If you walk through the aisles of your local supermarket or pharmacy, chances are you will come face to face with one of the most perpetual fallacies of relevance remaining in human reasoning – the noble appeal to nature.
Cosmetic products claim it, health foods chorus it and herbal medicines parade it; the honourable badge that reads the purest of words: natural. The idea that something is better, safer and simply right because it is natural has enjoyed a fixed place in a wide range of areas, including marketing, science, medicine and theology, where people are sternly warned against the impurities of products made from human intervention and design. Words like ‘artificial’ receive an unrelenting stigma in the worlds of food marketing and biotechnology, while words like ‘aberrant’ and ‘perverted’ are designated to the transgressors of ‘natural’ human behaviour and orientation. Naturalness is idealised and hyper-romanticised even in popular culture, where utopias, free from excessive human-designed technology and architecture, are illustrated and embraced as the absolute ideal (think the most recent prophetic 
phenomenon Avatar and James Cameron’s magnificent portrayal of Pandora). From the glorious idea of the noble savage to the big blue natives of Cameron’s lush, fictional universe, the message has always been clear: nature good, humans bad.
While it is certainly true in many cases that human interference with natural processes has proved to be no less than disastrous, the exact same can inarguably be described for nature. Take the most recent devastation of the Queensland floods for instance, or deadly outbreaks such as typhoid, cholera, plagues and polio. In Australia, we are no strangers to natural disasters, with our unfortunate share of floods, droughts and bushfires. Few of us (with the exception of anti-vaccination proponents) will object to human intervention in such tragic circumstances. Imagine standing in the path of a fire-engine with protest signs or vandalising flood levees in the name of Mother Nature. And for those who argue (and there are some) that the cruel workings of nature are some part of divine punishment bestowed by a superior being onto humankind for their evil ways (think the extremist Christian argument relating to the transmission of HIV between transgressors of heteronormative sexuality), what about those cruel instances that occur at the very 
heart of nature? Far from human settlement, animals in the wild endure the chronic fear of being caught and eaten in the natural hierarchy of the food chain, snakes and various carnivorous animals have been designed by nature to eat their prey alive and wildlife are not exempt from suffering the devastations of natural occurrences such as earthquakes, wildfire and seasonal drought. From the naturally occurring substance of cocaine to those tempting mushrooms in the grass that you know you’re not supposed to touch, praising something as being good simply because it is natural seems like very flawed reasoning. Nature is often cruel and unjust or simply, by widely accepted moral standards, plain wrong.
While labelling products as ‘natural’ could be one of the biggest marketing ploys known to humankind (oh, the woes of sitting next to an enthusiast of ‘all-natural deodorant’ on the afternoon bus), some more disturbing patterns emerge from the naturalistic fallacy. Using such reasoning to apply to ‘natural’ human behaviour causes many dilemmas. Objections to gender and race equality, homosexuality, animal welfare, stem cell research, in-vitro fertilisation, contraception, socialist political systems and welfare systems, have all been made in the name of what is perceived to be natural. Dogmatic authority preaches against what a divine creator intended for humankind, while proponents of eugenics, patriarchy or cut-throat capitalists in dog-eat-dog, individualistic societies like our own, rationalise their attitudes with the perfect Darwinian reasoning of survival-of-the-
fittest. Surely the majority of us perceive such ideals as being wildly outdated and morally wrong, and easily agree that ‘natural inclinations’ such as violence or adultery are socially and morally unacceptable, despite how our deepest, most savage urges might compel us to act.
In avoidance of sounding all Brave New World, very often there is nothing more beautiful, more comforting and more harmonious than a natural process or product. However, dismissing the integrity of everything that is man-made and artificial or discriminating against anything that goes against a very biased view of what naturally ought to be, is flawed and often dangerous. Nature should not be anthropomorphised, labelled as either good or bad, vengeful or just, and it certainly should not be relied upon as providing us with the best, the safest or with the most acceptable standard of morality and behaviour (although some will of course disagree). Taoist philosopher Lao Tzu wrote “Nature is not human hearted”. Maybe it is time we start acting accordingly.
