Informant38

Inspired by the return to light of bluishorange I sent this off to the New Scientist/Greenpeace debate "'What is 'natural' ?".
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A twelve year old boy throws a rock into a pool in a stream, in an untouched wilderness. The rock startles fish and causes them to do things they wouldn't otherwise have done, and to not do things they would have. And so on, along the infinite chain of cause and effect that is the movement of the universe through time. Should he be responsible for all that changes, all that happens? How can he be? And what shape would that responsibility take?
But isn't there a way of being that seeks a union with the unknowable outcome of our actions? The undone task of making that clear shelters those who insist all things are 'natural', whether made by human hands or not. Semantically valid, but spiritually a false point. By 'natural' we've come to mean in line with, connected to, the unbroken stream of life, of living, that's brought us here. In the abstract this is a vague and unimportant distinction. In the immediate, concrete sense, it has become a matter of survival, not only ours as human beings, but the survival of the possibility, the potential for being, of the forms we evolve toward.