If you want to inflict the unforgettable on your memory then you can watch a grizzly bear excavating the den of a black bear and hauling off a screaming cub whose death agonies can be heard in the distance as the mother bear flees from the den. It is a horrifying reminder of the brutality of nature and impossible not to wish you could intervene.
We’ve all heard that we should leave nature alone, “let nature be nature”. But imagine that, while witnessing this scene in real life, you determine that you don’t like what is going on and so you send a bullet into the grizzly’s heart. It would be a totally wonton act, more humane but also more wasteful than what the grizzly bear itself is doing. But it is no different than what the grizzly bear is doing. You would be an apex predator exercising your will. There is no separation, humans over here, nature over there. Nature is one thing and we’re part of it with all of our tools and technology.
Killing the grizzly bear would be hardly the most wonton act we humans do. But most of our destruction is through indirect means, habitat loss, pollution, etc..The false belief in the separation between ourselves and nature gives our wantonness its disguise. Unless we abandon it, this idea of separation will kill us eventually.
The difference between us and the grizzly bear is that it acts on its motivations without moral or other hesitation, while our trigger finger is stilled by reason. The same mental faculty which allows us to create the rifle and bullet also allows us to contemplate our ability to manipulate the world. We’re going to continue to be what we are, just as grizzly bears are going to continue to prey on black bears. And what we are, or at least what we have become, is the absolutely dominant species, the one on whose pleasure the others live and die. We kill the others with indifference, with ignorance, and often with brutality that rivals the grizzly bear,
Separating ourselves intellectually and morally from nature gives us the false comfort of believing that we are not animals, a mythology humans have indulged from the earliest days. Following this thought, we are quick to arrive at the conclusion that we are somehow better or made in the image of a higher being, or protected by God, or by our new god, Technology, from the consequences of our actions.
Darwin trashed any factual basis for this mythology, but even if we let go of it in fact, we’ve held on to the comforting illusion of a separation between ourselves and nature. Deceiving ourselves has been the price we’ve paid for the belief that we are over here and nature, occasionally brutal, but also beautiful and peaceful to partake of on weekend camping excursions, is over there, separate from us so we can enjoy the good and escape the nasty parts.
The difference, and it makes all the difference, is that even if we could continue to pretend for moral or aesthetic reasons that we are separate, for purely practical reasons we have to let go of the lie. If we don’t own what we are, we will destroy the habitability of the planet and in the process destroy ourselves.
What we are is a creature that manipulates the world for its own benefit. Accepting this fact means no more “letting nature be nature”. It means altering the world to suit ourselves without pretending either that the rest of nature will be fine or that we can somehow avoid making the alterations.
We build pipelines, put up wind turbines, create strange chemicals and mountains of plastic and at this point these actions have spread their consequences to the farthest corners of this finite planet. The only way we manage to maintain anything resembling the comfort of modern society is to recognise that modern life comes with the necessity of maintaining the planet as a habitable ecosystem for other life forms while simultaneously making huge disruptions in natural systems to benefit ourselves.
This means that there is nothing inherently right or wrong about shooting the grizzly bear. What matters is what we want to get out of the situation. There’s no balance in nature which we have not already disturbed. There is only our ability to manipulate the world and our best guess as to which actions, making allowance for their impact on the rest of life, are most likely to benefit us in the future.
What we know for certain is that we can’t live on this planet by ourselves. We’re completely dependent on the other life forms and they already live or die based on our whims, often our indifference. Our reason has delivered us to this situation and we can use reason to make choices.
These choices will involve curtailing certain actions in ways that are terribly inconvenient to us because the cost to the rest of the life on the planet is too high. It will also mean undertaking massive projects which are likely to be terminal for a few other species. We will have to do both. There is no longer any letting nature be nature. There is only us choosing who lives and who dies. And if we make good choices, then we get to live too. This is already where we are. We’re just reluctant to admit it.