Since when did humankind start deciding that "nature" can have its way? Okay, I know the answer to that: it was the Age of the Enlightenment, actually. But we've had a few good ideas since then, too, and one of them has to be scrapping this idea of the ultimate benevolence of "nature." If a river wants to overrun a town, do we move the town, or put up dikes? Nature is something that we can attempt to find harmony with, to reach some sort of balance with. In fact, the first "American value" (pre-dating Jefferson by several millenia) was respect for nature and our place in it. However, if you follow the course of human evolution, long before we had the brainpower to be cognizant of this fact, the mark of humanity has been our ability to shape the environment to fit our own needs. If you look at a map of the disappearance of large predators on this planet, it's the same map as that of human expansion. Sabre-toothed Tigers didn't just disappear because it was nature's will -- our forefathers slaughtered the competition so we could have the meat source to ourselves. Much more recently, we culled the wolf populations of the Great Lakes Region because they were dangerous to human inhabitants. Because of it, states like Michigan now have no other way to control their deer population (who didn't stop reproducing at former replacement rates just because their primary predator disappeared) other than to let hunters do it for sport. Likewise, our fishing industry, whose job, I remind you, is to provide food for people, needs to get rid of some competition, since we can't both share the same resource. We moved off other predators to increase our fish stocks, and sea lions moved into some of the hole we created. If this was fishermen fighting off an endangered species for the last tuna, well, that would be one thing. But an organized effort to maintain balance is just being, well, human.