[Marxism] This is the Engels quote

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1876/part-played-labour/index.htm

Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human 
victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on 
us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the 
results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite 
different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel the first. The 
people who, in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor and elsewhere, destroyed 
the forests to obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that by removing 
along with the forests the collecting centres and reservoirs of moisture 
they were laying the basis for the present forlorn state of those 
countries. When the Italians of the Alps used up the pine forests on the 
southern slopes, so carefully cherished on the northern slopes, they had 
no inkling that by doing so they were cutting at the roots of the dairy 
industry in their region; they had still less inkling that they were 
thereby depriving their mountain springs of water for the greater part 
of the year, and making it possible for them to pour still more furious 
torrents on the plains during the rainy seasons. Those who spread the 
potato in Europe were not aware that with these farinaceous tubers they 
were at the same time spreading scrofula. Thus at every step we are 
reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a 
foreign people, like someone standing outside nature – but that we, with 
flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and 
that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the 
advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and 
apply them correctly.

And, in fact, with every day that passes we are acquiring a better 
understanding of these laws and getting to perceive both the more 
immediate and the more remote consequences of our interference with the 
traditional course of nature. In particular, after the mighty advances 
made by the natural sciences in the present century, we are more than 
ever in a position to realise, and hence to control, also the more 
remote natural consequences of at least our day-to-day production 
activities. But the more this progresses the more will men not only feel 
but also know their oneness with nature, and the more impossible will 
become the senseless and unnatural idea of a contrast between mind and 
matter, man and nature, soul and body, such as arose after the decline 
of classical antiquity in Europe and obtained its highest elaboration in 
Christianity.

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