What species are we trying to protect, exactly? What climate are we trying to preserve? Only the range of species and conditions that happened to prevail coincident with our own flowering as a species. We don't want to save nature, we want to arrest it. We don't want the progression of nature - we want the status quo to be unnaturally prolonged.
There is a viewpoint which regards humanity as outside of nature. How pompous. How self-aggrandizing. How deluded. "But humanity is out of control! We're not in balance! We're out of harmony!" So were the first hugely successful Precambrian organisms, living in an anoxic environment and multiplying out of control until the accumulation of their waste product (oxygen) made their environment hostile to them - but opened the way for oxygen-dependent life forms to proliferate. All life succeeds to the greatest extent that it possibly can within the given conditions, until it is either crowded out by more successful organisms, or its own proliferation undermines the environment it needs to succeed. Equilibrium happens, but it is only one of many natural states. Extinction is the norm. During the course of this planet's history, far more species have gone extinct than have survived to surround us today.
Yet just because we happened along when we did, we look at the world as it has been over the past 5,000 years or so and say: this is how it should be. This is the world's natural state. Familiar animals. Polar icecaps. The stately procession of seasons in temperate zones. The sea level set at yea high. This is nature.
Well, yes. Yes it is. But nature is also the frozen winter that never ends for centuries, thick sheets of ice covering all the land you know. Nature is also the hellishly hot, muggy summer that never lets up, and Wyoming submerged. Nature is not simply the world we know from the songs of poets and the beauty of landscape paintings, nature is not simply the familiar wonder of our current happy medium as our cultures and societies have perceived and celebrated it. Nature encompasses extremes - bitter and suffocating global extremes, lasting centuries and millennia.
Our happy medium today is an anomaly. Even if humanity had never arrived on the scene, it would nonetheless still be passing, swinging towards a further, natural extreme - from our standpoint, an uncomfortable extreme - soon enough. The happy medium, the "natural state of things" as we hubristically view it, is a relatively brief transitional state. One that we merely lucked into inhabiting.
And THAT! is what we want to preserve. What we want to unnaturally prolong. Not for nature's sake, no. Not for nature!
For us.
I'll tell you what, too: we're smart enough to pull it off. I say let's do it.
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