After all, if everything humanity does is pollution, why single any specific acts out?
How we see nature plays little role, in after-the-fact justifications or condemnations. In fact pollution could be justified under either view:
Humanity is different than nature: all we do is pollution, in the sense that is outside of nature. So why single any specific act out? Or other potential arguments: "We are better than nature, and we'll eventually just sort pollution out with our technology".
Humanitity is "just" nature: so what we do is natural, including pollution. No need to do something else, we just keep doing what comes natural to us, including polluting. Why consider huge heaps of human garbage any worse that we consider other animals creating their own waste?
This is a dogmatic statement influenced by religions that put humanity as a separate creation.
Humanity is part of nature. Fixing the world requires accepting that.
If you yourself can cut a tree down and do whatever else to make a piano, there's no world created by humans. It'll take you a while but in the end there's only you and your shiny new piano and nature.
If there is a distributed process with countless people and organizations using intricate mechanisms to build components of mechanisms that build mechanisms that extract materials for building mechanisms for preparing different components of a piano, never seeing or knowing the whole end result... that's a world. If you can click a button and have this thing show up at your house and not even know about everything that goes into it (much less do it yourself)... that's a world.
And then someone will go on being pedantic and bring forward bees and ant colonies and the like. Let's call it "a matter of degree/scale/breadth" this might shut them up!
There's so many modifiers to 'reading' that I, along with probably many readers, are unsure what your trying to express.
None the less, his music is great and can be enjoyed, like any other artists, without listening to the political and culture drivel that artists sadly often produce. They are easily captured and swayed by instinct tautological ideologies.
Just because it feels right does not mean it to be true.
My favorite rendition of his "My love wears forbidden colors"
Or maybe it is a bit more complex. And the story maybe begins with civilized people who explicitly wanted to conquer nature. To make it bow to mens will. And quite some still want to exactly this. They were the ones creating that artificial distinction.
The romanticism of nature that you are criticize, is more of a counter movement to that philosophy, that we are in fact part of nature and we have to find our balance within the greater cycles.
Ivory is also typically only used for the keys, and doesn't actually impact the tuning of the instrument.
They exist, but they are notoriously difficult to tune and keep in tune compared to iron framed pianos. I think they have stopped making them for quite a while. I find it hard to imagine a high school using an instrument requiring so much maintenance.
If it was indeed a wooden framed piano, it was probably more of an antique than a practical instrument, and so, maybe with ivory keys, though again I doubt it.
That also made them pretty finicky, changing moisture and temperature would have a significant effect on the pitch of the piano. At that time 'standard pitch' was about A4@423 Hz, considerably below what it is today (A4@440), which lessened the problems somewhat but if you wanted to have your instrument well tuned you had better learn how to tune it yourself.
For harpsichord players (the predecessor to the piano) today self tuning is still the standard.
Piano history is fascinating, if you are interested in the subject I'd recommend reading 'Of men, women and pianos' by Arthur Loesser. It's an old book but a fantastic source of historical information about the development of the piano/grand piano.
What's the difference between the honey created by bees and the nuclear waste of a nuclear reactor?
If you get rid of the pro-not-human narrative there is none.
Plastic is another unbelievably horrible man made concoction which is absolutely destroying the natural world due to poor handling.
Since plastic waste and nuclear waste aren't food for other organisms, or don't naturally break down, they're not materials that belong in the natural environment. The is the same environment from which you come from, owe everything too, and which you're still totally and utterly dependent on for your survival.
Hopefully that's a good answer...
By the way, I used to share your beliefs, that it's all the same, it's all "natural", but I just can't keep up the mental charades anymore. Our intellect and creativity is an important part of our short-term survival, but thus far it's been massively destructive and I can't see that changing anytime soon.
- Ryuichi Sakamoto