Nature is no more or less "natural" than ever. Humans (and non-human animals!) have always and forever effected the ecosystem(s) they participate in. Sometimes in drastic ways.
It's true that we've increased the scale by an order of magnitude. or two. And it's probably true that it's not going to be pretty.
But it's no more or less "natural" than ever. "Natural" is probably not that useful a concept in general, it doesn't really mean anything in general, just like it doesn't mean anything on your food label.
> Both politics and the economy remain subject to persistent re-naturalization campaigns, whether from religious fundamentalists in politics or from market fundamentalists in economics.
Indeed, the whole concept of "the natural" is arguably always a right-wing and reactionary one. Used by people generally under a fantasy about what things _really_ "used to be" like, and that it was "always" that fantasy from forever until recently. I don't think it's a useful concept, I think it's downright dangerous when the fudamentalists start thinking they know what's "natural" (and thus, they assume, "good") and what isn't. But "sustainable" might be a useful concept for evaluation. As well as simply "good for humans", which is obviously subjective and a political question (a question of values and interests), instead of the feigned objectivity of "the natural". There's values and interests in the "re-naturalization" programs of fundamentalists and radical reactionaries too, despite their protestations to the contrary.
tldr: I think things are going to shit too, but thinking there's such a thing as 'the natural' and you know what it is, tends to make it worse.
The reductionism take seems to be fairly popular on HN in general, and it's kind of frustrating.
You can technically make that argument that humans are natural and therefore all of their impacts are also natural, but the fact remains that when shown a picture of a forest and a cityscape, everyone will instinctively know which one is more natural.
Nature is a useful concept. There are mental health benefits to being around nature[0], there are physical benefits of being around less pollution, there are future-of-the-human-race benefits to keeping things closer to the status quo than we're on pace to do with global climate change. We are changing our planet, in some ways positively and in some ways detrimentally, but it's pedantic to argue that this change is "natural".
It's useful to have a concept like "nature" to help describe humans' impact on our environment, for sure.
I think it's probably less useful when trying to determine what humans should do or expressing a value judgement on human behavior. I'm not necessarily convinced that the "natural" state of something is better than some alternative that humans might come up with.
I don't think you need to invoke "nature" to make the points you mention above. We can talk about the mental health benefits of being outside, or among trees, or just in a peaceful environment in general. We can talk about reversing global warming in many more practical ways: humanitarian, economic, as a conservation issue, etc.
"Nature" is a catch-all term, and its useful in that context, but if interpreted as an inherent good it can be misused to support racism, pseudomedicine, and other really bad stuff. Since it's not necessary to make a case for the good stuff, and it can be a big part of the case for lots of bad stuff, it might be worth making the effort to be more precise.
I see your point... However, fortunately, we are still able to tell the difference between a city block and the Amazon rainforest. The distinction between the two is still meaningful.
But "the Amazon" is a good example, because people in European cultures also have a bad habit of considering "primitive" people to be _themselves_ "natural", with implications including: wherever and whatever way they live now (or when Europeans first contacted them) is where and how they have "always" lived, with no history of cultural change or migration; they have had no effect on the ecosystems they live in, which have also always been exactly as they are now.
Usually none of that is true.
Even ecosystems _without humans_ (and before human carbon-producing industry) _changed over time_.
Ones with humans have, as a trend, changed even more, true, but for _as long as there have been humans_, way before modern carbon-producing tech.
But again, this is not meant to be a feel-good "so what we are now doing is fine." Nope, we're totally fucking things up, at an accelerated rate and order of magnitude greater scale. But not necessarily a categorical/qualitative difference.
>But it's no more or less "natural" than ever. "Natural" is probably not that useful a concept in general, it doesn't really mean anything in general, just like it doesn't mean anything on your food label.
The term "Natural" is very useful, it purposely separates phenomena as resulting from human activity/technology from those that are the result of long standing, generally slow moving evolutionary/geological changes. As humans can introduce change rapidly into our environment as a result our ability to design, it makes a lot of sense to have a word to quickly describe the general high level cause of such quick change.
Remember when bacterias suddenly decided to artificially dump oxygen in the atmosphere on a global scale? Once toxic and artificial, now part of the natural air we breathe.
Anyway, Wittgenstein would probably dismiss the relevance of defining what's natural or artificial for the world is made of facts and not of things.
True, but the Great Oxygenation Event took an extremely long time to effect most species though, and there are certainly exceptions, but that's just it, they're exceptions. Humans are pretty much guaranteed to introduce change (we are innovators/technologists to our core.)
The link makes the natural vs mankind argument a little bit, but the notion of an Anthropocene doesn't really hinge on it.
For instance, other epochs are all named after natural things.
Regarding the general utility of the concept, it probably does at least occasionally make sense to distinguish between things that would happen without us and things that happen because of us. Doesn't mean we have to have an implied preference for the one or the other though.
It's true that we've increased the scale by an order of magnitude. or two. And it's probably true that it's not going to be pretty.
But it's no more or less "natural" than ever. "Natural" is probably not that useful a concept in general, it doesn't really mean anything in general, just like it doesn't mean anything on your food label.
> Both politics and the economy remain subject to persistent re-naturalization campaigns, whether from religious fundamentalists in politics or from market fundamentalists in economics.
Indeed, the whole concept of "the natural" is arguably always a right-wing and reactionary one. Used by people generally under a fantasy about what things _really_ "used to be" like, and that it was "always" that fantasy from forever until recently. I don't think it's a useful concept, I think it's downright dangerous when the fudamentalists start thinking they know what's "natural" (and thus, they assume, "good") and what isn't. But "sustainable" might be a useful concept for evaluation. As well as simply "good for humans", which is obviously subjective and a political question (a question of values and interests), instead of the feigned objectivity of "the natural". There's values and interests in the "re-naturalization" programs of fundamentalists and radical reactionaries too, despite their protestations to the contrary.
tldr: I think things are going to shit too, but thinking there's such a thing as 'the natural' and you know what it is, tends to make it worse.