Try to imagine a society—or even an individual human being—that does not require some form of interaction with the natural world in order to exist. At the moment, I am reading Sharman Apt Russell’s Hunger: An Unnatural History (2005), and she speaks in her opening chapter about certain individuals—eccentrics, desperately overweight individuals, and even “hunger artists” who perform by abstaining from food—who have avoided eating for extraordinary periods of time. An American magician, for instance, had himself suspended in a six foot by six-foot by three-foot box near the Tower Bridge in London, England, for 44 days without food in 2003. But did this “entertainer,” David Blaine, go without water? Without air? And what about the 465-pound Scottish man, known to the public simply as “A.B.,” who fasted for 13 months in the mid-1960s in order to lose 276 pounds? Even during this long period of hunger, Mr. A.B. relied upon the planet, upon nature, for his very survival. All human beings throughout history have relied upon their relationship with nature in order to exist.