We are products of our environment that is, our surroundings, and our genetics. The two, which are also sometimes called nurture versus nature, do not exist apart from one another.  Organisms exist in something we call environment, a place, or atmosphere, that changes second by second.

If a bullet flies through your head while you read this, you have just been impacted by your environment. However, the neighborhood in which you live may be at least in part dependent upon your genetic make up. So long as prejudice and bigotry exist, more oppressed people will live in bad environments than other people.

The question, “Are we affected more by nature or nurture? “So often asked, always sounds absolutely ridiculous.  We do not ask for example, is my cat a product of cats mating, or the howling in the alley?  We do not ask if the cells inside a worm or beetle that creates the soil are products of the soil, or other worms and beetles.  Of course, everything, everyone, is produced by both matter, and the place wherein that matter comes to be. The division between behavioralist and genetic theory in psychology are likely behind this idea of a separation.

Nor is there any room for speculation that one could be more influential than another. As much as we are products of our environment, we are dynamically fluidly moving in that environment affecting matter, and therefore genetics of all living organisms, every moment of every day.

The poets say it as: No man is an island. Another way to say it is no man is a man.

A man is collection of the air in his lungs at that moment, be it polluted in Delhi, or pristine in Alaska. A man is a collection of the food he ate that day, the water he drank, the neurons firing in his brain because he heard a honking horn, or the cells, of his body.

Those cells are made up of matter too, ever smaller particles down to the atomic level. At this level we are space, and matter, moving through time.

This article calls for one to rightfully say that indeed environment does affect us. It is vitally important. It tells us that we should provide a stimulating, supportive, sustainable environment for all living organisms. It does not call for us to ignore that we are also formed by matter, which is shaped by environment through something we have come to call genes, or DNA.

Take care of your environment to what ever degree you can influence it to be more natural in accordance to natural laws, and you have become an environmentalist. Take care of your genes that are your body, your dynamic substance moving through place and time, with the utmost care of conserving, protecting and appreciating the miracle of genetic  bio-diversity, and you have just become an environmentalist.

To live, all organisms must work together cooperatively to protect the environment, that is we must nurture nature, and we must respect internal, and external, nature to nurture us.