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Humans are as natural as any animal on this planet. Beavers build dams, flooding vast areas and it’s natural. When humans do it, it’s not. Makes zero sense.

• henriquemaia 4y ago
  Though I understand, and in a way agree with your point—that human changes to the environment are as natural as that of beavers—, I think one important difference is the scale of those changes. Ours are not as natural in the sense that we no longer rely on our inborn capacities to produce those changes. Yes, in a way we are like beavers in our engineering. But we are insanely overpowered beavers. The scope of our changes puts us in a class of our own. So if we call changing the environment by one's own means only 'natural', and massively changing it by compounded means 'artificial', we are not natural, not as beavers. Ours is artificial. So contrary to what you said, that distinction makes at least some sense.
  • yourapostasy 4y ago
    > But we are insanely overpowered beavers. Modern human civilization is the apex predator that still often feels and acts like it is prey on the African veldt. So you get insanely overpowered beavering while some of us still compare us on the same level as beavers.
• quickthrower2 4y ago
  Seems like a whataboutism. Is there any other animal outside of humans we see as a serious threat to our habitat, to the extent we are?
  • refurb 4y ago
    Isn’t that all a matter of subjective opinion? If a beaver floods a field and leads to the extinction of some small species, is that “unnatural”? What if humans flood the same field? An even bigger question - if humans didn’t exist, does the earth have any intrinsic value at all?
• midoridensha 4y ago
  Beavers don't build ships and move to other continents and then build dams there, wrecking the local ecology.
  • refurb 4y ago
    Are you suggesting wolfs didn’t migrate to different areas and change the ecology with their hunting? That viruses didn’t spread and wipe out populations of animals?
    • midoridensha 4y ago
      Yes, I am definitely suggesting wolves (not "wolfs") did not build ships or airplanes and migrate around the world in an astonishingly short amount of time. They migrated slowly, on foot, as they were able to by following food sources, and using land bridges since wolves can't cross oceans. Same goes for viruses (I'll give you a pass on that one, it's more accepted now than "virii"): they don't float across oceans in a week, unless they're carried by birds (which most aren't).