Why harmony with nature is a myth

The history of technology and the philosophy of progress

The following is the conclusion of Chapter 2 from the book The Techno-Humanist Manifesto by Jason Crawford, Founder of the Roots of Progress Institute. The first section of this chapter told the story of progress as one of increasing human agency. The entirety of the book will be published on Freethink, one week at a time. For more from Jason, subscribe to his Substack.

Chapter 2, Section 2: Surrender of the Gods

The story of progress, then, is one of humanity gradually wresting our fate away from the gods and taking it into our own hands. It is a process of increasing mastery over nature.

The concept of “mastery” over nature makes many people cringe. The acceptable notion today is to live in “harmony” with nature. Conservationist Aldo Leopold called in 1949 for “harmony between men and land”;¹ by now the phrase has become an environmentalist cliché.² The United Nations extolled this “harmony” in their foundational 1982 World Charter for Nature, in at least nine Resolutions on Harmony with Nature, and in their Sustainable Development Goals.³

This vision of harmony rests on a romantic view of nature as a loving mother who provides for us and protects us. In statements for “International Mother Earth Day,” the UN has called Mother Earth “the source of all life and nourishment,” praised her as “[t]he one thing that remains to sustain the many waves of humanity,” and admonished humanity as her “delinquent child,” challenging us to repair relations with her.⁴ Greenpeace paints the same picture: one of their articles states that “we need nature to do what it does best: sustaining life it gives homes to”; another claims that nature “gives us what we need,” “protects us,” and even “could solve future problems.”⁵

The ideal of “harmony” with nature is often pitched in superficially humanistic terms, on the premise that “humanity’s well-being [is] derived from the well-being of the Earth.”⁶ But in practice it becomes a call to decrease human agency: to do less, limit impact, cede control. Reduce, relinquish, retreat. The UN calls for “decreased intake of new material resources” and “reduced environmental footprint.”⁷ “Degrowth” advocate Jason Hickel says that the objective “is to scale down the material throughput of the economy.”⁸ Indeed, a formula commonly used in environmental science is “IPAT”: impact = people × affluence × technology.⁹ Reducing impact, by this definition, means a smaller population using less technology to be poorer.

But slowing growth and limiting development isn’t living in harmony with nature—it is surrendering in a battle with nature, capitulating to her unreasonable demands. To truly live in harmony with nature, we must first dispel this romanticized vision of it. To love and respect nature, we must see it clearly for exactly what it is.

Nature is not a loving mother. It is supremely indifferent to human needs. It gives us sunshine, but also heat waves and drought; rain, but also flood; lush prairies, but also deserts and swamps. “Immune, inanimate, inhuman, it indifferently manifests itself in the thunderbolt and hailstorm, rabid bat, smallpox microbe, and ice crystal.”¹⁰

Untamed nature is fearsome, and was seen this way through most of history. The romantic view of nature is a modern luxury bred of technology and urbanization. Environmental writer Emma Marris says:

Wilderness has been seen throughout Western history as a source both of inexhaustible resources and of real peril…. Many European colonizers preferred towns and fields, where things were altogether safer, and they thought it progress when the land claimed for civilization expanded and savage nature shrunk. It wasn’t until societies attained a little safety, prosperity, and leisure that nature in its wildest aspect began to seem rather romantic.¹¹

Comfortable in our climate-controlled homes and on our manicured lawns, we can easily forget nature’s perils, but those who were truly in touch with the land, just a few generations ago, could not. The poet Robert Service described them in “The Law of the Yukon,” which he wrote in the voice of Nature herself, as she speaks of the men who came to challenge her:

One by one I dismayed them, frighting them sore with my glooms;
One by one I betrayed them unto my manifold dooms.
Drowned them like rats in my rivers, starved them like curs on my plains,
Rotted the flesh that was left them, poisoned the blood in their veins;
Burst with my winter upon them, searing forever their sight,
Lashed them with fungus-white faces, whimpering wild in the night;
Staggering blind through the storm-whirl, stumbling mad through the snow,
Frozen stiff in the ice-pack, brittle and bent like a bow;
Featureless, formless, forsaken, scented by wolves in their flight,
Left for the wind to make music through ribs that are glittering white…¹²

Further, nature is not harmonious. “Harmony” means “agreement or concord.”¹³ But nature is full of strife and conflict. Every organism on the planet competes for resources. Different species literally eat each other alive and invade each other’s bodies to exploit them. Members of the same species vie for dominance and mates, even with their own kin. An adult male tiger, if it comes across cubs that are not its own, will kill them, and then mate with the mother.¹⁴ A black eagle, when it hatches, will peck its weaker sibling to death.¹⁵ Tennyson, reflecting on the mercilessness of nature, aptly described her as “red in tooth and claw.”¹⁶

This conflict is inherent in non-rational nature. The selective pressure of evolution creates organisms that ruthlessly compete with and mercilessly dominate anything that gets in the way of their survival and reproduction. Nature may, for a time, be in “balance”—as births are balanced with grisly deaths, and predators with prey—but it is never in “harmony.”¹⁷

It is only human rationality that has enabled us, slowly, to transcend eternal warfare and reach some semblance of peace and cooperation. It is only human rationality that has any hope of creating harmony.

But that harmony requires the ability to commit to agreements and abide by norms. It is not possible to reach agreement with blind, non-rational nature. The only way to truly live in harmony with nature—to find agreement or concord with it—is unilaterally: to arrange its parts and direct its forces so as to best support human life. Nature absolutely enforces its immutable laws, which we ignore at our peril, but there is no reason to resign ourselves to the chance configuration of matter and energy it gives us. Using the former, we can control the latter.

Bacon said that to command nature, we must obey it.¹⁸ In the same spirit, we can say that to live in harmony with nature, we must master it.

To master nature is not to abuse or waste it; this isn’t a call to trash the planet or to pave it over for a parking lot. Nature is immensely valuable. It deserves our love and respect; we should care for and protect it. But we can conceive the value of nature entirely in human terms.

First, the environmentalists are right that human flourishing depends on the environment. The soil, the rivers, the forests support our lives and well-being. Stewart Brand says we should “think of ecosystem services as infrastructure. A bridge is infrastructure, and so is the river under it. … Radio spectrum is infrastructure, and so is an intact ozone layer.”¹⁹ We should maintain natural infrastructure diligently, as we would a sewer or a power grid. And we should be mindful that nature is a complex system, whose behavior is difficult to predict or control. But there is no reason to consider the original, “pristine” state of nature as an ideal, or to minimize our impact on it. On the contrary, we should upgrade and improve it—as we do when we clear fields, dredge rivers, or control animal populations.

We should return to grand geological engineering projects, such as canals, dams, and land reclamation. Once we were boldly ambitious on this front. The Suez and Panama canals severed continents from one another and shortened travel distances by thousands of miles.²⁰ (Would these projects survive environmental review or activist obstructionism today?) Much of the land in major coastal cities including New York, San Francisco, and Boston was reclaimed from the ocean.²¹ Technologist Casey Handmer recently proposed to revitalize the Salton Sea and eliminate drought on the Colorado River by using solar power to desalinate water sourced from the Gulf of Mexico.²² Whether or not this plan should be adopted, it represents the scale we should be thinking on.

The environmentalists are also right that nature has great spiritual value. The grandeur of the mountains, the seclusion of the forest, the sense of freedom on the open seas, are aesthetic experiences that restore and inspire us. But even to enjoy the beauty of nature, we control it. “The setting aside of wild nature is no less a human choice, in service of human preferences, than bulldozing it,” says the Ecomodernist Manifesto.²³ The most beautiful spots in nature are rare; we discover them, map them, and cordon them off in national parks. We find trails through the woods, mark and maintain them, upgrade them with stairs and railings for comfort and safety. We clear campgrounds and control dangerous animals. We ensure supplies of clean water. We stock medical necessities within reach. Our enjoyment of nature is an artificial experience.

A human-centered value system can also recognize a value in animal welfare. It is a psychological value: we feel sympathy for animals as fellow living creatures, and we hate to see them suffer or be abused. We value animals to the extent that they are attractive, show capacity for joy and pain, and do not pose a threat to human life. People care more about polar bears, elephants, and dolphins than about snakes, shrimp, or mosquitoes.²⁴

Animal welfare is a luxury we purchase with technology and wealth. Tribal hunters would readily sacrifice animal welfare for their needs: some native American tribes would run an entire herd of bison off a cliff, creating a pile of corpses to use; one such site in Montana contains “up to eighteen feet of compacted buffalo remains.”²⁵ Today, in contrast, many people pay extra for eggs from free-range chickens. In the future, synthetic foods such as lab-grown meat may replace livestock entirely.²⁶ But any comfort we are willing to provide to animals, and any scruples we have concerning their treatment, are based entirely on our sympathy for them (and must fit within the resources we can reasonably devote to this cause).

In short, this is an affirmation of anthropocentrism: placing humans at the center of our moral code.

One movement within environmentalism, known as ecomodernism, rejects the romanticized view of nature and embraces a more human-centric approach. Ted Nordhaus and Michael Schellenberger, founders of the ecomodernist Breakthrough Institute, wrote in 2011 that we must “abandon both the dark, zero-sum Malthusian visions and the idealized and nostalgic fantasies for a simpler, more bucolic past in which humans lived in harmony with Nature.”²⁷ Ecomodernism “offers a positive vision of our environmental future, rejects Romantic ideas about nature as unscientific and reactionary, and embraces advanced technologies, including taboo ones, like nuclear power and genetically modified organisms, as necessary to reducing humankind’s ecological footprint.”²⁸

The ecomodernism of the Breakthrough Institute and of writers such as Stewart Brand is closely allied with techno-humanism, and I agree with them on most issues. But my anthropocentrism is even more radical: there is no need to reduce our “ecological footprint,” and no reason, as stated in the Ecomodernist Manifesto, that “humanity must shrink its impacts on the environment to make more room for nature.”²⁹

Another wing of the environmentalist movement explicitly rejects anthropocentrism in favor of “biocentrism.” As biologist David Graber³⁰ explained, this refers to “those of us who value wildness for its own sake, not for what value it confers upon mankind”:

I, for one, cannot wish upon either my children or the rest of Earth’s biota a tame planet, a human-managed planet, be it monstrous or—however unlikely—benign. … We are not interested in the utility of a particular species, or free-flowing river, or ecosystem, to mankind. They have intrinsic value, more value—to me—than another human body, or a billion of them. Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, are not as important as a wild and healthy planet. [emphasis added]³¹

The intrinsic value of nature, then, is different from the aesthetic value of a beautiful landscape, or the psychological value of animal welfare. It is explicitly divorced from human happiness, from any value to humanity.

But the very idea of the intrinsic value of nature is incoherent. There is no way to value nature for its own sake, because nature is not one thing with goals or desires. The interests of different species and different individuals are in constant tension. If we optimize for the zebra, we harm the lion. The climate that is best for the gila monster is terrible for the emperor penguin. To repeat, nature is inherently full of strife and conflict.

If there were some standard of what is good for nature, then we could actively work to improve it. If it’s bad for species to go extinct, isn’t it good to de-extinct them through genetic engineering? Environmental ethicists have called de-extinction a “misallocation of effort,” a “risky ecological experiment,” and a flat-out “bad idea.”³² If it’s bad for the climate to change, isn’t it good to stabilize the climate through geoengineering? Almost four hundred scientists signed an open letter calling for an international non-use agreement on solar geoengineering, and a mere experiment with the technology planned at Harvard “was halted after objections by environmentalists and Indigenous leaders.”³³ If thriving, biodiverse ecosystems are good, isn’t it good to create new ones—say, on Mars, through terraforming? Carl Sagan wrote, “If there is life on Mars, I believe we should do nothing with Mars. Mars then belongs to the Martians, even if the Martians are only microbes.”³⁴ Although these criticisms are usually framed as practical concerns over specific harms, and reasonable people could differ on any particular issue, the consistent theme is: opposition to human intervention in any form.

If we can’t optimize on nature’s behalf, perhaps we should simply try to maintain stasis, limit change, reduce our “footprint”? Emma Marris writes:

For many conservationists, restoration to a prehuman or pre-European baseline is seen as healing a wounded or sick nature. For others, it is an ethical duty. We broke it; therefore we must fix it. Baselines thus … become the good, the goal, the one correct state.³⁵

But there’s no reason to privilege the configuration of atoms that just happened to exist before humans. And to do so would be profoundly unnatural. Every organism changes its environment: consuming resources, constructing shelter, producing waste. The algae cover the sea, the cattle graze on the grasslands, the beavers dam the rivers. Many animals dig tunnels or burrows, or build nests or hives. The coral reefs greatly altered the marine environment when they formed hundreds of millions of years ago.³⁶ Perhaps the greatest change to the environment in Earth’s history was the Great Oxygenation Event some two billion years ago—caused by cyanobacteria. (Owing to the mass extinction of anaerobic organisms that probably followed, it is also known as the Oxygen Holocaust.)³⁷

Humans modify our environment like every other species, we just do it more successfully and on a grander scale than most. And unlike the cyanobacteria, when we change the composition of the atmosphere, we have the potential to know what we are doing and to mitigate any harmful effects. But like all organisms, modifying our environment is how we live. To limit it is to limit human life. To limit us, and not other animals, is to single out humans for punishment and degradation.

What, after all, is “nature”? A bird’s nest or an anthill is natural; a two-story condominium is unnatural. A chimp cracking a nut with a stone is natural; a human using a nutcracker is unnatural. If a river changes course because it erodes its banks and overflows them, that is natural; if it changes course because humans dug a canal, that is unnatural. If its banks are eroding and humans build a levee to stop it from changing course, that is also unnatural.³⁸ Global warming is natural if caused by an interglacial period, but unnatural if caused by industrial CO₂. Global cooling is natural if caused by stratospheric injection of sulfur dioxide from volcanoes, but unnatural if caused by stratospheric injection of sulfur dioxide from balloons.

The only coherent definition of “nature” here is: the negation of humanity. The absence of human agency. Nature is whatever is not us, whatever we did not choose to do or create. It is the world as we found it, as it happened to us, rather than the world we made.³⁹ An essay published by the Sierra Club explains:

The wild persists as a place that remains undominated (if not untouched) by humans. A wild land is self-willed and sovereign—the rivers are free, the animals free, the fires free. … We need some spaces free of human intention, places where the herds still freely roam and the rivers are undammed.⁴⁰

To place intrinsic value on nature, then, is ultimately nihilistic and profoundly anti-human. Continuing the quote from David Graber above:

I know social scientists who remind me that people are part of nature, but it isn’t true. Somewhere along the line… we quit the contract and became a cancer. We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth. … Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.⁴¹

Radical anthropocentrism is an extreme stance, and I don’t expect everyone to endorse it, even among techno-humanists. Many of my colleagues value animal welfare, biodiversity, or the environment in general, and aren’t comfortable with basing all of these on human well-being. Some, on utilitarian grounds, place fundamental moral worth on all sentient experience.⁴² Others may adopt a Christian view in which the Earth belongs neither to humans nor to animals, but to God (which can lean more or less anthropocentric depending on how much one emphasizes God giving man dominion over the Earth⁴³ versus our responsibility to be stewards of God’s creation⁴⁴). But I am stating my position here in order to stake it out, and because I believe my conception of the value of nature is the only consistent position that deserves the title of “humanism.”

In The Control of Nature, John McPhee describes the quest for human agency as the

struggle against natural forces—heroic or venal, rash or well advised—when human beings conscript themselves to fight against the earth, to take what is not given, to rout the destroying enemy, to surround the base of Mt. Olympus demanding and expecting the surrender of the gods.⁴⁵

Humanity grew up in a world ruled by those gods. Now, we wield godlike powers ourselves. Material progress has granted us this agency, and that is the greatest praise I can bestow upon it.

Leopold, Sand County Almanac, 196.
McKibben, “Hope, Human and Wild,” “New Deal for Nature.”
Doncaster et al, “Living in Harmony with Nature.”
United Nations, “Harmony with Nature,” 2018; Kórösi, “Harmony with Nature”; António Guterres, “International Mother Earth Day.”
Salvador, “Earth to Humans”; Bout, “5 Reasons We Need Wildlife.”
United Nations, “Harmony with Nature,” 2017.
Kórösi, “Harmony with Nature.”
Hickel, “Degrowth: A Call for Radical Abundance.”
“Population, Affluence, and Technology”; Oxford Reference, “IPAT.”
Rhodes, Energy: A Human History, quoting Elaine Scarry.
Marris, Rambunctious Garden, 18. Corroborating this, Charles Mann writes in The Wizard and the Prophet (p. 372) that in the mid-19th century, “‘wilderness’ meant to most people wastelands full of dangerous creatures: places to be subdued.”
Service, Spell of the Yukon, 21-22.
According to the top Google search definition, which cites the Oxford English Dictionary.
Singh, “Strategy to Avoid Infanticide.”
Mock, “Avian Siblicide.”
Tennyson, In Memoriam A.H.H, LVII.
Hans Rosling writes: “Have you heard people say that humans used to live in balance with nature? Well, yes, there was a balance. But let’s avoid the rose-tinted glasses. Until 1800, women gave birth to six children on average. So the population should have increased with each generation. Instead, it stayed more or less stable. Remember the child skeletons in the graveyards of the past? On average four out of six children died before becoming parents themselves, leaving just two surviving children to parent the next generation. There was a balance. It wasn’t because humans lived in balance with nature. Humans died in balance with nature. It was utterly brutal and tragic.” (Rosling, Factfulness, 87.)
Bacon, The New Organon, 6.
Brand, Whole Earth Discipline, 16.
Worthington, “Panama Canal,” “Suez Canal Crisis.”
“The Changing Shoreline of New York City”; Netzer, “Future Development of San Francisco”; St. Onge, “Putting Boston on the Map.”
Handmer, “It’s 2024 and Drought is Optional.”
“An Ecomodernist Manifesto.”
The technical term for this is the “phyloempathic hierarchy” (Paulhus, “The Phyloempathic Hierarchy”). This is a broad generalization. There are more philosophic approaches, based in utilitarianism, that use sentience as the basis of moral value, and take seriously the welfare of shrimp or wild animals (“Crustacean Welfare”, Matthews, “Wild Frontier of Animal Welfare”).
National Park Service, “First Peoples’ Buffalo Jump State Park,” UNESCO, “Head Smashed in Buffalo Jump.”
Alwahaidi, “Lab Grown Meat Could be the Future of Food.”
Nordhaus, “Long Death of Environmentalism.”
Shellenberger, “On Becoming an Ecomodernist.”
“An Ecomodernist Manifesto.” Note that some ecomodernists are more human-centered than others. Alex Trembath, for instance, also writing for the Breakthrough Institute, says that “Anthropocentrism is one of the primary characteristics distinguishing ecomodernism from conventional environmentalism” (“Differences Between Ecomodernism and Effective Altruism”), and that “ultimately, the choice of how and where to protect nature will be a human one, driven not by what we have to do to survive, but what we want to do to thrive on an ecologically vibrant planet” (“Protecting Nature Because We Want to”).
Not to be confused with popular author David Graeber, of “bullshit jobs” fame.
Graber, “Mother Nature as a Hothouse Flower.”
Erlich, “The Case Against De-Extinction,” llester, “A Risky Ecological Experiment,” Martindale, “Bringing Back Wooly Mammoths.”
Milman, “Can Geoengineering Fix the Climate?”
Sagan, Cosmos, 170.
Marris, Rambunctious Garden, 3.
Hallock, “Reefs in Earth History.”
Aiyer, “The Great Oxidation Event.”
For an excellent story of building levees to maintain the course of the Mississippi River, see “Atchafalaya” in McPhee, The Control of Nature, which is quoted towards the end of this chapter. Similar stories could be told of the Yellow River and other rivers around the world (Carter, “When the Yellow River Changes Course”).
One environmental ethics textbook explicitly states that “environmental ethicists often employ a conception of nature on which something is natural to the extent that it is independent of human design, control and impacts” (emphasis original). (Valera, Global Changes, 85.)
Mark, “The Garden, Reconsidered.”
Graber, “Hothouse Flower.”
Sebo, “Utilitarianism and Nonhuman Animals.”
Genesis 1:28. Historian Lynn White blamed Christian anthropocentrism for “our ecologic crisis,” saying that it “not only established a dualism of man and nature but also insisted that it is God’s will that man exploit nature for his proper ends” (White, “Historical Roots of Ecological Crisis”).
Francis, Laudato Si’, paragraphs 67–69, 116.
McPhee, Control of Nature, p. 69.

For The Techno-Humanist Manifesto‘s complete bibliography, visit The Roots of Progress.