They just don’t want to consider the possibility that there are just too many people in the world. Like doomsday church people waiting for Messiah to show up, they are sure the right technology or social program will fall out of the sky just in time for salvation.
But don’t mention the possibility that we are blundering into disaster, one following another, caused by ever increasing consumer demand from adding more of us. You see, we just aren’t engaging in the correct kind of consumption is all.
You can get some of them, not most, not all, to comprehend finite space, finite habitat for man and the lifeforms he relies on and crowds out. But even this minority, will without realizing what’s implied, unwittingly propose whittling consumerism to ever tinier slices of the collective pie for each person as our numbers continue to grow.
How far does the slippery slope slide? Not to infinity, which would make the slope argument fallacious. But, some propose regression to paleolithic society, a place humans have already been. Will 11 billion mud huts and caves suit 22nd Century Mankind?
Without any advanced form of preserving history and managing society, no one will understand, much less have the means to stop all the thousands of future curious inventors, using their advanced human brains, from reinventing modern consumer society again from scratch.
Overpopulation remains taboo for the green people, yet it is the factor, as we increase its value on the other half of the equation that makes any form of consumerism whatsoever more burdensome on the environment.
All sort of products, from cars to consumer durables to consumer electronics used to have much longer average lives in service. More frequent trade ins/ups seem to have been foisted upon consumers by playing on status-seeking and a desire for novelty.
Environmentalism for many greens is a means to political ends, what humans want, like selling green goods or votes, not the goal itself, which is what the non-human life we depend on to exist needs.
Make room for nature. This needs to be our litmus test for separating the ecology conservationist from the products and politics utilitarian.
I like the primitive ‘ideas’, or lack of them. Some may prefer independance from their own domestication and let the external environment do it mainly because they’re either too dumb to build civilization or they’re afraid of the mundane consequences, civilizations internalize and dam up animal instincts with ‘laws’ that then burst and the whole rotten thing implodes – nature doesn’t play around with equality and human rights too much, thankfully.
This is possibly what Nietzsche referred to as the ‘tightrope walker’ in Zarathustra, where man is on one side and the superman on the other, many will implode their culture and civilization with too much toxic ideology and fall into the abyss either by regressing or advancing too fast either side.
That causing man to fall into the yawning void beneath him, defeated, a sacrifice, – yet those strong enough inside, a longing for the superman – Through that it can balance between nature’s ecosystem and the future of possibilities. Across the tightrope toward survival on a continent of time stretching far into the future from the moment we overcome the ‘tightrope’ of civilization, toward a harbor, where evolution has reached a higher altitude and has a strong footing, carved into the dna, that it cannot fall off into mediocrity and the void.
Then we can build ‘mud’ huts on other planets and live in extraterrestrial eco-techno caves inside asteroids and moons across the solar system – astroprimitivists with their own ecosystems speciated from earths flora and fauna – now that’s an incentive that overcomes both mundane modern society and allows an ecological environment to shape our evolution in equilibrium with our idealism.
[...] we have discussed population numbers here before, a description of the problem. But, other approaches need to be explored. In this case, [...]