Is Man killing the environment??

thanks . but i didn't use photoshop. actually, i didn't alter that picture at all. i'm just really white.

 

What.

Get out.

You are a zombie. A HOT zombie. Oh my God, were you in the Thriller video??? I love that video! Can I have your autograph?

 

You must have meant to say it WON'T be able to stop it. Because hybrid cars just reduce the fuel used, but it's still too much. And it does nothing to stop the urban sprawl eating up the countryside, be it farmland or wildland. This sprawl then forces us to cut down more trees for lumber and new crop land, drain swamps, build more levees around rivers that help cause bigger floods, etc etc.

And recycling is far from perfect, still uses lots of energy, and is in general a very industrial undertaking. It helps as far as resource mining goes, because we reuse what we've already mined (though only steel and aluminum are really 100% reusable, I think). But it doesn't help as far as our energy crisis goes, which is really the main problem we face right now.

 

thanks. the thriller video was freakin awesome. i wish i was in it. and we are ruining a very nice thread.




just so i'm not completely annoying and off topic. i once heard that it is worse for your body to live in a city and breathe in the exhaust from cars and pollution, than it is to be a regular cigarette smoker in an unpolluted environment.

 

I guess living in one of the most polluted cities AND smoking cigarettes makes me real dead then.

I love the stench of death in the morning.

 

Yes that's what I meant.

Actually, the only recyclavle item that is benefial to all is aluminum. It costs much less in $$ and environmental impact to recycle aluminum that it does to mine the ores and make more. It is both cheaper and safer for the environment to make new plastic than it is to recycle old bottles and milk jugs. The difference is the petroleum product that we can use in our polluting cars instead of making new plastic.

 

Yeah, I knew aluminum was definitely, I kind of guessed on the Iron. I don't see why it wouldn't be, though.

True. I guess it depends on the city. Somewhere like NYC or LA this is definitely true. Other cities might have better air.

 

it's not that we wake in the morning and tell ourselves, today i'm gonna do so killing of the earth. the problem here is NOT what we do, but DON'T DO. If we were not so passive, brainwashed, we would have reacted to the system and it's stupid consumtion. We are just slaves of the system. That's the problem, it's not about toxic materials etc.... We let it happen.... But sure, it's not easy to just drop out. It's an ACTIVE and deliberate decision, one day you wake up and think, fuck this, i'm not gonna be a servant to this greedy system that has enslaved my mind and habits and made med do things i don't want to. It's about saying NO

 

I think we are going into another ice age. Or at least heading in that direction. Although who's to say that we aren't the second or third human species to do this. What if everything connecting us to them was destroyed during their ice age?

As far as evolving....Humans have only evolved socially. We have not been evolving in terms of survival, hence polution. Referencing animals for example, dogs have done just the opposite. Bark still means bark (social) but they have adapted in terms of surviving.


In my opinion anyway.

 

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Yes i believe we are killing the environment. Not ALL of us of course...but some of us seem to have complete disregard for the planet we live on!! i attend college and it is sad to see how many college kids litter at school!! it makes me soooooo angry, there are garbage cans EVERYWHERE! is it really necessary to throw your garbage out your window as you are driving? or just drop it on the ground as you walk?! it shows blatant disregard! There ARE certain things we can do to make this planet a better place and we are certainly not helping if we litter, etc. etc.. perhaps doing certain things like cutting back on driving our cars, or littering may not help us out any...we may be in a state where there is no helping the planet it has gotten sooooo bad....just look at global warming! it is happening...but what can we do?? no one seems to know for sure...
ALL i do know is that people who litter make me MAD!!!

 

My thoughts:

We're messing up the natural world, that's for sure. I can't believe people who think it's unimportant (or even those who deny it). Though I guess it's not surprising, given that most people are not directly reliant on nature for survival anymore, so it's easier for them to either deny or rationalize the destruction of it, since they aren't fully in tune with how alarming this is.

Now, I don't think we're going to "kill nature." I see this as more along the lines of a massive biodiversity extinction like other ones throughout earth's history (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_extinction ) that's going to make things rough for a while for humans. Besides, we're gonna be drying up oil reserves at some point in the not-too-distant future (see dieoff.org and peakoil.net ), which will effectively negate much of the destruction we're doing.

There are things we can do to stop messing things up, though nobody is gonna do it, for obvious reasons. Recycling is good, but it won't even make a dent relative to the whole monstrosity of our situation, even if everyone suddenly does it (and most people are still wasting way too much.) I'm an advocate of primitivism, in large part for ecological reasons. The smartest thing to do (and really the only effective means) would be to reduce reliance on industrial technology, as that's what utilizes so many fossil fuels, which also enable petrochemical fertilizers that enable lots more food to be grown from agriculture, and other such things that worsens our overpopulation problem by allowing more people to be born, who all want to live lifestyles empowered by industrial technology; a snowball effect of sorts.

(Also, I'm highly skeptical of the idea that "alternative energy" will be the savior, because I think it's just a means to allow us to continue bad habits, as a species (which I think is fundamentally flawed), not to mention that it couldn't possibly serve as a full replacement.)

 

Domesticated, I am completely with you on all that.

PolythenePam, littering is the smallest of our problems right now; annoying and ugly but not really that destructive. You said "at least some people" are destroying the natural world. I'd say pretty much every American should be included in that, as things stand today. We use vast amounts of resources, far, far more (per capita) than any other nation. 25% of the world's fossil fuels are burned here, even though we only have 8% of the world population. This is how I'm in a warm house right now, on the internet, drinking hot coffee, with a room full of plastic items and electrical technology.

 

That'd be sweet if we could live like that. Rough, but cool.

 

I agree. In fact, I am slowly in the process of learning about wilderness living skills.

There's so much cultural mythology about hunter-gather lifestyles that it's no wonder people think it'd be so awful. One argument against stone-age living is that it is "more work" (which is then countered by modern day hunter-gatherer societies like the Kalahari Bushmen who spend, on average 20 hours per week gathering/hunting food and), then they say we live longer in modern societies(historically inaccurate, and then flawed methods used to assess this, combined with modern day hunter-gathered societies who still have longetivity), then they say we have medicine and all kinds of other advances that help us (hunter-gatherer societies are much healthier and much less prone to disease, overall). They further bash this with the stereotype that such a lifestyle is savage and brutal and uncivilized and stupid (which is again untrue, if you look to the native americans and modern-day hunter-gatherer societies). Knowing all this makes me really wonder about the point of having these huge "civilized" societies as we do today...

 

That's true man. And even 20 hours of work, in a hunter-gatherer kind of way, wouldn't so much feel like work. You're out there with friends and family, in the free air, picking fruits and nuts off plants or maybe hunting (which we do nowadays for fun anyways!)

I think the point of huge "civilized" societies is that the people in charge do nothing, no work. Since they control everything (mainly food as it tells in the Ishmael books, but also that we also have to pay for housing, i.e., we have to pay to exist), we are totally captive and have to participate.

 

Boy, what a negative question! What are all of the people going to do who answered this question with "yes"? Do the earth a favour and commit suicide?

 

I'm sure many people think that,without humanity; Planet Earth would be a beautiful planet full of green forests & billions of species of animals all eating each other & the oceans teeming with fish eating each other.
Remember the dinosaurs.......if they hadn't all died out ,they would have destroyed this planet by the wanton destruction of flora.
Diseases that man has overcome - may well have spread throughout the earth killing all mammals or surface dwellers.
The only thing I am convinced about & others are not is that Planet Earth is the only planet in the universe that can adequately sustain human life.If, by our recklessness or apathy,we destroy planet earth's eco-system so badly that it cannot sustain us;the human race will finally be run & we become nothing more than dinosaurs ourselves.
Awareness of the issues of de-forestization,global warming,pollution,nuclear waste,over-population,mass extinction of plant & animal species,is vital & when President Bush says: " The U.S.A. is addicted to oil".It is at last recognition of a massive problem,albeit, the tip of the iceberg.

 

Yeah. People are just lazy. I'd rather live in the woods and live "savagely" as some people put it, than live in a "civilized" culture, as we are now.

 

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