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| Naturalism vs Post-naturalism | |
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| Topic Started: Apr 11 2016, 11:13 AM (4,221 Views) | |
| Niedfaru | Apr 13 2016, 04:41 PM Post #61 |
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In order to properly refute that, I would to need to break the forum's "no politics" rule. Let's just say that I feel you are wildly understating the motives behind those responsible the problems you mention, and overstating the abilities of those trying to fix them. Humanity is not a coherent force, but a collection of selfish, short-sighted individuals. It is substantially more long-sighted than other species, but the majority of those making decision are not the more long-sighted members of the species. |
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| Holben | Apr 13 2016, 05:36 PM Post #62 |
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Rumbo a la Victoria
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As long as the discussion is civil it's generally okay to discuss policy, but of course only if you wish to do so. This topic was about ideologies from the very start, and IMO it's ideological differences that cause most internet slapfights, so we're doing pretty well so far. On a different level from individuals though, humanity is also a collection of cultures, some of which use resources more sustainably and efficiently than others... |
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Time flows like a river. Which is to say, downhill. We can tell this because everything is going downhill rapidly. It would seem prudent to be somewhere else when we reach the sea. "It is the old wound my king. It has never healed." | |
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| Niedfaru | Apr 13 2016, 05:45 PM Post #63 |
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Indeed. And at the moment, biggest users aren't doing so well, and the greatest bulk of population has little reason to try. Still, I should state that I don't think the immediate result of any of this is going to be humanity's extinction. That may come much later, but I do believe some form of global societal collapse is coming soon. The works of Joseph Tainter and Jared Diamond (his academic works, not his novels) are an excellent read if ever you feel up to a depressing but thought-provoking exercise. I'm currently working my way through Scatter, Adapt and Remember by Analee Newitz. It's somewhat more hopefully than Tainter, but I'm not sure how it will all come together. Anyway, that's where I see humanity's future it doesn't get it's act together sharpish. There's not a lot of research going into it right now, with big money favouring the technological solution, so it's hard to make any statements with certainty, but it's going to take some incredible politicking by the right people to avoid the future Tainter and his successors have foreseen, I think. |
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| LittleLazyLass | Apr 13 2016, 08:27 PM Post #64 |
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Proud quilt in a bag
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If our technology gets advanced enough, sometime in the distant future we won't even need earth. |
totally not British, b-baka! You like me (Unlike)I don't even really like this song that much but the title is pretty relatable sometimes, I guess. Me What, you want me to tell you what these mean? Read First Words Maybe | |
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| Niedfaru | Apr 13 2016, 08:55 PM Post #65 |
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The problem with the technological solution to any problem is that it only works as long as you use it properly. It doesn't matter how advanced technology gets, if people's attitudes don't change, all we'll end up is more advanced ways to mess things up. Whether it's Earth or another planet/moon/space station/Dyson sphere, all you're doing is pushing the borders of where you can harvest resources from. Sooner or later, it's more likely than not that you'll reach a point where the sheer distances involved push the running cost of your economy into diminishing returns. If you can't make the jump to the next lot of resources quick enough, it all collapses in on itself and you can't move on from there without outside help. As my historian friends are wont to remind me, social forces determine more of history than technological ones, and I see no reason why the future should be any different. |
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| HangingThief | Apr 13 2016, 10:48 PM Post #66 |
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ghoulish
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Ok, so what's humanity's justification and reasoning for allowing things to get so bad that it has to come to this? As the population continues to grow things will only get worse and worse for human living standards and the ecosystem. Hint: there is none. As monster said humanity is shortsighted. Humans can be intelligent, but human societies are not. Fighting human- inflicted environmental destruction is less like fighting a villain and more like fighting a fire. Also, the majority of farms are not there to feed people. They're there to feed animals. Feeding those soybeans to a cow is basically the same as throwing eight or nine out of ten pounds of soybeans away so the remaining pound tastes better. 60 percent of the worlds agricultural land is used for cows alone, but do most of the 7 billion people eat juicy steaks? |
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| Flisch | Apr 14 2016, 02:03 PM Post #67 |
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Superhuman
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It's hard to talk about this point without having actual examples. Two I can think of are and mass scale hunting the deforestation of the amazon rainforest. Mass scale hunting like that of the passenger pigeon is actually one of the things where humanity might get rid of a potentially useful animal (if they are hunted for meat) but even that is iffy, because we have enough domesticated animals, we do not need wild animals for sustenance. Luckily hunting becomes less of a threat the smaller the animal gets and the ecological impact becomes less critical the bigger they are. The ecologies of Eurasia and North America are doing fine with all the mega fauna extinct. If the bee went extinct that might prove to be problematic (still not enough to make humans go extinct, mind you) but nobody is seriously hunting bees. Deforestation is another thing that could prove to be locally dangerous. Then again, about 90% of the natural forests in Europe have been removed and we still haven't died out. You know what we did to get wood? Plant timber. Not really getting any awards for saving the environment, but it shows that even if it looks like you've depleted your resources, there are ways to work around that. Of course, it's not quite that simple, but apparently you don't need natural forests in order to a) survive and b) have relatively high living standards. In all fairness we do import most of our wood from elsewhere, but if we find our wood supplies to be insufficient, we can plant more timber. Of course, eventually we run out of space for farmland, timber and urban land, but when that moment comes we cannot even consider the question whether or not to save the environment, rendering the whole argument kind of moot. To top it off, wood is an important material. So, when we need wood, where do we get it from? We can cut down forests or we can plant timber. Timber requires space, lots of space, because of the trees' slow growth rate. Either way we would displace some habitats. Who decides which habitat is worth keeping and which isn't?
Justification? Reasoning? Again, concepts that only have a meaning for humans. Also, there's no such thing as "human living standards". On one part of the world people don't know how to survive to the next day and on the other part people have to actively try not to become fat. If we were to look at it objectively and ignore cultural and interhuman factors (interhuman would include war), one might even say that the overall human living standard increases over time. The fact that some people are not doing so well doesn't mean humanity as a whole has it worse than it used to. It just means that the increased living standards haven't reached those people yet.
So, those farms still feed humans, just very inefficiently. You do have a point though. Especially as human population soars higher from decade to decade we need to be more careful about how we use the available farmland. Not even necessarily to save the environment, but simply because we will run out of space after some point. So yeah, eventually we do have to think about how to use our farmland more efficiently. Either by adopting a mostly vegetarian diet or by adding insects to our menus. But then again, this isn't born out of ideology or morals, but of necessity. |
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| Scrublord | Apr 14 2016, 03:40 PM Post #68 |
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Father Pellegrini
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I would beg to differ on that statement. The ecosystems of North America and Eurasia in the pleistocene were not the same as those we would recognize today, in part because the megafauna are extinct. Most of temperate Asia (the part that wasn't covered in glaciers, that is) was covered in "mammoth steppe", which was dominated by mammoths, bison, and horses. Only small areas of this ecosystem exist today, which is fundamentally unlike the conifer forests that today dominate northern Asia. Regardless of whether the Pleistocene extinction was caused entirely by humans or not, the fact remains that you cannot simply dump a population of mammoths into modern-day Siberia and expect them to thrive. Too much has changed. |
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My Projects: The Neozoic Redux Valhalla--Take Three! The Big One Deviantart Account: http://elsqiubbonator.deviantart.com In the end, the best advice I could give you would be to do your project in a way that feels natural to you, rather than trying to imitate some geek with a laptop in Colorado. --Heteromorph | |
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| HangingThief | Apr 14 2016, 03:55 PM Post #69 |
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ghoulish
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I dunno, human living standards will never be the same as they were for the original hunter gatherers. Farmers may have taken over because we can breed faster, but compared to even the modern city dwelling 'farmer' hunter- gatherers lived a life of health and ease. You won't see a stressed, diabetic hunter- gatherer who works ten hours a day, nor one who's starving to death among thousands of others in a desolate, ruined landscape. Edited by HangingThief, Apr 14 2016, 03:55 PM.
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| Scrublord | Apr 14 2016, 04:11 PM Post #70 |
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Father Pellegrini
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I suppose what I've really been trying to ask all this time is, is there ever an instance where it's acceptable to allow a species to go extinct purely in the name of human progress? Or should all species be regarded as equally worthy of preservation--even if it's something like the guinea worm? |
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My Projects: The Neozoic Redux Valhalla--Take Three! The Big One Deviantart Account: http://elsqiubbonator.deviantart.com In the end, the best advice I could give you would be to do your project in a way that feels natural to you, rather than trying to imitate some geek with a laptop in Colorado. --Heteromorph | |
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| lamna | Apr 14 2016, 04:33 PM Post #71 |
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If you're shopping around for reasons for the natural world, obviously we need a lot of it so we don't, you know, die. But the unimportant stuff, like tigers and great Plains white fringed orchids. Because people enjoy them. Why do we have art? Why don't we just wear all the same utilitarian clothes? Why do people go to the cinema? Because it's pleasant. I want my big water feature to have orca in it, and I want my rockery to have snow leopards.
Noble savage nonsense. Hunter gathers get stressed, they have to work hard, and sometimes they die of starvation. Some of them even have diabetes. Many of them have access to nice stuff now, but that's only because they have contact with us fallen, downtrodden, ungodly farmers who have time to make condoms and smart phones and oil lamps. |
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Living Fossils Fósseis Vibos: Reserva Natural 34 MYH, 4 tonne dinosaur. [flash=500,450] Video Magic! [/flash] | |
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| Kamidio | Apr 14 2016, 04:41 PM Post #72 |
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The Game Master of the SSU:NC
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Question, is there a way to block/ignore topics, so that this one isn't hovering at the top of my feed in the portal? |
SSU:NC - Finding a new home. Quotes WAA
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| flashman63 | Apr 14 2016, 04:42 PM Post #73 |
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The Herr From Terre
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Both terms are anthropocentric. We are animals, this is our behavior. If it kills us and everything on earth? We were a shit species. If not, good. But neither one is good or bad any more than the organisms that breathed out oxygen were bad. |
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Travel back through time and space, to the edge of man's beggining... discover a time when man, woman and lizard roamed free, and untamed! It is an epoch of mammoths, a time of raptors! A tale of love in the age of tyrannosaurs! An epic from the silver screen, brought right to your door! Travel back to A Million Years BC ----------------------------------------------------- Proceedings of the Miskatonic University Department of Zoology Cosmic Horror is but a dissertation away ----------------------------------------------------- Some dickhead's deviantART | |
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| LittleLazyLass | Apr 14 2016, 05:05 PM Post #74 |
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Proud quilt in a bag
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People actually use the portal? |
totally not British, b-baka! You like me (Unlike)I don't even really like this song that much but the title is pretty relatable sometimes, I guess. Me What, you want me to tell you what these mean? Read First Words Maybe | |
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| HangingThief | Apr 14 2016, 05:32 PM Post #75 |
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ghoulish
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I was talking about ancient/prehistoric hunter gatherer civilizations. Y'know, before the farmers showed up. You're confusing 'noble savage' with the original affluent society theory. Despite common belief, life for early hunter gatherers wasn't a constant life or death struggle. They rarely starved, had access to a rich and varied diet, were physically fit and probably spent around fifteen hours a week at 'work'. Look at the artifacts they left behind, these people had time on their hands. They may not have been as "safe" as we are today, but at least their fight or flight response actually served its purpose rather than being bottled up and transformed into the poisonous substance we now know as stress. Farmers may have overpowered hunter gatherers by sheer numbers, but farmers as a rule sacrifice quality for quantity. Compared to a hunter gatherer, a farmer was overworked, unhappy and unhealthy. And even today, most of humanitie's major problems can be traced back to too many people trying to milk everything they have for all it's worth. All wars are fought over shortages, amiright? I suggest reading Guns, Germs and Steel if you haven't. (Before saying anything about modern medicine, the book explains why the farmer's lifestyle is the main reason we even need modern medicine.) Edited by HangingThief, Apr 14 2016, 05:34 PM.
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