wolfhnd » November 28th, 2017, 8:33 pm wrote:"At war with his environment" sounds like the environment is a social construct which of course it is because it is an abstraction, an over simplification.
No squirrel or squid could possibly have made up any of those: social construct, abstraction or oversimplification. I didn't think it was simple - no war is simple! It's just a generally recognized classification of types of human engagement: overt violent hostilities, intended and expected to result in casualties and eventual victory by one side or the other.
The "real" environment has exterminated more species than man will ever have the opportunity to.
In what way, over what time-span? The ecosystem isn't responsible for geological events, such as vulcanos and earthquakes, which victimize all species indiscriminately. It's important to divide "nature" into categorical components: astronomical, geologic, climatic and biological. Only the biological ones fit into an ecosystem, which is contained by climate and geography, which is a result of long geological processes, on a planet surrounded by its astro-system. These several magnitudes of event take place on different scales of time and numbers. Yes, a single astronomical event can take out as many species in a year as human industry can in a couple of hundred, or climate in a couple of thousand, or geology in a couple of million - but no (other) biological entity can cause that kind of damage in any length of time - not even the most deadly virus.
You can not live in harmony with "nature" only equilibrium punctuated by natural disasters and eventual extinction.
Can you not? And yet, pre-civilized human societies survived for several thousand years in the same little patches of territory, while empires typically chew up much bigger territory in two to five centuries. Harmony doesn't have to mean amity, but it does require moderation - either hard-wired or self-imposed.
Even equilibrium is an exaggeration because ecosystems are never static, they are partially self correcting.
Equilibrium extends to the limits of self-correction. It's a
system, with cycles of activity and process; destruction and restoration, integration and disintegration, motion and rest.
Push it beyond the limits of self-correction, and you have cascading extinctions. Targeted extinctions, using weapons unavailable to the target species, are uncorrectable: once the reef is dynamited, whatever lived in it, on it, around it, behind it; whatever came there to spawn or feed on the spawn, is gone forever.
We don't see the brutal war of species vs species because willful ignorance and the buffer of civilization.
Competition is not war. Predation is not war. Wolves kill individual groundhogs and caribou, but don't pour gasoline in groundhogs' burrows or spray poison gas from airplanes over migrating caribou herds. No damselfly ever decided to erase every last dragonfly off the face of the earth, by any means, including bounties, traps and the introduction from another continent of more voracious frogs... which will then turn on the native population of frogs...
The combination of scale, time, intensity, intent, means and rate of success are unique in the man vs nature conflict. Civilization is not a buffer to understanding the violence in nature - we brought that violence inside the city walls - but it does provide an effective bulwark against retaliation by nature --- until it suddenly and catastrophically fails.