I think we’ve already damaged nature too much, and it’s not just me that thinks that, science thinks that.
I’d like to see a rewilding of the planet, where world population is reduced by about 90%.
I’d also like to see global economic decline by about 90%.
I don’t want to see another species go extinct because of our doing, and if we continue down the road we’re on, we’re going to see thousands of species go extinct, we’re going to see massive climate change, deforestation, soil erosion, water shortage, peak oil, gas and uranium.
We’re going to see world war 3 fought over dwindling resources, and we’re going to see the (near) extinction of our species.
In terms of biomass, humans are already the largest species on the planet, and thanks solely to us, hominidae is practically the 3rd largest taxological family on the planet, after ants and termites, but relative to their biomass, I don’t think ants and termites consume a 10th or even a 100th of what we do, and they tend to allow what they consume to renew itself, they aren’t dependent on non-renewable resources and don’t pollute the way we do.
either we need to learn how to produce/consume a lot more like ants/termites, or our population needs to be reduced 10 fold.
We didn’t have these problems threatening to destroy us during the preindustrial age, so either we need to rewind the technological clock a couple of centuries in some ways, in all ways, or we need to depopulate.
Making our tech greener is insufficient, we need to power down and depopulate.
We consume and pollute way too much, capitalism must be replaced by ecosocialist governments. Our economies must become lean, austere, we shouldn’t produce much more than we need to survive.
We could theorize that we want to survive because we believe we’re something less than the totality of what there is. Ants don’t have such an instinct to survive because their focus is on the colony’s survival; they identify with the colony and not themselves; they see themselves as part of the whole organism that is the colony. So, your desire for self-preservation depends on what you call “self”. If you, for example, identified with the whole universe, you’d find it silly and laughable that folks worry about surviving. “Survive? What do you mean? Who do you think you are? How did this ant develop a sense of self?” It’s a theory.
Yup, what’s true is relative.
There could be a deeper meaning to the tubes. “Life is a journey from the maternity ward to the crematorium.” - Father Mascal. Stuff goes in and stuff goes out. In/out, on/off, life/death. A great Zen master said just before he died, “From the bathtub, to the bathtub, I have uttered stuff and nonsense.”
Yes and I’ll go further and posit that it’s impossible to fathom it completely because there will always exist an infinite regression since an eye cannot look at itself
What about the man that works hard his entire life and dies of a massive heart attack at the age of fifty five?
Better yet a man who works thirty five years at a company that eventually becomes outsourced to a foreign nation leaving him broke, without any retirement, and destroys all his life savings in the process.
Then of course there is the wealthiest of the world where they’re the idle leisure class, they’re bums of course just bums that happened to be worth millions or billions of dollars.
exactly, what about that guy who worked 12 hours a day, 5 days a week, drank 6 cups of coffee and 6 cans of pop a day, ate at McDicks because he didn’t have time to eat properly or exercise, only managed to get 4 hours of sleep a night, and his heart exploded because it couldn’t cope with all the stress and unhealthy living?
Well, increasingly that’s what the average American and Canadians lifestyle looks like, chasing the American Mirage, a shrinking middle class and a standard of living in freefall.
I say no, I’d rather work as little as I can, be healthy, and not contribute to the destruction of the environment or making the fat cats even fatter and lazier.
I’d rather rant online all day about how this sux, and if more people spent their time and energy scamming the system back, and working towards a socialist revolution, things could be different.
It’s quite simple really, if people are not properly incentivized, motivated, compensated in wages, having access to benefits of society, having concern of their overall health, having access to education or social mobility, or having access to a higher living standards where instead it is entirely reduced where they’re treated little more than mere slaves people are not going work very well under such environmental conditions. And why should they? Why should they work for nothing at all?! What such an arrangement to be under! Instead of however addressing this subject in western society where there is a lot of special interests not to it’s easier to call people lazy, societal defects, and call them a burden on society. There is no representation in government today to address these issues and that is because profit of the few individuals that run it.
That’s where we’re at in this insane socio economic experiment of western civilization.
