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.