I see the appeal of this framing, but it seems wrong. We came from nature but we’re qualitatively different. No other species could spread across the world in the virtual blink of an eye. No other species could dig up and burn gigatons of coal or eradicate thousands of species just for convenience, food, or sheer indifference.

I don’t see it helping conservation efforts either. If we’re part of nature, if we’re fundamentally not so different, then that implies we don’t need to worry too much about what we do. Dumping toxic waste is like a deer crapping on the ground. It doesn’t worry about where the stuff goes or what will clean it up, so why should we?

The answer is that we’re not part of nature, we don’t have robust ecosystems taking care of all those details. We should care because we still need nature for many things, and beyond that we still want it. And so we must act to preserve it, because we certainly are capable of acting to destroy it.