Humans as planetary parasites
https://reeswilliame.substack.com/p/humans-as-planetary-parasitesOpen linkView original on lemmy.zipSyndicated from the fediverse. Read and engage on the original instance.
View original on lemmy.ziphttps://reeswilliame.substack.com/p/humans-as-planetary-parasitesOpen linkView original on lemmy.zip
8 replies
Um, present population as in "people who are currently alive today?" I feel like, idk, at least 70% of humans would be pretty upset about that? (italics in original)
Woah, I missed that. This is article is straight up ecofascism.
Transiently (by going detritivore) violating long-term planetary ecosystem carrying capacity is a measurable fact. People's feelings are another thing entirely. Being human, I don't like it either. But the physical reality doesn't care. I don't know why Rees even talks about voluntary non-coercive measures -- the system clearly doesn't have such degrees of freedom. It's a statistic ensemble of darwinian agents, winner-takes-all in an exhausted medium/zero sum scenario. There is no central control, at all.
So the matter is entirely out of our hands. We're merely spectators. A lot of people seem to confuse description with prescription. I've given up pointing out the difference.
I feel like the article does a decent job of dressing down that statement, butit bears repeating:"Humans are the parasites" is literally ecofascist rhetoric and absolves the ruling class of responsibility.
Edit: this article buried the lede hard. They're proposing, somehow, a "non- coerceive method" of reducing the population by 70%, or 5.8 Billion people. I bet the solution is super humane too, like showers, right? This article and this writer are both ecofascists. The fact that OP is telling me not to talk about ecofascism tells me that OP is an ecofascist too.
Please don't throw words like ecofascist around here. Carrying capacity of the planetary ecosystem is limited, and with 8.3 billion of high consumers we're in deep overshoot.
The reality doesn't care how it came to this, and who's feeling guilty, and who's not. Overshoot resolves itsef by a die-off. And it will start with the poor and powerless first.
What the hell are you talking about? This sounds like a hangover from the 60s moral panic about overpopulation.
We have the means and ability to support everyone on the planet. The issue is capitalism and it's influence on government.
Capitalist and socialist cornucopianism both ignore the fact carrying capacity is being degraded and we are in an intensification trap now dependent on unsustainable inputs in the middle of mass extinction of other species
I think the point of the issue being raised is that we can't sustain 9 billion people sustainably and that means inevitable systems collapse on many scales.
If you replace one industrial system with another that is the same modes of production with different ownership, eco-socio-economic collapse still happens, and humans still share in the massive die-offs we started.
Intensive degrowth and radical production changes might save civilization, but almost noone outside of sf discusses those changes.