151–160 of 372 posts
(serious) Is there any hope? Its just one problem after another (probably because everything is linked). What are the chances that we will get our act together or be able to engineer ourselves out of all of these problems?
This apparently isn't a popular opinion, but: this world is precious. I would even go so far as to say miraculous . Until we wake up to this fact, we will continue to ennui ourselves and this world into oblivion. It's hard to prove (or even study), but I believe this is the root cause of all the other tragedies. It is not something we will merely engineer our way out of. We don't like religion (or in many cases, even…
It might be that the purpose of humans, mammals, multicellular organisms, whatever.....in the holistic sense, is no greater than theirs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Capitalism is based on infinite growth (economists even laugh at people like Malthus who proposed otherwise) and on fungibility of values (money is green no matter where from). This basically leads to a necessity of destroying nature for the sake of realizing economic growth. We need at least start to take seriously the fact that, the way capitalist economy is conducted, there is no way forward to save the environmen…
That explains the sparkling environmental record of the USSR and China!
If you assume that capitalism requires unchecked growth harmful to the environment, it doesn't follow that some specific alternatives to capitalism are automatically healthy for the environment. The only conclusion you can draw (if the initial proposition is true) is that if there is a healthy alternative, it's not capitalism.
By the way, some people believe China is currently practicing a form of "state capitalism" (regardless of what they call it, which by the way seems to be "socialist market economy").
This apparently isn't a popular opinion, but: this world is precious. I would even go so far as to say miraculous . Until we wake up to this fact, we will continue to ennui ourselves and this world into oblivion. It's hard to prove (or even study), but I believe this is the root cause of all the other tragedies. It is not something we will merely engineer our way out of. We don't like religion (or in many cases, even…
> Grassland species have suffered the biggest declines by far, having lost 717 million birds. These birds have probably been decimated by modern agriculture and development.
This one I'm not totally sure is even related to climate change. I don't want to tell the person next to me to "stop trying to make a better life for yourself" so I'm not sure what the solution to this is right now.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Capitalism is based on infinite growth (economists even laugh at people like Malthus who proposed otherwise) and on fungibility of values (money is green no matter where from). This basically leads to a necessity of destroying nature for the sake of realizing economic growth. We need at least start to take seriously the fact that, the way capitalist economy is conducted, there is no way forward to save the environmen…
That explains the sparkling environmental record of the USSR and China!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Saving the environment is simply saving ourselves I wonder, though... we know, for example, that bees pollinate plants, and that we need plants to be pollinated for our survival. But if the bees die out, we can figure out another technical way to pollinate plants - it might be a pain to carry out, and we might be kicking ourselves for not saving the bees before it got to that point, but it can be done. If it comes…
> If it comes down to a matter of survival, humans as a species will figure out a way to get what needs to be done, done. Don’t count on it. Human civilization depends heavily on trust and cooperation, and a large number of complex systems functioning which nobody completely understands and most people barely notice. The whole endeavor is quite fragile. Once basic systems start breaking down, people start starving an…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would never use the phrase "ideal state", but rather "natural state". Though, even that is not quite accurate as humans are naturally-occurring too, but the things we do (and do to the planet) are not quite so "natural". While thinking that "the planet is worse off because of humans" is a judgement, I think it's not unreasonable to assert that innocent life forms all over the world suffer by our actions (more than…
A beaver dams a river, flooding the shores and killing off the ecosystem. That’s natural. A group of humans do it and it’s unnatural?