You’re missing survivorship bias - nature didn’t just create these balanced ecosystems, it creates anything that goes, and things that don’t work out just die. Humans ruining earth for themselves is just as natural, just that we might die as result. But life won’t - it’s much more resilient than just one species. Or several.
Following this line of logic you can justify anything. If I kill your entire family, that’s natural. Would you be ok with that?
I think if you accept at all that there is suffering and there is beauty, then you shouldn’t hide behind “everything’s natural” and instead try and have a backbone and stick up for something more.
That's the point: naturalism can justify anything, and that makes it a poor guiding principle. As do many other things.
There are many natural things that are good. Clean air, unique little ecosystems like GP describes, endless variety -- and we should strive to respect and preserve those, but not because they are natural. Poor animals teeming with parasites, population "balance" maintained through periodic overpopulation and starvation (How do people think it happens? Forest fairies tell the deer how many babies to have?), predators feasting on the organs of their prey while the prey is still alive. All these things are natural but not good and we should not seek to replicate them.
> population "balance" maintained through periodic overpopulation and starvation (How do people think it happens? Forest fairies tell the deer how many babies to have?)
Thinking about this, I just realized a simple thing: balance in animal population via starvation might not be as grim as we expect (i.e. it happens completely because the weakest/least fit individuals cannot compete for food and literally starve).
The sexual reproductive system is apparently one of the things that stops working earliest when you're affected by disease or malnutrition. This means that malnourished deers will just start having fewer/no babies while they're being famished.
Still grim, because lots of animals would starve, and still very uncomfortable for the deers which, even if they might survive to "old age", will fail to breed due to starvation... but still better than the alternative in which every baby deer gets born in the world as usual, only to then starve to death while they're still very young.
It's still very grim if you recognize that animals - particularly advanced animals like deer - feel and suffer. Also makes you wonder if the fragility of reproductive system wrt. malnutrition isn't an evolutionary adaptation that smooths out the population crash a little bit after hitting the carrying capacity of a niche.
(Also: many (most?) living things have things that eat them, which is another population maintenance mechanism, and no less grim.)
Why should I be "ok" with natural? Screw natural. Nature does a lot of terrible things. People dying in hurricanes or at the hands of murderers isn't OK because its "natural" - its just not OK. We have the intelligence to influence our environment (and that intelligence is also a result of nature). Trying to categorize natural vs unnatural (whatever that means) is a fools errand and not a productive one in my view, since my ethics aren't based on "it's ok because the volcano was natural"
The problem with this line of thinking is that it might be a little short-sighted. Since we are intelligent, we should be careful. With great powers come great responsibility.
If someone doesn't like hurricanes, they can move where there is none.
When Earth will be 99% inhabitable (because of air pollution, soil degradation, lack of water), is the solution just to say "oh well", let's go to Mars?
For the individual the answer is almost certainly yes. If we have the ability to survive elsewhere than earth and we have brought earth to the point that it is 99% uninhabitable then going someone else is probably the best choice.
One could easily argue that our ability to consider our environment and make changes to our behavior accordingly is unnatural. Avoiding the above scenario is something we should be using our unnatural gifts to avoid.
Arguments based on how natural something is is highly subjective and not really worthwhile imo. Replace natural with what we're actually trying to discuss: As a species we want a stable environment that requires the least effort to survive in. Individuals have additional traits they want from the environment but that's all subjective. Things that most people consider natural are usually things that have a large data set to demonstrate their stability.
Hence the root cause of all human-caused problems: what is locally, short-term beneficial for an individual is often long-term detrimental to the group, and long-term success of an individual depends on long-term success of the group.
I.e. we're too competitive, not cooperative enough, and can hardly coordinate at scale. Our best coordination mechanism we've ever came up with is the market economy, which is essentially taking the survival instinct of individuals and building a distributed coercion system with it. Sure, it works, but wouldn't it be nicer if we could just talk our way into working together on shared goals, instead of using money and threats of starvation?
Well, from nature’s perspective, yes it is OK. Nature won’t put you in jail. However, do it on a wide scale (you start murdering billions to prove a point) then yes Nature cares and the survival of the species is thrown into jeopardy. As a person, no it’s not OK - acts that do more harm than good are agreed to (by choice) by most as illegal.
Comparing to aborting a human-monkey fetus, the question of is there more good than harm is new. In a scientific setting where few cases are performed and a lot of Nature’s rules are revealed to us, I think that is mostly good. Genetic editing expanded to a large scale can also, I think, be done in a good way (by editing genes to increase intelligence or removing genes to reduce disease). It can also be done in a harmful way - say, raising an army of clones or some nightmare scenario where the rich and wealthy raise super intelligent human children that rules and obsoletes the rest of humanity.
I argue though that those nightmare situations will happen anyway and that human society has always had huge swings in well-being and suffering, with the average standard of living growing.
I think trying to contain the research is useful only up to some point - tracking the research and labeling successes and failures (science) and opening these studies and results to all of humanity is I think ultimately helpful. Keeping some competitive advantage over competing nations or corporations is also helpful. The more we learn, the more we can identify and prevent misuse.
Last thing to point out is humanity, and nature, share in common that we grow by making a ton of mistakes. Whereas Nature learns by not dying entirely, humanity adds a method by learning by thinking - this seems to be faster.
If we apply sentience to Nature, perhaps we were allowed to live in the hopes that we’d help Nature survive the next astroid attack.
