Just something I was talking about with the wife this evening. She says that our house is not natural and used the phrase “out in nature”. But lots of animals build nests. And are we not animals just doing the same?
The issue is that many people don’t consider humans as part of the natural world.
Which is a ridiculous concept to me.
A beaver dam is a natural as the hoover dam. Both represent a species altering the environment for their benefit.
- ∟⊔⊤∦∣≶ ( @luthis@lemmy.nz ) 15•11 months ago
It’s kind of a pseudo-religious idea, the whole ‘natural is good and humans are not natural’… Gaia is good, humans have sin, humans are made separate and rule over nature and are therefore not part of ‘nature,’ God’s creation is perfect, all those ideas seem to have been merged into the dichotomy: there is nature and there is humanity.
Yes. Humans were born out of this universe just like everything else. It’s all nature. Even free will gets fuzzy when psychologists look into it. Some might say people have just as much free as a river that “chooses” its course and then fabricate a story after the fact about how they chose this or that, ignorant to external and internal (brain) influences. And then it starts to get fuzzy what’s internal and what’s external. Our brain is a part of the external world, and the external world we study is built by our subjective perceptions.
I concur. My gut is telling me there is a difference, but when I try to articulate it, I can’t.
Kind of like that senator who couldn’t define pornography, but her know it when he sees it.
Man made (aka human made) is obviously anything made by a human. So let’s rather talk about natural vs. artificial.
Here, the concept probably boils to the idea that humans have a consciousness, and a free will, which are not part of nature, but something special. It’s kinda religious.
But artificial could also have a more generic meaning of something extraneous doing things in an ecosystem, and changing it in completely new ways.
It’s like in a game where the players are controlled by users. The users are not part of the game and can create things that would never come to existence by means of the game’s nature, i.e. via procedural world generation or NPC AIs. So e.g. villages in minecraft are natural, but user-built structures are artificial.
Note though that goods produced by nature are not strictly better than artificially created goods. To name two examples: (1) Carrots harvested from a generated village in minecraft are no different from player-planted carrots. (2) Medicine is not better just because it’s extracted from plants.
using Minecraft to compare natural vs artificial was something I wasn’t expecting to see today. Specially comparing the quality of carrots generated by the game vs carrots planted by the player.
It depends on the situation, the topic, and even the person; words don’t have hard-coded meaning. For example, for me:
- A substance extracted directly from plants, even cultivated ones, is “natural”. One that relies on industrial processes is “man-made”.
- A desire path is “natural”, even if caused by human activity. A planned path is “man-made”.
So at the end of the day, perhaps it has to do with planning? At least for me. Man-made things aren’t just the result of human activity; they’re the goal of said human activity. That may or may not apply to what your wife was talking about, depending on the context of what she said - those nests are not the goal of human activity, unlike your house.
Honestly I see everything we do as natural. It may be different to the other life on this planet, but that’s just the way nature is: different species do different things.
What we do isn’t even terribly unique. Other species have been shown to create and use tech, communicate, do agriculture, have societies, and manipulate other life to its gain. What sets us apart from them is that we’re especially good at all that, we’re nature’s ultra generalists.
I think it’s also important to note that nature does not equal good or even beneficial for the environment. Some of Earths most profound horrors come from non-human life (that which is often called natural). And other species have been known to destroy their environment to grow (such as the great oxygenation event or the rats that destroyed Easter Island)
This is the kind of shit that keeps me up at night. Thinking about all the casual horror in the world. I’ve read about these “slaver” ants that kidnap eggs from another colony only to raise them as slaves for the rest of their life. Or those wasps that lay their eggs inside other living insects which then hatch and consume the host.
There are so so many insects on earth, so these fucked up horrors are just happening on a massive scale all the time all around us.
Legit those exact wasps were on my mind as I wrote that nature has horrors. Creatures like that always make me think, “damn nature, you scary” lol
I mean yeah but I’ve never seen a pigeon blast off the top of a mountain for materials to make concrete.
A beaver dam would be beaver made. A human house is man made.
And both are species altering the environment for their benefit. Both are Natural.
Despite his new eyes, man was still rooted in matter, his soul spun into it and subordinated to its blind laws. And yet he could see matter as a stranger, compare himself to all phenomena, see through and locate his vital processes. He comes to nature as an unbidden guest, in vain extending his arms to beg conciliation with his maker: Nature answers no more, it performed a miracle with man, but later did not know him.
To sum up how I understand this poetic piece of text (The Last Messiah from a Norwegian philosopher Zapffe). It‘s a feature of consciousness, that we can even perceive ourselves as apart from nature. Considering our subjugation of it in various ways and currently underway destruction of the climate, it makes sense to me too to differentiate.
My belief on this is that it is related to the scale of effect we have on the environment we’re in. A beaver can be considered a keystone species in it’s habitat because it can build a dam and have an outsize effect on other species in it’s habitat by changing water movement. Humans are extreme keystone species. Our actions alter ecosystems on a global scale. No other species has such an impact. Therefore I don’t think it is fair that we have such an impact on all of the other species on the planet. A beavers dam only affects the forest it is in.
I was at the giant copper mine outside of Salt Lake City, Utah. In the tour, they said, to appease conservationists, they basically relocate the mountain as they dig and add vegetation. So, the mountainous area that surrounds the mine is all man-made. Nature didn’t erode the rocks or push them up even though mountains are considered purely natural. It doesn’t really follow a beaver creating a new river because it built a dam either because it didn’t divert anything; it simply pushed it out of the way.
Man made = interfering with nature for profit. Natural = interference in nature for comfort.
Side note: I can’t help but picture a cartoon style in my head of a fat business tycoon with a shovel, yelling at the Lorax, “We’re putting it back!”
So if you build yourself a house it’s nature?
Most houses that you build yourself usually flow with the land.
Houses corporations build are for profit and usually come with more destruction for the environment.
The difference between something natural and artificial (man made) is that no one is responsible for the natural. People are responsible for producing the artificial. Animals, for example, are moral patients, so bear no responsibility for the results of their actions. That is why animals are a part of nature.
I’m also thinking beyond housing. It seems like such an arbitrary distinction to say that things humans make aren’t “natural “ but things that animals make are.
Not to be too pedantic but aren’t we as humans part of nature? Therefore what we make is a direct natural creation?
Is it the scale that makes things unnatural? I’ve never seen animal cities, but a single anthill has a higher population density than any city, and it’s 100% not “naturally “ occurring.