Your very insulting lines:
In the future why don’t you address the specific poster(s) you have a problem with instead of going into a spiel that discredits everything every environmentalist has done over the years to make living conditions better for humans, animals & plants around the world.
Jim
You’re right, I shouldn’t have written that.
What I wrote plainly makes it seem as if I believe that many or most environmentalists are closet genocidiers, when of course only a tiny minority are.
But there are some people for whom it seems the main attraction of environmentalism or animal welfare activism is that it allows them to advocate murder, or torture, or genocide against humans, and paint that murderousness in a pious light. These are the same people a few hundred years ago who would have cheered murder and torture and genocide under the cover of fighting heresy.
Ok, I can more than live with the tiny minority disclaimer. Thank you very much.
Jim
I see. Would it be fair to compare your OP to this one, entitled discourage by humanity which states (and I’m very loosely interpreting through my own eyes here): Humans are bad; humans have done bad things in the past, are doing bad things in the present and will continue to do bad things in the future. And your twist in the OP is that humans are so bad that even animals are better by comparison.
If so, then I’d like to point out some of the distortions in David Burns’ languague.
-All or nothing thinking (It’s the animal or us–no shades of gray)
-Overgeneralization (ALL humans are bad and deserve what they get for doing bad things to animals and their environments)
-Discounting the positive (How about the humans that are working toward a solution as we write these posts? They exist too.)
-Fortune-telling (Are you making a prediction without sufficient evidence?–That’s Burns’ explanation of the concept, but I think it applies here)
-Magnification (Are you blowing the importance of the tigers (or other endangered species) out of proportion?)
-Emotional reasoning (Is this fueled by anger more than reason?)
-“Should” statements (Is there a rule about how people “should” be behaving in the mix?)
One good thing about the “anal-retentive life-suckers” in GD is that they generally define their issue and then try to do what David Burns calls “untwisting distorted thinking” by “examining the evidence.” It helps to first define the issue and then see both sides of the issue to do this. If in your description of people who post in GD, you mean “life” to mean diffuse anger that has no focus, I’d like more of that sucked away.
Now, if you’re not doing this, and all your OP is about is: “IF humans beings manage to make every other living thing on the planet go extinct, then we’re the ones who truly deserve to be extinct.” Then what’s to disagree about. That’s like saying, IF a group of humans get in to a nuclear war and send nuclear bombs to another country, then they deserve to get bombed back. The only quibble could be about the word deserve, but other than that, it’s pretty much cause and effect.
Now, I don’t have anything against rants that are just venting diffuse anger, but your OP seemed to be disguised as an environmental or conservation issue. If you’re not trying to protect anything or offer any solutions, it couldn’t be that. And that seems a little insulting to the real environmentalists or conservationists or others that really are trying to protect something and are offering solutions to do it.
But why should mankind have the responsibility of stewardship? In fact, why is stewardship mandated, or even warrented?
There has been no steward on this world for it’s entire 4.6 billion years and it has gotten along just fine, despite numberous ecological catastrophes far worse than anything we have done. Life continues to progress and advance at an ever increasing rate. Evolution, you see, likes change. It kills off the old species and allows newer, more innovative and advanced species to emerge.
You say that it is because we are a thinking species, but I don’t think that mandates anything. As a thinking species, we can just as easily realize that trying to press the evolutionary pause button is not only futile but also undesirable. If someone had it done so in, say, the lower Tertiary Period, then there would be no tigers to begin with. But luckily, life continued through Cenozoic Era and we now have tigers, if only for a little while. As the Holocene progresses, something will come along to replace the tigers, just give it a couple million years.
We have 5 billion years left before the sun goes red giant. That’s more than we have had up until now. Tigers, like it or not, will become extinct long before then, does the mechanism really matter?
As Lemur said, no it won’t. This was conventional wisdom in the 70s with “Small is Beautiful” and all that, but it doesn’t hold water anymore.
As to whether I would kill a tiger or a whole Indian village, I can’t say, because I’ve never had either. I’m inclined to think the village would taste better, but I’d get full long before I could eat them all. That seems wasteful, so I’d probably kill the tiger. Everything in moderation.
I missed this one the first time around:
Malthus has been debunked a long time ago, though I note that he only advocated restriction on breeding on the lower classes.
Excellent points. This is indeed a complicated issue.
Here’s where I disagree with you. Raising all third-world countries and citizens to our over-consuming standards will not be a good thing. The good thing would be over-consuming G7 nations reducing our consumption, but we all know that isn’t going to happen. Are the third-world countries going to follow our sterling example of distribution of riches? They won’t be much better off overall with our North American model than they are now in their current economic model. They’ll be trading one set of problems for another.
Heffalump, your post is an excellent example of why I stay away from GD. You didn’t say anything wrong, but your post is like a lump of concrete thumped down into a lively discussion. There’s clear, precise thinking and communicating, and then there’s pedantry.
It can be debated if the world could handle every country living on the same level as the U.S. currently does. Certainly oil would vanish a lot quicker than it does right now. But there are some other factors:
Japan’s re-forrestation process has been quite succesful. Around three quarters of the country is forrested, I think they have pollution fairly in check and the population growth have leveled out. I’m confident it’ll happen in China, India and S. Korea too, and not in a distant future. Global corporations will then need to find new places to produce cheaply. Hopefully Africa will be the place. If I read statistics right, Tanzania gets over 90 % of it’s energy production from burning waste and “renewables”. It seems to me that the Tanzanians, and the nature in the country, could benefit from getting more developed. 80 % of the workforce is in agriculture, but only 4 % of the country is areable.
I take this to mean that they grow what they can in their backyard, have some livestock if possible, and burn garbage and wood to cook their meals. The country is a mess, with a current life expectancy at birth at around 45 years. Distibuting comdoms is not gonna help Tanzania.
If Latin America, Africa, and quite a few Asian countries followed our example, they would have more equitable distributions of wealth than they do now.
Oh, you were talking about otters. I can’t argue with you there.
Hmm, upon reading the OP in this thread I have discovered something about myself:
If I had a forced choice between destroying the human race, or destroying every other form of life on the planet (assuming there was somehow a guarantee that the human race would continue to exist and thrive just exactly to the extent it would have absent the destruction of all other life), I’d destroy all non-human life on the planet earth.
I would do it even if I myself were guaranteed to die either way.
I do think the existence of the human race is more worthy of preservation than the existence of all other life in general.
I’m completely suprised by this. Had you asked me yesterday and had I shot out an answer without thinking, I’d have said “sure, destroy the human race, no doubt.”
-FrL-
That is interesting - did you meet the woman of your dreams last night or something? 