I.

I love dogs.

I grew up in a two-dog household, and my future plans have always included at least one dog. When I pass a dog on the street, I often point and exclaim “Puppy!”, no matter how inappropriate it is for a grown man to do so, because all dogs are puppies and all puppies are adorable and I need everyone to know this.

Why do I love dogs?

They’re loyal and loving and giving, and even though they bark at passing cars and occasionally pee on the carpet having them in my life makes it unquestionably better.

The thing is, dogs as they exist today are a lot of things, but they aren’t natural.

Nature didn’t shape dogs, didn’t produce the breeds we see every day. It wasn’t like Darwin went to an island and found that a species of wolf had been separated by a mountain chain and on one side were Golden Retrievers and the other Yorkshire Terriers.

Dogs exist today as the result of millennia of co-adaptation and selective breeding by humans. They’re animals, yes, and Nature technically made the base form, but we humans molded them into shapes more compatible with us. Most dogs are very safe to have around humans.

But there is an animal that is a more natural Canid: Wolves.

And wolves are a lot of things, but they’re not pets. They aren’t domesticated; they aren’t bred for cuddliness and kisses. A wolf will hurt and kill and eat you.

Wolves are wild animals in their state of nature, red in tooth and claw.

The thing is, this distinction between dogs and wolves - between nature tamed and nature wild - this matters, when we think about who we humans are and what we want the world around us to look like. We might say we enjoy the natural world, might want less deforestation and more green spaces, but I’ve yet to meet anyone who wants actual wolves running around their neighborhood. We might go to farm-to-table restaurants and only eat organic, free-range eggs, but chickens mostly don’t exist in the wild for good reason.

In a first-world country, or even in any populous city, almost everyone’s experience of what we call ‘nature’ is that of dogs, not wolves. Nature tamed, not Nature wild. And so I think it pays to be precise what it means when we say nature, because it’s not as simple as ‘non-human animal’ or ‘uninhabited area’.

II.

There’s something called an appeal to nature, which is apparently distinct from the naturalistic fallacy, because naming things clearly is not a strength of philosophy.

Anyway, an appeal to nature is the idea that natural equates to good. It’s behind all the marketing in a grocery store that advertises organic, non-GMO, free-range, grass-fed, asbestos-free Doritos.

Once you point it out, the idea that something is axiomatically good just because it’s natural is kind of silly; after all, cockroaches are perfectly natural, as is gangrene, athlete’s foot, and Donald Trump’s hair. But most people have a tendency to buy into this just a little. After all, isn’t real food with real names better for you than Butylated Hydroxytoluene or Red Dye #5?

There’s multiple problems with an appeal to nature - for one, vaccines are pretty unnatural, but so is not dying of tetanus - but the one I’d like to focus on is the idea that natural is a quality something either has or it doesn’t.

I think a lot of people think about whether something is natural or not like this:

But the truth, like many things, is not so simple. Things, especially what we think of as ‘the natural world’, are more like this:

In its own way, crop-covered farmland is no more ‘natural’ than the concrete jungle of New York City, even though the former is made of plants and the latter of stone and steel and glass. Both are curated by humanity, just for different goals.

III.

What was the natural world like, before humans befouled it? What was paradise, before we paved it and put up a parking lot?

What was a person’s experience of nature, back before it was tamed?

Nature was terrible. And not in a sarcastic, that-movie-was-terrible kind of way, but in that it genuinely inspired terror. Nature was the domain of the uncertain, the cataclysmic, the cruel and uncaring world from which existence had to be torn day in and day out.

A farmer’s experience of nature would have been a constant battle to raise crops, hoping and praying that there would be enough rain to water them but not enough to wash them away, that locusts or other insects wouldn’t eat or foul them, that disease and fungus wouldn’t rot crops from the inside out. The ancient farmer was always only a few strokes of bad luck from starvation, and nature was the lottery they played every day of their lives.

Compare this to the farmer of today, who ensures their crops get enough water no matter what via massive irrigation, who uses pesticides to annihilate pests, who presides over massive machinery as it trundles along seeding and harvesting their crops. The farmer of today has access to genetically modified strains of plants that resist disease and grow larger with more yield than any ancient farmer could have hoped to have.

Is the ancient farmer in some sense doing something more natural? Sure, if by natural you mean they’re operating closer to the state of the pre-human natural world. Does that mean that what modern farmers do is unnatural?

I don’t think so.

Farmers have tamed nature, and this is good. This gives us abundant cheap food, enough to feed everyone on earth while only a tiny percentage of the population is needed to produce it.

(The fact that people still go hungry and starve is an issue of distribution, not production. We make enough calories to feed everyone.)

And this contrast between more natural and less natural on the spectrum, what I called nature wild and nature tamed above, is everywhere.

IV.

At this point, I’ve hopefully convinced you of the title of the post. A park isn’t really natural, any more than a Chihuahua is a wolf. It’s something sculpted, pruned, weeded, and landscaped. It’s full of plants, sure, but it’s an example of nature tamed, not nature wild.

How about going on a hike? That’s nature, right?

Not really.

Even if you’re hiking through a national park or other untouched terrain, even if you’re setting foot somewhere with wolves and bears and poison ivy where no human has ever ventured, simply by virtue of existing in the 21st century you’re still experiencing something very different than what our ancestors would have, long ago.

Today we have satellites overhead and GPS to Globally Position us wherever we are, and weather simulations to tell us what to expect the sky to do. We have rugged clothes that can be cheaply replaced if torn, and mass-produced boots with rubber soles that won’t get pierced by thorns or rocks. We have plastic and metal bottles to store water and abundant food to pack for ourselves. We have thermal sleeping bags and bug spray and sunscreen and sunglasses to keep us comfortable. We have first-aid kits with antibiotics and alcohol swabs and itch creams and sterile bandages.

Our distant ancestors had none of those.

What would venturing into the wilds have been like to our distant ancestors?

They knew of some of the dangers they’d face: Inclement weather, wild animals, getting lost and having no way to contact help or navigate back to the group. But there were other dangers that they must have realized, even if they didn’t know the causes: infection, disease, rot. A single cut gone untreated, a mild scrape gotten while pushing aside a thorny plant, and gangrene could set in.

Going into nature meant risking your life, even if it might not have felt that way at the time. Sure, untouched woods might be beautiful, but nature is often at its most beautiful when it’s at its most deadly. Bright colors usually mean poison in the natural world.

Consider also the perils of simple exposure: a cool night can spell death for someone without shelter or proper clothes or a fire. Add rain and wind, and anyone venturing beyond human settlements had to be wary of dying soaked and cold.

V.

There are places, in our world, that are still natural. Untamed.

The Amazon Rainforest.

The Australian Outback.

And going into those places, unprepared, without a guide, is quite likely to get you killed.

That is about as natural as it gets, as natural as the vacuum of space, and only slightly more hospitable. That our ancestors were able to survive in such environments - that there are people today who can live in such environments - is amazing, but it comes with a high cost.

People who have to fight nature every day to survive are doing just that - surviving. They can’t relax with a good book or take a hot shower. They can’t get into long debates about trivial things with their friends over drinks, or have a poker night once a week. They can’t take vacations or paid sick days, and the only insurance available to them is the beneficence of their community. There is no retirement, for them; if they stop struggling to survive, they stop surviving.

More fundamentally, constantly struggling to survive takes its toll on a person’s body and mind. Constant stress ages you, wears you down, leaves you ragged and weary and unable to relax.

There’s a lot of nostalgia for the past, but I think people consistently underestimate just how hard life was for those who came before us. How much they had to struggle against the world just to keep living. How much they suffered.

Is the world we humans have built for ourselves less natural than it used to be?

Of course.

It’s also far more forgiving, far more comfortable, and far less tragic.

VI.

Appeals to nature argue that natural means better.

This appeal is a fallacy because it’s wrong, but it’s wrong in two ways.

The first is simple: artificial does not equate to worse. Plastic is far superior to the materials humans used before it; purified metals and alloys are better than ores; our sewer and drinking water systems are far better for us than drinking ‘natural’, unfiltered water.

The second is that what we, in a 21st century first-world country, think of as nature is a tamed thing, something pruned and weeded and cultivated, and ultimately no more natural than a suburban lawn.

In other words, appeals to nature are always dependent on the reference frame they’re made from. If you’re standing in the middle of New York city and yearning for nature, you’re probably yearning for pine trees and dandelions and fireflies, not trees of death and poison ivy and malaria-carrying mosquitoes, even though the latter are just as natural as the former.

What we think of as ‘nature’ has already been massively affected by humanity over the centuries. Even the moon now has human footprints and a human flag on it:

Nature, to most Americans, is something safe and peaceful and beautiful. It’s sitting on your porch watching a sunset, or seeing autumn plumage on the trees, or sitting around a campfire with your friends. We tend to only think of it as horrifying and destructive during severe weather events and natural disasters (which, as actual climate change scientists will tell you, are still quite natural; plenty of them happened before we humans dumped a bunch of carbon in the atmosphere, and plenty will happen after).

In other words, appeals to nature are wrong because we’re wrong about what nature is actually like. It has always been beautiful, but only as humanity shaped it has it become good for us.^[1]

VII.

If you look at the human experience of nature over history, what you see is humans shaping and crafting their environments to be more and more friendly to them, until the default first-world conception of nature is something lovely and harmless, rather than the murderous (if beautiful) thing it once was.

And while the full argument is beyond the scope of this post, I think this is a good thing.

Are there things lost, as nature is tamed? Yes.

Wolves are beautiful, elegant creatures. Chihuahuas are not.

But I’d much rather have a Chihuahua^[2] as a pet than a wolf.

I’m not telling you not to enjoy going outside; just that, next time you go to the park or take a hike, understand that unless you’re trekking through the Amazon or the Australian Outback, your experience is more like that of eating a modern GMO fruit than anything our ancestors might have had: easier, safer, and altogether more delicious.

So maybe, the next time you’re taking a walk outside your climate-controlled residence to get some fresh air, take a second to appreciate the ‘less natural’ nature around you, and the benefits of living in a world so much more adapted to humanity than it used to be.

1. ^{^}

   Some argue that nature is good qua nature, as in, a fundamental good by itself. I’m not one of them. My circle of concern extends to sapient beings of all kinds, and somewhat to some kinds of animals, but I don’t consider plants, fungi, or bacteria to have any intrinsic moral worth.

2. ^{^}

   Actually a Shih Tzu, though I think the point stands.