Civilization, reinforced by modern religion, lends humans to believe we can break the laws of Nature and God. Breaking a law of Nature or Life is like trying to break the laws of physics: we can’t without breaking something or killing someone. I am not generally a religious writer, but if I were a prophet, I would write something like this.

The Real Word of God

The translation of Genesis in the Old Testament is wrong. God really said,

Protect my creation of the fish of the sea, and the birds of the air, and all the wild animals of the Earth, and every creeping thing that creeps upon the Earth. For the garden I created gives you life and spirit. Without my garden, there is no life. Without life, there is no spirit.

Of course the Dominion version is wrong. Think about it. Who would say, “Go head, I give you dominion over everything. Run into the forest with your ax and start chopping. Dig up the prairie. Brutally murder the neighboring people if they disagree. Breed, raise in death camps and murder billions of domesticated animals.” The only people who would say something that insane are politicians (aka Emperor Constantine, King James), bankers (money lenders), and large stolen land owners wanting to sell for development profit, on and on.

God’s Commandments: Thou Shalt

1. Protect Nature; the cradle of the Spirit. All life is created and nurtured by Nature. There can be no spirit without life. There is no spirit on the Sun, Moon or Mars without life. There is Spirit on Earth because there is Nature.
2. Live within your fair share. Limit family size, population and consumption so it does not unfairly take from or damage other life. This means ending civilization and peacefully reducing human population by 100x with one-child families and mandatory sterilization after your first child. We made too many people, consumed too much, now we have to pay the bill.
3. Let women run society. Women’s expertise is creating and sustaining life. Women are less greedy, violent and dangerous than men. Only woman can vote and hold political office. Sorry guys, you had your chance and messed up the entire planet.
4. Share equally. All assets, homes and income are exactly equal with no exceptions; as the Native Americans practiced in their tribes. The brilliance of the Native American wigwam is that anyone can build one from natural materials and everyone has equal housing.
5. Only create biodiversity and regenerate ecosystems. Here are some examples:
   • Western Indigenous tribes would send out runners to different pine nuts groves in the Fall and bring back nuts; the elders would decide which grove to harvest.
   • Local tribes in the Rogue Valley of Southern Oregon would gather at Table Rock in the salmon run season, catch a few of the first salmon, and let them dry. They would not fish for the tribe until the first salmon was dry; allowing the run to reach its spawning grounds first to create fish for the future.
   • Plains tribal elders would teach the youth to only harvest wild onions when their seeds were dry and ready. The tribe would then dig the wild onion plants with a stick, turn the plant upside down and shake to sow seeds for the next year. This simultaneously cultivated and expanded the wild onion patch, sowed next year’s seed and harvested onions at the same time: no tractor, no fossil fuels, no farmer, but yes, food forever.
   • The Camas Valley near Coquille, Oregon was so well tended by local tribes that the entire valley was covered with the perennial food of the camas bulb. The settling farmers plowed the camas under and grazed it off with cows.
   • Much of the California Central Valley was covered by 400-600 year-old Valley Oak trees yielding up to 500 pounds of acorns, which we cut down. With our greed and hubris, civilized humans have become a plague on Earth. Our society is built upon violence, and incompetent ethics and rules with disregard for all life except for our immediate gratification.
6. Live in small groups of no more than 100 or 150 known people, not strangers. A group of 50 or so people is small enough to be mobile between seasons and not deplete a food source shared by all. The size of the community is dictated by the environment. A community at the mouth of a salmon river can be larger than one in the Mojave Desert.
7. Own nothing. We own what we can carry or make with our own hands. Private property has led to the destruction of the natural Earth by a billion cuts. Building a modern home destroys the life on the lot; destroying life from the myriad of places from which the materials originated and preventing life from growing there in the future. It also despoils all the places energy and water come from.
8. Get out of Nature’s way. Do not interrupt Nature’s succession.
   • Take no more than nature can regenerate so as not to interrupt the ecosystem. Stay in balance. Leave for the future. There is more life in a dead tree than a living one.
   • Exposed topsoil is an emergency. Nature immediately starts to heal the wound with pioneer species that we call weeds. These early germinating and rapidly growing plants bring their own or build fertility. Every time the farmer plows or the logger clearcuts, civilized man resets Nature’s success back to zero. Each time it does this, man further breaks down Nature’s ability to heal herself.  Where once forests of 4-6′ wide pines grew on the Siskiyou Crest in Oregon, only grass will grow there now. The early gold miners and loggers first cut the trees up high because it was easier to travel the crests than the river valley.  This ended Nature’s ability to collect moisture with the fog broom effect in an arid climate: a Class 1 error that cannot be corrected.
9. Live by wise experience. No rules or laws. No one is “in charge” to have power over another. No one can tell another “what to do”. However, if someone disrupts the community, they are exiled. Only wise and experienced guides show when to sow seed, when and how to wildcraft, when and where to fish, how to preserve food, and make dwellings and crafts. As it is now, civilized man breaks every law of Nature and God or Goddess. Civilized man sets himself up on hills in stone buildings; acting as lord of Earth and people.

If We Break Nature’s Laws

Laws of Nature are the Laws of Life. If we break them, we selfishly harm all life for the future. But why do we care, things are fine now? We care for several reasons.

1. Life is not good for many of the species. Millions of species have lost so much habitat or been killed off out right by humans that they are going extinct. Imagine that COVID-19 had killed 7.8 billion humans and only a few dozen or hundred humans were left.
2. Ecosystems are shattered. An ecosystem is a life support system maintaining Earth as we are adapted to it. For example, old-growth forests and the oceans create oxygen and rain. Humans have killed or are killing the original biodiverse forests. Most farmed and forestry topsoil is no longer alive or is dying. It is being mined and will mostly be gone this by the end of this century.(1) Cultivated farmland soil is no longer a live ecosystem but dead mineral matter. This century, rain will begin to stop, climate will heat, the weather will become more extreme, forests will die, the cycle will accelerate and spin out of control. Earth is slowly becoming a dry barren desert planet. If you don’t believe me, take a trip to the cradles of civilization in the Middle East; the region is now a desert. Look at the Crater Lake National Park snow fall records; they have dropping by almost half over the last 100 years as the old-growth forest was removed. Mature biodiverse forests create the rain; modern plantation forests eliminate the rain and create catastrophic fires.
3. Biodiversity crashes. Diversity is the only way to sustain a complex web of life. Each living species performs multiple energy transactions in niches. Diverse systems are resilient to shock, but they can only be hit or wiped out so many times by foolish civilized humans before they disappear.
4. Humans have environmental amnesia. We live too short a time to see the consequences and damage from what we do. Imagine the changes we would have seen if we had been born in the time the slave trader Christopher Columbus was found lost at sea. Side note: the Monsanto founders began as slave traders having no value for life from the start. Corporations such as this should lose their charter and all assets for crimes against humanity and all life.
5. The soul of humanity dies. We die because we have killed our relations. The only thing the wild asks of us is to live in peace. We put animals in death camps to be brutally murdered in factories and then we eat them. What animals are left in the wild, are chased in terror through the woods to be murdered with our guns for sport.

The human soul has died. We civilized people and other forefathers are the destroyers. We are the ones we feared would come. Unless we abandon civilization and peacefully reduce our population by 100x (yes 100x) with one-child families, there will be no value in saving humanity. Humanity will slowly die and take most of the life on Earth with her.

Civilization is not a natural part of life. Civilization is a recent meme created by the human abstract mind, that we must live in large static communities of strangers by domesticating or enslaving plants, animals, rivers and the sea. Modern religions were created by civilized people to cope with and to justify civilization’s ills of mass extinction, depletion, poisoning, and our own mental and physical demise.

I have seen the death of Nature first hand. I have seen Nature desperately try to heal a plowed field as she sends out each annual wave of the diminishing seed bank until the soil is dead from repeated plowings. I have walked the hills in Eastern Europe now rocky and barren of topsoil from long ago removal of the ancient forest and grazing of goats for millennia.

I have seen Nature regenerate when we just get out of her way. I have planted two forests in my lifetime. One native forest about 30 years ago where I lived to recover an over-hayed and grazed field in Minnesota. 12 years ago I planted 6 acres of food-forest to restore the lost forest canopy. The original home of the Southern Oregon Permaculture Institute is now an edible landscape.

If we get out of Nature’s way, she knows what to do. Nature is the teacher. Our job is literally to do nothing. Leave her alone until she can recover over a few hundred or thousand years. Only then can we re-engage in an indigenous harmony with all life.

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Chuck Burr is author of Culturequake: The Restoration Revolution. Revised Fourth Edition. 10th Anniversary.

Post Editor, Beth Brown — Beth is a lifestyle writer and former assistant news editor of the Easley Progress. She graduated from Columbia College with a focus on Writing and Public Affairs. She is also a singer/songwriter/musician, yogi, activist and Love Warrior for Mother Earth.

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(1) Scientific America. Only 60 Years of Farming Left If Soil Degradation Continues. Chris Arsenault. 2014-12-04.

(2) Huffington Post. Soil Erosion Far Worse Than Reported In American Farmlands, According To New EWG Report (VIDEO). Joanna Zelman. 2017-12-06