idk the author
Always lovely when we take extremely complicated problems and conclude “it’s simple, we kill my favorite pet peeve”
Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet.
You’re doing the thing
It’s also incorrect, since many forms of human communities have existed which did live in an equilibrium with the environment… You know, until we expropriated and killed them to accumulate more resources for capitalism
People have been conquering, subjugating, and colonizing for wealth long before capitalism.
yes. Just replace Human or Human Being with Capitalism and Smiths observation holds true :)
Its a great movie quote, but I always found it a bit grating used outside that context, because, well, other animals dont instinctively develop some natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment.
Its not like a wolf will realize that they’ve been reproducing too much for the local population of prey animals and decide to have fewer cubs, or actively avoid certain prey species that have declining numbers compared to the rest, if theres too many to support the excess ones will simply starve, or wander off in search of prey. The rabbits wont decide to reproduce less if something happens to the local predator population, they simply overeat their food supply until their numbers collapse back down or their abundance causes the number of predators to rise.
The equilibrium is a product of every species acting in a way that would upset that balance if they were not all in competition with eachother, and it is only stable over relatively short periods of time, in the long run it changes under pressure from geological and climactic shifts, evolutionary adaptation, etc. All humans have done, is evolve an adaptation that is too disruptive for this process to look the way it normally does. (namely enough intelligence and aptitude for tool use to effectively adapt to different conditions much faster than the time it would take for anything slower breeding than perhaps a single celled organism to evolve a counter for).
Id be willing to bet that, if you gave any other animal a set of traits that effectively allowed them to adapt to things much faster than the pace of natural evolution, you would get similar disruption.
What’s more, such an equilibrium will eventually come back. If humans manage to destroy our natural life support system enough to go extinct? Then it will return as whatever survives our mass-extinction event fills empty niches and carries on as it has. If humans do survive but manage to make large scale civilization impossible and must revert to low tech subsistence hunter-gathering? Then they would be subject to the same growth constraints and competition as other large omnivores. If humans develop technology and infrastructure that allows for high tech industrial civilization to exist with a generally sustainable resource cycle, that doesnt disrupt the surrounding ecosystem anymore? Then that surrounding ecosystem is no longer subject to our disruption. If humans develop technology and infrastructure that just replaces by brute force the natural systems that we rely on, so as to no longer need them to survive, and continue on until the whole natural ecosystem is gone? Then as humans and their pets, crops, livestock, parasites etc would represent the whole of life remaining on earth, that built environment would be the environment, and as it would have to have been made generally self-sufficient and stable to get to that point, it would still represent a stable ecological state, if a very different and less diverse one than what exists now.
That doesnt mean that things wont change anymore once a stable state is reached, even stable environments in nature are not permanent, but humans cant logically continue to diminish a finite natural environment forever. Eventually humans will stop doing that, there wont be any humans to do it, or there wont be a natural environment left to do it to. In that sense, we can be viewed the same as any other disruption caused by any other organism, we’ve just created a much bigger shock than usual and the process of finding a stable state is still ongoing.
I would like to give you kudos for this superb dismantling.
Is ecofascism a real ideology? I’ve never run into a single adherent.
Few fascists call themselves fascists. But ecofascism is mostly used as a descriptor for policies and policy priorities that are genocidal in the name of ecology, even though the proponents may be non-fascist in other areas.
For example, a neoliberal legislator may cut foreign aid because it’s going to industries that emit carbon, while simultaneously cutting public transit funding to promote driving. Or a neoconservative may increase the funding for border police by a massive amount because climate change will lead to an increasing number of climate refugees.
have you ever heard of the tragedy of the commons? because it was coined by an ecofascist and has inserted itself deep into economic theory. ecofascists are few, just like all fascists, but their ability to ply power allows them to influence world decisions by seeming reasonable while they murder, kill, and disrupt
Idk I’m leaning towards the idea that it’s mathematically inevitable.
No matter what societal structure you have, if your ultimate goal is to become type 3 civilization, you want to grow efficiently with scale. The only way to do this is by using templates/cookie cutters/removing individuality/ authoritarian. This inevitably leads to ignoring natural habitats and laying out your mass-produced factory lines.
Also because of entropy, this kind of system will inevitably be destroyed. And power vacuum, new faction swarm in, the cycle repeats.
Life is just an entropy machine created by entropy after all…
Humans are inherently adaptive to their environment. Our bodies obviously change, but so do our minds. Our habits, our emotional responses, our beliefs of what is possible and what is necessary, all change depending on how we grew up and the world we see around us. It takes a lifetime to unlearn all the harmful lessons of a fucked up youth, and almost everyone has had a youth fucked up to be burdened with plenty of traumas to pass on to the next generation. And that’s on top of all the pain that the natural world can bring.
Humans are the dumbest possible species capable of doing science well enough to reach escape velocity from the physical limits of the ecological niche they evolved to occupy, but we’re also the only species, seemingly in the nearest billion light years. We’re the best shot this part of the universe has at bringing peace and joy to the natural world, including ourselves. And we are getting better at it, slowly and with many setbacks. There have been countless plagues and extinction events in the history of our world that have caused tremendous damage to the ecosystem, and we’re the first to try to mitigate itself.
If we manage to change fast enough to mitigate most of the crisis we are creating, we will build a better world than could have ever have been without us. A world where mammals live unburdened by parasites and parasites live unburdened by mammal immune systems. A world where people grow strong and healthy and loving and open and connected and sharply intelligent because our environments help us grow into our best selves. Food forests, friendships, peace and prosperity and labors of love.
We already know it is possible. We already know we could belong there. We all dream of such a world no matter how strangely contorted our sense of how to get there has become. We just have to keep building our social structures to get ahead of our technological power.
Who invented capitalism again?
Captain Capital.
I wonder which humans are the virus 🤔
