Environmentalism: households and industry

This is when you know moral nihilists are more of a danger to socialism than it is to anything else. EVERYTHING is spooks to you people, fuck off.

One of the central tenets of environmentalism - less so than reducing waste - is that the "environment" - and by extension nature - somehow needs to be "preserved".
That there is some inherent worth that "nature" possesses that is somehow separate from it's immediate utility to human beings. It's crypto-religious idealism, and runs contrary to both revolutionary intentions of socialism - that is, overcoming the present state of things - and a materialist understanding of the world and our role in it.

Uh. No.

This is exactly the sort of ideology at the heart of reactionary bourgeois ideology. No no, if we change anything all hell will break lose!
In reality, the "environment" was already being radically altered thousands of years ago, and humanity thrived not just regardless of it, but because it altered it's environment, and thus entered history.
Read PDF related to see how humanity has altered the world since the dawn of history, and we haven't somehow gone extinct because of it.

You talk about socialism, but all I see is bourgeois reactionary ideology.
Read Rafiq. Or that link I posted earlier.

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Lol

Don't destroy the things that produce oxygen, though.

Next you'll post some Zizek and more Stirner memes and continue justifying why you're an ignorant cunt.

Only because like capitalism itself we've been pillaging nature non-stop so we keep growing and ignoring the effects it has on non-'civilized' creatures like us.

Humanity did not have any power to seriously alter the world until the industrial revolution. Prior to that the most they did was drive European cave lions to extinction and build cities, the effect of which was negligible on the environment because of how primitive it was.

Come industrialization we've produced massive amounts of pollution, thinning our atmosphere and exposing us to cancerous rays of the sun, we've poisoned the fish in many areas making them dangerous to eat in large amounts (poison such as mercury or pesticides accumulates in the body passively of smaller animals, but if we eat to many of them we get massive doses). Not to mention eradicating massive swathes of forest that will take an entire century to even begin recovery on its own.

This ignores the possibility of nuclear war; It took a while for Hiroshima to recover and those bombs are tiny compared to regular nuclear warheads of today and how easy it would be to upgrade them to cobalt cased bombs

We have survived through sheer dumb luck and greedily ignorant consumption.

At this point we've strained ALL the earths easily available resources and polluted every environment known to mankind. The effects on humanity are visible.

E-waste like this: youtube.com/watch?v=yUCoToorc9M
is everywhere. The water is rising, the environment is dying and humanity has started to as well, we shouldn't have to wait for it to start really rolling to act, because by that point we'll have lost.

This thread convinced me eco-posadist gang is right

eco stalinism has already been tried.

the result: the aral sea no longer exists and egregious pollution and environmental destruction kek

the problem is that there are unintended consequences to destroying ecosystems and environments. it's not just a matter of crude arithmetic.

it's called precaution. there are unintended consequences to destroying species and ecosystems in which they inhabit.

all that said i agree with you. we already killed off the megafauna and almost every part of our planet has been altered in some way by humans in the last 2000 years to the extent that nothing we see is "organic" result of millions of years of evolution

Yes and before Khrushchev it was massively successful:
ng.ru/science/2008-11-26/14_forests.html

"Moscow has also the most scientific garbage disposal in the world. All the waste of this great city of more than 4,000,000 people is first used in "biothermal processes" which heat large "greenhouse farms" from underground. When the garbage and sewage is thoroughly rotted in this quite odorless manner, it is then used as a fertilizer for ordinary farming." - Anna Louise Strong reported in 1942
This was dismantled under Yeltsin and Putin and the residents of these areas are rioting right now.

False, the Aral Sea was fine even in 1989, The effects of water depletion were noticed by the USSR in the 70s (following a review of Khrushchevite idiocy) and a plan made to counter it. It was successful enough to prevent any further drying up of the sea, however Gorbachev cancelled it and Yeltsin ignored it leaving the Aral Sea to destruction. Nothing to do with the USSR at that point.

False. Humanity was hardly the sole factor of driving megafauna to extinction, that was environmental changes, the end of the ice-age which made their big, bulky forms disadvantageous in the new environments formed. That was natural and at that point in time humans were still part of nature. There was not civilization or real social structure much more advanced than what can be seen in animals. Island animals often did not react to humans negatively up until the 18th and 19th centuries because they were isolated from humans all this time. The sam thing goes for Australia, where evolution progressed on its own and the aborigines that were there had minimal impact as they were a part of nature.
I never thought I'd say this but read some anarcho-primitivist literature. We only began detaching ourselves from nature in the neolithic era. We only began to have a serious effect on the environment from the late medieval age and onwards.

This. A majority of the damage and the most devastating damage to the Aral sea was done after the USSR's destruction in the 90s when the capitalist governments of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan intensified the exploitation of the Aral sea in the interest of for-profit agriculture.

Except this has been going on since before capitalism established itself as the dominant mode of production.
Ancient civilizations drained wetlands, and build (irrigation) canals, cut down and burned forests, hunted megafauna to extinction, etc. Humanity - in it's 'historical phase - has never lived in "harmony" with "nature".
And why does this matter? What's so important about the experience of non-humans that that needs to protected and preserved?
Except as the link and PDF showed, this simply isn't true. Humanity has always altered it's environment. The first laws dealing with the protection of the commons emerged in the medieval period and earlier. (At least in Europe)
The ancients did much more than that. From irrigation (canals) dug in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Indus valley and China, to the clear cutting of forests in North Africa and the rest of the Mediterranean. Or the destruction of forests in pre-Columbian America, and Australia. Humanity was already altering biomes before the late medieval period. (When capitalism really kicked into gear)
True. But these concerns matter because they affect human beings. If we can't breath the air, eat fish, or go outside without increased risk of skin cancer, that's something that affects us personally. It's something that matters to our own subjective experience of the world.
In comparison, we're not going to die - on it self - because some forest was cut down or because some far off species like the Dodo went extinct. Life goes on as usual, and in fact - it's our altering of the environment - that produces all the necessities we need to enjoy life.
Everything from air pollution, to rising sea levels and temperatures, to the destruction of the ozone layer can be resolved without reducing "nature" to some sacred mystic "thing".
It wasn't dumb luck. It was through conscious collective effort. It's exactly what separates us from mere "animals." In that we actively participate in and forge our own history. We don't just exist in the moment - going wherever the current flows. We can actually actively analyze, and predict the world around us. And make decissions based on that.
Read Engels Dialectics of Nature
Again, this is something that matters because it personally affects us, and likewise, it's something we can address.

No it hasn't.

The Megafauna one is a retarded argument from the get go you ignoramus, I explained how we were not a major factor in their deaths and frankly at that point in history we were just another animal in nature, just slightly smarter than the other apes.

Draining wetlands and building irrigation was never on the scale of things like Lake Mead and relied on natures abilities anyhow. In all ancient cultures that did this: Egypt, Mesopotamia, Indus Valley, Rome etc. they relied on the river and were very careful to be respectful as they themselves were not arrogant enough to think they had power over nature.

Everything alters something. The alterations caused by Humanity prior to the late Medieval era were a pin-prick on the face of the earth. The late Medieval era and the renaissance spurred the development of advances in civilizations: guns and cannons, astrolabs, octants, watches, religious revisionism and most importantly the growing power of merchants and thus the predecessors of capitalism. Even then humanities effects were not powerful enough to significantly change nature. A stone in a river may move teh currents a bit, but does not effect the river over-all. In the industrial and following eras we became a boulder in the river, and THAT is when we can say that we had a definite impact.

However let us assume you are correct. 2000 years is nothing to evolution. Evolution is a process that takes more than 2000 years, or do you think whales just hopped into the water, lost their legs and became whales in 100 years?

North Africa was already in the middle of desertification when that ocurred, we did not cause this, we merely hurried it along. You keep repeating about irrigation and the likes but as I said its very minuscule compared to natural geological changes like Isostatic rebound.

No they don't. Humans are not isolated from nature, What truly benefits us should benefit nature and vice-versa.

Because the earth is not here to serve us, we have no moral superiority to do as we please and destroy other living beings. Do we have the means to? Sure, but to quote Ian Malcolm, We are "so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should."

shodor.org/ncssm/elc/content/attachments/EnvironmentalEthics-Hill.pdf

NO you absolute tard. Why do we care about some African child? Because we cherish their right to be human beings who deserve to live decently. This applies to animals. However since you seem to lack that part of human understanding here's a different thread of logic: If all animals were to vanish tomorrow we'd be soon to follow; We need nature, nature does not need us.

You can do that without destroying nature.

How vulgarly ignorant of you. To respect and cherish nature is not making it into anything mystic.

“Man is the most insane species. He worships an invisible God and destroys a visible Nature. Unaware that this Nature he’s destroying is this God he’s worshiping.” ― Hubert Reeves

Bootstraps.jpg

False. There are a myriad of creatures of near-human intelligence and the reason they are'nt civilized is because they don't need to be. Humanity had a good chance of ending up another intelligent species that didn't go anywhere but just exists. We were lucky that a few situational things in nature gave us the stepping stones to progress up from using simple tools and making more complex ones, making fire and developing more advanced culture. Nature has continually handed us advantages on a platter, the most important being our endurance. We only survived this long because we're durable enough to get through all the stupid shit we do and learn.

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Got any facts to back that up?

In the 1960s, Soviet researchers predicted the complete evaporation of the body of water, and a river used to irrigate farmland had the excess water siphoned into the lake. This was, however, expensive, and during the privitisations (and subsequent economic catastrophe) of the 1980s, the plan was abandoned. After Kazakhstan seceded, ultra-intensive cotton farming practices and infrastructure mismanagement (most water running through irrigation to the farms evaporated on the way there) accelerated the shrinkage. Most of the former Aral Sea is a desert.

This is literally information that can be acquired by a decent 30 minute search on the internet.

Part 1

The point is not that pre-capitalist ancients altered the world at the same scale and rate as today. It's that humanity has always altered it's immediate environment.

Contrary to fantasies of ancient peoples and noble savages living in harmony with nature, they instead devastated their local environments. See the Romans, Aborigines or the Mayas.
You can argue this didn't happen on the same scale as today, but that's not the point.
As humanity has expanded across the globe, our perception of the environment has expanded with it, as has the area that we now have some sort of influence over. But in that area humanity has always altered it's environment, and subjected it to it's own needs.
Not is it just the destruction of forests or extinction of species.
You mentioned rivers, but then forget to include those ended up being filled with sludge and sewage. Dams and drift nets would stop schools of migrating fish, and diminish their numbers. And before long species that were once the staple of the poor were only reserved for kings, and merchants set off for the new world to repeat the process.
Point is: There were no harmonious noble savages that "preserved" their "environment"
Even those ancients aimed to force nature to their will. Either by diverting rivers or reshaping biomes.

Even pre-industrial aborigines altered Australia's monsoons. The anthropocene didn't begin in the 15th or 18th centuries. It was already in motion ten-thousand years ago.

Evolution is not the point here. Unless you're concerned about our ability to adapt to changing environments, in which case we're doing just fine.
Sure. But deforestation made it worse. That's the point. Even with limited numbers, and primitive means, people were altering the biosphere thousands of years ago.
Except while we rely on nature, we're not one and the same. And how is it that when humans aren't isolated from nature, the triumph of civilization can somehow not be a triumph nature? Other animals too exploit their environments. Humanity as a species has just excelled at it more than others.
Throughout the history of this planet one form of life has given way to another. Anaerobic life gave way to aerobic life. Single-celled organisms to eukaryotes. Reptilian megafauna to mammals. Each evolutionary leap accompanied by planet-wide mass extinctions.
Earth is but changing once again, as it always has.
To you perhaps. But tell me, what innate worth does Earth have other than as a way to fulfill our own needs and desires?
We don't need it in the first place.
I've read it, and the central argument here is that "not caring" about the "environment" is - on itself - somehow "scary", and indicative of people lacking virtue in some manner. Caring about immediate utility is somehow too "vulgar".
It's the same sort of reactionary pathology underlying the opposition to communism. If you want to change something, you're evil. Or Only people bereft of virtue would want to alter the present state of things. We must remain in awe and humbled by the status quo.
Sure it's insightful in a way. But it's still just sentimentalism and idealism.

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Part 2
Thing is. I don't. It's not about believing human beings have some innate "worth." It's about realizing that your class interests coincide, and that you need each other to overcome exploitation.
Class struggle isn't about sentimentality, it's about rational self-interest. Not just that, but the exploited worker abroad is actually able - if the organization is in place - to aid you in the same struggle.
It's this was separates a fellow exploited prole from a dolphin or Koko the Gorilla.
A mere animal will never aid you in the class struggle from a position of understanding of it's own role in history.

Sure. But that doesn't change how nature is useful to us as a tool and a resource. And it's that which determines it's utility to us.
You really can't. The struggle to overcome capitalism, essences and the shackles of biology inevitably overflows into a conquest of the natural force that bind us.
Overcoming (or adapting to) climate change is going to require us to alter, and thus destroy the present state of things. Without our ravenous exploitation of the Earth, we wouldn't even have a chance at getting off this rock.
It is. Nature doesn't need to be "respected". It's not some god or eldritch force that will punish us for our sins.
Except conscious collective effort is the opposite of bootstraps and the "great man" theory of history. Historical materialism asserts that the development of mankind is the result of underlying processes, shaped by the conscious efforts of millions and billions of individuals acting in concert.
They may be relatively intelligent. But will I ever have an intellectually stimulating conversation with them? Will they ever aid the working class in overthrowing the yoke of capital?
No.
Contrary to your misanthropic view, humanity is Earth's most successful species. And it's the only one in a position to spread life to other worlds.

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LOL
That's not the subject of argument here, you're just wiggling at this point.
There is no fantasies there are facts. Compare Native Americans to the Colonists. The Native Americans are very similar to early human kind in terms of their life-style. They only hunted what they needed and often had small rituals (too religious for me but its an example) where they would apologize for taking their prey's life. They respected nature but also used it. That behaviour is visible in the archaeological remains of many such early human societies, From the more advanced Incas to the hunter-gatherer tribes living in the caves of Western Europe. The rest is just more of the same dogma, next.

In modern day, not then m8. It's like you're just saying big words to sound smarter.

No they didn't, at this point you're just being an idiot. To control weather and climate requires things like cloud-seeding and other technology that is only available today and even then to the government.

you truly are a psuedo intellectual. Anyone who has spent at the very least 1 semester of environmental science knows better than to blab about the Anthropocene like its a set fact, the way you are.
The term Anthropocene isn't even fully accepted as a term. We are living in the Holocene until science says otherwise.
Ad hominum aside, let me tell you why you're wrong. According to almost all interpretations of the anthrocene, it started at the very least in the A.D. of history. With many people suggesting the starting point to be… wait for it…. THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
geosociety.org/gsatoday/archive/18/2/pdf/i1052-5173-18-2-4.pdf

It is. You claimed that from 2000 years and onward nature has been directly affected by man, this includes evolution. Yet within the past 2000 years human power has not affected much of anything until the last couple centuries.

No. God you're so stuck up in human superiority that you can't see whats plain as can be. If you push over an already falling tree, you aren't the reason it fell were you?

What are you even saying at this point.
Other animals either have natural counter-balances or are intelligent enough to be mindful. We ought to be the latter, but are not.

One form of LIFE, BIOLOGICALLY. Civilization is not a form of biological life, it is a rationale of human development. By your own logic, civilization is a spook, because all it is, is a social construct, created in human minds based on rational agreements.

Reptilian megafauna going extinct was an extra-natural even that was caused by the crippling blow of the K-T event. The large reptiles in the following Cenzoic period had nowhere near the same domination of the prior period and thus subsided.

What leap are we seeing exactly? These mass-extinctions were caused by natural events. We stopped being natural when we stopped being dictated by nature and instead began openly defying it; 16th century onward.
This is not a mass-extinction, it is a genocide of living beings who do not have the power to defend their rights. For someone bitching about capitalist spooks your dogma is capitalist.

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You don't know that, for all we know some Dinosaurs could've ditched their loser brothers before the asteroid happened.

You are a capitalist in denial. Desires are a spook, and needs can be met without having to tear and destroy. The needs of human kind are no more important the needs of any other animal, if anything ours is far less important in the over-all view of things. Even the needs of ants would be more important to Earth's health, than ours, because Ants benefit the earth as much as they benefit themselves.

"Orbiting Earth in the spaceship, I saw how beautiful our planet is. People, let us preserve and increase this beauty, not destroy it!" -Yuri Gagarin

[X] Doubt

No, that's not the argument at all.

Because there is more to life than pure utility. Nature is not a tool to be manipulated. It is its own living breathing collection of beings with every right to be treated with care.

No that's not the argument at all you idiot. If anything the reverse is true because you are suggesting that we shouldn't change our destructive relationship with nature.

If anything only people bereft of virtue would be so arrogant, self-centered and obtuse as to resist change. If you're not getting the hint, environmentalism encourages change, it does not stop it.

Said no environmentalist ever, but do keep strawmanning your "fug uthority"esque bullshit.

"muh idealism" It's really ironic that you keep saying I'm reactionary, yet you're spitting out reactionary arguments about idealism and sentimentalism.

You are a literal sociopath, do you understand that? You are spouting literal dystopian levels of bullshit. Human beings are rational agents but more importantly they are living beings that have the ability to feel, think and care. What's the point of living if you don't care about anything but your own shut-off self?
Marx and Engels explicitly reject any notion of equality of outcome or the belief that all people are equal in ability, but they certainly don't dismiss the human factor of having equal rights because we're all human beings.

Key word RATIONAL. You are not rational you are arrogant.

As I explained, ONLY because Humans got lucky in their share of capabilities. This does not mean the animals are worthless and have no right to live. We share this planet with them. They are far more beneficial to this planet than we have been so far, despite our capabilities to create.

No it does not, but to value it solely by that measure is to be a heartless fool. By your logic mentally ill people are only fit for slave labor or disposal because they have no utility.

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You really can. You shit-talk environmentalism without even understanding the arguments made. There are a hundred ways of preserving nature without damaging progress or restricting ourselves. The USSR proved it, the ecological damage it did cause was minimal and only caused at all because people didn't know better. When they did, they righted many of the problems.

This is just twisting the human nature argument to serve your purpose. Human nature has virtues and vices. The point of socialism is to provide a social sphere where the only behaviors left will be those that are necessary. Greed, cowardice and other such vices will be eliminated because they will no longer be necessary to survival. That is intricately linked to environmentalism because by supporting the environment you are doing the right thing by over-coming your own laziness and selfishness and caring for more than your own gains.

That doesn't mean it requires the destruction of nature, in fact it requires the opposite.

Read Kardeshev. The Soviet space program was successful and yet it did not have to exploit nature excessively. Yes mining and industrial factories were required. But not to the point where they eradicated entire ecosystems.

You are pathetic, one does not have to be a god to be respected or cherished.

My bootstraps meme was referring to how "mankind did all by his-self" when you quite clearly ignore Marx. Mankind was dictated by his surroundings for centuries

Sure if you could understand them. Tell me, how intellectual a conversation you could have with a random Indian street beggar without a translator? Not much of one.

So nothing matters but humans, gotcha.

Humanity has existed for less than a million years, its creations may be great but we have nothing to compare ourselves with except our imaginations and our past. We have no idea if there was intelligent life in the millions of years prior because fossils are a small percentage of what the world was actually like back then. Humanity is currently the most powerful species, but it is also the most irresponsible and morally horrid species, because mankind abuses its power and dissipates it into uselessness.

If that is your measure of greatness then I pity you.

Throughout this post you have tried to demean me as reactionary, when in fact you are quite that which you accuse me of. Your dogma is technocratic, not socialist.

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they affected australian environment a lot, it's just hard to measure. we must defend nature against hominid imperialists tbh.

They lived in a hunter-gatherer fashion, and only took what they needed. Their impact was minimal

Detinitely lol

Give me a fucking break.

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EYYYY

Because I owe you a reply

And yet those native Americans helped hunt species to extinction. In Europe mountain lions went extinct. In Australia Giant Moas.
Point is: These "noble savages" that live in perfect harmony with nature are a myth.
So when does this "modern day" begin? Because this was already happening before the 15th century, as the PDF I included shows. In fact, it was instrumental in the conquest of the Americas. Sailors and settlers would travel to New England and the Hudson bay, or create settlements on the banks of the great American rivers, just to get their hands on (by then - in Europe) unprecedented numbers of fish, or timber resources.
By the time of the European discovery of the Americas, Europe was already suffering from pollution and deforestation. Which incentivized colonial exploitation.
For example: Tudor architecture - with its famous timber frames (also common in Europe at the time) - was partially the result of a timber shortage which prevented the construction of full timber houses. Places like Ireland - which were covered almost entirely by ancient forests in Roman times - became almost completely deforested.
See the link below for a general overview. Aboriginal Australians (and other peoples worldwide) were already influencing the biosphere and even rainfall thousands of years ago.
archive.fo/JwMzu
>you truly are a psuedo intellectual. Anyone who has spent at the very least 1 semester of environmental science knows better than to blab about the Anthropocene like its a set fact, the way you are.
Indeed. It's not. But the concept here doesn't revolve around some set time period. It's the mere idea that people can and have influenced the biosphere in the past. To such an extend they've inflicted lasting changes.
There is more to nature than just evolution. Likewise, not all change here translates into immediate genetic feedback.
Except, that was never my point. It isn't that there aren't still processes that are (more) removed from out immediate control, or beyond our current (full) understanding. It's that even people in the past where capable of changing the biosphere.
Humans aren't the only ones that build structures, engage in mutualistic relationships (see ants farming aphids), establish social hierarchies, use tools (great apes & corvids), travel the globe (see everything from migrating birds to ballooning spiders) or even use (rudimentary) language (see dolphins).
Point being: Humans aren't particularly unique in any of this. Other species have been altering the Earth's biosphere for billions of years. Humanity has just exceeded at it more so than others.
In that sense: What is it that separates Human civilization, from let's say, an ant hill? (Outside the whole part where we can actually analyze our own role in it all.) If you're going to mention mass extinctions, then see the next point:
True. But life adapted. Just as it did after the Great Oxygenation Event, or the various glaciations. Though perhaps a better example is the one below:
What about the Great Oxygenation Event? Or the various types of (by then) "primitive" life going extinct at certain times, at the hands of their more adaptable competitors? By extension, that was natural to, wasn't it?
>We stopped being natural when we stopped being dictated by nature and instead began openly defying it; 16th century onward.
That process started far earlier than that. Humanity already stopped being dictated by nature when it moved from merely managing fire to actively creating it. Since then, this change has only accelerated.
Again. This is not the first time that this has happened. We're just aware of our own role in it. The same can not be said about our predecessors.
Except rights are a phantasm. Besides: Who gives and enforces rights? Right. That would be us.

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