Environmental Collapse: when and how bad?

sus

Well-known member
I do think one of Gus's rhetorical flaws is that he will dismiss right wing hysteria as to ridiculous to be considered in the conversation but rake liberal hysteria right over the conversations burning center
Yes, because people on this board actively participate in versions of it.

I suppose I could dunk on Bunny or HMGovt, but everyone else is already.
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
Before I go, I wanna add a bit more provocation so people can yell at me and keep the thread going/board energy up.

I basically don't think species extinction is a big deal like everybody claims. I care quite a bit about the suffering of sentient creatures. But I don't think there's any reason to care whether some particular species is around or not, unless they're so ecologically critical that their loss causes a big domino effect. Like really, why does us not having a sabertooth tiger or woolly mammoth or dinosaur around matter at all other than the fact they're "sick"? Yeah, platypuses are pretty cool, but that's not a moral argument.

The earth has had a lot of extinction effects, and life, in all its complexity and subtlety, always bounces back. I don't see any reason to believe the current batch of biology is "sacred" in any meaningful sense, when we've had so many batches. Humans are special for obvious reasons, nothing we know of has ever been able to do what we can do. But some pretty tropical bird? Really, who gives a shit. The whole anti-extinction fetish, particularly from people who are fine locking up billions of mammals and birds in horrific Holocaust-level conditions for the meat industry, strikes me as a bad & boring take.
Yeah the primary reason i would tentatively offer for why we should be concerned about protecting any given species from endangerment and/or extinction, is the possibility that their ecological role is non-trivial. And such a possibly does seem to often be beyond the scope of what we can conclusively infer from data, but hey maybe I'm underestimating the data capture of climate science.
 

version

Well-known member
Before I go, I wanna add a bit more provocation so people can yell at me and keep the thread going/board energy up.

I basically don't think species extinction is a big deal like everybody claims. I care quite a bit about the suffering of sentient creatures. But I don't think there's any reason to care whether some particular species is around or not, unless they're so ecologically critical that their loss causes a big domino effect. Like really, why does us not having a sabertooth tiger or woolly mammoth or dinosaur around matter at all other than the fact they're "sick"? Yeah, platypuses are pretty cool, but that's not a moral argument.

The earth has had a lot of extinction effects, and life, in all its complexity and subtlety, always bounces back. I don't see any reason to believe the current batch of biology is "sacred" in any meaningful sense, when we've had so many batches. Humans are special for obvious reasons, nothing we know of has ever been able to do what we can do. But some pretty tropical bird? Really, who gives a shit. The whole anti-extinction fetish, particularly from people who are fine locking up billions of mammals and birds in horrific Holocaust-level conditions for the meat industry, strikes me as a bad & boring take.
I think it's mostly an emotional response. The thought of species going extinct can be a sad one and we tend to project our feelings onto things.
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
Yeah I think the likes of Extinction Rebellion is primarily a liberal outlet for ideological militancy, comparable to Antifa in that respect from what I gather, but that isn't to say the concerns aren't at all warranted.

We could just as well say MAGA is a reactionary outlet for ideological militancy.
 

version

Well-known member
Other than Stan's point about us not really knowing which species are crucial, I can't think of a practical argument against extinction. It's all very much to do with how it feels to us and things like morality and ethics.
 
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Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
Other than Stan's point about us not really knowing which species are crucial, I can't think of a practical argument against extinction. It's all very much to do with how it feels to us and things like morality and ethics.
You mean an argument for why a species' extinction is to be avoided? Yeah I'd say the ecological/systems argument is pretty neutral and grounded in science, and that a less neutral argument would be, say, an ideology of vitalism that values living matter as sacred.
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
I also take seriously the possibility that slight ecological or atmospheric changes can trigger unpredicted cascading effects. To me this possibility goes toward warranting climate alarmism. Again I'm not using "alarmism" as a pejorative here, admittedly I'm being semantically idiosyncratic which is a practice I think is worth avoiding usually.
 

sus

Well-known member
OK it's true, I just can't find it in my heart to give a shit, you can psychoanalyze that as you will.
Probably in part because I implicitly subscribe to whig history, which is a worldview worth reconsidering or at least nuancing.
 
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