Thank you for posting this. This is a really good 2-sentence summary of what I have been struggling to put into words. The other approaches to nature seem so anti-human.

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.

> "Nature" could also include humans. I haven't seen anything to suggest that the natural outcome of billions of years of evolution isn't some highly intelligent, dominant organism that ends up shaping its environment to an extreme degree.

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_).

>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 think this point has merit and it’s important for us to think of ourselves as part of the environment, but also, there are lots of other animals (like most of them?) that don’t care at all about the environment and the only reason they don’t destroy it in pursuit of their vital resources is that they can’t. There are endless stories of animals eating and breeding until their ecosystems are destroyed and they suffer massive die offs. Of course that tends to happen most often to invasive species, but nature certainly does not keep itself in balance through conscientiousness.

> here are endless stories of animals eating and breeding until their ecosystems are destroyed and they suffer massive die offs.

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.

That's exactly the idea - the environment does include humans. And if humans stopped intervening: that's "nature" (still adhering to the idea of nature as separate from humans, which I agree with other commenters, is problematic).