Relationship is a silent gift of nature

Not one gift has Nature thanked us for or will ever. Why? Nature needs nothing other than to not care about needs, instead it is. And all we have to give nature is respect and all we take is nothing like it. As we are nigh on poverty stricken by the poorest credentials, record and results in the 21st Century. Asking Nature’s endangered gang and hearing while you still can will help. Bank on it! Man takes everything from nature. Man returns nature’s gifts with our art. Art which wholly engulfs us as it distracts us from one reality into a benign or malign communion?

Communions of concordance expressed in the calls and replies of the wild art of nature rendered into harmless manifestations of our celebrity we are partial to and fondly, frustratingly immersed in our own creations and a right to destroy them at will. In fact, we’re the personification of nature and the reasons why we cause so much damage to the natural world are expressly because of that very point.

In the natural world, creatures, plants, or any form of life will expand to make use of all resources in their entirety, plus a bit extra beyond that. If there’s more food available, you will invariably get more and more deer until there’s too many deer to support, and then they’ll either be eaten by predators, or starve, or both. If there’s too many deer, this turns into there being more predators, but then with more predators, they do the exact same thing - they produce more predators than there are deer to support them, until they starve or get killed by other predators.

This is very much so the nature of evolution - procreation is based around making as many copies of yourself as possible which survive long enough to make more copies of themselves as well. The fittest creature for a given context will almost invariably produce more offspring which live longer than previous generations could manage, such as by having a mutation which allows it to survive on less food, or to run faster to catch prey or avoid predators, or any of a huge number of possibilities. The thing is though, that the very nature of evolution ensures that the creature will produce more than is sustainable, and then the less-fit versions of that creature will die off, and presumably the one which was most fit for the situation is all that’s left, causing a cycle of overpopulation and culling.

Humans do this exact same behaviour, except we do it better than other species are capable of due to our advanced tool usage, which is totally a natural trait. What’s the difference between a human dam and a beaver’s dam? The difference is a human dam is less likely to completely ruin the local ecosystem oddly enough. It’s a much bigger scale, but also has a much better grasp of the harm that can be dealt and so we add functionality to mitigate the harm done.

What of our tendency to overpopulate? Again, this is a natural part of any species on the planet, flora or fauna. We just happen to be good at finding ways around such so that we can push harder and farther than other species would be able to, especially today because our primary predator was ourselves. We haven’t really had any huge, immense wars lately to counteract our population growth by culling the herd as it were, and so other natural factors have started to take root instead, such as a natural inclination for lower birth rates under certain circumstances. Do you think it’s blind luck that, when we reach a certain level of our needs being met, that we stop producing as many children? That’s a universal trait in humanity and doesn’t have to do with technology. We simply produce as many children are as required to survive plus a bit extra.

If we don’t need that many to survive, we don’t produce many at all. With a nearly 100% infant survival rate to adulthood in western countries, parents only tend to have 2 children, which, when you factor in those who don’t have any, it comes out to a net loss instead of the normal net gain we usually see in most natural environments, but it’s still rooted in nature that this is how we are, rather than an artificial construct.

So why do we destroy so many species and habitats? …Because… it’s natural to do so. Basically every other species on the planet does the exact same thing, they just haven’t had the capacity to adapt nearly as quickly as we do, so they haven’t been able to do so on the scale we manage to accomplish. Species have gone extinct from predators or starvation since long before humans were ever around, or anything even remotely resembling humans. Entire habitats have been able to be damaged beyond recovery due to invasive species causing catastrophic chain reactions with their introduction before we existed as well. It’s not like we’re doing anything new that is unnatural in that regard, we’re just the best ones at doing it by orders of magnitude is all.

Because we have become the very pinnacle of nature for our world, however, able to enact so much natural change at so much greater of a pace than any other species, we also have become nature’s caretaker. Our relationship to nature is no longer being “just” a natural entity, but sort of a meta-entity which exists above nature in some ways as well. We can fundamentally alter nature, both our own nature and the greater concept of nature around us, so as to mitigate the harm our natural state enacts upon the world around us.

Because of this, it’s our very act of preserving nature that makes us partially unnatural, not our destructive tendencies - those tendencies are entirely natural, so weirdly enough… we are not just nature incarnate, the poster child of what nature is capable of, but we’re also able to go slightly above and beyond the limitations of nature in order to keep the natural cycle of destruction from continuing, because if we followed only our nature, the natural conclusion would be that we would expand until we depleted all the resources the planet has to offer simply because we’re capable of doing so. It’s specifically the fact that we don’t do this at nearly the rate we’re capable of that’s unnatural.

Which kind of makes our relationship with nature pretty strange, because we’re still a part of nature. Practically the definition of what nature is, even. The posterchild of nature. And yet, at the same time, we’re ever so slightly above the limitations of nature, which has forced us to become its caretakers. It’s pretty bizarre, but quite neat when you think about it. Cheers!