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Philosophical Environmentalism and the future of humanity
real_pochacco
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All right, the thread title is kind of ridiculous, but I had a pretty intense disagreement with my girlfriend about this the other day and I want to know what you think.
Here's a hypothetical: you have a choice. You can either a) allow all of humanity to live as hunter-gatherers for all eternity, until the sun explodes or something, or b) allow humanity to develop civilization, knowing that after 10000 years of civilization everything living (including people) will die out. Massive catastrophic nuclear war, total destruction of the environment, whatever. It's as full of life as the moon. Which would you choose?
I would choose b. I guess my decision is based on the idea that some of the things civilization provides are worth the cost to the environment. Furthermore, if there are no people around then there is no one to mourn the loss of beauty on the planet. Beauty on earth only exists with sentient life to watch it -- without an observer the complex interactions of animals, plants, and life on earth is just a giant meaningless machine.
Now we can change up the hypothetical a bit. What if, in option b, all of nature and the environment was completely destroyed, but people remained and were able to live for "all eternity"? I think in this case I wouldn't go for this option. It sounds too horrifying to me, on some level.
More changes. If you weren't convinced by 10000 years of civilization, what about 100000? 1 million? 1 billion?
Alternatively, you can mix it up by adding in a chance that humanity as a whole will achieve sustainability at some point, and civilization will be able to coincide with nature indefinitely. What chance would you need in order to risk it? 10 percent? 50 percent? 70 percent?
Edit: More generally -- can humanity achieve an equilibrium with the environment? if we can't achieve that, would it be best to dismantle civilization as we know it? what would be acceptable for humanity to give up in the name of sustainability?
Here's a hypothetical: you have a choice. You can either a) allow all of humanity to live as hunter-gatherers for all eternity, until the sun explodes or something, or b) allow humanity to develop civilization, knowing that after 10000 years of civilization everything living (including people) will die out. Massive catastrophic nuclear war, total destruction of the environment, whatever. It's as full of life as the moon. Which would you choose?
I would choose b. I guess my decision is based on the idea that some of the things civilization provides are worth the cost to the environment. Furthermore, if there are no people around then there is no one to mourn the loss of beauty on the planet. Beauty on earth only exists with sentient life to watch it -- without an observer the complex interactions of animals, plants, and life on earth is just a giant meaningless machine.
Now we can change up the hypothetical a bit. What if, in option b, all of nature and the environment was completely destroyed, but people remained and were able to live for "all eternity"? I think in this case I wouldn't go for this option. It sounds too horrifying to me, on some level.
More changes. If you weren't convinced by 10000 years of civilization, what about 100000? 1 million? 1 billion?
Alternatively, you can mix it up by adding in a chance that humanity as a whole will achieve sustainability at some point, and civilization will be able to coincide with nature indefinitely. What chance would you need in order to risk it? 10 percent? 50 percent? 70 percent?
Edit: More generally -- can humanity achieve an equilibrium with the environment? if we can't achieve that, would it be best to dismantle civilization as we know it? what would be acceptable for humanity to give up in the name of sustainability?
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*the hunter gatherer life was really shitty for its participants and also way more environmentally destructive than you'd think; see Easter Island. Actually, lots and lots of things wiped out various H-G societies.
is it? I know that I felt weird about it, because I've seen SO many shitty hypotheticals. let me go back and add some more real content.
Edit: Beat'd by a bunch of guys;o(
important point
one part of the already useless binary is completely useless itself. humans have never been in harmony with nature; even on a nasty, short, brutal subsistence lifestyle, we were hunting animals to extinction and doing all sorts of ruinous stuff. it wasn't good for the environment and it wasn't good for us.
but there are probably ceiling effects as to the negative environmental impact that such a lifestyle can have, surely. compared to the damage done by civilization.
Easter Island is a totally unique situation and can't be made analogous with other prehistoric societies. The hunter gatherer life isn't really as bad as you'd think. Take, for instance, the !Kung, one of the last indigenous tribes of Africa, whose members spend an average of three hours a day looking for food and spend the rest of it doing generally whatever the hell they want.
Humans are not unique in this regard. Animals also hunt each other to extinction all the time.
I agree that the premise of this argument is silly, however. It's a false dichotomy at its finest.
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Being at the top of the food chain and being an omnivore tends to have disastrous consequences for the ecosystem, especially if you're able to adapt to any environment.
No, there's not. You're looking at it from this stange classico-Darwinian standpoint, where the "light of nature" aligns everything correct, and only humans mess it up.
I do think it's funny how productive a hunter-gatherer lifestyle is, though. Those fuckers get like 10,000 kcalories in like three hours work. Damn capitalism.
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Yeah I read about that. Evidently they didn't start farming because it was easier, they did it because they had to in order to sustain large populations? And the first farmers were horribly malnourished?
Anthropology is pretty good for teaching that stuff. One of the things they consistently find is that technology consistently predates the use, because it's often easier maintain the old ways. Pottery and the wheel were around long before their use came to dominance. It only became useful to use pottery when populations could no longer sustain skin containers.
That's actually a major theory about how Religion started. You don't see too many religious relics from hunter/gathers, because if their luck was down they could just move to another area with another local god. When you were a farmer, you were at the hands and mercy of many local intricacies, and you had to pray that the local god would provide.
Don't you think a tree or a hill has worth in and of itself?
No, not really. Why would it?
Beauty and worth are qualities. Quality is formed by judgement. For something to be judged, it must be perceived. Your argument contradicts itself.
The trick is knowing how to balance the level of harmony with the available land and the size of the civilization. On a small scale and a large area, this is easy. When the land gets smaller or tougher to manage (Aborigines), or when the population goes up (modern-day Europe), you need to get progressively smarter about what you're doing.
Basically, civilization has grown to a point where our impact has outgrown our needed intelligence. So we as a people either have to get a lot smarter or a lot smaller.
Pretty much. There's a reason why even in the most bountiful natural environments (pacific NW, Japan) H-G societies produced small towns at best. Cities need agriculture.
Besides that, the sheer amount of required context here is absurd. You'd have to count out hundreds of thousands of factors to even begin to make a decision possible.
Of course....to keep this happy utopia they practiced infanticide to keep the population down, but I'd be okay with that.
Oh, of course. Don't worry - I've no time for the human vs nature false dichotomy.
Obviously anything we say about anything will be words, and without humans there are no words.
So a hill has no worth without humans as this is a word.
However, it continues, and is alive. I can imagine a world without humans, and this world would be beautiful to me. I'm not saying it's more beautiful than this one, and yes, again, it's facile to point out that if I don't exist I can't imagine.
The argument you said is an obvious one, and within the constraints of language I can't do anything to it. But there seems to be something circular in it. Something to do with separating language from concepts, in a non-Platonic way.
Argh it's annoying I only have a human brain to think with.
With the sound of music?
1. Develop and produce a synthetic, non-pollutant fuel/energy source.
2. Dismantle and dispose of all nuclear weaponry. Even if there are only nukes in the possession of the more benevolent nations there is a dire threat since those nations could easily fall under the control of someone who can and will use these weapons.
3. Begin a massive scale restorative program to restore the natural resources that we only seem interested in using and not preserving.
However, this is all speculative because this may not even work. Even if it could I doubt that any of the three, especially number two could even be carried out due to greed/beauracracy.
Anyway, just my thoughts on the matter. Hope it makes sense, I'm tired and my coffee hasn't kicked in yet. :P
Ideally we'd be at a point where no one would want to drop nuke's on someone else's city. That's a long time away from now, though.
I think humanity should focus on building the cities they have upward (and downward if feasible) instead of continually sprawling outward from the city center. Also, require farmers to follow the same stream regulations that timber harvesting has to follow--no logging within 30 feet of the stream, then special rules for another 15 feet. It's ridiculous to have the riparian management area, to protect fish, on Forest Service land . . . and then have barely an regulations on the same stream for a farm. Fish need the WHOLE stream to remain shaded and cold in order to be able to swim through it, duh.
Timber harvesting can be done sustainably if you don't cut more volume of wood than grows in a year. The biggest challenge to wildlife are too much developed or cleared land . . . If it's cleared to the extent that animals can't cross it easily, subpopulations end up isolated in tiny forest fragments and may become inbred. (It's especially hard for itsy bitsy creatures like toads and such to cross open areas . . . Deer, not so much.)
Also, I think the first world countries should offer financial incentives to the countries with the rainforests to encourage the governments of those countries to preserve them. We are all using the resource the rainforests produce, oxygen. Why shouldn't the South American governments get paid for producing that natural resource?
No the fact that the megafauna of the Americas evolved without contact with humanity for millions of years thus not being prepared for the introduction of mankind is the reason those species are gone.
Ironically this same problem wiped out the Native Americans when the Europeans arrived.
How is that different from what I said? o_O
You put the blame on humans, but as we see in Africa megafauna and Hunter/Gatherers CAN coexist quite well if given the right circumstances.
Yeah I guess I got kind of broad there, I kind of combined multiple parts of OP's post without intending to.
Where I was going with number two is that while those weapons exist, no matter who's hands they're in, there is ultimately a threat of them being used, the only permanent way to remove that threat is to dismantle and dispose of the weapons and destroy the knowledge and technology that gives people the ability to produce them. Of course, this is extremely unrealistic but since we're speaking in the hypothetical I figured it didn't really need to be realistic.
Damn, I'm obviously not thinking today. Force fields solve everything.
Yeah I dig what you're saying. I probably would have come to the same conclusion had I bothered to think more about my original statement. I tend to just get an idea and run with it instead of checking to see if there are any flaws present and then correcting them.
But in this case the humans were to blame. I'm not implying the hunter-gatherer mode itself is bad--the Native Americans achieved equilibrium with the species we have today. It's just that any species that's moved from one continent to another can wreak havoc. I mean, who thought kudzu would be such a problem?
Which brings up another problem, invasive species. Very hard to annihilate once they get going. Humans can limit their building activities just by STOPPING what they're doing, but to get rid of an invasive species requires a proactive effort, often in really remote areas. And invasive plants can spread just by hooking a seed onto some traveler's shoe. The traveler takes a plane somewhere and suddenly the seed has whole new vistas.
On a different note, I'm not getting how nuclear weapons would be a threat to the environment. The areas targeted would be cities, which are not great areas for native flora and fauna anyway.
Yes it can on a societal scale.
Reminds me of a tribe that lives in the Amazon somewhere (I forget where and don't know if their society has been changed by outside contact) where they didn't know how to make stone axe heads anymore. They simply found old ones on the ground and attributed it to god.
but they're listening to every word I say