I like the idea that somehow the quality of the world is somehow intrinsically better when humans aren't involved. Certainly there are plenty of ways that humans can make it worse, but that is not the same thing as saying that somehow humans are less a part of nature than any other organism or geological feature.
I wonder if the narrative that humans are not of nature makes it easier for us to harm the environment, since we do not feel part of it (as evidenced by our use of the word nature as some _other_).
To the contrary, there is a worldview whereby humans are not part of nature. Instead, they have dominion over it and a responsibility to care for all aspects of it as a custodian. To use a metaphor, nature without humans can never reach its full potential, just as a garden without its gardener will revert to a less ordered -- and less diverse -- state.
I believe the hypothesis that we're not one of these animal species may well prove false.
> Of course that tends to happen most often to invasive species, but nature certainly does not keep itself in balance through conscientiousness.
Neither do humans. We tend to fuck things up until they become real problems, then mitigate the damage, sometimes with success. That's not really conscientious, that's "winging it". This is the true nature of the human being.
But that's just fixing one intervention by means of another intervention, and the fix likely has just as many, if a different set, of poorly-understood and unintended consequences. So lately I've started to define nature a little differently - maybe "nature" isn't what earth looked like before humans, it's what earth would look like if humans disappeared. Or to put it less fantastically, a scenario of minimal human intervention from this point forward.
In that context, the blackberry, kudzu and ivy vines that we introduced, are the new landscape, the new nature, the thing that ends up taking over the sites we disturbed. Similar dynamics would presumably play out in the oceans and everywhere else.
The thing this definition of nature has in common with the more usual one, is that phrase "minimal human intervention." The difference of course is that it doesn't try to undo the recent past, which in general throughout the universe but also specifically in this context, I think is pretty much impossible. So this definition, and the course of action that follows logically from it, has the bonus attribute of being a bit more consistent with current reality.
Of course it'll never happen that way unless homo sapiens really does "disappear," i.e. suffers a dramatic decrease in either demand for intervention (read: population), or ability to intervene, in ecosystems. But it's interesting to think about.