This line of reasoning appears frequently, but it misses the concept people are referring to when they say nature. Words are defined through their use, and no person would describe a parking lot or the inside of a building as a natural environment.
I think most people picture a place without human activity at all when they imagine a fully "natural" environment, like an island thats never had people on it. In this interpretation, people living naturally would cause their environment to deviate minimally from how it would be in their absence.
We are currently the direct cause of an ongoing mass extinction. We have yanked the surface of the planet so far from equilibrium that it may never return to its previous state. We are from being a part of nature.
I agree with this definition of words and their utility, but I also agree with GPs definition of nature. Now we have two running definitions and they contradict, thus a debate ensues. Political debates are often a matter of warring sides trying to establish their meaning of a word over the other's.
Thankfully, we also have a reasonable expectation in the use of words in that they map to something real. The broader the internal consistency of that word, the more 'authoritative' it should be - although, admittedly, this is just my opinion. (Politics will surely have some say about this.)
On defining nature, we have witnessed two definitions.
1. Not human.
2. All of the cosmos.
Those who appreciate the theory of evolution, I think, will have a harder time determining where the threshold between human and nature would be.
> Those who appreciate the theory of evolution, I think, will have a harder time determining where the threshold between human and nature would be.
All human terms are subjective that way. The universe is relative and probabilistic. Ideas like "nature" can be useful, but that's not to say the universe has a boolean type called "Nature" that actually exists in any objective sense.
Yet we keep having these sorts of debates year after year. Nothing exists in the ways that most people think them to be. I could care less whether something is "natural" if the conclusion has no use.
When was the planet at equilibrium? This is not a rhetorical question and I don't advocate for the destruction (or indifference to destruction) of the environment. But what is the natural state of the planet?
I think most people picture a place without human activity at all when they imagine a fully "natural" environment, like an island thats never had people on it. In this interpretation, people living naturally would cause their environment to deviate minimally from how it would be in their absence.
We are currently the direct cause of an ongoing mass extinction. We have yanked the surface of the planet so far from equilibrium that it may never return to its previous state. We are from being a part of nature.