when did human beings stop being part of nature

i asked myself this question when i was at the grand canyon. the reason it came to me had to do with the foot paths along the rim and the paved paths that were a short ways away from the rim. i started to think about all the people that came there to experience nature, but were not being a part of it. the path you chose to walk on determined whether or not you were part of nature and existing within it, or experiencing it as something outside yourself.

i used to think things like this alot, and ruminate on them for long periods of time. not so much lately. but this one stuck with me. then i read this book "seize the daylight" about the history of daylight saving time. i never knew anything about it, and just took it for granted as something that always happened, that it was some sort of native technique stolen by the europeans or that ancient egyptians followed this process and it just continued to modern day.

well, i was quite wrong. the idea of it was first written down by benjamin franklin in 1784. he amused himself with the idea of moving hours earlier to take advantage of the morning sunlight in the summer months. he simply mused about it and it didnt go anywhere. it wasnt until 1907 when the idea came up again. this time, by an architect in britain named william willett. his designs took into account the sunlight and he made it his lifes mission to see that clocks were forced forward in spring and backward in fall.

the idea never caught on in his lifetime. eventually during the world wars a number of countries employed daylight saving time to increase production in their war plants and reduce evening raids. anyway, after world war 2 the idea of a daylight saving time was controversial and when in and out of fashion, whimsically. it wasnt until the mid 1980's that daylight saving time was made official in the united states. these things are crazy to learn.

anyway, this isnt about the history of dst. but, reading that book helped me to realize that human beings stopped being part of nature when time standardization was first formalized. that was in the year 1828. why then? because before then every community followed its own time based upon the sun at high noon. when the sun was at high noon the local church would ring its bell and people would set their watches to noon. or a ball would drop at city hall to signify the same things and folks would set their watches to noon.

when time standardization came into effect, it wiped out local times and wiped out the position of the sun relative to time. large swaths of land would be subjected to the local time of a major city. eastern time came about based on noon in washington dc. central time was based in columbus ohio. and on and on. and the idea of time standardization was primarily for the benefit of railroad schedules. corporations taking on nature in the name of profit.

so, my conclusion, is that when time stopped being judged by the position of the sun, humans stopped being part of nature and started being observers/users/abusers of nature.

at the time, some people disregarded the change. mainly farmers, natives, and those in rural communities they continued on living by the position of the sun and continued living in sync with nature, instead of trying to live in sync with the railroad companies.