Humans are as natural as any animal on this planet.
Beavers build dams, flooding vast areas and it’s natural.
When humans do it, it’s not.
Makes zero sense.
Beavers build dams, flooding vast areas and it’s natural.
When humans do it, it’s not.
Makes zero sense.
Ours are not as natural in the sense that we no longer rely on our inborn capacities to produce those changes.
Yes, in a way we are like beavers in our engineering. But we are insanely overpowered beavers. The scope of our changes puts us in a class of our own.
So if we call changing the environment by one's own means only 'natural', and massively changing it by compounded means 'artificial', we are not natural, not as beavers. Ours is artificial.
So contrary to what you said, that distinction makes at least some sense.
Modern human civilization is the apex predator that still often feels and acts like it is prey on the African veldt. So you get insanely overpowered beavering while some of us still compare us on the same level as beavers.
That viruses didn’t spread and wipe out populations of animals?
Same goes for viruses (I'll give you a pass on that one, it's more accepted now than "virii"): they don't float across oceans in a week, unless they're carried by birds (which most aren't).
What if humans flood the same field?
An even bigger question - if humans didn’t exist, does the earth have any intrinsic value at all?