Why do we take from nature instead of integrating with it?

Someone asked this question on Quora.

I had the temerity to answer. Here's my answer:

Why do we take from nature instead of integrating with it?

That’s not a Quora question so much as a book topic, or indeed many books and PhD theses.

But I’ll say a few things anyway. What follows is my opinion only. I can’t easily prove any of this but I do firmly believe all of it.

How we live is a combination of how we lived in the past, how we think we should live in the future, and what we desire today. This doesn’t always lead to the best solutions.

Efforts to drastically fix things have often made things worse, sometimes terribly worse. Some people conclude from this that we should never try to fix things. But that obviously doesn’t work either.

We need to learn from the past and still be aware that the future is very unlike the past. The thing we need to do less of is worry on a day to day basis.

The societies where day-to-day living is the most difficult have the least mental and emotional capacity for imagining how the future might be better. So the first thing we need to do, in each jurisdiction, be it nation or town, is to aim to be more generous and inclusive as a society. This is becoming a matter of urgency.