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.
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
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.
Humans have existed for 300,000 years.
Please pick up a calculator and graph 2^x^.
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.
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
Seize the Memes of Production
An international (English speaking) socialist Lemmy community free of the “ML” influence of instances like lemmy.ml and lemmygrad. This is a place for undogmatic shitposting and memes from a progressive, anti-capitalist and truly anti-imperialist perspective, regardless of specific ideology.
