Anthropocentrism is the hallucination in society of regarding humans as the central element of the universe. It involves interpreting reality exclusively in terms of human values and experience, often without understanding of what is really happening..
There are many examples of how this lack of understanding has led to mistaken attempts to emulate nature in providing services. An example is the installation of desalination plants to provided communities with potable water and or irrigation. The hydrological cycle is how natural forces have use energy from sunshine to supply water in rain and snow for eons with an ecological cost (such as the damage due to floods) that is remedied over time by other natural forces. It has been and will continue to be a major factor in natural operations such as plant growth and organisms operations.
Desalination plants provide potable water by using electrical energy (often from coal fired power stations emitting the greenhouse gases contributing to climate disruption and ocean acidification and warming). Ironically, these plants need cooling water circulated by using electrical energy in their operation. These plants are made of irreplaceable materials and have limited lifetimes so their operation is unsustainable process. So they are an eco costly emulation, not substitution, of the hydrological cycle.
That is, they are a common example of the failure of costly technological systems to emulate freely available natural processes. Despite these failings, proponents argue that desalination plants are often justified to meet the range of needs of industrialized civilization when what is freely available from natural operations is insufficient.
There is failure to understand that systems such as desalination plants are only temporary expedients. Installing these expedients as the population and infrastructure (and severity of climate change) grow only makes the inevitable collapse of the infrastructure and the die off of the population harder to deal with.
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