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We speak about nature in a curious way. We go into nature, spend a weekend in nature, talk about reconnecting with nature, protecting it, preserving it, or getting back to it. I use these expressions too; they are useful, and we all understand what they mean. Yet hidden inside them is a peculiar assumption: that nature is somewhere else, a realm we can enter or leave, while the human world occupies a separate space of its own.

But where, exactly, is the boundary?

I have been thinking about this while developing an essay on emergence, relationship and human belonging arising from my Living Field Hypothesis.

The more closely I look at the question, the stranger our imagined separation becomes. We can build walls between ourselves and the weather, live high above the ground, pave roads across forests and bring food home wrapped in plastic. We can spend entire days without touching soil, noticing the movement of the sun or knowing which phase the moon is in, and yet none of this places us outside the living world.

The breath entering my lungs has a history, as does the food on my plate. Water has travelled through clouds and landscapes, rivers and soils, plants and living bodies across spans of time almost impossible to comprehend before, briefly, becoming part of me. My body itself exists through processes I did not invent and cannot consciously command, continuously exchanging matter with a world that appears to be outside me but upon which every moment of my existence depends.

Perhaps civilisation has simply become extraordinarily good at concealing these relationships from us. I turn on a tap and water appears without my having to think about where it came from. I enter a supermarket and find food waiting beneath electric lights, separated from the soil, weather, insects, microbes, plants, animals and human hands involved in producing it. I adjust a thermostat and even the weather seems, temporarily at least, negotiable. The relationships have not disappeared; only much of the evidence of them has been pushed from view.

This raises a question I find increasingly difficult to dismiss: what does it actually mean to reconnect with nature if we never biologically left it?

Perhaps what we call disconnection is something rather different. A person can feel profoundly alienated from the natural world while remaining entirely embedded within it, because our awareness of relationship and the existence of relationship are not the same thing. I may cease to notice the systems sustaining me, but my failure to perceive them does not make me independent of them.

That distinction matters because, if nature is something outside us, our relationship with it begins to appear optional. We can visit it, admire it, exploit it, protect it or ignore it, always retaining the impression that there is an us here and a nature over there.

But if we are participants within the living world rather than observers standing beyond its boundary, the question changes. We are no longer deciding what relationship we should establish with something separate from ourselves; we are considering the quality of relationships in which we are already participating.

This is one of the questions that has continued to surface as I develop the Living Field Hypothesis, and it is leading me into a larger exploration of emergence and human belonging. I don't think the interesting question is simply whether humans should spend more time in forests, grow gardens, watch birds or walk barefoot on the earth, valuable though those experiences may be. There is something more fundamental beneath them.

Perhaps separation is not the condition from which humans need to escape. Perhaps separation is the story we have learned to tell about a condition of belonging that never actually ceased.

If that is so, then our familiar desire to “get back to nature” contains a curious paradox. We may indeed need to recover something—attention, humility, reciprocity, perhaps even wonder—but we cannot return to a living world we never actually left.

Perhaps the boundary we have been trying to cross was never really there.

© Carol Walden 2026. All rights reserved.
The Living Field Hypothesis