Issue #90: Living in the human zoo

Hey Heart & Soil Tribe

Have you ever been to the zoo and thought how sad it is to see some of the world’s most radical animals confined to a cage? 

In the early years of zoos, animals were kept in cages that bore no resemblance to their natural environment…

And not surprisingly, the animals quickly started dying from ‘unknown causes’.

Eventually, zoologists figured that they needed to mimic the animals’ natural environment if they were to have any hope of thriving.

(well thriving as much as one can expect while confined to a zoo)

This led to the concept of environmental enrichment, where zoos provide animals with environmental stimuli that mimic what they find in their natural environments.

This is fascinating. Zookeepers realized that for the animals to be physically and psychologically healthy, they needed to incorporate wild elements into their lives, including species-appropriate food, movement, sights, sounds, and smells…

Can you see where we’re going with this? 🤔

It begs the question, what is the natural habitat for humans?

Is it something like this:

Or this:

Just like those early zoo animals, most of the health problems we suffer from today can be attributed to living in an environment that bears little resemblance to our wild habitat.

We can’t flourish in a high stress environment of city apartments, traffic, office jobs, high debt, social media addiction and processed food.

It leads to loneliness, despair, anxiety and stress…

Metabolic dysfunction and disease.

The solution?

Well, we don’t have the luxury of time machines and we can’t all go live on an idyllic farm in Oregon…

But we can be intentional about enriching our environments with the things that we know we need to thrive.

Here’s a fun thought experiment…

If you were a zookeeper responsible for a ‘zoo version’ of you, how would you enrich your zoo environment so that you could thrive?

Would you feed yourself steak or cereal?

How much time would you allow yourself to spend on social media?

What sort of people would you want to spend time with, and doing what?

If you couldn’t get regular sunlight, would you purchase a red light therapy device to supplement?

Would you keep yourself confined indoors to a climate-controlled environment with artificial lights?

Or would you expose yourself to the cold, the heat, the wind, the rain and the dirt?

Consider this newsletter your gentle push towards building a better environment for yourself, one small step at a time. 

Start with something small today, perhaps bringing a bit more of the natural world into your daily life, be it through the food you eat, the air you breathe, or the company you keep. 

This is what we mean when we talk about an animal-based lifestyle. It doesn’t need to be a complete overhaul. It’s about introducing elements that remind us of our inherent connection to the wild, so that we can thrive and enjoy life a little more.

This week on Instagram:

This week on Radical Health Radio:

The Key to a Healthy Pregnancy After 40 | Ep. 59

This week on YouTube:

Reacting to Vegans of TikTok

This week on the blog:

6 Eye-Opening Benefits of Bone Marrow (Why’s It So Special?)

This week in customer reviews:

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– Ryan Yakiwchuk (WARRIOR)