First off huge props to the creator of this thread, I haven't seen such positive intellectual debate on NS for quite a while.
I also have often wondered if it's proper to assume that humans, and everything we do, is inherently "natural;" and by "natural" I mean that we are a product of of our environment and evolution, just like ants. Therefore the parking garage is just as natural as the ant-hill.
One troubling aspect of this assumption is that we then must accept that things like nuclear waste, chemical fertilizers and CFCs are also "natural" in this sense; that pollution, deforestation, the extinction of thousands of species as a result of human development, even the prospect of complete nuclear winter, are all also "natural". To believe that all of this is "natural" rubs against what many of us have been taught about about the role of humans and the environment.
I don't have any concrete conclusions to offer out of all this, but I will say that the world as we know it is the product of the efforts of many thousands of different species who have all affected our environment in ways we can't even begin to imagine. Millions of years of development by organisms like plants, soil bacteria, fungi, even the bacteria in our intestines that make it possible for us to digest food... in short the cumulative efforts of all of life on Earth have created what we know as "the environment" as it is today. Now humans are also playing a role in the development of the environment, and many think that our role is destructive rather than constructive.
I tend to share that belief, yet I do acknowledge that it's important that we don't separate ourselves from our environment by claiming that we, and our works, are not as much a part of Nature as anything else.
One assurance that I've found is knowing that evolution never stops. Right now at this minute every organism on earth is adapting to changes in its environment, human-caused or otherwise. Whatever environment we create, unless we kill off everything on the planet (which I sincerely doubt our capability to do), the place we create will offer as many opportunities for development and adaptation as we've ever had as a species. The air we breathe, the soil we till and the carbon we burn as fuel are all products of organisms that came before us and in some manner enabled our existence. Maybe our pollution and our waste will be the resources of organisms of the future; even if, to quote the poet Chris Chandler:
We've dumped so much plastic into the dirt
that the future's grass came up as AstroTurf.
So many fluorocarbons into the ozone,
that the clouds became Styrofoam.
And next came blooming fields of Dacron polyester
and living aluminum trees, and miles and miles
of NutraSweet granular coastlines lapped by diet soda seas.
(If you like this, you should check out Chris's website,
www.chrischandler.org. It's good shit!)
