It could be. We might be stabbing it with a pretty scary knife it wouldn’t survive, but the capitalists stuff a hydrogen bomb down its throat every day so that doesn’t really matter.
Let’s call that greedy people. I would not mind them being rich if they chose to be a little less rich to pay their people well and earn their money while respecting the environment and protecting the climate.
Nobody earns their way to have hundreds or even tens of millions. That’s a broken system of incentives and resource distribution that they exploit to enrich themselves. All of it, fundamentally, backed by the threat of violence.
I don’t like this argument that it’s just the rich screwing us over. Ya, they’re dickbags with no small responsibility for perpetuating our current situation and their insane lifestyles. But all of us need to use less junk, travel less, and eat a whole lot less meat.
I know so many people who will talk about the environment, but will still think nothing of hopping on a plane for the most frivolous of reasons. Won’t even consider public transportation. Eats meat every day.
Ya the oligarchy is fucking us over big time. But that doesn’t absolve you of any sort of personal responsibility. Reduce, reuse, recycle. And plant a garden while your at it!
No, we don’t. That’s part of this sick game. Convince the least powerful to sacrifice ever more while the most powerful sacrifice nothing? No. I won’t play this game anymore. I won’t voluntarily impoverish my options in life. Until the wealthy and powerful change, I refuse to make my life more costly or difficult than they’ve already made it. Life is hard enough as it is for the working class, I’m not making it more difficult and for almost zero measurable impact. The magnitude of difference between my impact and theirs makes mine completely, statistically, insignificant. The impact on navigating my life, however, is significant.
No more. Either the rich are brought to heel or we all die together.
And so nothing changes and the planet continues to burn. Keep up your conspicuous consumption because some dickbag has a yacht and custom tax scheme. It’s whataboutisim. For sure fuck the oligarchy. But if all the billionaires died over night it would barely make a dent in our co2 emissions.
But hey! At least you got yours. Don’t worry, the global south will suffer sooner and worse than you.
I don’t have anything. I survive. Almost all I spend is on basic survival. I don’t know who you think I am but I don’t have the luxury of purchasing choice and I especially don’t have the luxury of making my life more expensive than the wealthy have already made it, by sacrificing to resolve your discomfort with the world.
I’d tell you to go talk to the people with power but you already know they don’t care about what you have to say, that’s why you harass the working class, instead.
Lol I’m not trying to harass anyone. Just push back on the notion that all the world’s problems can be laid at the feet of the rich. And if we’re gonna collectively pull ourselves out of this ecological disaster we’ve gotta change. Be willing to eat less meat travel less, consume less overall. And plant a damn garden while you’re at it!
You’re right in that I don’t know anything about you. Except that you’re willing to completely miss the point of what’s been said and decide to take offence.
Why do you care to protect them in the first place? Are you one of them? Lurking on the peasant’s media space, defending the wealthy from their own selfish behavior? Why is the lesson that must be given that the wealthy aren’t as evil as their behavior suggests? Why is that your priority at all?
You give offense with every guilt layden demand that the poor and working class further disempower ourselves to satisfy you. Go nag the wealthy who caused this mess, go guilt them into stopping their companies from despoiling the air, the land, the water. Go demand they end the fossil fuel industry that they own and profit from that we are all forced to participate in.
We will never get out of this without the wealthy changing. So long as they refuse, we are lost. Eat less of the meat we can already barely afford with food prices where they are? Travel less!? Who can afford to travel anywhere? Plant a garden? Where the hell are we supposed to do that? Land is too expensive to even have any of it because the wealthy keep buying it all FFS.
You’re completely out of touch and yet you come here to lecture us about our responsibilities? You’re a class traitor and wealth apologist. If the wealthy refuse to sacrifice to fix the problems they caused then I’d rather watch the world burn.
Us. There will always be people who enjoy power games and needless cruelty, that’s just how we are as a species and what all the religions, empires and industries we’ve ever had have been based on.
We’re not capable of being better, the power games and cruelty have always been too well rewarded. It’s ingrained.
Step on the little man to get ahead, prove your place by ostracising the witch, genocide/crusade/colonise to acquire land and spread your religion, fabricate wars to steal resources, vote for the leaders who hate the same people you hate, etc.
It might not be all of us who do this, but it’s always been the majority and they keep winning.
Any attempt at a moral and just society full of like minded people, is always going to end by power games and needless cruelty, either from the people within it or from the people outside it.
That’s just how we are as a species. Collectively, we suck.
It’s guilt by association for those of us who aren’t needlessly cruel and power hungry, but it’s still valid as we will never be able to escape these systems of oppression created and upheld by the rest of our species.
In general I just get frustrated with the human slander. No. We’re not all evil assholes. We’re not stupid. We’re a bunch of animals that managed to break out of the normal fight for survival primarily by working together. This all only works because we help each other most of the time. And stupid? Why? Because we don’t all individually understand the massively complex world we’ve created for ourselves?
The bad people and things that happen are bad because they’re exceptional. They break from the norm and aren’t representative of the whole of the human experience. It really sucks that some psychos can take advantage of our behaviors to get us to do awful stuff, but the solution to that isn’t “Woe is me, humans are just bad. Maybe we should all just go away.” Are their victims bad? Do they not deserve to be saved because their oppressors are evil?
You can’t really have any social progress before you recognize that “we can do this” and “we are worth it.” Otherwise what would be the point?
It’s easy to forget that sadly most people do no support actually doing anything about it at all. Either they’d rather believe it’s OK, or they’d rather believe that we’re nearly winning.
9 meals. Feast or famine. Blah blah blah. The point being that people’s priorities can and do change very quickly when their material conditions are threatened.
That’s not entirely true though. Emissions from Europe aren’t really that high compared to China and India. I could be wrong but I don’t think the CCP have the same beliefs as the governments of Germany or France or even the USA.
Emissions from Europe aren’t really that high compared to China and India
India’s per capita emissions are lower than any European country except Albania, and China is only moderately higher than EU countries compared to the US, Canada, and Australia.
Total emissions are useless when populations vary so widely between countries.
That’s mostly because India and China don’t have the same standard of living as Europe and the USA. Though China in particular are trying very hard to fix that. I think some anti-climate and anti-renewable forces in the USA also don’t help.
Unfortunately the misanthropic sentiment is the foundation for a whole plethora of ecofascist tendencies, both intentionally and unintentionally so, that are shockingly common.
I do agree that this is very rare take from climate activists. Those folks usually know their shit and are pretty radical.
However, this line of reasoning is definitely a thing among laypersons. It has historical precedent that has its roots in Malthusian population theory.
“Humans are destroying the planet” has been a great way of off-loading the social responsibility aspect from multi-billion dollar gas guzzling AI-generated farts factory to Grandma, who forgot to put out her recycling last week.
the prefix “some” is implicit there. but also, like, the hundreds of millions of people commuting to work is a bigger problem than the thousands of people driving loud sports cars. it’s just that the hundreds of container ships going around the world is a way bigger problem still.
that’s why i continued my post. to illustrate that the issue is not the individual within the system, but the system itself and the people who shape it.
i mean, it has its roots in how we discuss climate change. we call it “human-made”, so yes, people will jump to “humanity is to blame for climate change”. it’s a very logical leap, and not entirely wrong, even if it doesn’t tell the whole story (which part of humanity is responsible?)
i feel like that part comes naturally. it’s pretty easy to go from “i’m trying to help” to “no matter how much i help i can’t make a difference because the system makes it useless” to “who designed the system?”
For climate activists it’s very unlikely, but there are people who believe Africans are the issue because of high birth rates, conveniently ignoring that richer countries do the most damage by far.
Well akshually, the rising standard and of living in the developing world in general and sub-Saharan Africa in particular means that kids in Africa are contributing to climate change. Now when you ask why kids in Africa can’t fuel their improving standards of living with solar panels instead you’re going to end up at these things, but still.
Uh… who’s “they?” Because I’ve seen plenty of people propose solutions (usually some combination of renewable energy and environmental protection at the national level).
That’s not a solution. It’s the title of a synopsis of the summary of an omnibus of a solution.
People aren’t concerned with implementing solutions or policy development to achieve solutions. They just want to blame petroleum companies and then spend their paychecks on plastic and airfare.
I love when people reinvent ethnic essentialism. Every single culture that had the means and the opportunity to rape the land for profit has done it. The ones that didn’t simply couldn’t.
South American natives fight mining companies, but if they had the right to exploit the land themselves, do you think they would be any different from the North American natives who found oil on their lands and are happily fracking for it?
I agree, we gotta address the root of the problem: Extractivism, colonialism and infinite growth economies are just human by-products.
edit: I’m not gonna engage in talks about unicorns and rainbows, but I guess most of you must find Bakunin pretty misanthropic too because of his views on vesting men with power… just reflect about the quote, is the problem just power, or is men having power? OP’s saints lack the power to rape the land, if you want to mention the goodness in humanity, show the societies that collectively rejected convenience at the cost of environmental destruction when they had the choice… all around the world, every group in power did the same thing when they had the opportunity, the saints that didn’t conveniently lacked the power to do it anyway.
Every single culture that had the means and the opportunity to rape the land for profit has done it. The ones that didn’t simply couldn’t.
This is wildly inaccurate and borderline racist. Your culture revolving around resource extraction doesn’t mean everyone’s does, and it doesn’t mean that’s a cope they have because they’re too stupid to figure out how to do it.
As a single example, the Menominee developed commercial forestry practices in the 19th century that allowed them to perpetually harvest from a sustainable old growth forest instead of clear cutting everything. After decades of battling the US government over control of their forest, today it still stands. Anyone who thinks that they’re incapable of renting and operating a chainsaw and cutting everything down is just a racist. They don’t do it not because they can’t, they don’t do it because they don’t want to.
This story isn’t unique, indigenous groups all over the world do what they can through legal systems and direct action to protect the environment. This isn’t to say every indigenous person is morally pure or has these politics, it’s just that if you deny it’s a trend that exists you’re closing your eyes to reality.
To add onto this the Klamath peoples were notoriously individualistic and “industrious” in comparison to their neighbors and during the reservation period they did, comparitively, exceptionally well as there were similar cultural virtues around “profit”. Thanks, in part, to both location and pre-contact culture they build a thriving lumber industry and by 1950 were one of the wealthiest tribes within the US and were the only tribes in the United States that paid for all federal, state and private services used by their members.
Obviously a ‘worst case’ for “raping the land for profit” right?
No. By 1950 the reservation has turned the “undesirable woodland” into a highly productive, healthy and sustainable forest and pastureland with by far the largest remaining stand of ponderosa pine in the west.
This, of course, could not stand and so the 1954 Klamath termination act was enacted. Originally the plan was to sell it all to private industry like Crown-Zellerbach, however the “lumber industry’s concern with how the increase in Klamath Forest timber would saturate the industry” resulted instead in creating the Winema and Fremont National Forests. Which of course have been heavily logged and largely mismanaged, but not nearly as bad as the plan was and certainly worse than when humans were more active in helping to maintain it.
This is wildly inaccurate and borderline racist.
Anyone who thinks that they’re incapable of renting and operating a chainsaw and cutting everything down is just a racist.
Hang on I thought we were implying a very specific subset of humans were responsible for killing and raping everyone, is that not racism or is it only racist when it’s towards the people I have no ill will for?
CEO of a mega corporation is not a race. There is no history of nations depriving CEOs of their land and then destroying it, rendering them incapable of basic subsistence level survival.
I mean, history occurred as it occurred. We still live with the effects of European colonization, it’s not an accident that you have to go through over $2 trillion of wealth on Forbes’ billionaire list before anyone who isn’t European descent pops up. That doesn’t mean anything about all white people, the vast majority being nowhere near as wealthy. But their ethnicity is far less important than the culture of exploitation and consumerism that is foisted on everyone else in order to make them money.
Every single culture that had the means and the opportunity to rape the land for profit has done it. The ones that didn’t simply couldn’t.
How did you come to this conclusion? From my perspective there is no way to demonstrate a culture had the means to exploit the land for profit unless they did it. I’d be interested in knowing if I missed something.
Possible counterpoints would be the existence of sustainable foraging practices and taboos around greed, or practices like potlatch. These exist in various forms around the world today.
Ethnicity is a tricky concept to apply here but I think you are getting at the concept of idealizing “primitive” cultures. I don’t think that’s what was going on in the OP. I think they are saying humanity has a choice, the choice that is being made is to allow these behaviors to continue.
It’s not ethnic essentialism to acknowledge that there are cultures that long knew of the dangers of exploiting the land too much and put more emphasis on sustainability in their usage of the land. Extractivism, colonialism and infinite growth are parts of our culture and culture can change as a result of conscious decisions. Indigenous cultures can be part of the motivation to do so at all and be inspiration for where to go instead.
But all humans are destroying* the planet, whether Amazonians or Africans or billionaires.
Every one of those people require land for agriculture or hunting, all of them use natural resources and will until they are expended, all of them have children that exponentially increase the demand on everything we all need (or want).
Billionaires are much more harmful than many thousands and more, it is true… but examples are legion of regular old proles destroying the environment around them once their population reaches a certain level (this varies depending on the local environment).
The simpler/more primitive the society, the less stressors they put on the environment, but they remain stressors regardless.
*By destroy I mean to make it inhospitable for people as we know them, planet will be fine long after we are all gone.
It’s because of the way we live. The capitalist/consumerist lifestyle is not very sustaiable because it burns trough resources too quickly. We could absolutely reengineer our civilization to be more eco-centric but that would hurt the billionaires.
A decentralized network of aquaponics systems could provide everyone with food. Cod houses are free of toxic chemicals. Vehicles that use compressed air in place of gas exist. Food can be cooked with solar cookers. Mechanical computing is a thing. And PCB boards can be made out of clay.
*By destroy I mean to make it inhospitable for people as we know them, planet will be fine long after we are all gone.
What if theres a new humanlike species after we are gone? They would not have the same knowledge as we do and could recreate the same, if not even worse results (especially if they rediscover our nukes) We made so much social progress, we cant just give that up now.
The “not all men” trope is intended to highlight the unhelpful complicity of that response in the context of patriarchy. It’s not meant to imply the inverse, lest you’ve been walking around supposing that all men are patriarchs. Or similarly, that no cop has ever met their birth father.
Do you think that authoritarianism’s hand in ecological destruction means that as humans it is imperative of all of us to overthrow authoritarianism, or do you think it means that all humans are bad and must perish?
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Did someone fucking print this tweet out and then scan it?
“How do I install this tweet!?” - some grandma still using AOL dialup
AOL Desktop Gold©️™️
Right!? Why is it slightly askew?
It was so good that I faxed it to myself at work.
Neither is the average human being anywhere, just trying to survive a hostile narcissistic environment they have no control over
Rich people are destroying the planet. It’s nobody else’s fault.
It could be. We might be stabbing it with a pretty scary knife it wouldn’t survive, but the capitalists stuff a hydrogen bomb down its throat every day so that doesn’t really matter.
Let’s call that greedy people. I would not mind them being rich if they chose to be a little less rich to pay their people well and earn their money while respecting the environment and protecting the climate.
Nobody earns their way to have hundreds or even tens of millions. That’s a broken system of incentives and resource distribution that they exploit to enrich themselves. All of it, fundamentally, backed by the threat of violence.
I don’t like this argument that it’s just the rich screwing us over. Ya, they’re dickbags with no small responsibility for perpetuating our current situation and their insane lifestyles. But all of us need to use less junk, travel less, and eat a whole lot less meat.
I know so many people who will talk about the environment, but will still think nothing of hopping on a plane for the most frivolous of reasons. Won’t even consider public transportation. Eats meat every day.
Ya the oligarchy is fucking us over big time. But that doesn’t absolve you of any sort of personal responsibility. Reduce, reuse, recycle. And plant a garden while your at it!
No, we don’t. That’s part of this sick game. Convince the least powerful to sacrifice ever more while the most powerful sacrifice nothing? No. I won’t play this game anymore. I won’t voluntarily impoverish my options in life. Until the wealthy and powerful change, I refuse to make my life more costly or difficult than they’ve already made it. Life is hard enough as it is for the working class, I’m not making it more difficult and for almost zero measurable impact. The magnitude of difference between my impact and theirs makes mine completely, statistically, insignificant. The impact on navigating my life, however, is significant.
No more. Either the rich are brought to heel or we all die together.
And so nothing changes and the planet continues to burn. Keep up your conspicuous consumption because some dickbag has a yacht and custom tax scheme. It’s whataboutisim. For sure fuck the oligarchy. But if all the billionaires died over night it would barely make a dent in our co2 emissions.
But hey! At least you got yours. Don’t worry, the global south will suffer sooner and worse than you.
I don’t have anything. I survive. Almost all I spend is on basic survival. I don’t know who you think I am but I don’t have the luxury of purchasing choice and I especially don’t have the luxury of making my life more expensive than the wealthy have already made it, by sacrificing to resolve your discomfort with the world.
I’d tell you to go talk to the people with power but you already know they don’t care about what you have to say, that’s why you harass the working class, instead.
Lol I’m not trying to harass anyone. Just push back on the notion that all the world’s problems can be laid at the feet of the rich. And if we’re gonna collectively pull ourselves out of this ecological disaster we’ve gotta change. Be willing to eat less meat travel less, consume less overall. And plant a damn garden while you’re at it!
You’re right in that I don’t know anything about you. Except that you’re willing to completely miss the point of what’s been said and decide to take offence.
Why do you care to protect them in the first place? Are you one of them? Lurking on the peasant’s media space, defending the wealthy from their own selfish behavior? Why is the lesson that must be given that the wealthy aren’t as evil as their behavior suggests? Why is that your priority at all?
You give offense with every guilt layden demand that the poor and working class further disempower ourselves to satisfy you. Go nag the wealthy who caused this mess, go guilt them into stopping their companies from despoiling the air, the land, the water. Go demand they end the fossil fuel industry that they own and profit from that we are all forced to participate in.
We will never get out of this without the wealthy changing. So long as they refuse, we are lost. Eat less of the meat we can already barely afford with food prices where they are? Travel less!? Who can afford to travel anywhere? Plant a garden? Where the hell are we supposed to do that? Land is too expensive to even have any of it because the wealthy keep buying it all FFS.
You’re completely out of touch and yet you come here to lecture us about our responsibilities? You’re a class traitor and wealth apologist. If the wealthy refuse to sacrifice to fix the problems they caused then I’d rather watch the world burn.
Whos stopping us from reengineering our civilisation to be eco-friendly?
Us. There will always be people who enjoy power games and needless cruelty, that’s just how we are as a species and what all the religions, empires and industries we’ve ever had have been based on.
We’re not capable of being better, the power games and cruelty have always been too well rewarded. It’s ingrained.
Step on the little man to get ahead, prove your place by ostracising the witch, genocide/crusade/colonise to acquire land and spread your religion, fabricate wars to steal resources, vote for the leaders who hate the same people you hate, etc.
It might not be all of us who do this, but it’s always been the majority and they keep winning.
Any attempt at a moral and just society full of like minded people, is always going to end by power games and needless cruelty, either from the people within it or from the people outside it.
That’s just how we are as a species. Collectively, we suck.
It’s guilt by association for those of us who aren’t needlessly cruel and power hungry, but it’s still valid as we will never be able to escape these systems of oppression created and upheld by the rest of our species.
In general I just get frustrated with the human slander. No. We’re not all evil assholes. We’re not stupid. We’re a bunch of animals that managed to break out of the normal fight for survival primarily by working together. This all only works because we help each other most of the time. And stupid? Why? Because we don’t all individually understand the massively complex world we’ve created for ourselves?
The bad people and things that happen are bad because they’re exceptional. They break from the norm and aren’t representative of the whole of the human experience. It really sucks that some psychos can take advantage of our behaviors to get us to do awful stuff, but the solution to that isn’t “Woe is me, humans are just bad. Maybe we should all just go away.” Are their victims bad? Do they not deserve to be saved because their oppressors are evil?
You can’t really have any social progress before you recognize that “we can do this” and “we are worth it.” Otherwise what would be the point?
I know right? Thats like saying all dogs are evil because police dogs attack protestors
We’re basically monkey’s with nukes.
This enemy classification includes the settler/colonialist workers in the Amazon who are working as the frontier of capital accumulation.
I thought Amazon workers for a bit and was thoroughly confused
maybe if yall spent less time on wordplay and more time on finding out where these people live something might get done
Oh, we know where they live. You’ll see. We just need critical mass. A revolution doesn’t happen over night and certainly not all at once everywhere.
It’s easy to forget that sadly most people do no support actually doing anything about it at all. Either they’d rather believe it’s OK, or they’d rather believe that we’re nearly winning.
9 meals. Feast or famine. Blah blah blah. The point being that people’s priorities can and do change very quickly when their material conditions are threatened.
I don’t know man. I know some of those kids in Africa, and they don’t all prioritize the environment over things like food and shelter.
For sure, but when we total up the list of top contributors, they’re nowhere near the top. So let them, because they’re not “the cause”.
I think that comment was sarcastic.
Yes, but sadly also no. They don’t play in the big leagues, but taken over the whole continent it adds up.
Africa emits about 1.45 billion tonnes of CO2 a year. Saudi Aramco emits 1.6 billion tonnes.
That’s not entirely true though. Emissions from Europe aren’t really that high compared to China and India. I could be wrong but I don’t think the CCP have the same beliefs as the governments of Germany or France or even the USA.
India’s per capita emissions are lower than any European country except Albania, and China is only moderately higher than EU countries compared to the US, Canada, and Australia.
Total emissions are useless when populations vary so widely between countries.
That’s mostly because India and China don’t have the same standard of living as Europe and the USA. Though China in particular are trying very hard to fix that. I think some anti-climate and anti-renewable forces in the USA also don’t help.
Don’t confuse can’t with don’t. People are people.
There’s one word that combines the three and more.
literally nobody thought that was the case. this is just holier-than-thou fartsmellery.
Unfortunately the misanthropic sentiment is the foundation for a whole plethora of ecofascist tendencies, both intentionally and unintentionally so, that are shockingly common.
I do agree that this is very rare take from climate activists. Those folks usually know their shit and are pretty radical.
However, this line of reasoning is definitely a thing among laypersons. It has historical precedent that has its roots in Malthusian population theory.
“Humans are destroying the planet” has been a great way of off-loading the social responsibility aspect from multi-billion dollar gas guzzling AI-generated farts factory to Grandma, who forgot to put out her recycling last week.
the prefix “some” is implicit there. but also, like, the hundreds of millions of people commuting to work is a bigger problem than the thousands of people driving loud sports cars. it’s just that the hundreds of container ships going around the world is a way bigger problem still.
Sure. But it’s not the individual commuters who are setting national transportation policy.
The folks driving the sports cars (and in the yachts and private jets), on the other hand…
that’s why i continued my post. to illustrate that the issue is not the individual within the system, but the system itself and the people who shape it.
are you sure about that? the “oh, humans are so evil, we’re destroying our planet! i wish all humans were dead” sentiment is extremely common
yeah that’s called ecofascism. it’s about as well thought through an ideology as anarchocapitalism.
i mean, it has its roots in how we discuss climate change. we call it “human-made”, so yes, people will jump to “humanity is to blame for climate change”. it’s a very logical leap, and not entirely wrong, even if it doesn’t tell the whole story (which part of humanity is responsible?)
i feel like that part comes naturally. it’s pretty easy to go from “i’m trying to help” to “no matter how much i help i can’t make a difference because the system makes it useless” to “who designed the system?”
Yes, but much more commom
For climate activists it’s very unlikely, but there are people who believe Africans are the issue because of high birth rates, conveniently ignoring that richer countries do the most damage by far.
That’s humans. Those are human constructs.
That’s animals. Those are animal constructs. Animals are causing climate change.
Yeah, libs have been slipping on the eco-fascism like a pair of custom-made shoes.
Well akshually, the rising standard and of living in the developing world in general and sub-Saharan Africa in particular means that kids in Africa are contributing to climate change. Now when you ask why kids in Africa can’t fuel their improving standards of living with solar panels instead you’re going to end up at these things, but still.
The idea of infinite progression.
AI datacenters woth their gas turbines
Its easy to criticize, but when you ask for a solution, they’ve got nothing. Literally zero.
Except for a large scale die off of humanity.
something something, the planet can only support 1 billion
As if 80% population loss is somehow a solution
Uh… who’s “they?” Because I’ve seen plenty of people propose solutions (usually some combination of renewable energy and environmental protection at the national level).
That’s not a solution. It’s the title of a synopsis of the summary of an omnibus of a solution.
People aren’t concerned with implementing solutions or policy development to achieve solutions. They just want to blame petroleum companies and then spend their paychecks on plastic and airfare.
I think people complaining about the climate generally support at least carbon taxes on these things.
That’s a strong assertion to make without evidence.
… does not identify the real enemy.
I love when people reinvent ethnic essentialism. Every single culture that had the means and the opportunity to rape the land for profit has done it. The ones that didn’t simply couldn’t.
South American natives fight mining companies, but if they had the right to exploit the land themselves, do you think they would be any different from the North American natives who found oil on their lands and are happily fracking for it?
I agree, we gotta address the root of the problem: Extractivism, colonialism and infinite growth economies are just human by-products.
edit: I’m not gonna engage in talks about unicorns and rainbows, but I guess most of you must find Bakunin pretty misanthropic too because of his views on vesting men with power… just reflect about the quote, is the problem just power, or is men having power? OP’s saints lack the power to rape the land, if you want to mention the goodness in humanity, show the societies that collectively rejected convenience at the cost of environmental destruction when they had the choice… all around the world, every group in power did the same thing when they had the opportunity, the saints that didn’t conveniently lacked the power to do it anyway.
Weird way of deflecting the consequences of the industrial revolution to millennia of subsistence farmers.
Can’t build anarchy on misanthropy.
This is wildly inaccurate and borderline racist. Your culture revolving around resource extraction doesn’t mean everyone’s does, and it doesn’t mean that’s a cope they have because they’re too stupid to figure out how to do it.
As a single example, the Menominee developed commercial forestry practices in the 19th century that allowed them to perpetually harvest from a sustainable old growth forest instead of clear cutting everything. After decades of battling the US government over control of their forest, today it still stands. Anyone who thinks that they’re incapable of renting and operating a chainsaw and cutting everything down is just a racist. They don’t do it not because they can’t, they don’t do it because they don’t want to.
This story isn’t unique, indigenous groups all over the world do what they can through legal systems and direct action to protect the environment. This isn’t to say every indigenous person is morally pure or has these politics, it’s just that if you deny it’s a trend that exists you’re closing your eyes to reality.
To add onto this the Klamath peoples were notoriously individualistic and “industrious” in comparison to their neighbors and during the reservation period they did, comparitively, exceptionally well as there were similar cultural virtues around “profit”. Thanks, in part, to both location and pre-contact culture they build a thriving lumber industry and by 1950 were one of the wealthiest tribes within the US and were the only tribes in the United States that paid for all federal, state and private services used by their members.
Obviously a ‘worst case’ for “raping the land for profit” right?
No. By 1950 the reservation has turned the “undesirable woodland” into a highly productive, healthy and sustainable forest and pastureland with by far the largest remaining stand of ponderosa pine in the west.
This, of course, could not stand and so the 1954 Klamath termination act was enacted. Originally the plan was to sell it all to private industry like Crown-Zellerbach, however the “lumber industry’s concern with how the increase in Klamath Forest timber would saturate the industry” resulted instead in creating the Winema and Fremont National Forests. Which of course have been heavily logged and largely mismanaged, but not nearly as bad as the plan was and certainly worse than when humans were more active in helping to maintain it.
Thank you for sharing this info! I’ll have to look up more about the Klamath and their history, it sounds really interesting
Hang on I thought we were implying a very specific subset of humans were responsible for killing and raping everyone, is that not racism or is it only racist when it’s towards the people I have no ill will for?
CEO of a mega corporation is not a race. There is no history of nations depriving CEOs of their land and then destroying it, rendering them incapable of basic subsistence level survival.
Ah ok sometimes these posts are referring to “europeans” or “white people”.
I mean, history occurred as it occurred. We still live with the effects of European colonization, it’s not an accident that you have to go through over $2 trillion of wealth on Forbes’ billionaire list before anyone who isn’t European descent pops up. That doesn’t mean anything about all white people, the vast majority being nowhere near as wealthy. But their ethnicity is far less important than the culture of exploitation and consumerism that is foisted on everyone else in order to make them money.
They’re just talking about people who are disgustingly privileged and exploitative. Historically that’s people with pale skin.
Someone desperately needs to read Graeber and abandon this misanthropic mentality.
How did you come to this conclusion? From my perspective there is no way to demonstrate a culture had the means to exploit the land for profit unless they did it. I’d be interested in knowing if I missed something.
Possible counterpoints would be the existence of sustainable foraging practices and taboos around greed, or practices like potlatch. These exist in various forms around the world today.
Ethnicity is a tricky concept to apply here but I think you are getting at the concept of idealizing “primitive” cultures. I don’t think that’s what was going on in the OP. I think they are saying humanity has a choice, the choice that is being made is to allow these behaviors to continue.
Fash podcasts.
It’s not ethnic essentialism to acknowledge that there are cultures that long knew of the dangers of exploiting the land too much and put more emphasis on sustainability in their usage of the land. Extractivism, colonialism and infinite growth are parts of our culture and culture can change as a result of conscious decisions. Indigenous cultures can be part of the motivation to do so at all and be inspiration for where to go instead.
this ain’t it, fam
i dunno, the indus valley civilization did minimal ecological damage compared to all the other civilizations
But all humans are destroying* the planet, whether Amazonians or Africans or billionaires.
Every one of those people require land for agriculture or hunting, all of them use natural resources and will until they are expended, all of them have children that exponentially increase the demand on everything we all need (or want).
Billionaires are much more harmful than many thousands and more, it is true… but examples are legion of regular old proles destroying the environment around them once their population reaches a certain level (this varies depending on the local environment).
The simpler/more primitive the society, the less stressors they put on the environment, but they remain stressors regardless.
*By destroy I mean to make it inhospitable for people as we know them, planet will be fine long after we are all gone.
It’s because of the way we live. The capitalist/consumerist lifestyle is not very sustaiable because it burns trough resources too quickly. We could absolutely reengineer our civilization to be more eco-centric but that would hurt the billionaires.
A decentralized network of aquaponics systems could provide everyone with food. Cod houses are free of toxic chemicals. Vehicles that use compressed air in place of gas exist. Food can be cooked with solar cookers. Mechanical computing is a thing. And PCB boards can be made out of clay.
What if theres a new humanlike species after we are gone? They would not have the same knowledge as we do and could recreate the same, if not even worse results (especially if they rediscover our nukes) We made so much social progress, we cant just give that up now.
Not all humans! >:(
hehe just like the “not all men”
The “not all men” trope is intended to highlight the unhelpful complicity of that response in the context of patriarchy. It’s not meant to imply the inverse, lest you’ve been walking around supposing that all men are patriarchs. Or similarly, that no cop has ever met their birth father.
Do you think that authoritarianism’s hand in ecological destruction means that as humans it is imperative of all of us to overthrow authoritarianism, or do you think it means that all humans are bad and must perish?