On a visit to the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State in the late 1980s, I saw single tree trunks being carried to ports on a flatbed truck. They were 9-10 feet in diameter.
400 foot tall Douglas first and cedars in the PNW must have been amazing, tallest trees now are just over 100 feet. A diameter of 2 or 3 feet compared to 15' diameters.
A few years ago, I visited a historic 18th Century mansion in New York.
The builders used 16 inch wide boards in a rough attic ceiling. Obviously, such boards were readily available and didn't have to be saved for something nice.
Such wide boards straight from a tree are basically unavailable today. Rather, they would have to be glued up from narrower boards.
In British Columbia, we are still cutting down ancient, amazing trees. These western yellow cedar were over 1000 years old and I just watched them get down last week. Some of the very last of their size in the whole mountain range.
It's all because of money. If wood wasn't so desired as a building material, people wouldn't bother the trees. The only way to fight it is to make trees no longer the easiest, cheapest building material. š¤·š½āāļø
I always wanted to immigrate to Canada just to wander around the beautiful places all over your country. Slowly I realised that Canada is not a country but a logging and mining entity. They have laws to protect the environment,but if they want to cut down that 1000 year tree,nobody can stop them.
She let companies do whatever they wanted. Saw a news story on it, companies were leaving all the branches and off cuts strewn around after clearcutting. Then grinding trees into fucking wood pellets to ship off to Europe.
She quit and was hired as vp at a pellet company. News tried to go to some talk the company hosted, they saw the news crew and snuck her out the back door.
People like this are fucking disgusting. Governments are so blatantly fucking corrupt.
The cedars in my photo are different trees in a different area (but still Vancouver Island). Same deal though - First Nations wanted to log this. Western Forest Products owns 64% though. They are using First Nations as a cover, itās disgusting.
Yeah, it's definitely sad. Sometimes I think about how cool the planet will be once we're gone again. I hope someday humans or someone can come back to see a pristine healthy earth.
Not all humans. There were plenty of humans here before 1620. They had been here for about 40,000 years. The loved this world and their lands.
Not only do we do them a terrible disservice when we attribute our own psychotic and sociopathic destruction to all humans, we let ourselves off the hook for our monstrous behavior.
Humans have been destroying the natural world since long before the modern era. We are largely responsible for the destruction of most megafauna in prehistoric times, and practiced incredibly destructive slash and burn agriculture in the bronze age at such a scale that entire continents and countries were deforested to make way for fields for grazing.
Just because our ancestors had less resources and power with which to destroy the planet doesn't mean they didn't try, and just because some groups lived in a symbiotic relationship with their environment, it doesn't mean it was the norm for humanity.
Archaeologists today recognize that human civilizations in Eurasia developed very differently from societies and cultures elsewhere in the world. Slash and burn in the Bronze age for grazing herds of domesticated animals is far from universal, or even large scale when compared to the whole planet and what we know of the vast majority of human behaviors elsewhere. Despite our desperate need to think we are the world, we aren't. It's really just a way of saying that no one but us matters. If other people did things differently, it doesn't matter. And the only argument we have for that is, they would have if they could have, they just didn't have the knowledge/skills/advancement.
Where is the evidence for humans everywhere "trying" to inflict such widescale destruction as occurred in Eurasia beginning with agriculture and herding? There isn't any, hence the need for the they-would-have-if-they-could-have belief.
The reality is that humans in many places in the world, throughout the western hemisphere, in Africa, in Australia, and other places, had true Nature cultures that had profound respect and even reverence for the planet and its life. That doesn't fit with the popular and self-serving "they were just too ignorant to be like us" belief but it's true. There is ample evidence for it. But it is also futile to present that evidence to people who don't want to believe it.
This is an excellent, well supported rebuttal to Jared Diamond's highly flawed theories.
Its conclusion:
Guns, Germs, and Steel is influential in part because its Eurocentric arguments seem, to the general reader, to be so compellingly "scientific." Diamond is a natural scientist (a bio-ecologist), and essentially all of the reasons he gives for the historical supremacy of Eurasia and, within Eurasia, of Europe, are taken from natural science. I suppose environmental determinism has always had this scientistic cachet. I dispute Diamond's argument not because he tries to use scientific data and scientific reasoning to solve the problems of human history. That is laudable. But he claims to produce reliable, scientific answers to these problems when in fact he does not have such answers, and he resolutely ignores the findings of social science while advancing old and discredited theories of environmental determinism. That is bad science.
I wasn't up for a long explanation for why I disagree with, because a long explanation is required. Here is an excellent scientific article that disputes the very popular claim that humans purposeful killing of "big" animals, or just general human destructiveness, as you claim, drove the megafauna to extinction. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2015032117
First of all, all the megafauna did not go extinct. Moose are considered megafauna, and so are bison. Some people consider American alligators megafauna. Several megafauna still exist in Africa, including elephants, giraffes, the hippopotamus and rhinoceroses, and elsewhere in the world.
This very good article addresses several significant points in its introduction:
. . . this period saw the extinction of other species, along with significant changes in many surviving taxa, suggesting a broader cause, notably, the ecological upheaval that occurred as Earth shifted from a glacial to an interglacial climate. But, overkill advocates ask, if extinctions were due to climate changes, why did these large mammals survive previous glacialāinterglacial transitions, only to vanish at the one when human hunters were present? This question rests on two assumptions: that previous glacialāinterglacial transitions were similar to the end of the Pleistocene, and that the large mammal genera survived unchanged over multiple such cycles. Neither is demonstrably correct. Resolving the cause of large mammal extinctions requires greater knowledge of individual speciesā histories and their adaptive tolerances, a fuller understanding of how past climatic and ecological changes impacted those animals and their biotic communities, and what changes occurred at the PleistoceneāHolocene boundary that might have led to those genera going extinct at that time.Ā
The authors are apparently unaware that human presence in the Americas predated the Clovis culture by at least 26,000 years, but that is additional evidence against the human-caused theory for the extinction. If humans were in North America at least 39,000 years ago, why wait more than 25,000 years, even 30,000 years to start killing all the "big" animals? Why kill all the short-faced bears, but not the grizzly bears, the dire wolves but not the timber wolves. And why go on this massive slaughter fest and then settle down and live with all the other animals with no evidence of driving any more to extinction? Find me the list for the species that have gone extinct in the last 5000 years in the Americas, because I can't find one. I'll be glad to credit it if you will provide it. It makes no sense whatsoever that human destructiveness is what caused the megafauna extinction in the Americas.
The article lists seven reasons Why Humans Aren't To Blame, including the overlap theory that I mention in my previous paragraph that is much, much more robust than even these experts credit.
More from the article:
But if It Was Climate Change, Why Hadnāt It Happened Before?
All of which raises a longstanding question: If extinctions were caused by climate changes at the end of the Pleistocene, then why did all those animals survive multiple previous glacialāinterglacial transitions (1,Ā 3,Ā 9,Ā 72), only to vanish at the one transition when human hunters were on the landscape? The question, although often used by overkill advocates to criticize climate-based explanations, is a reasonable one. However, although easily asked, it is not readily answered.
Underlying the question are two assumptions: first, that previous glacialāinterglacial transitions were similar to the PleistoceneāHolocene transition; and, second, that all 38 genera survived unchanged over multiple, previous glacialāinterglacial transitions (1,Ā 9). Neither assumption is demonstrably correct.
The very shaky human-caused megafauna extinction argument is western apologism for its own destructiveness. The belief is plain - "We're no worse than any other humans, but we are more advanced."
I've heard your arguments many, many times, for many decades. Because I've heard it all before, actually since the 1960s, maybe not the megafauna extinction that long ago, but all the rest of it, I've looked into these subjects very carefully for a very long lifetime. Because your comments are so common, even more than common, they are ubiquitous, I actually already predicted responses exactly like yours a day ago, just two comments down in this very thread, where I wrote:
There's nothing that can be done, it's just howĀ allĀ people are, and always have been! If anyone was different, it was just because they were so "primitive," while we are "advanced." They would have done the same, if they could have, if they had been "advanced" enough.
Why, even the human-caused megafauna extinction proves it!
I don't agree with you, but I understand that it is the dominant view of the dominant culture.
Thatās exactly what I was going to say. Itās frustrating when people generalize the problem to apply to all of humanity.
Itās also a very lazy way of declaring the problem unsolvable. That way, you can refuse to acknowledge that a different kind of human society is possible. So you donāt have to change or question your own way of life. You donāt have to do anything, which is very convenient, isnāt it?
Absolutely. There's nothing that can be done, it's just how all people are, and always have been! If anyone was different, it was just because they were so "primitive," while we are "advanced." They would have done the same, if they could have, if they had been "advanced" enough.
Why, even the human-caused megafauna extinction proves it!
Now, after repeating the common drivel I need to go barf.
No, frustrating is not a good description. I say it's a life of grief and rage to have to deal with it. And it never gets better, either. We manage to raise 'em like this generation after generation, century after century. It's a special talent.
Absolutely! As they used to say in the 1980s when the oligarchs achieved a soft coup through the election of Ronald Reagan, the more people there are, the more creative solutions to our problems we'll have!
oligarchs achieved a soft coup through the election of Ronald Reagan
There was never any need for a coup by the oligarchs; the United States was founded as a plutocracy and has always belonged to the capitalists. From the very first day of its existence, the United States has existed solely to serve the ruling capitalist class. Serving the ruling capitalist class is the sole purpose for which the United States exists and has ever existed.
Its culture, its society, pretty much everything about the United States is geared solely and exclusively toward serving the ruling capitalist class. Anything in the United States that is not in the interest of the capitalists or does not serve the capitalists is defined by American culture and society as un-American.
I agree with that just about 98%, and I very much appreciate you saying it. It's a truth that should be continuously played on loudspeakers everywhere that American ears can hear it. Instead of Fox News, it should be running nonstop in airports and bars and bus stations and all other public places in the country.
However, we did have one short period of time that was an exception to the extreme abuse by the wealthy, when the government did represent working people and we taxed the shite out of the highest earners once they reached a much lower level of income relative to the rest of our history. That was the New Deal. I'm old enough to remember its afterglow. It was only for white men, and by association white women. People of color were not included in it. But since white people made up 90% of the population, its benefits were widespread. I was around for all of it. I was born not long after WWII, and grew up when New Deal policies were still very strong. We don't actually deserve all the credit for that short-lived era, however. It was the era, and America, Canada, and western nations all over Europe were changing. The old aristocratic powers were finally truly dead, there had been a massive labor movement against the gilded age, and new political ideas were everywhere. Fascism, communism, capitalism and socialism were literally slugging it out everywhere. Other people helped us get there, or we probably never would have.
There was real planning on the part of the uberwealthy from the first day of the New Deal to undermine all of it. The 1971 Powell memorandum was a declaration of war against average Americans. They won the war, because Americans were so dumb and racist (as usual), they embraced their oppressors, invited them in, and started the party.
I totally agree. Americans do not understand themselves, their culture, or their history. And they have a lot of difficulty even trying.
We can't get another New deal. The senators made sure of that. How about we put a term limit on the president but not on Congress. The people don't want that so we're gonna do it.
Sometimes I think I'd be happier if I didn't know history .
Term limits can work both ways. They can get rid of the good public servants and the bad. Should Bernie Sanders have been kicked out of the house before he moved on to the senate, or out of the senate before now?
I don't those things help. Look at the painfully stupid American public, where so many people voted for Trump and so many more failed to vote to keep him out of office. Look at how unbelievable dumb republican voters are everywhere are the human toilets they elect to office. I'm not sure what could help at this point, honestly. Psilocybin in the water supply to give these people a clue?
Yeah I guess I look at term limits as a good thing now because there aren't any decent people up there. Or very few rather. And yeah Bernie is one of them.
When I look at it from a distance I keep hoping that the horrible people at the top turn on each other once they can't squeeze anymore from us. Really put their Dukes up with one another and start dumping secrets and screwing each other over royally.
With social media they seem to have such a grip on the collective psyche I feel like they can thwart any attempt to change things before it gets traction.
FDR's social democratic policies (New Deal) were only politically possible because of the communist threat posed by the USSR. Social democratic policies are always just a concession made by the ruling capitalist class to the working class out of fear of communists. Since the USSR no longer exists, social democracy is in decline worldwide.
Social democracy is a tool and a weapon of the capitalists. Social democracy is a tool used by the ruling capitalist class to pacify the working class without having to relinquish any political power. This ensures that social democratic concessions can be revoked at any time.
On top of that, social democrats are essentially political parasites who feed off the existence of a communist threat to capitalism. Without a communist threat, they crumble because they are no longer needed by the capitalists; the social democratic parties in Europe demonstrate this very clearly, as they have all been in decline since the fall of the USSR.
In short, New Deal-style policies are not possible without a communist threat. Even the New Deal served the interests of the capitalists and was designed from the outset solely to prevent the emergence of a genuine revolutionary communist movement in the United States.
I did say that; that it was only possible because of events occurring elsewhere in western societies. I'm aware that it served the capitalists. Certainly the New Deal didn't go far enough, and it's evident that democracies are in decline.
But we are at fault. We have perpetuated this nightmare of social injustice since Charlemagne. We worship mammon and ourselves.
You don't have to convince me. I'm certain the Native Americans had it figured out how to live, and no one has done better. We cannot have wealth at all. Period. Not and have a planet, and not have it and have a healthy society. It doesn't work. It's never worked. It's especially never worked in Europe.
I love this lecture by Michael Parenti, but even he isn't radical enough for me. He believes in small business. I don't believe in business at all. Trade is fine, but not business.
Got it. It's been a long time since I've had such a pleasant discussion on Reddit.
I'm certain the Native Americans had it figured out how to live, and no one has done better.
I'm not sure if that's the right attitude. It could lead to the problematic notion of the noble savage. Besides, there's hardly any chance for us to return to primitive communism, and I don't think that would be desirable in the first place.
I love this lecture by Michael Parenti, but even he isn't radical enough for me.
There was no noble savage belief. The myth of the noble savage is itself a myth. There was a genocide that came close to exterminating the Native Americans in this country, leaving only 237K of them alive in 1900, according to that year's census, out of unknown millions of people, but it was somewhere between six and sixteen million. They did not die mainly from disease, the preferred belief, but from 300 years of nonstop warfare. Then, we stole their children for another 80 years, until the 1970s. I was an adult before it ended.
People don't exterminate and steal the children of people they have romantic fantasies about. The genocide and the policies that harmed them for almost 400 years required vilifying and devaluing and dehumanizing. The myth of the myth of the noble savage was and is just another weapon their arsenal. It's a painfully predictable response to anyone expressing any respect whatsoever for them and their cultures and societies.
Of course there's no chance for us to return to that. But that doesn't matter. We aren't going to "return" to anything. We have screwed this whole planet up beyond our ability to repair or survive.
I'm old as dirt, and I grew up with traditional Native Americans who lived longer than I ever will, including people born in the 1860s and the 1890s. I have lived and worked with some of the most culturally intact people remaining in the country since the 1990s, Alaska Native people who practice the subsistence hunting, fishing and gathering they have practiced for 14,000 years,. although our destruction of wildlife and marine life is seriously affecting their ability to do that now.
My understanding of them is not romanticized in the least. It is personal lived experience of a very long lifetime, and there is no noble savage about it. My attitude of respect for them, especially at this time in history when we are in collapse from our culture, will not change. I've spent more than seventy years looking at both of my cultures, my indigenous and my European culture, at both of my heritages and their histories. It was my very identity, and I'm well educated, because I needed to understand how white people could do what they did in this country. There are no good answers, I'm afraid. The Natives had it figured out. I don't ask agreement or approval for my views.
The myth of the myth of the noble savage was and is just another weapon their arsenal. It's a painfully predictable response to anyone expressing any respect whatsoever for them and their cultures and societies.
Sorry, I didn't mean to attack you or anything. I feel like you misunderstood my comment here.
We have screwed this whole planet up beyond our ability to repair or survive.
Intellectually, I understand that this was likely the case, but I still want to hold on to my revolutionary optimism. Iām not sure if I could go on if I didnāt cling to this perhaps irrational hope.
I'm a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will. ā Antonio Gramsci, Antonio Gramsci: Prison Letters
With all respect and with no ill will whatsoever, I don't think I did misunderstand. Here is the pattern: someone expresses respect for indigenous cultures, and out comes the noble savage characterization of them. Look at what I wrote. Only that they figured out how to live and that no one has done better, followed up with a statement about not allowing wealth, and how it has never worked environmentally or socially. The context matters.
They had no wealth. If they ever starting accumulating many material goods, they had to throw a big party, feed everyone, and give it all away, something that in the Pacific northwest was called a potlatch, but all tribes did it. There was no implication in my comment that they had idyllic heavenly perfection, or peacefulness, or nothing but human kindness.
Wealth seeking is one of our two biggest environmental and societal problems. The other is that we live on planet Man, instead of planet Earth, enamored of our own abilities, which while pretty impressive aren't anywhere close to what we are taught they are. Our anthropocentrism, our cultural son-of-God perspective which is still very real no matter how we label it and regardless of whether we are atheists, has a horrific dark side. That darkness is our lack of respect for our world and the rest of its life. We breed contempt for everything but ourselves.
People need to get over even believing that a myth of the noble savage ever existed. It didn't. It was no more real than Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. Our use of it in that exact way, however, as dismissal, originated in an editorial by Charles Dickens written in 1853 in support of additional western expansion of the US, and in the eradication of the Native Americans, either culturally or physically, depending on your interpretation of Dickens' words. It continues to be used in that exact way, to the point that there are entire academic tomes devoted to this pseudo-intellectual and historically dishonest endeavor. Dickens wrote:
To come to the point at once, I beg to say that I have not the least belief in the Noble Savage. I consider him a prodigious nuisance and an enormous superstition. . . .
I don't care what he calls me. I call him a savage, and I call a savage a something highly desirable to be civilized off the face of the Earth. . . .
The noble savage sets a king to reign over him, to whom he submits his life and limbs without a murmur or question, and whose whole life is passed chin deep in a lake of blood; but who, after killing incessantly, is in his turn killed by his relations and friends the moment a grey hair appears on his head. All the noble savage's wars with his fellow-savages (and he takes no pleasure in anything else) are wars of extermination ā which is the best thing I know of him, and the most comfortable to my mind when I look at him. He has no moral feelings of any kind, sort, or description; and his "mission" may be summed up as simply diabolical.
I admit that this one by Dickens triggered my tribalism big time, and Dickens lost me as a fan forever. I can live without him.
I have only two great white guy quotations that I like, although I may have to add your previous quotation that I appreciated earlier to my list. The first is Robert Heinlein's remarkably countercultural and excruciatingly insightful statement that "Man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalizing animal."
Bob was all over that one, for sure.
The only reason I'm able to go on is because I fully believe my other favorite great white guy quotation by Albert Einstein, who said, "Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."
That one opens up infinite possibilities about the foundational reality of consciousness over materiality. I'm looking forward to better realities than this one that I'm certain exist.
I work with bacteria - our population explosion and consumption of resources is extremely similar to what happens when bacteria are unleashed on a resource, population boom followed by a crash. Weāve clearly boomed, we will have a very hard time avoiding a similar crash.
We are unnatural, unbalanced, there is nothing fair about our expansion. It does feel like we are intrudors on Earth, our inteligence alone is waaaay ahead of any other species, it feels like we parashuted on the planet and started fucking things up eventually.
Similar intelligence was developing in other humanoids alongside us but our psychotic fuckin ancestors killed and fucked them all and now we torture and eat anything that tries to develop, like octopi
Iāve always believed the human race was never actually meant to exist in the first place and that something went horribly awry in the evolutionary chain. I often struggle to wrap my head around the fact that the dinosaurs had to perish in one of the most brutal ways imaginable for this shit. Hopefully it ends sooner than later, because humanity deserves EVERYTHING thatās coming its way
Hopefully it ends sooner than later, because humanity deserves EVERYTHING thatās coming its way
Everything?
Not all of humanity deserves everything coming its way. What about innocent babies/children? Or the global south? Do they deserve everything coming their way too?
Just the current version. I bet the quarry for the stones used for the many, many pyramids destroyed an ecological system or two. It took much longer than modern projects, so it likely changed the face of the Earth with mine tailings and garbage.
I don't think so. The Mayan and Aztec pyramids were built of cut limestone that were but with harder stone tools. Mining tailings are metal ore tailings. Several metals are toxic, and the tailings are toxic because they contain metals, not soils or gravels. Limestone is not toxic.
Relative to the size of the land, I think it's quite a stretch to claim that the pyramids changed the face of the Earth to any significant degree. But, the Mayas did pollute their land with mercury, which they used for red paint. They also failed to farm sustainably, and they deforested to a degree that contributed to their collapse as a civilization.
However, their civilization, which existed over the course of several incarnations, one after the other, lasted over 3,000 years. That's about three times as long as Rome lasted, and Rome did pollute its waters and lands with toxic mining. It also razed every forest they ever saw. They also overfished and depleted the fisheries in the Mediterranean.
The Incas, on the other hand, had some of the oldest, and strictest environmental laws in human history. Violating those was punishable by execution. The Aztecs also were extremely careful with their environment, and are considered one of the most sustainable civilizations to have ever existed. https://pages.vassar.edu/sustainability-of-the-aztec-empire/
Thanks for the facts! I thought I might be shaky on that word. I was imagining the giant ancient trash piles (middens?) they have found and just multiplying them by locations and time. Middens + mining =/= tailings.
I did fail to imagine environmental laws of the ancient world. That is incredible to learn.
The Native Americans had brilliant Nature cultures, even the Incas and the Aztecs. The Native Americans of North America had brilliant cultures.
There are very few ways to live sustainably on this planet. People can't take more then the planet can replenish. And they can't think they're in charge, remaking the world into something they like better. They need to leave the planet alone. They have to consider that everything that exists is needed, that it has a place in the whole scheme of things, or it wouldn't be here, which is true; every part of life has a function within the whole. It's very simple.
Tragically for everything alive, western civilization going all the way back to Rome has long had a learned hatred for that way of doing things. We think challenging it, getting more out of the world, worshiping our own abilities, makes us more intelligent. That was really stupid. One could rightfully say it was a kind of primitivity, even savagery, in its own right.
Although not perfect, I also like the comparison of us as a virus to the earth system, and the earth is ramping up its immune system and has a fever (global warming) to try and rid itself of us.
Iāve referenced us as parasitic for a while now: parasite- an organism that lives on or inside another organism (known as the host). It survives by feeding on, growing, or multiplying at the expense of the host. While the parasite benefits by gaining nourishment and shelter, the host receives no benefit and is usually harmed.
Related to collapse because humanity destroys more of the world to make room for the artificial which is then monitored and controlled by someone else for domination. It seems we can accept that with Moore's Law that this acceleration hasn't stop and no preservation is going to be learned or to ever occur. Once its gone. It's gone.
Just a heads up - someone pointed out that at least one of these images is AI generated when posted in another sub. I 100% agree with the sentiment, but think itās important to ensure factual info is being shared!
All old growth forest in Norway was cut down between 1750 and 1930.
Norway even kidnapped the US President (when he was an ambassador) while he was travelling to Russia. Just so the US could buy norwegian timber instead of Russian
Grand Rapids, the former "Furniture Capital of the World".
My ancestors, Dutch Calvinists, dug out/cleared native burial mounds along the Grand River after Catholic laborers refused to touch the job. Anything for a buck.
In Washington state the old timers thought it impossible they could cut down the old forests...what a loss.
I donāt think so. Joyce Kilmer down towards the bottom of the Smokies and the Appalachians. Supposedly the among the biggest old growth forests in the eastern US.
I deleted my comment because I didn't address the whole of yours. The Nantahala is pretty big at more than half a million acres. Compared to the vast forest that was here prior to colonization, however, it is a small remnant, a sliver. The entire eastern portion of the US was one vast forest land, with some heavily wooded swamps in the south.
Even compared to the lands in the west it's pretty diminished. Yellowstone is 2.2 million acres; Death Valley is over 3 million. Not the west, but the Everglades is 1.5 million.
Yeah I know itās small, but I do enjoy the area and having the smokies and Pisgah NF close by is nice. But east of that and the Appalachianās is basically nothing. I wish there were more nationals forests on the east coast.
It sounds wonderful. It's significant that there aren't more lands set aside and protected from development in the east. Americans didn't do that for almost the first 300 years we were here. Yellowstone was the US's first national park, and it wasn't established until 1872.
That little patch of woods, if it's 3800 acres, is a sliver smaller than six square miles. That is tiny. But I'm not surprised, however, if it's the biggest you've seen in the eastern US.
That's great to know, I don't know why you're being downvoted. They might have only counted contiguous forests above a certain size, Joyce Kilmer is 3800 acres
Yeah, it's not an achievement that these fucks think it is. Such images are on the same level as that vietnam napalm girl, india gas disaster girl, guy falling from twin towers, many before/after glacier retreats, floods and fires and all.
As a small kid, passengered up north from detroit & back every summer, I'd get mesmerized then carsick from the rows and rows and rows of pines and couldn't fathom how trees grew in rows so straight and tame.... until I was maybe 25 and learned about the jobs program to employ folks jump planting trees in rows after the old growth forests were clear cut. I've been sad about us all ever since.
I've seen this reposted across multiple social media pages, and there are A LOT of people that are saying these are AI generated. We are already losing actual history and it getting dismissed as AI content. Its concerning and sad
After going to Sequioa, my #1 bucket list national park, and seeing the redwoods and sequoias, I felt one of those profound moments of smallness in time and the universe. Itās a good feeling, humbling the hell out of yourself. These trees are so old, their generational lines have to extend back millions upon millions of years for evolution to have noticeably occurred, which is insanely cool. Like seeing the Grand Canyon or experiencing Yellowstone, it just kinda slaps you down and puts you in your place. I know this is ridiculous, but It should almost be a constitutional amendment to have citizens take a govt. funded and required pilgrimage to one of the National Parks to learn pride and humility.
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I'm in the Pacific Northwest. I was looking through a library's online archive of 19th C. local photos. The images of the Redwood-sized trees were amazing!
But there were so many images of lumberjacks posing with the magnificent tree they just killed that it became really depressing and I had to stop.
I sometimes day dream about what it was like 100's of years ago. The world has changed so much and we are constantly changing it ourselves. I actually feel bad for humans coming in 100's of years from now. I feel like there will be less diversity and more cities and man-made structures. I may be wrong but we have already lost so much.
The map on slide two shows that we only started to destroy the forest when the colonizers came. In other words, the Indigenous populations knew how to live a sustainable lifestyle. Humans are not doomed, just this way of life is doomed and evil. People confuse the two because we are taught to believe that Indigenous people donāt even exist anymore.
If the colonizers had never come, the result would likely have been the same - it would just depend on how fast the methods and tools were invented and developed.
The first humans came here about 30,000 years ago. Only in the last 300 of those years have we laid concrete over what used to be vast forests. Because the Natives knew that they were brother and sister of the land around them. Yes, I'm sure some tribes have/had unsustainable practices. But only the current infestation of greed is causing the complete collapse of ecosystems.
I think the fact that they planted food forest needs more discussion. They planted the food they wanted, and the food the animals they harvested ate. They didn't live in some wild forest, they turned the forest into a sustainable means of feeding and protecting them.
More and more we are finding abandon cities throughout the Americas which were as complex if not significantly more complex than their European equivalents.
They were complex in different ways. I agree. Certainly at the time of contact Tenochtitlan was a magnificent city, brilliantly constructed and planned, and incredibly clean and healthy compared to Europe, and even to us. The documentary I often link to on the Kogi, The Heart Of The World, shows and discusses their very advanced engineering in their cities, and how they constructed paths and walls and structures that withstood the ravages of the jungle for almost a thousand years, and even four centuries after being abandoned.
They didn't have the writing we had, although the Mayas did have writing and libraries. But they were much, much better biologists than Europeans at the time of contact, and they understood Nature better overall. They were hybridizing crops for improved varieties throughout the hemisphere when Europeans didn't understand the role of pollen in plant reproduction. Their knowledge led to them being much more sophisticated at plant medicine.
It is significant that many people were more sophisticated than Europeans at medicine until quite recently in history, including the Asians of all kinds, especially the Chinese and the Indians, and also the Arabs. The Mayas were the best astronomers in the world, even without telescopes.
You are correct. They were true civilizations and we could have learned everything we needed to know about how to live on this planet from them.
Any actual basis for the statement Ā«europeans never didĀ»? Why should the pagan parts of european history erased in this context? Norse, Celtic and Balkan peoples history?
Countless species other than humans have also made species extinct in the past. All life on Earth ravages their fellow creatures. I'm not saying it's a good thing, it's just a fact of life on this realm. Modern humans are doing it at a unique rate though
I grew up and still live in the PNW. Spend a lot of my time in our woods. Itās daily that I catch myself fantasizing about out great lowland old growth forests & the biodiversity that they supported. Followed by a deep mourning for what once was. At this point Iām cheering collapse. Letās rid the earth of her greatest disease already.
I have a theory that when things get really bad, younger generations are going to looking at old people way worse than we look at boomers. Like people don't like them now, in 30 years the elderly will be despised and the target of hatred for not doing anything to stop the collapse. It will be ageism on meth and steroids.
That would only be because those young people don't know their history. The problem has never been just the people who were born thirty or forty years before the young people of any generation in the entire history of the US. We didn't have a chance to turn this around in the 1960s, as they believe, or even at any time in the 20th century. It needed to stop by 1800, and some people in the country even considered it. There were large numbers of Americans in the early 1800s who were against continued western expansion and ongoing genocide against the Native Americans. But more Americans didn't care. They just wanted more land and more money. It would have been better and we would have been better people if Europeans had stayed in Europe and figured their shit out instead of invading and destroying the entire world for the past 500 years. But we seem to raise 'em up to do the same things century after century.
It's their whole culture, and it's the majority in every generation that has existed in this culture for the past 1200 years that is the problem. We have been this way a very long time, and we always lash out at weaker people, like the Native Americans, like Black people, like immigrants as we are doing today, especially the brown ones, like the elderly. It's what we do instead of taking on the real power structure that is at fault, because taking them on is terrifying and futile. All that feeling cheated and its accompanying anger has to somewhere, and God knows we've run out of people around the world to invade and steal from.
If things were as easy as they think, they could just put a stop to it all themselves right now! Right? Just take the power away from the powerful! Easy peasy.
Five centuries of western European rampage for resources around the world:
Yeah, any peaceful and/or environmentally friendly humans were conquered. The baddies are just better at ruthless war and retaining the reigns of power.
I donāt disagree but Iām going to be that old person and look where we are right now. The wheels are turning and not stopping. The grip the boomers and billionaires have on our economy and politics is an iron fist. But theyāll be right to hate us.
Exactly what came to mind for me too. Itās been a long time since a movie wrecked me the way Train Dreams did. I made the mistake of watching it on a plane and I swear I cried like a baby for the last half of the movie. I think about it on the reg now.
the deforestation pictures are misleading. the midwest is the bread basket of north america. it wasn't clear cut for golf courses and suburbs, it was cut to feed ourselves.
When I'm done being sick and angry at seeing this, the only small comfort I can take is that humanity's impact is a blip in the history of our planet and at the geologic time scale, a million or a hundred million years from now, all of this will be dust regardless, no different than what an asteroid strike has done to our planet in the past, and I can only hope that the plant and animal descendants that survived this era will evolve and thrive in ways that would awe us if we were around to see it.
I live in New Zealand where the same thing happened. Luckily there's still some old growth left just due the sheer remoteness in some locations, but it's horrific to see the mismanagement of how it all happened. Those trees have amazing timber that last for years and is extremely durable and they wasted it for crap like wharf piers and street poles, flooding the markets to make as much money as possible. Sad isn't it?
100% bro! I am from Chch and seeing how deforested the Banks Peninsula is now... man... We don't get Kauri this far south sadly, but they felled all the kahikatea, totara, matai and miro that they could.
They didn't have the foresight to save even 10% of the land/forest, and a lot of it was just burned off for farming. Pure greed really ay?
Well I live in the uk now for many years, but I grew up in linwood. Our back yard faced the port hills. Every day I would look out and think āthese hills are so coolā. It wasnāt until I was in my 20s that I learned/realised that those same hills used to be completely forested. Then I learned about the Canterbury plains and the kahikatea as well and holy fuck it changed me.
Haha no way, small world ay... I completely agree though, imagine how 'clean and green' we could've been. Hope the UK is treating you well, all the best
They didnāt know better.
What you think people gonna say about as stupid cnts. In 200 years.
Always doing war. Always listing to politics. Letting 10% of people killing the planet
Like, I know itās unrealistic, but imagine if we learned from a culture like the Aboriginals of Australia, their 70,000 year old culture of respecting and living with the land instead of exploiting it.
Every time there is a better way of living Capitalism or the ones with military might have beaten it down. So sad, all these beautiful cultures erased.
The deforestation of old growth forests is the only "remember what they took from you" I will ever take seriously. There are so few left in the world and one of them is literally being used by IKEA to make ugly, overpriced furniture.
You know, when I visited Sequoia National Park, I could not fathom why anybody in any period of time would go "gee I've literally never seen a living thing bigger that this tree here, it must have taken hundreds and hundreds of years to grow so big. Oh well, time to cut it down"
Sometimes, when I go to one of the parks around where I live, I feel like I step into a complex, mini-world. It is so incredible to see all of the things that go on in a forest or a heavily wooded area. Exploring these areas beats any videogame or RPG any day. These little worlds of complexity are being lost forever.
it's crazy how I sometimes get this surreal feeling of just being in the presence of a dog, cat or a pigeon, living in a big city. Like HEY WOW AN ACTUAL ANIMAL! ISN'T THAT INCREDIBLE??
How I miss just being with animals :(
I went to NYC once in December 2016 for a 3 day work trip, basically just went for a few meetings so I ended up with a lot of free time to walk around. Iāve never felt particularly drawn to NYC as itās not my vibe, but being there at Christmas time was so depressing seeing all of the waste, extravagance, and consumerism. I walked past the giant Christmas tree they put up every year and it made me cry. Picturing that beautiful tree living its life in a forest for decades just to be chopped down, transported on a big rig cross country, and stuck in a square in smelly NYC for people to marvel at for a month til they toss it aside.
The amusing thing is that in the process of obliterating ecosystem after ecosystem, the end result will likely be giant forests standing on the ruins of what used to be our species and civilization because we obliterating so much of what kept our climate and life possible means mankind will eventually just end up fertilizer.
The thing that I hate about this discussion is that it blames *all* people for the sins of *some*.
Humans are not a virus or a plague or a parasite, we're a tools based ape that discovered fire. We USED to live quite harmoniously and many people still strive for that goal to mixed success all over the world.
IT IS DIRECTLY DUE TO MODERNITY AND CAPITALISM AND ALL OF THOSE ILLS THAT WE HAVE THESE PROBLEMS.
If I'm correct it's a map of old growth forests in the US. In the context of OP it's partly misleading because we actually have re-forested a lot of the country since the early twentieth century and if you don't know that the map is supposed to be old growth forests you'd think it was just forests in general.
This post links to another subreddit. Users who are not already subscribed to that subreddit should not participate with comments and up/downvotes, or otherwise harass or interfere with their discussions (brigading)
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Monsur_Ausuhnom:
Submission Statement,
Related to collapse because humanity destroys more of the world to make room for the artificial which is then monitored and controlled by someone else for domination. It seems we can accept that with Moore's Law that this acceleration hasn't stop and no preservation is going to be learned or to ever occur. Once its gone. It's gone.
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1tktn8x/being_the_cancer_of_the_earth/onazmy2/
Chemtrail_hollywood@reddit
God damn them. Iād give every one of their lives up to get the forests back. So fucking depressing.
awkwardmamasloth@reddit
Trees will never get that big again. Not as long has humans occupy the earth. What a shameful cancer we are.
Pythia007@reddit
Image 4 has got to be AI.
neoikon@reddit
I can't trust that they all are.
anonyngineer@reddit
On a visit to the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State in the late 1980s, I saw single tree trunks being carried to ports on a flatbed truck. They were 9-10 feet in diameter.
midgaze@reddit
Capitalism is plague
stop_talking_you@reddit
bro is 15 and hates the world
summercookiess@reddit
Look around this comment section, it's not just them.
anonyngineer@reddit
I've outlived at least 80% of the people who ever walked the earth and feel the same way.
LSUenigma@reddit
4 is believe is AI.. Maybe remove that.
But yeah, i agree with the overall sentiment
anonyngineer@reddit
Pictures with trees of similar size being logged are cited with sources in this 2016 article.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/vintage-photos-of-lumberjacks-and-the-giant-trees-they-felled
Demosthenes-storming@reddit
400 foot tall Douglas first and cedars in the PNW must have been amazing, tallest trees now are just over 100 feet. A diameter of 2 or 3 feet compared to 15' diameters.
It's really hard to appreciate.
anonyngineer@reddit
A few years ago, I visited a historic 18th Century mansion in New York.
The builders used 16 inch wide boards in a rough attic ceiling. Obviously, such boards were readily available and didn't have to be saved for something nice.
Such wide boards straight from a tree are basically unavailable today. Rather, they would have to be glued up from narrower boards.
eaterofdreams@reddit
In British Columbia, we are still cutting down ancient, amazing trees. These western yellow cedar were over 1000 years old and I just watched them get down last week. Some of the very last of their size in the whole mountain range.
morganational@reddit
It's all because of money. If wood wasn't so desired as a building material, people wouldn't bother the trees. The only way to fight it is to make trees no longer the easiest, cheapest building material. š¤·š½āāļø
Escudo777@reddit
I always wanted to immigrate to Canada just to wander around the beautiful places all over your country. Slowly I realised that Canada is not a country but a logging and mining entity. They have laws to protect the environment,but if they want to cut down that 1000 year tree,nobody can stop them.
eaterofdreams@reddit
Exactly. We are a corporation, not a country.
Disastrous_North_102@reddit
WTF, why?!
notislant@reddit
Ask the former chief forester Diane Nicholls.
She let companies do whatever they wanted. Saw a news story on it, companies were leaving all the branches and off cuts strewn around after clearcutting. Then grinding trees into fucking wood pellets to ship off to Europe.
She quit and was hired as vp at a pellet company. News tried to go to some talk the company hosted, they saw the news crew and snuck her out the back door.
People like this are fucking disgusting. Governments are so blatantly fucking corrupt.
eaterofdreams@reddit
Money, greed, power, etc.
ShreddyKrueger1@reddit
Idk the Vietnamese were successful in rural areas with certain tactics facing similar odds.
Pardot42@reddit
People say it's not all of us, but it's enough of us. Humans suck.
the_pwnererXx@reddit
Ironically it's first nations who owned the land and sold that tree
eaterofdreams@reddit
The cedars in my photo are different trees in a different area (but still Vancouver Island). Same deal though - First Nations wanted to log this. Western Forest Products owns 64% though. They are using First Nations as a cover, itās disgusting.
03263@reddit
Every old growth tree in North America will be gone soon, except the very few that have legal protections.
morganational@reddit
Yeah, it's definitely sad. Sometimes I think about how cool the planet will be once we're gone again. I hope someday humans or someone can come back to see a pristine healthy earth.
neonblack108@reddit
I used to believe that Humanity is the Devil.Ā I now believe we're a cancer.Ā Tragedy sprouts in our very footprints.
gnostic_savage@reddit
Not all humans. There were plenty of humans here before 1620. They had been here for about 40,000 years. The loved this world and their lands.
Not only do we do them a terrible disservice when we attribute our own psychotic and sociopathic destruction to all humans, we let ourselves off the hook for our monstrous behavior.
space_guy95@reddit
Humans have been destroying the natural world since long before the modern era. We are largely responsible for the destruction of most megafauna in prehistoric times, and practiced incredibly destructive slash and burn agriculture in the bronze age at such a scale that entire continents and countries were deforested to make way for fields for grazing.
Just because our ancestors had less resources and power with which to destroy the planet doesn't mean they didn't try, and just because some groups lived in a symbiotic relationship with their environment, it doesn't mean it was the norm for humanity.
gnostic_savage@reddit
Archaeologists today recognize that human civilizations in Eurasia developed very differently from societies and cultures elsewhere in the world. Slash and burn in the Bronze age for grazing herds of domesticated animals is far from universal, or even large scale when compared to the whole planet and what we know of the vast majority of human behaviors elsewhere. Despite our desperate need to think we are the world, we aren't. It's really just a way of saying that no one but us matters. If other people did things differently, it doesn't matter. And the only argument we have for that is, they would have if they could have, they just didn't have the knowledge/skills/advancement.
Where is the evidence for humans everywhere "trying" to inflict such widescale destruction as occurred in Eurasia beginning with agriculture and herding? There isn't any, hence the need for the they-would-have-if-they-could-have belief.
The reality is that humans in many places in the world, throughout the western hemisphere, in Africa, in Australia, and other places, had true Nature cultures that had profound respect and even reverence for the planet and its life. That doesn't fit with the popular and self-serving "they were just too ignorant to be like us" belief but it's true. There is ample evidence for it. But it is also futile to present that evidence to people who don't want to believe it.
This is an excellent, well supported rebuttal to Jared Diamond's highly flawed theories.
Its conclusion:
gnostic_savage@reddit
I wasn't up for a long explanation for why I disagree with, because a long explanation is required. Here is an excellent scientific article that disputes the very popular claim that humans purposeful killing of "big" animals, or just general human destructiveness, as you claim, drove the megafauna to extinction. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2015032117
First of all, all the megafauna did not go extinct. Moose are considered megafauna, and so are bison. Some people consider American alligators megafauna. Several megafauna still exist in Africa, including elephants, giraffes, the hippopotamus and rhinoceroses, and elsewhere in the world.
This very good article addresses several significant points in its introduction:
The authors are apparently unaware that human presence in the Americas predated the Clovis culture by at least 26,000 years, but that is additional evidence against the human-caused theory for the extinction. If humans were in North America at least 39,000 years ago, why wait more than 25,000 years, even 30,000 years to start killing all the "big" animals? Why kill all the short-faced bears, but not the grizzly bears, the dire wolves but not the timber wolves. And why go on this massive slaughter fest and then settle down and live with all the other animals with no evidence of driving any more to extinction? Find me the list for the species that have gone extinct in the last 5000 years in the Americas, because I can't find one. I'll be glad to credit it if you will provide it. It makes no sense whatsoever that human destructiveness is what caused the megafauna extinction in the Americas.
The article lists seven reasons Why Humans Aren't To Blame, including the overlap theory that I mention in my previous paragraph that is much, much more robust than even these experts credit.
More from the article:
Underlying the question are two assumptions: first, that previous glacialāinterglacial transitions were similar to the PleistoceneāHolocene transition; and, second, that all 38 genera survived unchanged over multiple, previous glacialāinterglacial transitions (1,Ā 9). Neither assumption is demonstrably correct.
The very shaky human-caused megafauna extinction argument is western apologism for its own destructiveness. The belief is plain - "We're no worse than any other humans, but we are more advanced."
I don't believe it.
To be continued . . .
gnostic_savage@reddit
I've heard your arguments many, many times, for many decades. Because I've heard it all before, actually since the 1960s, maybe not the megafauna extinction that long ago, but all the rest of it, I've looked into these subjects very carefully for a very long lifetime. Because your comments are so common, even more than common, they are ubiquitous, I actually already predicted responses exactly like yours a day ago, just two comments down in this very thread, where I wrote:
I don't agree with you, but I understand that it is the dominant view of the dominant culture.
Best regards.
ilir_kycb@reddit
Thatās exactly what I was going to say. Itās frustrating when people generalize the problem to apply to all of humanity.
Itās also a very lazy way of declaring the problem unsolvable. That way, you can refuse to acknowledge that a different kind of human society is possible. So you donāt have to change or question your own way of life. You donāt have to do anything, which is very convenient, isnāt it?
gnostic_savage@reddit
Absolutely. There's nothing that can be done, it's just how all people are, and always have been! If anyone was different, it was just because they were so "primitive," while we are "advanced." They would have done the same, if they could have, if they had been "advanced" enough.
Why, even the human-caused megafauna extinction proves it!
Now, after repeating the common drivel I need to go barf.
ilir_kycb@reddit
And then they start rambling on about human nature.
āIt's just human natureā
gnostic_savage@reddit
No, frustrating is not a good description. I say it's a life of grief and rage to have to deal with it. And it never gets better, either. We manage to raise 'em like this generation after generation, century after century. It's a special talent.
Micro-Naut@reddit
It will be better once there's 12 billion of us. We need to increase birth rates cause we're not getting there fast enough
gnostic_savage@reddit
Absolutely! As they used to say in the 1980s when the oligarchs achieved a soft coup through the election of Ronald Reagan, the more people there are, the more creative solutions to our problems we'll have!
ilir_kycb@reddit
There was never any need for a coup by the oligarchs; the United States was founded as a plutocracy and has always belonged to the capitalists. From the very first day of its existence, the United States has existed solely to serve the ruling capitalist class. Serving the ruling capitalist class is the sole purpose for which the United States exists and has ever existed.
Its culture, its society, pretty much everything about the United States is geared solely and exclusively toward serving the ruling capitalist class. Anything in the United States that is not in the interest of the capitalists or does not serve the capitalists is defined by American culture and society as un-American.
gnostic_savage@reddit
I agree with that just about 98%, and I very much appreciate you saying it. It's a truth that should be continuously played on loudspeakers everywhere that American ears can hear it. Instead of Fox News, it should be running nonstop in airports and bars and bus stations and all other public places in the country.
However, we did have one short period of time that was an exception to the extreme abuse by the wealthy, when the government did represent working people and we taxed the shite out of the highest earners once they reached a much lower level of income relative to the rest of our history. That was the New Deal. I'm old enough to remember its afterglow. It was only for white men, and by association white women. People of color were not included in it. But since white people made up 90% of the population, its benefits were widespread. I was around for all of it. I was born not long after WWII, and grew up when New Deal policies were still very strong. We don't actually deserve all the credit for that short-lived era, however. It was the era, and America, Canada, and western nations all over Europe were changing. The old aristocratic powers were finally truly dead, there had been a massive labor movement against the gilded age, and new political ideas were everywhere. Fascism, communism, capitalism and socialism were literally slugging it out everywhere. Other people helped us get there, or we probably never would have.
There was real planning on the part of the uberwealthy from the first day of the New Deal to undermine all of it. The 1971 Powell memorandum was a declaration of war against average Americans. They won the war, because Americans were so dumb and racist (as usual), they embraced their oppressors, invited them in, and started the party.
I totally agree. Americans do not understand themselves, their culture, or their history. And they have a lot of difficulty even trying.
Micro-Naut@reddit
We can't get another New deal. The senators made sure of that. How about we put a term limit on the president but not on Congress. The people don't want that so we're gonna do it.
Sometimes I think I'd be happier if I didn't know history .
gnostic_savage@reddit
Term limits can work both ways. They can get rid of the good public servants and the bad. Should Bernie Sanders have been kicked out of the house before he moved on to the senate, or out of the senate before now?
I don't those things help. Look at the painfully stupid American public, where so many people voted for Trump and so many more failed to vote to keep him out of office. Look at how unbelievable dumb republican voters are everywhere are the human toilets they elect to office. I'm not sure what could help at this point, honestly. Psilocybin in the water supply to give these people a clue?
Real history is horrifying. I feel you.
Micro-Naut@reddit
Yeah I guess I look at term limits as a good thing now because there aren't any decent people up there. Or very few rather. And yeah Bernie is one of them.
When I look at it from a distance I keep hoping that the horrible people at the top turn on each other once they can't squeeze anymore from us. Really put their Dukes up with one another and start dumping secrets and screwing each other over royally.
With social media they seem to have such a grip on the collective psyche I feel like they can thwart any attempt to change things before it gets traction.
gnostic_savage@reddit
I love Bernie.
ilir_kycb@reddit
Unfortunately, I have to disagree with that.
FDR's social democratic policies (New Deal) were only politically possible because of the communist threat posed by the USSR. Social democratic policies are always just a concession made by the ruling capitalist class to the working class out of fear of communists. Since the USSR no longer exists, social democracy is in decline worldwide.
Social democracy is a tool and a weapon of the capitalists. Social democracy is a tool used by the ruling capitalist class to pacify the working class without having to relinquish any political power. This ensures that social democratic concessions can be revoked at any time.
On top of that, social democrats are essentially political parasites who feed off the existence of a communist threat to capitalism. Without a communist threat, they crumble because they are no longer needed by the capitalists; the social democratic parties in Europe demonstrate this very clearly, as they have all been in decline since the fall of the USSR.
In short, New Deal-style policies are not possible without a communist threat. Even the New Deal served the interests of the capitalists and was designed from the outset solely to prevent the emergence of a genuine revolutionary communist movement in the United States.
gnostic_savage@reddit
I did say that; that it was only possible because of events occurring elsewhere in western societies. I'm aware that it served the capitalists. Certainly the New Deal didn't go far enough, and it's evident that democracies are in decline.
But we are at fault. We have perpetuated this nightmare of social injustice since Charlemagne. We worship mammon and ourselves.
You don't have to convince me. I'm certain the Native Americans had it figured out how to live, and no one has done better. We cannot have wealth at all. Period. Not and have a planet, and not have it and have a healthy society. It doesn't work. It's never worked. It's especially never worked in Europe.
I love this lecture by Michael Parenti, but even he isn't radical enough for me. He believes in small business. I don't believe in business at all. Trade is fine, but not business.
The Fake Philosophy Behind Capitalism https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NA8mBCl7Y2U&t=154s
ilir_kycb@reddit
Got it. It's been a long time since I've had such a pleasant discussion on Reddit.
I'm not sure if that's the right attitude. It could lead to the problematic notion of the noble savage. Besides, there's hardly any chance for us to return to primitive communism, and I don't think that would be desirable in the first place.
Yeah, Michael Parenti is pretty awesome.
gnostic_savage@reddit
There was no noble savage belief. The myth of the noble savage is itself a myth. There was a genocide that came close to exterminating the Native Americans in this country, leaving only 237K of them alive in 1900, according to that year's census, out of unknown millions of people, but it was somewhere between six and sixteen million. They did not die mainly from disease, the preferred belief, but from 300 years of nonstop warfare. Then, we stole their children for another 80 years, until the 1970s. I was an adult before it ended.
People don't exterminate and steal the children of people they have romantic fantasies about. The genocide and the policies that harmed them for almost 400 years required vilifying and devaluing and dehumanizing. The myth of the myth of the noble savage was and is just another weapon their arsenal. It's a painfully predictable response to anyone expressing any respect whatsoever for them and their cultures and societies.
Of course there's no chance for us to return to that. But that doesn't matter. We aren't going to "return" to anything. We have screwed this whole planet up beyond our ability to repair or survive.
I'm old as dirt, and I grew up with traditional Native Americans who lived longer than I ever will, including people born in the 1860s and the 1890s. I have lived and worked with some of the most culturally intact people remaining in the country since the 1990s, Alaska Native people who practice the subsistence hunting, fishing and gathering they have practiced for 14,000 years,. although our destruction of wildlife and marine life is seriously affecting their ability to do that now.
My understanding of them is not romanticized in the least. It is personal lived experience of a very long lifetime, and there is no noble savage about it. My attitude of respect for them, especially at this time in history when we are in collapse from our culture, will not change. I've spent more than seventy years looking at both of my cultures, my indigenous and my European culture, at both of my heritages and their histories. It was my very identity, and I'm well educated, because I needed to understand how white people could do what they did in this country. There are no good answers, I'm afraid. The Natives had it figured out. I don't ask agreement or approval for my views.
I have enjoyed it, too. Thank you very much.
ilir_kycb@reddit
Sorry, I didn't mean to attack you or anything. I feel like you misunderstood my comment here.
Intellectually, I understand that this was likely the case, but I still want to hold on to my revolutionary optimism. Iām not sure if I could go on if I didnāt cling to this perhaps irrational hope.
As you can tell, I like quotes.
Why Capitalism Loves Doomers - YouTube
gnostic_savage@reddit
With all respect and with no ill will whatsoever, I don't think I did misunderstand. Here is the pattern: someone expresses respect for indigenous cultures, and out comes the noble savage characterization of them. Look at what I wrote. Only that they figured out how to live and that no one has done better, followed up with a statement about not allowing wealth, and how it has never worked environmentally or socially. The context matters.
They had no wealth. If they ever starting accumulating many material goods, they had to throw a big party, feed everyone, and give it all away, something that in the Pacific northwest was called a potlatch, but all tribes did it. There was no implication in my comment that they had idyllic heavenly perfection, or peacefulness, or nothing but human kindness.
Wealth seeking is one of our two biggest environmental and societal problems. The other is that we live on planet Man, instead of planet Earth, enamored of our own abilities, which while pretty impressive aren't anywhere close to what we are taught they are. Our anthropocentrism, our cultural son-of-God perspective which is still very real no matter how we label it and regardless of whether we are atheists, has a horrific dark side. That darkness is our lack of respect for our world and the rest of its life. We breed contempt for everything but ourselves.
People need to get over even believing that a myth of the noble savage ever existed. It didn't. It was no more real than Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. Our use of it in that exact way, however, as dismissal, originated in an editorial by Charles Dickens written in 1853 in support of additional western expansion of the US, and in the eradication of the Native Americans, either culturally or physically, depending on your interpretation of Dickens' words. It continues to be used in that exact way, to the point that there are entire academic tomes devoted to this pseudo-intellectual and historically dishonest endeavor. Dickens wrote:
I admit that this one by Dickens triggered my tribalism big time, and Dickens lost me as a fan forever. I can live without him.
I have only two great white guy quotations that I like, although I may have to add your previous quotation that I appreciated earlier to my list. The first is Robert Heinlein's remarkably countercultural and excruciatingly insightful statement that "Man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalizing animal."
Bob was all over that one, for sure.
The only reason I'm able to go on is because I fully believe my other favorite great white guy quotation by Albert Einstein, who said, "Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."
That one opens up infinite possibilities about the foundational reality of consciousness over materiality. I'm looking forward to better realities than this one that I'm certain exist.
Best regards, and happy trails to you!
TheOldPug@reddit
Raising dragon slayers, or whatever.
ilir_kycb@reddit
Yeah, exactly as I said, āfrustratingā doesn't quite capture it.
I think having or finding friends who understand makes it more bearable.
gnostic_savage@reddit
By the way, I love the quotation.
mrpickles@reddit
What changed?
OldTimberWolf@reddit
I work with bacteria - our population explosion and consumption of resources is extremely similar to what happens when bacteria are unleashed on a resource, population boom followed by a crash. Weāve clearly boomed, we will have a very hard time avoiding a similar crash.
muddaFUDa@reddit
Weāre really just bacteria with elaborate dreams.
OldTimberWolf@reddit
And opposable thumbs
melancholicd3spa1r@reddit
Funny thing is. We are
RykosTatsubane@reddit
Who's we
guilhermefdias@reddit
We are unnatural, unbalanced, there is nothing fair about our expansion. It does feel like we are intrudors on Earth, our inteligence alone is waaaay ahead of any other species, it feels like we parashuted on the planet and started fucking things up eventually.
Kristoff_Victorson@reddit
Well we like to think weāre intelligent, but how intelligent is a species clearly heading for disaster and doing nothing but speed up?
summercookiess@reddit
The disaster might be a side effect of the intelligence.
Spiritual-Entrance59@reddit
I think the same, we are very unnatural compare to other habitants of the Earth, very toxic
rematar@reddit
My gonads are out in front of me, ripe for physical attacks. That's some unnatural nuttage.
BusyEquipment529@reddit
Similar intelligence was developing in other humanoids alongside us but our psychotic fuckin ancestors killed and fucked them all and now we torture and eat anything that tries to develop, like octopi
eternallyfree1@reddit
Iāve always believed the human race was never actually meant to exist in the first place and that something went horribly awry in the evolutionary chain. I often struggle to wrap my head around the fact that the dinosaurs had to perish in one of the most brutal ways imaginable for this shit. Hopefully it ends sooner than later, because humanity deserves EVERYTHING thatās coming its way
summercookiess@reddit
Everything?
Not all of humanity deserves everything coming its way. What about innocent babies/children? Or the global south? Do they deserve everything coming their way too?
OilHot3940@reddit
I have to agree. But I have done my part. No children and vasectomy. You?
neonblack108@reddit
Absolutely. No kids.Ā Decided long ago to not reproduce.Ā Ā
mazhar69@reddit
You mean European white capitalists?Ā
Sankofa416@reddit
Just the current version. I bet the quarry for the stones used for the many, many pyramids destroyed an ecological system or two. It took much longer than modern projects, so it likely changed the face of the Earth with mine tailings and garbage.
Micro-Naut@reddit
There aren't any trees there now so I think you're right
gnostic_savage@reddit
I don't think so. The Mayan and Aztec pyramids were built of cut limestone that were but with harder stone tools. Mining tailings are metal ore tailings. Several metals are toxic, and the tailings are toxic because they contain metals, not soils or gravels. Limestone is not toxic.
Relative to the size of the land, I think it's quite a stretch to claim that the pyramids changed the face of the Earth to any significant degree. But, the Mayas did pollute their land with mercury, which they used for red paint. They also failed to farm sustainably, and they deforested to a degree that contributed to their collapse as a civilization.
However, their civilization, which existed over the course of several incarnations, one after the other, lasted over 3,000 years. That's about three times as long as Rome lasted, and Rome did pollute its waters and lands with toxic mining. It also razed every forest they ever saw. They also overfished and depleted the fisheries in the Mediterranean.
The Incas, on the other hand, had some of the oldest, and strictest environmental laws in human history. Violating those was punishable by execution. The Aztecs also were extremely careful with their environment, and are considered one of the most sustainable civilizations to have ever existed. https://pages.vassar.edu/sustainability-of-the-aztec-empire/
Sankofa416@reddit
Thanks for the facts! I thought I might be shaky on that word. I was imagining the giant ancient trash piles (middens?) they have found and just multiplying them by locations and time. Middens + mining =/= tailings.
I did fail to imagine environmental laws of the ancient world. That is incredible to learn.
gnostic_savage@reddit
The Native Americans had brilliant Nature cultures, even the Incas and the Aztecs. The Native Americans of North America had brilliant cultures.
There are very few ways to live sustainably on this planet. People can't take more then the planet can replenish. And they can't think they're in charge, remaking the world into something they like better. They need to leave the planet alone. They have to consider that everything that exists is needed, that it has a place in the whole scheme of things, or it wouldn't be here, which is true; every part of life has a function within the whole. It's very simple.
Tragically for everything alive, western civilization going all the way back to Rome has long had a learned hatred for that way of doing things. We think challenging it, getting more out of the world, worshiping our own abilities, makes us more intelligent. That was really stupid. One could rightfully say it was a kind of primitivity, even savagery, in its own right.
NegativeGoose37@reddit
Dumb comment.
Top_Hair_8984@reddit
You'd be correct. I say humans were the worst experiment ever tried. And I doubt we're finished our rein of destruction quite yet.Ā
EchoesOfEleos@reddit
I believe a parasite is most accurate.
Sober_Alcoholic_@reddit
Yeah, itās a pretty good analogy.
Although not perfect, I also like the comparison of us as a virus to the earth system, and the earth is ramping up its immune system and has a fever (global warming) to try and rid itself of us.
B4SSF4C3@reddit
You've become a virus
That's killing off his host
We been watching you with all of our eyes
And what you seem to value most
So much potential
Or so we used to say
Your greed, self-importance and your arrogance
You piss it all away
nlashawn1000@reddit
Straight facts Dr Zoidberg.
Nitecore_Fail@reddit
Parasites š¦
Peripatetictyl@reddit
Iāve referenced us as parasitic for a while now: parasite- an organism that lives on or inside another organism (known as the host). It survives by feeding on, growing, or multiplying at the expense of the host. While the parasite benefits by gaining nourishment and shelter, the host receives no benefit and is usually harmed.
BeefNBroccoli2@reddit
You mourn the forests we never saw. I mourn nothing, because my FaceID unlocks in 0.2 seconds and that's a kind of peace the ancients never knew
alwaysmilesdeep@reddit
"My govt tracker unlocks in .2 seconds, ready to fill my brain with lies and propaganda"
Let me guess, your gonna be a billionaire too?
BeefNBroccoli2@reddit
Billionaireās a stretch, millionaire easily though. Wild how āFace ID ā spiraled into all that. Couldnāt just take the joke, huh?
Monsur_Ausuhnom@reddit (OP)
Submission Statement,
Related to collapse because humanity destroys more of the world to make room for the artificial which is then monitored and controlled by someone else for domination. It seems we can accept that with Moore's Law that this acceleration hasn't stop and no preservation is going to be learned or to ever occur. Once its gone. It's gone.
Widget1A@reddit
Just a heads up - someone pointed out that at least one of these images is AI generated when posted in another sub. I 100% agree with the sentiment, but think itās important to ensure factual info is being shared!
Vegetable_Log_3837@reddit
Yep, aluminum ladders in a black and white picture? The tree isnāt right at all either.
ideknem0ar@reddit
Aluminum ladders? Which pic were you referring to? I zoomed in and they look wooden to me.
Vegetable_Log_3837@reddit
Number 4, aluminum ladders and the tree looks totally fake. Iām skeptical about 3 as well.
Vegetable_Log_3837@reddit
Number 3 looks weird too.
Somethingpithy123@reddit
Human race is a virus.
popejohnsmith@reddit
The logged ALL of Michigan's native forests except for a small patch at Hartwick Pines. Heartbreaking loss.
And cimpletely unconscionable!!
Crishello@reddit
Even worse: they are proud of it. I can tell from the pictures
FifthMonarchist@reddit
All old growth forest in Norway was cut down between 1750 and 1930.
Norway even kidnapped the US President (when he was an ambassador) while he was travelling to Russia. Just so the US could buy norwegian timber instead of Russian
Lord_Cavendish40k@reddit
Grand Rapids, the former "Furniture Capital of the World".
My ancestors, Dutch Calvinists, dug out/cleared native burial mounds along the Grand River after Catholic laborers refused to touch the job. Anything for a buck.
In Washington state the old timers thought it impossible they could cut down the old forests...what a loss.
popejohnsmith@reddit
I've also heard, the ancient cypress trees of Louisiana suffered a similar fate. So sad.
FadeIntoReal@reddit
I was once taught in school that Michiganās native pine forests made an unbroken carpet from lake to lake, covering the entire state.
iJon_v2@reddit
What does picture #2 depict? There are more forests than thatā¦even now.
WildFlemima@reddit
They're young. They're still going through succession. It takes hundreds of years for a forest to truly recover
iJon_v2@reddit
True, however I live near an old growth forest thatās not depicted here.
WildFlemima@reddit
None of the trees have been cut in that forest, ever?
iJon_v2@reddit
I donāt think so. Joyce Kilmer down towards the bottom of the Smokies and the Appalachians. Supposedly the among the biggest old growth forests in the eastern US.
gnostic_savage@reddit
I deleted my comment because I didn't address the whole of yours. The Nantahala is pretty big at more than half a million acres. Compared to the vast forest that was here prior to colonization, however, it is a small remnant, a sliver. The entire eastern portion of the US was one vast forest land, with some heavily wooded swamps in the south.
Even compared to the lands in the west it's pretty diminished. Yellowstone is 2.2 million acres; Death Valley is over 3 million. Not the west, but the Everglades is 1.5 million.
iJon_v2@reddit
Yeah I know itās small, but I do enjoy the area and having the smokies and Pisgah NF close by is nice. But east of that and the Appalachianās is basically nothing. I wish there were more nationals forests on the east coast.
gnostic_savage@reddit
It sounds wonderful. It's significant that there aren't more lands set aside and protected from development in the east. Americans didn't do that for almost the first 300 years we were here. Yellowstone was the US's first national park, and it wasn't established until 1872.
gnostic_savage@reddit
That little patch of woods, if it's 3800 acres, is a sliver smaller than six square miles. That is tiny. But I'm not surprised, however, if it's the biggest you've seen in the eastern US.
WildFlemima@reddit
That's great to know, I don't know why you're being downvoted. They might have only counted contiguous forests above a certain size, Joyce Kilmer is 3800 acres
iJon_v2@reddit
Probably and idk why either. Itās a section of the southern blue ridges right outside the smokies. It beautiful there!
popejohnsmith@reddit
Re-planted.
SubstanceStrong@reddit
Old growth forests Iād wager
popejohnsmith@reddit
Tjank you! Yes. Old growth, virgin, primordial. That's what I meant by 'native' which now seems too vague.
diedlikeCambyses@reddit
I genuinely struggle to look at it. I've been collapse aware for decades and I don't usually get ruffled by much. But this is quite disturbing.
ashvy@reddit
Yeah, it's not an achievement that these fucks think it is. Such images are on the same level as that vietnam napalm girl, india gas disaster girl, guy falling from twin towers, many before/after glacier retreats, floods and fires and all.
bbbbbbbssssy@reddit
As a small kid, passengered up north from detroit & back every summer, I'd get mesmerized then carsick from the rows and rows and rows of pines and couldn't fathom how trees grew in rows so straight and tame.... until I was maybe 25 and learned about the jobs program to employ folks jump planting trees in rows after the old growth forests were clear cut. I've been sad about us all ever since.
rayjay5901@reddit
I've seen this reposted across multiple social media pages, and there are A LOT of people that are saying these are AI generated. We are already losing actual history and it getting dismissed as AI content. Its concerning and sad
3d1thF1nch@reddit
After going to Sequioa, my #1 bucket list national park, and seeing the redwoods and sequoias, I felt one of those profound moments of smallness in time and the universe. Itās a good feeling, humbling the hell out of yourself. These trees are so old, their generational lines have to extend back millions upon millions of years for evolution to have noticeably occurred, which is insanely cool. Like seeing the Grand Canyon or experiencing Yellowstone, it just kinda slaps you down and puts you in your place. I know this is ridiculous, but It should almost be a constitutional amendment to have citizens take a govt. funded and required pilgrimage to one of the National Parks to learn pride and humility.
mexican-street-tacos@reddit
I'm sad for all the animals that are displaced and die out.
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StupidizeMe@reddit
I'm in the Pacific Northwest. I was looking through a library's online archive of 19th C. local photos. The images of the Redwood-sized trees were amazing!
But there were so many images of lumberjacks posing with the magnificent tree they just killed that it became really depressing and I had to stop.
TheseBurgers-R-crazy@reddit
Look what they took from us
17071942@reddit
Be not a cancer on the Earth ā Leave room for nature ā Leave room for nature.
pippopozzato@reddit
American Chestnut Tree just entered the chat.
erabera@reddit
I sometimes day dream about what it was like 100's of years ago. The world has changed so much and we are constantly changing it ourselves. I actually feel bad for humans coming in 100's of years from now. I feel like there will be less diversity and more cities and man-made structures. I may be wrong but we have already lost so much.
Escudo777@reddit
I wish those magnificent trees were left alone. We truly are the most destructive species.
FungusRespecter@reddit
The map on slide two shows that we only started to destroy the forest when the colonizers came. In other words, the Indigenous populations knew how to live a sustainable lifestyle. Humans are not doomed, just this way of life is doomed and evil. People confuse the two because we are taught to believe that Indigenous people donāt even exist anymore.
Nobilian@reddit
If the colonizers had never come, the result would likely have been the same - it would just depend on how fast the methods and tools were invented and developed.
FungusRespecter@reddit
The first humans came here about 30,000 years ago. Only in the last 300 of those years have we laid concrete over what used to be vast forests. Because the Natives knew that they were brother and sister of the land around them. Yes, I'm sure some tribes have/had unsustainable practices. But only the current infestation of greed is causing the complete collapse of ecosystems.
gnostic_savage@reddit
It was closer to 40,000.
https://www.jsg.utexas.edu/news/2022/08/new-mexico-mammoths-among-best-evidence-for-early-humans-in-north-america/
alwaysmilesdeep@reddit
I think the fact that they planted food forest needs more discussion. They planted the food they wanted, and the food the animals they harvested ate. They didn't live in some wild forest, they turned the forest into a sustainable means of feeding and protecting them.
More and more we are finding abandon cities throughout the Americas which were as complex if not significantly more complex than their European equivalents.
gnostic_savage@reddit
They were complex in different ways. I agree. Certainly at the time of contact Tenochtitlan was a magnificent city, brilliantly constructed and planned, and incredibly clean and healthy compared to Europe, and even to us. The documentary I often link to on the Kogi, The Heart Of The World, shows and discusses their very advanced engineering in their cities, and how they constructed paths and walls and structures that withstood the ravages of the jungle for almost a thousand years, and even four centuries after being abandoned.
They didn't have the writing we had, although the Mayas did have writing and libraries. But they were much, much better biologists than Europeans at the time of contact, and they understood Nature better overall. They were hybridizing crops for improved varieties throughout the hemisphere when Europeans didn't understand the role of pollen in plant reproduction. Their knowledge led to them being much more sophisticated at plant medicine.
It is significant that many people were more sophisticated than Europeans at medicine until quite recently in history, including the Asians of all kinds, especially the Chinese and the Indians, and also the Arabs. The Mayas were the best astronomers in the world, even without telescopes.
You are correct. They were true civilizations and we could have learned everything we needed to know about how to live on this planet from them.
Nobilian@reddit
Logically every major society would make the same transition to a profit-based system - because people. There is no reason to think they wouldnāt.
alwaysmilesdeep@reddit
Any actual basis for this statement? Natives lived with the earth in peace. Europeans never could
Nobilian@reddit
Any actual basis for the statement Ā«europeans never didĀ»? Why should the pagan parts of european history erased in this context? Norse, Celtic and Balkan peoples history?
softhackle@reddit
Countless species went extinct due to human influence thousands of years before colonialism existed.
FungusRespecter@reddit
Countless species other than humans have also made species extinct in the past. All life on Earth ravages their fellow creatures. I'm not saying it's a good thing, it's just a fact of life on this realm. Modern humans are doing it at a unique rate though
Salt-Analysis1319@reddit
this absolutely ruined my saturday, thank you
Agitated-Raisin6197@reddit
I grew up and still live in the PNW. Spend a lot of my time in our woods. Itās daily that I catch myself fantasizing about out great lowland old growth forests & the biodiversity that they supported. Followed by a deep mourning for what once was. At this point Iām cheering collapse. Letās rid the earth of her greatest disease already.
IllBeGood3@reddit
I have a theory that when things get really bad, younger generations are going to looking at old people way worse than we look at boomers. Like people don't like them now, in 30 years the elderly will be despised and the target of hatred for not doing anything to stop the collapse. It will be ageism on meth and steroids.
gnostic_savage@reddit
That would only be because those young people don't know their history. The problem has never been just the people who were born thirty or forty years before the young people of any generation in the entire history of the US. We didn't have a chance to turn this around in the 1960s, as they believe, or even at any time in the 20th century. It needed to stop by 1800, and some people in the country even considered it. There were large numbers of Americans in the early 1800s who were against continued western expansion and ongoing genocide against the Native Americans. But more Americans didn't care. They just wanted more land and more money. It would have been better and we would have been better people if Europeans had stayed in Europe and figured their shit out instead of invading and destroying the entire world for the past 500 years. But we seem to raise 'em up to do the same things century after century.
It's their whole culture, and it's the majority in every generation that has existed in this culture for the past 1200 years that is the problem. We have been this way a very long time, and we always lash out at weaker people, like the Native Americans, like Black people, like immigrants as we are doing today, especially the brown ones, like the elderly. It's what we do instead of taking on the real power structure that is at fault, because taking them on is terrifying and futile. All that feeling cheated and its accompanying anger has to somewhere, and God knows we've run out of people around the world to invade and steal from.
If things were as easy as they think, they could just put a stop to it all themselves right now! Right? Just take the power away from the powerful! Easy peasy.
Five centuries of western European rampage for resources around the world:
The British empire: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Empire#/media/File:The_British_Empire_5.png
The French empire: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_the_French_colonial_empire#/media/File:EmpireFrench.png
The Spanish empire: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/04/Spanish_Empire_at_its_greatest_Extent_1783.png
The colonial powers of Africa: https://www.facinghistory.org/resource-library/colonial-presence-africa
toastedzergling@reddit
Yeah, any peaceful and/or environmentally friendly humans were conquered. The baddies are just better at ruthless war and retaining the reigns of power.
cad4mac@reddit
I donāt disagree but Iām going to be that old person and look where we are right now. The wheels are turning and not stopping. The grip the boomers and billionaires have on our economy and politics is an iron fist. But theyāll be right to hate us.
ApplesBananasRhinoc@reddit
They still want to cut down old growth trees, is anybody doing anything about it??
mintBRYcrunch26@reddit
Yāall watch Train Dreams yet? Oh boy.
charwink@reddit
Exactly what came to mind for me too. Itās been a long time since a movie wrecked me the way Train Dreams did. I made the mistake of watching it on a plane and I swear I cried like a baby for the last half of the movie. I think about it on the reg now.
Metalt_@reddit
Literally watching it right now while coming across this post
iJon_v2@reddit
What a movie. Should won more awards.
Asabovesobelow778@reddit
That movie is amazing
roywill2@reddit
In 100 years no more human impact, just nomadic bands. In 10,000 years old-growth is back In 1,000,000 full species diversity again.
AnAdventureCore@reddit
Lotta Eco Facisim in here.
Slick424@reddit
The word "Eco Facisim" is meaningless gibberish.
gay_manta_ray@reddit
the deforestation pictures are misleading. the midwest is the bread basket of north america. it wasn't clear cut for golf courses and suburbs, it was cut to feed ourselves.
alwaysmilesdeep@reddit
All of New england was clear cut, at the start of the 20th century over 90% of trees had been removed.
The reason we have national parks (i.e. desolation) is because of the damage it caused.
Spiritual_Move_8353@reddit
When I'm done being sick and angry at seeing this, the only small comfort I can take is that humanity's impact is a blip in the history of our planet and at the geologic time scale, a million or a hundred million years from now, all of this will be dust regardless, no different than what an asteroid strike has done to our planet in the past, and I can only hope that the plant and animal descendants that survived this era will evolve and thrive in ways that would awe us if we were around to see it.
Violet_Apathy@reddit
The saddest thing is that we would need another ice age for this to even be a possibility again.
smn_kng@reddit
They did this to everywhere. It's going to be wild that nearly all old growth forest will all be gone in my lifetime.
The shortsighted greed of humans is so remarkable it's almost fascinating.
The fact we are still actively destroying every ecological system on earth as of its no problem is diabolical.
The fact we have collapsed civilisations before from destroying ecologies and assume we can avoid it again is mesmerizing level of hubris.
What a time to be alive given the arc of the planet to date.
I'm only slightly bouyed by the reality that "life" is far more resilient than our assumed human intelligence and has seemingly survived much worse.
Humans are inconsequential in the greater scheme of time and evolution but why the hell are we such dicks about it.
Elpickle123@reddit
I live in New Zealand where the same thing happened. Luckily there's still some old growth left just due the sheer remoteness in some locations, but it's horrific to see the mismanagement of how it all happened. Those trees have amazing timber that last for years and is extremely durable and they wasted it for crap like wharf piers and street poles, flooding the markets to make as much money as possible. Sad isn't it?
Coldsnap@reddit
The kauri, man, itās heartbreakingĀ
Elpickle123@reddit
100% bro! I am from Chch and seeing how deforested the Banks Peninsula is now... man... We don't get Kauri this far south sadly, but they felled all the kahikatea, totara, matai and miro that they could.
They didn't have the foresight to save even 10% of the land/forest, and a lot of it was just burned off for farming. Pure greed really ay?
Coldsnap@reddit
Well I live in the uk now for many years, but I grew up in linwood. Our back yard faced the port hills. Every day I would look out and think āthese hills are so coolā. It wasnāt until I was in my 20s that I learned/realised that those same hills used to be completely forested. Then I learned about the Canterbury plains and the kahikatea as well and holy fuck it changed me.
Elpickle123@reddit
Haha no way, small world ay... I completely agree though, imagine how 'clean and green' we could've been. Hope the UK is treating you well, all the best
ActivisionBlizzard@reddit
But think of the profit they made!
Infinite_Goose8171@reddit
I dont think humanity is a cancer. But i agree with ishmael. There are Takers and Leavers.
Funkyasaclown@reddit
They didnāt know better. What you think people gonna say about as stupid cnts. In 200 years. Always doing war. Always listing to politics. Letting 10% of people killing the planet
Depressionsfinalform@reddit
Like, I know itās unrealistic, but imagine if we learned from a culture like the Aboriginals of Australia, their 70,000 year old culture of respecting and living with the land instead of exploiting it.
Every time there is a better way of living Capitalism or the ones with military might have beaten it down. So sad, all these beautiful cultures erased.
gnostic_savage@reddit
Thank you.
Karasu-Fennec@reddit
Humans lived in the shade of these trees for millennia. Capitalism gave us the incentive to rip them down.
Flintstones_VRV_Fan@reddit
If it makes you feel any better, soooo many of them died cutting these trees. It makes me feel a little better.
Fauxfurfriend@reddit
Look how big this plant (or animal) is. Lets kill it. We are a plague
Cammanjam@reddit
Know what they made out of the redwoods? Fuckin toothpicks. Because the wood is so soft. All that destruction for toothpicks
illumi-thotti@reddit
The old growth forests in Europe are being used to make IKEA furniture. European environmentalists have been fighting the company over it for years
CheesecakeExpress@reddit
This is insane
illumi-thotti@reddit
The deforestation of old growth forests is the only "remember what they took from you" I will ever take seriously. There are so few left in the world and one of them is literally being used by IKEA to make ugly, overpriced furniture.
Xenophon_@reddit
Most of this was done for the sake of animal agriculture
bottom_armadillo805@reddit
You know, when I visited Sequoia National Park, I could not fathom why anybody in any period of time would go "gee I've literally never seen a living thing bigger that this tree here, it must have taken hundreds and hundreds of years to grow so big. Oh well, time to cut it down"
Choadboy_Wonderfuck@reddit
We were in a "we are bigger than earth" stage. Now we are in a "the earth is bigger than us" stage.
ImNotACollector@reddit
It's been one of my dreams to see massive redwoods I don't know if any are leftĀ
True-Vast-3731@reddit
Look at them. All smiling. Proud of the destruction they're causing.Ā
Well now that very same destruction is right at your doorstep.
SuperBaconjam@reddit
Makes me fucking sick every time I see photos like these of the destruction of the natural world.
Dr_5trangelove@reddit
White people. SMH
SubstantialDonkey981@reddit
Profound, but the graphic does not represent current forest status.
EbonyPeat@reddit
Not cancer, just greedy and rotten stewards.
Rossdxvx@reddit
Sometimes, when I go to one of the parks around where I live, I feel like I step into a complex, mini-world. It is so incredible to see all of the things that go on in a forest or a heavily wooded area. Exploring these areas beats any videogame or RPG any day. These little worlds of complexity are being lost forever.
d0ming00@reddit
it's crazy how I sometimes get this surreal feeling of just being in the presence of a dog, cat or a pigeon, living in a big city. Like HEY WOW AN ACTUAL ANIMAL! ISN'T THAT INCREDIBLE?? How I miss just being with animals :(
fastworms@reddit
I went to NYC once in December 2016 for a 3 day work trip, basically just went for a few meetings so I ended up with a lot of free time to walk around. Iāve never felt particularly drawn to NYC as itās not my vibe, but being there at Christmas time was so depressing seeing all of the waste, extravagance, and consumerism. I walked past the giant Christmas tree they put up every year and it made me cry. Picturing that beautiful tree living its life in a forest for decades just to be chopped down, transported on a big rig cross country, and stuck in a square in smelly NYC for people to marvel at for a month til they toss it aside.
va_wanderer@reddit
Not quite. Those trees end up turned into lumber and donated to Habitat for Humanity to make homes, not tossed into a dump.
Eager_PurpleOverdose@reddit
Those trees look so majestic...
va_wanderer@reddit
The amusing thing is that in the process of obliterating ecosystem after ecosystem, the end result will likely be giant forests standing on the ruins of what used to be our species and civilization because we obliterating so much of what kept our climate and life possible means mankind will eventually just end up fertilizer.
The trees will return, once we cannot.
Nook_n_Cranny1@reddit
Ugh! The hubris of man, cutting down trees to build monuments to progress, then wondering why the world feels hotter, emptier ā¦ and eerily silent.
Crusty_Magic@reddit
Looking at these photos the same way I do of other people involved in a cult.
Welkitends@reddit
Pennsylvania, also known as Penn's woods...
Is sadly just Farmland and brush.
SomethingLessEdgy@reddit
The thing that I hate about this discussion is that it blames *all* people for the sins of *some*.
Humans are not a virus or a plague or a parasite, we're a tools based ape that discovered fire. We USED to live quite harmoniously and many people still strive for that goal to mixed success all over the world.
IT IS DIRECTLY DUE TO MODERNITY AND CAPITALISM AND ALL OF THOSE ILLS THAT WE HAVE THESE PROBLEMS.
03263@reddit
I think everyone knows that, it's just how we talk. There's no word for "only the worst of humanity" so we just use "we"
Awatts2222@reddit
If they ever right a new Bible man should be the new locusts.
the_pwnererXx@reddit
They accomplished gathering the materials required to house millions of people, they should smile
Suerte13cr@reddit
They all seem so proud of killing an ancient tree.Ā
Worship_Strength@reddit
Uncle Ted was right.
wHAtisLife59@reddit
Hate those fucking men.
melody_magical@reddit
I disagree with the map on slide 2. Native American food forests were very complex and well managed ecosystems, they were not untouched.
iJon_v2@reddit
What is it even supposed to be a map of?
guitar_vigilante@reddit
If I'm correct it's a map of old growth forests in the US. In the context of OP it's partly misleading because we actually have re-forested a lot of the country since the early twentieth century and if you don't know that the map is supposed to be old growth forests you'd think it was just forests in general.
iJon_v2@reddit
I was about to say. I live near an old growth forest thatās not on the more current map.
conscsness@reddit
Is the photo not of the forest map concerning logging by European illiterate slaves?
Hot_Blackberry_6895@reddit
The earth will slowly heal when we are gone. A cursed species. Simultaneously intelligent and incredibly dumb.
FerrousFellow@reddit
Our intelligence gives us countless dimensions to demonstrate our entitled and untempered ignorance
Top_Hair_8984@reddit
Sometimes? I miss these big trees with constant pain, grief and anger.Ā
GantzDuck@reddit
One of the reasons why I don't have kids.
Feeling_Turnip_1273@reddit
Breaks my heart. The giant stumps are still in the forest as reminders where I live.
shaikuri@reddit
If we ever survive this lunatic era of greed, maybe future generations will see this again down the line.
But this generation... We're screwed.
Doughtnutz@reddit
These are a gut wrenching photos.
PUNd_it@reddit
Woulda been real cool if it closed on that last guy
Archeolops@reddit
Trees are the main characters of earth and weāre their curse
StatementBot@reddit
This post links to another subreddit. Users who are not already subscribed to that subreddit should not participate with comments and up/downvotes, or otherwise harass or interfere with their discussions (brigading)
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Monsur_Ausuhnom:
Submission Statement,
Related to collapse because humanity destroys more of the world to make room for the artificial which is then monitored and controlled by someone else for domination. It seems we can accept that with Moore's Law that this acceleration hasn't stop and no preservation is going to be learned or to ever occur. Once its gone. It's gone.
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1tktn8x/being_the_cancer_of_the_earth/onazmy2/
hellbillyjoker@reddit
We can never atone for the sins of our past.
darbycrash1295@reddit
Humans are a mistake.
Old-Key-8639@reddit
There is so much grief to be had, in this time of endings