Why I Don't Recycle Part 2: Nature? I hardly knew her!

I thought it was only appropriate to have my first opinion-based blog post be an elaboration on my last facebook wall post, where I mentioned as an example how I am morally opposed to recycling.  Unfortunately, I soon realized that I had a lot more to say about this subject than I thought, so I'm going to break this post down into four posts to make it easier to read.  You can check back here over the next four days to read it in chunks in order to prevent you, dear reader, from looking at six pages worth of material and saying "fuck that shit".  As always, feel free to comment.

First, I feel like I should apologize for that terrible excuse for a post title joke.  In all fairness, I'm an idiot.  Anyway, now for a major point in my argument that I realized about 2 years ago; a point that no one has really countered yet seems hesitant to agree with me.  It’s the argument to end all “appeals to nature”, which in of itself is a vastly flawed argument.  In keeping up with my lazy-man style armchair philosopher, I will unabashingly quote the definition from its Wikipedia article, saving me the trouble of putting it in my own words.   “Appeal to nature is a fallacy of relevance consisting of a claim that something is good or right because it is natural, or that something is bad or wrong because it is unnatural or artificial. In this type of fallacy, nature is often implied as an ideal or desired state of being, a state of how things were, should be, or are: in this sense an appeal to nature may resemble an appeal to tradition.”  It’s a terrible argument in the first place because: “Several problems exist with this type of argument that makes it a fallacy. First, the word "natural" is often a loaded term, usually unconsciously equated with normality, and its use in many cases is simply a form of bias. Second, "nature" and "natural" have vague definitions and thus the claim that something is natural may not be correct by every definition of the term natural; a good example would be the claim of all-natural foods, such as "all-natural" wheat, the claimed wheat though is usually a hybridized plant that has been bred by artificial selection.  Lastly, the argument can quickly be invalidated by a counter-argument that demonstrates something that is natural that has undesirable properties (for example aging, illness, and death are natural), or something that is unnatural that has desirable properties (for example, many modern medicines are not found in nature, yet have saved countless lives).”  Yet people will still use this argument to justify their opinions regardless, whether it is an argument for “natural” foods by hippies or for “natural” marriage by the religious.  So to make this already flawed argument even more useless, I posit a question to those who make statements about what is natural or not: What the fuck is unnatural?

The term unnatural usually applies to three things: artificially made objects and outcomes like a building or a drought caused by a man-made dam; the supernatural like ghosts; and things that are the opposite of the norm like homosexuality.  First off, let’s get the irrelevant supernatural point out of this discussion because it’s mostly used in reference to things that are either natural laws yet to be discovered by man or the rantings of crazy people.   As for the other two- what exactly is unnatural?  An ax?  It’s made out of wood and stone from “nature”.  The White House?  Stone, wood, mortar, glass (made from sand, and totally found in “nature” sometimes too), etc.  The computer you’re reading this on?  Minerals, metals, plastic, electricity, all found in or harvested from “natural” products.  Ok, fine, how about the fact that they were made by humans, and not just created for “natural” reasons like survival and reproduction but stupid shit like Snuggies and plush Pikachu dolls?  Oh, you mean the humans that evolved from the same puddle of lipids and RNA molecules like every other living thing on this earth?  The tool use that plenty of animals and arguably plants have exhibited?  Or the complicated desires that humans have built up over the thousands of years of Homo sapiens evolution?  

"Complicated" would be a good way to describe
my own Snuggie-related desires.

What part of that is unnatural?  It’s not like a dimensional rift opened up one day and granted us extra-dimensional materials, knowledge, or ideas.  Some biblical god or gods didn’t one day bless us with extra-natural powers.  Our continued survival, technical knowledge, and need to paint ourselves arbitrary colors to support a group of men throwing a ball of swine skin around a field of painted grass are the outcomes of the natural processes of evolution, time, and luck.  Our needs, no matter how complex, are simply instincts made unusual over time and evolution.  And even the things that may not be the norm, or majority, in a collected population sample, like homosexuality, is not caused by anything not already found in nature.  Tools, human thought, and society are all natural.  And unless you’ve had personal contact with extra-dimensional beings, I challenge you to think of anything unnatural.  There is no unnatural.  There is only nature.  The appeal to nature is irrelevant.

So without the appeal to nature, the question of whether or not to protect “nature” is neutralized.  The loggers cutting down a forest are a natural occurrence, as is the protestors chaining themselves to the tree to save its life.   Which side you stand depends entirely on your personal choice, and shouldn’t be beholden to anyone else’s moral standpoint.