(this is a concept for a part of a longer collaborative work)
The human quest for love, improving our lives and finding understanding, pursue human values that are not inherent in nature. Their pursuit requires reliable knowledge of nature, though, and the kind of values exhibited in her designs of natural systems. So ethics for using the earth is partly a matter of learning to notice the way nature makes complex relationships that work beautifully. It’s also a matter of observing how our having changed the earth alters our own ability to live by our own values.
![A Human Changed Earth](https://synapse9.com/issues/images/Anthropocene.jpg)
Nature offers myriad examples of how complex communities can live together, demonstrating many kinds of competition, collaboration, conflict and tolerance, etc., that do or don’t work. They offer something like a set of natural ethical principles for “what works”. In nature all living systems need to produce a profit of surplus energy, for example. Continue reading Ethics for Economics in the Anthropocene, life on a world changed by man