What happens to our decision-making when we turn nature into God? Humans crave cognitive shortcuts to spare us the metabolically costly mental labour of reasoning through complex decision-making. The heuristic of "Natural Good, Unnatural Bad," has become one such shortcut. But what is natural? Why have we come to deify nature? And does worshipping it help us to make the best decisions for humanity and the environment?

Natural is not always what is good for humans or the environment. Nature, for instance, is very good at killing off children under the age of five. Charcoal production, while quite natural, is leading to rapid deforestation throughout Africa. And biomass burning is treated as carbon neutral by many government regulations partially because it feels natural. 

Humans are not the first species to radically alter the planet and its atmospheric chemistry. During the Paleoproterozoic era, the first mass extinction was caused by cyanobacteria metabolizing CO2 into O2, turning the oceans and atmosphere from a reducing to an oxidative environment which wiped out most of life on earth. Humans, via our harnessing of technology, have radically altered the carbon, nitrogen, and hydrological cycles of the planet. As a result, standards of living have improved but a deep existential angst and fear of technology is building as we threaten the ecosystem life support services that "nature" provides us with. Can humanity have its cake and save nature too?

While some dispute the very notion of nature claiming that everything is natural and made of stardust, traditional environmentalists and ecomodernists both heavily reference nature, though they have radically different conceptions of it and tools for how to preserve and interact with it. Environmentalists favour harmonizing with nature through agroecology and renewable energy, with human populations and energy infrastructure distributed diffusely across the land. Ecomodernists favour "decoupling" from nature by continued urbanization and intensifying agriculture and energy production on the smallest footprint possible to allow rewilding. 

We live in strange times where rather than setting clear goals and searching for the best tools to achieve them we make emotional decisions based on deifying nature and what feels natural. We are at risk of relying on simplistic labels and slick marketing in making our most consequential decisions like how to mitigate and adapt to climate change.

Alan Levinovitz is a professor of Religion at James Madison University. He works at the intersection of philosophy, religion, and science, focusing especially on how narratives and metaphors shape belief. His most recent book is "Natural: How Faith in Nature's Goodness Leads to Harmful Fads, Unjust Laws, and Flawed Science."

Books Referenced: 

Sapiens: Noah Yuval Hariri

Factfulness: Hans Rosling