More reason for humility in our relationships with ecological communities

Many public decisions about the environment seem infused with a worldview that supposes nature is well understood as a machine and that the key purpose of science is the discovery of its rules to then control nature for the betterment of humanity. That nature-as-machine worldview leads to damaging overconfidence in forecasting ecological outcomes. A competing worldview is that nature is better understood to unfold like human history-explainable but critically and inherently unpredictable because of the important influence of historically contingent events. Recent analysis offers compelling support for this idea. This article explores a demanding consequence of such findings-namely, that those involved-directly and indirectly-with environmental decision-making should strive to relax the influence of the nature-as-machine worldview on environmental decisions, including difficult-to-identify influences that have resulted from centuries of this worldview's normalization. This striving includes analyzing decisions about the environment in terms of humility and favoring humbler decisions.