Separation Story

The cultural constructs of separation simply didn’t exist for the vast majority of our history.

Depending on where we mark the beginning of imagined ‘separation’, we’re talking about this mindset existing only for between 0.008% and 0.07% of our lineage’s existence on this planet.

Homo habilis 2 million years ago didn’t have property rights, mind/body dualism, mechanistic worldviews, or human exceptionalism narratives.
For Homo sapiens specifically – our 300,000 years on earth – there is clear evidence of reciprocal relationship. Cave art, burial practices, and animistic worldviews across all continents show our species understood ourselves as embedded in nature through symbolic thought, culture, and ritual.

Therefore for 97-99% of our history (3+ million years), conscious beings in our lineage lived embedded in/as part of nature, without imagining separation.

The separation worldview isn’t humanity’s natural state. It’s an extremely recent aberration – and one that only ever spread to a portion of human cultures through colonialism and conquest. Releasing the separation worldview isn’t instant – it’s gradual unlearning of conditioned patterns. But it does give us the choice to ‘compost’: keep what nourishes, while letting the rest break down and transform.

So when did we start imagining that we were separate from nature?

Some cite the beginning of agriculture in the Neolithic period which started around 10,000 years ago (we’ve lived in agricultural communities for only 0.33% of human history). However even then, agriculture was not automatically extractive. Many agricultural societies maintained reciprocal relationships with land. Ancient cultures across Europe, the Americas, Africa, Asia, Oceania practiced agriculture and held ‘kinship worldviews’.

The separation worldview that spread globally through colonialism developed primarily through European history (a period that brought real discoveries alongside immense harm). Key inflection points:

Roman Empire (200 BCE – 500 CE): Property law, hierarchical worldviews, but still animistic elements. Land as property to own and engineer.
Christianity * (especially post-Constantine, 4th century CE): Dominant institutional interpretations of Nature as fallen/separate from divine. Medieval interpretations of religious texts emphasised human dominion over nature.
Enclosures (UK: 12th century onwards, peaked 1500s-1800s): Privatization of commons, severed communal land relationships.
Scientific Revolution (1500s-1600s): Mechanistic worldview, Descartes’ mind/body split.
Enlightenment (1700s): Reason over embodied knowing. Science taught us to view nature as material we could control.
Industrial Revolution (1760-1840): Massive acceleration, fossil fuels, urbanisation.
Colonialism (1500s-1900s): Imposed extractive worldviews globally. Turned ecosystems into commodities to claim, extract and trade.

These changes brought many benefits to some, at great cost to others, and each step moved us further from understanding ourselves as part of nature.

The dispossession of relational, land-based, nature-kinship cultures is pan-European and multigenerational. Roman conquest, followed by the developments listed above, systematically dismantled these cultures across the continent and beyond. Each wave of Anglian settlers – the Brythonic, the Anglo-Saxons, the Norse, the Normans (themselves descended from Gauls and Norse) – originally came from nature-connected cultures. The severance happened at different times and to different degrees, but the roots were there.

The Romans started a chain that finds its echoes in the later dispossessions. The colonising European nations whose cultures had been severed from relational, land-based ways of knowing exported this ‘wound’ globally. This in no way attempts to excuse those behaviours, but to explain what happened.

Therefore anyone living in Anglia today, regardless of ancestry, is a descendant of some version of this dispossession – because every thread of global ancestry was subject to some version of the same cultural dismantling at some point in history. African, American, Australian and Asian cultures were all affected by the later stages of this chain.

This understanding is offered in solidarity with, not competition to, the struggles of Indigenous peoples worldwide who have maintained threads of their heritage and whose colonisation has been more recent and sometimes ongoing. The wounds inflicted on still-living cultures are neither equivalent to nor explained away by what happened in pre-Roman Europe. Rather, understanding the origins of the colonising worldview and healing the wound in the coloniser culture, is part of the larger work of restoring relational ways of living globally.

The severing of the thread does not extinguish the birthright. Where living indigenous cultures carry their traditions forward in unbroken continuity, that continuity deserves recognition and protection. Where threads were cut – as they were across most of Europe – recovery and remembering is equally valid and necessary.

* _Note:_{While some interpretations of Abrahamic teachings (Christian, Islamic, Jewish) contributed to separation and domination narratives, believing that God created the world does not mean believing that humans should dominate it. Many practitioners recognise earth-honouring elements within their religions. The specific theologies may differ, but the shift from extraction to reciprocity can emerge from multiple starting points – those from any faith can choose the threads that honour rather than dominate Earth.}

Photo by J. Ramos – view from North Norfolk steam train.

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