Your Environment can affect your Health

From a certain perspective, environment is to the earth what health is to the body. Indeed, without the contribution of each element of the environment (water, air, fire, etc.), planet earth would not exist as we know it. By analogy, if functional limbs and organs did not exist, there would be no life in a human body. As a matter of fact, many elements or components of nature work similarly to certain organs of the body on a functional point of view. For instance, through the process of carbon dioxide sequestration, trees in the forests are literally (rather functionally) the lungs of our environment. In fact, many scientific studies acknowledge that, through a natural filtration process, the trees help purify the air and lower the risk of dying from air pollution. Hence, the air that humans breathe becomes less filled with toxic particles susceptible to affect their lungs, and therefore people in this environment benefit from a better health (at least in terms of quality of air).

This purification process of the air we breathe is just one of many ecological services (as far as we scientifically know) that environment provides to us humans in planet earth. But what if we, as humans, could inspire from these services to seek for the unknown, to try to make our immediate environment an instrument, a tool for our specific needs relative to health improvement, among others. Sometimes nature (i.e., the environment) is the best teacher when it comes to understand our world, and even our body which depends upon health to survive. And this is where and how the science of biomimicry is taken into account.

Biomimicry is the observation and examination of nature, its processes, models, systems, and elements to emulate or take inspiration from to solve human problems. The Greek words bios (life), and mimesis (imitate) are the origins of the term Biomimicry (Biomimetics). Premises of this science induce that many challenges associated with the improvement of any functioning process (including human health as a complex organic process) can be solved, either wholly or partly, by looking into the vast and phenomenal solutions present in our immediate environment. Nature's solutions to very complex situations are highly optimized and often reach far beyond any solution which mankind has yet to achieve. Adequate observation and comprehension of these natural processes could open up the vaults of the unknown and allow the transfer of this ‘’nature knowledge’’ to specific issues pertaining to the micro-level of human scale.

Besides, maybe this is the reason why our eyes and other sense organs function basically outwards to see, hear, feel, taste and touch the vectors of information (provided to us by our immediate environment) so that we can do our part and decrypt the truth, the solution, the cure from the beautiful outside world, the environment. Therefore, it is fathomable that many of the issues that conventional medicine cannot solve up to now could eventually and hopefully be replicated on the scale of the human body when considering a more holistic and integrated approach to apprehend ourselves and the environment.

Thus, seeking a healthier human life in a healthy environment… that’s what it could, should, and hopefully will be. But it will if (and only if) we all understand that we are just an element, that we are just part of the environment, and that our actions should be an expression of gratitude for our health, among others, thanks to those precious ecological services. On a final note, out of ignorance, we didn’t even ask for ‘nature/environment services’, but in total honesty, we probably don’t even deserve them anyway, given the fact that natural elements resources are being depleted for abusive mercantile anthropic activities. Nevertheless, those ecological services are so vital for the durability, sustainability and pereniality of this environment which is the craddle of humanity, and ultimately the quiet guardian of our own health.

#Environment