This is literal blood and soil shit and tells you a lot about where liberal environmentalism comes from.
Ensuring a clean environment is not a matter of appeasing some nature god or attaining some idealized balance with the unvierse, but a pragmatic matter of survival. It makes no sense to dump toxic waste in rivers, and maybe we should ask ourselves why we're producing so much toxic waste in the first place. The planet itself though is nothing special, just a ball of dirt with life crawling all over it. There is no planet-mind, that shit comes straight out of idealist philosophy and the ideology of slavery.
Jordan Kelly
Saying the planet is nothing special is like saying your home or family is nothing special.
As you said, it doesn't make sense dumping toxic waste in rivers, but that is beyond the pragmatic matter of survival of humans on earth.
Believe whatever you want to believe about the planet, but I happen to think there's a good reason for caring about the only place you and everyone else is destined to live and die, unless you count the steel floor of a space station in orbit.
Aiden Morris
The primary reason we don't pour toxic waste in rivers is because that water supply comes back to our bodies and kills us, or makes the environment unlivable in the long term. It's not because the river spirit needs to be appeased, or out of some idealist notion of preserving the holy balance of nature.
If we really wanted to appease the balance of nature, we'd kill every human, and indeed all life on earth, because the natural tendency of life is to exhaust itself and annihilate itself. That's what life is, if we're going to rely on some appeal to nature argument. This is a completely valid argument to make, kill all life now to prevent untold generations of suffering, but if you point out this obvious conclusion from the dominant logic of today, you're ostracized and declared insane, even though the ruling class shows open disdain for the people it rules over, openly regarding them as a disease to be exterminated. Of course, the ruling class themselves, and their middle class functionaries to an extent, are exempted, and are able to buy indulgences (which is what carbon tax credits are, the scientist equivalent of the Church selling indulgences).
Christian Sullivan
First. It is not pragmatic for anyone to dump toxic waste into rivers. That is something we can both agree on.
Second. The real issue here is you and other supposedly unironic "eco-fascists" seem to think that humanity is something outside of nature when it is a fundamental part of nature. You say to kill all life and yet make distinctions between the ruling classes and middle class, and compare carbon tax credits to church indulgences which shows laziness and incoherency in your philosophy.
Humanity is part of nature, and extermination of life by itself is an affront to nature.
Jaxson Bennett
I'm calling THEM eco-fascists, dolt. I fucking hate eco-fascism and think it's adherents should all be dragged out and shot, which is likely more than you're going to do to any fascist.
I never denied humanity was a part of nature, only that enshrining "the state of nature" as some holy of holies is ridiculous and complete ruling-class garbage. The Green movement relies on such religious ideology.
My argument in second paragraph is basically to illustrate the futility of these "appeal to nature" arguments, because in the end we all die and the universe reaches a heat death, and there is nothing that can be done about it. Any argument to tell us how we should live that is rooted in nature as an end unto itself, or man as an end unto himself, is fatally flawed from the start and should be thrown out. Ultimately, we have to ask ourselves what we want to do with our lives, and how we want to cooperate with each other, rather than engaging in some faggotry about how our way of life is in accord with nature as the eco-fascists want.
The middle class - that is, the educated strata of workers that are legally and psychologically separated from the pool of unskilled labor - is not the ruling class under capitalism, but is necessarily dependent on ruling class institutions and ruling class ideology of some sort. These people do not want a "workers revolution" of any sort, and the lower classes have no reason whatsoever to trust them, because the middle class has always abused the lower class and sold them out for cheap political privileges every single time in developed capitalist societies.
Elijah Sullivan
First, I can agree that the state of nature concept is specious. But that doesn't preclude a nature which always has state.
In your appeal to nature, you say everytthing is futile because we die and the universe will end in the future, but what is the alternative?
Cooperating with eachother is nice, but only attenable on the long-term when there is some shared vision, but what shared vision is there if it's nothingness? Unless we believe what we are doing is in accord with nature, nature being a catch-all term for the shared present, then there is no reason for any cooperation outside of meaningless short-term goals.
In your last part: previously you made reference to a middle class and a ruling class, but now you assimilate them again into the boug vs the proles and that they don't want to a workers revolution, but what is your point exactly?
Julian Ross
As a collective, though, fucking with the environment will eventually fuck over humanity if the wrong set of feedback loops happens. this can happen without humanity doing anything like from cosmic events or events inherent to geological processes but humanity is a factor here
Sebastian Nelson
"Legally and psychologically separated" quite explicitly means that the middle class and the "working class" are quite different classes with quite different goals and mindsets. No unity is possible between the middle class of educated workers and the lower classes of uneducated workers (in their own various strata) and the unemployable. The middle class goes along with ruling class beliefs about environmentalism because it serves their class interest, the suppression of the low, would do so with little prompting from capitalists, and the middle class itself has been often at the forefront of this brand of environmentalism (they want reforms that the capitalists don't want, because such reforms would hamper profits). The lower class worker or unemployable hears (if they understand things correctly) that environmentalism declares that their very existence is itself the environmental problem, and that no austerity will ever be enough. Indeed, the middle class rails hardest against the lowest of the low, even though their carbon footprint is often far less than the middle class, since the lowest of the low don't even have cars any more, and many are skipping meals and going on meatless days. I know I have skipped meals and cut my meat intake considerably, because it's cheaper.
ALL goals are meaningless in any objective sense. There is no purpose to life, and trying to read a purpose into nature is just ruling class mythology at its worst. It's up to you to make a good argument for cooperation instead of the senseless Social Darwinism that defines the present order. Beating people over the head with biological imperatives or the law of nature or the notion of humanism doesn't work, and the latter of these has visibly and obviously failed for the past 50 years in a big way. I take it as a given that most people like living, and that they have no reason to end their life because some other asshole declares that Nature's order demands it. Savage competition for the sake of competition doesn't serve that purpose, as human history and prehistory certainly demonstrate, and thus - regardless of whatever natural tendencies humans may have - we must cooperate, build tribes and eventually civilizations. Co-operation thus is probably a natural human tendency and a tendency of intelligent life that can recognize the problem of competition for competition's sake, but it is not a given nor is there some Spirit of Man that will compel humans to come together.
Ok, so your point is that the middle class hates the poor, the poor has no horse in the game, and the middle class will work against the rich and the poor for the environment's sake. I can't say that's wrong, but I have to ask: what is the degree of difference between the middle and rich vs the middle and poor?
In your second point, you seem to be against any sort of Spirit or soul, and thats understandable, but if everything is strictly about survival and the failure of humanism, then what you do you have to say about the fact that we are communicating via electrical signals from hundreds, perhaps thousands of miles away about the rights of the Earth and it's inhabitants?
