Last weekend, a friend of mind asked me if I thought humankind was really more powerful than "nature". Nay, he dared me to defend that position.

I said that the entire premise that humankind and nature are separate at all is the result of human hubris. There is no need to adversarialize our mother.

More powerful than nature? We ARE nature. And yes, I do believe that we are its most powerful incarnation, at least in the universe we can see and comprehend (which is a big caveat, I admit).

Everything that we have made is the result of us. That's artifice. But we are not our own products (or at least, not completely, just yet). We are the products of nature, and thus, by extension, all that is artificial, all that is synthetic, that is made by humans, is also made by nature.

Artificial is natural.

And so, by that logic, the dichotomy that mutually excludes artificial and natural things isn't an actually operational concept. We made it up. We created it ourselves. Nature, as a category, is synthetic.

Natural is artificial.

Comments –Nato