I find this idea of a "synthetic environment" kind of strange in a way. We crossed that line twelve thousand years ago when we started large-scale farming. That alone was a transformation of nature which immensely upset the previous natural order and caused human population to rise immensely. But I wouldn't really consider that artificial in a major way, and on some level we're also part of nature. I don't think we are any more artificial in building cities than bees are in building their hives. There is a difference, but not one which matters for this conversation, though I will mention that that difference has to do with the fact that we picture an idea in our heads before projecting it into reality through labour.

I don't think it's healthy to see the world as a struggle between the natural and artificial, because it's so hard to properly define. Humans are natural, making tools is in our nature, so is constructing shelter. I think the proper way to see the world is as this unity, humans exist within nature and act to transform it, as does every other animal species on this planet. The ecosystem would look wildly different did termites and bees not transform it for their own benefit, and similarly it is humans who transform nature in their own ways for their own benefit.

This does not mean unconditional support for human activity. Glass, concrete, and steel towers and spreading suburbs are terrible transformations of nature. They are terrible because of their destructive potential for no gain, they are unsustainable by nature, they upset the balance in a way which makes the land less fertile, less capable of supporting life in general let alone humans, and in the long term are a loss not only for natural diversity but for the human species as well. There exists a rift due to industrial agriculture where humans take from the earth and give back to it from the mountains and the bedrock while pushing waste into the oceans, which is unsustainable and which has and will lead to ecological collapses. This is but one part, industry in general, pollution, the carbon cycle, land use change and associated environmental effects, it all acts to lower the carrying capacity of this Earth in the long term. This is how I believe it is best to critique transformations of nature in this manner, because terms are easy to define, the unsustainability is scientifically provable, you have no such ambiguities as when you talk about artificial and natural as two entirely separate concepts.

This also gets you out of very bad ways of thinking. There is no "natural carrying capacity" for this planet except what it currently has. There is likely a theoretical maximum and some day we might hit it. What's clear is that we haven't hit it yet, we just
fail to push the current carrying capacity by transforming nature in an unsustainable fashion for short-term benefit. You can no longer say things like "There really should not be this many humans in the world", since it's plainly not true. There are supposed to be exactly as many humans as there are, because humans naturally transform nature to support themselves. It is our own nature, our species being, to take those gifts of nature and use them to transform them, through our own labour, into products which are use-values to ourselves. This is just as it is the nature of bees to pollinate and build hives, the nature of woodland animals to eat their hives and the flowers they pollinate, and the nature of elephants to topple trees to create for themselves a grassland instead of a forest.

It is not that there are too many humans, even with our unsustainable practices this planet easily currently produces enough food for ten billion to live well-off. It is not that there is artificial and natural, to make natural artificial is natural, because to transform nature is human nature. It is our current, wasteful and unsustainable transformation of nature, no different to those transformations that took place twelve thousand years ago except in its unsustainability, which has been been sucking the life out of this planet. But as humans, we have the unique ability to both imagine and then through labour project that ideal into reality, to once again transform what was natural to something which suits our needs. Our needs are, in the long term, sustainably keeping at the very least ten billion people alive, and permaculture is one of the ways in which we can both imagine that and start to bring it into fruition. However, our own relations and structures might prevent a total change in our transformation of nature in its present state, which is why political action is as important, if not more so, than homesteading or community gardens.

Idk man, I don't think overpopulation is an issue and I despise imagining that there is something uniquely bad about artificial things and that they are somehow different from nature. They are nature, their creation is our nature, and we ourselves are creations of nature. It's only how we have in the last few millenia, really even few centuries, been doing those transformations which is the true issue.

End of insane HN rant I guess. There's obviously no infinite growth, but we're also far from overpopulation. The world is not a Malthusian nightmare, it's not that resources cause population to explode and conditions to worsen, we can see that in the richer nations of the Earth where instead resources cause population to drop after a point. We'll naturally reach our peak well within the theoretical maximum carrying capacity of the Earth, that's my point. Permaculture is one important step on that path. Neo-Malthusians and genocidal maniacs and eco-fascists disgust me to no end.