abuse it, but we also cannot completely cut it off from humanity through severe preservation efforts.

The key is conservation of resources above all else. Conservation would limit our reliance on land use, natural resources, as well as reduce production of pollutants. We can achieve this fairly easily by car pooling to pollute less, conserve water by taking shorter showers and filling the dishwasher fully. We can implement more wind farms to use cleaner, renewable energy. We can examine the population problem as our resources and space become sparse and evaluate our ecological footprints to ensure we are impacting the earth in a healthy way. It is fairly easy to do these things, integrating them into daily life regardless of whether you are an environmentalist or simply a person who likes breathing clean air. By being respectful of nature, we can avoid extreme measures that only separate us from wilderness. Keeping a good balance is the only way that humans and nature can coexist.