Back to Nature

Such idealistic back to nature movements also developed in other parts of Europe. Almost contemporaneously, a group of British writers including Harold John Massingham, Adrian Bell and Rolf Gardiner, promoted their vision of a revitalised countryside (Moore-Colyer, 2001). Central to this vision was an agriculture based on organic principles and this movement became one of the origins of Soil Association which was founded in 1946. 

For a full life cycle assessment, the basic principle is that each material and energy input into the system should be traced back to natural resources obtained from the environment, or to releases into the environment. These are termed elementary flows , and they represent inputs into or outputs from the system being analysed. In an analysis of this type, it may be relatively straightforward to assign a material value to a flow of (for example) water effluent into the environment, but what may be less certain is the environmental impact of such a flow in a quantitative sense. 

Let us now come back to nature as it is, and look at the size of the smallest organisms. Figure 11.5 compares the genome size distribution, calculated under a series of assumptions (Islas etal., 2004), of free-living prokaryotes, obligate parasites, thermophiles, and endosymbionts. The values of DNA content of free-hving... 

Moreover, new biomimetic materials generate new perspectives on nature and artefacts that could help change the public image of chemistry. The development of synthetic materials - synthetic dyestuffs in the late nineteenth century and synthetic textiles in the twentieth century - has been celebrated as the triumph of artificial over natural products. In contrast to synthetic materials of the plastics era, composite materials (though still artificial and even more artificial than the conventional plastics) have turned the chemist s attention back to nature. 

On January 9, 1979, Secretary Schlesinger in a talk to the National Association of Petroleum Investment Analysts Group of New York in New York City, again called on industry to switch back to natural gas from oil. In a major shift in the Carter Administration policy, Secretary Schlesinger said that the United States would emphasize increased industrial consumption of natural gas instead of coal to reduce oil imports. 

While the Carter Administration has long discouraged the use of natural gas to fuel utility and industrial plants, it recently reversed this position because a short-term surplus of natural gas has developed and they are now pleading with electric utilities and industrial plants to convert back to natural gas. 

Fig. 10.3 Annual weighted average tritium concentrations of representative weather stations. Values increased dramatically in 1963 and have been steadily decreasing ever since. Values are much higher in the northern hemisphere (where the nuclear tests took place). At present the tritium concentrations are almost back to natural values. [From Environmental Isotope Data World Survey of Isotope Concentrations in Precipitation, vol. 1 (1969) and vol. 7 (1983).]...

The back-to-nature ethic embodied in both Russian ideals about the organic life and dachniki s activities contributes an important comparative example to understandings of environmental and nature movements in other parts of the world. Russians ideas about environmental stewardship invert the expected relationship between person and land, so that nature is understood to care for and protect people. Yet this does not absolve individuals from responsible behavior, even though what constitutes responsible action might seem at odds with the goals of environmental conservation. As a result, while popular opinion in Russia might hold that litter and fires in forests are undesirable, the perpetuation of such practices is understandable within the logic of a philosophy that sees nature as the one space where the normal rules and structures do not apply. 

The strong tendency towards phytotherapy and self-medication is further supported by health insurance companies which exclude medication for minor diseases from the list of reimbursed products. So-called lifestyle drugs cmd functional food are the industry s reaction towards such trends. Patients take care of their heedth in a more responsible manner and try to prevent severe and chronic diseases by changing their lifestyle and controlling their food intake. Dietary measures instead of medicine represent the new approach toward a healthier life. A profound distrust of genetically engineered food has paved the way to a back to nature trend with a preference for products with the bio label. 

Brower, V. (2008). Back to nature extinction of medicinal plants threatens drug discovery. J. Natl. Cancer Inst, 100 838-839. 

The above presented materials cover only a small fraction of the TCM research field in China, and most of the researches are still in continuation. Today as Back-to-Nature has become a worldwide trend, TCM becomes an appealing and fascinating research field, attracting research efforts from all over the world. In recent years, TCM has been used in treatment of many difficult and complicated human diseases, such as AIDS, Cancers, Alzheimer s diseases, etc. Its efficacy has been supported by numerous clinical data. To further explore the mechanism of TCM and active principles become a challenge to all the natural product chemists, biological and medical researchers. 

Murdoch, J. and Miele, M. (1999) Back to Nature changing worlds of production in the food system. Sociologia Ruralis 39, 465-484. 

Phillip Morris Boca Foods, Back to Nature... 

We are now witnessing a growing movement away from petrochemical-based fibres back to natural fibres. There are some reasons for this, e.g. ... 

Back to Nature is the solution then Looking at a few numbers in Table 4.7 may prevent hasty judgments reading this questioa About 50 million t of plastics are produced in Europe each year from petroleum. The production of natural polymers is about 0.1% percent of this total virtually all of which is poly lactic acid. These numbers are not promising it would be lunacy to expect that polylactic acid (Fig. 4.30) or any other semi-synthetic and biodegradable polymer could replace petroleum-based plastics in any foreseeable future. 

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