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Virus implies we are invasive. We are born from and part of nature. Humans are more like cancer. We are growing too rapidly and killing the host.
This post: How do invasive species overtax an ecosystem? Capitalism. List of the worst offenders.
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That’s an easy thing to say, but not really accurate. Even without capitalism, we’ve wiped out entire animal populations. We’re just doing it a lot faster now. Even if we were fully socialist, and there was no profit being made for anyone, our own humanity would be destroying the ecosystem; strip mining would still happen under perfect communism (e.g., not authoritarian states).
Capitalism and communism both need to same resources, they’re just distributed different.
Capitalism and communism both need to same resources, they’re just distributed different.
I’m really not convinced by this. I’m not going to try and make an argument for communism. But the idea the amount of consumption under capitalism would be the same as under alternative economic systems is just absurd. The amount of waste created by planned obsolescence, fashion (fast and otherwise), consumption from status anxiety, the things people buy to cope with long working weeks and commutes. In addition to this the extra damage caused by the billionaires and mega rich.
We would still need access to the same types of resources under alternative economic systems. But there is so much waste created by things which are exclusive to capitalism.
I like you critical thinking going on. To me it is simply the number of people, pure and simple. If there was 10 people on the planet it would be a lot harder for any long term consequences to show up. Unfortunately all the modern systems support an ever expanding population base (for stupid reasons imho). We need a system that doesn’t have this feature. Despite capitalism’s benefits, it’s tied to exhaustion. Problem I see, how could the breeding ever be overcome within the system? I’ve got nothing. I’m sure natural processes will take the system off line if it doesn’t line up with some fundamentals.
The problem is capitalism but the problem is also people that are unwilling to change their lifestyle
So the people unwilling to let go of glutinous life styles is the real issue? Person living in the woods with a simple lifestyle ok but Taylor and her plane no good?
The vast majority of self-proclaimed leftists I met still eat animals.
As a vegetarian I feel like this is purity testing. It’s easy for me to not eat meat but some of them seem really weirdly attached to it.
Unilateral sacrifices are fine when it’s easy, but a lot has to change and it can exhaust you. If they’ve only got the mental energy for one, then I’ll accept their help with systemic change. Even a slightly better economy would internalize the cost of eating meat.
As a vegetarian you still pay for animals to be murdered for your personal enjoyment. Every laying hen whose eggs you eat had a brother who best case was shredded alive soon after hatching, or kept around for a few weeks to be murdered for his flesh. Laying hens are murdered once they age out of peak egg productivity to be sold as cheap meat. Cows and their male counterparts suffer similar fates.
My point is that yes, even most well-intentioned communist humans indeed are a plague, and the planet would be better of without us.
That is literally eco-fascist rhetoric.
“Fascism is when animals aren’t put through a lifetime of torture for no reason”
Sounds delicious.
I think that when robots become autonomous, they can be used to promote healthier ecosystems. Forestry robots can plant new generations of flora, using GPS to identify rain patterns alongside soil erosion records, then plant the right types of things for a given location to improve the ecosystem’s success.
I think that going “future solutions will fix this problem, don’t think about it now” like you are is a huge part of the problem.
Don’t think big picture, do actions, now.
It has to be both IMHO. We need to stop the bleeding, and also plan to heal. Re-introducing beavers by airdrop was once a futuristic solution too.
Oh you’re certainly right, but “I think once the future happens” is just silly, it’s the same logic religious nuts have of “once the rapture happens” it breeds inaction and stagnation.
Was going to mention the Aral Sea
We are perfectly capable of sustaining a clean and balanced environment. We probably will, eventually. The question is: how much damage and pain will we cause before we decide to?
We probably will, eventually
My old boss told me one time (I’m translating from corporate speak) that it’s 100% totally okay to personally inflict any amount of environmental damage that benefits us in the short term, because the solutions to climate change are on the way. Like it’s a totally forgone conclusion that the bright minds working on these problems will solve them. Always have, always will.
You and I and every sane person agrees minimizing the damage is best either way. It just reminded me of that convo lol. Bro was using the “confidence in human ingenuity” as a blank check excuse to actively cause the damage that will need to be undone. Absolutely insufferable. If it were 100% confirmed there were no way for us to survive what’s coming he’d still run the business the same way just with a different convenient excuse
“Well what does it matter that the oceans are all lava now, and will tsunami every livable inch of land, killing all life on earth? We can still harm the planet today. Won’t batter next week when we’re all ash!”
Wouldn’t we need to exploit our planet for material for a growing population regardless of our species economic system? It’s more of an issue of degree, no?
Some exploitation is necessary, in the same way a bison exploits the grass.
But different economic systems can generate vastly different levels of environmental destruction. For example, our system encourages planned obsolescence, fast fashion, and overall disposable goods. There are countless materials we don’t recycle simply because it’s not profitable to do so. You can build a system on a more circular economy, where new raw materials are only harvested if recycling can’t provide.
Education and quality of life improvements lower birth-rates. We have enough resources and the logistical means to ensure all peoples have access to high quality of life. We choose to deny this based on a capitalist profit seeking model, where we over allocate resources to the most wealthy and strip them from the least.
Preach
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Think about how much shit is wasted on the daily, and then think about if we just didn’t do that. Tons of shit nobody wants is manufactured and destined for landfills for no reason other than to make a few billionaires some pocket change. Now think about all the plastic fucking packaging.
We could be doing shit in a sustainable manner. But no, capitalism.
It’s the deliberate choice to use processes over more sustainable options, like using gas and coal instead of cleaner solutions like nuclear. Other examples would be outsourcing processes that we could do cleanly to the 3rd world because it’s cheaper.
Doesn’t matter. Both the first argument and yours presuppose the internal value of bio diversity detached from humanity, which is weird.
Nature is valuable insofar we can coexist with it. If climate change were driven by the factors independent of our actions, our collective goal would have been to defend humanity and not LDAR.
I cannot prove it, but vibes are that this sentiment is coming from years and years of anti climate action propaganda.
Do you mean to say that human life is the only life with value, and all other life gains value by virtue of its positive relationship with human life?
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I don’t understand how you envision our species coexisting in equilibrium with our planet. Are you suggesting that we give up our resource hungry high technology and live closer to what the Amish are trying to do?
The future you’re talking about won’t be in your own hands. Technocapital will make those decisions about how to exploit the planet for you, and population stability, quality of life, and economic, measured use of resources (ie literally “conservative”) will all be secondary, tertiary, or even more distant goals. There will not be a great flash of light where turning the planet into a gray brick will yield a positive singularity. When we’ve used the world up, it’s gone, but you and I will be left alive for a litle while to writhe like flayed worms in hell. Maybe another species can guzzle up our bones in several million years to make a computer do unnecessary math calculations with the hopes of achieving infinite growth?
At our current level of industrial capabilities we could provide a standard of living for all humans at around the level of an eastern European country. That sounds bad if you live in America, but it sounds like an impossibility if you live in the 3rd world. The truth is capitalism creates these disparities and prevents the study of more equitable technologies.
I don’t understand how you envision our species coexisting in equilibrium with our planet.
Because I don’t want to discuss this. This is a vile path. It’s like a debate on the fact that jews disproportionately control more capital than other ethnicities or not.
You don’t want to discuss your ideal vision of humanity? That’s odd.
Not in a context of eco fascism
Fair enough, what if I wanted to ask you outside of that context? I have very few thoughts and opinions about this subject and would appreciate any reasonable views.
You should look up solarpunk for ideas of how we can live in a symbiotic way without giving up technological advancements or reducing our quality of life. Mostly it’s stuff like sustainable farming, renewable energy, and not being wasteful with materials.
Yes, but if we stop capitalism the population will likely maintain itself at a reasonable level. The only reason we have as many people as we do now is thanks to government pressure to reproduce as much as possible, restricted access to family planning techniques, and rape culture.
This is the age old debate about human nature.
We have a biological imperative to consume and reproduce. Unchecked consumption and reproduction is unsustainable give finite resources.
Can we curb those innate desires, and can we do so ethically? It’s not a simple answer.
Humans have existed for 300,000 years. It is only in the last few hundred that we have decided on this route. It is not human nature to consume and reproduce more than a ecological niche can support us and many peoples across the world live in balance with their ecosystems before Europeans invaded them.
No, it’s only the last few hundred years we had the capability to decide on this route.
It is not human nature to consume and reproduce more than a ecological niche can support.
Yes it is. It is a biological imperative to consume and expand. There is no biological imperative to stop doing that. Up until recently the balancing factor has been the cruelty of nature and vast amounts of human death, especially in the very young.
Yea breed till extinction is natures way. Those reindeer on the island off Kamchatka.
I think the biological imperative to stop is the total doom it creates us all if left unchecked. Pretty strong motivation. I think the game musical chairs is closer to reality than symbiotic relationship, conflict being inherent in survival.
Community created cooperative protection.
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Was it a decision though to not, or were we just not capable of it before
It is not human nature to consume and reproduce more than a ecological niche can support us and many peoples across the world live in balance with their ecosystems before Europeans invaded them.
https://link.springer.com/rwe/10.1007/978-3-540-33761-4_62
Tell that to the mammoths.
For fifteen thousand years or more before the arrival of Europeans in the Americas, passenger pigeons and Native Americans coexisted in the forests of what would later become the eastern part of the continental United States.
A 2017 study of passenger-pigeon DNA found that the passenger-pigeon population size was stable for 20,000 years prior to its 19th-century decline and subsequent extinction, while a 2016 study of ancient Native American DNA found that the Native American population went through a period of rapid expansion, increasing 60-fold, starting about 13–16 thousand years ago. If both of these studies are correct, then a great change in the size of the Native American population had no apparent impact on the size of the passenger-pigeon population. This suggests that the net effect of Native American activities on passenger-pigeon population size was neutral.
And there are many more cows alive today than there have ever been before.
Cows are absolutely thriving.
Because they are useful to humans. Yet all the pigeons living in the rain forests that we cleared to give cows more room are dead.
The Native Americans ate the Passenger Pigeon.
The passenger pigeon was an important source of food for the people of North America.
Archaeological evidence supports the idea that Native Americans ate the pigeons frequently prior to colonization.
They were not killed by deforestation, the European colonists killed them all.
What may be the earliest account of Europeans hunting passenger pigeons dates to January 1565, when the French explorer René Laudonnière wrote of killing close to 10,000 of them around Fort Caroline in a matter of weeks.
After European colonization, the passenger pigeon was hunted with more intensive methods than the more sustainable methods practiced by the natives.
Once pigeon meat became popular, commercial hunting started on a prodigious scale.
By the 1870s, the decrease in birds was noticeable, especially after the last large-scale nestings and subsequent slaughters of millions of birds in 1874 and 1878.
Professor Willerslev said: "Scientists have argued for 100 years about why mammoths went extinct. Humans have been blamed because the animals had survived for millions of years without climate change killing them off before, but when they lived alongside humans they didn’t last long and we were accused of hunting them to death.
"We have finally been able to prove was that it was not just the climate changing that was the problem, but the speed of it that was the final nail in the coffin—they were not able to adapt quickly enough when the landscape dramatically transformed and their food became scarce.
“As the climate warmed up, trees and wetland plants took over and replaced the mammoth’s grassland habitats. And we should remember that there were a lot of animals around that were easier to hunt than a giant woolly mammoth—they could grow to the height of a double decker bus!”
Humans did not cause woolly mammoths to go extinct—climate change did: study
Tell that to climate change.
And who created capitalism? Humans. Checkmark atheists
Capitalism started ~500 years ago in Europe. It did not come from humanity as a whole, yet you would condemn everyone on Earth to die because of that?
How about instead of this childish take on reality, we realise that it’s a system that can easily be dismantled and we don’t have to kill 8 billion people.
No matter what system you use, humans will ultimately ruin it. Regardless of how many it takes to ruin it. Throughout history, long before capitalism, every and all systems eventually fail when put against humans
Ok, doomer.
Is it your recommendation that we continue to destroy our resources (and thus ourselves) while making no attempt to improve the situation?
My recommendation is to do what you can personally and then not let it ruin your life. I moved my house to offgrid, I’m fully solar for my electric I don’t use any gas and I don’t burn wood I just built enough solar and Battery to be fully electric.
In the process of finishing up rainwater collection and filtration to cover my water needs luckily I live somewhere with a good amount of rainfall that I should be able to pretty much fully cover my water might need a little bit of groundwater to fill the gaps here and there but not much.
I do drive a car but it’s a tiny little smart fortwo, i can fit two of them in a standard parking spot and they get over 40 miles to the gallon. Absolutely everything in my kitchen from my plates to my cups to my bowls to my utensils are all stainless steel so no generation of microplastics from them. I’ve done everything I realistically can to reduce my own footprint and I will vote in favor of improvement when it’s possible and I will encourage others to do what they can as well. But I will ultimately accept that nothing will truly affect anything in the long run human greed will always ruin everything
Does anyone unironically say this anymore?
People are still saying this shit in here in the comments. We also saw it said a fuckton during Covid. It’s literally one of the most cliche and common eco-fash talking points.
Lemmy does have some eco-fascist takes. Its not often but you have situations where posts are infested with the most deranged reasoning. Instead of focusing on the root issue, the perspective is given towards normal people and how bans are the “way forward” rather than regulation.
Yeah, but real people?
I assume you’re all real people in here, unless you’re a bot?
I’m assuming people are being unserious edgelords when they say things like that. Especially now. There’s too much regular fascism right now to worry about “eco fascism”.
Yeah I’m sorry to say but that seems like a naive mindset in these days. I used to think edgelords were just saying Nazi shit online to be edgy, then the last 10 years happened. Now I know better. When people tell you who they are believe them.
Different groups of people.
Back in the day, they were just edgelords saying shit to piss people off. The group that “Hitler did nothing wrong” as a name for a Mnt Dew flavor did it knowing it would never actually get through. They did it to embarrass Pepsi co. The problem was was that those people got pushed out of their spaces by real nazis over time because those people didn’t get the joke and main stream news misreported on it.
The “people are a virus” types I knew way back when have all quieted up. The worse of them are do-nothing Democrats who make noise human rights, but still put their stocks in front of that. Everyone else is some flavor of socialist or communist by now.
No they are not. I know it’s convenient for you to think this way but they’re not.
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Who invented capitalism? Europeans. Who continues to perpetuate it? Nationstates.
Fuck off with the ecofash.
Power tripping.Better yet, if you can’t handle my comment, that’s on you. Not me. You’re the bad faith actor here. Not me.
So go post it on YPTB.
Why are mods removing comments?
Because you’re posting eco-fascist rhetoric.
Lol .ml behavior.
.ml is really just as bad as reddit. Neither place can handle people thinking differently
Yeah they really attract power hungry morons which is ironic.
Not tolerating fascism is general leftist behaviour.
but, healthy debate, please
There’s nothing healthy about calling humans a virus and saying they need to die. That is literally eco-fascism, and I will not platform fascism.
Likewise I will not platform racism, transphobia, sexism, zionism, nazism, or any other sort of fucked up hate ideology. If that upsets you, you are free to post elsewhere.
https://threadiverse.link/quokk.au/post/574335 is an example of healthy debate that has been kept up, because it is not advocating for the death of billions.
Nobody is saying that everyone needs to die, just that we need to love more sustainably and limit tactically lower our population
Power tripping. They can’t handle counter arguments.
So that I’ll know which ones to upvote.
