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Where is the discontinuity implied? It seems like there is a continuum between entirely engineered environments and largely untouched ones. The latter is consid

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.

throwanem 7y ago
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.
- the8472 7y ago
  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.
  - throwanem 7y ago
    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"?)

throwanem 7y ago

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.

the8472 7y ago
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.
- throwanem 7y ago
  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"?)