What is "Natural?"

A couple of things have gotten me thinking about this. One is, not surprisingly, labor and delivery. The other is the Little House on the Prairie books that I finished re-reading this month.

Like a lot of Americans, I've become more inclined to think well of products labeled "all natural" and usually for good reason. While "organic" is so overused it borders on absurd, "all natural" usually indicates no preservatives or no added hormones or generally less crap. I'm pro whole wheat and I vote.

Of course, in the 1880s you didn't have the options that we do today. Your food was organic because you either grew it yourself or you bought it from the guy who did. Food was carefully caught or harvested and carefully stored. They weren't processing the heck out of everything and there was no throwing away leftovers in Styrofoam boxes. Things were all natural by default.

The problem is, to paraphrase Bart Simpson, nature is a hideous bitch goddess. Like us, she is corrupted. What was good and pure is compromised.

Take the Rocky Mountain Locusts that extended their breeding ground into the Great Plains in the 1880s, devestating millions of acres of homesteaders' crops. Two competing "natural" forces collided: man, tilling the ground to produce food for survival and a bunch of hungry grasshoppers.

The Earth has always been meant to produce food for man (whereas we could argue about whether or not man was meant to hunt to survive), so in an important sense, farming is natural. So, too, do locust have to eat, and they frequently travel in swarms, so it was completely "natural" for them to migrate east for more food.

... A cloud was over the sun. It was not like any cloud they had ever seen before, wrote Laura Ingalls Wilder in "On the Banks of Plum Creek."

There was no wind. The grasses were still and the hot air did not stir, but the edge of the cloud came across the sky faster than the wind...

The Cloud was hailing grasshoppers. The cloud was grasshoppers. Their bodies hid the sun and made darkness. Their thin, large wings gleamed and glittered. The rasping whirring of their wings filled the whole air and they hit the ground and the house with the noise of a hailstorm.

They ate everything that was green and good; every leaf, every ear of corn. They ruined Pa's crop, and then they laid their eggs for a frightening reprise.

Au naturale.

It is no wonder we developed pesticides. Man, unlike beasts, can develop artificial means to protect itself against predators or the elements. Isn't that a kind of natural?

The truth is, we don't know precisely what nature should look like, only what it does. And sometimes it ain't pretty.

All creation groans Scripture says. Not unlike a woman during childbirth I suspect. In anticipation. Agony and beauty wonderfully, horrifically, inexplicably entwined until the end comes.

This is why we need thoughtful people to wrestle with questions of medicine and science. We are not called to conquer nature, but sometimes we have to try to temper her awful power--not because we can but because she is imperfect too.

And I will go easier on women who opt for comfort measures during childbirth. What is natural is not always good.

Another Reason To Tell Your Child To "Go Play Outside!"

Apparently there are some difficulties with the link. Maybe you have to sign up for the Pioneer Press to have access to certain articles, hence the reason the link worked for me. Apologies.

Here is the article:

Self-discipline, ADHD and the power of nature
By Maja Beckstrom
mbeckstrom@pioneerpress.com
Article Last Updated: 04/01/2008 04:13:55 PM CDT



Girls who can see trees outside their apartment window have more self-discipline. And kids with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder have an easier time focusing after spending time outdoors in spaces with greenery.
These are some of the findings from research conducted by Andrea Faber Taylor, who studies the benefits of nature to children at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is a keynote speaker Friday at "Nature, Children and Families: A Necessary Connection," a conference at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum.
Several studies since the 1970s have measured how natural spaces affect adults: Office workers who look out onto greenery like their jobs more and report greater life satisfaction. Patients whose hospital rooms overlook trees recover from abdominal surgery faster. Even photographs of nature have been shown to boost people's moods.
Now, Faber Taylor and Frances E. Kuo, director of the Landscape and Human Health Laboratory at Urbana-Champaign, have found a similar relationship with nature and children. They studied kids at a Chicago public-housing development by measuring the amount of greenery children saw from their apartment windows and by testing participants' concentration and ability to control their impulses. They found the greener the view, the higher the girls scored.
Faber and her colleagues theorized boys were not affected by the view because girls spent more time indoors, both because their parents wanted to protect them and because they were expected to help out with younger siblings.
Why would a view of nature improve concentration and impulse control? Nature is what researchers call a "restorative environment" that can help people recover from the mental and emotional fatigue of staying on task.
"The leaves are kind of moving, there are maybe some squirrels and birds. It holds your attention, but it's not riveting," Faber Taylor says. "You can think about other things while you're looking. There is this opportunity for reflective thinking, and that in itself is restorative."
Faber Taylor's most recent work has been with children diagnosed with ADHD. She surveyed 500 parents about how different leisure activities affected the behavior of their children and found children had fewer ADHD symptoms after spending time on tree-lined streets, grassy back yards and parks as compared with indoors or outdoor spaces that lacked greenery.
Finally, another study about to be published looked at 17 grade-school children who took 20-minute walks in three different settings: a quiet downtown, a manicured neighborhood with trees and a large city park.
The children exhibited the fewest symptoms of ADHD after walking through the park.