Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Are we natural?

From http://www.techvenkat.com/rainforest/
When i first answered this question my first reaction was of course we are natural, humans are mammals, mammals are animals, so therefore humans have to be natural. Although i answered the question something still didn't seem right to me, why is it that if we are natural we as humans take the other parts of nature such as the rain forests or the beaches to make things that we as humans don't need to survive. Humans have taken the things that where on the earth that inspired them and made them profitable, the greed that some people have has changed what we as a people see as nature.

        In John Stuart Mill article Nature he explains that humans have to be natural because when we eat the act and everything to do with it is part of the laws of nature. my understanding is that in order to survive we must eat, our body takes in what it needs and that everything about our bodies processing the food is natural. with this train of thought that means that humans have to be natural once again. yet as human culture has developed instead of taking in food in the "natural" form, humans are eating already processed food that has nutrients that the food might not have had before, yet because humans have modified it to make it "healthier" or to make it so the food that we eat has a better profit value. so then although our body's are doing whats natural yet what we are eating is unnatural, is this what we are doing by eating actually natural in the day and age.
the video above is a music video made by the band Rise Against, the video itself shows all the things humans have done to nature, and how we as humans are not much different from nature however we take things from what is the animals or planets natural habitat and change it to our liking so that we as humans control everything that is natural. the video shows the amount of animal cruelty that is done in the world and how we as humans are slowly killing the earth and all the things on it but ourselves. I believe that people have instead of adapting to the land have made the land adapt to us instead, destroying the concept of natural. Since humans refuse to live off the land everything is shifting from natural to man made.

  So are we as humans natural anymore or have we changed the concept of natural to our liking in order to not feel as bad that we are destroying the environment.
 - Zach Wingfield