Two Visions of Environmentalism

> Lappen’s taxonomy also suggests a more philosophical way of looking at these disagreements as reflecting two fundamentally different worldviews: a human-centered view of environmental problems versus a neopastoralist one that emphasizes the interests of nature as distinct from humanity.

The obvious(?) resolution of this dichotomy is that humans are not distinct from nature and our interests are identical. I mean, you believe in evolution, right?

More precisely, there are no "interests of nature". The phrase is meaningless. Nature has no goals. Life (living biomass) is a chemical tautology.

(As an aside, I like to point out that you cannot measure the efficiency of life because it has no goals.)

The problem here isn't some conflict between Human and Nature: we are natural.

The problem is that we have become only partially self-aware as a species, and therefore only partially aware of the world around us. The very moment we began to actually examine the living world around us (the science of ecology) is the moment we as a species began to figure out how it works and how to work with it.