What exactly is Nature? Why should we care about it? How are we affecting it? What should we do differently?

(Note: I use capital-N Nature to distinguish it from other meanings of the word.)

Postcard Nature and Buffet Nature

I hiked in the Sierra Nevada recently. As always, I was awed by the beauty of Nature (in this case, pine/cedar forests with a sprinkling of brilliant yellow aspen).

But I realized I had fallen into a mental trap; I was thinking about Nature as a source of inspiring mountain vistas and beautiful sunsets, sort of an art gallery for my viewing pleasure. I call this "Postcard Nature".

Similarly, people talk about the "bounty of Nature", thinking of it as something that produces food with little or no effort on our part. I call this "Buffet Nature".

Thinking of Nature primarily as an art gallery or an all-you-can-eat buffet is superficial, self-centered, and ultimately self-destructive. I'm reminded of The Giving Tree, an oddly abhorrent children's book by Shel Silverstein, in which a man exploits an apple tree until only its stump is left.

What is Nature, really?

You know this already, but nature is made up of many interacting systems:

• Geology
• Atmosphere
• Oceans
• Hydrology (the movement and distribution of water)
• Climate (combines the above)
• Evolution
• Ecology (plants, animals, microorganisms, and their population dynamics)
• Astronomy (what happens on Earth depends on its magnetosphere, on solar weather, on the Earth's movement relative to the sun, and even on the solar systems's movement in the Milky Way galaxy)

These systems operate on various time scales, ranging from hundreds to billions of years. Each system interacts in complex ways with most or all of the others.

I'll call this system of systems "Real Nature".

Real Nature has produced an environment on Earth that's amenable to life. It has water and atmospheric oxygen, a suitable temperature range, and a magnetosphere that protects the surface from lethal cosmic particles.

It has produced not just life, but extremely diverse life, and a mechanism (random mutation and natural selection) that produces increasingly sophisticated organisms, and eventually intelligence.

This all seems like a miracle, but it's not. It's explained by the Anthropic Principle. There are almost certainly countless planets whose conditions don't allow evolution beyond a certain point, or that don't allow life at all.

So Nature is pretty amazing. But it isn't moral or noble. Organisms are inherently selfish. They're genetically programmed to survive and reproduce. If this means killing and/or eating other organisms, that's what they do.

The biological part of Nature depends on death. If organisms didn't die naturally, their ecosystem would quickly fill up and they'd die unnaturally. Evolution depends on fitter mutations reproducing more. That generally means that less fit individuals die earlier.

For evolution to work, everything has to die. Even the fittest individual has to die, because a mutation might produce an even fitter individual, and Nature needs to make room for it. So most organisms have a genetically-encoded lifetime limit.

How humans disrupt Nature

Things started to go wrong with the advent of agriculture, c. 12,000 years ago. At that point there were about 5 to 10 million humans. Prior to that the populations of all species were generally cyclical, and were determined mostly by the availability of food.

Due to their intelligence, humans figured out how to grow food. That gave them an essentially unlimited food supply. Human population therefore began to increase exponentially, and it has done so ever since.

Eventually humans needed more land for agriculture, and they started clearing continents. They needed wood for fire, building, and war, and they deforested Europe.

They developed technology and industrial mass production. They polluted the atmosphere and changed the climate. They filled the oceans with plastics.

They built roads and highways that were death zones for all other species. They eliminated the habitat of other species.

As a result of all these things, other species began to go extinct. Species extinction is part of Nature, but humans have accelerated it by a factor of thousands.

Humans are intelligent. They could easily have stepped back at some point and said: "We have the ability to reproduce without limit, but we've decided not to. We're going to pick a population that won't impact other species, and limit ourselves to that".

But they didn't do this. They just kept reproducing and consuming without limit.

All humans are intelligent, but only a few are wise. Humanity as a whole behaves foolishly - in fact, no differently from a bacteria colony.

How humans view Nature

Most modern humans don't understand Real Nature. In large part they're contemptuous of it. The ideas that Nature exists to serve humans, and that humans have priority over other species, are central to the major religions.

When Europeans arrived in the new world and saw its forests, they didn't see it as an ecosystem; they saw it as lumber, and they set to work chopping it down.

Why do people think this way? As an example: I have a friend - let's call him Ray - who is very smart and a wonderful guy in general. He considers himself politically liberal. But:

• Ray despises Nature. He views it as messy, dirty, and dangerous. To him, animals eating other animals is cruel and disgusting. He prefers human 'development' - buildings, pavement - to Nature. Ray and I hike in the hills every week, and sometimes we encounter a view so magnificent that Ray concedes that Nature has some merit. But this is Postcard Nature; Ray knows little about Real Nature, and has no interest in learning.
• Ray hates the idea of death. If there were an immortality pill, he would eagerly take it; he thinks any sane person would. I don't think he's thought through the long-term implications of this.
• I wrote an essay about whether human civilization will survive another 10,000 years, and how we can increase the odds of it doing so. When I told Ray about this, he was uninterested in the issue. He said he's unconcerned about what happens after he dies, and he thinks that 99.9% of humans are the same.
• When I discuss my ideas on human overpopulation with Ray, he scoffs at them. He thinks there should be as many human beings as the Earth will support (in the short term, which he doesn't distinguish from the long term).
• Ray thinks that human technology will solve the climate crisis, and that a larger human population is more likely to produce the genius who will find this solution.

Ray's views on Nature are deeply entrenched. I've never made any progress arguing the above issues with him. His hackles are raised immediately. He seeks out minor points of disagreement, and uses them to discard the main points. It's like talking to a Fox News Republican.

Ray aside, I'm especially concerned (and appalled) by the idea that "trashing Earth is inevitable, but that's OK because we can colonize Mars or maybe a planet of another star". This is misguided idiocy; it's even more wrong than religion.

It seems that most humans have an incomplete and distorted view of Nature and humanity's role within it. Their thinking is confined to a box that extends only to their own property lines and to the end of the fiscal year.

Their world views, and hence their political views, are selfish and short-sighted. They want to own and consume as much as possible; what happens later, even to their own descendants, is of no concern to them.

What should we do?

To summarize:

• Nature is completely and solely responsible for the existence of humans, and for everything that we depend on to survive.
• Humans are destroying Nature at a breakneck pace.
• We know this is happening, but we continue to do it.

This is idiocy; it's insanity. Most humans don't seem to know what's happening. Of those who do, only a fraction care. Some brave people are taking action; some (like me) write essays. We're denounced as alarmists, environmental extremists, and so on.

Here's what humans should do: reduce their numbers. Get out of the way, and let Nature work the way it did before agriculture.

They should do this not to benefit themselves (humans tend to look at everything through the lens of self-interest) but to save Nature. Nature is the important thing, not humanity. The measures of success are Biodiversity, clean air, and clean water.

I like to end these essays on a (perhaps unrealistic) positive note. Here are some things that might help the human / nature problem:

• Teach Real Nature throughout elementary and high school rather than in upper-division college courses.
• Educate the public about the current destruction of Nature, through all available media: TV documentaries, social media, etc. It can be depressing and hopeless. Emphasize cases where things are being reversed and progress is being made.
• Expose everyone to Nature. Not just a 1 mile scenic hike, but a solid week or more in wilderness, at various places around the world. Maybe with some hunting and fishing.

One of the underlying problems is that, in America's system of unregulated Capitalism, corporations are primary perpetrators of environmental damage, and they don't want the public to know about it. To deal with this effectively, we need to change our form of government.