[tathougies]

Man is a creature no different from a beaver. Why is a manmade structure any different from a beaver? You say fences encompass large swaths of land. Well then, certainly a coral reef is a blight on the earth, since it is much larger than most manmade partitions and imposed on the land by animals, the same as man.

[jbay808]

I'm sorry, but either I'm much worse at communication than I thought, or you're deliberately misinterpreting what I write -- and I'm not sure why.

Obviously I don't object to fences being big, I object to them being impermeable. That's not just a problem for me and other humans; migtatory animals get seriously impacted by these long one-dimensional structures parcelling up the landscape as well. There have been proposals for landscaped bridges to link sides of highways to allow moose and other animals to cross, but the cost of doing that extensively is quite prohibitive.

By the way, I agree with your characterization of humans as being just like other animals. But if beavers were constructing hundred-kilometre-long barriers that blocked off our migratory routes (ie, roads and highways), and routinely shot or overran humans that attempted to cross them, then I think we'd consider beavers to be a serious problem too.

[tathougies]

You can walk through all the mountains made of coral? You can barely walk around southern California without one of those awful reefs getting in your way

[jbay808]

If you have a point to make, would you care to spell it out more clearly? This is starting to feel like a troll comment, which I didn't expect on HN.

[tathougies]

Yes. The pint is that all creatures build and maintain things. It is human bias that leads us to believe a skyscraper is unnatural and a beaver dam or reef natural

[jbay808]

I appreciate that humans are a part of nature. But "natural" and "unnatural" refer to valid, if nebulous, regions of concept-space that it is useful to have words for.

When your neighbour says she avoids putting chemicals in her food, do you cross your arms and say "even water is a chemical"? Or do you accept that her usage of the word points to a valid region in concept-space that isn't hard for you to understand, if you aren't hung op on dictionary definitions?

I wrote a cousin comment explaining why, despite the fact that humans are part of nature, there is a qualitative difference between human structures and beaver dams / coral reefs. It's not human bias, but human power and social structures that cause the difference. Or else, as I mentioned there, you're welcome to bring wire cutters with you on your hikes and treat fences the same way you treat other natural barriers.

This is also why, in a post apocalyptic movie, the decaying artifacts and skyscrapers of a lost society feel more like a natural landscape than artificial structures. It's because they lose the power structure that backs them.

Insisting on a useless definition of "natural" that encompasses literally every object in the universe just makes communication a chore.