“But just as nature provides labor with the means of life in the sense that labor cannot live without objects on which to operate, on the other hand, it provides the means of life in a more restricted sense — i.e., the means for the physical subsistence of the worker himself…
“It is just in the working up of the objective world, therefore, that man first really proves himself to be a species being. This production is his active species life. Through and because of this production, nature appears as his work and his reality. The object of labor is, therefore, the objectification of man’s species life: for he duplicates himself not only, as in consciousness, intellectually, but also actively, in reality and therefore he contemplates himself in a world that he has created. In tearing away from man the object of his production, therefore, estranged labor tears from him his species life, his real species objectivity, and transforms his advantage over animals into the disadvantage that his inorganic body, nature, is taken from him.”
Karl Marx, Estranged Labor
"Human beings always remain rooted in their biological evolutionary history, which we may call “first Nature,” but they produce a characteristically human social nature of their own which we may call “second nature.” And far from being “unnatural,” human second nature is eminently a creation of organic evolution’s first nature."
Murray Bookchin, What is Social Ecology?
"That man’s physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature."
Marx, Estranged Labor
“Have you not considered how your Lord dealt with the possessors of the elephant?”
Orbital