Good post
Ecosocialism vs. Ecofascism
I believe if we get rid of some people, the world will become more sustainable.
Also I depicted Cool hats
*Fewer humans, and that would actually solve most of our problems, it’s just that we need to be more specific about which humans we get rid of. Specifically billionaires/unchecked capitalists.
Specifically billionaires/unchecked capitalists
The easy scapegoat oversimplifies the problem, which goes beyond & predates capitalism. Though exterminating all of humanity is one way to achieve sustainability, it doesn’t necessarily require it. So far, however, humanity has reached living standards beyond subsistence only by consuming resources at unsustainable levels faster than the planet can replenish, and that has been true regardless of economic system. Even when living at subsistence levels, humanity has likely caused mass extinction events.
From a comment to a similar post
People here tend to fixate on their pet theories that scapegoat capitalism for everything including that humanity’s drain on ecological resources exceeds Earth’s rate of regeneration without acknowledging that their alternatives don’t address the problem, either.
Although governments are far more able than individuals and firms acting singly to take action to protect the environment, they often fail to do so. The centrally planned economies of Eastern Europe, where governments controlled production, had a particularly poor record on pollution control. Per capita mortality from air pollution in Eastern Europe (outside the EU) and China remains high relative to the EU and North America.
In particular, the Soviet economy—with constitutional guarantees to continuously improve living standards & steadily grow productive forces—caused disproportionately worse ecological damage than the US’s. All economic systems have the same capacity to degrade the environment & deplete stocks of natural resources. Without adequate policies to protect the environment, improving & maintaining living standards with the continuous economic growth necessary to do that threatens the environment.
Moreover, human activity before capitalism has led to extinctions of megafauna, plants, & animals dependent on those plants. The quaternary megafauna extinction was likely driven by overhunting by humans. Those extinctions & increased fires coinciding with the arrival of humanity to Australia transformed the ecosystem from mixed rainforest to drier landscapes. Aboriginal landscape burning
may have caused the extinction of some fire-sensitive species of plants and animals dependent upon infrequently burnt habitats
More recently, they killed off the elephant bird likely due to major environmental alterations & overconsumption of their eggs.
Until humanity starts living sustainably, they are the problem.
A socialist society can be ecologically devastating. But, unlike capitalist one, it doesn’t have to be.
Capitalism pursues infinite growth in a finite world. As long as unsustainable practices deliver you more (which is extremely often the case) - they will be pursued, and if you block them all, it will cripple the economy as it will lower the expectation of profit. Capitalism breeds practices like planned obsolescence, aggressive marketing and tracking to fuel overconsumption, it promotes a lavish lifestyle - all to ensure the monetary flow necessary to keep such economy afloat.
Socialist society is more adaptive in this regard. You can ramp up production and overconsumption, Earth be damned, or you can slow down and invest in long-term, sustainable solutions, even at the expense of short-term returns. The latter, however, means getting less competitive internationally, which is exactly the sacrifice the socialist countries of the past, including USSR, were not willing to make.
'Someone tried once and did it wrong, so it must be impossible. 🤷♂️"
Marx was talking about capitalists raping the soil to the point of destruction in 1860 lil pup
There were fewer humans a century ago. and there were no human caused ecological crisis back then.
it isn’t the number of people really, but the exploitative economic system they use.
/s!!! /s!!!
btw, humans managed the extinction of megafauna when where were around a million humans 10 thousand years ago.
There were also infinitely fewer people concerned about humans’ ecological impact and no effective way to change that. Now we have millions and millions of people all over the world worried about it and we are all interconnected via the internet. We caused a mass extinction with a million of us in disparate tribes, just imagine what we could accomplish if all 8 billion of us actually worked together toward changing the world for the better! Unfortunately we’re still stuck in stupid tribes, and the most powerful tribe that controls every aspect of life in every other tribe is obsessed with destroying the Earth at a never-ending, ever-increasing pace. Here in America, our ruling class is literally trying to bring about the apocalypse. But naw, getting rid of them couldn’t possibly lead to any kind of benefit, we better get let them burn it all down in the name of line-go-up 🙄🙄🙄
No human caused ecological crises during the height of industrialization? Sure bud.
Go check on the Aral Sea to get an idea of what a non-exploitative economic system can do.
sorry. I’ll take all the responsibility of forgetting the “/s”.
thought it was clearly sarcasm, because duh.
carry on.
was trying to make it a clearly obvious point against that argument.
Sarcasm is dead and .ml killed it.
Deadpan sarcasm doesn’t translate well from a verbal medium to a written medium.
Unless you’re in an echo chamber…
wouldn’t say echochambers are immune, maybe communities where users know each other. like if anyone who knew me read it, they would immediately realize it’s sarcasm. but without any context, sarcasm is indistinguishable from a stupid idea.
wonder how many times I’ve agreed with a nazi, because he was being sarcastic and I didn’t realize.
Your username should have given me a clue
Cope
Meme is accurate. I am weird and misanthropic.
Yeah, I was going to say that there is nothing inherently illogical about the misanthropic person, despite what the meme implies.
I just wonder if non-misanthropes have actually met people or if they’ve got this idealized view of them.
The latter. Can’t condemn them for their idealistic optimism. But at least i would shut up and not mock what I don’t really understand.
But that’s just me, an idealistic, optimistic, altruistic misanthropist 😁
Most people are not that observant and really self-centered.
From there just a little variance in the spectrum ranging from “I think as highly about others as I think about me” to “they are all inferior to me” can make a massive difference on how someone sees and interacts with the world. And barely anything of it is based on the actual reality of other people.
It’s not that I feel I’m better. It’s that I know how awful I am and how little variance there really is to humanity.
If people are like me then they’re pretty awful.
Real talk? Missing the third group that groups the other two under the same heading for political expediency. The bottom group is essentially never sincerely grouped with the top.
Just uhh, don’t look at all the things we’re doing for infinite growth. The beef industry is totally a normal thing to inflict on an environment
-Malthus, apparently
Well we needed something to replace all the native ruminants we brutally slaughtered.
Do we?
If we’re a part of nature, everything we do is also a part of nature, it’s just that we have the capacity to understand the consequences of humanity’s actions on the rest of nature
I mean if you want to generalize, mass extinction events are also an occurrence in nature even when we’re not involved. I think the hope of environmental endeavors is to try and preserve as much as we can, which our current population growth and desired goals of wealth just will not do.
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Connection between the human development index (HDI) and total fertility rate (TFR)
The human development index has three components -GDP per capita is one of them, life expectancy is the second and the education level - the third. As all these factors are negatively correlated with fertility
Generally seems like the right message, but there are plenty of third factors that might be a more direct cause — amount of drugs, microplastics, pesticides, etc in the environment / food.
Personally, I prescribe to Carlin’s philosophy. The problem will take care of itself.
There aren’t actually many cool hats
If everyone on the planet lived like an American… Yikes.
Urban ecology is the proof of dialectics.
Most people who say humanity is an invasive species are actually just talking about white people. They’re erasing the harmony between Indigenous peoples and nature that in Australia has lasted for tens of thousands of years.
Yet if you say white people are an invasive pest… /joking
From earlier comment on similar post
Moreover, human activity before capitalism has led to extinctions of megafauna, plants, & animals dependent on those plants. The quaternary megafauna extinction was likely driven by overhunting by humans. Those extinctions & increased fires coinciding with the arrival of humanity to Australia transformed the ecosystem from mixed rainforest to drier landscapes. Aboriginal landscape burning
may have caused the extinction of some fire-sensitive species of plants and animals dependent upon infrequently burnt habitats
More recently, [indigenous people] killed off the elephant bird likely due to major environmental alterations & overconsumption of their eggs.
and I see like before the same OP still won’t do the decency to support fellow humans by following web accessibility. That sums up our conviction of humanity.
So you’re saying those people would never have industrialised?
I’m not gonna say never, because this planet’s got a few billion years left in it yet, and that’s a longass time, but I don’t think they’d resort to industrial technology in the next, say, ten thousand years. Industrial technology is only one branch of the “tech tree”, so to speak, and it’s not the direction Indigenous technology was headed.
Indigenous technology was already very advanced, with large scale sustainable agriculture systems that were deeply integrated into the environment. When the white colonists arrived, they said the land was “like a park estate”. They believed the land had randomly just grown into manicured grasslands ideal for hunting game. But a few decades after they prevented Indigenous people from practicing their traditional land management through controlled burns, the grasslands turned into rainforests. Turns out, they’d been using fire to prevent the growth of scrub and maintain a mosaic of grasslands and forests that made it maximally easy to hunt animals like the kangaroo, while maintaining the wild population. It was agriculture without domestication. And it was so efficient, Indigenous Australians only had to work a few hours a day. They spent the rest of their time relaxing, discussing philosophy and the arts, and performing ceremonies. I wish My life was that nice!
At the time of colonisation, the recent trend was the increasing cultivation and selection of Indigenous plants for better yields. They were increasing their agricultural capacity and their population. I don’t think this would have lead to industrialisation, because industrialisation was a very miserable state of existence, as you’d know from any Dickens book. The First Australians wanted technology that made life better, not worse. I think they were heading for technologies we have yet to discover, which would have further improved their daily living situation.
Also, they were the first to invent flying machines.
