You're right! I imagine that if we did just "go back to Nature" we would forget and do this all over again in a few thousand years, eh?

We need a new synthesis that incorporates our scientific knowledge with the deeper reality around us. That's exactly why I find TFA and Levin's work so fascinating: science is discovering that life thinks, which discovery then forms a bridge between the "mystic" experiential communing with nature and the "hard" rational-materialistic science.