You know, I feel like every time I watch someone die, I gain a little better understanding of life itself.

Witnessing the dying process informs me of how I myself want to leave this world, should I be fortunate enough to have any say in the matter.

But I think it also reveals something deeper, something related to my place in the cosmos.

As it so happens, it was the height of the planting season when a lot of this was going on, so I often found myself out in the garden thinking about these things.

And that gave me some clarity on how I fit into the overall natural world.

See, when I observe the plants and animals living and dying around me, I'm struck by the brutal nature of existence.

Every last organism is struggling against all odds to survive and reproduce in a harsh environment.

And it'll do anything within its power to make that happen.

You won't find any lofty ideals of morality or justice out here.

It's might makes right, survival of the fittest.

The strong survive, and the weak are cold.

Life on this planet existed that way for billions of years before we came along.

So before we insert our human egos into the equation, I think we have to recognize these fairly uncontroversial facts about the savage nature of the biosphere.

Now, the reason for caution here is that we humans have a terrible tendency to anthropomorphize other living things, especially other animals.

I don't think it's always a conscious decision, but it leads to some very strange logic that skews our perception of nature, because it creates this illusory hierarchy of worth or value that has no basis in the natural world.

As humans, we ascribe subjective value to different organisms, because some are far more useful to us than others.

But this has some unfortunate side effects.

For instance, it's led us to focus nearly all our attention on the relatively small number of species that obviously benefit our civilization, while ignoring those that seem useless.

After all, why should we care about some bug that lives way out in the wilderness, far removed from any human settlement?

So we make these arbitrary and self-serving decisions about which organisms are worth saving and exploiting, and which are not.

And that's gotten us into a lot of trouble as we continue to destroy habitats and wipe an increasing number of species off the face of the planet.

People are starting to realize that, hey, this bug in the forest was actually the lynch interactions and eliminating it had all these negative cascade effects that we didn't expect.

The fact of the matter is that, even at this late hour, we still know very little about how the millions of species on earth are interacting with and affecting one another.

Which makes it difficult to make any strong, scientifically objective claims about which organisms are important and which aren't.

Therefore, a prudent approach might be to treat all organisms on an equal footing, even if they don't have feet.

But what does all this mean for the garden?

Since humans are at the top of the food chain, we hold great power over what lives and dies in the garden.

Which means that at some point, every gardener must come to grips with being the judge, jury, and executioner.

When I started gardening again as an adult, I found myself hesitant to kill the insect pests that were attacking our plants.

Hell, sometimes I even feel bad about pulling up weeds that worked hard to grow up big and strong.

But at the end of the day, I'm a living organism with just as much evolutionary will to survive as the pests and the weeds.

So if it's me or them, I'm choosing me every time.

And I think that's perfectly natural.

I mean, we all have to draw our own lines in the sand, right?

Some of us hunt, some of us fish, some of us rip out a bunch of plants so that we can grow other ones in their place.

But the common denominator is that we're killing to survive.

Which is something that our species has been doing for millions of years.

To feel guilty about that would be like trying to take the blame for the sun rising in the morning.

It's simply how life works.

On this planet at least.

So why am I talking about all this?

Well, it occurred to me that if we really want to reconnect with nature, we gotta first understand how we fit into it.

The problem is that modern society greatly obscures the myriad ways in which the natural environment is currently sustaining us.

Since the agricultural revolution some 12,000 years ago, the vast majority of humans have been subsistence farmers, so there wasn't any doubt about where the food was coming from.

Most people were directly interacting with plants and animals on a daily basis.

Of course, this is no longer the case in advanced societies.

Efficiencies in modern agriculture have allowed the populace to remain largely oblivious about its own food supply.

When you think about it, that's a fairly significant turning point.

We're some of the first people in all of human history to enjoy such a luxury.

But it comes at the cost of isolating us from the killing floor.

We no longer have to see how the sausage is made, so we develop a warped sense of our place in all this.

And in the confusion, we attempt to apply the morals and values of our human societies to the natural world, which I believe is a mistake.

Non-human animals aren't people, and we shouldn't treat them as such.

Rather, we should make an effort to understand and respect the role that each organism plays within the ecosystem, including our own.