Humanity: Living with nature and not causing global ecosystem crisis for thousands of years.
Capitalism: Starts the industrial revolution and the need for eternal Exponential growth, resulting in massive environmental destruction over the last ~250 years.
“Clearly, the humans are the problem.”
I think you vastly underestimate exactly how much impact humans had on the enrollment environment all the way back to the stone age.
Any animal causes changes to an ecosystem. The bigger the numbers, the bigger the changes. In general, it never reaches crisis because something else comes along and shifts things into balance.
But the current crisis wasn’t, and isn’t, solely caused by the industrial revolution. We caused issues with megafauna waaaaaaay back. We shifted waterways and changed ecosystems during the earliest agricultural development. Everything today is stacked up on top of that, not some kind of distinct thing.
Our distant ancestors weren’t some kind of noble and mystical race, perfectly balanced with all around them.
Capitalism wasn’t even around as a distinct system back when we first started dumping pollutants and waste into the world. Money wasn’t always in place.
The industrial revolution changed the scale, but it would have happened without capitalism because us monkeys have always refined our tools and technology over generations. Stone, bronze, iron, steam, petroleum, silicon, it’s a progression that was damn near inevitable.
I just don’t buy the idea that human ingenuity and technological progress would have just stopped when factories were imagined and built. Best case, maybe it would have been slower, more careful under something like an anarchist structure (or lack thereof). But there’s nothing saying it wouldn’t have been worse either. It’s a big game of what if, and there’s no current way to test technological progression theories. We can’t just set up an experiment somehow on mars and let it play out while preventing capitalism to see what happens.
Shit, there were non capitalist systems in place during the industrial revolution, and they didn’t exactly reject it all.
Humanity: Living with nature and not causing global ecosystem crisis for thousands of years. Capitalism: Starts the industrial revolution and the need for eternal Exponential growth, resulting in massive environmental destruction over the last ~250 years. “Clearly, the humans are the problem.”
I think you vastly underestimate exactly how much impact humans had on the enrollment environment all the way back to the stone age.
Any animal causes changes to an ecosystem. The bigger the numbers, the bigger the changes. In general, it never reaches crisis because something else comes along and shifts things into balance.
But the current crisis wasn’t, and isn’t, solely caused by the industrial revolution. We caused issues with megafauna waaaaaaay back. We shifted waterways and changed ecosystems during the earliest agricultural development. Everything today is stacked up on top of that, not some kind of distinct thing.
Our distant ancestors weren’t some kind of noble and mystical race, perfectly balanced with all around them.
Capitalism wasn’t even around as a distinct system back when we first started dumping pollutants and waste into the world. Money wasn’t always in place.
The industrial revolution changed the scale, but it would have happened without capitalism because us monkeys have always refined our tools and technology over generations. Stone, bronze, iron, steam, petroleum, silicon, it’s a progression that was damn near inevitable.
I just don’t buy the idea that human ingenuity and technological progress would have just stopped when factories were imagined and built. Best case, maybe it would have been slower, more careful under something like an anarchist structure (or lack thereof). But there’s nothing saying it wouldn’t have been worse either. It’s a big game of what if, and there’s no current way to test technological progression theories. We can’t just set up an experiment somehow on mars and let it play out while preventing capitalism to see what happens.
Shit, there were non capitalist systems in place during the industrial revolution, and they didn’t exactly reject it all.
The good old slavery and crusade days.