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Comment by baron816 | Hacker News Reader

"We do damage to nature...and we do less damage to nature when we occupy less of it." Edward Glaeser is the man.

I have to admit this line of thinking never really resonated with me, and it resonates even less as I get older. My goal in life is not to have minimum impact on my environment, and yes, that includes nature.

I think the nuance of the middle gets lost in these conversations. The right tends to think humans should have dominion over all (while ignoring the fact that we haven't "conquered" nature, and we have ample evidence of the carnage we cause when we think we have), and the left seems to take an Agent Smith view that we're a plague upon the planet and need to be contained, quarantined, and engineered until we no longer impact anything (while ignoring the fact that this flatly isn't possible, or even desirable).

So no, I do not believe that "we do damage to nature", because besides it being a nonsense statement, even the kernel of truth in it is wrong-headed in my opinion.

everything from our pets to our lawns to our roads and farms does damage to biodiversity though, which ultimately makes all life less resilient.

Yay I'm not the only one! Preserving biodiversity is oft-unstated most important goal of environmentalism. It's our meta-darwinian imperative.

Why would we care about biodiversity? There are only two reasons that come to my mind, and both IMO should be addressed directly:

- because it's cool and fun to have all those cute plants and animals around

- because biodiversity reduces the chance of sudden ecological collapse that would leave us without food

- Ecological fortitude as you say. Good for food but cleaning up our other messes which can harm us.

- Biodiversity helps us understand life better by providing exceptions to dogmas

- Biodiversity is the crowning achievement of this earth and would take along time to recover. We can colonize other planets more easily than we can replicate our biodiversity on them.

There are more humans right now than there ever was ever before. The biosphere that supports us is already being strained by all our activities. The simple fact is that humans by default do impact our environment very strongly and negatively, especially for all the other species that we share it with. And that is why we need to be careful about minimizing our impact, not eliminating it altogether.

>So no, I do not believe that "we do damage to nature", because besides it being a nonsense statement, even the kernel of truth in it is wrong-headed in my opinion.

It is the general consensus of the scientific community that we do. How is it a nonsense statement?

I agree.

And since there doesn't seem to be any other form of consciousness other than humans around, I'm going to say that the nature is here for us. Extereme right view is obviously stupid because we need a stable environment to survive. Extreme left view is equally stupid, because it's self-destructive. We're the only part of nature that can care; the rest of it doesn't care, it simply is.

So my goal, and my POV on the goals for society, is to be a responsible gardener. To exploit nature in order to safeguard our survival and comfort of this planet, realizations of our dreams and desires. And that involves a lot of pro-environmental efforts, because our natural environment is pretty helpful and damn useful if we don't go around and indiscriminately destroy it.

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