in environmental anthro today i had the TA class (which i missed last week). the TA talked about how anthropologists/scientists are starting to look at ecosystems differently than in the past. they used to be seen as ever-present. hardly changing. but now they have found that where people used to live and have later abandoned the site, a new floral environment can take the place of the old one of which the previous inhabitants lived. so the question posed is, with this knowledge, how do we now define natural vs. artificial. meaning what do we see as human intervention, from buildings/urban sprawl to a changed ecology of a certain part of the world.
now this kinda seemed retarded to me, trying to break this into an either/or when what you've been pointing to is a co-evolution of plants with humans. wouldnt the excersize nullify itself because humans have some sort of an impact on everything it encounters? and if not, then nothing is as black and white as that. take the movie donnie darko. the bitch of a teacher tries to get donnie and his class to categorize everything into two polar categories: extreme adjectives. i cant remember if it was good vs. evil or happy vs. sad, but how can you place something like riding the bus into one of these?

as stated before it doesnt really matter if you categorize this coevolution into natural vs. artificial because everything since human presence has been a change. so natural would just be anything before humans started dotting the globe. so what importance is that if they've successfully circumscribed the whole damn thing?

a successful (fit) species has an effect on its surroundings by whatever manner its adaptations have allowed it to change its environment. the textbook example: light colored moths big pimpin in england. livin it up til BOOM industrial revolution and BAM only the darkies survive blending into the soot-ladden bark of the trees they choose to perch on. now i guess this could be considered artificial workings in a once natural environment, but how often could something like this occur to the point where no one knows who the fuck came first? well. thats why this shouldnt be how things are categorized. because everything is change and its irreversible, so quit trying to recreate a natural environment and develop a new way of thinking about it than in such a rather broad regards. because charting human interference means looking back 4 million years ago when many other factors (species) hadnt presented themselves yet, and many had already died out. and if you're interested in anything living, well good luck going back a couple billion years before the first amino acids begat the first proteins which in turn begat the first cells.

those are the dudes that fucked everything up.