Man vs Nature

[Frank Hipper]

There's something that constantly confounds me.

The whole attitude of "Man-made isn't natural, and is therefore bad."

If we, as a species, evolved under natural processes and are products of the planet and it's biosphere, how exactly is anything we do "unnatural"?

Of course we create poisons and situations that do not exist without our intervention, and they can have devastating results, but how is this "unnatural"?

"Natural" poisons exist in abundance, and situations can arise that devastate life on a global scale without human interferance.

How is it we're seprate from nature, and why do we get such a bum rap?

[Boyish-Tigerlilly]

This has been a problem that has plagued me for a while, but I think I have come to the conclusion that if it does not readily exist by itself in nature, it is not nature.

I don't think a human behavior can be unnatural, since it does occure in nature and it's not the same as making a chemical that doens't exist normally; some things we can make aren't natural. There are some compounds that don't exist freely in nature.

However, even if our weapons and tech are not 'all" natural, I would think the behavior, ability, and impulse to create and use said things is natural. That we can construct technology is natural, even though not all technology itself is natural, "freely available"

I don't know, perfectly, so if someoneone has a better explanation, it woud be good.

The definition my bio professor gave us for natural was 'occuring freely or found freely in nature.' Unnatural doesn't mean bad though. There are lots of good, unnatural things.

[dworkin]

As one popular professor has noted;

"No other organism has instituted a welfare state."

[Sea Skimmer]

How is it we're seprate from nature, and why do we get such a bum rap?

Because people are stupid, trying to look further then that is unnecessary

[lPeregrine]

Because usually "natural" is a dishonest argument that really means "something I don't like about society". The usual targets are no more "unnatural" than modern medical technology or any of the other conveniences we enjoy. So it's obvious the "unnatural" argument is a false cover, since not too many people will argue against all the equally unnatural things they benefit from.

[Zero]

We call things external to human interferance natural because we consider ourselves the only creatures with mental abilities to actually make choices about how we interact with our environments. That's what I've always figured, at least. It isn't really different, but we make the distinction because we know we can regulate our own actions.

[El Moose Monstero]

Oooh, I've just been writing an essay on this for some sociology module we have to take alongside our environmental science courses so we get an 'alternative perspective'.

The gist of the 2 arguments is:

Man is natural, as you said. Whatever we do occurs in compliance with a set of deeper natural values which dictate what we do, regardless of whether we're aware of them or not. A building built badly will always fall down regardless of whether there's a team of engineers hanging round to explain why. Everything we do can more or less be found in some way in nature or could probably be created by some random combination of natural events.

The problem this poses is that if you simply say everything we do is natural, then in terms of people analysing repurcussions of things, it means that everything can be just shrugged off as natural without thinking about it.

Saying that we are seperate to nature only works when you're thinking on short-medium timescales and the far off evolutionary processes or longer timescales that nature takes to do the same things that we do; it's the simplest way to deal with the problem. For example, on a short timescale, ignoring the natural sources and natural methods, global warming is occurring too fast and will lead to changes in sealevels over the next 700 years. On a short timescale, this is an event with a profoundly human source, and the response needs to be measured in that manner; this however does not deny the inherently natural source of human society, it's just the easiest way of wrapping our heads round the problem.

That's the way I interpret it anyway, but there are groups of socioligists who do seem to be arguing that we are distinct and seperate in the absolute.

[Admiral Valdemar]

Ugh, sociology. Keevan can let you in on that subjetc's flaws.

Natural? Depends on definition. One would be hard pressed to call an aeroplane natural, though something natural designed and built it, but that would be a distortion of the concept. Natural would be anything that arose through the blind indifference of the universe, as opposed to something engineered. Course, with that definition, you then have to accept that a beaver's damn is "unnatural" along with bird nests and the like.

It really all depends on how you see nature in the grand scheme of things.

We could certainly create something that would never have arisen via natural forces and could wipe out a whole lot of life on the planet. There's a reason genetically engineered organisms have never been released in the wild (though reports exist that one Japanese company did just that years back). Would one define an engineered organism capable of overthrowing all other forms of life on the planet as natural or unnatural?

[El Moose Monstero]

Ugh, sociology. Keevan can let you in on that subjetc's flaws.

Ugh, no explanation needed, very glad it's over - but the single 5000 word essay is worth 2 BIOL or ENV modules and no exams, so I'm happy enough to do it.

[Rye]

I think the distinction here should be between natural formations and artificial formation. To steal Paley's watch example, it is clearly not a natural part of the beach/forest/field because it was artificially produced. There is a meaningful distinction there.

However, yeah, something being artificial doesn't make it "bad," notions of goodness and badness are as much artifice as anything else we have produced, since values are not inherent to objects.

[Zero]

I think the distinction here should be between natural formations and artificial formation. To steal Paley's watch example, it is clearly not a natural part of the beach/forest/field because it was artificially produced. There is a meaningful distinction there.

However, yeah, something being artificial doesn't make it "bad," notions of goodness and badness are as much artifice as anything else we have produced, since values are not inherent to objects.

How can you really come to understand what is and isn't artificial, though? I mean, can you actually explain how the distinction is made?

[Darth Raptor]

How can you really come to understand what is and isn't artificial, though? I mean, can you actually explain how the distinction is made?

Maybe whether or not it was created deliberately? At least that's where I draw the line. To echo Valdemar, I don't consider beaver dams, bird nests and termite mounds to be natural either- although the creatures that created them are.

[Rye]

I think the distinction here should be between natural formations and artificial formation. To steal Paley's watch example, it is clearly not a natural part of the beach/forest/field because it was artificially produced. There is a meaningful distinction there.

However, yeah, something being artificial doesn't make it "bad," notions of goodness and badness are as much artifice as anything else we have produced, since values are not inherent to objects.

How can you really come to understand what is and isn't artificial, though? I mean, can you actually explain how the distinction is made?

I go with a known means of production, or being similar in construction to known produced objects. For instance, anything that bears the hallmarks of being vacuum-formed plastic will presumably be artificial. Intent can be a guideline too, though it doesn't apply to all examples of artificial things.

If we find some natural phenonmenon that emulates an artificial production method (such as vacuum forming plastics) perfectly, we'd have no means of distinguishing between a natural one and an artificial one, unless we then changed the artificial method to specifically distinguish itself.

To use an alien craft as an example, if it doesn't use anything similar to what we know, though it may truly be artificial, due to it being so utterly alien to us, we wouldn't be able to conclude it wasn't a product of nature beyond our cognition.

I'd also imagine that if you lived in a village where some psychologists were messing with people's perceptions from birth, and making the average foliage appear to grow watches, people would conclude, based on that, that watches do naturally grow in fields/on trees etc, especially if that view was reinforced in daily life. It'd be entertaining to watch, anyway.

[Eframepilot]

The separation between Man and Nature in terms of the definition of the word "nature" predates the theory of evolution, so although we now know that we humans came from nature, we are no longer part of "Nature" as it was originally defined. Describing something as "natural" carries the connotation that it was not man-made as a holdover of the old division between man and nature. Of course, this is all just semantics and holds no meaning for whether a man-made product is preferable to a "natural" product or vice versa; the method of production should not by itself make a difference in whether the product is "bad" or not. Nature certainly is capable of creating its own pollution in much greater volumes than human civilization (volcanic eruptions and such), though not as consistently or creatively as we have done.

[Shinova]

When they say Mother Nature, do they mean strictly organic forces like bacteria, animals, and plants, or do they mean any non-man-made forces like hurricanes, global climate changes, solar flares, supernovas, gamma bursts, etc?

[Eframepilot]

When they say Mother Nature, do they mean strictly organic forces like bacteria, animals, and plants, or do they mean any non-man-made forces like hurricanes, global climate changes, solar flares, supernovas, gamma bursts, etc?

Mother Nature usually includes any non-manmade forces on the Earth; I think Mother Nature was on Time's list for Person of the Year because of all the various storms and earthquakes to hit. Astronomical stuff isn't counted as part of Mother Nature because it's, uh, in the heavens or something.

[Lusankya]

I doubt this whole debate would be cropping up at all if it weren't for the profound effect that human society is currently having on the environment.

Many people have the idea that the changes caused by human presence are somehow "unnatural" because in recent times we built boats to get places, rather than relying on land bridges and driftwood to spread our species from continent to continent.

I'm not going to go into the morality of our effect on the environment, but as far as our impact is concerned, I don't see the spread of humanity any differently from any of the other events in the past that caused mass extinctions. That we are aware of what we are doing doesn't make us any different from any other freakish environmental phoenomenon, and many animals are adapting to live with us (or falling by the wayside) as would occur with any major environmental change.


ROAR!!!!! says GOJIRA!!!!!

[speaker-to-trolls]

When they say Mother Nature, do they mean strictly organic forces like bacteria, animals, and plants, or do they mean any non-man-made forces like hurricanes, global climate changes, solar flares, supernovas, gamma bursts, etc?

Mother Nature usually includes any non-manmade forces on the Earth; I think Mother Nature was on Time's list for Person of the Year because of all the various storms and earthquakes to hit. Astronomical stuff isn't counted as part of Mother Nature because it's, uh, in the heavens or something.

Most people still haven't quite gotten to grips with the fact that nature is a lot bigger than this utterly insignificant little blue green planet in the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the galaxy we call our home. The Universe outside our planet has only recently been known in any great detail, and it is still more or less impossible to really have any contact with it, so in many peoples minds it seems like a recent phenomenon, something which doesn't have any place in nature (Earth), which has 'existed' (we have been in contact with it) for many thousands of years.