This one made it into the book. I wrote it in 2008, for an anthropology course, though it ended up being a genuine argument rather than just an academic exercise. It aged fine — the core position is defensible, and the usual counterarguments haven’t improved much since then.
The question “Is human nature anti-nature?” sounds like the setup for an environmental polemic. It’s actually a category error. To say human nature is anti-nature, you have to first remove humans from the category of nature — which is the move the essay refuses to make.
Humans are animals. Our behaviors, including our destructive ones, emerged from the same evolutionary pressures as every other species. The Mbuti Pygmies, whose entire society and religion is rooted in and oriented toward the forest, are not less “human” for having a non-extractive relationship with their environment. The Declaration of Belem in 1988, signed by indigenous peoples from across the Americas to assert their right to protect their territories, is an expression of human nature. The impulse to conserve is human. So is the impulse to strip mine. Both are human nature.
What the question is actually asking is: which human behaviors are we going to call “natural” and which are we going to treat as aberrations? And that’s a political question, not an anthropological one.
The essay argues that the historical record — across cultures, across millennia — shows as many examples of human cultures managing and protecting natural systems as it does destroying them. The indigenous management of the Amazon basin. The ethnoecological practices of communities along the Rio Negro. The relationship between the Shoshone and Columbia River ecosystems, developed over thousands of years of direct interaction.
If human nature were simply anti-nature, none of those relationships would have developed. They would have been stripped and moved on from. That’s not what happened — until a particular economic system arrived and made stripping profitable.
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*This piece was expanded and collected in [Not My America: A Stranger in a Strange Land](https://www.amazon.com/Not-My-America-Stranger-Strange-ebook/dp/B0G3C44X7D/) — essays about America observed from the outside, by someone who left and couldn’t quite believe what he found when he looked back. Available in Kindle and paperback.*
**[Get Not My America on Amazon →](https://www.amazon.com/Not-My-America-Stranger-Strange-ebook/dp/B0G3C44X7D/)**
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**You might also like:** [Anarchy as Religion – Religious Anarchy in Social Context](https://www.vagobond.com/anarchy-as-religion-religious-anarchy-in-social-context/), [The Internet Isn’t What We Thought It Would Be….](https://www.vagobond.com/the-internet-isnt-what-we-thought-it-would-be/), [Using Religion to Save the Environment](https://www.vagobond.com/using-religion-to-save-the-environment/)
*Browse the full CD Damitio catalog at [indignified.com/books](https://indignified.com/books)*
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My books don’t fit in any neat box — because they’re about people who feel something huge is missing… and actually go look for it. Some even find it.
Dive into the full catalog and see which story hits you hardest. CD Damitio on Amazon.
CD Damitio writes at indignified.substack.com — essays on utopias, dystopias, and the spaces between. Free to read. No algorithm, no sponsored content. His books can be found on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/stores/CD-Damitio/author/B001JP7NWA
CD Damitio writes INDIGNIFIED — utopias and dystopias explored. Free to read.
