Kudos for stirring the pot of thinking the whole way through the article. I liked how your perspective kept yielding new ideas.

Your discussion of degrees made me think of "when do many grains of sand become a heap?" One could argue "heap" is a purely subjective / human thing. On the other hand, a heap of sand has objective physical powers a handful of sand doesn't.

An image arose reading this of a couch potato absorbed in an American football game -- he's completely shut out "wild nature" in order to experience an artificial "wild nature" as if he misses the fierce fight for survival.