Denial of extinction crisis

Nature Talk
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I’ve now read through this dialogue, and I’ve seen it repeatedly touch on the issue of economics, and how it has led to personal problems, global warming, and extinctions. I also believe people will always deny the harm to their world that comes with their lifestyle in this commercial culture.

I spent a number of years analyzing the roots of both, the world’s ecological problems, including, of course, the great extinction rate, and of the problems of abuses of people, from smaller scale abuses, to war, and genocide. I then had what felt like an epiphany when I asked myself, “who do we work for?”. That is who do we give the largest bulk of our life’s service to? I expect most of you can guess the answer I came up with. It was those who control the money that we work for, and those with the money to control the resources we pay for. I then ask “Do those who control the most money care the most about what is good for us, our children, our human community, our natural community, and the future of those communities, or have they always been willing to accept variable amounts degradation of our lives and our children’s lives, the quality of life in our human communities, and the natural wealth (biodiversity), and natural beauty of our natural communities, to maintain, and gain money?" Then when we work for money, and those who control it, have we not also become willing to accept some degree of degradation of everything truly valuable and beautiful, so we can get money? I think most of us take for granted that there will be compromises in how good the things we do for money are for our world. We might not have to get paid to do it, if there were no compromises. I then hear people complaining that people won’t pay them to do good work for their human, and natural community. That is not what the monetary system was designed for. For the thousands of years since we started using the monetary system, we have been working for the degradation of our world.

I also realized that before we worked for money, there were shepherds that, that unlike the aboriginals before them, started to control far more food than they could eat, and treated all of those herd animals as their private property, and the growing herds they controlled overgrazed, and trampled the land, and terribly degraded the natural communities on that land that had fed the aboriginals. The farmers followed, destroying the natural communities more thoroughly, burning down, and plowing the natural community under. These two types of agriculturalists took the future food production of the land away from nature, and from the aboriginals, that had been living in harmony with, and were being fed by, their natural communities, as one more native species in those communities. Slavery started after shepherds started monopolizing control of area food supplies. The monetary system started as tokens for access to food, and then became an abusive system of control of everyone, and everything. Once some people started controlling too much of the food, using this monetary system, they could then pay hungry soldiers to kill for access to food, and governments, and nations, were created by those controlling the money, to control, and ultimately abuse, the land, and everyone, and everything on it. I would argue that any good work of governments is tokenism. Beyond token amounts, I think we are misguided when we expect governments to pay for good work. But we need to remember that the value of monetary units is artificial . It is all faith based. In agreeing to the artificial value of money, we effectively agree to an abuse of everything, and everyone in the world. That said, I know it isn’t so easy to suddenly try to be the first one to not accept its artificial value, after a critical mass of the populace has already learned to withhold their service to their community from those community members not giving money.

Before agriculture and money people lived in relatively small mutualistic groups of people that helped each other, and were contributing members of a mutualistic natural community of all species. After accepting the monetary system we shifted to largely serving those abusing and degrading the natural community, as well as abusing the human community. After this the works of humans began to be defined as “unnatural”.

Many old stories were made up, told, and later written, about beautiful worlds, with names like Eden, or Paradise, before agriculture, the monetary system, and of governments, and nations, and the abuse of our mother nature, and of the human populace that came with them. I say that agriculture was the first step on the road to Hell, and that the monetary system was the biggest step on that road.

So how can we get off this road, and back on a road towards a richer, more beautiful natural community, in which humans can increasingly again be a species that contributes to the the natural wealth, and beauty, rather than serving to degrade it? I believe we can always ask ourselves if our actions are really a greater net benefit to our natural, and human communities, or really a greater net harm. For my last 24 years, I have chosen to make helping with the protection, and regrowth, of the natural community, in the richest (species diverse), most beautiful patch of land within a short bike or bus ride from my apartment, as my escape from my dysfunctional commercial culture, and from my difficulty functioning within it, as my recreation, my therapy, my exercise, my art, and my contribution to my human and natural communities. I do this mostly by thoughtful weeding around native plants that need help to avoid being overwhelmed, and to spread out again, prioritizing plant species that I know will help other community members (with mosses the top group). I also occasionally move local, wild seeds or plants I estimate are missing from, and needed in, the spot I bring them to, and from where they may spread again, as I weed around them. Towards this end I have also been spending this time either studying my local natural community, the identification, and niches of its members, or teaching others about this. It costs little to no money. While I know not everyone can get a disability income and a bit of family help to do this as much as I do, I know everyone can make choices to serve their natural community, and the community of people that love it, more, and feed the beast, serving the blindly abusive hierarchy of money, and those with more of it, less.

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107

I’ve now read the first linked article on this subject of extinction denial, and have to admit my earlier comments were somewhat off topic, but I know I wasn’t the first one. The subject seems to be one of high profile commentators, and congressional testifiers, who are loudly denying that extinctions are happening at a great rate due to the current economic policies of the world, and how to counter them. Instead my commentary was on the roots of the extinction crisis, which I have more or less argued is having any economic system.

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108

I wouldn’t say there was a harmony, but amount of people on Earth when the species evolved were so many times less, so any damage that was done wasn’t so crucial, I won’t blame us that we came to agricultural life, with constant access to meat we could get bigger brains, etc. As any other species we live and want to thrive, we’re not alone in destroying, every species that can get as much place and resources as it can will get them, so I agree with scientists that say that humans just being ordinary living species, but for a reason of intelligance and culture we got what we have now. Money in form of horns, stones to make weapons, etc. were used before Bronse age, it’s in nature of people to not simply give something to another one but to want something back (and it’s not always in a material way). I believe if we could start again it would end in a similar way.

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Trade in horns and stones was limited to the small numbers of those objects we might carry. With the monetary system with nearly unlimited symbolic value, people started controlling armies, leading to greater order of magnitudes of abuse of people and the land. I also disagree with treating those who have controlled the food in agriculture, or the money in the monetary system as “us”. It has always been a hierarchy, with those who controlled the most food and money controlling, and I would argue abusing, those who controlled the least.

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Each person is a person, those people who have power are no different than those who don’t, it’s not a surprise when those who get control after not having it behave even worse than those who had it constantly. I don’t want to build a wall between different people, it never leaded to anything good.

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111

And it was brilliant, thank you for your work in putting it together.

I will bookmark it so I can reproduce it, if I may (with no exchange of money involved:) when I next feel the need to express those observations. I have pondered these things all my life, and only in the last ten years realized how society works, in the manner you describe.

Understanding this saves a lot of energy wasted trying to impact the situation more superficially, eg argument between disciplines, political factions, labour groups, or with land managers who cyclically destroy the results of the token projects and fundings.

I do the same as you, and, having read the morning news, and sent one more email pleading for someone to come and testify to the 100% success of my current 2 year chemical-free restoration weed control project, I thank you and head off to enjoy the indestructible essence of life in the plants despite all going on around them, trying to forget the ongoing destruction of adjacent forest by weed vines and trees, the imminent track-widening and cycle path creation through the forest, and the coming summer, keeping hope alive that it will not be another one of drought.

And trying as always to offer, but not insist on the acceptance of, truthful information, in responding to the appreciative but blissfully ignorant comments of the well-meaning passers-by.

I find your post to be very relevant to the topic of the need to counter mistruths and denial of science.

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Individual people vary immensely. (Edit: Perhaps? )whether they want or gain or keep power, what they do with it, and how it affects them, depends on their individual nature at least as much as their situation in life.

And how much they want to gain or keep power affects how much and what demonstrated truths (science) they are prepared to deny, suppress or actively oppose by influencing others, where that truth threatens their perceived power (which is actually extremely limited, compared to the power of Nature, but they dont know that yet).

So the relevance of Stewart’s assessment, right or wrong in detail, is that by seeing hidden reasons for denial we can perceive mistruths.

Then even if we cant do anything about them we can make sense of our observations of society, such as denial of demonstrable truths.

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113

Thank you so much kaipatiki_naturewatc ! I was afraid someone might think it was too long, but it is what I’ve been working on for years.

You are, of course, welcome to reproduce any of this, as is, or edited as you would! I almost mentioned you in my comments, as the person who I had noted doing much the same as I do, but may not have found the earlier quote of yours to refer to. And like you, to a reasonable degree, I can happily ignore what is going wrong in the world, as I do my therapy of weeding, much like aboriginals must have done their harvesting, and watching natives species that had declined retake a bit of the land vacated as I pulled several weeds away from them. A bit of my work. Here I am pleased to see that we are now getting some rain, after a dry summer, and drier winter than had been normal in Seattle.

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114

People live in hierarchy, and each person would prefer to keep it’s place or get higher, and it just comes to the point that when you have power to keep it you can’t stop, I don’t say it’s good, but it just happens so, to stay in your elite society you need to prove you’re the one who you was a month ago, etc. I don’t say that we should leave it be that way, I just say it’s the natural way of human actions. And we have to take in mind that modern (last few thousands of years in Europe and Middle East) religion separated society from nature, so it’s even harder for people to realise what’s wrong with their actions, human is set higher than anything else in their minds, they take nature as resource.
I’m not talking about denial right now, but about the way society evolved, I won’t call it a mistake, as it’s how the life goes, and sometimes life and evolution leads to extinction. Wrong is a term humans set up.

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115

Regarding religion, as you say, separating society from nature, I came to the conclusion that the religions that started in the last maybe 5,000 years, (as opposed to anything that might be called “religion” prior to agriculture) were created as tools to control the populace. As part of my analysis of what I believed was wrong with our world, I read the Old, and New Testaments 5 times.

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Sure they was, I’d say it started at the time when there appeared a person who was between another person and “gods”, but for quite long time humans weren’t higher than other nature, distance between humans and dangerous open world were getting bigger so humans were becoming less in contact with it, started thinking they’re somthing unique and definitely chosen by higher power. Ofc timings are different in different parts of the world and different civilizations. But as I see it humans often lack global thinking, they solve problems when they appear but not prevent them.

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I’d also like to respond to something @ jameson_nagle said early in the dialogue about not trusting science, and scientists. I would argue that not all, but all too much, of science has been co-opted by money, such that the results of the “scientist’s” work is skewed by what those with the money want. Then the media, controlled by money, quotes the “science” that those controlling the media with their money want. I then may hear average people talking about what “science” or “scientists”, say, and how they often treat it as some great truth, when, not all, but too much, of what they learn about, is information skewed by this process.

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118

My understanding is that the extinction of most megafauna correlates well with the arrival of humans in every continent except Africa, where they evolved together. Climate change was probably involved with that as well, but either way I’ve actually read an argument that the move from hunting and gathering to agriculture was caused by that lack of megafauna, since hunting smaller animals is so much less efficient. I haven’t looked into if that checks out with the timeline. That and all the extinctions caused by the Polynesian colonization of the Pacific makes me pessimistically wonder if our exponential increase in extinction is an inevitable consequence of our exponential increase in population density. However, views on protecting the environment have had revivals before and I sincerely hope it can happen again. I feel like iNaturalist could have a major impact in inspiring people to be more interested in nature.

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No doubt early, aboriginal humans wiped out mega-fauna after leaving Africa, but then came to live in relative harmony with remaining species, especially relative harmony compared with members of the commercial culture that came with Columbus and other Europeans travelling the world at that time, to take control of the land of the world, and exploit it, at any expense to its peoples and natural communities.

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It is a pleasant notion that early humans were in uniformly harmonious relationships with the other living things around them but the reality is that human cultures have always been diverse, complex and changeable. That’s how hunting and gathering cultures shifted to agriculture in the first place.

Europeans did not introduce “commercial culture” around the world. Almost every place Europeans travelled to had complex cultures with developed trading practices. The history of colonialism is full of tragedy but it is a story of technologically advanced, militarized empires subjugating and exploiting people who were ill-equipped to resist them, sometimes with the help of epidemics they brought with them, not a story of commerce subjugating pre-agrarian, anarcho-syndicalist Arcadias. There were plenty of agrarian and a number of industrial cultures with heirarchical, oppressive empires of their own that fell before the European wave.

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I would at least agree that the Incas, and the Aztecs, with their corn, gold, and empires, were already on much the same path as the agriculturalist, money using, empire building Europeans, just behind them enough for the Europeans to conquer them, and I would argue it was the same misguided path.

I don’t think I said that early humans were in “uniformly” harmonious relationships with other living things, but that, in general, those relationships were much more harmonious with nature than the culture of the Europeans, including agriculture, monetary systems, large cities, nations, and empires, and moving goods around the planet, which I had failed to mention included moving species, that communities they were moved to, were not adapted to living with.

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It’s only been a little over 500 years. How long do you think it took the earliest Americans to come into harmony with the environment? Or the later ones when they developed agriculture?

Ironically, one of the places where there is evidence of something like anarcho-syndicalist Arcadias is Europe itself, ca. 5000-3500 BCE before the arrival of the Indo-Europeans. Large settlements, the size of cities but not functionally cities as were later developed in Mesopotamia, unfortified except for simple walls, with little evidence of major warfare.

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But that, too, is only a matter of degree, and only because of relative technical advancement. How much Polynesian vegetation was destroyed when Polynesian people arrived with their pigs? How was Australian fauna impacted by the arrival of the dingo with early Aborigines?

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I could write a book on this stuff. Unfortunately, people are part of nature. For a long time they lived off what they could harvest or farm from the environment. It’s quite interesting to follow the evolution of teosinte to maize. So we have had an impact on the environment for a million years or more. A couple of my thoughts - Agriculture went off the rails when it went from growing food for family/village and trading any surplus, to being a complete cash crop. That’s when the large scale environmental damage started to happen. Now, with profit margins for farmers at such a low rate, they have to use every piece of land they can, and intensively rear livestock, both of which are damaging. Consumers love their cheap food.
Secondly, and this has gotten me into a lot of trouble in the past, when you look at Eurasian History, it’s been a matter of continual invasion and battling for ‘homelands’ for thousands of years. I assume indigenous peoples did this as well, but on a smaller scale. By the time Europe and the Asian civilizations finally got settled into states, they were still warring. Is it any wonder that this mindset carried to ‘undiscovered’ areas like North and South America. I don’t condone it, but it is what happened. How we change that is the challenge, along with managing markets, pure Capitalism, and means of exchange. I won’t ramble on about this much more - it’s late - but it is fascinating how human cultures have developed.

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No doubt the aboriginal peoples that came to Australia did a lot of damage to Australian ecological communities when they brought their dingos, as the Polynesians did a lot of damage to the ecological communities of their new homes, when they brought their pigs, but the reason that introduced species have been so problematic is that the rate of new species moved into communities not adapted to them has been far faster than the local ecosystems could adapt to them. Neither the first aboriginal humans arriving in Australia, nor the first people arriving in Polynesia, imported new species to their new homes, and to the natural communities there, that were not adapted to those new species, at the rate the commercial culture of Europe has moved species to new communities around the world since the days of Columbus.

I will add that my argument is that the biggest problems that humans brought for other species came with post-agricultural cultures, which might be better defined as cultures that came after domesticated animals and plants, and those dingos and pigs were domesticated species. The pigs could widely be understood as part of agriculture, and the domestication of dingos were at least part of the process that became agriculture.

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