Man and nature are in the same body of the earth's biosphere, and human reproduction and social development cannot be separated from nature, so we must rely on and use nature; At the same time, we should transform nature and let it benefit and serve mankind. The unity of opposites and struggle between man and nature push the society forward.
How to grasp the identity and struggle between man and nature? Marxism holds that understanding things means understanding the contradictions of things, and understanding the identity and struggle of specific contradictions and their interrelations. Dialectics requires grasping the opposition in the same and grasping the same in the opposition. Disrupting the unity of contradiction and struggle will inevitably lead to metaphysical mistakes. It is against the contradiction of the objective world to think only in the same and absolute unity, or in the opposite and absolute opposition.
In the activities of transforming nature, we overemphasized the struggle between man and nature in many aspects and unilaterally emphasized the role of struggle in the development of things. The idea of "fighting with heaven and earth is fun" has long been a guide for people's actions, and it has also led to "fighting with water is fun" in water conservancy construction for decades, ignoring the identity between man and water. The result of the blind struggle between human beings and nature is to transform contradictions, that is, from the violation of nature to the violation of nature by human beings, so that human beings will eventually be punished by nature and bear the consequences. Such as temperature rise, environmental deterioration, ecological imbalance, land subsidence, soil erosion, soil desertification and a series of natural system imbalances are the consequences of people's excessive struggle with nature.
The idea of harmonious coexistence between man and nature applies the principle that contradictory identity and struggle are interrelated, which requires people to correctly handle the relationship between identity and struggle between man and nature. Because without identity, there is no pure struggle, and struggle is always associated with identity. Therefore, the struggle between man and nature is a struggle within the same unity, and it is a struggle to build water conservancy and eliminate floods on the premise of ensuring the sustainable utilization of natural resources by mankind. At the same time, we should also pay attention to the fact that harmonious coexistence does not mean that there is no struggle, because there is no identity without struggle. Identity is based on differences and opposites, and there is no development of human society without the struggle between man and water. Therefore, only by correctly handling the relationship of identity and struggle between man and water can we truly realize the sustainable utilization of water resources and thus support the sustainable development of economy and society.