Humans: Part of nature or planet-killer bacteria?

This semester I took Environmental Sustainability as one of my natural science requirements. It’s been an average class with an average teacher that I can’t complain, but what really caught my eye were the fundamentals of science. During my youth I was never any good at the science classes mostly because I really didn’t grasp any of the material whatsoever. Now that I am back to science classes under a new light, I have to say how intrigued I’ve become at the marvels that science has found which led to amazing contributions to society in general. I definitly encourage anyone that has the knack for it to engage in the life of scientific study which I consider one of man’s most valuing devotions.

Since last week I have been discussing the meaning of nature with my mother. “What is nature”, “what does it mean to be natural”, and “what isn’t” were the key questions. The discussion started off when I pointed out that everything is natural or at least comes from nature. There is no such thing as a line between natural and artificial. Artificial comes from natural. This was my rational thought which touched the feelings of both my parents as they both have their own, but different, attachments to the sacredness of “natural”. I then stated to them that a computer is natural. Everything in its compusure is derived from nature, or in other words, it came from the dust to become a computer: “Puff”and plastic, silicon, aluminium, metal, steel, etc all came from nature to make a computer. Of course plastic is immediately said not to be from nature but is it not really? Are the chemicals we handle and mix to form plastic not derived from nature? Everything is derived from nature!

I suceeded in pointing my view onto them but I kind of failed to make the point to the other question which asked if the implied “artificial” objects are themselves natural. I accepted for a while that the answer was negative. I mean a computer isn’t from nature or natural for nature doesn’t create it and it doesn’t belong to the natural process of nature. So I guess almost everything we do isn’t natural but artificial. Artificial comes from the Latin word artificium meaning craftmanship. So everything we do that changes the nature or natural process of things is artificial. It is man-made. We’ve heard that a lot lately right?
Still our definitions weren’t clear because let’s say e.g. a pure wooden desk is man-made. It is not mixed with any other resources but purely wood. However if it wasn’t for the craftmanship of man that desk would have never naturally existed, but we generally accept a pure wooden desk as natural because the resource was not meddled with in any form. So now we can take two options: 1) it’s artificial because artifical means anything altered by man, which deduces to me that practically everything we use and most of what we eat is artificial. 2) It is natural but man-made. This means that the subject is identifiable with natural resources but just altered by human hands to a certain degree. The “certain degree” lands before the line that divides natural and artificial; but since the meaning of the word artificial has been corrupted, the line is subjective to what each one thinks something is artificial or something is natural.

My mother falls into the second category and thinks that the location of the line is obvious. It might just be… I fall into the first category and just think that the word “artificial” has been attached to too many negative connatations so to say that the wooden table is artificial just seems like something we don’t want to hear.

The discussion didn’t end. Actually I ended up putting everything in perspective as I then asked what if everything we do and make is natural, from nature, part of nature, and part of the natural process it doesn’t matter how much we mix and combine! Imagine the rage fuming in the house! Well the fact is that everything every animal and being does in this world is natural! We don’t say it is artificial. We don’t say when beavers build dams it is artificial. We don’t say that when bees make honey it is artificial. So who is to say that if we consider humans part of nature and a creature of nature, then obviously everything we do and make has to be natural!

This brings me to my title because I think the human race doesn’t really know the answer. Are we a part of this nature like I mentioned in the anterior paragraph? Hasn’t everything we done and made have the same value of everything else made and done in nature?

My possibility is: Could it be that we are bacteria? Could we be a sophisticated universal bacterium that came from the vague of the universe to infect the earth slowly like a cancer destroying all cells and organisms in the body? Maybe that’s why we are here and what we are truly doing in a grand plan of things which we cannot grasp the “why’s” and “what’s”. I think this possibility makes sense. Is that not what we are doing in this planet right now? You could ask why it took us 200,000 years to finally get some damage in but who knows how long we take to wipe out a planet. I mean maybe it’s now that we finally got it going with the exponential population growth, the greenhouse gases, the massive threat to biodiversity and extinction of animals, the turning of the planet into a trash-container, the destruction of forests and natural environments, the overuse of the planet’s limited resources, etc. We the human bacteria have finally multiplied our damage to a point of no return. The organism Earth has obviously responded. She’s been attacking us with all she’s got: HIV, flu’s, earthquakes, hurricanes, melting of the ice capes, tsunamis, cold and heat waves, etc. However we are too many now! She can’t get rid of us. We’re at the latter stages of the cycle. Maybe Earth is the last planet left of this galaxy, maybe the Homosapiens have been doing this for eons: Jupiter, Neptuno, Mars (I bet Mars was just before us), Venus, etc. We killed them all. They were all beautiful with life.

Where are we from? I don’t know.

We are either a bacteria destroying the planet and if so there is no point trying to withstand our destiny as it is incompatible in our species DNA; or we are not only part of this nature but its most complex and ultimate creation and thus everything we make and use is natural. We should then be conscious of this and make more friendly natural technology to co-live with our environment and fellow species in a more harmonical way. It would definitly be in our self-interests.

Scott Alexander