I know what the equation is for living and dying. It could all be said in the word “balance”.
Living in balanced eating, breeding and killing.
We avoid—or better said—deny our understanding that life, all life, is sustained by eating that which is living. I don’t make an exception between plants and animals because the equation is the same and is embedded in the totality of organic life.
What plants “eat” is another consideration of what eating means and what plants provide. Healthy life is a balance of killing that regulates populations and seeks to limit their sustainable numbers according to what the collective ecology needs to sustain their numbers—according to various populations in balance with each other in the continuing pulse of life and death.
Eating, as in hunting, is “dinner” and requires well being to both succeed in killing and surviving. Eat and be eaten is also an ecological story because of its influence on environmental balance.
The other leg is breeding. Its demand is survival in which there is no “individual” person, only the character of the individual’s capacity to eat and avoid being eaten before it breeds or dies of its own aging.
In feeding, vulnerability is everything. Feeders prey on the weak, the young, the unprotected, and those it can take advantage of, because it is easier and less risky.
Overpopulation destroys the environment. Underpopulation leaves life in an unregulated condition. Life thrives in a mobile balance in between. It all depends on environmental circumstances and genetic skills.
Looking at the character and balance of these interactive forces of nature’s dynamic can provide for human understanding and the necessity of human integration with nature. This perception also explains why we are not long in continuing in life and living on Earth.