The Conflict Between Natural and Human Technologies

Abstract

This essay addresses a question that is always left unanswered in institutional debate: why are the congresses, symposiums, fairs, seminars, and similar events convened to settle the conflict between economic conglomerates and citizens over technological interventions in Nature so ineffective? The answers remain incomplete: some groups who assert the enjoyment of nature's rights lack the tools to implement them; others, whether or not they recognize or dismiss these rights, argue that corporate rights and the rights guaranteeing people's economy are inalienable — and in this case, they do have the legal instruments and force to sustain a unilateral and often explosive relationship with the Earth and its principal cognitive fact: Nature. From another angle of this confrontation, the essay poses a methodological challenge to the versions of corporate freedom generally championed by legal, economic, political, and industrial engineering professionals, which, when they collide with the views of environmentalists and the productive practices of peasants and Afro-descendant and Indigenous communities inspired by a broader spectrum of vernacular and independent professional knowledge, expose the relativism and complicity of the subjectivism sustained by arguments over the usefulness or uselessness of ethics, bioethics, and morality in their unilateral action within the natural cognitive space.

The central question this text tentatively raises is that the earth and its living productive systems, including minerals, are intelligent organizations bearing cognitive languages — taking distance from interpretations and categorization models that assume these forms of life, unlike human ones, lack language and intelligence.