NATURE isn’t cruel or kind, wasteful or Spartan, beautiful or ugly.

Nature is just nature. It just gets on with it.

The Romantic poets accepted and encouraged the notion that nature is some kind of entity with human attributes, and we have been bedeviled by this ever since.

Hippy types like to think of the world as Gaia, a deity or an immense sensitive living creature.

Truth is, this world couldn’t care less what happens to us. You can’t hurt the world because it is inanimate. It feels nothing.

But will its almost infinitely complex energy-exchange systems react if you mess with them? You bet.

Stick a tyre lever in one set of cogs and something comes to a screeching halt in some distant part of the factory. We still don’t know enough about how Gaia works. though I confess I find it easier to visualise Gaia as a machine rather than something living.

And we do so like sticking tyre levers into the works.

Mucking about with the natural world for our own benefit (and inevitably to other creatures and plants’ detriment) has been going on for a very long time.

Human beings have a long history of altering ‘nature’ to suit themselves. The first genetic engineering was probably in on the Yangtze Delta or Sumeria many thousands of years ago, when early farmers selected only those wild grasses that had extra large seeds from which to grow next year’s crops.

A grey squirrel is often the only squirrel today’s child is likely to see. Its success has been traced to a population explosion at Woburn Park, Bedfordshire in the early 20th century. It is from the US, and it has driven the smaller native red squirrel from almost all its haunts. We did that.

A payback of sorts came when some klutz from England introduced starlings into Central Park New York in 1890. Its 200 million population has driven out many native species right across the States. We did that as well.

Rabbits were introduced to Britain as a food animal by the Normans in 1066. We waited nearly 800 years before we introduced it into Australia (1859), where it rampaged through natural populations and ruined millions of acres of grassland.

Look at the number of breeds of dog. We did that too.

Our experiments with cross-breeding sometimes come spectacularly unstuck. The way the aggressive African bee hybrids are taking over North America is a case in point.

The Observer’s Book of Birds was one of my first books and I’ve always been fascinated by these distant relatives of dinosaurs. I don’t want to think that feeding them is wrong, but I’m starting to wonder if this isn’t yet another tyre lever in the works.

It seems a good thing to encourage birds into our garden, where we can pay in food and nesting-boxes for the delight of watching their habits, their flight, their colour and listening to their song.

I always get a little thrill when a robin comes to sit on my spade handle at the allotment. But if we make them tame, they are more vulnerable to the predation of cats.

If we give them food, and they nest and rear families because their food source is regular, we have artificially altered the balance of nature.

If we then fall ill or move away or even worse, just get bored, the birds’ welfare, which hangs on our generosity and interest, particularly in an urban environment, is jeopardised.

The dilemma facing future generations will be more extreme than ours, I suspect. We’ve run out of places where wild animals can go to get out of our way. We may also be twiddling the hot knob on global temperatures.

What causes me sorrow is that during this or the next generation, we will see the disappearance in the wild of the polar bear, the mountain gorilla, the giant panda, the snow leopard, the tiger, the white rhino, and at least three large marine species. The way things are going, in a century there won’t be any animals bigger than a gnu anywhere in the wild at all.

There just isn’t room on the planet for us all. And no matter what we say to the contrary, the human species is hell bent on taking the lot.

Compassion for animals and their untrammelled environment is one thing: but tell me who gets shot if a tiger is about to make a meal of a lost child in the jungle. Would that be the child or the tiger?

This scenario is a poignant reminder about who comes first on this planet and who may also, through his misunderstanding of the world’s stupendous and wonderful natural machinery, come last.