What we should have realized by now about nature

I have not had a significant, “special” moment with the non-human world. I respect nature as much as human beings and I recognize humans as one component of nature. I love the morning birds’ chirping, the blue sky, falling leaves and the wind, but I don’t expect amazing things to happen between the human and non-human world. However, I feel warm and fuzzy inside when I see some unexpected human’s respectful love toward animals.
My mother values animals just as much as humans. She truly respects nature as a nature. A few years ago, we adopted a cat as a result my sister’s hunger strike for getting a cat. Since then, as we had expected, mom became the one who took care of everything for the cat. My mom became a total cat-person, and started taking care of every stray cat in the neighborhood. So within two years, we had more cats than people in the apartment. She never let her love for cats stop at the door of our apartment, but also took care of the street cats in our village. Now, she spends 1-2 hours a day feeding stray cats and helps people adopt orphan kitties. At first, she faced some troubles from neighbors who complained that my mom helped increase number of street cats of the village. But it should be okay, because since my mom feeds the cats, they don’t need to rummage through the trash anymore. Also cats don’t breed like rabbits. One of her goals is spaying and neutering cats and helping them get adopted when they are kittens. Some of the doormen of the apartment complexes around town now know my mom very well and they even started helping her feed street cats; sometimes they take orphan kittens in for adoption.
I never thought of her in this way before, but she is a true environmental activist that respects nature as much as humans and recognizes nature exactly the way it is.
The most important thing that we should think about for conserving nature is changing our definitions of the essence of humans and nature. We have traditionally defined and recognized nature as in service of humans’ needs. It seems that even the beauty of nature exists solely for tourism. As long as we keep this attitude toward nature and keep approaching environmental problems like a mechanic, we will eventually lose nature as well as our existence in the nature. We tend to make diagnoses of problems and try to fix the part where we see a problem like mechanics--for example, how preserving species will work if there is no habitat for them. Some species have gone extinct by direct humans’ activity, like hunting, but even more animals are disappearing from indirect humans’ influence, like getting rid of their habitat for our own habitat needs or pollution because we think that land and rivers exist for our own development. However, we should acknowledge that our asymmetric relation to nature has driven us to destroy it.
By now, we have learned that all creatures are inter-related. Other creatures are just as valuable to the earth as we are. We depend on each other and whether or not we fix the problem on one node of chains, we will be affected by the food chain. We might be able to exist longer than many other species, but at some point we will face the inhospitable nature unlike never before. We are not God, who is outside of the food chain and nature, but we exist within nature just like any other creature.
We will be able to fix the root of the environmental problems when we see ourselves as one of many components of nature. I believe that must be the ultimate enlightenment for human beings.