In your vernacular, this too is a cop out : One is that animals and plants suffer in order for others to survive. For the most part, a balance is achieved. Anim

In your vernacular, this too is a cop out : One is that animals and plants suffer in order for others to survive. For the most part, a balance is achieved. Animals and plants take what they need in order to survive, and there's no other way for them to survive. It is absolutely true that animals do what they do without regard to the consequences of their actions. The western pine beetle doesn't think twice about killing a pine tree that would have lived another hundred years when it uses it to feed its brood. A beaver doesn't poll the prairie dogs that have lived in the meadow for 5 generations before destroying their habit by flooding it. If I understand your argument correctly, it is applying morality to the question, not whether or not something is "natural." And that is absolutely a fair way to go about it. One can argue that it is immoral for humans to do the things they do. That is separate from the question of whether or not it is in their nature to do those things. This statement, "We don't need all the destruction we cause to survive.", is also a problem since if we immediately restored all of the habitat we "destroyed" to convert it to agriculture then there would be a lot of "not surviving" going on. That we should be good stewards of the planet is something that I think we agree. My original comment here is that we have to consider human's impact on that planet to be just as 'natural' as the impact of non-human forces on the planet. And it helps in the debate to understand how much of our nature we, as individuals, can influence. Humans are inherently tribal/social animals and as such we are strongly influenced by the "norms" of behavior around us. A really good recent example of this is masking. In an area ambivalent about masking, masking behavior reflects what others are doing. A lot of people wearing masks? More likely to wear a mask. Few masks in sight? People less likely to wear a mask. Because of this effect, we can (and I think should) influence others to good behavior by exhibiting good behavior. And in the original article this was called out as buildings that increased wildlife diversity over buildings that did not provide habitat. That is both a good and 'moral' thing to do. To bring the conversation full circle, the original comment to which I responded included this: "Have less buildings. Leave more undeveloped land. Reintroduce predators. Remove invasive species. Allow nature to take over (it will)." We do that by creating park areas. Not by tearing down existing facilities[1]. The philosophy that we could "fix" things by removing human change is unrealistic given human nature. [1] Yes we remediate things like mines to revert them back to their state prior to mining but it is rare that a former city will be remediated back to nature. See Detroit as an an example of an opportunity to do so which was not pursued.