Harmony

One of the familiar tropes of the resulting dogma is that our pre-industrial ancestors “lived in harmony with nature” while we moderns live in conflict with it. This alleged conflict, we are warned, is destroying nature and, in turn, will destroy humanity. “Addicted” (as the common accusation goes) to the inexpensive energy available from fossil fuels, we denizen of modernity sinfully acquire frivolous material goodies today at the expense of mass destruction, destitution, and death tomorrow. Our departure from our ancestors’ practice of living in harmony with nature spells our doom. To live harmoniously with nature is to understand and accept the non-sentient reality of natural forces. The greater this understanding and acceptance, the greater the harmony. Because we humans today know so much more than did our ancestors about physics, chemistry, forestry, meteorology, metallurgy, biology, epidemiology, and on with life estrays, logistics, urges… we live so much more harmoniously with nature than did our ancestors. Nature all along did its thing – for example, it occasionally failed to water crops, and it often grew lethal bacteria within children’s lungs – while human beings who were as ignorant of nature as nature is of human beings, chanted, danced, built totems, burned leaves and twigs, sacrificed animals, all in fruitless efforts to solve the problems. In a contrast that could not be more stark – and as evidenced by our scientific knowledge of how to irrigate fields, and how to produce and administer antibiotics – it is us today, in the modern globalized world, who live in much closer harmony with nature. Only people who understand natural forces and how to counteract or reinforce or sustain or alter them with other natural forces can be truly said to live harmoniously with nature. Every moment of every day every one of us in the modern world enjoys some good, service, or experience that is made possible only because countless strangers perform a complex series of astonishingly well-coordinated actions that have among their final results the goods, services, and experiences that are commonplace in modern life. From the alarm on your smartphone that awakens you in the morning, through the coffee and croissant that you enjoy for breakfast and the computer or other power tools that you use to work, to the hard shingled roof over your bedroom and the soft machine-woven sheets on which you fall asleep at night, you consume, each and every day of your life, a steady stream of the fruits of the labours of billions of strangers. Let’s stop mistaking dull routines and the absence of complex patterns of production and consumption as evidence of lives lived in harmony with nature. It’s a myth – we might say an urban myth – that pre-industrial people lived with nature harmoniously, or more harmoniously than we today live with nature. Nature devastated our pre-industrial kin. Nature ruthlessly plowed them into early graves. Our ancestors’ failure to produce much material wealth was a reflection, not of their harmony with nature, but of their deep ignorance of – and, hence, conflictual relationship with – nature. Harmony category / product Bamboos they are nature-oriented up to you! Bamboos include some of the fastest-growing plants in the world, due to a unique rhizome-dependent system. Certain species of bamboo can grow 91 centimetres (36 inches) within a 24-hour period, at a rate of almost 40 millimetres (1+1⁄2 in) an hour (equivalent to 1 mm every 90 seconds). This rapid growth and tolerance for marginal land, make bamboo a good candidate for afforestation, carbon sequestration and climate change nature mitigation. Bamboo is versatile and has notable economic and cultural significance in South Asia, Southeast Asia, Indonesia, and East Asia, being used for building materials, as a food source, and as a raw product, and depicted often in arts, such as in bamboo paintings and bamboo working. Bamboo, like wood, is a natural composite material with a high strength-to-weight ratio useful for structures. Bamboo’s strength-to-weight ratio is similar to timber, and its strength is generally similar to a strong softwood or hardwood timber.