For instance, milk, which has recently become popular to drink raw, i.e. unprocessed and unpasteurized, from the cow to the glass to your mouth. Sounds great, it is a return to the traditional way of consuming milk without all that unnatural treatment. It's natural! It's also natural to get diphtheria and typhoid fever too from drinking non-pasteurized milk. That was why pasteurization was invented, so we no longer had to suffer from those diseases. This ideology of "returning to the past" is on par with the Tea Party movement : it propagates and augmente the recent tendency of American culture to regress from the progress we have made. And for people who are so obsessed with anti-bacterial products (bacteria, which so happens to be a natural occurrence) prefer to drink something that can and will get you sick. Not to mention that the FDA has made it illegal to sell or purchase non-pasteurized milk. It's a bit like moonlighting moonshine, but far more whimpy.
Also like the Teabaggers, this idea of returning to the past (or regressing) and to nature is similar to the Conservative idea of "small government". It is really only, as Bill Maher has pointed out, small government where they want small government. It is not some all-encompassing criterion under which all standards, regulations, laws and unions will abide; it is small government under an arbitrary microscope; hence why they do not ask for small government when it comes to the military. Same with returning to the past. Let's drink something that will cause diseases that pasteurization remedied 150 years ago... well, why don't we also do what we did 150 years ago : own slaves and allow women no rights! And while we are at it, let us embrace the idea that the earth is flat and that lightning is the work of the gods. It's return to the past where they want a return to the past.
The ideology of returning to nature is emphatically ridiculous. Yes nature is a self-sustaining system that is beautiful, but nature is one awesome monster. It is because of it's destructive ambivalence that nature is so beautiful. Everything evolved to survive, and a lot of those evolutionary moments were apart of a need to reproduce sexually, which required beauty. The night sky is only beautiful because it is a dance of destruction, where stars burn at immensely hot temperatures and explode, celestial bodies bombard one another, and galaxies collide. In nature and in the heavens the only way anything is to be created is to destroy something else. That's life.
To return to nature is to regress the human race from the habit of living, i.e. playing golf, going to farmers markets, taking kids to soccer games, making money; to survival, i.e. staying alive long enough in order to have sex and pass on your genes, which entails avoiding being eaten or getting a scratch that might get infected and consequently die from. Nature is the true dog-eat-dog world. The entire propagation of life rests on the cycle of killing, eating, and dying. That includes vegetarians as well : vegetarians kill plants and eat them in order to continue living (get over it). They even kill thousands of rodents, nominally every harvest season when farming equipment kills the communities of hundreds of rodents thriving in the crop fields. Life cannot propagate without death, which is a long recognized and honored fact of life by the Native Americans.
A return to the past and nature entails living in a world where it would be easier to get a woman than it would be to get food, which is usually the case for African tribes and, hence, the high percentage of HIV and hunger. Some men would think it would be great to be able to live in a world where getting a woman is easier than getting food... right, so long as you can live long enough to reach puberty (usually a 1 : 40 chance against) in order to enjoy the qualities of sex. But even in that case you will only be able to enjoy sex for about ten years and then die from scurvy.
There is a reason for progress and advancement of civilization, not to ruin your false ideals of a simpler way of life, but so we no longer have to endure the hardships of nature. Drink your raw milk and eat your organic produce, but don't think for a minute you are returning to simpler times and reconnecting to nature. It is because of anesthetics that we don't have to endure the natural pain of child birth, and because of vaccines that we don't have to face the possibilities of disablement from polio. It is because of gasoline that we don't have to pay high prices for bread because the grain was also bought to feed the horses we (literally) worked to death to get around NYC. Just know what you are asking for when you ask for a return to the past.
You can't get much more natural than this :
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