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Nordic wrote…

People are just animals

Do you mean just, as in only? Imagine that, nothing more, so says Nordic.

It’s would be good to know where you’re coming from Nordic.

What else would humans be but just "animals"?

Certainly not also "plants." Not also "minerals," either.

The word 'just' strikes me as exclusionary of further possibilities.

So I do not care for that word in general, as for me it does not lend itself to subtlety (or intuition.)

Nordic wrote:People are just animals, and if you've ever encountered overgrazed ranchland, it ain't that much different.

Isn't this a rather direct summoning of the image of TEH SHEEPLE, that well known thoughtstopper? C'mon you know we're WAY different than mere animals - they don't have wireless internet.

Cosmic Cowbell wrote:Question: As pertaining to this article and the concept of "outside factors", should anthropogenic forcing of extreme climate variations be consider by definition as such?

Yes, because weather is certainly an outside factor affecting population group stasis. But more interesting and just as applicable to this idea of the instability of equilibrium must be the effect that the "outside agency" of a thinking, reasoning population group with the inherent ability to provide adaptive solutions to a seeming endless series of encountered enivornmental challenges might have in this regard. Now if we could only find one. A thinking reasoning population, that is. That would sure come in handy.

Hm, well last time I looked under my ass in the toilet I was reminded that I was indeed "just an animal".

Excpet I was shitting in a toilet.

And my manure was going to a water treatment plant. Which is on the beach. Which stinks and has rendered the entire city of El Segundo California, an otherwise very nice place, into a sewage-scented non-paradise.

Sure, we're "more" than animals, but that conceit has gotten us into a lot of trouble. As in "our shit don't stink" right?

Our affects on the planet are that of animals. We eat, we breathe, we consume, we poop, we destroy.

In the same way that cattle will overgraze some rather beautiful and pristine landscapes if there are too many of them. Oh, and they also destroy the water.

Thinking we're special is what got us into this mess.

People, after all, were way WAY too "special" (re: smart) to EVER destroy the Gulf of Mexico, right? After all, to get a high paying job with BP you have to be "special", right? Special people don't make mistakes.

BTW I was just reading a book about the real Mother Jones. Her father escaped persecution in Ireland and managed to get out before the English killed him. He later sent for his family to come to America.

Mother Jones eventually married a steelworker in Memphis Tennessee. Lots of poor people, meaning people who worked 14 hours a day for almost no money, had to live in a part of town that was particularly swampy. There were a lot of them there and there was no sanitation system.

She gave birth to three children, and things were about as rosy as they could be for someone in their situation.

Then a Yellow Fever epidemic hit and just about wiped out the whole city.

Her children and her husband all died. In a rather short period of time.

So tell me again how humans are special?

I guess her immunity was pretty special, but that's another story.

Sounder wrote:The word 'just' strikes me as exclusionary of further possibilities.

So I do not care for that word in general, as for me it does not lend itself to subtlety (or intuition.)

I think I understand what you're saying, but sometimes I think the exclusionary "just" is not only appropriate, but also necessary — in a similar way as a curse word might sometimes be necessary: in order to get the attention of someone who hasn't been listening. (Not intending to imply that this is "you," necessarily.)

Here's why. For umpteen thousands of years, the human race has (falsely) imagined itself to be separate from "the animal kingdom" — and this error has inspired many other errors. Even the suggestion that "Humans are animals too" was met with (and often still is) derision and ridicule at best and charges of heresy at worst.

If someone wants to say that "just" is "exclusionary of further possibilities," I certainly have no problem with that — I even agree with it — just so long as the same benefit is offered to our other cousins in the animal kingdom! A human then wouldn't be "just a human," but then neither would a dog be "just a dog" — other possibilities should obtain there, also.

Nordic wrote:Special people don't make mistakes.

But no one is even suggesting that the human race might be extinct within 100 years because of some "mistake". They're suggesting extinction is imminent because the human race has thrived incredibly. Sure, if you continue to allow the likes of Tony Hayward to personally determine the health of the planet, things are going to go to shit. But if you think the issue of human waste disposal has not improved immeasurably in the last hundred years you're barking up the wrong tree. FYI, as recently as 1950, the city used to channel untreated raw sewage directly into the Santa Monica Bay. Ah yes, the good old days, before there were so goddam many fucking people! Stupid animals.

nordic wrote:Our affects on the planet are that of animals. We eat, we breathe, we consume, we poop, we destroy.

In the same way that cattle will overgraze some rather beautiful and pristine landscapes if there are too many of them.

Who owns the "beautiful and pristine landscapes" of this good earth? For whose benefit ought they to be maintained as such?

What might the owners do about the increasing populations which are rendering them less attractive?

I hope they don't think people are just animals, or I guess they might do what any landowner would do if an environmentally destructive pest began to breed too quickly, which is to say, organise some sort of cull.

Beware of wolves in environmentalists clothing.

Hammer of Los wrote:Who owns the "beautiful and pristine landscapes" of this good earth? For whose benefit ought they to be maintained as such?

Who do you think owns them?

I think the very idea that "the land" can be "owned" is an imaginary human construct and one of the biggest collective errors the human race has ever made.

barracuda wrote:But if you think the issue of human waste disposal has not improved immeasurably in the last hundred years you're barking up the wrong tree. FYI, as recently as 1950, the city used to channel untreated raw sewage directly into the Santa Monica Bay. Ah yes, the good old days, before there were so goddam many fucking people! Stupid animals.

That's not even the point. The point is that we're animals. Yes, "just" animals.

How anyone can argue otherwise is beyond me. It's disputing the most very basic of facts.

As regard to the other argument here, the fact of the matter is that we've only been able to "thrive" so successfully by consuming a staggering, and unsustainable, amount of stuff. Oil, water, land, air ......

This "thriving" is exactly like getting in early on a Ponzi scheme and thinking you've found a GREAT investment.

Hammer of Los wrote:

You can only separate resource depletion and population in argument; in the real world, an irreducibly complex and interdependent place, they are inextricably linked.

Resource depletion is undesirable.

Humans deplete resources.

Therefore humans are undesirable.

There's a name for this piece of strawmanning sophistry, but I forget. What's wrong with, "Therefore humans should (in their own interest) intelligently manage the resources they need to survive"?

JackRiddler wrote:
There's a name for this piece of strawmanning sophistry, but I forget.

I think it's called "paranoia"

JackRiddler wrote:

Hammer of Los wrote:

You can only separate resource depletion and population in argument; in the real world, an irreducibly complex and interdependent place, they are inextricably linked.

Resource depletion is undesirable.

Humans deplete resources.

Therefore humans are undesirable.

There's a name for this piece of strawmanning sophistry, but I forget. What's wrong with, "Therefore humans should (in their own interest) intelligently manage the resources they need to survive"?

Sounds like that strawman "slipped" on the ice, and fell down the "slope" on his ass.

Nordic wrote:This "thriving" is exactly like getting in early on a Ponzi scheme and thinking you've found a GREAT investment.

Well, it's slightly different, in that this pyramid scheme has been running for the last hundred thousand years, give or take. And just to be clear, I don't dispute that we are just animals. I agree entirely. Our actions are the actions of natural forces in play, nothing more. But each animal species has its own niche of abilities. I just don't happen to believe that the natural successes of human specialities necessarily guarantee our own doom by definition. They may help secure our longevity, if correctly harnessed.

Nordic wrote:As regard to the other argument here, the fact of the matter is that we've only been able to "thrive" so successfully by consuming a staggering, and unsustainable, amount of stuff.

No different than any other animal in that manner, with the codicil that we don't have to consume or waste or pollute as much as we are entrained to do by the corporate forces which attempt to determine and limit our spectrum of choices while maximising their profit margins. It's not a requirement, right?