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Comment by jfaucett | Hacker News Reader

"...some people want to keep making that worse so we can populate the world with even more sheeple who have even more iphones."

That sentence is horrible. We're talking about living, breathing, thinking human beings not "sheeple". And to equate people who have dreams, hopes, and aspirations to a lot of mindless animals whose only desire is to destroy the planet and play on iphones is an egregious misrepresentation of reality.

If we want to make our planet better for all its inhabitants we need to be clear and honest about the facts and our goals. I happen to think our primary goal should be human flourishing, self-actualization and happiness. If you think our primary goal should be the elimination of species extinction or something else - I don't want to put words in your mouth - we could discuss that...

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Ecological protection is not necessarily mutually exclusive with human development. And human beings are massively reliant on those ecosystems in subtle and important ways. Your point seems like a false dichotomy. We just need to approach problems in an environmentally literate way.

It's not a false dichotomy, because the above poster isn't presenting a dichotomy at all. We'd all like to see human flourishing AND ecological protection. Sometimes those goals interfere with each other, and sometimes they don't. In the cases where they do, we can ask: which is our _highest_ priority? If we had the choice between saving the human species and nuking the planet, or going extinct to save the extant ecosystem on Earth, which should we choose?

That's the point being made. Nobody's trying to say that all actions live on a 1-D spectrum between "environment preserving" and "human promoting". That's obviously untrue. I don't think anybody needs reminding that humans can't flourish if the Earth is a barren desert.

If you take out the sheeple statement, then he has a strong point. Look at any graph of the human population or energy use and you'll see the former skyrocketing in the last 300 years and the latter rising even faster than that.

This is unsustainable. But on an individual human level, we don't want to sacrifice the lifestyle we have. And many religious people will not use birth control.

If this was a graph of any asset in a market, would you take a long or short position?

Habitats are being destroyed through everything from logging to overfishing to melting ice. This is a serious planet-wide risk. Already the number of species gone extinct is larger than in the previous million years combined, I believe.

Humans have flourished too much; we're killing the planet. If anything, we should focus on constraining ourselves. What took millions or billions of years to evolve is in the process of begin destroyed in a few hundred years. On a geological timescale we're the equivalent of a bomb going off.

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