Theories to consider:

Theorist Herman Daly, a professor at the University of Maryland and former senior economist, offers an interesting theory which correlates with the Humans versus Nature theory. The theory states that the world’s current economic climate is like a subsystem, which belongs to a bigger parent system, being the biosphere, or the earth. The subsystem, at this point in time, being relatively new, is geared for growth. It is all set up to grow and expand, whereas the parent system, the earth, is not geared for growth, it remains the same. Thus we are witnessing and contributing to a sub-system which is encroaching on its parent system, and that, according to Daly, is the fundamental cost of economic growth.

In Society and Nature, Peter Dickens, who is based at the University of Cambridge, asks a central question in his piece, formulated in these terms: "How, as society transforms its environment, are people's own natures being transformed?" In order to find answers to this initial problem, Dickens identifies five core concepts: industry, community, evolution, risk and, consequently, knowledge. Taking from the philosophy of the Enlightenment but also referring to the ideas of Michel Foucault and Bruno Latour, the first parts brings historical hints and conceptual elements in order to understand how nature can evolve with our perceptions, culture, ideologies, into debates. Chapter 1 revisits the evolutionary thought since Darwin, Spencer, Sumner and Durkheim (p. 30), while Chapter 2 concentrates on the massive human exploitation of the nature through work, industry, and consumption, in a complex dynamic that is labelled as "humanity's metabolism with nature" at the end of the reading, Dickens goes on to say:

“The world is envisaged as hierarchically stratified. At the most general level are physical mechanisms(e.g. gravity). At a higher level are chemical structures and mechanisms. Higher still are bioplogical mechanisms( e.g. those generating an organism’s growth). Finally, there are physical and social mechanisms. Mechanisms in each level of reality are rooted in, but not reduced to, those operating at lower levels. The nature of these structures and mechanisms is subject to constant critique and scientific development. This critique and development can also stem practical, everyday experience.”