Posted by John, October 30th, 2010 - under Nature.

Tags: Engels, Humanity

I was thinking about the concept of metabolic rift that John Bellamy Foster has developed and found something from Engels on humanity’s relationship to nature.

I wonder about the idea of mastery. Certainly his comments before that imply not a concept of mastery over nature, but,as he says at the end, ‘our mastery of it [nature – JP] consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly.

What do you think?

John

Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel the first. The people who, in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor and elsewhere, destroyed the forests to obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that by removing along with the forests the collecting centres and reservoirs of moisture they were laying the basis for the present forlorn state of those countries. When the Italians of the Alps used up the pine forests on the southern slopes, so carefully cherished on the northern slopes, they had no inkling that by doing so they were cutting at the roots of the dairy industry in their region; they had still less inkling that they were thereby depriving their mountain springs of water for the greater part of the year, and making it possible for them to pour still more furious torrents on the plains during the rainy seasons. Those who spread the potato in Europe were not aware that with these farinaceous tubers they were at the same time spreading scrofula. Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature – but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly.

Engels, The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man (1876)