Not sure that's accurate. Animals aren't trying to create things that break down easily; they're not trying to do anything but survive. The argument is circular: if animals make it, it's part of Gaia else it's 'unnatural'. Animals didn't make plastics, so they're 'unnatural'. By definition I guess, not by any real difference between them and bone or termite mounds or dinosaur bones or geodes...you know, things that can last for millennia.
Hell, even the Earth itself is made of crystals and granite and lead and arsenic and on and on. What's more natural than mother earth?
I don't applaud plastics entering the environment carelessly. But not sure we have a handle on why it's bad, when we say its not natural.
>The argument is circular: if animals make it, it's part of Gaia else it's 'unnatural'. Animals didn't make plastics, so they're 'unnatural'.
Er, this is your argument, not mine. Mine is: "if animals make it, and it is unmade (or remade, or recycled, or broken down [0]) by something else, then this is 'natural'." Plastics nor PFAS meet that standard. Those matter types stay static. The animals called 'humans' make plenty of other stuff that can't be adapted by microbes and fungus and rot that keep things from the natural world participating.
>By definition I guess, not by any real difference between them and bone or termite mounds or dinosaur bones or geodes...you know, things that can last for millennia
But this is the real pièce de stràwman: the objects under discussion have expanded from things that animals build, to natural features that don't chemically interact with the environment. Of course fucking bones and geodes aren't the same as nonbiodegradable plastics or PFAS -- not only are they contained physically by virtue of their properties, but they are also regularly destroyed by the various systems of Earth, like UV light or multicellular life, or the same geological processes that create them, respectively.
Every example provided in the parent is, and has been, a part of the world for so long that they're not disruptive to other systems, or at least are physically contained.
>I don't applaud plastics entering the environment carelessly
Should they be introduced more thoughtfully? The point is that the system is unfamiliar with it. It can't be broken down and reused by something new.
[0] Plastics 'break down' into smaller plastics. I don't think that quite counts.
Granite breaks down about as fast as plastic. No, plastic is not very different from, well, almost the entirety of the planet earth. But for a thin skin of muck.
Geodes and dissolved heavy metals and salts and on and on -all entirely 'natural' and been there forever - don't chemically interact, much.
Natural poisons exist nearly everywhere. Nature is not some wonderful synchrony of cooperative organisms. Everything is doing its best to kill something else through poison, acid, lye, violence etc. That apricot pit wants to kill you with cyanide so it's pit can thrive in your decaying body.
Heck, an imbalance in ordinary creatures (think invasive species) can do untold harm.
Examples abound. It's not about kind, just concentration and rate.
It's a complex system, and the dichotomy 'natural' doesn't contribute much to the discussion. That's my thinking anyway.
You aren't reading, or possibly understanding, what I'm writing.
Granite seems fine to me, and even if it isn't, it is localized in ways plastic and PFAS aren't. Plastic is very different from almost the entirety of the planet earth. It doesn't occur naturally, and doesn't break down naturally; just like PFAS. You can obscure this fact all you like, but it's trivially true.
>Natural poisons exist nearly everywhere. Nature is not some wonderful synchrony of cooperative organisms. Everything is doing its best to kill something else through poison, acid, lye, violence etc. That apricot pit wants to kill you with cyanide so it's pit can thrive in your decaying body.
Natural poisons (wait, now you're fine with invoking "natural"?!) are broken down over time -- they're natural. That apricot pit doesn't "want" anything, unlike the humans that make plastics or PFAS, and its cyanide "pollution" is contained physically by virtue of its properties, unlike the plastics and PFAS made by humans. Plus, the pit is easily metabolized by the various systems of microbes and fungus and rot that keep things from the natural world participating in the great cycle, like cyanide and apricot pits and apricot flesh and absolutely everything related to or created by apricots ever. I repeat, "every example provided in the parent is, and has been, a part of the world for so long that they're not disruptive to other systems, or at least are physically contained".
The system is complex, yes, so let's not go polluting almost the entire environment with things that haven't existed long enough for the various naturally-occurring garbagemen to notice, let alone adapt to them. Are unnaturally occurring materials vital to modern human life? Yes! Do we absolutely need to blanket the ecosystem in them, to our cancerous detriment? No!
Your definition involves setting humanity apart from
nature and then inverting the implicit superiority in doing that. Once you’ve taken those steps you can say anything people make that isn’t made by other animals is worse because it is unnatural.
To me the essential idea is we have the scale and capacity to move global homeostasis in ways that few animals (at least since dinosaurs) have.
Plastics are not unnatural. They are produced by animals. Humans are animals. Just more dangerous than others on a global scale.
Wax moths and bacteria both have already naturally mutated and evolved to consume plastics. Evolution and life are perhaps less fragile than you think.
None of this is to say we shouldn’t behave responsibly, only to say we also shouldn’t panic every time someone creates something that kills some stuff. That too is natural, and drives evolution.
Exactly as parent stated, there already are organisms evolving to consume plastic. The same is probable to happen for PFAS. It has carbon therefore it contains useful energy that some creature will eventually evolve to digest and outcompete other organisms.
That of course is to the detriment of the very properties we desire in these materials. Just as flooding the environment with antibiotics made them less effective, so will flooding the world with plastic will make plastic lose it's advantages. Just more slowly. This is another reason to not contaminate the environment with our externalities.
It's useful to distinguish things that are made with human influence and things that aren't, and it can be done without value judgments (one is superior or inferior). It's useful because of the disproportionate effect of synthetic things vs. natural things. No species prior to humans had the ability to obliterate all life on earth.
On the contrary, some species have already obliterated most other life on earth namely cyanobacteria during the great oxigenation event. Possibly others have done the same. They certainly did not care at all about the destruction they caused. All of this was perfectly "natural".
That of course does not mean we should follow their example. It just means that "natural" is not a useful term.
This is still a far cry from a global nuclear winter or a deliberately redirected asteroid, or any other number of things that only humans are capable of.
The Great Oxigenation Event is a terraforming level event. We are not yet capable of such a large scale manipulation. Nuclear winter is at most comparable to a supervolcano or an asteroid impact.
Also, if you consider asteroids to be natural and their orbits to be natural then "nature" is already plenty capable of playing cosmic billiards. Or do you want to restrict nature to just biology?
Everything you’re saying is anthropocentric. Give it 1, 10, or 100 million years and the natural order you idolize will have upended itself a thousand times over. All the familiar species will be extinct except for a few. The surface of the earth will have been buried or ground to dust under glaciers. Rivers, lakes and coastlines will warp and vanish and new ones will be created. The changes we have made will be wiped away but even if they remained they would pale in comparison to the violence that nature will have wrought on itself. Hopefully we will be among the stars then having outgrown this tiny pebble.
I mean, sure. Do you have any instrumental goals that aren't anthropocentric? I'm serious. Do you want anything, anything, that isn't explicable by your embodiment as a human on the planet on which you evolved? I can barely think of anything at all that fits that criteria, let alone something in that category that I personally might want.
Having evolved under the conditions that have largely prevailed for 100,000 years or more, I'm anxious to not rock the Great Boat too sharply. The rate of change is ultimately unstoppable, but we don't have to introduce disruption into otherwise stable systems, and thereby increase it. Why? Because I, too, if I manage to think that far ahead, agree that humanity should ought to get out among the stars because nature's inexorable march will change those conditions no matter what we do. Consider, however, the nature of the blood system in vertebrates: it evolved in the way that it did to emulate the properties of the ocean that once surrounded our simplistic, barely-multicellular ancestors. Diffusing foodstuff in and waste out is a passive existence; putting those services under the control of an internal ocean that the organism can influence means much more complex options. Like leaving the ocean entirely, and becoming something new.
The environment around us is intertwined with our health and well-being, in ways that we don't yet understand. If the natural environment, the "ocean", changes under our feet too quickly, we won't be able to package enough of it up to take with us to the stars. Put another way, are there any external dependencies for, say, vaginal pH? How about nutritive crops? Gut flora? How much greenery should a human see to remain psychologically healthy? What does the greenery require? We're in the very early stages of "evolving a blood system" so we can leave; we need to ensure the environment can sustain us until we do.
You keep saying fuzzy things like "made by humans", and "easily metabolized by other microbes", and "great cycle". I'd suggest pinning down a more formal definition of natural. Here's one (well, many): https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/natural.
By definition 4
> 4: having an essential relation with someone or something
your rhetorical question and answer:
> Are unnaturally occurring materials vital to modern human life? Yes!
pretty much prove that plastic is natural, by definition 4, of course.
The closest definition of the 15 to the way you are using the word is 8
> 8: occurring in conformity with the ordinary course of nature
But that's more related to a process by which something occurs. And the key word there is ordinary. The closest I think we have to your argued use of natural would be saying something like the process of extraordinarily changing the environment in a way that disrupts existing ordinary processes, is unnatural. The example used for this definition is death, so something like murdering somebody with a gun might be colloquially closest to this definition, for the death was unnatural.
But regardless, semantically we run up against a pretty unarguable definition when looking at the noun nature:
> 1: the external world in its entirety
By definition whatever the world includes is part of nature.
It's pretty clear you can't exclude humans from nature and then argue anything they do is not natural.
Getting off of semantics, the reason this is even an argument at all is because nature in a transhumanist world might look very different than nature in our predominately "organic", or human, world. And an argument in the piece we're discussing is that transhumanism isn't interesting anymore because we're living it. Then, if we're living it, it's our nature. We introduced plastics, who's to say microbes or fungi or nanobots won't develop to decompose plastic too? Certainly that exhibits the characteristics you describe as participating in the great cosmic dance of Gaia, no? Even so, it still boils down to a time scale thing. If we made obsidian in a lab, would it be unnatural just because it didn't come from a volcano? Yes, and no!
Finally, a reassuring reminder that HN is, in fact, quite natural:
> Mine is: "if animals make it, and it is unmade (or remade, or recycled, or broken down [0]) by something else, then this is 'natural'."
Does this mean that at some point in time lignin was artificial by your definition, as it couldn't be broken down by anything for a few million years as far as we can tell?
PFAS, like nearly everything, has a half-life. As a category so large the half-lives can range from days to thousands of years in a vacuum, but even those with thousand year half-lives can be broken down with catalysis in seconds.
It is new tech on the scale of humanity and we will figure it out.
Hell, even the Earth itself is made of crystals and granite and lead and arsenic and on and on. What's more natural than mother earth?
I don't applaud plastics entering the environment carelessly. But not sure we have a handle on why it's bad, when we say its not natural.