More reason for humility in our relationships with ecological communities

Abstract 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.