Do the animals care?
Or the plants for that matter?
No, they just starve, wither, get farmed to death. Fark us
Well, all those things were ‘put’ here to be used as we see fit. We’re just doing what we are told…
It does say in the babble that humans have dominion over the animals.
Certain types of people do use that as justification to do whatever they like with animals.
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What about that Black Mirror episode with the robobees? That seemed to work out well. Maybe we should do that
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Sorry I disagree., Part of the fault lies with religions upon which the main industrialised and exploitative civilisations value systems are based. Commonly called the “judaea-christian ethic” system.
These religions promote the concept that human life is above all else. That everything else exists for the benefit of human life and can therefore be exploited for the benefit of humans. There are religions such as Buddhism which value all forms of life, abhor violence.
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I sit in on a few committees down here for the catchment system that serves Launceston. Where the salt water meets the fresh water that comes down off the mountains provides the perfect environment for a heap of ecosystems, some including endangered species. Or at least used to.
We meet annually to discuss the monitoring results and every year your seeing an endangered species move to critical (to sometimes extinct) which is replaced by a well numbered species into endangered, and then in to potential extinction again. It’s like watching this morbid conveyor belt.
No one truely gives a ■■■■. The people that are passionate are so resigned to the fact if you sat in on one of these things you’d think they didn’t give a rats. Everyones numb to it. The jadedness and helplessness is soul breaking. Theyre called improvement and management programs but to be more accurate a lot of these well intended and poorly funded groups are just holding back what’s being more and more confirmed as inevitable
Hate to say it but agriculture, which is pretty much Australia, is killing this area literally. Pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, illegal dumping, dairy effluent, piggery effluent, stormwater management not to mention effluent from boats, salinity, turbidity and silt has made it so even after the amount of work that gets put in your still seeing worsening results every year. No one monitors usage until it enters the cachement. There are rarely limits on what farmers can and cannot spray, although I’m sure I could get pulled up on this and be told the opposite.
The comical amount of applications that you see for forestry, or new industry and activity plus existing expansions is only matched by an inability to monitor them if they observe their permits and conditions. If you recon a spud processing plant honestly goes around checking to see if effluent run off or irrigation hasn’t knocked off an endangered frog species (one of which actually took the time to adapt to drainage lines in rural areas) guess again. I care about it, and I’ll condition things to the hilt or ask for more people information till I can’t make anything else up.
Extinction, ice age, little swamp things start rooting again but I can’t see my grandkids having much of a time, or the likelihood of their grandkids even being a possibility.
I could mention it won’t matter cause we won’t have won a flag by then anyway but that would be trite and then some.
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Really paints human kind as a virus to every other living thing. We are pretty much farked. Only a matter of how long it’s going to take.
We can urgue all day long about how much human kind have effected climate change and the planet in general. But the facts remain the same. The planet is in trouble, weather we are contributing or not.
Governments won’t do fark all about it, I can guarantee that. Long term future looks bleak.
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Interesting take, and i don’t doubt that a lot of the problems stem from what you’re referring to. I feel like pointing blame like this becomes really divisive and can detract from the actual problem and what needs to be done. It happens too much in politics and social/world issues these days. See, we’re already discussing it instead of the tree kangaroos.
*take with a grain of salt.
Christianity Islam and Judaism are really just competing forms of jumped up shamanism that originated in the middle east. As such they have appalling 1500-2000 year records of intolerance, belligerence and worldwide exploitation. They have lead the way. Even if they sort of revise their value systems when they finally realise the world as we know it is farked, they will just say, whatever happens is the will of God.
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Environmental exploitation and destruction is a universal human thing, not tied to any single belief system, and no belief system is unimplicated.
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It is possible to have a conservation minded belief system, an ordered society which stays within bounds in terms of environmental impact.
Unfortunately it is unlikely to survive because any ordered society based on that would soon be over-run by the other exploitative groups.
In case that fact is lost on you: I refer to the Australian Aboriginal culture and the invasion by the European christian based exploitative culture. South American Indians and Spanish value systems, Mexican Indians, American Indians, Canadian Indians… the list goes on.
Quite possible that before the end of this century there won’t be a living Essendon supporter who had seen Essendon with a flag.
I’d definitely argue the case against ANY historical or current human society being called ‘conservation minded’ in any meaningful sense. When humans first arrived in Australia, the combination of firestick farming and hunting caused titanic ecological destruction and a localised mass extinction of very significant scale, which is why you don’t see diprotodons and mihirungs and procoptodons when you go to Healesville Sanctuary. By the time 1788 rolled around, huge amounts of Australia was under literal agricultural cultivation - there were no fences or property rights, and the crops were nardoo and myrniong and warragul rather than wheat and sheep, but the myth of ‘noble savages living in harmony with untouched nature’ is discredited quasi-history, largely driven by a colonist class that didn’t recognise indigenous agriculture as agriculture, and which didn’t want to do so because it’d bring the whole issue of land ownership into uneasy question.
Same pattern happened all over the world. All across the Pacific, the fossil record tells is that as soon as humans arrive, the local large animals disappear. Same in New Zealand - the moas were gone very quuickly after the arrival of the Maori. Same story happened in north America.
Seafaring- and industrial-era Europeans are no different to any other people, ecologically speaking. It’s just that they brought with them technology that allowed the to do a more throrough job of destruction. Other peoples would arrive in a new place, slaughter all the big animals and cause massive ecological havoc, and then ether settle into an uneasy equilibrium with the devastated shell of an ecosystem that’s left over (which is what happened in Australia) or else die out completely (Easter Island says hi)
Problem with what’s going on in the modern day is that our impact is global rather than local, ther’s no barriers other than our own self-imposed restrictions holding us back, and the sheer scope and intrusiveness of our impact is so much larger. After jubilantly gorging on all the Australian megafauna, the first indigenous Australians weer eventually forced by ecological pressure to find a steady state with the scarred dry fire-prone gum-tree ecosystem and the smaller roos and the possums that managed to survive the initial onslaught. Modern humanity isn’t going to get to that point until there’s nothing left but rats and jellyfish and cockroaches.
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I reckon you made a few of these up. ‘We also hunted the hippoplopomous and the turkeypigadactal and the turdburglarsaurus rex.’ I’m onto you HM
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The major problem is as an intelligent species we have gotten around nature’s safeguards of over population control and now there’s over 7.8 billion of us. We conquered predators, diseases, old age… beating mother nature. The planet could sustain us easily but we just keep growing and growing in number. I joked earlier about culling the herd but that’s what we do to stop disasters when one animal over populates eg dingoes
Back in the 1970s we used to talk about how bad it would be with overpopulation based on the exponential extrapolations.
And so it came to pass.
But we did not think it through completely. We did not imagine the destruction of the Amazon, the acidification of the ocean and global warming.
We were wrong. we thought people would be starving by 2020.
Humans are the first anti-Darwinian species.
That is a big idea.
The next is we may not be if we can’t survive the coming catastrophe we are engineering.
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So the Matrix was right, we are a virus.
Just wish I could do Neos tricks. Why do we get the bad but not the good.
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Humans are to the planet what cancer cells are to a lifeform - they just keeping multiplying unchecked with ultimately terminal consequences.
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