Natural Humanists acknowledge that human beings, and all of the species from which they evolved, have always lived in completely natural, totally wild environments, for virtually all of the past 4,200 million years[i],[ii].
This has only ceased to be the case in the past 12,000 years[iii] (less than 0.0003% of our ancestors’ total time on Earth) when humans started to destroy these shared wild environments, solely to graze animals, which they had enslaved to provide them with food, or to grow crops, solely to feed themselves, or to feed the animals they had enslaved as their food-providers. This effectively converted these previously wild, biodiverse areas of land into totally unnatural, hugely nature-depleted outdoor ‘food factories’.
Even right up to the Industrial Revolution, in 1800, over 90% of the world’s population still lived in rural areas[iv], but from then onwards, initially in Europe and the USA, they started to build houses, roads, schools, factories, towns and every other type of construction that now forms part of the almost completely unnatural ‘built environments’, in which most human beings spend most, if not all, of their lives.
This has resulted in human beings, for the first time in history, having almost no contact with nature, or with truly natural environments at all, and has also led to the destruction of a large proportion of the world’s natural environments, thereby denying millions of other species a habitat and natural existence.
Indeed, according to the United Nations, most people on Earth now live in (unnatural) urban areas, including over 80% of all of the people in Western Europe, North and South America, Australia, Japan and the Middle East, a figure that is expected to continue to increase in the future[v].
Even people who still live in rural areas today, have very little contact with truly natural environments, as almost all land in rural areas is, in terms of biodiversity, effectively an ‘agricultural wasteland’, where once hugely-biodiverse wild woodland and meadows, which, for millions of years, were shared equally by thousands of species of different living things, and with which humans had daily contact, have been replaced by totally unnatural ‘monoculture’, such as fields of grass for our enslaved cows and sheep to eat, or fields of potatoes or cabbage or wheat, where very few other species of wildlife exist, not least because of chemicals sprayed to protect these crops at the expense of any other wild species.
Quite rightly, there is much concern today about the destruction of the rainforest, to create land for human agriculture, for example, in the Amazon region of South America. However, the sad truth about our own countries’ history is that the majority of all land on Earth, including most of the agricultural land in the UK, was, itself, previously wild forest or other hugely biodiverse natural environments, and these too were destroyed, just to create our own agricultural land, which is now effectively just one huge ‘open-air food factory’.
We also ‘stole’ this wild land to build all of the roads, buildings and other human-made ‘biodiversity deserts’, like golf courses, which are now part of the modern, totally unnatural human world, and are solely for the selfish benefit of human beings.
Some Natural Humanists may choose to move home, from urban areas to rural areas, and may choose rural locations which have as many natural features and environments as possible, rather than moving to intensively farmed ‘human-made’ agricultural areas. They may choose to live in homes with a view of natural things, not of other homes, roads or any other artificial features.
Natural Humanists acknowledge the irony that farm animals have the ability to live most, if not all of their lives in rural areas, and to have daily contact with nature, even though they’re all effectively unnatural ‘human-made’ species, which have been deliberately bred by humans to have characteristics which make them efficient at meeting human beings’ own selfish needs, for example, for meat, milk or wool.
In contrast to this, most human beings, who are themselves a completely natural species, often have no ability at all to live in such rural or natural locations, as many governments and local councils deliberately deny them the right to build homes in such rural areas, and also restrict the numbers of new homes there, which are often only allowed to be used by people who were born in, or already have a connection with these rural areas, which, in an immoral capitalist society, means that the cost of buying or renting the limited supply of homes that do exist there, is well outside the budget of many people, possibly for the whole of their lives.
The result is that many human beings are effectively ‘imprisoned’, in ‘unnatural’ towns, cities and other human-built environments, possibly for the whole of their lives, and have little or no contact with, or even any appreciation or knowledge of, the natural world.
Click here to read the next Chapter!
References
[i] Earth.com. “All life on Earth comes from one ancestor, now we know who it was.” Earth.com. 22 May 2025.https://www.earth.com/news/luca-last-universal-common-ancestor-progenitor-all-life-on-earth/
[ii] Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). “Frequently Asked Questions About Evolution”. https://www.pbs.org. 6 June 2025. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/faq/cat01.html
[iii] Teletchea, Fabrice. “Animal Domestication: A Brief Overview”. Animal Domestication. 17 July 2019. IntechOpen. 9 June 2025. doi:10.5772/intechopen.86783. Cited on: https://www.intechopen.com/chapters/67565
[iv] HYDE (2023), with minor processing by Our World in Data. “Share of the population living in urbanized areas” [dataset]. PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, “History Database of the Global Environment 3.3” [original data]. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/long-term-urban-population-region?time=1800
[v] Our World in Data. “Share of the labor force employed in agriculture”. Our World in Data. (based on data from the International Labor Organization (via the World Bank) and historical sources). Cited on: