I came across this quote in Leonard Nelson’s System of Ethics (so it’s probably translated from German, as Nelson’s book is):
As though to test his youthful vigor, divinity thrust man into conflict with Nature, which contests him every step of the way and at the outset largely has the better of him. Every step he must wrest from her alien power. Yet every step he does achieve is to his good, for he himself violently foists on Nature an alien law that issues solely from his own heart.
–Jakob Friedrich Fries
I like this. Very anti-environmentalist. It also reminds me of the comments by Mises, Rand, and Rothbard (in Locke on IP; Mises, Rothbard, and Rand on Creation, Production, and “Rearranging”) regarding the nature of creation lying in the phenomenon of rearranging existing matter.
