Billions of years passed after the dawn of creation. Bacteria arose on the earth's surface, then vegetation flourished, and animals and man emerged. All arose and developed naturally. All things in the universe undergo constant change together; there are no exceptions. Believing himself to be the crowning achievement of God-made in God's own image, mankind set about to fashion the future with his own hands. But millions of years ago, the monkey who, by such reasoning, was the most advanced and highly evolved of the organisms on earth never claimed to be the lord of creation or made in the image of God. It simply lived in nature and didn't worry a bit. Only man today wonders what he should eat and how to live; only he frets over tomorrow. We should be concerned first with why, living as we do in nature, we are so reluctant to entrust our future to God.
Clever man does not know life; he agonizes over death and asks, "What should I eat?" I generally do not know what word to use when I talk of human life, just as I have difficulty expressing the notion of death. Whenever I try to say what one must live by, or, stepping back a little, when I try to explain in concrete terms what food to live on, I always fear being understood in a narrow, limited sense and forced to give an explanation that can only be specious. This is why the only explanation possible is to say that all one has to do is to live. Pressed further, all I can do is explain as well as possible what manner of living is true to man by resorting to some vague, abstract analogy: "The sparrows live by picking at the seeds in the grass growing over there. All man ever had to do himself was simply to live." That is about the only explanation I can give. People stumble right from the start by asking themselves what they should be eating. They turn inquiring eyes to the form, quality, and value of food, wondering what they should reach for first and what is important. Gradually, a few specific foods are selected as necessary for man from the large number present in nature, and the rest are cast aside. This thinking grows even worse, culminating eventually in the conviction that there is no harm in growing and eating whatever one likes. First there is nature and there is food, and in the midst of this lives man. That was the original state of the world. But the moment that people hearken to the view that first there is man and he produces the crops of his choosing, humanity is transformed into an arrogant lord who commands nature. Man believes that he has spared and made wise use of nature. He thinks that human intelligence is superior to the wisdom of nature and God. But although humanity can learn from nature, it is not able to control or guide nature. One could say that nature bears the wisdom of God. It has taken nature five billion years to create plants, animals, and man. How can scientists hope to know what organisms to create to supercede man? Man shouldered the hardships of growing crops from the moment that he began to think he could grow food for himself with human knowledge. He has become an animal that can survive only by processing and cooking the food that he eats. It is like spitting up at the heavens. These efforts have had the effect of destroying nature and ravaging mankind. Of course, I have no intention of saying simply to stop processing and cooking food. It is just that I am worried over the process whereby precious food is transformed by false human knowledge into evil food, degrading and corrupting humanity. Human knowledge has passed beyond the bounds of naturally derived knowledge. I reject human knowledge that deviates from the wisdom of God. I am afraid that mankind may refuse to live in an inhabitable nature and may cut himself off from the future with his arrogant intellect. Creation is like a magnificent orchestra playing the symphony of nature. Humanity should have been content as one member of that orchestra. Bored with just watching the natural drama about him, mankind has been drawn toward a stage where he can play a one-man show. Well, by tracing the effects that his disregard for nature and the progress made in the foods that he promoted have had on his own destiny, we get a good idea of where exactly this absurd struggle leads. Wild, primitive wheat arose on the Mesopotamian plains in the Middle East. Wild rice is said to have originated in southern China, Burma, and remote parts of Assam. Rice also reportedly existed since antiquity in the Saharan region of Africa. Ancient man who settled in these three great birthplaces of grain began cultivating the wild rice and wheat that grew there, in this way coming by an abundance of food. It was here that the Mesopotamian, Chinese, and Egyptian civilizations were built up. But today, each of these regions has been totally transformed to desert. All that remains are vast, desolate ruins. Why should this be? I strongly doubt that this was the result of changes in climate and desertification that created food shortages, scattered people and destroyed civilizations. What actually happened was that trees were cut down in the name of civilization. Advances were made in farming methods and slashand-burn agriculture adopted. All this depleted the soil, causing a decline in vegetation and setting the process of desertification into motion. Up until about twenty years ago, I was optimistic. Even as recently as ten years ago, I thought that if our supply of energy runs out, mankind will be able to get by if only he is willing to practice natural farming. But lately, I realize all too well just how wishful such hopes have been. Human intelligence has overdeveloped and become sidetracked. Today, man has metamorphosed into a creature that can remain unconcerned even if it loses sight of and destroys nature and God. It is fair to say that man's excessive confidence in his own intelligence has caused him to lose sight of, or rather to destroy, true nature and true food, true life, true God, even the true image of man himself. With nature ruined, true nature is nowhere to be found anymore. Food worthy of being called the staff of life can no longer be had. There just are no natural children around any longer who live according to their instincts. It looks to me as if natural people, natural farming, and natural diet are all receding and vanishing at an accelerating speed. From "The Road Back to Nature"
