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As a spin off from the Climate Change thread, I'd like to explore some of the deeper implications of the widespread environmental destruction that seems to have become a norm of human society and some of the movements that have started as a result. Some questions to generate discussion: 1. What does a sustainable human society look like? 2. Does technology always entail environmental destruction? 3. What is the human carrying capacity of the planet? 4. What are the ethical considerations when it comes to things like treesits, tree spiking, and other forms of sabotage committed in the name of the environment? If this thread ends up being a sort of catch-all for general environmental discussion, that's fine, but I'd like to particularly focus on some of the more extreme or radical forms of environmentalism, because those tend to elicit strong emotions and interesting viewpoints/discussion. I urge you to not take part in this thread if you're not in here to have a serious discussion. Check the D&D guidelines about low-content posts and maintaining a civil tone. This kind of thing can be a touchy topic around here, but that is no reason for things to get out of hand. ------ I personally think that human society is in pretty serious peril right now due to what we've done to the planet. Climate change is going to threaten our ability to grow crops in many regions of the world, we've depleted a good portion of our natural resources, and the extinction/loss of biodiversity we've been party to has put many ecosystems in a very fragile state. A 1972 study by the Club of Rome illustrates this pretty well. The Limits to Growth was an attempt to develop a computer model based on human consumption trends and the interaction between humans and the environment that would have predictive power and give us some idea of where we were headed. The "business-as-usual" run of the model showed what researchers referred to as "overshoot and collapse" happening around mid-21st century. Basically, a huge population crash with a pretty large reduction in the complexity of society. The study was heavily criticized at the time but has recently enjoyed some renewed interest. In 2008, a scientist named Graham Turner with CSIRO in Australia did a retrospective on the study where he took 30 years of real-world data and compared them to what Limits to Growth predicted happening from 1972-2002. Disturbingly, the real-world data corresponded almost exactly to the disastrous "business-as-usual" model from Limits to Growth. What this strongly suggests to me is that we can't keep doing things the way we are without facing serious consequences.
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| # ? Mar 22, 2013 04:40 |
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| # ? May 18, 2013 11:51 |
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I don't really have much to add at this point so I didn't want this to be the second post but you got a link for the study and the retrospective? To add some content, you were posing the question on what is the carrying capacity of the planet. I don't think that question can really be answered as it is so dependent on technology. If you were to posit that question to someone in the 1930 the answer would be radically different than when you asked in 1960 after the revolution in crop density let the population explode. If we wanted to focus on population growth and focused on dense vertical living including things like vertical farming we could probably double our population without reaching some crash point like that paper was predicting. In that vein, one of the biggest constraints to our growth isn't how much resources we are using but how efficiently we are using them. This doesn't even start to consider how human life on Earth will be impacted once we can start mining mineral resources from near Earth asteroids. Lets not forget too if we had some pie-in-the-sky utopia where we moved off fossil fuels for power generation and used fission for baseline power generation. I feel like I'm rambling at this point, but I guess the point I'm trying to make is that there is just too many parameters involved in answering that question that we'd need to layout some base assumptions to work with first before having a way of answering it. Still though, interested in seeing what others say about this stuff.
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| # ? Mar 22, 2013 07:10 |
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To answer one of the OP's questions, there is good evidence that at least in terms of food production, we wouldn't hit a carry capacity limit until well past 15 billion people with current technology. http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/10/it...to-feed-15.html
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| # ? Mar 22, 2013 07:28 |
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Your Sledgehammer posted:2. Does technology always entail environmental destruction? Your Sledgehammer posted:4. What are the ethical considerations when it comes to things like treesits, tree spiking, and other forms of sabotage committed in the name of the environment? Never mind the ethical concerns, though: sabotage, destruction, and other violent means of protesting environmental destruction are ineffective. Spiking trees or blowing up a pipeline sure as hell doesn't rally people to your cause, and in this day and age of the "war on terror," the government and corporations are sure as poo poo not going to come to the bargaining table over that, either. Environmental destruction is a systemic problem, and a systemic problem requires more than a few radical individuals. It requires a lot of people, around the world, and a broad layer of support. That doesn't happen through self-isolation or vandalism.
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| # ? Mar 22, 2013 07:41 |
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At least in some respects, we are self-limiting our own capacity as well. Pretty much the entire First/Developed world is at or just under the replacement of births: 2.1 children per couple. And while the developing world still has huge birth rates, the rates are falling even there as people become more economically secure and education more widespread (especially among women). World population is most likely going to continue to grow for a couple more decades at least, but the rate seems to be starting to plateau. Policies such as China's 1-child law make this change even faster. I doubt we will go too far over our actual carrying capacity food/starvation-wise. I am personally far more concerned about how the overuse of antibiotics, increased urbanization and lack of adequate hygienic/public health practices worldwide will affect diseases. We are way over due for a major pandemic.
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| # ? Mar 22, 2013 07:46 |
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Return to ye olde wilde forests of old my brethren!Your Sledgehammer posted:1. What does a sustainable human society look like? Your Sledgehammer posted:2. Does technology always entail environmental destruction? Your Sledgehammer posted:3. What is the human carrying capacity of the planet? Your last question is really dangerous because the line between activism and crime is very, very thin in this case.
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| # ? Mar 22, 2013 08:11 |
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HighClassSwankyTime posted:Your last question is really dangerous because the line between activism and crime is very, very thin in this case. The problem I have with this is most effective protests have been illegal at the time. The law, while used for moral good, is also used as a sledgehammer for commercial interests. Whilst I don't know where the line will be drawn if eco terrorism becomes a thing, I do believe that effective activism WILL break laws. The 'proper' channels for activism have been marginalised to the point that a protest effort is no longer a disruption to business as usual, so why would people listen? I don't know where this line of thinking goes, and I've never engaged in activism, but it's not some paint by numbers, 'Like on Facebook' thing. It's real, it's disruptive, it's getting in people's faces to make them listen. Morals should guide actions in this territory, not the rule of law, because the law is in the hands of the people who maintain the status quo.
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| # ? Mar 22, 2013 09:29 |
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Uranium Phoenix posted:Never mind the ethical concerns, though: sabotage, destruction, and other violent means of protesting environmental destruction are ineffective. Spiking trees or blowing up a pipeline sure as hell doesn't rally people to your cause, and in this day and age of the "war on terror," the government and corporations are sure as poo poo not going to come to the bargaining table over that, either. Environmental destruction is a systemic problem, and a systemic problem requires more than a few radical individuals. It requires a lot of people, around the world, and a broad layer of support. That doesn't happen through self-isolation or vandalism. Maluco Marinero posted:The problem I have with this is most effective protests have been illegal at the time. The law, while used for moral good, is also used as a sledgehammer for commercial interests. Whilst I don't know where the line will be drawn if eco terrorism becomes a thing, I do believe that effective activism WILL break laws. The 'proper' channels for activism have been marginalised to the point that a protest effort is no longer a disruption to business as usual, so why would people listen? Organizations can (and sometimes do) reduce their ecological impact, and individuals leading conservation-minded lifestyles and raising awareness can make a healthy difference in attitudes. However, when a corporation or entity is habitually calloused in their lack of preservation and sustainability, there must be an outspoken response or legal action. If these companies are too big then they can threaten democratic process. And the public of any nation cannot rely on the news media or documentary filmmakers to do all the work. http://www.academia.edu/303042/Gandhi_on_providence_and_greed posted:“'Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need but not for every man’s greed’,said Gandhiji. So long as we cooperate with the cycle of life, the soil renews its fertility indef-initely and provides health, recreation, sustenance and peace to those who depend on it. But when the ‘predatory’ attitude prevails, nature’s balance is upset and there is an all-round bio-logical deterioration.”
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| # ? Mar 22, 2013 18:41 |
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Maluco Marinero posted:Whilst I don't know where the line will be drawn if eco terrorism becomes a thing, I do believe that effective activism WILL break laws. Eco terrorism is and has been a thing for quite some time. FBI testimony from 2002.
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| # ? Mar 22, 2013 19:26 |
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Uranium Phoenix posted:It's ethically wrong to kill or maim people, especially people who are just trying to make a living in a society that demands resources. Earthfirst! never killed or maimed anyone. They also managed to change the national dialogue on environmentalism. Their failure was in communication, not tactics. They did in fact save the Redwoods, which I wouldn't call ineffective. Considering the state of environmental issues at the time they rose to prominence, I wouldn't say that they were ineffective at all. The more prominent and politically connected environmental groups were losing the battle, and Earthfirst! showed that a sustained, physical front-line presence could in fact make a difference. The very fact that ALF and ELF were labeled as the number one domestic terrorists in the U.S. only shows how desperate the government was to stop them. I won't defend ALF and ELF, because their tactics were too extreme and dangerous. Who the gently caress burns things down in an effort to save those said things? Idiots do. In totality, though, ALF and ELF were the product of a very few people. They were very young and dumb and they are paying the price for their extreme methods. I highly doubt they would advocate for anyone to follow their example. They luckily never killed anyone. One of the reasons for that was, they didn't want to kill or hurt anyone. They wanted to create a spectacle and make a point, not injure people. Monkeywrenching was a very seldom used practice. The creators of Earthfirst! readily admit that the books and talk about monkeywrenching were mostly bluster. Tree spiking was the same. They didn't have armies of people spiking trees, and the trees that they did spike they marked. Earthfirst! worked when it was modeled after civil rights type sit ins. People put their lives and bodies on the lines to protect a specific environmental feature. This type of action actually captured the public's attention, much like it did in the civil rights movement. A few people can make a very serious change, and dismissing the work they did and the pain they went through to achieve what they did is disgusting. Pohl fucked around with this message at Mar 22, 2013 around 20:29 |
| # ? Mar 22, 2013 20:21 |
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I've always had very mixed feelings with many radical environmental movements. On one hand I consider my self a radical and an environmentalist, but I also try to base my radical and environmental views on science and evidence rather than gut-feelings or the "optics" of a situation. For every time radical environmentalists have saved a forest they've attacked nuclear power. For every time they've caught an industry illegally dumping harmfull pollution and brought them to justice they've hounded and demonized important research projects. For every salmon spawning habitat they've protected they've knocked down a cell or radio tower or spread panic about EM RAIDATION. There's many different movements and many different people within them, but there's a tendency for many within these movements to have a factually incorrect and even harmful view for every legitimately good view they have. And it's hard to say if they've been net positives for the environment. I'm not sure every tree saved combined outweighs the harm they've caused the environment by successfully hamstringing and demonizing nuclear energy. I'm not sure the legitimate health concerns they've shown a light on have outweighed their demonization of science-based medicine and marketing of "natural" alternatives. Most of the environmentalists I personally know are all climate scientists or biologists, or at least scientifically-minded people. They have backgrounds or information that guide their support for various "radical" causes, but for so many others though they seem guided purely by emotions, group think, and philosophy over fact.
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| # ? Mar 22, 2013 20:42 |
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satan!!! posted:To answer one of the OP's questions, there is good evidence that at least in terms of food production, we wouldn't hit a carry capacity limit until well past 15 billion people with current technology. http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/10/it...to-feed-15.html With current methods and resources, yes. But current agriculture depends heavily on fossil fuel based fertilizer, mechanization and transport, which will get a lot more expensive as fossil fuels ineviatably get more rare and costly, which will increase food prices greatly, which we know will cause even more starvation (it's not like we're feeding everybody now, even) and cause massive destabilization (because society collapses quick without a stable food supply,and this leads to war). Of course, this is ignoring the fact that we are going to, by the middle of this century, have a lack of phosphorous which is a prerequisite nutrient for plant growth. Without it, no artificial fertilizer, and no modern crop yeilds. I didn't see that they have taken that into account in that link of yours. The current level of population is only sustained by industrialized agriculture. If it goes, so do the people.
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| # ? Mar 22, 2013 21:23 |
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HighClassSwankyTime posted:Another question that is completely circumstancial. The carrying capacity for a hunter-gatherer society is considerably lower than an industrial-agricultural society. Although a hunter-gathere society is environmentally more responsible, I don't think anyone would seriously argue that we should return to that period of human history.
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| # ? Mar 22, 2013 21:37 |
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quote:1. What does a sustainable human society look like? It could look like a lot of different things. I think many point out hunter/gatherer/fisher societies before the agricultural revolution, based on some archeological studies of some of the general (non-complex) societies, such as they didn't overuse natural resources, they had egalitarian community/family patterns, and their diets and activity levels were much healthier than ours today. There'd be no way to revert to that life now due to so much population, but I think we could base some ideology off that hunter/gatherer structure. We don't have to overuse natural resources, we could be less greedy, we could stop producing throwaway junk, we could be more egalitarian. We could be more sustainable overall. There's so many ways to accomplish this (permaculture, smarter irrigation methods, green roofs, vertical farming and greening of cities, reforestation, investing in alternative fuel sources and stopping oil sands expansion, etc.) quote:2. Does technology always entail environmental destruction? quote:3. What is the human carrying capacity of the planet? quote:4. What are the ethical considerations when it comes to things like treesits, tree spiking, and other forms of sabotage committed in the name of the environment? quote:As early as 1984, Meares Island and Sulphur Pass had logging blockades, after the BC government decided to log most of the island. A legal application from the Nuu-chah-nulth First Nation was granted, which halted the logging and imposed a legal injunction. In 1989, a sustainable development stakeholder process was set up to provide land use plans for Clayoquot, but this dissolved in 1992. In 1993, the Clayoquot Land Use Decision (CLUD) came about. According to Friends of Clayoquot Sound, this decision called for: Desmond fucked around with this message at Mar 22, 2013 around 21:43 |
| # ? Mar 22, 2013 21:40 |
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Desmond posted:It could look like a lot of different things. I think many point out hunter/gatherer/fisher societies before the agricultural revolution, based on some archeological studies of some of the general (non-complex) societies, such as they didn't overuse natural resources, they had egalitarian community/family patterns, and their diets and activity levels were much healthier than ours today. There'd be no way to revert to that life now due to so much population, but I think we could base some ideology off that hunter/gatherer structure.
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| # ? Mar 22, 2013 22:03 |
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Primitive people also changed their environments pretty harshly too. Get enough hunter-gatherers in an area and they can gently caress poo poo up just like we do today. The point is sustainability, which can be radically pushed up with technology along with social science and economics. Our environmental issues today are not science-based but rather political/economic. It's not that primitive people were in "harmony with nature" but that life was so short and brutal they couldn't grow large enough to gently caress poo poo up most of the time.
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| # ? Mar 22, 2013 22:19 |
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A few random thoughts:a lovely poster posted:Eco terrorism is and has been a thing for quite some time. FBI testimony from 2002. The train of thought also tends to ignore how the U.S. government has repeatedly cracked down hard on the far right, especially during the 1990s after the Oklahoma City bombing. The militia movement had a bunch of its members rounded up and jailed on various charges. Libertarians have also been panicking recently since DHS labeled the extreme right as a hotbed of potential and actual domestic terrorists. (Which in my opinion, they are.) But most libertarians, far right types, and green anarcho-primitivists don't kill anyone. No one at that anarchist conference ever killed anyone. It's "lone wolves" who often leave the organized groups and go off on their own. But people who share the ideology do, and the members who are ostensibly peaceful people endorse people who do. So what do you do? Rent-A-Cop posted:The reason there's no way to revert to that life is because it never existed. You can cherry pick a few small societies here and there, add in a little 18th century sentimentalism and some 21st century feelings of disenfranchisement and you get something that looks like a Disney movie. It's a modern variation on the old Noble Savage trope. But fundamentally, that life never existed for the vast majority of pre-agricultural humans. What most of them did have sucked pretty hard by any reasonable modern standard. Constant physical exertion to eke out a barely livable diet, short life expectancy for men and abysmal life expectancy for women and children, and the constant threat of total a ecological collapse they'd never see coming and that would probably kill everyone. It's a total solution to feelings of disillusionment, brought about by living in a society where everything is confusing and crazy. And truth be told, modern life is confusing and hosed up, and living as a hunter-gatherer would probably be a kind of haven where you do know exactly where your place is and what your life is about. So you can imagine yourself as a mystic hero who - by blowing up construction projects and threatening research scientists - is on his or her way to destroy everything and replace it with absolute primitivist bliss. But they're really not going to accomplish anything of the sort.
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| # ? Mar 22, 2013 22:49 |
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If you got enough hunter-gatherers together they would stop being hunter-gatherers. Almost everywhere people went they developed sustainable methods of agriculture; of course, there are some counter-examples like Cahokia, but those are notable for being exceptions to the rule. Whether it be corn/bean/squash, food forests, or terra preta, people (I use tropical/Native American examples because so much material on pre-modern agriculture is about those groups, which is probably due to the Noble Savage myth) generally gravitate towards both sustainable and nutritionally sufficient forms of food production - that is, as long as it is possible or there isn't a profit incentive in the way. Even traditional methods can be hugely improved by a little experimentation. A great example of this is Masanobu Fukuoka, a microbiologist who quit his job and spent his life trying to figure out a method to grow food with the least possible labor. He focused on the traditional goal of a two-grain harvest of Rice and Barley from the same field in one year, and was able to remove the labor of hand-seeding, flooding the field, and hand-weeding all while keeping the same yields. He used a mulch of living clover and the straw of the previous years harvest, and over the decades he worked the ground only gained fertility. Modern agricultural is so focused on high-yield monoculture that the field of focusing on low-labor inputs and versatility is completely neglected. Now that plants have gone international there is an incredible amount of experimentation to be done all over the world testing new combinations of flora and environment. Fukuoka used an Australian tree to rehabilitate clear-cut hillsides and turn them into productive Mandarin Orange orchards, and there are dozens of Asian vegetables that are climate appropriate which are basically unknown in the west. Three books I'd highly recommend for anyone interested in the subject is Fukuoka's The One Straw Revolution for the ideology of environmental agricultural, James C Scott's The Art of Not Being Governed for a good example of how so many modern agricultural practices come from the needs of the state for taxation purposes, and Toby Hemenway's Gaia's Garden for a how-to guide on temperate-climate permaculture.
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| # ? Mar 22, 2013 23:19 |
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Scrree posted:If you got enough hunter-gatherers together they would stop being hunter-gatherers. Almost everywhere people went they developed sustainable methods of agriculture; of course, there are some counter-examples like Cahokia, but those are notable for being exceptions to the rule.
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| # ? Mar 22, 2013 23:31 |
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I would definitely second Scrree's recommendations and would suggest with starting with Gaia's Garden. The title kind of put me off too but it talks about sustainable techniques that allow you to grow a lot of food with minimal effort and money in pretty much any patch of dirt you can find. It turns out that you can feed yourself throughout the year with a surprisingly small amount of land and significantly cut down on your food bill.
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| # ? Mar 23, 2013 00:35 |
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Rent-A-Cop posted:Humans who failed to develop "sustainable agriculture" either all died when the food ran out or were wiped out by societies who farmed better than them, with a few exceptions like Australia where instead of developing agriculture people drove every animal worth eating to extinction and then survived as hunter-gatherer nomads for a few tens of thousands of years. That's what I meant. Another interesting example is Iceland (hey, finally something European!) where the Norse who settled there had a golden age for 200~ years before the forests all got clearcut and the grasses too worn down by sheep; they then had a near social collapse and eventually asked the Norwegian King to rule them and keep the peace. After that, though, they basically did okay living off fish until they started to develop a modern economy post-WII. Basically whenever humans got to a new environment they abused it as long as they could before the backlash forced them to change their ways to something that actually works over time. This cycle has been broken, or more likely delayed, in modern agriculture because we continually find more and more costly workarounds in the search of short-term profits. Artificial fertilizers, powered greenhouses, genetically modified crops - they're all shortcuts to avoid properly stewarding the land and only lead to a dependent food system. I'm not painting any idealized picture of the past. People ruined their environments all the time, but that doesn't me we should follow in there footsteps and learn from their worst mistakes. It's important to remember that almost every single human existing today is directly descended from someone who worked the land for sustenance, and that never has food production been so disconnected from the consumer. This isn't the choice between Scientific Effectiveness vs. Hippy-Dippy Bullshit, but between an inflexible system already experiencing problems that causes real issues even when it's working and a robust system of localized and varied production that might be able to withstand the coming trials of the 21st century climate change.
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| # ? Mar 23, 2013 00:48 |
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1. Like others have said it all depends on what do you define as 'sustainable' and what level of development you want. My vision of a 'sustainable' society is one that would be stable over millenia and is capable of long-term planning over the course of centuries. In addition it would be fully spacefaring and overwhelmingly urban. 2. No not at all the aboriginal Australians quite literally torched their continent with nothing more but flame while we face the choice of deploying the advanced technologies necessary to prevent collapse and undo the damage our forefathers wrought or watch our civilization devour itself completely as its foundations are smashed apart by climate change and resource shortages. 3. This again depends on how much development you want to sacrifice and how much of the earth you wish to split between human habitat and natural reserves but with the new resource discoveries and the high probability that population will peak around midcentury I think that resource wise the planet can support us for a while that is until climate change and environmental degradation pull the rug out from under us if they are not tackled. Again if mankind becomes truly spacefairing and gains access to the vast resources of the solar system then the earth will cease to have an actual carrying capacity for humanity as we would be able to seal ourselves in a bunch of acrologies/space colonies and wait for the restoration projects to finish. 4. 'non-lethal' forms of sabotage are ok if you consider them as a sort of environmental strike but legit eco-terrorism is about the worst thing environmentalists could do for actually preventing collapse and forcing change.
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| # ? Mar 23, 2013 00:57 |
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The funniest thing about GMO crops is that all of the effort going into researching them would probably be more rewardingly spent just breeding plant varieties like humans have always done or finding alternative plants that are resistant to the in-vogue threat. The history of industrial agriculture has been finding more costly ways to do the same thing.
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| # ? Mar 23, 2013 01:06 |
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Scrree posted:The funniest thing about GMO crops is that all of the effort going into researching them would probably be more rewardingly spent just breeding plant varieties like humans have always done or finding alternative plants that are resistant to the in-vogue threat. The history of industrial agriculture is like 80 years long, and we've managed a hell of a lot in that span, from the Haber process to every kind of disease and drought and flood resistant everything, massive polyploidy, plus BT and roundup ready. You really can't gregor mendel your way into that kind of result in four generations. Kind of a funny story about that. An uncle of mine is a retired farmer, and retired farmers don't take up golf, they keep farming, but instead of producing feed, they produce seeds for other farmers to plant. One of the more charming aspects of his business is growing heirloom oat seed, because modern oat stalks are much shorter than the varieties employed 50-100 years ago. This is good because they are much more resistant to storm and wind damage, but too short to work with the human and animal powered harvest and storage techniques that the Amish farmers use. So he grows 100 year old oats to let people with 200 year old farming equipment stay in business. Slo-Tek fucked around with this message at Mar 23, 2013 around 01:26 |
| # ? Mar 23, 2013 01:18 |
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Dameius posted:I don't really have much to add at this point so I didn't want this to be the second post but you got a link for the study and the retrospective? Not sure if you can find the study itself online, but here's the retrospective, which goes into a good bit of detail about the original study. If you've never been exposed to any serious considerations of social collapse before, it can be pretty shocking. Fair warning. http://www.csiro.au/files/files/plje.pdf Uranium Pheonix posted:It's perfectly possible to have technology and the environment exist side by side...Technology, like a lot of things, can be used for both bad and good. I see a lot of this "technology is neutral, depends on how you use it" talk in threads like these and I really do not agree. Most products of modern society require ecological damage in order to be made. If it is impossible to make something (a car, say) without an entire technological system/society backing it up, then making that thing necessarily involves environmental destruction (because we have yet to see any highly technological society that doesn't destroy the environment). Name me one modern technology that doesn't involve environmental degradation or unsustainable resource use. Note that I'm not saying technology is all bad - quite the contrary. It's just not "neutral." You can get the good aspects of it, but all the bad parts come with it - there is no way to separate the two. The question then becomes whether the good outweighs the bad. HighClassSwankyTime posted:Although a hunter-gathere society is environmentally more responsible, I don't think anyone would seriously argue that we should return to that period of human history. Ah, but some people do seriously argue that. Here's an excellent article by an anonymous writer at The Anarchist Library. I thought about posting this article in the OP but I don't want this to be just an anarcho-primitivism thread. Rent-A-Cop posted:Hunter-gatherer society in general is not "environmentally more responsible." That kind of living requires a huge amount of productive ecology to support a very small number of people. Per-capita it is about the least environmentally responsible way humans can survive. Care to back this up? Because it makes absolutely no sense. Scrree posted:Basically whenever humans got to a new environment they abused it as long as they could before the backlash forced them to change their ways to something that actually works over time. This cycle has been broken, or more likely delayed, in modern agriculture because we continually find more and more costly workarounds in the search of short-term profits. Artificial fertilizers, powered greenhouses, genetically modified crops - they're all shortcuts to avoid properly stewarding the land and only lead to a dependent food system. Desmond posted:There'd be no way to revert to that life now due to so much population, but I think we could base some ideology off that hunter/gatherer structure. We don't have to overuse natural resources, we could be less greedy, we could stop producing throwaway junk, we could be more egalitarian. We could be more sustainable overall. There's so many ways to accomplish this (permaculture, smarter irrigation methods, green roofs, vertical farming and greening of cities, reforestation, investing in alternative fuel sources and stopping oil sands expansion, etc.) Agreed on both counts. Scrree, have you read Craig Dilworth's Too Smart for Our Own Good? I read part of it but didn't finish because it is textbook-dense, but it's a really interesting analysis along the lines of what you are getting at. As far as the whole hunter-gatherer vs. civilization thing goes, I don't think anyone here is seriously arguing that hunter-gatherers were some sort of saints that didn't ever harm the environment. Certainly, there were some groups who did. Humans also hunted the megafauna to extinction. The difference between that and civilization, though, is that ecological degradation is an intrinsic feature of civilization. That isn't necessarily true of hunter-gatherer bands. Lots of good discussion and debate going on in here. Your Sledgehammer fucked around with this message at Mar 23, 2013 around 02:17 |
| # ? Mar 23, 2013 02:15 |
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Your Sledgehammer posted:Care to back this up? Because it makes absolutely no sense. The amount of free area needed to sustain the same amount of humans through non-optimized methods is superior to the amount needed to sustain them through optimized methods. Where "Optimized" means cultivating rather than gathering, and wild animal hunting rather than breeding in pastures. This is quite obvious: Wild animals will reproduce slower than ones in pastures (otherwise we wouldn't sue pastures at all!) and there's more food to be made in a farm than in a forest (otherwise no one would've ever farmed in the history of humanity.) Also, a forest can be very easily overhunted, leading very rapidly to a collapse of it's ecosystem.
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| # ? Mar 23, 2013 02:37 |
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Your Sledgehammer posted:Not sure if you can find the study itself online, but here's the retrospective, which goes into a good bit of detail about the original study. If you've never been exposed to any serious considerations of social collapse before, it can be pretty shocking. Fair warning. The trouble with anarcho-primitivism is that a hunter-gatherer societies can support a very small number of people per square mile. Worldwide implementation of anarcho-primitivism would mean the death of billions of people. Anarcho-primitivism is therefore the most evil political philosophy in history, aside from those that advocate wiping out humanity altogether.
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| # ? Mar 23, 2013 02:39 |
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Aureon posted:The amount of free area needed to sustain the same amount of humans through non-optimized methods is superior to the amount needed to sustain them through optimized methods. I agree with all of this, but Rent-A-Cop went a step further when he claimed that gathering is a less "environmentally responsible" way of life. If you're measuring how environmentally responsible something is based on how much environmental destruction it causes, then I'd say gathering has everything else beat hands-down. That's why his post makes no sense.
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| # ? Mar 23, 2013 02:43 |
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Silver2195 posted:The trouble with anarcho-primitivism is that a hunter-gatherer societies can support a very small number of people per square mile. Worldwide implementation of anarcho-primitivism would mean the death of billions of people. I'd say it is "evil" only if anarcho-primitivists actually wish for the deaths of billions. I don't know of any who do. They all see collapse of civilization as an inevitable consequence of an unsustainable way of life. It's pretty much the difference between saying "the ship is sinking!" and saying "the ship is sinking and I'm glad!" There is an enormous moral difference between the two, and it is really disingenuous to muddy the waters. If you want to continue on this tack and claim that primitivists are eagerly awaiting the deaths of billions, you're going to need to back up the claim.
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| # ? Mar 23, 2013 02:48 |
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Your Sledgehammer posted:I'd say it is "evil" only if anarcho-primitivists actually wish for the deaths of billions. I don't know of any who do. They all see collapse of civilization as an inevitable consequence of an unsustainable way of life. The same defense could be made of white supremacists who see a race war as "inevitable". I did say the philosophy was evil, though, not every individual person who advocates it. I do think it requires a certain amount of willful blindness to the facts for an intelligent person to advocate it. Silver2195 fucked around with this message at Mar 23, 2013 around 02:53 |
| # ? Mar 23, 2013 02:50 |
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Your Sledgehammer posted:I agree with all of this, but Rent-A-Cop went a step further when he claimed that gathering is a less "environmentally responsible" way of life. If you're measuring how environmentally responsible something is based on how much environmental destruction it causes, then I'd say gathering has everything else beat hands-down. That's why his post makes no sense. Assuming an equal amount of people, hunting/gathering causes an environmental collapse much faster than an agricultural-based society. Space is a resource, especially of fertile land. Arguably, fertile land is the most important resource we have - and hunting/gathering, at same-population, would cause a collapse where agriculture wouldn't.
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| # ? Mar 23, 2013 02:52 |
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It is a good thing we have vast worldwide conglomerations protecting our land and water from these crazy people that want to hunt and gather on the land. Wait, what? This is probably the dumbest derail in history. Really.
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| # ? Mar 23, 2013 02:56 |
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Silver2195 posted:The same defense could be made of white supremacists who see a race war as "inevitable". If a scientist published a well-sourced, thoroughly-researched article that claimed in the conclusion that the death of billions of people would inevitably take place if human society stayed on its present trajectory, would you say that scientist was evil, or was advancing an evil philosophy? My hypothetical admittedly wanders somewhat far afield of anarcho-primitivism, but I'm curious.
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| # ? Mar 23, 2013 02:56 |
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Your Sledgehammer posted:If a scientist published a well-sourced, thoroughly-researched article that claimed in the conclusion that the death of billions of people would inevitably take place if human society stayed on its present trajectory, would you say that scientist was evil, or was advancing an evil philosophy? My hypothetical admittedly wanders somewhat far afield of anarcho-primitivism, but I'm curious. I won't push the point. There was a certain amount of intentional shock value in my use of "evil," which is a very loaded and hard-to-pin-down term. I'd still call it a very dangerous philosophy.
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| # ? Mar 23, 2013 03:00 |
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Silver2195 posted:I won't push the point. There was a certain amount of intentional shock value in my use of "evil," which is a very loaded and hard-to-pin-down term. I'd still call it a very dangerous philosophy. Fair enough. I respect that and can even agree to a certain extent. I guess I'm like Desmond in that I think bringing a critique of civilization and technology to bear on the environmental problems we face will hopefully cause us to learn some things. Perhaps we can take some of the good of civilization and some of the good of the old-school H/G lifestyle and come up with something totally new that is more sustainable.
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| # ? Mar 23, 2013 03:04 |
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Your Sledgehammer posted:some of the good of the old-school H/G lifestyle and come up with something totally new that is more sustainable. Like what? It is all calories. A hunter gatherer can extract X calories per minute from Y amount of territory. A modern intensive farmer can extract a whole hell of a lot more calories from a whole lot less territory. Currently, we can exchange petro-calories for food calories (and the exchange rate isn't too bad at the moment), which lets more of us eat higher on the food chain than would be possible without all that stored up sunshine in the form of coal and diesel. But when that runs out, farming is still going to keep more people alive with less extincting everything else than any of the alternatives, for the same number of calories. It's all a numbers game. 500 hunter gatherers wouldn't have any notable environmental impact if they were burning hairspray cans to roast baby manatees. But when you get into populations in the tens of thousands, you are going to be extracting more calories than exist sustainably in Thumper and Bambie and fruits and nuts, and you need intensive agriculture. Any number of people, practicing modern agricultural techniques, is going to have vastly less environmental impact than the same number of people doing any kind of daniel quin bullshit camping weekend. The only way you can pretend your camping trip is saving the planet is if you don't have to share the planet with a couple billion other people. Then, with all those other people gone, it doesn't really matter how eco-friendly your yurt is. Slo-Tek fucked around with this message at Mar 23, 2013 around 03:38 |
| # ? Mar 23, 2013 03:23 |
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Your Sledgehammer posted:I agree with all of this, but Rent-A-Cop went a step further when he claimed that gathering is a less "environmentally responsible" way of life. If you're measuring how environmentally responsible something is based on how much environmental destruction it causes, then I'd say gathering has everything else beat hands-down. That's why his post makes no sense.
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| # ? Mar 23, 2013 03:26 |
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Pohl posted:The very fact that ALF and ELF were labeled as the number one domestic terrorists in the U.S. only shows how desperate the government was to stop them. I won't defend ALF and ELF, because their tactics were too extreme and dangerous. "Why the gently caress is the government making hate proclamations about a handful of environmental activists?" Someone in the political chain was pissing themselves about the potential for environmentalism to hurt their future profits. The FBI spent more effort, and arrested more people (more than zero), for environmental activism than they have for the entire banker/criminal global economy bailout scam. quote:"But the report cited what it called other "troubling" FBI practices in its monitoring of domestic groups in the years between the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and 2006. In some cases, Fine said, agents began investigations of people affiliated with activist groups for "factually weak" reasons and "without adequate basis" and improperly kept information about activist groups in its files. Among the groups monitored were the Thomas Merton Center, a Pittsburgh peace group; People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals; and Greenpeace USA. Activists affiliated with Greenpeace were improperly put on a terrorist watch list, the report said. Thought-crimes got this guy 20 years. quote:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eco-terrorism#Government_response_in_the_USA I mean nothing suspicious here right? quote:"Anna" had been working with the FBI to infiltrate the group since 2004. She encouraged their activities and provided them with bomb-making information, money to buy the raw materials, transportation and a cabin to work in, and produced consensual audio and video recordings of their activities. According to "Anna", McDavid threatened to kill her if she turned out to be working with law enforcement. As with many things Obama carries on with Bush's proud legacy. quote:http://www.globalresearch.ca/obama-administration-targets-environmental-and-animal-rights-activists-as-eco-terrorists/13857 Even allowing for some peoples distaste at "hippies" the way these issues are handled is an interesting contrast to criminals in the banking industry.
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| # ? Mar 23, 2013 08:34 |
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Scrree posted:powered greenhouses Have been a thing since about 1830. Even ignoring those, using hot-beds is an even older trick that you'd probably be using on the veg patch in your back garden/allotment if your job allowed you the time nowdays. No fuel required, just re-usable frames, stable manure and leaves will kick out enough heat to grow stuff in mid-winter. And then there's the use of forcing pots. Don't completely write off methods that allow food to be grown in winter just because they're abused at large scales. Let's get down to the brass tacks - capitalism's the problem, really. Longer hours and lower margins. If the margins on milk weren't so stupidly small, there wouldn't have to be hyperfarms, so their impact would be distributed across the landscape. Kerbtree fucked around with this message at Mar 23, 2013 around 12:44 |
| # ? Mar 23, 2013 12:40 |
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| # ? May 18, 2013 11:51 |
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I have recently read about the no-till farming approach as well, and I think it has very interesting impllications. Practices like this, and aquaculture farming and other low-effort high-yeild farming practices that work with or mimic the processes of nature might be the most sustainable way to go. It kind of makes a basic kind of sense, a lot of mankinds greatest inventions mimic natural things and processes that have evolved and stayed because they functioned so well. Current agricultural mainstream research is, to my perception, very locked into improving and furthering the status quo. Permaculture and related concepts aren't taken very seriously, probably becaue people seem to attach pseudo-new age/hippie gaia bullshit philosophy to it (Fukuoka is guilty of this as well) rather than adopting a purely scientific utilitarian stance of: Minimum effort, minimum environmental impact, minimum resources, maximum yeild. Permaculture needs to get out of the moonlight and rainbows territory and start being researched and trialed on a huge scale for maximum yeild with minimum fertilizer, mechanization and soil destruction. I've for instance seen the idea thrown around for farms to use excess plant matter in an ABE process to create butanol to use for fuel, which would be carbon neutral. But at the moment this is hilariously inefficient and has to be resesearced befor it can be implemented, and even then it might need to be done by a designated chemical plant for max efficiency, and it will still never be done before the loss of fossil fuels makes it the best option. But I think it might be a way to go. Also, a very interesting TED talk: Though many of you may have seen it http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=vpTH...v%3DvpTHi7O66pI
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| # ? Mar 23, 2013 13:00 |
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