Nature doesn’t have a consciousness, it just is. I think to anthropomorphize it as having one, to conceptualize it as being some kind of actor with goals or morals, is kind of to not understand it fundamentally, or to accept what it is. It’s just another extension of the naturalist fallacy.
That’s not really to advocate, you know, for climate change, or what have you, but I also don’t really believe that this is going to be the thing that takes people out, weirdly? I mean, certainly, the holocene extinction is going to be a thing, and it’s going to cause mass human and animal suffering and extinction on a scale that is only precedented by meteors and the like. That’s looking pretty inevitable, at this point, to me. The thing is, I don’t think the species as a whole, the human species, really needs or relies on nature to survive, at this point. Pollinators, maybe, but aren’t we at a point where corn and other crops upon which we rely for a good, like, 50% of our mass produced highly processed food is really reliant on a lot of “natural” things. Or, isn’t reliant on like, nature, as a whole. It’s all as a result of discrete resources which are highly individualized and pretty isolated. Maybe large amounts of the land becomes non-arable, I dunno.
I think more broadly though, what I find to be slightly more probable than that as a counterargument is frankly that I can kind of imagine the end of the world, without the end of capitalism. Most people say it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, right, but they still imagine the end of the world as being kind of mutually inclusive to the end of capitalism. No, I think capitalism, I think capitalists, our plutocrats, our idiots in charge, would probably rather keep the planet on a tenuous kind of life support, where you don’t really have non-globalized, local ecology, environmental variation, the like. I think they would rather prevent the apocalypse by whatever margin is most deemed most profitable. We have schemes for cloud-seeding to block out more UV light, which would probably kill a bunch of plants and mess up a ton of ecosystems from geographically irregular and potentially unpredictable irrigation. We have schemes for dumping huge amounts of iron oxide into the ocean to kickstart massive algae blooms that can sequester carbon dioxide and probably increase ocean acidification. We have schemes for genetically modifying human and food supply-threatening viruses and invasive species to start to self-terminate after the genes propagate to like, the seventh generation. Hell, there’s even some level by which people might argue that invasive species are good, because they provide an inherent surplus population sourced from natural ecology that humans could kind of skim the top off. When those things end up going sideways, or otherwise threatening the bottom line, we’ll probably start seeing people just implement more short term solutions, that kick the can five years down the road, while mass ecological and human extinctions are constantly ongoing and potential quality of life plummets for the general population. Apocalypse as an ongoing process, rather than as a singular event.
Thinking that an ecological apocalypse would be the end of it, that humans are that easily crushed and nature can/will just go on totally unbothered, I think that’s a rather optimistic viewpoint. It also missess the mass amounts of suffering which are currently ongoing by looking to some theoretical future, much like AI tech evangelists do with the singularity, idiot leftists tend to do with “the revolution”, evangelicals do with the rapture. We need to, uhh, maybe figure out a better structure and approach, here.
Yeah see, that’s what I’m talking about. Like what the fuck would the water wars even be? That shit don’t make no sense, it’s not like water is a non-renewable resource. Freshwater is maybe a larger concern, right, but climate change means more solar heat which means more water evaporation which means more fresh rainwater and not less. Maybe in combination with increased acidification because of emissions and related things, maybe in combination with a decreased capacity to absorb that rainwater because of desertification and much increased rainwater runoff due to too large a volume of water for a dried out landscape. No part of that really involves a water war, though. That’s just some pop culture shit.
Yes, the water wars will be about fresh water. No one goes to war over water that needs to be boiled. And no, climate change does not mean more fresh water.
Nature doesn’t have a consciousness, it just is. I think to anthropomorphize it as having one, to conceptualize it as being some kind of actor with goals or morals, is kind of to not understand it fundamentally, or to accept what it is. It’s just another extension of the naturalist fallacy.
There’s a flipside to this, and that’s the “blind nature” fallacy. Like Neodarwinists trying hard to ignore physiology and with that the fact that the way selection works is not a random process, but a process employing randomness strategically: The natural error in DNA transcription is quite high, correction mechanisms then bring that down to virtually zero, then, after that, mutations are introduced again. And it makes a hell a lot of sense: If you have a finch which has trouble getting food it’s much more fruitful to mess around with the beak shape than to mess with mitochondrial DNA. Our genome and physiology has ways of detecting environmental pressure and reacting to it on that kind of level. Any genomic line containing that kind of capability is way more fit in the ways of adapting than one that doesn’t, thus, it out-competes the others. Long since has. In case you have an hour for a physiology lecture.
Is it “a mind”? Well, it depends on your definition of mind. But it’s definitely not “mindless”: It’s deliberate. It’s not blindly throwing shit at the wall, it’s strategically throwing shit at the wall and coming down to it our minds don’t have a better strategy, either.
Thinking that an ecological apocalypse would be the end of it, that humans are that easily crushed and nature can/will just go on totally unbothered, I think that’s a rather optimistic viewpoint. It also missess the mass amounts of suffering which are currently ongoing by looking to some theoretical future, much like AI tech evangelists do with the singularity, idiot leftists tend to do with “the revolution”, evangelicals do with the rapture. We need to, uhh, maybe figure out a better structure and approach, here.
We need to be blasting this shit into the ears of everyone on lemmy, 24/7. Bunch of fucking secular cultists. Wake the fuck up and smell the shit you’re walking in, and then grab a shovel.
Nature doesn’t have a consciousness, it just is. I think to anthropomorphize it as having one, to conceptualize it as being some kind of actor with goals or morals, is kind of to not understand it fundamentally, or to accept what it is. It’s just another extension of the naturalist fallacy.
That’s not really to advocate, you know, for climate change, or what have you, but I also don’t really believe that this is going to be the thing that takes people out, weirdly? I mean, certainly, the holocene extinction is going to be a thing, and it’s going to cause mass human and animal suffering and extinction on a scale that is only precedented by meteors and the like. That’s looking pretty inevitable, at this point, to me. The thing is, I don’t think the species as a whole, the human species, really needs or relies on nature to survive, at this point. Pollinators, maybe, but aren’t we at a point where corn and other crops upon which we rely for a good, like, 50% of our mass produced highly processed food is really reliant on a lot of “natural” things. Or, isn’t reliant on like, nature, as a whole. It’s all as a result of discrete resources which are highly individualized and pretty isolated. Maybe large amounts of the land becomes non-arable, I dunno.
I think more broadly though, what I find to be slightly more probable than that as a counterargument is frankly that I can kind of imagine the end of the world, without the end of capitalism. Most people say it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, right, but they still imagine the end of the world as being kind of mutually inclusive to the end of capitalism. No, I think capitalism, I think capitalists, our plutocrats, our idiots in charge, would probably rather keep the planet on a tenuous kind of life support, where you don’t really have non-globalized, local ecology, environmental variation, the like. I think they would rather prevent the apocalypse by whatever margin is most deemed most profitable. We have schemes for cloud-seeding to block out more UV light, which would probably kill a bunch of plants and mess up a ton of ecosystems from geographically irregular and potentially unpredictable irrigation. We have schemes for dumping huge amounts of iron oxide into the ocean to kickstart massive algae blooms that can sequester carbon dioxide and probably increase ocean acidification. We have schemes for genetically modifying human and food supply-threatening viruses and invasive species to start to self-terminate after the genes propagate to like, the seventh generation. Hell, there’s even some level by which people might argue that invasive species are good, because they provide an inherent surplus population sourced from natural ecology that humans could kind of skim the top off. When those things end up going sideways, or otherwise threatening the bottom line, we’ll probably start seeing people just implement more short term solutions, that kick the can five years down the road, while mass ecological and human extinctions are constantly ongoing and potential quality of life plummets for the general population. Apocalypse as an ongoing process, rather than as a singular event.
Thinking that an ecological apocalypse would be the end of it, that humans are that easily crushed and nature can/will just go on totally unbothered, I think that’s a rather optimistic viewpoint. It also missess the mass amounts of suffering which are currently ongoing by looking to some theoretical future, much like AI tech evangelists do with the singularity, idiot leftists tend to do with “the revolution”, evangelicals do with the rapture. We need to, uhh, maybe figure out a better structure and approach, here.
We rely on nature for everything. The water wars will make that more apparent, I suppose.
Yeah see, that’s what I’m talking about. Like what the fuck would the water wars even be? That shit don’t make no sense, it’s not like water is a non-renewable resource. Freshwater is maybe a larger concern, right, but climate change means more solar heat which means more water evaporation which means more fresh rainwater and not less. Maybe in combination with increased acidification because of emissions and related things, maybe in combination with a decreased capacity to absorb that rainwater because of desertification and much increased rainwater runoff due to too large a volume of water for a dried out landscape. No part of that really involves a water war, though. That’s just some pop culture shit.
Yes, the water wars will be about fresh water. No one goes to war over water that needs to be boiled. And no, climate change does not mean more fresh water.
There’s a flipside to this, and that’s the “blind nature” fallacy. Like Neodarwinists trying hard to ignore physiology and with that the fact that the way selection works is not a random process, but a process employing randomness strategically: The natural error in DNA transcription is quite high, correction mechanisms then bring that down to virtually zero, then, after that, mutations are introduced again. And it makes a hell a lot of sense: If you have a finch which has trouble getting food it’s much more fruitful to mess around with the beak shape than to mess with mitochondrial DNA. Our genome and physiology has ways of detecting environmental pressure and reacting to it on that kind of level. Any genomic line containing that kind of capability is way more fit in the ways of adapting than one that doesn’t, thus, it out-competes the others. Long since has. In case you have an hour for a physiology lecture.
Is it “a mind”? Well, it depends on your definition of mind. But it’s definitely not “mindless”: It’s deliberate. It’s not blindly throwing shit at the wall, it’s strategically throwing shit at the wall and coming down to it our minds don’t have a better strategy, either.
We need to be blasting this shit into the ears of everyone on lemmy, 24/7. Bunch of fucking secular cultists. Wake the fuck up and smell the shit you’re walking in, and then grab a shovel.