Damage to Nature

The term “nature” is not used here in an ideological sense, nor idealized, assuming an original perfection as defended for example by a Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Nature is sometimes beneficent, preserving a harmony that has been established during the immemorial times of evolution, sometimes destructive, threatening, ruthless…

The contradiction arises, at least in part, if one distinguishes between nature-life, governed by biological and ecological balances archimillennial, and nature-matter, with its meteorites, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis and other forms of cataclysms often destructive of life. Nature-matter is governed by the laws of chance, and inevitably tends towards disorder (increasing entropy), while nature-life results from a slow and constant organization through the filters of natural selection, ensuring in principle an ever more complex and perfect order.

We are therefore entitled to expect natural laws resulting from living a guarantee of balance, health, well-being and safety. It is in them that ecosystem balances root, as well as functional harmony of organisms. When disharmony, trouble, suffering arise, one is entitled to question their causes: what is the factor of disorder that has entered into a system based on order?

, the fantasy of perfection, of health, of happiness – finally of paradise – that inhabits our psyches is explained in scientific terms of evolution: the biological and statistical laws of genetic adaptation could only tend towards optimal functional and ecosystem harmony. Whenever ruptures occur in this process, they must be explained in terms of accident (most often due to nature-matter, such as the meteorite that destroyed dinosaurs), malfeasance (when man deliberately against natural laws), or failure (when a natural process encounters adverse circumstances).

When we talk about nature, it is obviously about this nature-life, as it was before undergoing transformations under the effect of human action, such as deforestation, tilling, erosion, drying up of groundwater, pollution, salinization, construction, emissions of PCBs and CO2, etc.

An evolutionary conception of nature, essential from the scientific point of view, did not exclude an emotional relationship to the natural world, made up of empathy, respect, or even a certain sense of the sacred, as was found in animistic societies. Such provisions, whether based on spiritual reality or anthropomorphic projection, had at least the advantage of preventing environmental destruction.

We must therefore ask ourselves about the origins of indifference, contempt and even sadism that we often find in our materialistic society in the face of the green world. These trends play a decisive role in the crucial balance between resource collection and conservation, destruction and preservation of the environment, green or black future of the blue planet…