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This attitude is similar to a smoker saying after decades of smoking "I don't regret anything, I enjoyed it".
Or an astronaut who willingly goes to space, even though the increased cosmic radiation exposure, increases their risk of cancer.
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100 years may be optimistic. And I don't think young people or children today deserve an agonizing life watching their loved ones, their own children, perhaps, starving to death or dying in a water war. Also you don't need to be a hunter gatherer to not rape the planet.
> watching their loved ones, their own children, perhaps, starving to death or dying in a water war. Sadly, this was close to the default condition throughout much of human history. It is only recently, with the benefits of industrialization and globalization that we have made that kind of thing much rarer than it was.
There is disagreement about just how inefficient turning an acre of corn into slabs of cow, but it should be clear that it is some fraction of the efficiency of just eating that corn as food itself.
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Yes but who’s willing to get off at the next station, not the passengers who’ve been on it from the start and not the passengers who just got on and are getting a taste.
Technology really is the only way out.
This way of living, with that many people on the planet is not sustainable. We are on a runaway train to extinction and we want it to go faster. The economy!
Are there any resources for determining which US politicians support environmentalism (specifically meaningful, evidence-based policies as opposed to vapid virtue signalling) and/or where the "battleground" states are? I guess in general I'm looking to get involved more in climate politics, but I don't know where to start.
Non-partisan group attempting to get a carbon tax and dividend law passed, and they are making progress. They continue to get new co-sponsors on their bill, they do a lot of training on how to get involved, how you can speak to your Congressperson etc.
Humans can have a beneficial impact on the environment too, by terraforming and making the land more productive. There's some evidence that the Amazon mix of fruiting tree and nut species were selected for by humans. "The Supposedly Pristine, Untouched Amazon Rainforest Was Actually Shaped By Humans" https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/pristine-untou... Since some people us this as political grounds for eug…
May I kindly ask, why do you feel the need to jump out and defend the human species as also being good in the face of what is described in the article? I am genuinely interested in understanding what motivates this reaction.
I also think there's a tendency to anchor on what "is". Just because things are natural doesn't make them implicitly "good". And how does one define quality in the first place?
Put another way, what is the distinction between natural and artificial? Are humans not part of nature? And will "nature" not be here long after we've destroyed ourselves, if in fact we do?
Climate change is the most obvious, but there’s long list of issues like this that if suddenly every human on Earth magically expected to live 1000 to 10,000 years would become more pressing issues.
As a semi-futurist, this is the core issue, it’s not that humans don’t see the future, they’re unable to change... the issue is that humans simply do not care about the future.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> watching their loved ones, their own children, perhaps, starving to death or dying in a water war. Sadly, this was close to the default condition throughout much of human history. It is only recently, with the benefits of industrialization and globalization that we have made that kind of thing much rarer than it was.
I think this is far less evident than usually assumed. The life of the last hunter gatherer tribes is probably the best approximation we have on how our ancestors may have lived. And while death is a more common (and swifter, less problematic) occurrence for these people, they were hardly unhappy compared to us -- sure, they didn't have iphones.
Many times these hunter gatherer societies have much higher maternal and infant mortality than ours, and higher rates of violence against women.
It is technology and the knowledge based economy that gives women an equal footing. Before that, men took advantage of their relative physical strength and size to consign women to secondary roles.