Man-made?

Man-Made? — It Doesn’t Exist

The concept of anything on this planet being “man-made” is an illusion created by society. Human beings may manipulate the Earth’s resources or assemble them in different ways, but everything still originally comes from the Earth.

We, as a species, are part of the Earth ourselves, yet we are the only creatures to inhabit it that pay money—money that is itself made from materials taken from the Earth—to live here. We have created entire systems of ownership, currency, property, borders, and laws around a planet that none of us actually created. We draw lines on maps and decide where one person’s land ends and another person’s begins, even though the land existed long before either person did.

Somewhere along the way, humanity began to see itself as separate from nature rather than as a part of it. We build cities and call them civilization. We pave over the ground and call it development. We take resources from beneath the Earth, turn them into products, sell them to one another, and somehow forget that every step of the process depends on the same planet beneath our feet.

We often talk about “the environment” as though it is something separate from us—something outside of humanity that we can choose to protect or destroy. But there is no true separation. The air we breathe is part of the environment. The water we drink is part of the environment. The food we eat grows from the environment. The materials used to build our homes, vehicles, roads, phones, and computers all come from the environment.

We are not visitors here.

We are part of it.

Modern civilization has also made many of us increasingly disconnected from the skills our ancestors needed simply to survive. Most people today could not grow enough food to feed themselves, find or purify their own water, build adequate shelter, or survive for very long without the systems civilization has created for us. We depend on grocery stores, electricity, plumbing, transportation, technology, and countless other things that we often take for granted.

That doesn’t necessarily make humanity weak. It makes us dependent.

The more complicated civilization becomes, the more layers of dependence we build between ourselves and the resources that keep us alive. Someone grows our food. Someone transports it. Someone stocks the shelves. Someone provides the electricity that keeps the refrigeration running. Someone maintains the roads that allow the food to reach the store. Someone manufactures the vehicles used to transport it. Someone mines and processes the materials used to manufacture those vehicles.

We can trace almost anything we use every day through a long chain of human labor and natural resources until eventually we arrive at the same place:

The Earth.

Even something as seemingly unnatural as a smartphone began with materials that already existed in nature. Minerals were mined from the ground. Metals were refined. Sand became glass. Petroleum became plastics. Trees and other plant materials contributed to packaging and manufacturing processes. Humans designed the technology and assembled the pieces, but we did not create the raw materials from nothing.

We rearranged them.

That distinction is important.

Humans have accomplished incredible things. We have built monuments that have survived for thousands of years. We have constructed skyscrapers that reach hundreds of feet into the sky. We have created vehicles capable of crossing oceans and spacecraft capable of leaving our planet. We have developed computers that can perform calculations in seconds that would have taken humans years to complete.

But none of these accomplishments happened independently of nature.

A skyscraper is not made of “human.” It is made of steel, glass, concrete, and countless other materials that originated somewhere in the natural world. A car is not made of “human.” It is made from metals, plastics, rubber, glass, and other resources that humans learned how to extract and transform. Even the most advanced computer is ultimately a collection of materials that existed before the computer itself ever did.

And none of it could have been created without human beings—which means none of it could have been created without the Earth creating us first.

We don’t create matter.

We rearrange it.

We don’t create resources.

We discover, extract, refine, combine, and transform them.

We don’t create life from nothing.

We are life, participating in the continuation and transformation of other life.

Even the things we call “man-made” are ultimately Earth-made.

Perhaps humanity’s greatest illusion isn’t that we can create things. It is that we can create them without the Earth.

We can’t.

Every building, every road, every machine, every invention, every piece of technology, and every human being exists because the Earth provided the materials and conditions necessary for it to exist.

And yet, we continue to treat the Earth as though it is merely a warehouse of resources waiting for us to use. We fight over oil, minerals, land, water, and other resources as though the resources themselves belong to us. Nations compete for access to what the planet provides while people argue over who has the right to possess pieces of it.

Imagine if we looked at the world differently.

Instead of asking, “What can we take from the Earth?” perhaps we could ask, “What can we do with what the Earth has given us without destroying the system that provides it?”

Instead of seeing ourselves as owners of the planet, perhaps we should see ourselves as participants in it.

The Earth existed before our homes, our governments, our currencies, our borders, and our civilizations. It will continue to exist after many of the things we have built are gone. Buildings will eventually crumble. Roads will deteriorate. Technology will become obsolete. Entire civilizations can disappear.

The Earth will remain.

That doesn’t make humanity insignificant. In fact, it makes our responsibility greater. We have the ability to manipulate our surroundings on a scale that most other species cannot. With that ability comes the ability to cause enormous damage—but also the ability to understand what we are doing and make different choices.

We are not separate from the natural world.

We are not above it.

We are the natural world.

Maybe “man-made” isn’t really the right term after all.

Maybe there are only things the Earth made—and things humans learned how to rearrange.

And perhaps remembering that would change the way we treat the only home we’ve ever had.