Nature woo

"Nature woo" refers to the irrational belief in the goodness of all things deemed "natural." Although such beliefs sometimes have a faint basis in science, any kernel of truth is usually blown way out of proportion and then coated in woo, all in the name of a campaign by the crunchier-than-thou to prove that Mother Earth loves them more than you.

Get the "artificial junk" out of my ground-up sweetened kale smoothie!

Dolphins and money New Age

Cosmic concepts

Crystals Quantums Your inner self Holistic medicine

Spiritual selections

Alan Watts Anima Mundi Biology Revisioned Egotheism Men's movement Pineal gland Quantum Stirwand The Venus Project v - t - e

“”The word 'natural' is completely meaningless! Everything is natural! Nature includes everything! It's not just trees and flowers! It's everything! A chemical company's toxic waste is completely natural! It's part of the nature! We're all part of nature! Everything is natural! Dog shit is natural! It's just not real good food!

—George Carlin

This explains why marketing managers love the meaningless word "natural" in phrases along the lines of "full of natural goodness" as they assume that customers will believe that anything that is "natural" is good for them.

Naturally lethal

Of course, nature woo ignores the fact that a vast number and range of perfectly natural things are either deadly or very bad for you. For example, belladonna, rabies, tetrodotoxin, excessive ultraviolet radiation and leprosy are all perfectly "natural" but are in no sense good for you. In fact the only way you may be able to survive some of these many natural baddies is through the intervention of "unnatural" modern medicine.

Nature woo relies on maintaining false dichotomies between Nature, humankind and human products, as if Homo sapiens does not form a part of dear old "Mother Nature", and as if once Homo sapiens has generated something it ceases to be "natural". In finer terms, the distinction made seems to be between the spontaneous and instinctive on the one hand, and the "unnatural" intellectual and reasoning (i.e. not spontaneous, and thus not with obvious time-proved antecedents) on the other. In other words, appeal to nature here is effectively a chthonic version of an appeal to tradition.

Examples

• Alternative medicine
  • Crystal healing
  • Herbalism
  • Homeopathy
• Natural parenting woo:
  • Lactivism
  • Natural childbirth and home birth, which may or may not be better for mother and child (should be cheaper, at least), but are not necessarily better just by virtue of being "natural."
• Vaccine hysteria
• Organic food
• Aspartame controversy
• Chemophobia
• E number phobia

See also

• List of medicinal plants (includes side effects)
• Noble savage, a stereotype of native peoples used to hawk "natural" products
• Folk science