[tantivy]

“Nature” and “natural” are normative terms that commonly distinguish the world altered and created by humans from the world that isn’t altered or created by humans. It’s clear in context that Sakamoto is using the term accurately in a normative sense, not making a semantic error.

[msla]

And that normative sense succeeds in separating humanity from nature, creating an "Us vs It" narrative that makes pollution easier to ignore.

After all, if everything humanity does is pollution, why single any specific acts out?

[coldtea]

Pollution goes on because it's the convenient path of least resistance, has short term benefits (e.g. we keep indulging in consumptiona as usual) and there are huge profit interests. That simple.

How we see nature plays little role, in after-the-fact justifications or condemnations. In fact pollution could be justified under either view:

Humanity is different than nature: all we do is pollution, in the sense that is outside of nature. So why single any specific act out? Or other potential arguments: "We are better than nature, and we'll eventually just sort pollution out with our technology".

Humanitity is "just" nature: so what we do is natural, including pollution. No need to do something else, we just keep doing what comes natural to us, including polluting. Why consider huge heaps of human garbage any worse that we consider other animals creating their own waste?

[msla]

> Humanity is different than nature

This is a dogmatic statement influenced by religions that put humanity as a separate creation.

Humanity is part of nature. Fixing the world requires accepting that.

[MichaelZuo]

This would imply every human action is 'unnatural'...

[throwaway290]

I think the key is "world".

If you yourself can cut a tree down and do whatever else to make a piano, there's no world created by humans. It'll take you a while but in the end there's only you and your shiny new piano and nature.

If there is a distributed process with countless people and organizations using intricate mechanisms to build components of mechanisms that build mechanisms that extract natural resources for building mechanisms for preparing different parts that are eventually put together as a piano (which itself is almost a side effect, a minor detail almost no participant of the process sees or even knows about)... that's a world. If you click a button and have this thing show up at your house and not know a bit about what goes into it much less do it yourself... that's a world.

[coldtea]

>If there is a distributed process with countless people and organizations using intricate mechanisms to build components of mechanisms that

And then someone will go on being pedantic and bring forward bees and ant colonies and the like. Let's call it "a matter of degree/scale/breadth" this might shut them up!

[throwaway290]

I was going to point out that it is kind of a spectrum but decided to try and see what I can make of binary differentiation. You're right it's not great, too vague, writing doesn't like that and favors black and white thinking and neat causality chains, but few are able to see it as a limitation of writing as medium instead of how things "actually" are.

[coldtea]

Only under a naive mechanistic non-contextual machine-like reading :)

[MichaelZuo]

> naive mechanistic non-contextual machine-like reading

There's so many modifiers to 'reading' that I, along with probably many readers, are unsure what your trying to express.