🚀 go-pugleaf

Among all of us conservationists there is a continuum of beliefs that
ranges between
those who want to conserve nature because of the material importance of
natural products and services for people, to the more 'environmentalist'
position of nature for nature's sake.  I probably stand closer to the
latter.

However, I reject the proposition that environmentalists or
preservationsists want to maintain an unrealitic pristine state, and I
accept that humans are part of nature.

What I believe we should try to preserve and conserve are the natural
functions of the biosphere, permitting any and all natural change to take
place.  I define a natural system or natural process as one in which human
influence is not the dominant factor.  Although humans are natural, we are
in a class by ourselves, mostly because our technology allows us to escape
from the limits of metabolic energy.  No other single species has near the
capacity to alter the biosphere in the short term that we have.