Nature

Nature isn't cruel, it is simply indifferent.

Consider any prey animal, say a gazelle.  It lives its life just fine until one particular unremarkable day when it is caught and eaten.  Perhaps it has even been chased before and escaped but its immaterial to nature.  One day while trying to flee it gets brought down, killed and eaten.

Similarly nature treats most of its creations the same way.  You eventually will become fodder for other life.  Even if you don't die violently, you most likely decompose and be consumed.

Unless of course you get buried under volcanic ash or get mummified.

People have taken greater control of this process than any other creature on the planet, finding way to fend off certain diseases and survive certain disasters.  We can even predict when some are coming.

Unfortunately we are also by all the evidence the cause, or at least the contributor, to some.

We have carelessly introduced or removed things into nature on an unprecedented scale.

It isn't a new phenomena we have been doing it since we started slash and burn agriculture.

Still it is only in the industrial age that we started to dig up carbon and re-release it into the atmosphere.

It took millennia for that carbon to become coal, oil, natural gas and remove it from the environment.  We are reversing the process at breakneck speed.

Nature will adjust, it always has.  We weren't always around and we may be returning to a state that doesn't support our survival.

Nature doesn't care.

Nature

I was watching a show about packs of painted wolves in Africa and how they interact and hunt.

What wasn't clear near until nearly the end that everything that was happening was happening in a nature preserve surrounded by human habitation.

Yes in most ways they live as they always have, the animals, but they have limited range and are endangered.

Its very hard to find areas on this planet not being taken over by humans or at least not changed by us.

The oceans, as vast as they seem, now have huge islands of plastic garbage from us.  We have been devising ways to clean them up but of course it would have been easier not to create them in the first place.

Polar bears have recently infested a remote area in Siberia where humans live because the melting ice is destroying their habitat.  I don't imagine this will end well for the bears.

This isn't totally new, humans have been altering the environment since very early on, we just have now achieved worldwide capabilities.

In many cases its too late, a lot of species are simply gone and not coming back.

Nature is not kind.  It really operates on a survival of the fittest concept where the ability of a species to exploit another is generally limited to its own survival.  If you eliminate your food source you starve so over time the natural order ended up in a state of equilibrium.

Humans have gone outside of nature and converted habitats for our use.

We have sort of gotten away with it so far, although a fair number of modern ailments may be the result of our activity.

We can't get away with it forever, or can we?