That's a reasonable response and you raise some good questions, which I address in other articles. I agree that we're not the only tool-users, but that doesn't mean we should understate the difference in degree. As you say, the "intensity and effect varies," but sometimes differences in degree add up to a difference in kind. So that becomes a mere semantic disagreement.
As to whether we're natural, I point out elsewhere that that word has a great many meanings. Metaphysically, we're natural, given philosophical naturalism, but that kind of naturalness allows for all kinds of profound discontinuities and transformations. Thus, in other articles I compare us to black holes. They too are natural, but they transform space and time into something else. Likewise, personhood transforms nature-as-the-wilderness into artificiality.
Again, this ends up being a semantic question of how we want to define "natural." In one sense we're natural and in another we're not. We're opposed to nature in so far as nature is understood as being wild. That is, we're civilizers, cultivators, domesticators, and we mean to eliminate all traces of wildness since wildness is existentially horrifying (godless, absurd, amoral, antisocial, inhuman, etc).
See especially the bottom link, if you're interested: "How Nature Made Us Virtually Supernatural."
