As with all evolving bodies of knowledge, there is constant change going on on the Davis Wiki. A friend of mine just deleted a series of pages on Food Debate, for the good reason that they became lame dead-end pages that didn’t foster much debate. One of those pages had an essay I wrote specifically for the debate over “natural” vs “unnatural.” Oh no!

Well hey, the wiki saves everything, so let me just cut and paste my arguments on the mindlog for posterity. It was part of a conversation, so I changed it to stand on its own.
“Natural” is generally considered in terms of the continuum between human-independent and human-involved or human-made. First, what I find interesting is that we define natural vs artificial in terms related to humans and not ”intelligence”, or ironically, ”artifice.” Since a beaver dam would be considered natural, and a human dam artificial, the distinction already loses some of its meaningfulness. If artificial things are limited to cultural constructions (where a beaver dam and a bird’s nest are constructed out of instinct rather than training), then consider the tools made by chimpanzees, which should be considered artificial because they are culturally inherited rather than genetically inherited.

Next, “Natural” describes only the process by which something came into existence, rather than any characteristics about that entity itself. Willow trees contain a compound in their bark, which when extracted and consumed relieves headaches - we call it Aspirin. A ”naturally-occurring” compound that when encountered in pill form ellicits the feeling that it is ”unnatural.” Imbibe it in some sort of “willow-bark tea” and you’d think “natural.” Synthesize it in a lab, purify it, and avoid all the uncharacterized chemicals found in the willow bark, and all of a sudden, it is ”unnatural, Western, reductionistic, or bad chi.” But did it ever occur to anyone that there is nothing ”natural” about shredding and drying willow bark and dipping it into piping hot water?

”Natural” and ”Artificial” might be better used in terms of degree rather than as either-or. The willow-bark tea might be considered ”more natural” than the purified aspirin in a pill form. Brownish cane sugar would be more natural than white table sugar. But the problem with this is that ”natural” merely refers to the degree to which something has been processed by humans, and so it would be better to refer to it in terms of its degree of processing. Additionally, if you think about it, one of the ”natural” categories given above, “Grown” (vs manufactured) is not really very natural at all. Crops have been bred, selected, mutated, and engineered by humans for milennia (although engineering is more recent), and this entire process has resulted in wholly ”unnatural” crops, works of artifice themselves.

Finally, ”natural” in no way means good for humans, or even nature for that matter. Asteroid impacts are natural, yet they do humans and nature little good in the immediate future. Irrigation is artificial, yet, it can bring lush growth to otherwise dead areas. Finally, countless poisons and toxins are produced by both “nature” and humans, as well as anti-toxins, antibiotics, and antibodies. ”Natural flavorings” aren’t even neccessarily from the flavor they describe, as almond flavor comes from peach pits, and I have no idea where ”natural cherry flavor” comes from, but I have it on good authority that it aint cherries. Tastes like cherries, though. Finally, human-caused forest fires were once used to frequently maintain the health of forests in California, arguably a component of the natural cycle, so where do we place these on the natural-artificial slide?

I think that natural is useless term. Not that it shouldn’t be used, because it can help us imagine the degree to which humans have become involved in something. But as a synonym for anything meaningful such as: safe, tasty, healthy, ecological, or moral, it falls apart. Synthesized aspirin in pill form is safer than sucking on willow bark, probably less disgusting to the taste, unknown about healthiness, and probably more ecological because it doesn’t involve stripping tons of trees of their bark. As for whether or not it is more or less moral, let me know if you think it is right to give people an unknown dosage of a medical compound, because that’s what you would get with the “bark tea” analgesic.

As for humans and artificial things causing damage to the world and us, I think the blame is wrongly pinned on artificiality itself. Would not cornstarch-based plastics be artificial, yet be part of a solution to environmental woes? All my garbage bags (incl. compost… so convenient!) and packing peanuts for shipping are made of cornstarch, but there is nothing natural about a highly bred and modified grass that is seven feet tall having its seeds broken into its constituents, some of which are ground up and then pressed into pellets which are dyed green and spread out in thin sheets to contain my food waste and make it easy to lift out of my bin when I go to dump or compost it. I think the enemy of a beneficial interaction between humans and their environment is not those things that are deemed artificial, as if artificiality had some intrinsic malicious quality, the proper enemy is ignorance. Ignorance of the effects caused by humans.

Eating willow bark for pain relief involves ignorance - of the uncharacterized chemicals in the bark, and so too do some artificial food additives, when we don’t know the long-term consequences of consuming them. Using ”natural” as a proxy for ”good” only invites mistakes, indeed, if we were to set our powers of reasoning aside and use the natural-artificial distinction to decide on the superiority of one thing over another, we would be embracing ignorance and have created a new enemy out of ourselves.