"To conquer nature is, in effect, to remove all natural barriers and human norms and to substitute artificial, fabricated equivalents for natural processes"
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"To conquer nature" sounds like swagger, the old political boast of dams, highways, and growth curves bending the world to human will. Campbell punctures that triumphalism by translating the phrase into its real operating costs: conquering nature doesn’t mean mastery so much as replacement. You don’t defeat floods; you pour concrete, straighten rivers, and build codes and insurance markets that pretend water will behave. You don’t outsmart ecosystems; you fabricate substitutes - fertilizers for soil complexity, air conditioning for shade trees, desalination for watershed protection.
The line’s bite is in its pairing of "natural barriers" with "human norms". Campbell implies that nature isn’t merely external scenery; it’s an old co-author of culture. Seasons, scarcity, distance, disease, and geography have historically disciplined behavior and shaped morals, family structures, work rhythms, even political expectations. When technology erases those constraints, it also quietly unhooks the social agreements built around them. The "artificial, fabricated equivalents" aren’t neutral tools; they are new regimes - engineered systems with owners, maintenance costs, failure modes, and politics.
As a politician, Campbell’s likely intent is cautionary rather than anti-modern: a reminder that every act of environmental "progress" creates dependency on infrastructure and expertise, and shifts power toward whoever controls the replacement systems. The subtext is risk: when you swap resilient natural processes for brittle human-made ones, you inherit the obligation to keep the machine running forever - and the bill comes due in crises, inequities, and contested authority.
The line’s bite is in its pairing of "natural barriers" with "human norms". Campbell implies that nature isn’t merely external scenery; it’s an old co-author of culture. Seasons, scarcity, distance, disease, and geography have historically disciplined behavior and shaped morals, family structures, work rhythms, even political expectations. When technology erases those constraints, it also quietly unhooks the social agreements built around them. The "artificial, fabricated equivalents" aren’t neutral tools; they are new regimes - engineered systems with owners, maintenance costs, failure modes, and politics.
As a politician, Campbell’s likely intent is cautionary rather than anti-modern: a reminder that every act of environmental "progress" creates dependency on infrastructure and expertise, and shifts power toward whoever controls the replacement systems. The subtext is risk: when you swap resilient natural processes for brittle human-made ones, you inherit the obligation to keep the machine running forever - and the bill comes due in crises, inequities, and contested authority.
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| Topic | Technology |
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