have a copy paste
"Nature changes the environment every day of our lives - why shouldn't we change it? We're part of nature." This remark of Floyd Dominy (ex-Commissioner of Reclamation), recorded by John McPhee in his book, Encounters with the Archdruid,(1) typifies an evasion familiar to most environmental activists and scholars. Human beings are natural, therefore everything they do is "natural." Ergo, human projects cannot "harm nature," and thus the qualms of the environmentalists are without meaningful foundation.
No less an environmental philosopher than Baird Callicott has been enticed by this ploy, as he writes: "we are part of nature, so our recent habit of recycling sequestered carbon [i.e., through the consumption of fossil fuels] is not unnatural." (2) (In fairness to Callicott, we must also note that he acknowledges that some human interventions in "nature" are clearly immoral).
In an identifiable sense of the word "natural,", both Dominy and Callicott are entirely and indisputably correct. But this is not the only, or even the most relevant sense of "natural" found in environmental debates. And this equivocation is at the root of a great deal of rhetorical mischief in environmental debates and policy.
The sense of "natural" apparently intended by Dominy and Callicott in the above citations is this: "a condition in accordance with natural law." By implication, "unnatural" can only mean "contrary to natural law," which is to say physically impossible. (When a scientist encounters a validated "exception" to an assumed "natural law" he has in fact proven that the putative "law" was no such thing).
It follows, as Dominy suggests, that everything that human beings create and do is "natural," including transuranic elements, DDT and chloro-fluorocarbons, atomic reactors, genetically modified organisms, exponential population growth, etc. The "unnatural" includes perpetual-motion machines, time travel, faster-than-light velocities - unless and until, that is, these sci-fi notions are found to be possible, whereupon they are acknowledged to be "natural."
"Artificiality" is thus abolished by semantic fiat, and with it all cause for concern about the warnings of the environmentalists. "If it can be done, go ahead and do it - don't worry, be happy, after all it's natural." To repeat Dominy's cheerful reassurance, "nature changes the environment every day of our lives - why shouldn't we change it? We're part of nature."
This argument, which I have heard from numerous students throughout my twenty-five years of teaching Environmental Ethics, has a superficial plausibility, accompanied by a suspicion that there is some sort of logical hocus-pocus at work at a deeper level.
There is indeed, as I hope to demonstrate below.
The "all-is-natural" argument is reminiscent of another, familiar to most students who have taken an introductory course in ethics: psychological egoism. This theory is simplicity itself: All human action is selfishly motivated. The immediate rejoinder is obvious: what about saints and heroes? - what about the soldier who falls on a live grenade to save his buddies, or of a Martin Luther King or Mohandas Gandhi who willingly accept imprisonment? Surely their voluntary acts were not selfish!
