Matt “Ivan” Stiefel
I am sitting in front of my shiny laptop listening to digitally created Andean music and a steady stream of coal trucks roaring past my apartment. I adjust my glasses to correct my otherwise blurry vision and think about the WVU Philosophy Department?s difficult question: ?Is it OK to alter nature??
Before attempting to answer this question, the words OK and nature must be clarified.
What does OK commonly mean? Does OK mean bad? I don?t think so. Imagine that an unnamed WVU freshman sleds down the hill behind Woodburn Hall on a lunch tray and careens into a park bench. The sledder is lying on her back holding her arm. A friend runs up and asks, ?Does it hurt badly?? She responds, ?No, I am OK.? In this case OK does not mean bad. But, does OK mean good? Once again imagine, or remember, that I wanted to kayak the Gauley River at full flood stage, but a park ranger tried to stop me. After great argument, I finally convinced her let me on the water. She said, ?OK, you may paddle the flooded river, but I don?t recommend it.? Clearly in this case OK does not mean good. OK neither means good nor bad, right nor wrong. OK is a gray area between good and bad. To be OK is simply to be satisfactory or acceptable.
What does nature mean? I just ate a bowl of cereal that was supposedly 100% natural. But this cereal, which I poured from a plastic bag inside a cardboard box, does not seem to be a part of nature. Usually, nature seems to refer to something detached and other than human. A tree is a part of nature. A dog is a part of nature. My laptop is not a part of nature. Anything which is not a direct product of the human intellect seems to be a part of nature. This definition might need to be revisited after we discover extraterrestrials, but for now it should suffice. A human child seems to be a part of nature and a product of humans, but most of the time, humans result from the instinctive sex drive. Drawing a line between humans and nature or products of the human intellect and products of instinct might seem arbitrary, but this seems to be the reality of the common definition of nature. I would argue that many of our present environmental crisis result from this arbitrary separation between humans and nature, but that is a whole different essay. The idea that nature is separate from human?s intellect reflects common usage.
So, I am trying to answer the question: is it acceptable to alter things which the human intellect did not create?
I think that changing natural resources into this laptop that I am typing on is a good thing. I would argue that the global climate altering CO2 released from the coal fired power plant proving much needed electricity is a very bad thing. I believe that my eyeglasses are good for they improve my naturally blurry vision. I think that it is wrong for mountaintop removal coal mining to destroy Appalachian communities, culture and the mountains themselves to fuel our county?s addiction to dirty energy. I think it is acceptable to chisel a rock into a sculpture. I think it is OK to carve a dead tree into a canoe. It seems OK to log a single forest. It is satisfactory to mine the earth for needed resources. Changing nature can be both good and bad. There does not seem to be anything inherently wrong with altering nature, nor does there seem to be anything inherently good.
Whether an act is right or wrong seems to depend on much more than whether or not nature was altered. The far reaching consequences of an act on the environment and humans, which are inseparable from the environment, must be considered before concluding whether or not that action was right or wrong. It is dangerous to believe that humans can always improve nature, but it is fallacious to think that all alterations are bad. It is simply OK to alter nature.
