Submitted by Bezotcovschina in Anarchism

The recent post about domestication and domination made me wondering how the term nature and "natural" is defined in the context of anarchism, specifically green and anti-civ varieties. Can anything human-made be "natural"? Can something doesn't made by human be "un-natural"?

Interesting to hear out your thoughts

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subrosa wrote

There's an etymological root shared by nature, generate, genuine, kind. It's all beginning, birth, origin. There's an etymological root shared by art, arm, army, arranged, order. It's all manufacture, artificial, hand-made.

Basically, the old tension between being and doing, preservation and progress, coming from and moving to. And between there's the one that unites them in a massive contradiction, which in turn disperses the one into many. Kinda like what nature's been doing and what human beings have done. #deep #wisdom #fencesitting

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Majrelende wrote (edited )

This is all my definition, and no one has exactly the same two definitions.

Nature is undefinable. If it can be defined, described, written down, then it is not nature. I consider nature to be essentially the same as the Daoist Way.

But to summarise imperfectly, nature is when everything goes along with their correct or natural paths, according to the desire of themself, of the land. I can't get more detailed than that, because as I said, it is indefinable; we can only hint at it. There are some linguistic reasons as well, I think, English being a language of rigidity or "sameness", at least in connotation if not in grammar.

Subrosa reminded me: the world is always being created. This is why nature is indefinable: it is creative, always working in unpredictable ways, animated and alive, whereas the rigid and artificial, in relation to civilisation and what I call thing-mind, are all uniform, all the same, and they are in constant decay and collapse, which can be saved only by the application of ever-increasing amounts of labour and theft from elsewhere. Because of the requirement for reproducibility, much of science is stuck in artifice, and can only glimpse nature. This decay is true for scientific farming, which attempts to apply human knowledge and labour to manipulate nature, but only destroys it in the process. It is also true for buildings, obviously enough, and capitalist economy, and others: at this point in their unnatural progress they all have to steal in ever-increasing amounts to survive, whether that is materials, energy from petroleum, anything.

There is a qualitative difference between a modern house, and a mouse hole. They are both habitations, and both, if left to themselves will decay, but the mouse hole will, abandoned, be inhabited by different creatures, become a place where water soaks into the ground; roots will wrap around it, trapping air for the fungi and small animals, and so on. On the other hand, a town is not made to decay; in all cases, people have tried their best to ensure that no decay happens at all, by using laboriously and inefficiently created artificial methods and materials. Nature can rot, certainly, but artifice breaks, becomes useless, destroys, consumes. The decay of nature is creative; the decay of artifice is just that, self-degradation that inhales the world.

So thus, not everything humans do is unnatural. Nature as everything-not-human is a horribly depressing, and extremely anthropocentric definition. In anarchy, not dominating or being dominated, the cops and sages in our heads, the belief in the usefulness of control all gone-- at that point, we are living by nature, and in all likelihood quite happily and creatively, with diversity, beauty, and abundance flourishing in all places now that we are acting properly and contributing to, rather than destroying, nature.

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lettuceLeafer wrote

Nature is whatever subjectively hippies kike the typical raddle user makes them feel like a hippie. Gardening, pissing outside, not using oil, no tech ect. It's a very subjective seemingly random thought.

I think everything is either natural or not tbh mostly bc I don't like the concept of something being natural or not.

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Tequila_Wolf wrote

Everything is nature and everything is natural. There's no division between humans and the non-human world except the ones we as humans create ideologically and materially, like we do all other hierarchies.

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zephyr wrote

unnatural is what i have in my mind. natural is when i am eaten by a tiger.

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AnarchoDoom wrote (edited )

I think the best, simplest, most "objective" definition there can be is: "wildlife".

Or "life-supporting systems that can sustain without human interference":

Anything that requires human action is therefore artificial. But are animals still part of "nature" when they got changed by any human intervention?

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NeoliberalismKills wrote

Just because intervention is necessary doesn't make it unnatural. Beavers need to "maintain" their dams.

And I feel like you're maintaining the artificial separation of human and nature. Humans are as much nature as is the aforementioned beavers.

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Fool wrote

Everything is part of nature - even plastic and cities.

The life on earth is evolving to make use of the new habitats forming - plastic eating bacterias have been discovered - humans are just building habitats il-suited for humans (and most other life).

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