Separation Story

The cultural construct of human separation from nature has only existed for a sliver of human history - here's when it began, and why that matters now.

We stand at a critical moment in human history. We are in a crisis of imagination - it is easier to picture the end of the world than the end of the systems destroying it, and we are treating the symptoms of the metacrisis not the cause. If we drive a car, the steering wheel follows our gaze. Mindset shapes behaviour.

The biggest barrier to systemic change isn’t a lack of solutions, it’s that most of us have stopped seeing ourselves as part of nature, kin with the living world. Even the use of the word ‘it’ reveals this – as if parts of the natural world are inanimate. But nature is a moving, changing, breathing network of life. We forgot that for 96-99.9% of our history our ancestors lived in dialogue with nature and that we all belong to the land. The separation worldview isn’t humanity’s natural state - it’s an extremely recent aberration. In order to ‘unlearn’ this we first need to understand how and when it happened.

Depending on where we mark the beginning of imagined ‘separation’, we’re talking about this mindset existing for maybe between 0.13% to 4% of our 300,000 years of human history. Cave art and burial practices across many continents suggest animistic worldviews expressing human embeddedness in nature through symbolic thought, culture, and ritual.

Some cite the beginning of agriculture in the Neolithic period which started around 12,000 years ago. However even then, agriculture was not automatically extractive. Many agricultural societies maintained reciprocal relationships with land. Ancient cultures across Europe, the Americas, Africa, Asia, Oceania practiced agriculture and held ‘kinship worldviews’. Cartesian dualism is sometimes described as a key turning point in European perception - this was just 385 years ago. The separation worldview that spread globally through colonialism developed primarily through European history (a period that brought real discoveries alongside immense harm). Key inflection points:

• Roman Empire (200 BCE – 500 CE): Property law, hierarchical worldviews, but still animistic elements. Land as property to own and engineer.

• Christianity: (especially post-Constantine, 4th century CE): Dominant institutional interpretations of Nature as fallen/separate from divine. Medieval interpretations of religious texts emphasised human dominion over nature. (While some interpretations of Abrahamic teachings contributed to separation and domination narratives, many Christian, Islamic, Jewish practitioners now and over the centuries recognised earth-honouring elements within their religions).

• Enclosures (UK: 12th century onwards, peaked 1500s-1800s): Privatization of commons, severed communal land relationships.

• Scientific Revolution (1500s-1600s): Mechanistic worldview and Descartes’ 1641 presentation of a mind/body split.

• Enlightenment (1700s): Reason over embodied knowing. Science taught us to view nature as material we could control.

• Industrial Revolution (1760-1840): Massive acceleration, fossil fuels, urbanisation.

• Colonialism (1500s-1900s): Imposed extractive worldviews globally. Turned ecosystems into commodities to claim, extract and trade.

These changes brought many benefits to some, at great cost to others, and each step moved us further from understanding ourselves as part of nature.

The dispossession of relational, land-based, nature-kinship cultures is pan-European and multigenerational. Roman conquest, followed by the developments listed above, systematically dismantled these cultures across the continent and beyond. Each wave of settlers to the British Isles – the Brythonic, the Anglo-Saxons, the Norse, the Normans (themselves descended from Gauls and Norse) – originally came from nature-connected cultures. The severance happened at different times and to different degrees, but the roots were there.

The Romans started a chain that finds its echoes in the later dispossessions. The colonising European nations whose cultures had been severed from relational, land-based ways of knowing exported this ‘wound’ globally. This in no way attempts to excuse those behaviours, but to explain what happened.

Therefore anyone living in the UK today, regardless of ancestry, is a descendant of some version of this dispossession – because every thread of global ancestry was subject to some version of the same cultural dismantling at some point in history. African, American, Australian and Asian cultures were all affected by the later stages of this chain.

This understanding is offered in solidarity with, not competition to, the struggles of Indigenous peoples worldwide who have maintained threads of their heritage and whose colonisation has been more recent and sometimes ongoing. The wounds inflicted on still-living cultures are neither equivalent to nor explained away by what happened in pre-Roman Europe. Rather, understanding the origins of the colonising worldview and healing the wound in the coloniser culture, is part of the larger work of restoring relational ways of living globally.

The severing of the thread does not extinguish the birthright. Where living Indigenous cultures carry their traditions forward in unbroken continuity, that continuity deserves recognition and protection. Where threads were cut - as they were across most of Europe - recovery and remembering is equally valid and necessary.

Releasing the separation worldview isn’t instant – it’s gradual unlearning of conditioned patterns. But it does give us the choice to ‘compost’: keep what nourishes, while letting the rest break down and transform.