www.wcool.com
| Mouth-Off Main PageThe use of the word "natural" is pretty strange since humans themselves are natural and anything we do or make is still within the construct of "nature." But if we define natural as "things that are created without human intervention" and then claim that natural products are empirically better than unnatural ones, we are saying that human attempts to improve our environment are inherently inferior to the random forces of nature.
Fruits and vegetables have evolved over thousands of years to maximize there own ability to survive and prosper. Cucumbers did not evolve out of a desire to make healthy food for humans, but it just so happens that cucumbers are pretty good for us. If humans work hard enough, we should be able to come up with farming methods, chemicals, or other techniques to make these cucumbers even better for humans.
Although it would be nice to eat fruits and vegetables grown without pesticides or preservatives, since the methods farmers use have been found to be safe, we eat those vegetables because they are much less expensive to grow and preserve. Natural skin products like Aloe Vera are nice, but we should expect scientists who work years on creating skin products to come up with better solutions for our skin than the stuff that coincidentally exists in nature.
Claiming that natural foods and products are superior to man-made ones comes from a general distrust of human’s ability to improve the environment for ourselves. Naturalists would be happier if we all just used what is already around us and didn’t strive to change and improve our environment.
Back to www.wcool.com
| Mouth-Off Main Page