Man vs Nature is an old dichotomy; I'm not sure many people still hold it in their world view. It was just one step along the path of defining "self" vs "other". That differentiation is significant because it helps individuals identify threats vs allies. Colonizers may have defined indigenous people as "other" because they didn't have any shared cultural substrate that they could reliably cooperate through. Of course, that differentiation was likely varried per individual, and I'm sure there were many colonial individuals who detestested taking advantage of indigenous people.

The exploration described in the article might be better described as drawing more of the "other" into "self". Finding that which was previously uknown to your "self" (perhaps your cultural upbringing, national identity, or collective societal knowledge) and understanding it. In this circumstance the understanding is of nature and environment, but people find this same fire in more modern differentiations as well. For instance, globalization is rapidly developing universally agreeable culture, and there are many people passionate about sharing and adding parts of their culture to that global identity.

Your wish for cohabitation seems to me to be a similar desire of drawing "other" into "self", and will ultimately demand a similar degree of understanding to pull off.

"Man vs Nature is an old dichotomy; I'm not sure many people still hold it in their world view."

It remains alive and well in the view that anything Man does is unNatural and simply by virtue of being unNatural automatically inferior to Nature.

> Man vs Nature is an old dichotomy

I can't think of any lone man vs. the wilderness stories from before Ibn Tufail's Autodidactus (12c.), but I'm happy to be corrected.

Eight hundred years still counts as "old". Horace, whose "Drive out nature with a pitchfork..." only makes sense in context of the same dichotomy, predates ibn Tufail by about a millennium in any case. And I'd argue for a likely origin alongside that of agriculture, which was much earlier still.

Ibn Tufail is one of the fathers of modernity. His book was translated by one of John Locke’s friends. In the context of history, this is early modern Spain. 800 years is a long time for an individual, but if the question is "did people always do this or is this a modern thing?" then finding a text at the dawn of modernity which was specifically influential on later moderns doesn't count as evidence that people always did a thing.

I’d need to read Horace to get a sense of the context there.

EDIT: Looked up Horace:

> We, who love the country, salute Fuscus that loves the town… If we must live suitably to nature, and a plot of ground is to be first sought to raise a house upon, do you know any place preferable to the blissful country? … You may drive out nature with a fork, yet still she will return, and, insensibly victorious, will break through [men's] improper disgusts.

I believe in context, this is about how country living is better than city living, so it's not really about "man vs. nature" at all. I think the metaphor is that like a farm where you're ploughing the soil, still little plants will do their thing, so too you may like the city, but little bursts of rural enthusiasm will burst through.

Ibn Tufail came up with a thought experiment of "What if a person were born on a desert island? How far could they build a civilization?" The English translated this in the early modern period, and it gave birth to Robinson Crusoe, which in turn gave birth to a million derivates which pit lone individuals against the wilderness. (Robinson Crusoe → Survivor → The Apprentice → Coronavirus disaster!) AFAICT, this is a purely modern phenomenon, but again, I'd be interested in seeing what predecessors there are historically that I'm missing.

I mean, I'm not knocking, but I do wonder if you're taking "man vs. nature" to mean something more specific than the way it's being intended, is all. Not so much Bear Grylls, as just the idea that the two categories exist in a way that's distinct from one another. Although I am glad to know that Bear Grylls is drawing on so historically rich a tradition!

I think many more people incorporate it into their worldview than recognize that they're doing so.

Considering our energy needs it's not possible for large amounts of people to cohabitate with nature without altering nature. So yes, the mere (permanent) existence of humans in some area will inevitably alter nature and thus not be what we consider pristine nature anymore.

Sure. My point is that "pristine" is a meaningless concept here - any life that exists in a given environment will alter that environment to some degree; that's one of the things life does - and that I think the habit of valuing this specter of "pristineness" points to a failure to distinguish between the habit of any form of life to modify its environment, and the human habit of altering ours in ways we know are noxious and still do anyway.

My other point is that "nature" is a meaningless concept, too, and actively harmful in that it gives us an excuse to conceive of ourselves as essentially apart from our environment, and much more able to control the extent of its effects on us than we demonstrably are. Sure, we can keep the rain and cold at bay. But if climate change isn't enough evidence that our power over our environment has hard limits, the current pandemic sure as hell should be - to say nothing of the next one, or the one after that. "Nature" is something that's supposed to be out there, away from us, on the other side of a wall or a window, except when we choose for it not to be. "Nature" is an enemy.

The trouble is that, looked at that way, we inevitably find Horace was right, all those centuries ago: drive her out with a pitchfork all you like, she'll always come running back.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say.

There clearly exist areas that are more and those that are less impacted by human presence. When people talk about nature they often mean just the latter parts while perhaps considering engineered ecosystems part of "the environment" not necessarily part of "[pristine] nature". Having different words for these different things is useful. You can quibble about which words best fit them, but the distinction doesn't go away.

"Nature" isn't a word that's useful for expressing position along the continuum you describe, though. Instead it describes a sharp discontinuity that doesn't actually exist. The resulting mental model can't help but be inaccurate - and accidentally so, which means the simplification can't be controlled to avoid impairing the utility of the model.

I'd categorize the resulting conceptual error alongside the one that leads people to believe in creationism because camera eyes like ours seem too complicated to have arisen by chance. They aren't, but that's a thought you need the right conceptual tools to build. Without them, you might never get there.

Ultimately, what I'm saying is that "nature" is likewise the wrong tool with which to build thoughts about how humans interact with our environment.

Where is the discontinuity implied? It seems like there is a continuum between entirely engineered environments and largely untouched ones. The latter is considered natural, hence "nature" as an expression of one part of the continuum.

Of course there are other uses of the word, such as "nature finds a way" meaning that biological life will adapt to engineered environments too. But this the usual inadequacy of human language, the same word can have multiple, even conflicting meanings.

Anyway, if you wish to convey some important concept better you should name it so it can be discussed instead of just pointing at other concepts and declaring them inadequate. This is what confuses me about this discussion, the lack of proposed improvements.

How much modification equals not "nature" any more, though? It's like trying to define how many grains of sand make a heap. The difference is that nobody imagines a heap of sand is anything but a heap of sand.

We're already talking in terms of a better concept, that of an explicitly understood continuum between totally unmodified environments and totally human-built ones. That is the improvement, because it accurately models reality in a way that an ill-defined concept of "nature" does not, and avoids lending itself to implicit confusions like that between "natural" and "desirable" discussed elsewhere in these comments. There are desirable aspects to built environments, and desirable aspects to unbuilt ones, and undesirable aspects of both as well. A maximally desirable human environment incorporates both, and I don't see how sloppy analysis of the sort encouraged by "nature" makes such an environment easier to attain.

Well, this is quite a tangent. I think this somewhat due to different understandings of the semantics of the word. I guess this communication issue does suggest using more specific terms would be helpful, but I want to point out that the interpretation of the word "nature" is not the only possible use.

> avoids lending itself to implicit confusions like that between "natural" and "desirable"

See, this "implicit confusion" doesn't seem compulsive to me. I see that there's a romanticized view of nature, sure. But there's that famous adage from Hobbes' Leviathan about man in a state of nature having a nasty, brutish and short life. And really, nature does a lot of undesirable things.

> How much modification equals not "nature" any more, though? It's like trying to define how many grains of sand make a heap. The difference is that nobody imagines a heap of sand is anything but a heap of sand.

Well, heapiness itself is a continuum. That's why we tack on qualifies such as "small heap", just like we tack "pristine" onto nature to mean something at a more extreme end of the spectrum. "tamed nature" indicates something more to the other end.

Anyway, back to the original discussion. What I was trying to say is that humans cannot generally cohabitate with nature. We can't have billions of people live in a forest or on the steppes. At a global scale we can share the planet and have leave some areas largely untouched, but that's not living together. It's living apart and occasionally visiting.

It's not a issue of semantics, but of semiosis. It's exactly that breadth of reasonable interpretations, and the necessarily consequent ambiguity, that I'm arguing we'd do better to avoid.

By the same token, "cohabitate" wasn't the best choice of word. What I mean by it is to direct our modification of the environment so that it doesn't benefit us to the active detriment of other life. One example, as mentioned by another commenter here, is to design roads so that they don't block migration routes or access to resources. Granted that that's more expensive, but it's also not without tangible human benefits alongside those of avoiding ecological derangement, like fewer citybound deer eating everybody's gardens and posing a dangerous obstacle to traffic - granted in turn that the mechanism here is higher cull rates through human hunting that doesn't happen in the city because high population density doesn't mix well with .308 rounds flying all over the place, and that's rough on some individual deer, but it also improves population dynamics and quality of life for the deer that don't get shot because they're closer to the carrying capacity of the local environment, and we have to fill that maintenance role anyway because our ancestors extirpated the large predators which previously did so.

That's one example of the larger idea, which is to recognize that an ecosystem is a system, with its own internal logic and feedback loops, and engineer our environment modifications to function as part of that system - instead of kicking the whole thing apart and then trying to figure out after the fact what to do as the pieces of what we've so blithely broken fall hard atop our heads.

Like with climate change. Or kudzu, or starlings, or zebra mussels, bison, banana fungus, novel coronaviruses...

(And anyway - between our effect on the atmosphere, and the arguable mass extinction event we've caused, is there any place on the planet which can accurately be called in your usage "pristine"?)

You're falling into the same trap there that GP was pointing out. Yes, any number of humans (starting at 1) will alter the state of their surroundings. But that doesn't make the surroundings "unnatural" in any way. It just happens that modern human societies tend to alter their environment in a way that it loses many of the properties that we long for, yet somehow we don't seem capable of changing the way we shape our environments in a different way. Instead we declare "that over there" to be "nature" which is to de desired and "this here" to be "the civilized world" and most people literally can't imagine any correspondence of the two.

> Considering our energy needs it's not possible for large amounts of people to cohabitate with nature without altering nature.

And when you realize you can say the same thing about ants and termites, you will know what the person you're talking to is talking about.

Making the distinction "Human vs Nature" implies Humans are special, set apart from any other species; even if you say that Humans are bad, being especially bad is still being special, and set apart.

Human habitation might well be natural, but fences aren't.

Then badger setts and beaver dams aren't, either.

That's not what I mean. Wander in the countryside for a while - outside of one of these national parks - and your wandering is likely to be interrupted at every turn by kilometres of chain-link fence, impassable highway, or some other artificial obstacle that spans a vast distance and makes you feel enclosed, rather than free. A beaver dam is no such barrier.

I think the urge to explore the landscape goes much farther back than the colonial period, which is a very recent blip in human history. The author should look back not to 200 years ago for the source of that instinct, but 20,000 years ago or more - and consider what wilderness might have looked like then.

Ask a fish how much of an obstacle the artifice of beavers imposes.

We're violently in agreement, I think, inasmuch as we both find much obnoxious in the effects of human artifice as directed to modifying our environment. Where we differ is in the use of a special category "unnatural" to describe those effects we do not like. I don't argue that only the equation of "natural" with "desirable" is without value; I argue that "natural" is meaningless, as is its converse, and if we want to talk about desirability, we're better served to do so directly instead of confusing the issue with less precise concepts.

I'm sure the fish would see them as an unnatural barrier and an annoyance, but I don't speak for the fish or think so much of their perspectives.

Speaking personally as a human, there are few other vertebrate animals on Earth that can remotely pose a serious threat to my freedom, provided I exercise common sense precautions. That's probably why I'm most concerned with the human modifications to the landscape. I am forced to heed them. I'm sure fish would see it differently, although they'd still encounter a lot fewer beaver dams than human obstructions.

See my other comment about how I would feel differently if beavers built dams across highways and shot people crossing them. I might be less inclined to treat beavers as a harmless part of the natural landscape then.

We can make the natural vs unnatural distinction because humans have at least a partial hegemony over all other species now. Not completely; clearly microbes and insects are still out of our control. If there were intelligent alien invaders that started building walls and bridges and cages, I'm sure we'd label those as "unnatural" and "artificial" too, whereas a beaver dam is a natural curiosity. If there were other rival intelligent species sharing the Earth and reshaping it to their own vision, they probably wouldn't fit into the nature category.

It marks a power dynamic, and it's an important distinction. Artificial structures are backed by the power of laws and property rights and other enforcement rules. That gives them a power beyond their material strength. Ants and beavers reshape the earth too, but the only thing stopping you from paving them over are objections by other humans. The other ants would hardly even retaliate.

Edit: I guess the core of my point is that if you want to include a pair of wire cutters in with your bug spray and bear whistle and other hiking gear, so that you can freely pass through chain-link fences, then maybe you will start to view those fences no differently than rocks and fallen logs, just another curious structure erected by another fascinating mammal. I, personally, would never feel so bold.

Well, it depends a lot on where you cut the fence. Around here, though, usually someone has taken care of that before I get there.

That aside, I agree with everything you've just said. The only point where we differ, I think, is that of whether the word "nature" and its allies make a useful shorthand for any of these concepts.

I think the points you've raised deserve more focused consideration than that. For example, I agree that it's far too easy and thus too common for people to forget that we do have a unique power over our environment, and to use that power in ways that do harm. I don't think that deserves to sneak past under so fuzzy and easily dismissible a term as "unnatural"; I think it deserves to be called out for exactly what it is.

That's a lot harder to do when we make a habit of glossing over such considerations with a shorthand like "nature". That's undesirable because these are the considerations that inform every decision we make about how we exist and behave in our environment, on scales as large as that of climate change and as small as what we do with our backyards, when we have those. Or, for that matter, whether we have those. None of this stuff is as simple or as abstract as "nature" makes it seem, and that's why I argue that "nature" fails to serve a useful purpose.

Thanks for elaborating, I think I understand what you mean now! I was really confused when you said that beaver dams are just like fences, because to me they're not at all the same. It sounds like we actually have a very friendly disagreement. =)

I think "nature" is our best way to express these important but nebulous concepts, but you think it hides those exact same concepts. We're probably both right -- it will depend what community we're in, and their understanding and interpretation of the word "nature".

You have to look at the scale. Humans are trying to control every last price of land and there are no predators to stop them. If beavers were blocking every river most likely some predator would take care of that very soon.

The fences are really annoying in the West of the US. I like the way Scotland does it. You have the right to pass through privately owned land so cross country hiking is possible. Here in California there is always a good chance that some fence will block you. It’s also bad for animals. As far as I know bears will have trouble getting over barbed wire fences so their territory gets restricted a lot.

And... parking lot boundaries you can't walk through, too.

Walls everywhere.

There is very little about land management in the US that has ever not been objectionable.

A deliberately obtuse interpretation, a fence is a manmade structure while those aren't.

Man is a creature no different from a beaver. Why is a manmade structure any different from a beaver? You say fences encompass large swaths of land. Well then, certainly a coral reef is a blight on the earth, since it is much larger than most manmade partitions and imposed on the land by animals, the same as man.

I'm sorry, but either I'm much worse at communication than I thought, or you're deliberately misinterpreting what I write -- and I'm not sure why.

Obviously I don't object to fences being big, I object to them being impermeable. That's not just a problem for me and other humans; migtatory animals get seriously impacted by these long one-dimensional structures parcelling up the landscape as well. There have been proposals for landscaped bridges to link sides of highways to allow moose and other animals to cross, but the cost of doing that extensively is quite prohibitive.

By the way, I agree with your characterization of humans as being just like other animals. But if beavers were constructing hundred-kilometre-long barriers that blocked off our migratory routes (ie, roads and highways), and routinely shot or overran humans that attempted to cross them, then I think we'd consider beavers to be a serious problem too.

You can walk through all the mountains made of coral? You can barely walk around southern California without one of those awful reefs getting in your way

If you have a point to make, would you care to spell it out more clearly? This is starting to feel like a troll comment, which I didn't expect on HN.

Yes. The pint is that all creatures build and maintain things. It is human bias that leads us to believe a skyscraper is unnatural and a beaver dam or reef natural

I appreciate that humans are a part of nature. But "natural" and "unnatural" refer to valid, if nebulous, regions of concept-space that it is useful to have words for.

When your neighbour says she avoids putting chemicals in her food, do you cross your arms and say "even water is a chemical"? Or do you accept that her usage of the word points to a valid region in concept-space that isn't hard for you to understand, if you aren't hung op on dictionary definitions?

I wrote a cousin comment explaining why, despite the fact that humans are part of nature, there is a qualitative difference between human structures and beaver dams / coral reefs. It's not human bias, but human power and social structures that cause the difference. Or else, as I mentioned there, you're welcome to bring wire cutters with you on your hikes and treat fences the same way you treat other natural barriers.

This is also why, in a post apocalyptic movie, the decaying artifacts and skyscrapers of a lost society feel more like a natural landscape than artificial structures. It's because they lose the power structure that backs them.

Insisting on a useless definition of "natural" that encompasses literally every object in the universe just makes communication a chore.