[mactavish88]

It's always odd to me how people tend to think that human-created ecosystems are "freakish" or "unnatural".

Humans evolved in the same environment as the ecosystems we're modifying. The buildings and cars and roads we make are made of materials we find on earth, similar to how birds build nests or ants make anthills. (Whether all the things we build are good and healthy for us and our environment is another story.)

My hypothesis has long been that this view of human activity as "unnatural" was actually born of the religious perspective that some religions hold that humans were implanted into the universe from the outside.

[542354234235]

I think it is a useful distinction for non-religious reasons. First is that humans change the environment more than anything else, by a large margin. As they say, “the dose makes the poison”. All species modify the environment they live in, but none are reshaping the oceans, every landmass, the air, the climate etc. like humans. Humans created multiple elements that never existed on earth.

Second, humans are conscious of the things we are doing. We can write articles about it and make choices about how we will change the environment in the future. We cannot discuss things with wolves in Yellowstone about how they are changing the area. The cinnamon trees in Hawaii can’t get together and decide how to share space with other plants.

And finally, always have at least three items when listing things.

[fallous]

Life has fundamentally changed the environment multiple times. The reason you live in an oxygenated environment is due to the waste produced by life.

[jermaustin1]

How long did it take to oxygenate the planet though? Millions of years, billions?

How long did it take to spew enough carbon into the atmosphere to create acid rain? How long did it take to clear cut most of the wester European forests?

No one thinks the earth was perfectly harmonious before man, but in the last 200k years (0.0004% of the earth's age), we have DEFINITELY left a mark that no other life form before had. In the last 200 years, we've probably done more harm than all other life forms before as well (but that I'm less confident about).

[sfn42]

That carbon we're spewing into the atmosphere was once part of the atmosphere. We're just putting it back.

Similarly, life forms are responsible for removing it, producing oxygen etc. The planet has gone through multiple mass extinctions, ice ages etc, it has changed much more significantly and over short time periods before.

That's not to say we shouldn't be reducing emissions and trying to reduce our impact. I just don't like this argument that seems to me like it's based on trying to guilt people - "The earth was fine until we ruined it!", it's bullshit. The earth is a planet, we do not have the capability of destroying it. We can change it so we and many other life forms can't live here any more but it will still be a planet and there will most likely still be some form of life here for millions of years to come.

The problem is we are shitting where we sleep, we are ruining our own home. If we take it too far, which we may already have done, we won't be able to live here any more, at least not in the way and scale we currently are. And we're certainly not living anywhere else any time soon either, so that means we screwed ourselves.

And when we're gone I personally don't care whether there's still dolphins or whatever. Life comes and goes. That's life. Everything will end, the sun will die and so will the universe. The only question is when.

Why anyone would care about what happens after we're gone is beyond me. What we need to prioritize is self preservation. And we rely on the current ecosystem so if we ruin it we ruin ourselves. But from the resulting apocalypse new life will form, which couldn't have existed without it. The earth will be fine, we might not be.

[jlaternman]

“We can change it so we and many other life forms can't live here any more but it will still be a planet and there will most likely still be some form of life here for millions of years to come.“

When people talk of destroying the planet, they do not mean obliterating its mass in a Death Star-like way. They’re just talking about destroying its ability to sustain life, and it seems clear we have the potential to trigger that change. It’s a small planet, and even if we had no knowledge of it, looking around in the universe suggests its ecosystems and atmosphere are fragile and can’t be taken for granted.

[southernplaces7]

>They’re just talking about destroying its ability to sustain life

You should really look deeper into the effects of large historical asteroid impacts and other major cataclysms. Literally, the worst that humanity could do even if it tried with current technology doesn't even come close to being so fantastically destructive. We could, tomorrow, start polluting the earth to the absolute straining maximum of our ability and follow this up with the launch of all our nuclear weapons everywhere in the world, and we'd kill ourselves off (or at least enough of us to no longer be able to continue our destruction efforts in a meaningful way) long before we'd more than pull off a tiny fraction of the destruction one large asteroid causes.

And no, we wouldn't at all ruin the Earth's ability to sustain life. Our planet and its ability to regenerate ecosystems has survived multiple impacts my massive asteroids, at least a couple of impacts by literal small planets, at least two total ice ages in which the planet turned into an essential snowball (think ice caps from pole to pole) and at least three massive magmatic events (that I can think of off the top of my head) spanning whole subcontinents worth of lava flow and multiple massive volcanoes erupting constantly, without pause, for hundreds of thousands of years, only for life to bounce back from all of this.

It's pure ignorant hubris to think that any human effort today could come close.

[thatcat]

SO2 and NOx produces acid rain

[jermaustin1]

My bad - point stands, just wrong element/molecule.

[thatcat]

I for sure agree with your sentiments. I added the correction because I thought the acid rain reduction program worked and was a good example of how regulation can work, but after looking it up again I found that the pH of rain didn't increase even though so2 emissions of power plants were significantly reduced.

[thatcat]

The life that produced oxygen wasn't using technology to create that change at accelerated rates. Also each time that has happened, it destabilized the ecosystem and led to mass extinctions.

[fallous]

Indeed, microbial life did not have technology and yet fundamentally changed the environment to the point that it produced mass extinctions. That was my point. Humans are not the only form of life to fundamentally transform the environment, nor is technology required in order to do so.

[keithalewis]

I see what you did there.

[Biologist123]

Well done in getting this up immediately. Pieces like this BBC piece are either implicit or explicit propaganda to define “nature” as a world without humans. Even the word “freakosystem”, as novel as it is, sets up an implicit good/bad dichotomy.

Edit: If you on-board the assumption that all change is bad, you potentially open yourself up to a great deal of anxiety associated with that change.

[dodslaser]

While this is technically correct, there is an important distinction to be made that we are the only species capable of even understanding the ramifications of our actions on an ecosystem, and choosing to change our behavior to have less (or more) of an impact on the environment we are in.

Any species could drive another species to extinction, or carry them from one location to another, but no other species are actively choosing to do so.

[Ygg2]

What does "actively choosing" mean? An ant might choose to move the bugs they milk. Do they count?

[haswell]

I’d define this as: we consciously understand the potential and real consequences of our actions.

Ants operate on instinct and are not capable of extrapolating higher order consequences like we are.

[devilbunny]

Thinking of individual ants is really the wrong analogy; ant colonies are more like the organism. Your hands work on instinct too (just look at newborn babies; they can do very little, but they can grab things).

[haswell]

I don't think my response changes for a colony.

I'm not saying ants/ant colonies don't exhibit intelligent/sophisticated behavior, but we don't have evidence to suggest they understand the higher order consequences associated with where they build their colonies.

For similar reasons, we don't consider it murder when an apex predator kills a human, but we do when it's another human.

> Your hands work on instinct too

The operation of many (if not most) of the systems in our bodies is instinctual and a mystery to us from a 1st person perspective, e.g. we don't actively beat our hearts, digest our food, etc. But continuing the last point, if you used your hands to cause harm to another human, "my hands work on instinct" isn't a reasonable defense. We still have agency and the ability to choose how we use our hands, and we're (generally) aware of the consequences of the actions we facilitate with our hands, even if we aren't directly aware of how our hands function.

[Biologist123]

Thanks, “actively choosing” assumes we have conscious will. Whilst widespread, this belief is alas just an assumption.

[Ygg2]

It goes beyond that. Depending on ecosystem and size of settlements human leaving may actually decrease bio diversity. Think it was Bulgaria or Romania, but with rural places that had their populations die out, also saw decrease in bio diversity.

[loudmax]

Incidentally, this concept of modifying one's ecosystem comes up in Richard Dawkins' book The Extended Phenotype, which is a follow up to The Selfish Gene. One of the illustrative examples is beavers turning fast moving streams into convenient slow moving fisheries by building dams. The ecosystem the beavers built is "natural" in the sense that beavers are animals and it's in their nature to chew through trees. But presumably, at least some other animals were pushed to extinction when their habitat was modified by the beavers.

[lproven]

> It's always odd to me how people tend to think that human-created ecosystems are "freakish" or "unnatural".

While this may be true, it's not what this article is about, which is IMHO why it's a refreshing change.

[eloisius]

Was it George Carlin that joked something like “maybe the earth conjured up humans in order to put all this plastic in its crust for some purpose we don’t understand”?

[jemmyw]

Or to release the energy in oil and coal. When you get a build up of stored energy something evolves to use it up.

I'm not being serious, but it's an interesting thought.

[aesch]

Sounds like an extension of the second law of thermodynamics.

[binarymax]

He certainly decried the use of “all-natural” labels for products, because “everything comes from nature!”

[hiccuphippo]

Just like organic and non-organic vegetables. All vegetables are organic!

[Ygg2]

Maybe that's just the sidequest. The real quest is getting multi planetar.

[haswell]

What if the real quest is to collectively find ways to coexist without destroying the only planet we know to be fully capable of supporting human life richly?

And this doesn’t have to be at odds with our space ambitions.

But framed the way you framed this, it somewhat reminds me of the religious perspective that this world is just prep for what is to come. As a consequence, they see the harms we’re doing as inconsequential.

[Ygg2]

> And this doesn’t have to be at odds with our space ambitions.

I never said, it is. Did I?

A side quest is an optional thing you do while you complete the main quest. Mentioning it as a side quest serves as a link to the supposed Carlin quote.

I always considered the main quest of life is to promote more life. Multi-planetary life is life more resistant to medium to large cosmical calamities.

[haswell]

I was primarily responding to this:

> The real quest is getting multi planetar.

Which when viewed as the "real" quest, has potentially problematic downstream effects. My point was that there are many people who see who see the world as something to escape and live lives prioritizing things that harm our long term ability to survive here in the pursuit of that escape.

I appreciate the clarification that this is not what you meant. It wasn't clear that the "real quest" had any connection to the side quest since they seem unrelated.

> Multi-planetary life is life more resistant to medium to large cosmical calamities.

I don't disagree. But I strongly believe that stabilizing the home base is a higher priority in the near term i.e. at a time when the planet is in a precarious place, spending enormous amounts of resources trying to colonize mars is a questionable priority when we have more immediate problems that would benefit from such lofty ambitions.

[Ygg2]

> I appreciate the clarification that this is not what you meant. It wasn't clear that the "real quest" had any connection to the side quest since they seem unrelated.

Thanks, I'm pretty sure I know what I meant. I meant a gaming analogy (main quest/ side quest) not the Christianity metaphor. Just because you perceive as such doesn't mean I meant it as that.

> But I strongly believe that stabilizing the home base is a higher priority in the near term i.e. at a time when the planet is in a precarious place

Sure, just make sure you're not waiting for Godot (I meant the play, but pun is intended).

Earth is never a stable place. Ecosystems are a constant rise and collapse of dietary chains, continents aren't standing still, and cataclysms are a dime a dozen. Organisms causing mass extinctions are also nothing new under the Sun. Albeit, we do hold a speed run record I believe.

[bix6]

Is it? No other animal seems obsessed with getting off this beautiful rock.

[bix6]

I do think there is a difference when you can cause rapid global change. And most animals are benefitting their ecosystem in some way whereas we’re just extracting resources for the highest bidder 3000 miles away. Our ecosystems are struggling to replenish themselves because we lack harmony with nature. We live in an unnatural society that clearly cannot sustain our changes.

[declan_roberts]

This is what the headlines say but it's not true. For example look into regenerative agriculture. All of the small scale farms around me are moving to rotational grazing systems because they improve the pastures and fertility of the land over time.

[bix6]

Small scale being the key word.

Industrial farming is ruining our water supply. We just had another algae bloom here and all the wild life died.

[Lutger]

There are several competing, and sometimes complementary perspectives on what 'nature' means. Some include humans and their activity within it, others do not.

One thing you can ask yourself: if human activity and the impact it has on its environment is included in what you call 'natural', then what even does remain of the word 'unnatural'? What do people refer to, when they use that word? If you don't have any sensible explanation for it, then the whole thing collapses, yet evidently a lot of people really want to keep using the word nature and even seem to have no problem in making themselves understood when doing so.

[noja]

I think if you are short-terming your existence by destroying everything around you, that could qualify as unnatural.

[Lutger]

That's interesting. Aren't there examples in nature where a species essentially destroys itself? There are many on the population level. Plants often do this, its called succession.

There's a layer to this, where natural also implies good and unnatural implies bad. For example, plastic is bad because it is unnatural, but arguing it is natural after all somehow makes it good (that is the rhetoric I believe). This depends on the notion of a 'natural order', whether that is some vague concept of 'the universe' or of God himself. Anything against that order is bad and unnatural. Humans are part of that order.

Of course, that is very pre-modern idea. I believe what comes close to a useful definition of natural would be something like 'emergent' or 'spontaneous', as opposed to deliberately designed. Its a quality you could also ascribe to, for example, cities or software systems. You don't need the human/nature split for it to be useful. It is not exactly capturing what people think of as natural, but then again we also do not believe in God anymore - by and large. At least not in the way we used to.

[kgwxd]

> what even does remain of the word 'unnatural'?

Shame.

[denom]

With our consumption humans are drawing down on the ‘reserve’ that ecological services have built up.

Human activities lack the sophistication of an ecosystem that is in balance and cannot recreate the network of benefits thereof.

[perrygeo]

Your hypothesis makes sense. I'd call it "human exceptionalism" - the (wildly unsupported) assumption that we are separate from nature.

Religions that see humans and nature as part of the same system don't have this idea of "unnatural" landscapes. They have no concept of "wilderness". All landscapes are landscapes to which we both belong and shape through our actions.

[JR1427]

Humans have brought with them the ability to dramatically change ecosystems on timescales far shorter than usually seen without them (exceptions being volcanic eruptions etc).

These short timescales mean that the mechanism of natural selection and evolution do not have time to adjust ecosystems to changes, so they can collapse rapidly.

[gman83]

It reminds me of people who won't eat certain foods because it contains "too many chemicals".

[haswell]

Except we know certain chemicals are harmful, and we have no idea about the long term effects of many others. We also have a history of using materials we don’t understand and only stopping after it kills or harms enough people.

[jcranmer]

The problem with this worldview is that it dramatically underestimates the harm of "natural" products compared to "artificial" products.

You see, if it's fermented grape juice, it's "natural", and so it's a complex flavor profile. But if you actually list out what's in it, it's a lot of toxic chemicals banned as food additives, and synthetic wine is illegal as a result. And you can't omit the egregiously toxic stuff because it makes the test came out wrong.

[IAmBroom]

Your assumptions about beverage law are dead wrong. "Synthetic wine", whatever you mean by that, is not "illegal". And beverage makers actually have much more freedom than ordinary food makers in their choices of ingredients.

[jcranmer]

Synthetic wine is the name for people who are trying to create wine from its chemical ingredients rather than from the natural process of fermentation.

There was an article several years back about one of these groups trying to get regulatory approval to sell their product, and the stumbling block was the use of things that weren't approved additives. (I want to say it was tannins, since that's the most overtly problematic chemical in wine, but it has been several years since I've seen the article, so I could be mixing it up for one of the other carcinogens involved).

[IAmBroom]

You mean like caffeine and fried animal fat? :D

[haswell]

My point wasn't that there are no naturally occurring harms, but that foods which on their own are otherwise considered safe may take on a different safety profile when altered depending on the nature of that alteration.

e.g. we're beginning to realize that eating highly processed meats on a regular basis can cause GI problems/cancer in the long run while eating some of the components individually and prepared differently does not.

[randomcarbloke]

you just sound like an anti-vaxer, one of those UPF fearmongering cultists.

[bix6]

There’s a big difference between a real strawberry and a vat of chemicals called strawberries.

[postalrat]

A real strawberry contains many times more chemicals. The chemistry of a strawberry is like alien technology compared to our primitive science.

[trelane]

Seems akin to the Ship of Theseus.

Is an entirely artificial--but indistinguishable down to the atomic level--strawberry not a strawberry?

[haswell]

When we have the ability to replicate strawberries at the atomic level, then I’d grant you this point.

We presently do not, and the market is filled with products calling themselves one thing while in reality being in essence a vat full of chemicals.

[trelane]

My point was that strawberries are a vat of chemicals.

[haswell]

But surely you’d agree that “vat of chemicals” is not the only metric by which to evaluate a substance, and that not all vats of chemicals are strawberries.

You can play this game with everything that exists. Everything is just a concoction of atoms. But some arrangements of atoms result in nuclear weapons. Others make up the breakfast I ate this morning.

The fact that they’re all just atoms doesn’t mean they share other properties like: safe to eat, tastes good to humans, etc.

[hiccuphippo]

How about diamonds? We are able to make diamonds and yet people prefer naturally created ones for some reason.

[haswell]

I think this is somewhat beside the point.

Going back to where this started, many people feel uncomfortable consuming products that contain chemicals added by humans/corporations.

Whether or not this concern is fully justified is a fair point to debate. If we could perfectly replicate the ideal strawberry down to the molecular level, said strawberry shouldn’t be a concern, even for people who go out of their way to avoid food additives.

People value diamonds for an entirely different reason. What they value is the narrative behind the diamond. Its (supposed) rareness, and the fact that natural forces produced something beautiful. There are also still echoes of hundreds/thousands of years of culture that placed a high value on them before science could replicate them.

But ultimately I think this is all orthogonal to the strawberry situation. The reasons someone does or does not want to eat a truly perfect strawberry replica will be very different from the reasons someone values a diamond.

[bix6]

Lab grown diamonds start with a diamond seed which comes from the earth (you can use a synthetic seed later on).

[bix6]

Strawberry flavored sour candy is not the ship of strawberries you seek.

[trelane]

Strawberry flavored candy is easily distinguishable from a real strawberry.

[TeMPOraL]

I agree strongly (except with the religion part - I suspect that being guilty for existing is a perspective that was thought of / rediscovered many times over the generations, regardless of religious tradition).

My takeaway from the article is: yes, we can adjust ecosystems, and no, they don't immediately wither and die, nor do they become boring monocultures. Despite popularly repeated memes, we aren't destroying everything we're touching or otherwise "playing god". If anything, this tells me we should study those ecosystems and learn from them, to become gradually more intentional about the changes we introduce.

[satisfice]

I also don’t see the value of the distinction. You could say that the idea that human-created change is unnatural is a purely artificial construct.

What does concern me is the collapse of natural (meaning tested over millions of years) biodiversity.

[BriggyDwiggs42]

I completely agree with disregarding the man/nature dichotomy, it’s complete nonsense. On the other hand, tool use and tool construction aren’t exactly the same as beaver dams, anthills, or bird nests because the particulars of the tool aren’t at all hardwired, which implies that the tool might have unexpected ramifications for the environment that would have otherwise been detected if the behavior had appeared over evolutionary timescales. A wariness towards self-conscious human ecosystem modification isn’t exactly unwarranted.

[throwaway290]

Humans are part of nature but if humans are also growing to have disproportionate impact on the rest of nature it kinda worth thinking about what's going on then